Too kind sirs
Am quite surprised more than 1 person bothers to read some of my posts...
Just something else from the source I mentioned previously:
The Qur’ān’s complex manipulation of the Aramaic Gospel Traditions is,
furthermore, neither accidental nor haphazard. It is rather, quite deliberate and
sophisticated. It wood behoove readers to realize a basic fact concerning dogmatic
re-articulation as we have laid it out herein, namely that the Qur’ān excercises
complete control over its challenging or re-appropriation of passages from the
Aramaic Gospels—not vice versa. This is evident both implicitly and explicitly
within the text... Finally, consider that the text skillfully translates or interprets
Hebrew and Aramaic terminology and seamlessly integrates them into the overall
literary, rhetorical, and theological coherence of the particular passage or Surah
wherin they occur, which is the unmistakable intention behind zakariyyā in Q 19:2
and s.arrah in Q 51:29 for example.
Dispensing with hasty and superficial readings of the text—which may incorrectly
yield ‘mistakes’ or ‘contraditions’ in the qur’ānic re-telling of Biblical narratives
or post-Biblical controversies—is the first step in truly appreciating its
linguistic, structural, and thematic integrity... The point is that such a dexterous command
of Biblical and post-Biblical literature as a whole, and such strong volition on the
part of the Qur’ān’s authorship, is central to our understanding of its dogmatic rearticulation
of the Aramaic Gospels Tradition. (The Quran and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions)
As I mentioned I can't recommend pp1-48 of this text enough for anyone with even the slightest interest in Early Islam. You can probably read the first 30 or so pages on Google books
here. It's basically a literature review of 200+ sources and is a fantastic overview of scholarship. I can't think of a better 48 pages I've read.
Another interesting (and much shorter) article is Reading the Quran through the Bible
[here] which convincingly shows how the audience must have been fully familiar with the Biblical narratives (and that many later Muslim exegetes didn't understand their own text because they were unfamiliar with the Bible and were forced to speculate wildly):
Another case is the Qur’an’s reference to the laughter of Sarah (a name that does not appear in the text; the only woman given a name in the Qur’an is Mary). In Genesis, Sarah laughs after she hears the annunciation of Isaac’s birth, but the Qur’an refers to her laughter first. Accordingly, Muslim commentators struggle to explain why she laughed. One famous commentator, the tenth-century al-Tabari, wonders if she laughed out of frustration when the visitors would not eat the food she prepared or if she laughed out of relief when she realized that the visitors did not have the habits of the Sodomites. Yet the reader who knows the Bible will understand that Sarah laughed out of surprise at the promise of a son in her old age, even if the Qur’an—for the sake of a rhyme in Arabic—reports these events in reverse order.
In such cases the Qur’an seems to count on its audience’s knowledge of the Bible. Indeed, by taking a liberty with the order of the story, the Qur’an seems utterly confident in that knowledge. It expects that the reader has the Qur’an in one hand and the Bible in the other.
This presupposition of audience knowledge is hard to reconcile with the traditional 'pagan backwater' narrative.
