6 ms·

Fragments of World's Oldest Koran May Predate Muhammad

brock_r 11y ago
So if the parchment's carbon dating window contains the known date in reality, doesn't it make more sense to throw away the low end of the window? (Unless of course, you just want to undermine the religion.)
- bsaul 11y ago
  i first read it the way you did, but after second reading i think they meant that fragments were produced over the period, with old fragments in the older date and more recent ones on the more recent one.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  You're right. If the range didn't overlap at all, that might be something. It's hard to believe that professional researchers would be this obnoxious, so I somewhat suspect that Discovery has the figures wrong.
verandaguy 11y ago
I'm very interested in how research into this will develop, but I'm also concerned about zealots going out of their way to slow down any such research. If this is true, it could be a major turning point for many of the Abrahamic religions, not just Islam. Hopefully this encourages more skepticism than aggressive idealism.
- petewailes 11y ago
  It almost certainly won't encourage scepticism, sadly. People just don't work that way (on the whole). Example: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want-to-be-right http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want...
- news_1776 11y ago
  Do you think Muslims will trust a group that is to them a bunch of random British researchers that just happened to come across an old piece of parchment with Arabic writing just lying around in a British university? Also this is coming from a country that to them seems biased against them. That my friend is just plain crazy.
nsns 11y ago
The last paragraph says: Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done on the parchment in the fragments, and not the actual ink, but added "If the 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." Nothing to report yet then?
gilgoomesh 11y ago
> University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. Without a narrower range, it's ridiculous to say that it predates Muhammad. At most it predates the first known, fully assembled Qur'an from 653CE. (Aside: I realize this story comes from Fox News but its listing of dates as "Anno Domini" is in poor taste, given the subject matter.)
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  Oh, please. CE means precisely AD but with a gloss of PC lipstick. Next we're going to hear that uttering AD instead of CE triggers those of weak constitution.
  - gtk40 11y ago
    Older works I have seen referred to CE as meaning "Christian Era" anyway. I don't know if that predates "Common Era" or not, though.
    - gilgoomesh 11y ago
      The term was originally "Vulgar Era" (meaning "the one that the people use", as opposed to the aristocracy which dated from the reign of various kings). Jewish academics started using "Common Era" to mean the same thing as "Vulgar Era" in the mid 19th century. "Christian Era" has never been used academically. It presumably came about due to people guessing at the "CE" in academic texts". It's not wrong though, so there's no problem. Also, unlike "Year of our Lord", it doesn't align the author with Christianity; it is merely factual.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Poor scholarship has never stopped anyone. As a theological masters degree student and PhD candidate I have always been just blown away at how poorly people do their work. In terms of years AD isn't really disrespectful the CE (Common Era) never really caught on and it was the same years. Muslim year numbers are in AH (1 AH is when the prophet moved to Medina) so 1 AH Day 1 is 16 July 622. So the years would be 54 BAH to 23 AH. This range means that it goes with our history from the time. As far as history goes int he last 100 years we have gotten very good at dates in our history and especially around the 6th Century. Bogus reporting on bogus scholarship.
mandazi 11y ago
>The Times of London reported that radiocarbon dating carried out by experts at the University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. The man known to Muslims as The Prophet is thought to have founded Islam sometime after 610 A.D., with the first Muslim community established at Medina, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 622 A.D. When they test the document, how do they know the difference of when the document was created versus when the actual document was written on? For example, paper could be created before the paper is actually used to write on.
- gilgoomesh 11y ago
  > Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done on the parchment in the fragments, and not the actual ink
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- virmundi 11y ago
  For other news sources the researchers estimate that given the importance of the Koran it would have used the newest products. This is, of course, wild speculation. There is no way to confirm or deny that the original Korans were written on new parchments.
news_1776 11y ago
This is highly unlikely as the parchment contains diacritical marks which were not introduced until 4 caliphs/leaders after the Prophet who had all already died/been killed. This has been mentioned by many critics as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics#history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics#history This seems more like a means to incite Muslims rather than science.
- thom_nic 11y ago
  FTA: > Article originally appeared on FoxNews.com. yup :)
- chipuni 11y ago
  Not JUST the diacritical marks. The writing style looks like Nashk, which came much MUCH later than the Koran.
- hackuser 11y ago
  That's very interesting. Do you happen to know a good place to read about that (i.e., more reliable than Wikipedia)?
ucho 11y ago
Why the hell it is on front page of all IT news sites?
- swsieber 11y ago
  Because a) it's a hot topic b)it's an example of fallacious logic and bad conclusions
- DanBC 11y ago
  There's a bunch of information hidden away in University libraries. These things get rediscovered every now and again. Isn't it exciting, interesting, that there's a bunch of knowledge to be gained from stuff we already have? Isn't "finding out about this stuff" relevant to hackers? A bunch of Victorian authors were recently de-anonimised when we found notes by Charles Dickens. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charles-dickens-notes-solve-the-mystery-of-unidentified-victorian-authors-10384128.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charles-dicke... Here's an HN discussion about the possibility of dinosaur feathers being discovered in amber https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145685 And here's how Al Jazeera reported the discovery of this Quran http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/world-oldest-quran-manuscripts-uk-150722110034399.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/world-oldest-quran-man...
j_m_b 11y ago
Why not date some of the ink?
- DoggettCK 11y ago
  I seem to remember reading they re-used paper a lot back then, scraping off old ink. Paper could've been much older than the author.
s_q_b 11y ago
Alright, this headline just seems wrong. First, radiocarbon dating comes with error bars. The date range identified is from 570 C.E. to 632 C.E. Given that Muhammad is thought to have founded Islam in the period from 610 C.E. to 630 C.E., and that date keeping was relatively good in this period, this would seem to confirm rather than dispute the traditional accounts. Second, the radiocarbon dating was performed on the parchment only, not the ink, as the article belatedly notes. Given the practice of ancient scribes to re-use parchment repeatedly, a rather unfortunate practice that has resulted in the loss of uncountable ancient texts, the age of the writing would be controlling, not the age of the parchment. Third, I'm forced to draw a rather unfortunate conclusion from this information. The assertion in this article seems deliberately calculated to undermine the historicity of Islam. There is a very sad and shortsighted movement in some corners of military scholarship right now that identifies Islam itself as the enemy, often beginning with Huntington's "clash of civilizations" narrative and ending with some examples of sheer lunacy, such as the recent article by a West Point associate professor arguing that legal human rights scholars are "an Islamist fifth column." Islam is one of the world's great religions, and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry. I have known many good people who drew their strength from Islam, and condemning an entire religion is a type of insanity that is directly contrary to the founding principles of the United States. Islam is not the enemy. Those who would pervert it for their own violent ends are. We cannot lose that distinction.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry. A few people try to claim that other religions don't inspire terrorist groups, but that's clearly bullshit. Buddhism is generally seen as pacifist but there's a Buddhist army and probably 2 Buddhist terrorist groups. (And that's not including Aum Shinryko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Karen_Buddhist_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Karen_Buddhist_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodu_Bala_Sena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodu_Bala_Sena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement etc.
  - 11y ago
zeveb 11y ago
> 568 A.D. … 645 A.D. … 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. … 610 A.D. … 622 A.D. It's 'A.D. year,' not 'year A.D.'! Sheesh.
- s_q_b 11y ago
  When discussing history, especially Islamic history, it would be better to use year C.E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era
  - NoGravitas 11y ago
    But CE's still just the same numbering system as AD. Much better to use AUC[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita
    - s_q_b 11y ago
      Well, really we should use the World Calendar, as specified by the League of Nations, or the Hijri since we're discussing Islam, or good 'ol ISO 8601 as this is Hacker News. Heh, yeah, it all does become a little silly. The important thing is communication. Using Christian dates is needlessly upsetting when discussing world religions. Upsetting people disrupts communication, so I avoid it.
dogma1138 11y ago
The likelihood that the entire Koran was written from scratch after the birth (and during the life) of Muhammad is pretty slim. The Hebrew Bible was canonized* after the Babylonian exile and there have been copies found containing different versions of other books. The Old Testament has additional books to the Hebrew Bibles (Maccabees) that were never canonized in the Hebrew Bible but remain an Historical Jewish cannon (The Great Revolt). There are also varied versions of the New Testament such as additional Gospels and Epistles that were not canonized at all or did not survive transition from proto-Christianity into Orthodox Christianity (Or sub sects like the Coptic and Syriac Bibles). The original works that make up the New Testament was most likely been written in Classical Hebrew, Hellenic Hebrew and Greek (Since some canonization was conducted in as late as 300-400CE also possibly Talmudic Hebrew), there were quite a few sects during the Hellenic period of Judaism that either converged into Christianity or into Judaism so there was quite a bit of cross pollination between various religious texts that some were canonized in the New Testament, some were canonized as the external canon in Judaism and some were lost for ever. So it would be quite surprising if the Koran was a body of work that was exclusively written during the life time of Muhammad since it's much more likely that it's been gathered from existing works and rewritten and adjusted just like the Hebrew Bible to fit the required goal during it's final canonization. It is also highly likely that adjustments would've been made after the canonization it self since variations can be found both the Hebrew Bible and the Old and New Testaments, as far as the Hebrew Bible goes with the exception of the Hebrew Bibles that is used by surviving Judaism derivatives like The Samaritans, Karaim, and Beta Israel is standardized since the 9th century (a handful more recent versions were discovered with alterations over the years but not in masses) and the New and Old Testaments were altered with each new translation pretty much upto the modern era. On a side note, I am for one actually surprised that this work was conducted dating early Islamic artifacts and texts tend to generate quite a big shit storm. *I refer to Canon as the agreed on final collection of works that made it into each book, minor variances such as ones regional differences between existing schools and different translations are not treated as separate canon.
- news_1776 11y ago
  That's a lot of "facts".
pp19dd 11y ago
Reason why this story is doing circles again and trending high is because of a colossal, major screw-up, and no one picked up on it but a few readers yesterday. The 8/31 rawstory "article" originally claimed the carbon dating range was 568 - 545. The 7/22 University of Birmingham press release that the story is loosely based on stated "568 - 645": the reporter copied the range wrong by 100 years and then researched and wrote rest of the article based on that. They've since corrected the number (after it trended on reddit), but not altered the narrative to reflect the change. So you have an entirely speculative article based off of incorrect facts and sensationalized on that premise, and no one bothered issuing a correction notice because it's obviously sloppy, sloppy work and that'd be too much work or worse, embarrassing. And now, all the lazy regurgitation of trending material from other news outlets is repeating the message whose very first paragraph was so horribly wrong.
ilitirit 11y ago
While I would actually like this to be true (just to see how it would affect Muslim beliefs), I don't think it is. But what surprises me more than anything else is how a legitimate historian can come to the conclusion that this finding changes in any way what we know already, especially since the same person admits that the radiocarbon dating only applies to the ink and not the parchment. The quotes from Tom Small are unremarkable considering his previous publications and statements about Islam.
saiya-jin 11y ago
apologies for my simplistic agnostic point of view, but what's the big deal? that some historic records from 1400 ago may not be that super accurate? anyway from big enough distance, isn't christianity just a sect* of judaism, and islam just a sect* of christianity? they share most prophets, events etc. and god should also be roughly same guy up there somewhere. * by sect i mean forking given official doctrine at that time by claiming that all before didn't get it right but you did, god showed it to you specifically etc. just like gazillion variations of chtristianity forked from original catholicism (well, I suspect that even catholicism is now are quite a bit different religion from the original one in early AD centuries). something tells me I just insulted half of this planet, but cannot help it - from rational point of view, what holy books contain are just some old stories, not more or less interesting then say Myths and legends of ancient greece, or Aesop's fables. now imagine somebody would base their whole life around those, feeling he is right and all others got it wrong. funny, no? no... From purely rational point of view, I fail to see any added value of religions in these times. There are many irrational - emotional aspects where they work, but I just cannot turn off my rational critical part of me that asks questions and doubts anything not provable by experiment, repeatedly. And the Ultimate truth, I mean THE truth, should be able to stand any test of logic with flying flags and should be as solid now as 1500/2000/3000 years ago. my 2 lousy cents

So if the parchment's carbon dating window contains the known date in reality, doesn't it make more sense to throw away the low end of the window? (Unless of course, you just want to undermine the religion.)

bsaul 11y ago
i first read it the way you did, but after second reading i think they meant that fragments were produced over the period, with old fragments in the older date and more recent ones on the more recent one.
jessaustin 11y ago
You're right. If the range didn't overlap at all, that might be something. It's hard to believe that professional researchers would be this obnoxious, so I somewhat suspect that Discovery has the figures wrong.

verandaguy 11y ago

I'm very interested in how research into this will develop, but I'm also concerned about zealots going out of their way to slow down any such research. If this is true, it could be a major turning point for many of the Abrahamic religions, not just Islam. Hopefully this encourages more skepticism than aggressive idealism.

petewailes 11y ago
It almost certainly won't encourage scepticism, sadly. People just don't work that way (on the whole). Example: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want-to-be-right http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want...
news_1776 11y ago
Do you think Muslims will trust a group that is to them a bunch of random British researchers that just happened to come across an old piece of parchment with Arabic writing just lying around in a British university? Also this is coming from a country that to them seems biased against them. That my friend is just plain crazy.

nsns 11y ago

The last paragraph says: Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done on the parchment in the fragments, and not the actual ink, but added "If the 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." Nothing to report yet then?

gilgoomesh 11y ago

> University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. Without a narrower range, it's ridiculous to say that it predates Muhammad. At most it predates the first known, fully assembled Qur'an from 653CE. (Aside: I realize this story comes from Fox News but its listing of dates as "Anno Domini" is in poor taste, given the subject matter.)

fluidcruft 11y ago
Oh, please. CE means precisely AD but with a gloss of PC lipstick. Next we're going to hear that uttering AD instead of CE triggers those of weak constitution.
- gtk40 11y ago
  Older works I have seen referred to CE as meaning "Christian Era" anyway. I don't know if that predates "Common Era" or not, though.
  - gilgoomesh 11y ago
    The term was originally "Vulgar Era" (meaning "the one that the people use", as opposed to the aristocracy which dated from the reign of various kings). Jewish academics started using "Common Era" to mean the same thing as "Vulgar Era" in the mid 19th century. "Christian Era" has never been used academically. It presumably came about due to people guessing at the "CE" in academic texts". It's not wrong though, so there's no problem. Also, unlike "Year of our Lord", it doesn't align the author with Christianity; it is merely factual.
baldfat 11y ago
Poor scholarship has never stopped anyone. As a theological masters degree student and PhD candidate I have always been just blown away at how poorly people do their work. In terms of years AD isn't really disrespectful the CE (Common Era) never really caught on and it was the same years. Muslim year numbers are in AH (1 AH is when the prophet moved to Medina) so 1 AH Day 1 is 16 July 622. So the years would be 54 BAH to 23 AH. This range means that it goes with our history from the time. As far as history goes int he last 100 years we have gotten very good at dates in our history and especially around the 6th Century. Bogus reporting on bogus scholarship.

mandazi 11y ago

>The Times of London reported that radiocarbon dating carried out by experts at the University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. The man known to Muslims as The Prophet is thought to have founded Islam sometime after 610 A.D., with the first Muslim community established at Medina, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 622 A.D. When they test the document, how do they know the difference of when the document was created versus when the actual document was written on? For example, paper could be created before the paper is actually used to write on.

gilgoomesh 11y ago
> Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done on the parchment in the fragments, and not the actual ink
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
virmundi 11y ago
For other news sources the researchers estimate that given the importance of the Koran it would have used the newest products. This is, of course, wild speculation. There is no way to confirm or deny that the original Korans were written on new parchments.

news_1776 11y ago

This is highly unlikely as the parchment contains diacritical marks which were not introduced until 4 caliphs/leaders after the Prophet who had all already died/been killed. This has been mentioned by many critics as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics#history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics#history This seems more like a means to incite Muslims rather than science.

thom_nic 11y ago
FTA: > Article originally appeared on FoxNews.com. yup :)
chipuni 11y ago
Not JUST the diacritical marks. The writing style looks like Nashk, which came much MUCH later than the Koran.
hackuser 11y ago
That's very interesting. Do you happen to know a good place to read about that (i.e., more reliable than Wikipedia)?

ucho 11y ago

Why the hell it is on front page of all IT news sites?

swsieber 11y ago
Because a) it's a hot topic b)it's an example of fallacious logic and bad conclusions
DanBC 11y ago
There's a bunch of information hidden away in University libraries. These things get rediscovered every now and again. Isn't it exciting, interesting, that there's a bunch of knowledge to be gained from stuff we already have? Isn't "finding out about this stuff" relevant to hackers? A bunch of Victorian authors were recently de-anonimised when we found notes by Charles Dickens. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charles-dickens-notes-solve-the-mystery-of-unidentified-victorian-authors-10384128.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charles-dicke... Here's an HN discussion about the possibility of dinosaur feathers being discovered in amber https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145685 And here's how Al Jazeera reported the discovery of this Quran http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/world-oldest-quran-manuscripts-uk-150722110034399.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/world-oldest-quran-man...

j_m_b 11y ago

Why not date some of the ink?

DoggettCK 11y ago
I seem to remember reading they re-used paper a lot back then, scraping off old ink. Paper could've been much older than the author.

s_q_b 11y ago

Alright, this headline just seems wrong. First, radiocarbon dating comes with error bars. The date range identified is from 570 C.E. to 632 C.E. Given that Muhammad is thought to have founded Islam in the period from 610 C.E. to 630 C.E., and that date keeping was relatively good in this period, this would seem to confirm rather than dispute the traditional accounts. Second, the radiocarbon dating was performed on the parchment only, not the ink, as the article belatedly notes. Given the practice of ancient scribes to re-use parchment repeatedly, a rather unfortunate practice that has resulted in the loss of uncountable ancient texts, the age of the writing would be controlling, not the age of the parchment. Third, I'm forced to draw a rather unfortunate conclusion from this information. The assertion in this article seems deliberately calculated to undermine the historicity of Islam. There is a very sad and shortsighted movement in some corners of military scholarship right now that identifies Islam itself as the enemy, often beginning with Huntington's "clash of civilizations" narrative and ending with some examples of sheer lunacy, such as the recent article by a West Point associate professor arguing that legal human rights scholars are "an Islamist fifth column." Islam is one of the world's great religions, and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry. I have known many good people who drew their strength from Islam, and condemning an entire religion is a type of insanity that is directly contrary to the founding principles of the United States. Islam is not the enemy. Those who would pervert it for their own violent ends are. We cannot lose that distinction.

DanBC 11y ago
> and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry. A few people try to claim that other religions don't inspire terrorist groups, but that's clearly bullshit. Buddhism is generally seen as pacifist but there's a Buddhist army and probably 2 Buddhist terrorist groups. (And that's not including Aum Shinryko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Karen_Buddhist_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Karen_Buddhist_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodu_Bala_Sena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodu_Bala_Sena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement etc.
- 11y ago

zeveb 11y ago

> 568 A.D. … 645 A.D. … 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. … 610 A.D. … 622 A.D. It's 'A.D. year,' not 'year A.D.'! Sheesh.

s_q_b 11y ago
When discussing history, especially Islamic history, it would be better to use year C.E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  But CE's still just the same numbering system as AD. Much better to use AUC[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita
  - s_q_b 11y ago
    Well, really we should use the World Calendar, as specified by the League of Nations, or the Hijri since we're discussing Islam, or good 'ol ISO 8601 as this is Hacker News. Heh, yeah, it all does become a little silly. The important thing is communication. Using Christian dates is needlessly upsetting when discussing world religions. Upsetting people disrupts communication, so I avoid it.

dogma1138 11y ago

The likelihood that the entire Koran was written from scratch after the birth (and during the life) of Muhammad is pretty slim. The Hebrew Bible was canonized* after the Babylonian exile and there have been copies found containing different versions of other books. The Old Testament has additional books to the Hebrew Bibles (Maccabees) that were never canonized in the Hebrew Bible but remain an Historical Jewish cannon (The Great Revolt). There are also varied versions of the New Testament such as additional Gospels and Epistles that were not canonized at all or did not survive transition from proto-Christianity into Orthodox Christianity (Or sub sects like the Coptic and Syriac Bibles). The original works that make up the New Testament was most likely been written in Classical Hebrew, Hellenic Hebrew and Greek (Since some canonization was conducted in as late as 300-400CE also possibly Talmudic Hebrew), there were quite a few sects during the Hellenic period of Judaism that either converged into Christianity or into Judaism so there was quite a bit of cross pollination between various religious texts that some were canonized in the New Testament, some were canonized as the external canon in Judaism and some were lost for ever. So it would be quite surprising if the Koran was a body of work that was exclusively written during the life time of Muhammad since it's much more likely that it's been gathered from existing works and rewritten and adjusted just like the Hebrew Bible to fit the required goal during it's final canonization. It is also highly likely that adjustments would've been made after the canonization it self since variations can be found both the Hebrew Bible and the Old and New Testaments, as far as the Hebrew Bible goes with the exception of the Hebrew Bibles that is used by surviving Judaism derivatives like The Samaritans, Karaim, and Beta Israel is standardized since the 9th century (a handful more recent versions were discovered with alterations over the years but not in masses) and the New and Old Testaments were altered with each new translation pretty much upto the modern era. On a side note, I am for one actually surprised that this work was conducted dating early Islamic artifacts and texts tend to generate quite a big shit storm. *I refer to Canon as the agreed on final collection of works that made it into each book, minor variances such as ones regional differences between existing schools and different translations are not treated as separate canon.

news_1776 11y ago
That's a lot of "facts".

pp19dd 11y ago

Reason why this story is doing circles again and trending high is because of a colossal, major screw-up, and no one picked up on it but a few readers yesterday. The 8/31 rawstory "article" originally claimed the carbon dating range was 568 - 545. The 7/22 University of Birmingham press release that the story is loosely based on stated "568 - 645": the reporter copied the range wrong by 100 years and then researched and wrote rest of the article based on that. They've since corrected the number (after it trended on reddit), but not altered the narrative to reflect the change. So you have an entirely speculative article based off of incorrect facts and sensationalized on that premise, and no one bothered issuing a correction notice because it's obviously sloppy, sloppy work and that'd be too much work or worse, embarrassing. And now, all the lazy regurgitation of trending material from other news outlets is repeating the message whose very first paragraph was so horribly wrong.

ilitirit 11y ago

While I would actually like this to be true (just to see how it would affect Muslim beliefs), I don't think it is. But what surprises me more than anything else is how a legitimate historian can come to the conclusion that this finding changes in any way what we know already, especially since the same person admits that the radiocarbon dating only applies to the ink and not the parchment. The quotes from Tom Small are unremarkable considering his previous publications and statements about Islam.

saiya-jin 11y ago

apologies for my simplistic agnostic point of view, but what's the big deal? that some historic records from 1400 ago may not be that super accurate? anyway from big enough distance, isn't christianity just a sect* of judaism, and islam just a sect* of christianity? they share most prophets, events etc. and god should also be roughly same guy up there somewhere. * by sect i mean forking given official doctrine at that time by claiming that all before didn't get it right but you did, god showed it to you specifically etc. just like gazillion variations of chtristianity forked from original catholicism (well, I suspect that even catholicism is now are quite a bit different religion from the original one in early AD centuries). something tells me I just insulted half of this planet, but cannot help it - from rational point of view, what holy books contain are just some old stories, not more or less interesting then say Myths and legends of ancient greece, or Aesop's fables. now imagine somebody would base their whole life around those, feeling he is right and all others got it wrong. funny, no? no... From purely rational point of view, I fail to see any added value of religions in these times. There are many irrational - emotional aspects where they work, but I just cannot turn off my rational critical part of me that asks questions and doubts anything not provable by experiment, repeatedly. And the Ultimate truth, I mean THE truth, should be able to stand any test of logic with flying flags and should be as solid now as 1500/2000/3000 years ago. my 2 lousy cents