Eleventh International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The Quranic revelation presents itself as the seal of the Word of God expressed in stages, beginning with the Hebrew Bible and continuing in the New Testament. The understanding of the previous phases, however, does not fully reflect the orthodox and canonical definition that the two previous monotheisms express about themselves. In particular, the apocryphal gospels find enough space in the Koran. Much of the physiognomy of Mary and the childhood of Jesus is based on them. If the Christian canon has tended to exclude all the most miraculous aspects of the Child Jesus, on the contrary, the Koran re-evaluates them, to the point of presenting an anecdotal completely unknown to Christian canonical texts. In substance neither Jesus nor Mary are diminished by this reading. The study of the apocrypha of the New Testament in the Koran is particularly useful for deepening the figure of Jesus and the value that the two theologies, Christian and Islamic, attribute to him. Although the fundamental divergence regarding its nature arises, the great opportunity for dialogue on a theological basis remains.