SoCiNiANiSm, iSlAm ANd ThE rAdiCAl uSES of ArAbiC SCholArShiP

Socinianism —or, broader: anti-trinitarianism— was often paralleled to islam: both the Christian heresy and the muslim religion reject the doctrine of the Trinity and regard Jesus only as a prophet, not as a god. There are indeed numerous historical connections between both currents. From michael Servetus onward, the Qur’ān and islamic writings had an impact on the emerging Socinian critique. Antitrinitarians tried to establish a historical genealogy from early (Ebionite) Christianity through islam (which preserved the true monotheistic idea) to the present. They often took their knowledge from much more orthodox Christian Arabist scholarship, which provided e.g. translations of passages from alQarāfī’s critique of St. Paul. moreover, some bold writers like Aubert de Versé even proposed a historical-critical approach to the text of the Qur’ān, having in mind the model of richard Simon’s historical criticism of the Old Testament.

Palabras clave: librepensadores; librepensa-miento; antitrinitarismo; Socinianismo; ilus-tración radical; herejía(s); Corán; primer cristianismo; dualismo; biblia; Judíos; ju-daísmo; orientalismo; orientalistas; deísmo; deístas.mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 i it is only due to the experience of the radical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that we now know about the «freethinkers of islam.» 1 When Johann Jacob reiske tried to introduce his students in leipzig in 1748 into classical islamic culture, he pointed out par-allels to the Christianity of his time.islam had also experienced schisms and the emergence of many sects, heresies, dispute, and ab-surd doctrines.Among its heretics were also religious critics: Just as certain freethinkers among us, who have dared to attack the unpro-tected flank of religion, there were a certain ma'arri and a certain ibn arrawandi among the Arabs, whom it pleased to mock all kinds of sects and to tear them apart, by saying that there was no sound basis save in pure reason.
reiske had apparently encountered these authors in his research and he compared them to what was called a mocker of religion -a «religionsspötter»in his time. 2 Although in the standard works on islam, such as hottinger's historia Orientalis (1651), there were already certain surveys about islamic groups including the «zindikaei» 3 that were based on al-makīn, and Jakob Friedrich re--immann disussed the possibilities of an «atheismus mohammedo-rum» in 1729, 4 the names of an al-ma,arrī or of an al-rāwandī 5 do not appear, nor do they in Pierre bayle. 6reiske's discovery, of course, was too late to still have an impact on the Enlightenment. in fact, it would take until the twentieth century that fragments of religious-critical works of these authors could be retrieved through extracting them from their refutations. 7Scholarship was still far from being able to connect the dahrī-s that were mentioned in 1697 by d'herbelot -he calls them «deherites» 8 -and Pietro della Valle's mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 naturalists from lar, 9 whom bayle had identified as proto-Spino‫ـ‬ zists, with islamic freethinkers. 10f we want to talk in terms of a general «transfer of heresy» from islam to the European radical Enlightenment, then we have to expect other very complex forms of transmission. 11On the one hand there was perhaps a subliminal continuity of heretical ideas in astrological, alchemical, or medical treatises, but on the other hand we need to take a simple fact into consideration: orthodoxy of one particular religion is automatically a heresy in the eyes of another.This means that those who argue especially for the truth of the doc-trines of their own religion may in fact have a subversive effect on another religion.
A key example in the relationship between islam and Christiani-ty is antitrinitarianism. 12in its opposition to Christianity, islam perceives itself as true monotheism.Within Christianity, however, there has been a certain movement that rejected the trinity as a con-struction of three persons that could not be logically understood and that was not supported by biblical evidence.This antitrinitarian movement, which appeared during the mid-sixteenth century, has later been called Socinianism in reference to the antitrinitarian Faus-to Sozzini.Throughout the entire seventeenth century, it became the specter of all Christian denominations until it slowly transformed into unitarianism and liberal theology during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 13 a Secta Thabaioun, a qua eam p. 311.diversam fuisse indicat, fuerit distincta.Hoc ait, e duabus hisce Sectis natam esse tertiam Mundanistarum & Naturalistarum, quae praeter mundum materialem & naturalem aliud non agnoverit principium, atque in hac haeresi fuisse Alfarabium & Avicennam.» 9Israel, "Rethinking Islam", 635; Bayle, P., Écrits sur Spinoza, F. Charles-Daubert and P.-F.Morau (eds.),Paris, 1983, 114.  10 On the dahrī-s and other «freethinkers» see now Crone, P., "Post-Colonialism in Tenth-Century Islam", Der Islam, 83 (2006), 2-38.
11 Heresy transfer should be regarded as a specific case of cultural transfer.On cul-tural transfer, there has been an elaborate discussion during the last twenty years.See e.g.Espagne, M. and Werner, M. (eds.),Transferts.Les Relations interculturelles dans l'espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle), Paris, 1988.
Within Christianity, Socinianism was the heretical counterpart to islam as a whole, as anti-Trinitarian monotheism outside of Christi-anity (together with Judaism).On the other hand, this means that orthodox islamic theological treatises and islamic polemics against Christianity in particular are in this point related with a heresy with-in Christianity.if then, rather than just an affinity, a transfer existed between both islam and Socinianism, this was in structural terms a transfer from the orthodoxy of a competing system to the hetero-doxy of one's own system. 14ore interestingly, Socinianism was in fact a precursor to the Enlightenment -and to the radical Enlightenment as well.its ra-tionalist opposition to everything that seemed illogical in doctrine, its interpretation of the teachings of Jesus -he was simply viewed as a human beingas some kind of moral philosophy, and its argu-ments for religious tolerance foreshadow the views of the eight-eenth-century Enlightenment.indeed, especially during the second half of the eighteenth century it is possible to see a continuity be-tween Socinians such as Andreas Wissowatius, Samuel Przypkowsky and Samuel Crell on the one hand, and early Enlightenment figures such as John locke, Jean le Clerc, Philipp van limborch -even isaac Newton and William Whistonon the other. 15Around 1700 there were numerous members of the intellectual avantgarde who promoted various mixes of Socinian, Cartesian, Spinozistic, and lockean views. 16hat does this constellation mean for a transfer of heresy? it means that during the transitional period from Socinianism to En--Al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 lightenment during the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-centu-ry, a matrix existed, within which islamic anti-Christian polemics could be read and absorbed.as we may know through research in the field of cultural transfer, a certain constellation of ideas from one cultural context is often reconstituted in a completely different way in another.this is exactly what happened in this case, and we will see in the last part of this paper what strange avenues, for ex-ample, islamic polemic against Paul took in the west.
i have already pointed out that islam was not the only religion that claimed to represent a genuine and uncorrupted monotheism.Ju-daism could make a similar claim that went back in time even fur-ther.this means that we would have to acknowledge that the «mono-theistic transfer of heresy» could always also occur in relationship to Judaism. in the course of its reception by the radical Enlightenment, Jewish anti-Christian works and islamic anti-Christian works were often connected and mutually reinforced themselves. 17ut the constellation is even more complex.it is not only a mat-ter of a parallelization and of a transfer of heresy between islam and socinianism -with an incorporation of Judaism-but during the seventeenth-century, it is also a matter of constructing or recon-structing the historical succession of religious movements.it is a matter of a historicization of this parallel.as we shall see, the sev-enteenth century saw the emergence of theories that try to establish the chain of Jewish -Christians -islam -socinians -Enlighten-ment. 18his historicization needs to be seen in the context of a number of historicizations, which were created in the course of the seven-teenth century.some of these historicizations are explicit counternarratives, which means that they are attempts to rediscover against official historiography latent transmissions of marginal groups.in this respect they are also relevant for the emergence of the radical Enlightenment, because the latter found -from gabriel Naudé to gottfried Arnold and Pierre baylein these counter-narratives one of its main ressources. 19f we are then interested in a reception of islamic texts -and manuscriptsin the milieu of the radical Enlightenment, we need to look not only at the continuity of materialistic, sceptical, and re-ligious-critical ideas, but to incorporate to a large extent also this discontinuity of an interreligious transfer of heresy.how else could it be explained that islamic and Jewish polemicists such as al-Qarāfī, Alguazir, Orobio de Castro, and Elijah montalto were avidly read by thinkers such as henry Stubbe, Noël Aubert de Versé, John Toland or Anthony Collins and were used for their unitarian, deist, or atheist projects? in what follows, i shall try to draw a line which leads from the political pressures of the early antitrinitarianism to the apologetical-ly inclined oriental studies of the seventeenth century and then to the pro-islamic tendencies among figures of the radical Enlighten-ment around 1700. i would like to argue that what was still an en-forcedly strategic, tactical, and voluntary «islamizing» and «judaiz-ing» in the 1570s, became, partly also through the unintended help of orientalist scholarship, genuine, historical-critical models, found-ed on textual evidence, which were incorporated by protagonists of the radical Enlightenment into their own world views.Crucial are in this context the details of the historicization of these models.it was important whether early islam was connected to Nestorian, to Arian, or to Ebionite origins.Each individual connection would at-tract different recipients within the radical Enlightenment.
ii Already from early on, polemicists recognized the striking paral-lels between Socinianism and islam.Was this really the case?did anti-Trinitarians use islam as their model?it might be possible to al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 answer this question, albeit only by a step-by-step and careful anal-ysis.let's start by looking at miguel Servet, the founder of the anti-Trinitarian movement.Servet came from Spain, where islamic rule prevailed for centuries and where still hundreds of thousands of moriscos lived.20 in his work De trinitatis erroribus (1531), Servet mentions the Qur'ān several times.After Theodor bibliander's latin translation of the Qur'ān that was based on the medieval translation of robert of Ketton (1143) had been printed in 1543, 21 Servet had actually read it and he even quoted specific sūrah-s such as sūrah 3, 4, and 5 in his main work, Restitutio Christianismi (1553). 22Calvin has used this against Servet during his trial in geneva.however, it needs to be pointed out that the islamic influence in Servet's work is rather marginal.it is surpassed by Jewish influences. 23Above all, however, the criticism of the Trinity in Servet was a result of a bypass of late scholastic nominalistic criticism and Erasmian exege-sis. 24Authors such as William of Ockham, robert holcot, gregory of rimini, Pierre d'Ailly, and John major, on whom Servet relies in his De trinitatis erroribus had discovered innate contradictions in the doctrine of the Trinity only to suggest that a belief in the Trinity was what mattered and not if one could know for sure.Such contra-dictions became critical once humanist scholarship on the New Tes-tament suggested that earlier testimonies of Christianity did not yet contain any evidences for the doctrine of the Trinity. 25nly the generation after Servet made a larger step towards islam -a step which was mainly politically motivated.After Servet had been burned at the stake, antitrinitarianism developed only in those areas where there was no strong national state with a centralized au-thority emerging, or where the control of confessional orthodoxy was weakened by external influences.This was the case in Poland and hungary.Transylvania was since 1541 under the influence of the Ot-toman Empire. 26Ferenc david and giorgio biandrata, the antitrini-tarians there who were influential at the court of Johann Sigismund, elaborated those references to the Qur'ān that Servet had already made and they carefully established a certain relationship to the is-lamic faith. 27it becomes clear that alongside of Judaizing -matthi-as Vehe (glirius) was already seeking connections to Judaism 28 - islamizing became a reality approximately at the same time.Since Jews had a better standing than Christians in the Ottoman Empire, a conversion to Judaism was also a possibility for the latter.
The necessity to be on good terms with the powerful neighbor motivated the hungarian antitrinitarians to strategically stress the proximity to islam.And it was the search for an ally, which led sporadically radical protestants who no longer believed in the Trini-ty to contact islamic authorities.Widely known is the case of the theologian Adam Neuser from heidelberg, who wrote a letter to the Sultan in Constantinople in 1570, which reads: i am firmly persuaded that my retreat from among the idolatrous Christians will engage many Persons of Consideration to embrace your belief and your religion, especially since many of the most learned and most considerable amongst them are herein of the same Sentiments with me, as i shall inform your majesty by word of mouth. 29ge in an antitrinitarian way.See Schmidt-Biggemann, W., Apokalypse und Philologie.Wissensgeschichten und Weltentwürfe der Frühen Neuzeit, Göttingen, 2007, 79ff. 26 Neuser and his friends considered the visit of the Transylvanian envoy Kaspar beke in Speyer as the perfect opportunity to establish contacts to the hungarian antitrinitarians.The letter, however, was found in Neuser's house and his plan scandalized.Eventually, Neu-ser converted to islam and moved to Constantinople, only because he was unable to find refuge elsewhere.behind the overly sensitive reaction of Palatine officials was of course the fear of subversive political alliances with the Ottoman Empire. 30Coalitions with the religious enemy were considered high treason. 31in this context, «Papal-Turkism» (Papatoturcismus) or, more severely, «Calvinist-Turkism» (Calvinoturcismus) was attacked. 32implicit in such ne-ologisms was the fear that Calvinist monarchs could strike a politi-cally motivated alliance with the Turks.Still in 1716, people were outraged about the extravagant plans of a certain marquis de lan-gallerie, who allegedly, with an accomplice, had promised the Turk-ish Aga in The hague to rally Protestants and, after overthrowing the Pope with the help of the Turkish fleet, proclaim a universal theocracy, with its seat in rome. 33if this adventurous story is to be believed, then it was certainly still a late reverberation of ba-roque chiliasm.Throughout the Thirty Years' War and shortly there-after, self-styled prophets had proclaimed the imminent fall of rome by the Turks.Soldiers of fortune adopted such ideas and tried to put them into practice just like brigadiers would.during the 1650s, for example, a former military commander traveled across Silesia, a rusty apocalyptic sword in his hand, promising his followers already titles such as «bishop of Ferrara». 34euser and his few followers, however, can be compared to nei-ther Calvinist rulers nor apocalyptic warriors.Yet, the perceived threat that emanated from him was similar, which means that the fear of a socinoturcismus, a Socinian-Turkism, seemed just as plau-sible as that of a Calvinist-Turkism had been.Fausto Sozzini, in re-turn, had avoided any affiliation with islam, probably because he was well aware how such an image could harm his still infant movement.
iii One can certainly imagine how Christian orthodoxy was trying to stress the association between Socinianism and the religious ene-my islam. in Transylvania, Peter melius already warned in 1568 that anti-Trinitarians preached a «Turkish Christ». 35Already in these years an anti-Socinian polemic was born which denounced an-titrinitarianism by stressing its similarities with islam.The anti-Soc-inian texts of the next one hundred and fifty years to come have readily incorporated this topos. 36it is only natural that the devel-oping field of Arabic studies of the early seventeenth century, often practiced by theologians and entrusted with a polemical mandate, had its fair share in anti-Socinianism and contributed to the paralliz-ing effort.The leiden-trained theologian Johann heinrich hottinger from Zurich published in 1660 in the second edition of his historia orientalis a chapter with the title "de pseudo-Christianis illis, quos 34  Arabes vocant al-muwahhidīn". 37it dogmatically explicitly spelled out the paralles between Socinianism and islam, mainly based on authentic muslim documents.Already before hottinger, the latter's teacher Jacob golius, Johannes hoornbeck and others had in some passages in their works emphasized this similarity, but nobody had done it so systematically and based on islamic scholarship. 38ottinger had made first attempts on the subject in his german Christlichen unpartheyischen Wägweyser. 39This time, however, he tackled it on the basis of Arabic manuscript sources. he states his concern very clearly, namely «that those teachings that have been called from the abyss of the old anti-Trinitarians may pave a way for islam within the boundaries of Europe». 40What he intended was «to prove from a synthesis of the principles of the mohammed-ans that barely one milk resembles more another, one egg more an-other than most of the teachings of both of these religions». 41This required first of all to reduce first islam and then Socinianism to its fundamental articles of faith.Thereafter it would be possible to compare their essential characteristics.hottinger does so in five bul-let points: 1) «both teach that religion is also a community, for the sake of whose welfare it is permissible for humans to follow any random sect». 4237 Hottinger, Historia orientalis; I use the augmented second edition, Zürich, 1660.On Hottinger see besides Loop, "Johann Heinrich Hottinger"; Fück, J., Die arabischen Studien in Europa bis auf den Anfang des 20.Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1955; Hamilton, A., "Seventeenth Century-Studies on Islam", Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 3 (2001), 169-182.Hottinger's language skills in Arabic have been evaluated critically by a contemporary native speaker: Ecchellensis, A., Eutychius patriarcha alexandrinus vin-dicatus, Roma, 1661, 378-446. 38Hottinger, Historia Orientalis, 362ff.; see Hoornbeek, J., Summa controversiarum religionis cum infidelibus, haereticis, schismaticis, Utrecht, 1653; idem, Socinianis-mi confutati, I-III, Utrecht, 1650-1664; Maccovius, J., Theologia polemica posthuma, Franeker, 1646.2) «about Holy Scripture both say that the old Testament has been corrupted by the Jews» and «that christianity could not proven by evidence from the old Testament.[…] Both take from the New Testament only as much as serves their cause». 43We shall still ret t turn to the corruption thesis.
3) «in regards to the nature and the attributes, one has to note that the Socinians partly agree with the Mohammedans, partly they fall back to contrary errors -the teachings of the catholic churchpartly the Mohammedans are better than the Socinians». 44This obt t servation indicates an interesting distinction of Hottinger: the Socint t ians are in fact even worse than islam.This means a quiet and careful appreciation of islam (at the expense of the Socinians), in the sense, as Hottinger points out later, that «the Mohammedans provide us nonetheless with ammunition against their own brotherstintarms, the Socinians». 45islam -the distant opponent-may then be used to fight threats within one's own religion.if the Socinians, for example, deny the miracles of christ, then they can be confronted with islamt t ic texts that point out that these miracles occurred by divine will and authority, but they are generally accepted.as it was the case with Theodor Hackspan, islamic scholars during the seventeenth century justified their occupation partly by saying that arabic and Persian texts could be used for christian apologetic purposes. 46) it is «certain that the Socinians borrowed those arguments which they used against the Holy Trinity, from the worktshop of the Mohammedans». 47) «The core arguments about divine revelation are incomplete and mutilated in both.»This is also where Socinians are worse than islam.
Al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 the islamic texts which Hottinger uses for his analysis are, aside from the Qur'ān, on the one hand the standard works in the field: Pococke's editions of Abū l-Faraj (Bar Hebraeus) 48 and Erpenius's edition of al-Makīn (Elmacin). 49Especially the footnotes in these works, which referenced further readings, were widely used by ear-ly modern scholars. 50But Hottinger also drew on a number of manuscripts.Those were manuscripts that had either been acquired by Golius from syria and Constantinople some time between 1625 and 1629, or they were purchased by Hottinger himself. 51He owned, for example, al-Baydāwī's Qur'ān commentary -which is archived at the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich under Ms. Or. 8 and which he used extensively. 52But Hottinger used one particular manuscript more extensively than any other: ahmad b.Idrīs al-Sanhājī al-Qarāfī's al-Ajwiba al-fākhira 'an al-as'ilah al-fājira. 53e shall still talk about al-Qarāfī more extensively, but it should be noted here that the manuscript which Hottinger probably used was no.Or. 173 from Golius's collection. 54ased on hottinger's work, it was possible to put arguments about the parallels between Socinianism and islam on more solid foundations.Polemicists such as Jurieu, Abbadie, Prideaux and many other authors have made ample use of it in the decades there-after.The author of the Réflexions historiques et critiques sur le ma-hométisme et socinianisme (1707), mathurin Veyssière la Croze, a former benedictine refugee and librarian of the royal library in berlin, argued along similar lines, but with a slightly different struc-ture. 55unlike many before him, he had a clear motive.he was worried about the steadyfastness of young scholars, who might be led astray by Socinianism: The mind of man is made for knowing and worshipping of god, but it must be fix'd by motives upon which it can rest; and these motives the Socinian religion will never be able to furnish.Thus when they have pass'd some time in that Sect, they are soon appris'd of their wavering State between doubt and Knowledg; and like People that are ready to drown, they grasp at the first thing that comes in their way.Some of them embrace Spinosism, some Popery; oth-ers go over to Judaism or to mahometanism, and very few of them return to the Orthodox religion. 56la Croze had critically examined the cases of Adam Neuser and matthias Vehe (glirius), 57 where he discovered such kind of psycho-logical dynamic, even though he did not even know the more extreme cases from anti-Trinitarian circles of the 1570s such as martin Seidel, who became a deist, or Christian Franken, who even died a convinced atheist. 58la Croze's reference to Spinozism, however, indicates that The manuscript contains 143 folios und is dated on 707 AH.It originates from the Golius collection.In the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, in which Hottinger's manuscripts are today, there is no copy of al-Qarāfī among the papers.I am grateful to Tobias Nünlist for the information. 55The he had not only past cases in his mind.On the contrary, he was much more concerned about intellectuals from his own time.One of his protégé's in Paris, for example, experienced a skeptical crisis and, af-ter turning to anti-Trinitarianism, converted to Judaism, thus grabbing the life-saving straw which la Croze had evoked. 59unlike hotting-er, however, who almost dogmatically tried to show parallels, la Croze was mainly interested in illuminating the psychological-intel-lectual dimension and in documenting it with concrete historical cas-es.This was another peculiarity of la Croze's work, which was al-most a historically documented survey of Socinianism.
in the eyes of some of his orthodox contemporaries, this was al-ready going too far.la Croze's opponent in berlin Johann heinrich Oelven circulated a review of the Réflexions in 1708, where he re-ferred to it as Der turbanisierte socinianer [The Turban-Wearing Socinian]. 60in it, he attacked la Croze for using a treatise about Nestorians to stress the religious tolerance in islam and its ethical value system.This praise of islam -expressed as a criticism of the contemporary intolerance of Christianityput a different light on the parallels between Socinianism and islam which la Croze stressed in his book.implicitly, Oelven observed, the comparison became something positive.
it was possibly the initiative of michel de la roche, a friend of the Trinitarian skeptic Samuel Clarke, that led to the translation of la Croze's Réflections (1712) into English, together with three other works on islam (one of them by reland). 61le roche was in charge of publishing the Bibliothèque angloise and the Memoirs of litera-ture. 62he praised islam as a wonderful religion in the former in 1717 and recommended reland's De religione mohammedanica (1705) to all of his readers.in the latter, he discussed Servet's burn-ing at the stake and provided a review of la Croze's work that was extremely positive.iv but we are already getting ahead of us, since this is already part of the islamophilia of the early Enlightenment. 63it is important to recognize that hottinger's dogmatic parallelization of Socinianism and islam, although it was supported by Arabic manuscripts, was not a historical theory.What counted was the comparison, not a his-torical construct.Since the reformation, however, historical con-structs had become an important component of the destruction of the traditional perception of Christianity.They were especially used in the radical reformation. 64in this vein in 1568, in their anony-mously published De falsa et vera unius Dei Patris fili et spiritus sanctus cognitione, biandrata and david mention islam for the first time in the context of a briefly sketched history of antitrinitarian-ism. 65 According to them, the doctrine of the Trinity was to be blamed for the «East to have been lost,» because, while islam had succeeded in appealing to the people of the Near East, Christianity had became incredible: because of the Christian doctrine of god in the three persons and the coeternal, co-equal and co-essential son, the entire East was lost, as their writings clearly testify.Consider, for instance, the Qur'ān, not indeed to confirm some truth of faith, but to understand, on account of this single cause, the loss of the entire east.
Such words about the loss of the East, of course, bore consider-able political weight in the Europe of the 1560s, and both biandrata and david were well aware of it.in this context, biandrata even 63  quoted Averroes, when he talks about this loss: «Equally due to this doctrine of the deity, the Jews rejected Christianity.but even the philosophers ridiculed the Christians, because they worship numer-ous deities: see Averroes.» According to biandrata, it was Joachim of Fiore during the twelfth century who rebelled against the power of academic theolo-gians after the victory of islam.Following in the latter's footsteps were later scholars such as Erasmus, Juan de Valdés, bernardino Ochino, lelio Sozzini and others.These figures had only continued to destroy the edifice of the Old Church that both luther and Zwingli had already severely damaged.This historical-theological interpretation, which seems so typical for the reformation period, albeit it already contains strong anti-Trinitarian traits, still views is-lam as the opponent, to whom, due to serious mistakes, territory was lost.This, however, was about to change -although it should take a while, because Socinianism after Fausto Sozzini was predom-inantly concerned with biblical interpretation and avoided devising any kind of historical construct; it confided itself to «sola scriptura» and refrained from historical thinking.it required the input of a de-nominationally unaffiliated antitrinitarian like daniel Zwicker to change the situation some time during the mid-seventeenth century. in his work irenicum irenicorum (1657), Zwicker provided a very peculiar counter-narrative about the doctrine of the trinity, which in-cluded Simon magus as the evil inventor of the trinity, followed by Cerinth and Pseudo-Orpheus.66however, Zwicker would not have accepted a corruption of pre-Nicene Church Fathers to an extent that they had proclaimed the equality of Father and Son.Such teaching could be found neither in Clemens romanus, nor in igna-tius, Polycarp, Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilius, Tatian, irenaeus, or Tertullian. 67This claim had more or less been made by david and biandrata, 68 but Zwicker's advantage was that he could draw on a historical-critical investigation of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity that was scholarship at its best, namely the Opus de the-ologicis dogmatibus, which the Jesuit denis Pétau published be--tween 1644 and 1650 in five volumes, to the dismay of his coll l leagues. 69n 1661, after he had been severely criticized by comenius, Zwicker changed his narrative and in his Irenicomastix he tried to sketch an uninterrupted nonltrinitarian tradition from Early christianl l ity to the present.He had to defend himself against comenius's obl l jection that the Monarchist system became extinct in the fourth cenl l tury and that there was a big gap between them and the work of Servet.This led Zwicker to look for allies for the period after the fourth century and he carefully made references to the Qur'ān.He quotes sūra 12 -Servet had already used it-which says «and the most of them do not believe in God without committing idolatry».70 Zwicker then suggested a counterlnarrative of antitrinitarianism, which led through islam.as it was already the case with Biandrata and David, his model was the ideal of a connected chain of witl l nesses of truth since the time of christ, as it had been suggested by Sebastian Franck during the «left» Reformation.Not only orthodoxy was capable of displaying a continuity, but so could the «true» spirl l itual church of supposed heretics.71 What was only suggested in Zwicker was more fully developed only a few years thereafter, namely in the circle of amsterdam emil l gres from eastern Germany and Poland.
christoph Sand (the Younger) had come to his Dutch exile from Brandenburg and he continued the Patristic scholarship of his father, christoph Sand the Elder, while he worked as a deputy lector at the Elzevier printing house.The work of both Sands appeared in 1668 under the title Nucleus historiae ecclesiasticae. 72it is a counterl church history from a specifically arian point of view.Sand was not a Socinian proper, but he defended the subordinatian Trinity, similar mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 to Zwicker. in his nucleus islam plays an important role.it is treated in seven densely written pages, which make already good use of hot-tinger's historia orientalis.Sand tries to refute numerous anti-islamic claims and he attempts to show that muhammad did in fact believe in Christ as the son of god.but just like the Arians, muhammad viewed him as a most excellent and perfect human being. 73his allows us for the first time to see how the developing anti-trinitarian counter-narratives paradoxically connect with certain antiislamic polemical writings from the middle Ages and the renais-sance.A specific dogmatic position (Arianism in the work of Sand) makes a certain source attractive, where the Qur'ān was brought into connection with Christian influences. in the case of Sand this was a medieval tradition that viewed muhammad as a disciple of an Arian.That was the tradition, which had originated with John of damascus, who had suggested, based on one particular muhammad legend of the Christian monk bahīrā, that this monk had been an Arian.74v Already at this stage, it would be possible to speculate about possible influences of historicizing anti-Trinitarians and Arians about the evolving radical Enlightenment, especially in England.during the 1660s and thereafter, Arianism was appealing especially to English circles. in his clandestine work an account of the Rise and Progress (1671) henry Stubbe, for example, writes «that the religion of mahomet is chiefly founded on the doctrines of the Nazarene Christians and the Arrians».75but it is still to early for this at that point.
What we need to understand before we can go on is how anti-trinitarian genealogies connected in peculiar ways with different narratives of corruption. it is not easy to get a general idea about the numerous narratives that tell about an intentional corruption of sacred texts.First, there is the accusation of muslims that Jews and Christians had corrupted the bible -the doctrine of tahrīf. 76Then, there is the Christian claim that Jews had corrupted the Qur'ān. 77hird, Christians were accused of having corrupted the Qur'ān.hava lazarus-Yafeh has examined such claims for the middle Ages and published her findings in a book under the title intertwined Worlds. 78These intertwined worlds, however, have continued to exist during the early modern period.
Only after the complexity of the competing corruption-narratives is understood properly is it possible to understand how both orien-talists and radicals integrated their own projects and claimed it for themselves.The connection with the constructed genealogies of So-cinianism seems obvious, but also with legitimizing genealogies of Calvinist or lutheran Christianity.Arabic scholars, for example, tried hard to legitimize their study of islamic culture.Theodor hackspan, Professor of Oriental languages at the university of Alt-dorf, for instance, adopted from his teacher georg Calixt the con-viction that it was important to discover an earlier consensus within the Church in order to regain the true system of faith again. 79in hackspan's eyes this implies, with the help of Pharisaic Judaism and islam, the reestablishment of the uncorrupted Abrahamic reli-gion which, according to the Qur'ān, had been corrupted by the Jews.This was possible, because hackspan viewed the Qur'ān as a blend of Jewish, Christian, and original components.hackspan pointed out in 1644 that the Qur'ān was a «mixture of many differ--mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 ent things, partly revealed, partly corrupted, and partly added to what had been revealed». 80Nonetheless, hackspan concludes, it contained also genuine Abrahamic elements and should therefore be used for restitution purposes.
in his chapter "de statu Christianorum et Judaeorum tempore orti muhammedani" of his historia orientalis hottinger also dis-cusses the Jewish and Christian elements of the Qur'ān. 81The sources for such claims are very old and can already be found in byzantine anti-islamic polemics, such as those by ricoldus de mon-te Crucis or Johannes Kantakuzenos. 82According to legend, mu-hammad had a Jewish servant, Abdia ben Salomon and, as we have heard already, a Christian servant as well, a monk by the name of Sergius, who is otherwise generally known as ba¬īrā.
in addition to that, there were also historians of heresies, who had acquired a considerable knowledge about the Orient.One of the most significant among them was Abraham hinckelmann, who pub-lished an edition of the Qur'ān in hamburg. 83hinckelmann at-tempted to uncover the roots of Jakob böhme's heresy in Zoroas-trian dualism. he retraced the teachings of the alleged Zoroastrian Chaldaic oracles via the Kabbalah and islamic mysticism to Europe.his own collection of Sufi manuscripts, Kabbalistic and neo-Platon-ic texts formed the basis of his work.hinckelmann views the cor-ruption of Christianity as recurring, caused by a pagan («Sabian») doctrine of dualism and of a concealed deity, which consisted along with it.his agenda was the restitution of genuine Christianity. 84lightly different was the thesis of Willem hendrik Vorst, a dutchman with Socinian leanings, who privately expressed his con--viction that the passages in the Qur'ān that provided a positive por-trayal of Jesus Christ must have been inserted later by Arabic Chris-tians. 85This enabled people such as Vorst to rid Christianity from its link with islam.it was especially embraced by Socinians, who had been critical of a Christian interpretatio pia of the Qur'ān that had been put forward by Nicholas of Cusa, because it tainted the idea of a «pure» monotheistic islam by asserting an alledged vener-ation of Christ as the son of god.
in fact, the ideal of a defense of a pure monotheistic islam was the goal of all those anti-Trinitarians who had developed an interest in islam, even if this meant to bring hypotheses about potential for-geries into play.Already from the beginning, several anti-Trinitari-ans suspected that certain passages might be later interpolations.Very important for them was the search for old textual variants in manuscripts, especially those of the Prologue of John, which con-tained the most explicit textual manifestation of the much despised Trinitarian logos theology.Already long before John mill's critical edition of the New Testament from 1707, which contained more than ten thousand different textual variants, 86 scholars had gathered textual variants. 87When Adam Neuser, for example, spent his days in Constantinople as a simple cavalryman, he searched the libraries for old New Testament manuscripts and sent copies of them to his followers in Transylvania. 88he knew that the latter were in pro‫ـ‬ cess of preparing a new edition of the New Testament which was supposed to prove the unitarian truths of ancient Christianity.The new development since the mid-seventeenth, however, was the fact that now the Qur'ān became also subject of such historical-critical study. in 1682 we encounter an antitrinitarian corruption hypothesis con-cerning the Qur'ān that may have been inspired by hendrik Willem Vorst. it took, however, a path of its own and was not just orally con-sidered like in the case of Vorst.This hypothesis occurred in the con-text of an attempt to establish contacts with islam, which seems, al-most one hundred years later, just like Neuser's «Socino-Turkish» move.The pattern is again the same: A letter was supposed to be handed over to an envoy who happened to be on a diplomatic mis-sion to the West and who was supposed to serve as a vehicle to trans-mit the message to islamic countries.This time the envoy is the mo-roccan ambassador in london.The letter, which contains a text from the early seventeenth-century by a certain Ahmed ben Abdala, to-gether with an extensive commentary, promises an alliance between Western anti-Trinitarians and mohammedans. 89This time, however, the tone of the letter is markedly more self-confident and direct.
Two Socinians tried to convey the letter and some manuscripts to the moroccan ambassador who was visiting london.Noël Aubert de Versé, the huguenot author of the letter, 90 not only offers an al-liance between Western Antitrinitarians and Eastern islam, but sur-prisingly also demands from the muslims to accept certain correc-tions in the Qur'ān, since certain passages were corrupted.One of them was the famous passage in sūra 4,156, which claims that Christ did not die on the cross: «but they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, it only seemed to them as such.» in his latin commentary to the manuscript which accompanied his letter -a text by Ahmed ben Abdala from around 1610-Aubert suggests that this passage must be a later interpolation that had been added after the times of muhammad. 91based on the scholarship of gerard Wiegers, we know that the ben Abdala letter is to a large extent a modified adoption of the anti-Christian polemics by the morisco muhammad Alguazir. 92Aubert writes in his commentary that the Prophet muhammad did not have any reason to deny the death of Jesus: «i dare to say that the Quranic text has been cor-rupted». 93According to Aubert, it was easy to do so, because these were very short and disconnected passages, which muhammad had written down.it was possible to change, corrupt, and correct them after his death -by the Jews, who did not want Christianity to spread in the East under the flag of muhammad, and so inserted an absurd story which would divide Christians and muslims.Similarly, the «dedicatory Epistle» by Aubert to the moroccan ambassador reads: «those contradictions were foistered into the scatter'd papers found after mahomet's death, of which in truth the Alcoran was made up.»And the letter promises: «We do in these our papers en-deavour to clear by whom, and in what time such alterations were made in the settings of the Alcoran». 94nlike Vorst, Aubert charges the Jews, not the Christians, with forgery: When some Jews, whom mohammad used when he was still alive, saw that the latter's teachings were accepted by all people, by both is own countrymen and the Jews, and that this actually produced Christians under the guise of islam, they were deeply hurt and they fraudulently inserted these completely absurd stories into his papers.This is how they turned mohammad into the main culprit of the entire fallacy and they taught and showed that it was a mistake to believe him and his teachings and that people would adopt a belief system from a person who was completely inexperienced, yet the most audacious and shameless of all. 95lius consanguinei post ipsius mortem pro libitu depravare, immutare, corrigere potue-runt; quam in rem facili conspirare et consentire poterant; quippe qui in una eademque urbe manebant, et apud quos solos multa nondum aliis cognita, nondum edita Mahometis scripta; reposita erant imo ferunt.» 92 The Jews thus wanted to spill discredit upon mu¬ammad in or-der to prevent a pure -non-Trinitarian-Christianity from spread-ing.
Such a utilization of the Qur'ān may seem surprising.The idea of an interpolation of the Qur'ān is hardly discussed among islamic scholarship and appears only among a very select circle of Western scholars today.generally, the concept of «athetesis,» an unauthorized insertion, is not made in regards to the Qur'ān. 96but how did Au-bert come up with it then in the first place?Was he even able to read Arabic? it seems as if he did not.Neither the bundle of papers captured by the English court nor any other of his writings betrays traces of a proficiency in Arabic. he mainly draws on Patristic sources. in fact, Aubert did not even seem to have a profound knowl-edge of the Oriental scholarship of his time.but how did Aubert ar-rive then at his historical-critical hypothesis about the Qur'ān?
The answer has two parts.The first part: there is a medieval tra-dition, according to which three crafty Jews, Wahb b. munabbih, ,Abd Allāh b. al-Salām and Ka,b al-Ahbār, had become followers of muhammad so that they would render him into a dissenter of Chris-tianity, to which he had assigned.in their hearts, however, they re-mained Jews.but after the death of muhammad they persuaded ,Alī, the son of Abū Tālib, to whom muhammad had bequeathed his writ-ings that he would proclaim himself as a prophet.They then made numerous changes and alterations to the Qur'ān that were in agree-ment with their on interests.This tradition comes from the Risālat cipi populis, a suis etiam popularibus et Judaeis, et isto pacto sub Mahumedano nomine vere Christianos evadere, veriti ne tandem tota gens Christiana efficeretur, absurdissi-mam hanc fabulam in ejus schedas intrusisse, ut tanti erroris reum Mahometem ipsum facientes, docerent, ostenderentque temere illi credi, ejusque disciplinam recipi, utpote hominis vel imperitissimi vel omnium audacissimi et impudentissimi.»The text goes on: «Profecto corruptum hac in causa Alchoranum videri debere omnibus et sapientibus Mahumedanis merito asseruerim, cum ipse Mahometes sese Christi disciplinam annun-ciare re doceat, nullo ullibi exceptione ab ipso facta, cum clamat multoties se Evangelio credere, nullibi corruptum esse accusans.Id tamen procul dubio fecisset si ei constitisset Jesum minime mortuum fuisse, et si ei corruptus fuisse a Christianis scriptura.Innumeris in locis idololatriam, superstitionem, polytheismum Christianis exprobrat, alium vero hac de re silet.»Usually, the redaction of the Qur'ān after Muhammad's death is ascribed to Zayd b.Thābit, who operated according to the orders of ,Umar or Abū Bakr. 96 al-Kindī, a Christian anti-islamic work from the tenth century, which consists of a fictional exchange between a muslim and a Christian. 97his work has greatly influenced the image of islam during the Eu-ropean middle Ages.its thesis appears again in Nicolaus of Cusa's Cribratio alkorani (1461), on which numerous Arabists from the seventeenth century drew. 98Sand had used the Cribratio with the intention to find positive statements about Christ in the Qur'ān.
The second part of the answer is more complicated, though more interesting: Aubert seems to have interpreted the tradition that had been transmitted by Nicolaus of Cusa in the light of his most recent experiences.We know that Aubert, shortly before his visit to Eng-land in 1681, when he was living in holland, trying to make ends meet, worked for the Elzevier publishing house. 99At the shop, he was entrusted with the latin translation of richard Simon's revolu-tionary histoire critique de vieux testament from 1678.After bos-suet's protest, the first edition, published in Paris, had been confis-cated and destroyed. 100however, a manuscript copy of it survived and, partly due to Elzevier's eagerness to make a profit, it was translated into latin and published in 1681. 101n his work, Simon discusses also the corruption of the original biblical text in the process of the vocalization by the masoretes.102 Apart from that, moses, according to Simon, was not the author of the Pentateuch. in fact, it had been compiled much later.The mes-sage of Simon's work is clear: even a «holy» text can be problem-atic.Aubert, who translated Simon's work, was a diligent disciple of his master.he also knew the tendencies among several Socinians such as those by lelio Sozzini in his commentary to the gospel of al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 John to consider several passages as later and corrupted interpola-tions.Several years later and influenced by Jean le Clerc's liberii de sancto amore Epistolae theologicae, Aubert expressed the hy-pothesis that the term «Jesus» that appeared in the manuscript of the Prologue of John had been replaced by «god». 103Aubert, like Willem hendrik Vorst before him, applies this philological scepti-cism in regards to the bible to the Qur'ān, combining it with the thesis from the Risālat al-Kindī, and draws his own conclusions.Thereupon, Aubert sketches, without any knowledge of Arabic, a «histoire critique» of the Qur'ān.
but what, aside from Simon's work, instilled in him the desire to try to emend the Qur'ān? in what direction was this emendation supposed to go?As becomes clear from the document, Aubert's goal was to uncover a pure version of islam that was still connected to Christianity and the crucified Jesus, but that could also be under-stood as a rational faith.Such interest sprang purely from scholarly reflection and was entirely theoretical in nature.
Presumably, between 1679 and the end of 1680, when Sand died, and still before he left for England, Aubert may have discussed with Sand at length the relationship between Arianism and islam in the facilities of the Elzevier publishing house.maybe they even dis-cussed the question of how it would be possible to apply Simon's new critical approach to the problem. 104One passage in Sand's book focuses on the Qur'ān sūra four, which denies that Jesus was actually crucified.Sand points out that this opinion was unjustifia-bly «attributed» to muslims. 105in return, he quotes several other islamic documents which imply that Jesus did in fact die on the cross.
vi Only if we understand these complex connections between parti-san genealogies, theories of corruption, and plans of restitution, only then is it possible to understand the matrix in which the early mod-ern reception of islamic anti-Christian and anti-Pauline texts took place and which contributed to the radical Enlightenment. in order to do that, it will be necessary to retrace what i shall call «the natu-ral history of the discourse». 106A natural history of this kind does not only retrace the broad intellectual lines, but it pursues in detail every individual manuscript in regards to how it was received in scholarly libraries and by collectors, every form of adaption of the text by intellectuals.
We soon discover that in the case of the reception of ideas from islam this discourse was influenced by all kinds of accidental fac-tors.it depended on what kind of manuscript -one out of a thou-sand possible onesa golius or a Pococke purchased at the bazaar in Aleppo or from their contacts in Constantinople.The fact that al-Qarāfī, from a theological point of view a second -or third-rate author, would play such a prominent role in the circles of European freethinkers (instead of, say, ibn hazm or ibn Taymiyya), 107 or that Aubert -without his own knowledge-would write a commen-tary on muhammad Alguazir, that hinckelmann arrives at his specu-lations in part due to his reading of Abū ,Abd Allāh muhammad b.Sa,īd al-Sanhājī and 'Atā' b. muhammad b. al-husaynī, 108 all of that is highly accidental.On the other hand: once an idea was picked up in the West which could be of interest for certain purpos-es, things become much more «necessary» and cogent.more precisely, in all of these cases there is a divergence be-tween the «necessity of the influence» and the «contingency of the transmission.»by «necessity of influence» i mean that the ideas that were transmitted were certainly important and, once they be--mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 came known, could not be ignored.The contingency of transmission refers to the authors and channels, though which these ideas were transmitted to the West and which were profoundly coincidental.
Especially by looking at the longue durée of the natural history of this discourse, then all the numerous paradoxes it contains be-come obvious.it all starts with Risālat al-Kindī, wich, as we have seen, exercised such tremendous influence during the early modern period, and wich, as Paul Kraus discovered, even influenced ibn alrāwandī's Kitāb al-Zumurrudh. 109This means the arguments used by early Christian polemicists originated partly from freethinkers within islam itself.This is the reverse scenario from what we know about the recep-tion of anti-Christian islamic polemics in Socinianism: in the Risālat al-Kindī Christian orthodoxy as the direct enemy of the antagonistic religion joins forces with a heresy within islam.moreover, hava lazarus-Yafeh has shown how the field of biblical criticism wit-nessed a complex interplay between Christians, Jews, and mus-lims. 110Finally, both Jewish and islamic anti-Christian polemicists drew on the work of Socinians and on Western scholastic logic, be-fore their work became a source for the arguments of Christian anti-Trinitarians and freethinkers. 111econstructing the natural history of this discourse will also help us to identify practices -the compilation, the secondary reception, the modification-that played an integral role in the process of transmission by radicals.in his contribution in this volume Justin Champion has beautifully shown how much radicals and freethink-ers during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries de-pendent on what they were able to read in translation in the publi-cations of orientalists.by looking at the transmission of anti-Pauline polemics, we shall see in greater detail how exactly the perspective in regards to genealogies and concepts of corruption came to be modified in the process of transmission.
islam knows a number of various traditions of stories about the Apostle Paul and his role in the corruption of original Christianity.accordingly, Paul turned Jesus into the Son of God who was more than just a prophet.This led christianity astray from its genuine faith.Research by Samuel Stern and P.S. van Koningsveld has shown that the story as we know it in its original form is part of the Kitāb al-ridda wa-l-futū¬ by Sayf b. 'Umar al-Tamīmī, who died in 796-7.112 it is the story of Paul and his four disciples, Jacob, Nestorius, Melcun, and a fourth who is called «the believer.»The three first names are references to the three christian groups in Syr-ia; the fourth is a reference to true faith, islam.Several different versions of the story are structured similarly to the Parable of the Three Rings: a father or king confidentially tells each of his sons or disciples that he was telling only him the truth. 113However, he tells each one of them something different.after the father's or king's death, the sons discover the divergences in each version of the story, which is the starting point for religious strife.What is pe-culiar on some of the anti-Pauline version, however, is not just the fourth disciple, but that this disciple has a group of followers who live as eremites.Thirty of them will eventually come to face with the prophet, which establishes the connection to islam.at this point, i will skip the transmission history of the story as far as it is known to us in the islamic tradition.it is clear, how-ever, that in this tradition the story was in its different versions fairly well-known.Some time in the thirteenth century, al-Qarāfī learned about it and used to it in his apologetic work.The latter, of course, was only one of many potential sources that were in-volved in the transmission process of the story. 114But so that the story arrived and made an impact in the West, it needed to pass through the eye of needle, so to speak: the manuscript, which now carries the call number Or. 173 and which contains al-Qarāfī's al-Ajwiba al-fakhira that contains three versions of the story, 115 mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 needed to be part of the manuscript corpus which golius pur-chased in the levant.
When Johann heinrich hottinger from Zurich studied Arabic culture under golius around 1640, he also came across this particu-lar text and used it intensively for his studies.The story came to be known to intellectuals in the West then predominantly through the passages hottinger quotes from it in his historia orientalis.Still, we need to carefully examine how Western scholars interpreted and adopted the anti-Pauline story.
henry Stubbe, physician, a follower of hobbes, and political the-oretician and orientalist -in the eyes of James r. and margaret Jacob, he is the key link the radicals of the English revolu-tion and the evolving radical Enlightenment 116 -was eager to in-tegrate the material transmitted by hottinger in his clandestine work from 1671, the account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism: i remember a mahometan story of Ahmed ben idris, that Paul instructed three Princes in religion, and taught each of them a different Christianity: as-suring each of them singly that he was in the truth, and that afterwards when Paul was dead, each of them pretended his religion to be the true religion de-rived from Paul, whence arose great feuds amongst them. 117different passage reads: Ahmed ben Edris, passing over the Nestorians as a foolish sort of Christian hereticks, brings in a fable concerning Paul, as if he had deluded the World into an opinion of the deity of isa, and given a beginning to the heresy of Euty-chius and the Jacobites.And that an Arrian or else a Judaising Christian whom he calls an Elmunin (al-mu'min), or true believer, did anathematize Paul there-upon, saying, We were the companions of isa; we saw him; we are descended from him; he was the servant and Apostle of god; he never told us otherwise.And the same Author further tells us that mahomet met with thirty of the de-scendants of this Elmunin or orthodox person, who were retired into an hermit-age, and that they owned his doctrine and profess'd moslemism.118 From this Stubbe concludes that islam was founded on the teach-ings of Nazarene Christians and Arians.This conclusion, however, is somewhat imprecise, because viewing the descendants of Elmun-in as Arians follows still the tradition that stems from John of da-mascus.This was also what Sand had believed.Yet, Arian and «Nazarene Christians» are two different things, but we encounter this more precise analysis only later, in the work of la Croze.
When la Croze, about thirty years after Stubbe, read the history in hottinger, he solved the puzzle in a different way. he initially had another problem in his mind which he brought into it.muham-mad had obviously a strange idea about Christianity, especially about the Trinity. he believed that the Trinity consisted of the Fa-ther, Jesus, and mary.but where did this idea come from?ludovico maracci, the Qur'ān translator, had suggested that muhammed adopted here the views of the sect of the Collyridians, which Epiph-anius mentions in his work. 119This sect worshipped especially the Virgin mary, and mu¬ammad could according to marracci have be-lieved that they saw mary as a deity and as the third person of the Trinity. in germany, Johann michael lange, a student of Wagenseil in Altdorf, had criticized in his treatise De fabulis mahomedicis (1697) marracci's theory and examined the entire subject anew. 120ccording to lange's findings it is, as la Croze points out, much more probable that mahomet, who had commerce with the Nestori-an Christians, who were very numerous both in Persia and in Ara-bia, had also been witness to their complaints concerning the title of the mother of god, which Cyril of Alexandria, and the Council of Ephesus had decreed to the blessed Virgin.besides, la Croze adds, there might have remained until then some of the Nazarenes and Ebionites in Arabia, where the strength of the party was in the time of Epiphanius.mahomet might have learned from them what was to be found, according to Origin's account, where they have our lord Jesus Christ proclaim as follows: «The holy Spirit, my mother, took me up by one of the hairs of my head and transported me to mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 the great mountain Tabor.»All these things might have produced a confusion of ideas, which is not improbable in such a man as mu¬ammad. 121based on a fragment from the Nazarene gospel, 122 la Croze then brings, with a certain level of caution, the Ebionites as a possible group in Arabia during the seventh century into play.
These were the subjects which la Croze had in mind when he was reading hottinger's translation of the al-Qarāfī passage during his study of lange's work.Once the Ebionites had caught his atten-tion, la Croze saw the history of the thirty adherents of the faithful in a different light.
One may see here sensible traces of Ebionism.Those hereticks hated St. Paul, whom they treated as an Apostate and Transgressor of the law.We have no reason to doubt, but in mahomet's time there were some who liv'd in re-tirement, to save themselves from Persecution.And therefore however embroil'd and perplex'd this Narrration be, we may conclude that the thirty Persons, whom Ahmed speaks of, were the remains of the Ebionites, who with-out any difficulty, embrac'd the doctrines of the false Prophet, who reviv'd Opinions perfectly like their own. 123en Shlomo Pines wrote his disputed theory about the Jewish-Christian sources in ,Abd al-Jabbār b.Ahmad's tathbīt, he did not know that la Croze had already anticipated the idea of the presence of Jewish Christians at the time of mu¬ammad, based on the al-Qarāfī material which he used. 124ecently, François de bois argued in regards to the nasārà which are mentioned in the Qur'ān that they were not just Christians but Nazareans, Jewish Christians.de bois reminds us that Epiphanius mentions the Elchasaitians, who share several important doctrines with islam, starting with prayer towards Jerusalem to their interpre-tation of other rituals.he also points out that the concept of the concluding prophet -the «seal of the prophet»-does not only ap--pear in mani but already among the baptismal sect, in which he was raised and which, according to de blois, was most likely a group of Elchaisaitians. 125Already in 1978, Patricia Crone observed in a different context that the Elchaisitians were a similar combination of Jewish Christianity and gnosticism as the Athinganoi in byzan-tium and the Arabs at the time of muhammad. 126f this means that the Christians mentioned in the Qur'ān were Elchaisitians or only a group of Judaizing Christians, who devel-oped similar characteristics after the seventh century as genuine Jewish Christians did during the first, second, or third century can remain open at this stage.What is important for us, however, is that the Jewish-Christians living in Northern mesopotamia -especially around Nisibis-correlate with what we know from the anti-Pau-line legends.
Shortly after his Réflections and after his encounter with this par-ticular work, la Croze met and befriended a real Socinian.This was Samuel Crell, the grandson of the famous Socinian theologian Jo-hann Crell.both men had an exchange about the attitude of the So-cinians towards islam, in which Crell stressed that Sozzini had dis-tanced himself from it. 127125 Du Blois, F., "Elchasai -Manes-Muhammad.Manichäismus und Islam im religionshistorischen Vergleich", Der Islam, 81 (2004), 31-48.
however, although Orientalists until Pines had forgotten the theory of the connection between Ebionites and the Qur'ān, it fea-tured prominently in the revisionist historical concept of one think-er: John Toland.i do not need to elaborate here -Justin Champion is much more qualified to do so-how the discovery of the Gospel of Barnabas in the library of the Prussian Consul in The hague prompted Toland to become interested in and endorse the genealogy Jewish-Christians-islam-contemporary unitarianism. 132The morisco forgery from around 1600 that was supposedly a genuine gospel of the Apostle barnabas, which already announces the coming of mu¬ammad as mediator and which is in agreement with the four rules of islam, appeared to be the missing Jewish-Christian link be-tween Christianity and islam. 133From the study of English deist circles it becomes clear how the interplay of these forgeries with both islamic and Jewish anti-Christian polemical works -Anthony Collins bought numerous treatises of this kind when the bibliothe-ca Saraziana was sold 134 -creates a completely new image of the mArTiN mulSOW al-QanÐara (AQ) XXXI 2, julio-diciembre 2010, pp.549-586 ISSN 0211-3589 history of religion which oscillates between unitarianism, deism, and Atheism.This development, from early anti-Trinitarianism to seventeenthcentury Orientalism and the reception of islamic sources by early deism, illustrates the origins of the radical Enlightenment.Of course, it is just one of many. it seems stunning that this develop-ment came to end precisely at that moment when the thirty-two-year old reiske discovered the heterodoxies of al-ma,arrī and ibn al-r×wandī.recibido: 05/04/2010 Aceptado: 21/06/2010 Ritchie, S., "The Pasha of Buda and the Edict of Torda.The Islamic Ottoman Influ-ence on the Development of Religious Toleration in Reformation Transsylvania", Journal Mulsow, M., "Who was the author of the 'Clavis apocalyptica' of 1651?Millenarian-ism and Prophecy between Silesian Mysticism and the Hartlib Circle", in J.C. Laursen and R.H. Popkin (eds.),Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture: Continental Millenarians: Protestants, Catholics, Heretics, Dordrecht, 2001, 57-75. 35Biandrata and David wrote a refutation against his accusations, Demonstratio falsitatis doctrinae Petri Melii, et reliquorum Sophistarum per Antitheses una cum refutatione Antitheseon veri et Turcici Christi, Weißenburg, 1568.See Hughes, P., "In the Foorsteps of Servetus: Biandrata, David, and the Quran", Journal of Unitarian Uni-versalist History, 31 (2006-7), 57-63, 58.