Definition by Way of Example: The Golden Calf

Perhaps the best way to describe what we mean is to unfold salient aspects of religious co-production through example. Consider just this one verse from the Qurʾan: “And when We made a covenant with you, and raised the Mount over you, ‘Take hold of what We have given you with strength, and listen!’ They said: ‘We hear, and disobey,’ and they were made to drink the calf into their hearts because of their disbelief” (Q Baqara 2:93, cf. 2:60, Nisāʾ 4:153).Footnote ⁵ The passage presents itself as an eye-witness report of the founding moment in which scripture erupts into history: the giving of the commandments to Moses and to the Israelites. Already at this most general level, we can understand these lines as a “co-production” in the sense that the Prophet and his believers are creating space for themselves within sacred history by looking toward the Hebrew Bible and the Israelite people to whom the earlier prophecies were given, reinterpreting the events of that foundational moment to appropriate their authority for Islam.

Such appropriation or supersession does not require any true knowledge of or contact with “real” biblical Israelites, who had disappeared more than a millennium before the Prophet’s birth. But if we wished to emphasize the “co-” in this co-production, we could stress that this Qurʾanic passage not only adopts the general shape of the biblical narrative but also demonstrates an awareness of the languages and interpretive practices of other communities that considered themselves heirs of the Mosaic covenant with Israel—in this case, the Jews. The mount of revelation, Ṭūr Sīnīn, is named not in Arabic but in Aramaic, the language of many Jews (and Christians) in the area of Islam’s birth.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, the image with which the verse begins suggests a familiarity not only with ancient Israelite scripture but also with the much later teachings of the Jewish rabbis. “We raised above you the towering height of Mount Sinai” is not a citation from the Hebrew Bible but from rabbinic midrash. Commenting on Exod 19:17, the Talmud’s tractate Shabbat reports the following discussion: “ ‘And they stood beneath the mount’: Rabbi Avdimi the son of Hama son of Hasa said: This teaches that the Holy One, blessed be he, overturned the mountain upon them like an inverted cask, and said to them, ‘If you take upon yourselves the Torah, good. If not, here you will find your grave’ ” (b. Šabb. 88a).Footnote ⁷ And what of the devastating line “we hear and we disobey”? In Deut 5:24 (MT), the Israelites declare to Moses, “We hear, and obey” (cf. Exod 24:7). Elsewhere, the Qurʾan borrows this phrase and applies it to the early community of believers in Islam (Q 2:285, Māʾida 5:7, Nur 24:51). But here, discussing the Israelites to whom these words were originally attributed, it transforms the phrase through a multilingual pun, playing on the homophony between Hebrew wə-šāmanū wə-ʿāsînū (“we heard and obeyed/we will hear and obey”), and Arabic samiʿinā wa-ʿaṣaynā (“we hear and disobey”).Footnote ⁸ The Qurʾan often alludes to beliefs it characterizes as Christian or Jewish, and although we should not treat every such characterization as accurate or as evidence of real interaction between the early community of Muḥammad’s followers and a specific Jewish or Christian community, the Qurʾan does bear traces of such interactions. The citations and plays on words in this passage are an example, pointing to a shared scriptural and linguistic space. Many modern scholars (and before them, many Muslim, Christian, and Jewish exegetes) have pointed out that the Qurʾan’s Arabic vocabulary is deeply influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic and that its revelations show an extensive awareness of rabbinic and Christian (especially Syriac) exegesis.Footnote ⁹ In this sense, too, we might call the Qurʾan a co-production, a product of interaction with and thinking about Jews and Christians (among others).Footnote ¹⁰

But our example also makes clear that co-production does not mean collaboration. On the contrary, in this case the Qurʾan evokes commonality precisely to shatter it, so as to appropriate the space and place of prophecy for Islam rather than Judaism. In fact, this passage will underwrite the Islamic doctrine of taḥrīf (the charge of Jewish and Christian alteration and falsification of previous scriptures), allowing the Islamic community to recognize and appropriate the authority of the previous scriptures while simultaneously setting them aside as tampered with and therefore incapable of providing a path to true interpretations of God’s teaching (cf. Q 4:46: “Among those who are Jews are those who distort the meaning of the word, and say, ‘We hear and we disobey’ … twisting their tongues and disparaging religion”). To continue with our definition through example: the “co-” in “co-production” need not be symmetrical, collaborative, or irenic. Conflict begins with the same prefix.

Nor need co-production be contemporaneous or synchronic. For example, the rabbinic tradition cited by the Qurʾan, Tractate Shabbat 88a, is itself a type of co-production. It can be understood as the product of an earlier supersession, a rabbinic response to the Pauline Christian critique that cast Jewish observance of Torah as coerced slavery to law, opposed to the freedom of Jesus’s followers (cf. Gal 3–5; Rom 7). In the next line of the midrash cited by the Qurʾan, Rabbi Aḥa bar Ya’akov responds to the divine threat described by Rabbi Abdimi: “This provides a substantial protest against the Law.” Rava concludes the discussion by looking forward in history. The first revelation may have been coerced, he grants, but the Jews later accepted the law of their own free will, “in the time of Ahasuerus, as it is written” (in Esth 9:27).

The Talmudic passage was, in other words, part of a rabbinic hermeneutic that emerged in reaction to and was influenced by the pressures of a dominant Christian culture. The Qurʾanic Mount Sinai is not independent of the Pauline Mount Sinai “which stands for slavery” (Gal 4:25). Nor, for that matter, is it independent of the sectarian dynamics already present in the Hebrew Bible itself. The story of the golden calf, and Israelite histories and historical hermeneutics more generally, were a co-production long before followers of Jesus or of Muḥammad began to reinterpret them in the context of later cultures (Hellenistic and Roman, Sassanid and Arabian) that had, in turn, their own historical sensibilities. This is another characteristic of co-production we wish to stress: every instance of co-production stands in relation to other instances, earlier and later.Footnote ¹¹

This dia-, ana-, and meta-chronic aspect of co-production is difficult for us to capture. In narrative as in physics, the arrow of time tends to flow in only one direction. Moreover, as historians, we are trained to mine a particular context, to accumulate the artifacts and the intentions of agents of a given place and time, with the goal of determining what an object of knowledge might have meant to specific people in a unique historical moment. Narrative coherence and contextual interpretation are important and must not be ignored by historians. But because of their interrelated prophetic claims and traditions, every moment in the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is also potentially interconnected with prior moments, even if evidence for such connections has not survived or is not known to us. And similarly, every moment is potentially connected with later ones as well. Just as the early Islamic community drew on traditions co-produced in other times and places to imagine its own place in salvation history relative to other traditions, the co-productions of early Islam would be put to similar work in countless futures, shaping the possibilities of existence for Muslims, Christians, and Jews in sometimes very surprising ways.

In tenth-century Baghdad, for example, the judge Ibn Qurayʿa (d. 367/978) was apparently asked: “What does the qāḍī (may God favor him!) say of a Jew [m.] who committed fornication (zanā) with a Christian [f.], and she brought forth a child with a human body (jismuhu lil-bashar) and the head of an ox (wa-wajhu lil-baqar)? They are now both under arrest. What does the qāḍī opine respecting them?”Footnote ¹² The judge gave immediate answer: “This is plain evidence that the accursed Jews were made to drink the love of the calf into their hearts (fī ṣudūrihim) (sic),Footnote ¹³ so that it now comes out from their penises (min uyūrihim).” The calf imbibed by the disobedient Israelites at Sinai is here somatized in the sexual organs of their descendants. The passage teaches us something about the evolution of ideas about the sexual reproduction of religious difference within the judge’s own historical context of tenth-century Baghdad. But it affects the future as well. The Kurdish scholar Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282) chose to transmit the story in his Biographical Dictionary. The fourteenth-century Egyptian Muḥammad b. Mūsā al-Damīrī made use of Ibn Khallikān’s account in his Great Book of Animals, where the golden calf is first associated with the Jews and then deployed for intramural critique, representing all who rush toward error, specifically Muslims who are too interested in “the dirham and the dinar,” and Sufis who dance and sing ecstatically during religious gatherings (as the Israelites were said to have done before the calf) rather than listening reverently as the Qurʾan is read.Footnote ¹⁴

This anecdote suggests that the calf has a place in the history of systems of values such as the stigmatization of money and the association of the pursuit of wealth with Judaism: a vast and enduring moral economy that was also co-produced. Or we could use the calf to explore the ways in which the intersection of sectarian dynamics and natural histories produce bio-theologies. Analogies between sect and species such as this one of Israelites, Jews, and “Judaizers” with the golden calf were neither rare nor inconsequential. Other verses of the Qurʾan (2:65–66, Aʿrāf  7:163) suggest that the Jews are transformed (or reincarnated: musikhu) into apes because they transgress the sabbath. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to leap more than a millennium, these verses have underwritten characterizations of Jews as sub-human.Footnote ¹⁵ We might then put these analogies into dynamic relation with similar analogies and strategies in Judaism and Christianity, seeking to write a history of the racialization of religious difference and to understand that phenomenon, too, as “co-produced.”

None of this implies continuity, essentialism, teleology, positivism, or necessity. We should not assume that these Qurʾanic verses about the golden calf necessarily produced racism or that they were understood in the same way by Ibn Qurayʿa in Baghdad as they had been by the early community of believers in Medina three centuries before him or would be understood in Egypt four centuries after. But we should also recognize that the work done by the golden calf in the Islamic community’s imagination of difference between (in this case) Muslim and Jew cannot be contained within one moment or historical context. It has served the imaginations of many times and places and made possible new kinds of work in each of those times and places.

We hope this definition through example has made clearer what we mean by co-production: the ongoing dynamics of forming, re-forming, and transforming the three religious traditions in their manifold sectarian forms through mutual interaction in thinking and (sometimes) living with and against each other.

An Exemplary Figure of Co-production: The Monk Sergius-Baḥīrā

One relatively straightforward way to gain a sense of the power of co-production is to choose any scriptural passage, personage, place, or prophetic pedagogy and trace the work to which it is put across different times, places, and communities. We offer here the example of the monk Sergius-Baḥīrā, a figure so fruitful that its products can be found in multiple traditions and centuries, helping us perceive the ongoing and mutually constitutive roles that Muslims, Christians, and Jews (whether real or imagined) played and play in each other’s self-understanding. The example will also suggest that although the term co-production is not found in the sources we are studying (i.e., it is not emic), the historical actors that produced those sources recognized and participated in the phenomenon. To put it in our terms: through the Baḥīrā tradition, the multiple Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions that deployed Sergius as a figure of “interfaith” interaction and influence recognized historical co-production and reflected on its theological meaning, a reflection that at times even treated co-production as a counter-concept to true revelation. In the resulting archive of stories about Sergius-Baḥīrā we can therefore perceive the theologically creative—albeit often polemical—power of co-production from the internal perspective of each of the traditions, as well as observe from the outside the historical dynamics involved in moments of co-production between groups and traditions.

According to tradition, the Prophet Muḥammad received his first revelation at the age of forty in the cave at the Mountain of Light (Jabal al-Nur), where the angel Gabriel “taught man that which he knew not” (Q ʿAlaq 96:5). By this account, the Prophet is a vessel transmitting the angel’s revelations to humankind (cf. Q Isrāʾ 17:105–6, Furqān 25:5–6, Aḥzāb 33:39–46). However, the Qurʾan also attests to the charge that Muḥammad received his teaching not from God but from a human being and in a “foreign language,” that is, not in Arabic (Q Naḥl 16:103). Clearly, there was debate about the role of the prophet and the source of the prophecy in the early Islamic community. Sergius-Baḥīrā stepped into that debate.

We cannot determine whether he first appeared in Christian or in Muslim communities, a question already posed by the name of the monk. In Muslim Arabic sources he is called by the proper name Baḥīrā. Christian Arabic and Syriac legends call him Sergius the monk and explain that Muslims call him bḥīrā, implying that the name is an epithet (a passive participle of b-ḥ-r: “the approved, eminent one”) rather than a proper name.Footnote ¹⁶ Some put the two names together: Mar Sergius Baḥīrā. Most Latin sources call him simply Sergius, apparently not understanding the Semitic name or epithet.Footnote ¹⁷ For our topic, however, the question of origin is secondary. What is important is that since the eighth century, a wide variety of allusions to the relationship between the Christian monk Sergius-Baḥīrā and the youthful Muḥammad flowed from both Muslim and Christian pens. Jewish authors also referred to the story and to the role of the Jews in it.

We will not analyze these diverse and sometimes contradictory versions in detail,Footnote ¹⁸ nor will we inquire into the historicity of Sergius-Baḥīrā or into the influence of Christian monks on Muḥammad, although questions about the relationship between real interactions and figures of thought are always important to bear in mind when speaking of co-production. We will focus on hermeneutical key points of the Sergius-Baḥīrā narrative that are relatively stable in the respective traditions, as well as on some particularities in individual sources that are especially informative for understanding co-production from an emic or etic perspective.

The core of the traditional Islamic narrative is the recognition and blessing of the twelve-year-old Muḥammad by the Syrian monk Baḥīrā. The latter, gifted with prophetic spirit, knows that a prophet will arise among the Arabs. When the caravan of Muḥammad’s uncle and guardian, Abū Ṭālib, arrives to water at his well, Baḥīrā sees an unusual shadow above the child, examines him, and concludes that this is the expected prophet. He reveals Muḥammad’s prophetic mission to Abū Ṭālib, warning him of Jews and other adversaries who wish to harm Muḥammad and prevent his mission.

This ostensibly positive portrayal of the Christian monk, and negative portrayal of the Jews, may have been inspired by (or perhaps itself inspired) verses of the Qurʾan: “You will surely find the most hostile of men toward those who believe to be the Jews and those who ascribe partners unto God. And you will surely find the nearest of them in affection toward those who believe to be those who say, ‘We are Christians.’ That is because among them are priests and monks, and because they are not arrogant” (Q Māʾida 5:82).Footnote ¹⁹ But the tradition goes farther than the sūra. By recognizing Muḥammad’s mission, Baḥīrā implicitly contradicts the charge, repeatedly invoked in Christian efforts to rebut Islam and deny Muḥammad’s prophetic status, that the New Testament promised no prophet after Christ. The Baḥīrā story presents Muḥammad as the successor of Moses and Jesus, a lineage underscored by intertextual details such as the shading cloud, which recalls Moses at Mount Sinai (Exod 24:15–18; cf. 40:34–38), the transfiguration of Jesus (Matt 17:5; cf. Acts 1:9), and apocalyptic imaginations of the “Son of Man coming in a cloud” (Luke 21:27; Rev 14:14). The scene of encounter at a well resonates with the calling of King David by the Prophet Samuel (1 Sam 16), conveying Davidic authority to the blessing of Muḥammad.Footnote ²⁰ Muḥammad’s age may also be an allusion to the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:41–44). In Ibn Iṣḥāq’s (d. 150/768) influential version of the legend, Baḥīrā is in possession of an ancient book of prophecies to which he owes his foreknowledge of Muḥammad’s mission, perhaps implying (with a nod toward the doctrine of taḥrif) that Baḥīrā possessed a more complete set of Christian prophecies than the corrupted canonical gospels from which Christians had deleted the promise of a prophet to come.

This overdetermination is characteristic of a certain type of co-production in which one community claims the prophetic power of another while at the same time seeking to make the other tradition superfluous, even presenting it as proclaiming its own obsolescence. Early and late antique Christianity had made intensive use of this strategy (which, in this case, is called “supersession”) with regard to the biblical prophets and the Jews and vis-à-vis Greco-Roman oracles, prophecies, and wisdom. Confronted by Islam, Christianity now found itself on the other side of this co-productive strategy, itself threatened by a hermeneutic of obsolescence.

The Christian Sergius-Baḥīrā traditions seek to subvert and reverse this hermeneutic, turning it against Islam. In them, the monk is Muḥammad’s mentor. The encounter at the well, if mentioned at all, is only the beginning of a long relationship between student and teacher, a relationship designed to strip Muḥammad of any claim to prophecy. Narrations about the monk who instructed Muḥammad were (and continue to be) so widespread in the Christian world that their origins, transmission, and intertextuality can hardly be reconstructed. They circulated in Syriac-, Arabic-, Armenian-, Coptic-, Ethiopic-, Greek-, and Latin-speaking communities. Each variant accentuates different motifs and each testifies to a particular context-dependent way of approaching Islam (and Judaism) and, therefore, to a specific type of literary and intellectual co-production.

Syriac formulations are attested already in the early ninth century. In them, the young Muḥammad, informed by the monk about his prophetic future, asks about the religion he will teach, and Sergius-Baḥīrā imparts to him the most important teachings of Christianity. This tradition stresses the similarities between Christianity and Islam and thus creates a sympathetic basis for Christian life under Muslim rule. We might call this an “irenic” use of the Baḥīrā co-production, insofar as it is meant to further co-existence by tracing to the Christian monk everything that Muḥammad preached, including even the claim that the Qurʾan was revealed to Muḥammad by the angel Gabriel. This catechesis agrees entirely with the teachings of the Qurʾan, most remarkably even in response to Muḥammad’s question about Christ. “Christ is,” Baḥīrā replies in perfect harmony with Q 4:171, “His Word, which He committed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him.” The incarnation is omitted, as is worship. Penned by Christians under Islamic rule, this account presents their faith as compatible with Islam, a concern foregrounded in the grateful Muḥammad’s promise to his Christian tutor that no evil will happen to the Christians in the coming age of Islamic rule. Baḥīrā thus becomes a chief witness to the compatibility of Christianity and Islam and guarantor of Muslim protection for Christians.

But the Syriac narrative simultaneously seeks to undermine Islam’s claim to revelation, making it a Christian invention. Without Baḥīrā, Muḥammad would not have recognized his prophetic calling; without his instruction, he would have no teachings to spread. In the second part of the Syriac legend, a disciple of Baḥīrā, who has converted from Arabian polytheism to Islam, reports that the wise monk had written the Qurʾan for Muḥammad to give him guidance as a political leader. The suspicion quoted in Q 16:103 and vehemently rejected by the early Islamic tradition is here affirmed: Muḥammad received his teaching from a human being in a foreign language. The revelation is a man-made work. Baḥīrā serves Syriac Christianity as the secret author of the Qurʾan. But the price for this service is high: the Christianity co-produced in this “conversation” with Islam renounces much of the Christological content of its faith.

This price is highlighted in the Arabic Christian versions of the legend, which conclude with a dying Baḥīrā repenting the unforgiveable sin of having created Islam. The Arabic version is rich in details about Muḥammad’s repeated visits to Baḥīrā, always nocturnal so that the tutelage can remain secret. These visits become negotiations in which the Christian monk’s message is adapted to the Arabs, characterized as a people too primitive for unadulterated truth. Baḥīrā first informs Muḥammad of the pure doctrine and the ideal way of life, Muḥammad returns with misgivings, and Baḥīrā then adapts the original precept. The angel Gabriel is nowhere to be found. What emerges from this conspiratorial cooperation between monk and Muḥammad, according to the Arabic Christian polemicist, is “Islam,” that is, a simplified version of (Eastern) Christianity suitable for the uncivilized Arabs.

The Arabic Baḥīrā legend offers a comprehensive Christian interpretation of Islam, providing “historical contexts” for numerous Qurʾanic verses. Similarities and differences between the two traditions are made to serve as historical evidence for the superiority of Christianity over Islam. In our terms, we might say that, for Christians confronted with Islam, the demonstration of historical co-production was a hermeneutic strategy to prove the inferiority of the “product,” Islam. The “product,” however, proved so powerful that the religiously superior (from the Christian point of view) became the politically inferior. In his Arabic form, Baḥīrā realizes this himself, becoming a tragic figure: “For I know that I have played into the hands of those who will be their enemies…. The door I have opened for myself and for others is the worst door: I have passed falsehood off as truth and asserted absurdities.”Footnote ²¹ But even in this realization, Baḥīrā continues to serve his fellow Christians, for he alone can testify about Muḥammad: “I taught him many things like this and none of it resembles prophecy.”Footnote ²² Co-production is here presented as a tragic counter-concept to revelation. Byzantine and Western sources would stress the tragic potential even further, having Muḥammad (or one of his followers) murder Baḥīrā to keep the Christian origins of Islamic teachings secret.Footnote ²³ The Christian Arabic legend is distinctive in its tragic rendering of Baḥīrā, and it is also distinctive in that it assigns no role to the Jews. In all other versions of the narrative, Christian as well as Muslim, the role of the Jews is central, and that role is precisely to exonerate Baḥīrā and, through him, all Christianity from any guilt in the creation of Islam. We have already seen how, in the Muslim literature, Baḥīrā warns Abū Ṭālib that the Jews would seek to harm Muḥammad.Footnote ²⁴ For the Muslim author al-Suhaylī (d. 581/1185), Baḥīrā was himself a Jew, a rabbi from Medina who warned Muḥammad against his co-religionists.Footnote ²⁵ In the Christian legends, the danger posed by the Jews is more subtle: they enter the scene after the death of Sergius-Baḥīrā, bringing Muḥammad under their influence and corrupting his message even further. In this telling, the Qurʾan emerges from the collaboration of the Christian monk and Jewish scholars.

In Eastern Mediterranean sources, a certain Jew wins Muḥammad’s trust after Baḥīrā’s death: Kaʿb al-Aḥbār, described in Muslim sources as a prominent convert to Islam. Kaʿb teaches Muḥammad that he is the Paraclete whom Christ has proclaimed, presumably an allusion to Jesus’s announcement of the Messenger Ahmad in Q Ṣaff 61:6 (cf. John 14:16–16:7). This mapping of Muḥammad onto Ahmad “the comforter” and thence the Paraclete also appears in other early Islamic traditions without reference to Kaʿb. For Muslims, this was presumably a “positive” co-production in the sense that it identified a place for Muḥammad (Aḥmad) in Christian revelation. But for Christians accustomed to interpreting the Holy Spirit as the announced Paraclete, placing the teaching in the mouth of a Jew is “negative,” highlighting the common carnality of both Jews and Muslims. In this Christian tradition, Kaʿb is credited with revising Baḥīrā’s work to pollute it with Judaism: “Sergius gave them the New and Kaʿb the Old [i.e. Testament], Sergius gave them the sounding-board and Kaʿb the announcer with a loud voice.”Footnote ²⁶ Here again Islam is presented as a mixture, co-produced by a Jew and a Christian, with virtue and guilt clear; the Jew has corrupted the good foundation laid by the Christian. The strategy highlights similarities between Christianity and Islam, suggesting that, if not for the Jews, there would be no irreconcilable differences between the two.Footnote ²⁷

In our definition, we emphasized that co-production need not imply collaboration and often works without mutual agency. The Christian Sergius-Baḥīrā offers a paradoxical confirmation of this claim. The emergence of Islam is here a story of collaboration with the polemical aim of denigrating the result. But at the same time, the story itself turns out to be a complex co-production in which “Judaism” and “Islam” are used by the various Christian communities to shape and strengthen their own self-image. The authors comb Christian, Jewish, and Islamic texts to prove that the Qurʾan was compiled in several stages by several editors of different religious affiliations and thereby to disprove its claim to divine revelation. Historical hermeneutics are here deployed to uncover traces of co-production that can serve as evidence of human fabrication.

Western Christianity developed similar strategies, producing a number of Latin works that recount the Sergius-Baḥīrā legend in order to denigrate the Qurʾan as a diabolically inspired work co-authored by heretical Christians and evil-minded Jews.Footnote ²⁸ The historical efforts of Western Christians, however, are devoted to producing an understanding of the Qurʾan as the product of many redactions, falsifications, and revisions by numerous people with diverse intentions rather than (as in the early Syriac and Arabic legends) as the work of one Christian. One has only to count the nouns and verbs with the Latin prefix co- in William of Tripoli’s De statu Saracenorum of 1273 to be convinced of the polemical force of such claims.Footnote ²⁹ The Latin translation of the Arabic word Qurʾan as collectio (instead of recitatio), common throughout the Middle Ages, concentrates as in a burning glass the power of co-production to serve medieval Christians as a counter-concept to revelation.

We might say that the accusation of falsifying the scriptures (taḥrif) brought by Islam against Jews and Christians is here turned against Muslims. The fifteenth-century Christian scholar Nicholas of Cusa, writing in the context of the Ottoman threat to Western Europe, provides a relatively sophisticated example. He proposed that the Qurʾan had to be “sifted.” To this task he devoted his writing Cribratio Alkorani (1460/1), in which he distinguished “moments of truth” in the Qurʾan that were consistent with Christian doctrine from the many co-productions (or so we would call them, Cusanus does not) with which it had become corrupted.Footnote ³⁰

Regarding the role of Judaism in these Christian counter-revelatory co-productions, we propose the following correlation: the greater the aversion of the Christian authors to the Qurʾan, the greater the share they attribute to the Jews in the process of its compilation. This correlation reinforces our sense that the function assigned to Judaism in Western religious history is that of the enemy of Christianity per se, dangerous not only in the guise of “real Jews” but even more as a “Jewishness” that, in the form of heresies and falsifications, repeatedly tries to infect and corrupt Christianity. This figure of Judaism had, over centuries, proven tremendously useful for the formation of Christian traditions and societies and was easily integrated into the Christian engagement with Islam.Footnote ³¹ The more Judaism could be discovered in Islam, the more dangerous Islam would seem for Christianity.

In our definition, we asserted that co-production in thought affects the possibilities of life and co-existence for people in the flesh. “Real” Jews paid an obvious and high price for the involuntary service of “Jewishness” as a negative foil in the co-production of Christian understandings of Islam, but we will not address that here. Instead, we will stress a less obvious point: the Christian “co-production” of Islam as “Jewish” had implications for “real” Muslims as well.

The Dominican historian Jaime Bleda, for example, used Sergius-Baḥīrā to legitimate the extermination of Muslims in his Chronicle of the Moors in Spain (1610/1618). Bleda split the figure into three: Baeyra (as Bleda called him), presented as Muḥammad’s Jewish uncle and possibly his biological father, a man learned in magic and astrology; Sergio, a Nestorian monk and Muḥammad’s teacher; and another teacher called John, an Arian from Antioch. Deploying the most up-to-date Spanish ideas about purity of blood, Bleda suggested that Muḥammad himself was the son of an incestuous relationship between Muḥammad’s mother and the Jew Baeyra, her astrologer brother, making him “Iudio de los quatro quartos” (that is, 100% Jewish). Aspects of Islamic practice, such as circumcision and abstinence from pork, were borrowings from Judaism. Islam was merely a debased form of Judaism, and therefore the descendants of Muslims, even if they were baptized Christians, should be expelled from Spain just as the Jews had been by the Most Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492. Bleda’s “judaizing histories” of Islam were addressed as memoranda to the royal court and thereby contributed, as he himself boasted, to legitimating one of pre-modern Europe’s largest forced transfers of humanity, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Moriscos from Spain between 1609 and 1614.Footnote ³²

Jewish authors, for their part, also took part in the Baḥīrā tradition, adapting some of the uses to which Jews were put in both Muslim and Christian versions. A few decades after Bleda, the Egyptian Jewish scholar Josef Sambari discussed “Buhayran” in his Sefer Divrei Yosef (1673), presenting him as a Christian (though not a monk) who was Muḥammad’s most intimate counselor and companion, responsible for the Qurʾan and for all the errors and deviations from the true Jewish faith that it contained.Footnote ³³ Sambari’s Christian does the work that Jews did for Bleda, that of turning the Baḥīrā tradition into a weapon against Islam.

Sambari may have known of Christian predecessors like Bleda, but such direct transmission of knowledge was not necessary, for Jews had long ago developed their own counter-narratives to the anti-Jewish Sergius-Baḥīrā. An early one told of ten Jewish sages who, to safeguard the Jewish community, converted to Islam and wrote the Qurʾan for Muḥammad.Footnote ³⁴ The story may reflect Jewish knowledge of a hadith attributed to the Prophet: “If only ten Jews had followed me, every Jew on earth would have followed me.”Footnote ³⁵ According to some tenth-century Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic manuscripts, the ten sages placed the mysterious “disjointed letters” (ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿāt) in the Qurʾan as secret proof of their authorship. The hidden message: “Thus do the sages of Israel counsel the mute, wicked man.”Footnote ³⁶

The ten sages function for their Jewish authors much as did the Baḥīrā of the Eastern Christians, deploying similarities between their faith and Islam in order to preserve the superiority of their own religion while building bridges to the dominant faith with a view to avoiding persecution. Unlike the criticism aimed at the monk in the Arab-Christian version of the Baḥīrā legend, the ten sages are presented as Jewish heroes. None of the relevant texts contain the slightest condemnation of their conversion. The Arabic manuscript preserved in the Cairo Genizah even pronounces a curse against anyone who reveals their secret authorship of the Qurʾan to non-Jews.Footnote ³⁷ As in the Christian tradition about Sergius-Baḥīrā, here too traces of co-production are used as an historical argument against the Quran’s claim to divine revelation.

Thus far, Sergius-Baḥīrā has served us as a figure who incorporates multiple histories of co-production between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But it is worth noting that he plays an important role in the creation of difference within religious groups as well as between them. In all but the oldest Christian sources, for example, Sergius-Baḥīrā is assigned to a variety of Christian “heretical” sects (we put heresy in quotes here because the classification is itself the outcome of sectarian struggle). Arian, Nestorian, Jacobite, Nicolaite, Sabellian, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox: like a chameleon, the monk assumes the coloration of whatever sect the author in question seeks to tar with the brush of “Islam.” The characterization of Sergius-Baḥīrā as heretic has a double effect. On the one hand, it further reduces the quality of the Qurʾan, presenting it not only as a joint work of Christians and Jews but of false Christians and Jews. On the other hand, for those who consider themselves orthodox, the portrayal of their rivals in terms of past heresies may carry a reassuring message, prefiguring their defeat.

The importance of the heretical in these narratives suggests that we should not differentiate too quickly between co-productions within religions and those across or between them. Peter the Venerable’s Summa totius Saracenorum (1122) exemplifies this interweaving of reflections on differences within and outside of one’s own religious community. The Summa appeared as a supplement to the Latin translation of the Qurʾan Peter had initiated. After presenting the Qurʾan as a toxic mixture composed in dangerous collaboration by the Nestorian heretic Sergius and several Jews, Peter discusses whether the Muslims are to be called heretics (haeretici) or pagans (ethnici). Footnote ³⁸ He cannot—or does not want to—come to a clear conclusion, for in his view, what makes Islam so dangerous for Christianity is precisely that it is a mixture of Jewish, pagan, and heretical Christian elements. If we focus on the author’s intention, we might say that Peter uses co-production polemically as an argument against Islam. But if we choose to ask about the aporetic reasoning that characterizes the hermeneutical dynamics underlying this representation of religious communities, we might conclude that the categories of “heresy” and “religion” are themselves co-productions.

The oldest eastern versions of the Christian Sergius-Baḥīrā legend do not identify the monk as a heretic. For writers in these circles, the entrance of a false Christology into Islam comes from the Jew Kaʿb, not from any heretical tendencies in Baḥīrā. Nevertheless, Syrian and Arab Christians also found ways to relate their representation of Islam to important inner-Christian controversies. According to the Syriac account, Baḥīrā destroyed crosses in churches, preaching that since Christ suffered on only one cross, only one cross should be venerated. Persecuted by the ecclesiastical authorities, he took refuge among the “sons of Ishmael.” In other words, it was because he was an iconoclast that Sergius-Baḥīrā met Muḥammad, who in turn adopted his teacher’s views.Footnote ³⁹ We could follow this path into yet another vast field, that of the place of images—ranging from iconophilia to iconoclasm—in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This field, too, yields co-productions aplenty, among them many of the motifs and strategies we have just encountered in the stories about Sergius-Baḥīrā. These include the attribution of iconoclasm to alien influence from a neighboring faith (as when iconoclastic emperors are called “Saracen-minded” and accused of “follow[ing] the lawless Jews and infidel Arabs”Footnote ⁴⁰) and the role of the Jews as “instigators” of Christian and Muslim error (in this case, iconoclasm). The cultivation of such fields would nourish our claim that co-production affects all dimensions of the religious—not only thinking, storytelling, and reasoning but also cultic practice, everyday prayer, and bodily devotion. Not only the mental but also the physical, not only the textual but also the artistic heritage of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are constantly formed, re-formed, and transformed by mutual engagement, both real and imagined.

It is because all these pasts and many more are contained in the figure of Sergius-Baḥīrā that he has served us as an example of what we mean by co-production. He is a personification of historical apologetics, a figure put to the work of representing and justifying multiple views of the proper relationship between various communities, each claiming to live according to divine teachings revealed in particular historical contexts. This is normative and dogmatic work, but its results are plural, often producing opposing valances and purposes. We have seen Sergius-Baḥīrā used to assert similarity and difference, kinship and enmity.

That work continues, and so does its plurality. The Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin recently named its “Violence Prevention Information Site” Bahira, interpreting the monk’s instructions that Muḥammad’s uncle should protect the young prophet from his enemies (and omitting Baḥīrā’s identification of those enemies as the Jews) as a normative statement about “protecting people from violence.” Baḥīrā here serves to promote the “peaceful and tolerant understanding of Islam.” ^{Footnote 41} In his short 2012 film, “Innocence of the Muslims,” the Coptic-American producer Nakoula Basseley Nakoula staged the Christian Baḥīrā legend to very different effect, using it to present Muḥammad as an undesirable character manipulated by a renegade monk into pretending to receive revelations. Reaction to the film (or to rumors about its content) provoked Qurʾan burnings by evangelical Christians in Florida, the murder of Christian nuns by Muslims in Palestine, and an attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and dogged Hillary Clinton’s political career.

We are not suggesting that one of these interpretations—the irenic and tolerant or the polemic and intolerant—is truer to the obscure history of Sergius-Baḥīrā than the other. As we have seen, the potential for both is already contained in the earliest traditions. Our point is that these interpretations are produced by a shared sense across all these religious communities that historical hermeneutics are a powerful tool with which to establish and legitimize the truth or falsity of any particular interpretation of God’s multiple revelations to humanity across time. To put that point at its most general: not only are Islam, Christianity, and Judaism co-produced, but so are the conceptual tools—history and theology—through which we think with and about these religions.

History and Theology: A Co-production

In asserting that these conceptual tools are co-produced, we are not echoing the claims of Mircea Eliade and his Chicago colleague Marshall Hodgson that the establishment of “a historical God” was an Israelite innovation nor that “the traditions that grow out of the Hebrew experience” have produced “all of the excesses of communalism and persecution which have gone with these traditions wherever they have travelled.”Footnote ⁴² What we mean is that historical hermeneutics have long been and remain a tool for the generation of authoritative meaning within Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. They were shaped by and gained power from their use in the sectarian co-productions of these faiths, and that process continues to shape the possibilities for historical thought in every culture touched by those faiths, including many of even the most deliberately secular historical hermeneutics available to us today.

The point is confounding but vital. Insofar as prophecy is understood as revealed in a particular historical moment but authoritative for all time, every encounter with scripture, indeed every moment in the life of a believer, has the potential to provoke questions (and answers) about the proper relationship between the moment of interpretation and the moment of revelation, the time of the prophet and that of the believer. This was Hodgson’s point when he claimed that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were “‘kerygmatic’ life-orientational traditions—those that call for ultimate commitment on the plane of the historical.”Footnote ⁴³ The believer’s plane of the historical is not the same as that of today’s theologian or academic historian, but neither is it entirely separable. These too are co-produced, and relationship between them is one of the ongoing labors of modernity.

Again, we are not talking of origins. Many ancient cultures imagined that the favor or disfavor of supernatural beings toward a given person or people could be recognized in the unfolding of their fortunes through time.Footnote ⁴⁴ Certainly the Israelites put these ideas to their own use, seeking to “unfold the mysteries of the past,” so that “we will tell to a generation still to come” “what our ancestors have told us” (Ps 78:3–5, 61). In this psalm, the lesson of that past, much of it collected from Exodus, is that when the people honored God, he supported them, and when they disobeyed him, he punished them, but still they did not learn, so he “abandoned his power to captivity.” Here, a people’s political status is an index of its piety, and God gives as he receives, making history a barometer of fidelity. In the much later and more lapidary phrasing of the Qurʾan: “Systems have passed away before you. So travel the earth and see how those who denied [the Messengers] fared in the end” (Q Āl ʿImrān 3:137).

The histories that the Israelites considered authoritative are significant for the future of historical thought not because “the Hebrews invented history” (they did not) but because their histories remained relevant to the work that some later communities—most influentially, Christian and Islamic communities—would do to produce their own “historical God.” The history of the Israelites came to be read competitively but through shared commitment to the meaningfulness of a common canon of events (N.B., we do not say texts) in the distant past. This combination gave historical hermeneutics a role in the production of prophetically authorized meaning within and across these three traditions that is distinctive from the work historical hermeneutics might do in the encounters (real or imagined) of these three with any other traditions.

One symptom of the importance of this work is that it ranks among the first tasks that the author of Luke-Acts assigned to the risen Jesus when, encountering his disillusioned disciples on the road to Emmaus, “starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained (diermēneusen) to them throughout all the scriptures what was about himself” (Luke 24:27). A similar dynamic emerges in the earliest biographies of the Prophet to the Arabs, in which “the people of the Torah” are hired by Muḥammad’s Meccan enemies to question and confound him, or do so of their own accord, motivated by their hostility to true teaching. The refutation of these rabbis’ interpretations was said to be a primary motive for the revelation of the Qurʾan: “It was the Jewish rabbis who used to annoy the apostle with questions and introduce confusion, so as to confound the truth with falsity. The Qurʾan used to come down in reference to these questions of theirs.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Insofar as the teachings of Jesus and Muḥammad took the form of re-interpreting the Israelite past, we can say that they authorized and were authorized by (among other things) the emergence of new historical hermeneutics.

To the degree that any later community chose to claim the authority of the Israelite past as its own rather than abandon that past as irrelevant (as so many pasts have been abandoned), it could legitimate that claim by asserting that the Jews did not correctly understand their own history; or that the records of that history had been corrupted or intentionally altered; or that in the interval God had offered new teachings, new prophecy, and new history, transforming the meaning of the old. All three of these strategies required the development of a historical hermeneutics appropriate to the new claim. The importance of these hermeneutics only grew once the gates of prophecy were sealed and the canon of revelation closed in each of these traditions. Disputes about the proper interpretation of a word or an event produced and arbitrated sectarian differences, both within Christian, Jewish, or Islamic communities and across them. In this sense, the historical replaced the prophetic as a mode for revealing divine instruction, and history became, as we saw in our examples, a weapon of apologetics.

This co-production of the historical and the theological did not end with the Reformation, Enlightenment, modernity, or secularism. Some of the most influential Enlightenment efforts to separate the study of history from that of prophecy or the study of philology from that of theology, such as those of Immanuel Kant or Friedrich August Wolf, were themselves co-productions, attributing the intertwining of history and prophecy or of theology and philology to the corruption of Christianity by Jewish superstition.Footnote ⁴⁶ Likewise, some of the most “modern” understandings of history, such as those of Hegel or of Marx, can be understood as secularizing the historico-theological complex we have tried to describe, secularizations in which the unfolding of humanity’s progress toward ultimate fulfillment is understood as legible in history.

Our point is not that the historical and the theological should be fully separated but that they cannot be. Our contemporary historical practice, no matter how secular its intention, is already influenced by theology, and theology continues to be transformed by historical hermeneutics. In short, history retains the potential to do theological work and vice-versa. Can we as historians become conscious of the theological potential of our work? Can we as theologians imagine how different historical questions and emphases might produce different theological possibilities?

These are, we realize, dangerous questions, so let us conclude by pointing to some of their perils as well as their opportunities. First, a peril: to grant that the history of religion retains a constructive potential is not to suggest (as so many Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers did in the past) that the historical should serve as an instrument of the apologetic or that historians should wield their research as a polemical shield or spear. It is only to recognize that the work of the historian can be put to work by believers and in ways capable of changing belief within their communities. Would greater historical attention to co-production produce a greater awareness within faith communities of just how entangled their histories are with the histories of others? Would such awareness in turn produce constructive theological work? Therein lies the opportunity for what we might call co-produced theologies. These would have to reflect on what it means for one’s own religious tradition to be deeply indebted to others, real or imagined. They would need to be both critical and constructive, questioning identitarian narratives by revealing them as in fact co-produced and offering new narratives and interpretations from this realization. Co-produced theologies would recognize the powerful potentials of co-production, including the potential for violence.

We could hope that co-productive theologies might nurture epistemic gratitude toward other traditions and interpretations. We think here of the Christian historian Sozomen, who mused (a few centuries before Muḥammad) about the diversity of prophecy in the various religious traditions. He explained that diversity by attributing it to a musical strategy of divine providence that “in harmony with what is to come, not only put the future into the mouths of [biblical] prophets, but also partially into the mouths of foreign ones, just like a musician who, for the sake of a foreign melody, strikes superfluous strings or adds more to the already existing ones.”Footnote ⁴⁷ But religious co-production itself has always been deeply ambivalent, equally capable of producing exclusion and inclusion, extermination and co-existence. Making co-production the explicit object of our historical attention will produce new meanings, but it will not eliminate the plurality of those meanings or their multivalent potentials. To imagine otherwise would produce not gratitude but yet another intolerance.Footnote ⁴⁸