One of my signature ideas, and with which many people came to know me, is the proposition that modern Islam, especially in its Arab and Middle Eastern form, is a modern construct built on a revolutionary structure of German philosophy of history, the same one that informs romantic nationalism and Marxism, and articulated in historical Islamic symbolism.
In this essay, however, I’m planning to discuss something entirely different: a critique of the Islamic tradition itself, more precisely, of the historical self-understanding of Islamic orthodoxy in relation to its origins in Biblical salvation history. That is, I will restrict myself here to talking about the Qur’an in the sense of a religious text, a scripture, with no concern for modern politics or ideology.
My central device to understand the development of the Islamic tradition, Islamic self-understanding, Islamic identity, and Quranic exegesis, and its relationship to the Biblical world is Marcionism. My central proposition is this: the development of Islam can be fruitfully understood as a Marcionism that actually succeeded in severing itself from the Jewish and Christian world from which it sprang. This, in my view, is one of the largest sources—perhaps the single largest source—of Islamic errors, misconceptions, and the tradition’s almost chronic inability to build culturally fruitful bridges with Judaism or Christianity. (I understand there is a large cottage industry of scholars who make their living by asserting the opposite. I do not care much for them.) The result is a religion that is both part of the Biblical world and entirely alien to it, built on a minimalist text that is scarcely understood because it lost its referents, a religious consciousness that is referentially dependent yet hermeneutically autonomous. A text that gestures toward a lost world while denying the legitimacy of the only traditions capable of supplying its texture. In what follows, I will lay out my thoughts on the matter.
Marcionism and the Problem of Biblical Continuity
For the reader unfamiliar with early Christian theological history, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by Marcionism and why it occupies such a decisive place in the formation of Christianity. Marcionism was the first great post-apostolic theological crisis—one that forced the Church to define, with lasting consequences, its relationship to the Hebrew Scriptures and to the God who revealed Himself therein. It threatens the coherence of Christian faith and the integrity of Christian scripture—a debate that, more than any other, determined what Christianity would become and what it would refuse to be. (For interested readers, I recommend this podcast episode on the history of Marcionism.)
The development of Islam can be fruitfully understood as a Marcionism that actually succeeded in severing itself from the Jewish and Christian world from which it sprang.
Marcion of Sinope was a second-century Christian arch-heretic who arrived in Rome around 140 AD and proposed a radical solution to what he perceived as the problem of the Old Testament. The God of the Hebrew scriptures—the God who drowned the world in wrath, commanded the slaughter of the Canaanites, hardened Pharaoh’s heart only to punish him for it, and haggled with Abraham over the fate of Sodom—could not, Marcion insisted, be the same God revealed in Jesus Christ. The former was a lesser deity, the demiurgos, a God of law and wrath and crude retributive justice who created the material world and imprisoned humanity within it; the latter was the true God, the Stranger God, a God of pure love and mercy previously unknown to mankind, who descended in Christ to rescue humanity from the demiurge’s dominion.
On this basis, Marcion rejected not merely the authority but the relevance of the Hebrew Scriptures altogether. The Old Testament, in his view, was not a providential preparation for the Gospel but its negation. Christianity could not be understood as the fulfillment of Israel’s history; it could only exist as a rupture from it. Salvation required nothing less than complete severance.
Marcion accordingly constructed his own canon—indeed, the first attempt at a fixed Christian canon, to which the church reacted by beginning its own canon. That is, and this is crucial, this very debate is the reason we have the Holy Bible as it is today. Marcion’s scriptures consisted of an edited Gospel of Luke, which he called simply the Evangelikon, stripped of the nativity narrative, genealogies, and all passages that tied Jesus to the God of Israel; ten Pauline epistles similarly purified, collected as the Apostolikon; and nothing else. No Genesis, no Exodus, no Prophets, no Psalms, no Matthew or John with their heavy Jewish texture. Marcion also composed a now-lost work called the Antitheses, which systematically juxtaposed passages from the Old and New Testaments to demonstrate their irreconcilable opposition—the God who commanded “an eye for an eye” against the Christ who commanded love of enemies, the God who cursed those who hung on trees against the Christ who redeemed humanity by hanging on one. Jew-less Christianity.
Marcion rejected not merely the authority but the relevance of the Hebrew Scriptures altogether.
The Church responded with extraordinary severity. Marcion was excommunicated, and his theology was treated as an existential threat to Christianity itself. Justin Martyr wrote against him (this work is lost), Irenaeus refuted him in Adversus Haereses, and Tertullian, the great Latin Father, devoted five books of his Adversus Marcionem to dismantling the heresy with ferocity. Without the Tanakh, these fathers argued, there would be no Christ, no salvation, and no Christianity. The God who formed Adam from dust was the Father who sent His Son; the Law was the condition for the Gospel; the sacrifices of the Temple were types and shadows of Calvary. There is simply no church and no Christ without the Hebrew scripture.
Marcion’s movement persisted for several centuries—there were Marcionite communities well into the fifth century—but eventually it vanished as a living tradition. The Old Testament was retained, and with it the entire typological and figural architecture that would shape Christian thought, art, and civilization for two millennia, a theology of history, a covenantal imagination, and a scriptural world thick with narrative continuity.
The radical severance Marcion demanded did not materialize. Christianity retained the Old Testament, and in doing so, it retained the referents without which its own scriptures cannot be read. The New Testament is not a self-sufficient document. It is, in the strictest sense, hermeneutically dependent on the Hebrew Bible—not merely influenced by or in dialogue with it, but structurally incapable of signification without it.
This dependence operates at multiple registers. At the lexical level, the fundamental vocabulary of the New Testament—covenant, messiah, sacrifice, atonement, temple, prophet, kingdom, election—carries meaning only as inherited from the Hebrew scriptures. These are not free-floating terms that the New Testament redefines at will; they are words whose semantic content was built up across centuries of Israelite textual tradition, and the New Testament deploys them with the expectation that the reader possesses this content. The legitimacy of Christianity hinges on such terminological fidelity.
Marcion’s movement persisted for several centuries—there were Marcionite communities well into the fifth century—but eventually it vanished as a living tradition.
At the narrative level, the New Testament presupposes not merely acquaintance with but deep formation in the stories of Israel. “Behold the Lamb of God” is not a metaphor but a typological identification that requires Exodus 12, the Passover, the blood on the doorposts, the angel of death. The Passion narratives do not merely allude to or use Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53; they are constructed as the antitype to which those texts stand as type—legible as fulfillment only to a reader for whom the type is present. The Epistle to the Hebrews is an extended argument about the superiority of Christ’s priesthood to the Levitical order, an argument that would not be unconvincing but simply unintelligible to a reader who does not know what the Levitical priesthood is, what the Day of Atonement involved, or why Melchizedek matters.
At the deepest level—the grammatical level—the New Testament presupposes an entire semiotic system, a way of reading providence and history, figure and fulfillment, promise and consummation, that was itself the product of Israel’s scriptures. The Christian hermeneutic is typological through and through: the brazen serpent is the crucifixion, Isaac on Moriah is Christ on Golgotha, the Exodus is baptism. This figural imagination, in which earlier events are real in themselves yet also shadows of later and fuller realities, was not invented by Christians; it was learned from the Prophets reading the Torah, from the Psalms reading the history of Israel, from Daniel reading Jeremiah. To sever the New Testament from the Old would be to sever the text not only from its referents but from the very interpretive grammar that renders it a coherent discourse rather than a collection of enigmatic pronouncements.
Marcion’s canon would have produced an entirely illegible and epistemologically crippled Christianity—a text that everywhere gestures toward a context it has forbidden itself to access, making claims it has deprived itself of the means to substantiate, invoking types while destroying the apparatus of typology.
Marcion’s canon would have produced an entirely illegible and epistemologically crippled Christianity
Islam, by contrast, took shape under precisely the hermeneutic conditions Marcion sought to create: a scriptural system that retained Biblical figures and allusions while decisively severing itself from the inherited textual economy that rendered those figures intelligible. Islam is what Christianity would have become had Marcion prevailed. It is a Marcionism that actually succeeded.
Islam
It is one of the ironies of the contemporary academy that, even as the humanities have suffered widespread methodological erosion and ideological capture by the children of Orientalism and other intellectual gladiators, some of the most consequential advances in historical-critical scholarship over the past several decades have occurred in the field of early Islamic studies which maintained a degree of philological seriousness and historical restraint no longer taken for granted elsewhere.
The arguments advanced in this essay are indebted to that body of work. In particular, they draw on the scholarship of scholars such as Fred Donner, Gabriel Said Reynolds, Ahmed al-Jallad, and others who have approached early Islam in methods developed separately from the stories of the Islamic tradition about itself.
What distinguishes this scholarship is not a shared conclusion but a shared methodological refusal to read later Islamic doctrinal coherence back into the earliest strata of the Qur’anic text; a refusal to treat Islamic tradition as either a transparent continuation of Biblical religion or as an entirely sui generis eruption; and a refusal to substitute political pieties for philological and historical judgment. The result has been a more nebulous picture of early Islam as a movement whose scriptural claims were intelligible only against a preexisting Biblical horizon, even as they progressively reconfigured—and ultimately displaced—that horizon.
Perhaps the most consequential insight yielded by this body of scholarship is the recognition that Islamic self-understanding itself—that is, Islam as it has been classically narrated and systematized—functions as a retrospective interpretive device, imposed upon the opaque origins of a text whose earliest history largely escapes us. What presents itself as pristine origin is, on closer examination, already the product of interpretive labor. The coherence traditionally attributed to Islam’s beginnings is not a datum but an achievement—one realized only after the fact.
Stated plainly: we do not, in any strong historical sense, know how Islam began. What can be maintained with a degree of plausibility is limited and general. There was a historical individual named Muhammad; a religious movement coalesced around his activity in the late antique Near East; and a body of proclamatory texts—eventually stabilized as the Qur’an—became associated with his person and authority. This movement, over time, either generated or fused with emergent forms of regional political organization, culminating in the consolidation of a confessional–political community that came to be called Islam.
We do not, in any strong historical sense, know how Islam began.
Beyond these broad contours, historical certainty rapidly dissolves. The detailed narrative supplied by Islamic tradition—the detailed biography of the Prophet in Mecca, the jahiliyyah of idolatrous Arab paganism against which he preached, the dramatic hijra and the Medinan consolidation, the linear progression from persecution to triumph—cannot be treated as transparent historical record. Much of it bears the unmistakable marks of later mythologization, shaped by the needs of an already constituted community seeking to establish origin, authority, and teleology simultaneously.
Here, the contribution of scholars such as Gabriel Said Reynolds is especially disruptive. Through sustained attention to the Qur’an’s internal logic, intertextual allusions, and rhetorical posture, Reynolds has shown that the Qur’anic text presupposes a milieu far more saturated with Biblical language and theological dispute than Islamic tradition allows. The Qur’an does not read like a proclamation addressed to naive pagans encountering monotheism for the first time; it reads like an intervention within an already scripturally literate environment—one deeply conversant with Christian theology, Biblical narrative, and intra-monotheistic polemic.
If this is correct, then large portions of the traditional account of Islam’s earliest setting must be reconsidered. The Qur’an appears less as the founding document of a new religious world ex nihilo than as a text emerging within a late antique Christian-inflected context, even as it progressively displaces, reorders, and ultimately disauthorizes that context. The classical Islamic narrative, on this reading, does not so much preserve the memory of origins as retroactively organize them, imposing coherence, unity, and doctrinal clarity upon what was initially fragmentary, contested, and only partially understood. In other words, Islam (as an organized religion) almost literally invented itself through a sustained act of backward interpretation—stabilizing text, meaning, and identity only after the fact. Islam did not begin outside the biblical world and remain there; it began inside the biblical world and cut itself off.
The upshot of this line of inquiry is that we know—and can know—considerably less about the origins of Islamic scripture and the process by which it acquired canonical authority than we do about Christianity. This asymmetry is the nature of the available evidence. In the case of Christianity, we possess a relatively rich documentary record of early doctrinal conflict. The Marcionite controversy is not inferred retrospectively; it is directly attested. We have polemical treatises, theological arguments, competing canons, and sustained debates preserved in writing. From this material, it is possible to reconstruct with some confidence how the Church arrived at the New Testament canon, why it retained the Hebrew Scriptures, and on what theological grounds alternative configurations were rejected.
Islam (as an organized religion) almost literally invented itself through a sustained act of backward interpretation
Nothing comparable exists for Islam. We have no clear record of an Islamic analogue to the Marcionite controversy—no documented debate in which Jewish and Christian scriptures were explicitly considered, evaluated, and formally excluded from the religious life of the emerging community. Instead, what we possess are later narrative constructions that presuppose a severance already accomplished and seek to naturalize it by projecting it back onto the prophetic moment itself.
A frequently cited example is the tradition in which Muhammad encounters his companion Umar reading from a Torah scroll and forcibly forbids him from doing so. Whatever its devotional function, this report cannot plausibly be treated as contemporaneous historical evidence. Its form, language, and polemical utility strongly suggest a later provenance—most likely the second if not third Hijri century—at precisely the moment when Islamic identity, law, and epistemic boundaries were being systematized. Such reports do not document the act of severance; they rationalize it after the fact. They function as etiological myths designed to explain why an epistemological boundary that already existed ought to be regarded as primordial and prophetic.
What remains obscure, therefore, is not whether a severance occurred, but how and when it took place. On this point, the historical record is largely silent. Yet the severance itself is not in doubt. The Qur’anic text, as well as the earliest strata of Islamic discourse, is saturated with Biblical figures, narratives, and motifs drawn from both Jewish and Christian traditions both primary and secondary. This pervasive intertextuality makes it implausible to argue that the exclusion of Jewish and Christian scriptures was an original development. On the contrary, it suggests that the Qur’an emerged within a milieu already deeply embedded in Biblical language, even as it progressively displaced the textual authorities that sustained that language.
If, moreover, one accepts the argument advanced by Fred Donner—that the movement associated with Muhammad was initially a broad confessional coalition rather than a sharply delimited religion—then the likelihood that Jews and Christians once participated, at least provisionally, in the same religious space increases significantly. This hypothesis gains further plausibility from the substantial evidence of Christian and Byzantine influence on the early Islamic polity, particularly under the Umayyads, whose administrative practices, artistic forms, and even theological vocabulary betray deep continuities with the late antique Christian world.
Taken together, these considerations point toward a gradual but decisive process of differentiation. The severance from Jewish and Christian textual authority appears to have coincided not with the inception of the movement, despite what the Islamic tradition itself claims, but with its transformation into a self-conscious, politically sovereign religious community—one that now required clear boundaries, exclusive sources of authority, social hierarchy, and a stabilized identity distinct from the traditions out of which it had emerged. At that stage, the inherited Biblical referential world could no longer be permitted to function as an interpretive constraint. It had to be displaced.
The severance from Jewish and Christian textual authority appears to have coincided not with the inception of the movement, despite what the Islamic tradition itself claims, but with its transformation into a self-conscious, politically sovereign religious community
Beyond this, little can be asserted with confidence. The precise mechanisms by which this epistemological rupture was effected remain largely inaccessible to us. What survives is only the outcome itself: a religious tradition in possession of a scriptural text densely allusive to Biblical material, yet formally severed from the very textual bodies that once rendered those allusions intelligible.
This epistemological severance had far-reaching consequences for the development of Islamic hermeneutics, Qur’anic exegesis, and, more broadly, for the conditions under which meaning could be generated, stabilized, and contested within the Islamic tradition. By displacing the Biblical textual world that had originally supplied many of the Qur’an’s narrative and theological referents, Islam entered into a distinctive interpretive situation: one in which scripture remained densely allusive, but the inherited bodies of text that once constrained and oriented interpretation were no longer available as authoritative points of reference.
The Qu’ranic Text
To grasp the implications of this development, it is first necessary to form a clear idea of the nature of the Qur’anic text itself. The Qur’an is best described as elliptical in a strict literary and hermeneutic sense: it presupposes contexts, narratives, and interlocutors that it rarely supplies, and it gestures toward stories and figures without unfolding them in a sustained or sequential manner.
Unlike the Bible, the Qur’an does not present itself as a continuous narrative in which meaning accumulates through temporal progression. Nor does it exhibit a clear overarching compositional logic in which individual units are ordered toward a discernible end. What we encounter instead is a compilation of proclamatory passages marked by a striking stylistic uniformity but little explicit narrative scaffolding. The text moves abruptly between genres and registers: brief Biblical allusions to well-known figures and episodes; eschatological warnings and visions; exhortatory sermons; legal or moral instructions; liturgical formulae and hymnic declarations. These materials coexist, overlap, and recur, often without transitions, chronological markers, or narrative closure.
Even when the Qur’an refers to Biblical characters—Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus—it rarely recounts their stories in full. It alludes, corrects, admonishes, and presupposes recognition, but it almost never narrates. (This is the reason Reynolds feels he stands on firm grounds, claiming that the Qur’an must have first appeared in a Biblically literate milieu.) The effect is not that of a story told, but of a discourse intervening in stories assumed to be already known. If one does not know the story, the text is almost meaning-less. Meaning is therefore not generated internally through narrative development, but externallythrough recognition of references whose full contours lie elsewhere.
Published originally on December 26, 2025.
