RE: Birmingham Quran fragments older than Muhammad...lol
August 31, 2015 at 12:14 pm
(This post was last modified: August 31, 2015 at 12:17 pm by Minimalist.)
Even the Mail's story contains a link to the original Times story. That seems to be a subscription service, though so here is the full story from The Australian.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=...Nq2Vo5MdGA
The discrepancy between the ink and the parchment also suggests that this could be a very clever fraud along the lines of the Jehoash Tablet or the Temple Pomegranate.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=...Nq2Vo5MdGA
Quote:Keith Small, from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, said that carbon dating was not always reliable and the dates announced last month applied not to the ink but to the parchment. The provenance of the text is also unclear and its calligraphic script is characteristic of later inscriptions.
Yet Dr Small believes that the dates are probably right and may raise broad questions about the origins of Islam. “If the [radio carbon] dates apply to the parchment and the ink, and the dates across the entire range apply, then the Koran — or at least portions of it — predates Mohammed, and moves back the years that an Arabic literary culture is in place well into the 500s,” he said.
“This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran’s genesis, like that Mohammed and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Mohammed receiving a revelation from heaven.
The discrepancy between the ink and the parchment also suggests that this could be a very clever fraud along the lines of the Jehoash Tablet or the Temple Pomegranate.
