khalil andani on the injil

This is a fascinating conversation between Dr. Khalil Andani and Paul Williams.  (Although they both go to great pains to say that Dr. Andani is there as an academic expert and not any kind of religious authority. I found it to be a little excessive. It seemed like Williams is worried to death that he will be accused of giving an endorsement to an Ismai'li). 

Adani has some interesting ideas of what the Quranic "Injil" is. He argues that there is a parallelism in the Quran / Islam between "Quran and sunnah" , "Kitab and Hikmat" and "Torah and Injil". And specifically he argues that the Injil isn't really a separate independent scripture in its own right. It should primarily be seen as the "wise application of the Torah" as taught by Jesus (as) and not a stand-alone text. In particular, it can't possibly be the New Testament or Biblical gospels. 

Finally, Andani points to some research which (contrary to what many Christian missionaries tend to say) there is a very long history of Muslim scholars accusing the Christian Bible of textual corruption. One claim which you might see Christians make is that Ibn Hazm (is it anachronistic to call him Hispanic?) of the 11th century was the first Muslim to accuse the Bible of textual corruption. But in fact, Al Jahiz  , the black Iraqi scholar, was accusing the Bible of textual corruption several centuries earlier. 

I've mentioned al-Jahiz in this blog before. I feel like I need to be more familiar with him. Many years ago, I read a translation of his Al-Fakhar al-Sudan min al-Abyadh. He is also famous for having foreshadowed the theory of evolution. A real polymath.