the Bible

A critical analysis of reader-text, especially the sacred texts as the important topic of hermeneutic, is one of the focal points of attention among scholars of humanities. This paper, through a comparative study between the Bible and the Qur’an, concentrates on the image of woman in the account of creation. The paper first shows that there are deep differences between these two sacred texts concerning the image of woman. Then it argues that throughout the Judaea-Christian history and the Islamic traditions multi and contradictory interpretations and understandings of the account have been produced by religious authorities, scholars and critics. The main purpose of the paper is to show that despite the differences between the two texts, there is a common paradigm between Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions regarding the image of woman. This paradigm is that the authoritative discourses of both traditions have used the creation story, as a theoretical tool to downgrade women. Certainly, many factors are influential in producing this paradigm including disposition of the authors, extratextuality (the context of reading) and intertextuality (relationship of texts). In this paper, the notion of intertextuality will be emphasized, as an important factor in bringing about this paradigm.

This paper explores the method Allāmeh Muhammad Husayn Kāshif al-Ghiṭā, a famous Muslim theorist of the 18-19 th centuries, employed in his critique of Christianity. Although, his method for looking into the Bible is similar to that of Christian and Jewish scholars, his assumptions and results are different. Based on his viewpoints on the Bible, he believes in impeccable revelations. He examined superstructure, namely accuracy of attribution of books and pamphlets to their authors as well as personality and credibility of Jesus Christ’s disciples and apostles. Lack of credibility of the twelve original disciples of Jesus Christ and unreliability of the Gospels are proved. Moreover, he has carefully examined the content as infrastructure of the New Testament. As such, incongruities can be observed between the New Testament and the Old Testament. There are contradictions in the Bible itself. He prefers to apply argumentative tactic for general readers. In addition, his application of comparative step in his critique is considerable. This paper studies Kāshif al-Ghiṭā's approach to review the Bible in order to figure out Muslim scholars' viewpoints on the Christianity.

Most modern scholars consider the Book of Esther to be a kind of historical novel; hence, the historicity of many of its characters and events is highly debatable. While the present study does not intend to defend the historicity of the book, it does review it again by using sources that have received less attention in this regard. That the Book of Esther has a lot of Persian realia in it is not news, but most scholars have debated its historical value by comparing the book with classical sources. However, the present article aims to show how a significant part of the historical material of the Book of Esther is in line with evidence that if not all, but most of the classical sources are unaware of, and accepting this fact means that the author of the Masoretic Esther had direct or indirect access to sources associated with the Persian state. In order to prove this issue, using the descriptive-analytical method based on library studies, the primary focus of this article has been on sources other than the Greek ones, mainly Achaemenian royal inscriptions, and economic and legal documents found in different parts of the Persian Empire.