new world
interview

Responding to a Person,
Not to a Book
Fr. SIDNEY GRIFFITH, an early Christian scholar and linguist, describes the birth of Christian-Muslim relations, tracing a path to today’s challenges. Fr. Giussani’s emphasis on the element of “empathy” with the early disciples adds a dimension of hope for the communication of the faith: the accent of experience.

by Margaret Harper McCarthy

Father Sidney Griffith brings decades of scholarship to the table of discussions on the early Christian Church and the communication of its message to the wider world. He has spent his life working on texts belonging to the first centuries of Christianity, in which he encountered the first elements of a “dialogue” between Christians and Muslims. Recently, Fr. Griffith’s incisive interest in the communication of the faith then and now met with a surprise in his reading of Luigi Giussani’s At the Origin of the Christian Claim. 
At the recent New York Encounter, you were saying that the study of the historicity of the Gospels often leads to an underestimation of the fact that these texts were person-to-person testimonies.
Our Scriptures are basically documents of human memory, assisted by the Holy Spirit and recognized by the Church. This was very interpersonal and not just a document of information.

You also said that Msgr. Luigi Giussani’s book At the Origin of the Christian Claim contributed to your own thinking on the subject. How so?
When I read Fr. Giussani’s book, I was prompted to explore the idea that within the faith community, the real historical value of these Gospels is not primarily as documents that give historical information about the life of Jesus or of the Early Church–not that these texts don’t give us that information–but as documents which allow me, as a believer, to gain some access to the human experience of faith that the disciples had as a result of their personal encounters with Jesus. I began to want to explore this idea as an important dimension of the historicity of the Gospels for me as a believer. Against my previous tendency, I came to see this other dimension as “empathy”–a kind of intuited awareness of another’s cognitive experience. On the basis of this human “empathy,” through the medium of writing we can gain an experience of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who, in turn, are articulating the experience of the people who met Jesus. We can have a kind of “empathetic” faith experience with them and communicate in the faith. I had never thought that before. One of the things that Fr. Giussani constantly accented in this book was precisely the personal experience of those people whom Jesus called and who responded. Those very human experiences are accessible even today over all of these centuries.

What propelled you to become a scholar of biblical languages and early Syriac Christianity?
I was ordained in1965 and sent to The Catholic University of America to the Semitics department, to study ancient and Near Eastern languages in view of that goal, as well as some Arabic for “comparative” purposes. I started to look around for texts written in Arabic by Christians in the early Islamic period, and discovered that there was a huge archive of material which hardly anybody was studying.

What do the early texts, written in Arabic by Christians who had encountered Islam, tell us about the first moments of dialogue with Islam?
The first thing Christians noticed about this burgeoning Islam was what it said about “Jesus the Messiah, the Son of Mary,” as the Koran always puts it. Later, after the Middle East came under Muslim control (in 650) and when people began to take on the language of the hegemonic group (mid-8th century), they began to translate the Scriptures into Arabic. The first theological tract composed in Arabic was written around 770 by a Christian who was very much taking his cue from the Arabic Koran while putting great emphasis on what Christians believe about Jesus of Nazareth and what that leads them to believe about God. He calls on the testimony of the Koran, along with biblical testimonies, in order to commend the orthodox Christian view. He was writing a sort of corrective.

Is there anything instructive for us in the way these early Christians wrote about their faith in the language of Islam?
As Christians everywhere have always done, when challenged to give an account of their faith, they try to do so in the idiom of the challenge. They try to understand the perspective from which the challenge is coming and to respond in terms that would be intelligible to the one making the critique. Because the Koran was becoming a very important culture-determining book in this period, naturally the first apologists would want to set out Christian thinking in an idiom that was becoming ever-more widespread.

To whom were these texts addressed?
They were addressed primarily to fellow Christians–why shouldn’t they accept the teaching of Mohammed? Over time, they became part of a “dialogue” between Christianity and Islam. From the middle of the 8th century into the 10th, in Baghdad, for example, Islamic doctrine itself was in the process of formation. Much of its early expression seems to have been formulated in response to Christian critiques and observations. Many scholars of the time flocked to Baghdad as a cultural capital–not only Muslims, but Jews and Christians as well. So, for a couple of centuries, all three of these faith communities were engaged in an intellectual life.

Many people refer to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the three “religions of the Book.”
I tend not to like these phrases. The idea of the “people of the Book” is a very Islamic idea. Christians are in response not to a book but to a Person, the Person of Jesus of Nazareth who is for us the Word of God. Scriptures are the Word of God, but in the words of human beings. This is very different from the Muslim idea of the Koran as the Word of God in the words of God–the human person is only a “channel” of God’s word. The person of Mohammed has no contribution to this Word. In the Islamic view, the Koran is comparable to what Jesus’ Person is for us.

Doesn’t the new accent you discovered in Giussani emphasize this?
Yes. The Book is simply a medium in the communication process between the first Christians who actually knew Jesus and us. These are the people on whom it finally dawned, after an intense process of interaction, that in Jesus, they were really encountering the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in person. This is a dramatic realization for people to come to. And through them to us. St. Paul says “faith comes by hearing.” And one of the ways of hearing is through the written Word. But I had never thought of the idea of an “empathy of faith” between us and the early Christians, through the medium of writing.

What are the challenges of a Christian-Muslim dialogue?
Personally, I think that the root problem has to do with a difference between Islamic prophetology and Judea-Christian prophetology. For Islam, Jesus is the penultimate prophet, just prior to the coming of the last Prophet, Mohammed, in a series of prophets. So, Jesus is bringing a message from God which is essentially the same as the messages of all the previous messengers; and He is delivering it to His community, in its own language, which would have been either Hebrew or Aramaic. Jesus delivered it to His community in the same way that Moses delivered the Torah to the Jews, and Mohammed delivered the Koran to the Muslims. But what we have instead of one document are four different texts recording the sayings and doings of Jesus in the Greek language which was not even Jesus’ language (in the Islamic view, there would have only been one text). For us, there is one Gospel with four “reflections”–it is not a book as it is for Islam. It is the Good News about who Jesus of Nazareth is.

So then, from the Muslim point of view, the four Gospels and the other New Testament texts are a deviation from Jesus’ original message?
The Muslim thought, which has its beginning in the Koran, is that the present-day followers of Jesus, unlike the original followers of Jesus, made a basic mistake in regards to what they think about who He is: the Son of God. The key to the whole thing is the answer to the question that Jesus Himself posed: “Who do you say that I am?” Muslims and Christians give different answers to that question, and those different answers will spell out, in the end, their distances from one another.