Non-Christian religions and historical sources: if Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism were subjected to the same historical-critical scrutiny as Christianity, what would remain?

---

 

If there’s something modernity finds particularly intolerable, it’s a religion claiming to say “I am the only way.”

No matter how much our contemporaries strive to “sweeten” the image of Jesus Christ to make it palatable to modern audiences, it was He who dared to declare: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:1-6).

This “detail” alone is enough to render Christianity unique in the diverse religious landscape of human history: no one else has ever made such a claim.

 

Non-Christian religions put to the test of historical sources

What if the historical sources of other religions were subjected to the same tests of reliability that the Gospels have undergone for centuries?

This task was taken up by American scholar Gary Habermas, chair of the Department of Philosophy at Liberty University (Virginia), alongside theologian Benjamin C.F. Shaw.

They have dedicated a brief but intriguing exploration to the historical sources of non-Christian religions, uncovering numerous “difficulties.”

Let us recall that the current state of historical-critical analysis on Christian sources (in addition to the numerous non-Christian sources on Jesus) unanimously confirms that they date back to 20–60 years after Jesus’s death, also highlighting the existence of even earlier sources, dated to 35/36 AD.

 

Buddhism under the lens of history

Starting with Buddhism, the very historical existence of its founder, the Buddha, presents notable challenges.

Historian James Ketelaar from the University of Chicago has identified a discrepancy of over 2,000 years among the earliest sources regarding Buddha’s birth date.

A 2,000-year gap (!) is akin to claiming that Jesus was born “sometime between Socrates and Descartes!”

Yet, the historical existence of Buddha is crucial for Buddhists since their faith, as Ketelaar writes, is “based on the fact that the historical Buddha actually attained enlightenment.”¹J.E. Ketelaar, The Non-Modern Confronts the Modern: Dating the Buddha in Japan, History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 2006, pp. 73–74.

Buddhist scholar Edward Conze has also raised another major issue regarding Buddhism’s historical sources. The primary writings attributed to Buddha date to 600–900 years after his death.

Here’s what Conze writes:

“We have no objective criteria to isolate the original text. All attempts to identify it rely on mere assumptions, and discussions on the matter generally result in nothing but futile disputes.”²E. Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, Penguin Classics 1959, pp. 11–12.

In other words, beyond the lack of reliable information on Buddha’s historical existence, some of his original teachings might be among those we have today, but we will never truly know which are authentic and which were later written by his followers.

 

Hinduism and the Earliest Historical Sources of Krishna

Turning to Hinduism, the Hindu god of joy and love is Krishna. Yet, here too, significant historical issues arise.

Most Hindu scholars doubt that Krishna actually lived.

In the preface to the 1983 Bhagavadgītā, the sacred text of Hinduism (described as a “unique mythology”), the spiritual authority Abhay Charan De wrote that Krishna is “a poetic symbol to present the ideas of an anonymous genius or, at best, a minor historical figure”³A. Charan De, Bhagavad-Gītā, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust 1983, pp. xv, xix.

Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri further noted that none of the existing Hindu texts can be precisely dated earlier than the 12th century AD⁴N.C. Chaudhuri, Hinduism: A Religion to Live, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997, pp. 30-31.

According to Hindu tradition, the moment when Krishna is said to have lived and spoken with his first disciple, Arjuna, is dated to around 3000 BC. However, the earliest available historical source for this is from about 4100 years later!

One can only imagine how many changes may have occurred in the text concerning the true teachings of Krishna over more than four millennia.

 

Islam, the Quran, and Texts Predating Muhammad

We conclude this brief exploration of the historical sources of religions with Islam.

Muslim believers claim that God Himself revealed the content of the Quran to Muhammad around 600 AD. The Prophet then preached and recited it (Quran translates to “recitation”), and his followers memorized and recorded it on palm leaves and stones.

The Quran only became a proper book after Muhammad’s death in 632 AD, during the caliphate of Abu Bakr.

For this reason, Muslims believe the Quran descended directly from God, word for word, letter by letter. It is therefore considered absolutely free from any error, which is why it cannot be interpreted by the faithful.

Yet, as we observed in the past, it is almost certain that the Quran contains at least one falsehood, namely when it states that Jesus did not die on the cross. Being a prophet of God (Quran 2:87, 136, 253; 3:45; 4:171; 5:75; 57:27; 61:6), He could not have met such an end: “They neither killed nor crucified Him; it only appeared so to them” (Quran 4:157).

No historian of Christianity, not even the most skeptical, has ever denied the historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a fact firmly established, documented in all Christian and non-Christian sources of the time.

“This is devastating for Islam’s claim to be the true religion of God,” wrote Michael Licona, a professor at Houston Baptist University. “Because the Quran is wrong. And because the divine inspiration of the Quran is claimed to be dictation, if the Quran is wrong, it is not divinely inspired, and the foundation of Islam falters.”

There is a second issue related to applying historical-critical analysis to the Quran.

It concerns the oldest existing copy of the Quran, the Birmingham manuscript discovered in 2015.

Keith Small, an Islamic scholar at the Center for Islamic Studies in London and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, explained that it “gives more support to peripheral views about the Quran’s genesis, such as the idea that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that already existed and adapted it to fit their political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven.”

The same English researcher published a historical-critical analysis of the Quran in 2011 entitled Textual Criticism and Qurʼān Manuscripts (Lexington Books, 2011), concluding the impossibility of establishing a reliable historicity of the text:

“The available sources do not provide the necessary information to reconstruct the original text of the Quran during Muhammad’s time or immediately following his death until the first official edition of the Quran traditionally ordered by Caliph ‘Uthman.”⁵K. Small, Textual Criticism and Qurʼān Manuscripts, Lexington Books, 2011, p. 4.

But the main evidence, added Larry Hurtado, a historian of religions at the University of Edinburgh, is that «there has never been an original text of the Qur’an» and that «the history of the transmission of the Qur’anic text testifies both to its preservation and to its destruction»⁶Larry Hurtado, Book Review Keith E. Small, Textual Criticism and Qur’ān Manuscripts, Scottish Journal of Theology 2015.

Indeed, several historical moments are known in which various ancient texts and variants of the Qur’an were deliberately destroyed (the first time around 850 CE).

The previously mentioned Birmingham manuscript, whose dating seems to confirm Islamic tradition, contains several agricultural and geographical references that do not match the arid Arabian Peninsula and are written in an Arabic dialect rejected by early Muslim scholars as it was not the dialect of Muhammad’s tribe.

The British historian Tom Holland questioned this: why does the Qur’an address an agricultural people when it is known that sixth-century Mecca was not an agricultural community?

The historian and Islamicist from Princeton University, Michael Cook, along with orientalist and Islamicist Patricia Crone, co-authored the famous Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977). They were the first to propose the thesis that the Qur’an is a late product from the 8th century, composed of materials drawn from a variety of Judeo-Christian and Middle Eastern sources.

Here is their conclusion:

«There is no conclusive evidence that the Qur’an existed in any form before the last decade of the 7th century; and the tradition that places this somewhat opaque revelation in its historical context is not attested before the mid-8th century»⁷M. Cook, P. Crone, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge University Press 1980, p. 3.

Although the Islamic community and numerous scholars have rejected various theses from Hagarism, the Qur’an’s dependence on previous Christian texts has been independently confirmed by several other researchers, as we have already observed.

In a text edited by Islamic theologian Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and Daniel De Smet, director of the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), some Gospel verses were compared with Qur’anic surahs, concluding:

«There is indisputable evidence that the Qur’an is a scriptural work and that the editor of the Qur’an had the Gospel text in front of him, or at least had it in mind, as the Prophet cites Jesus’ statements with their characteristic formal features»⁸D. De Smet, M. Ali Amir-Moezzi, Controverses sur les écritures canoniques de l’islam Editions du Cerf 2014.

A “Ray of Truth” in All Religions

Clearly, this does not contradict what was affirmed by the Second Vatican Council, namely that non-Christian religions «not infrequently reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men».

However, this does not prevent us from observing how problematic the authenticity of the historical sources of non-Christian religions would be if subjected to the same thorough, critical, and penetrating scrutiny to which Christianity has been exposed.

After centuries of meticulous analyses of Christian sources by both believing and non-believing scholars, the historical attestation of Christian sources remains barely dented.

Even the skeptical scholar Bart D. Ehrman has admitted that «scholars are convinced that we can reconstruct the original words of the New Testament with reasonable accuracy (though probably not 100%)»⁹B.D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, Oxford University Press 2000, p. 443.