CHAPTER TWO The Quran — The Prophet’s Miracle

today. Millions of people still speak and write the language in which the Quran was revealed nearly 1500 years ago. This provides stunning proof of the miraculous nature of the Quran, for there is no other book in history which has been able to make such an impact on its language; no other book has moulded a whole language according to its own style, and maintained it in that form over the centuries. Take the Injil, known as the New Testament, of which the oldest existing copy is in Greek and not Aramaic, the language which Jesus is thought to have spoken. That means that we possess only a translated account of what the Prophet Jesus said and did; and that too, in ancient Greek, which is considerably different from the modern language. By the end of the 19th century the Greek language had changed so much that the meaning of at least 550 words in the New Testament - about 12% of the entire text - was not known. At that time a German expert, Adolf Deissman, discovered some ancient scrolls in Egypt. From them it emerged that biblical Greek was in fact a colloquial version of classical Greek. This language was spoken in Palestine during the first century AD. Deissman was able to attach meanings to some of the unknown words, but there are another fifty words whose meanings are still unknown. (The Gospels and the Jesus of History, by Xavier Leon-Dufour S.J.) Ernest Renan (1823-1894) carried out extensive research on Semitic languages. He wrote a book on their vocabularies, in which he had this to say about the Arabic language: “The Arabic language is the most astonishing event of human history. Unknown during the classical period, it suddenly emerged as a complete language. After this, it did not undergo any noticeable changes, so one cannot define for it an early or a late stage. It is just the same today as it was when it first appeared.” In acknowledging this ‘astonishing event of human history’ Renan, a French orientalist, is in fact acknowledging the miraculous nature of the Quran. It was the Quran’s phenomenal literary style which preserved the Arabic language from alteration, such as other languages have undergone. The Christian Jurgi Zaydan (1861-1914) is one of the scholars to have recognized this fact. In a book on Arabic literature he writes: “No religious book has had such an impact on the language in which it was written as the Quran has had on Arabic literature.” World languages have changed so much throughout the ages that no expert in any modern language is able to understand its ancient form without the aid of a dictionary. There have been two main causes