The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims [Hardcover]

F. E. Peters (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2007

Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe that their Scriptures preserve God's words to humanity, and that those words were spoken uniquely to them. In The Voice, the Word, the Books, F. E. Peters leads readers on an extraordinary journey through centuries of written tradition to uncover the human fingerprints on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran, sacred texts that have enriched millions of lives.

Bringing the latest Biblical and Quranic scholarship to a general audience, Peters explains how these three powerfully influential books passed from God's mouth, so to speak, to become the Scriptures that we possess today. He reveals new insights into their origins, contents, canonization, and the important roles they have played in the lives of their communities. He explores how they evolved through time from oral to written texts, who composed them and who wrote them, as well as the theological commonalities and points of disagreement among their adherents. Writing in the comparative style for which he is renowned, Peters charts the transmission of faith from the spoken word to the printed page, from the revelations on Sinai and Mount Hira to Mamluk ateliers in Cairo and Gutenberg's press in Mainz.

Peters is an acknowledged expert who has written extensively on these three great world religions, each of them an inheritor of the faith of Abraham. Published in conjunction with an exhibit at the British Library, this illustrated book includes beautiful images of the rare editions on exhibit and constitutes Peters's most ambitious and illuminating examination yet of the sacred texts that so inform civilization both East and West.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Peters, professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at NYU and author of The Children of Abraham, lucidly explains how Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities understand and interact with their sacred texts—the Tanakh, the Bible and the Qur'an. Unsurprisingly, he opens with discussions of authorship and canonization: who wrote the books, how did the sacred texts achieve their final form, and how do religious authorities discern what counts as "the Word of God"? He also takes up the question of translation, elucidating the theology that underlies the Islamic belief that "a translated Qur'an is not really a Qur'an." But the truly fascinating sections of the book investigate quirkier topics, such as the different religions' regulations about the conditions under which people are allowed to handle sacred books. One of the most interesting chapters addresses the relationship between art and text, examining how various scribes and calligraphers have illustrated holy books; Peters makes an intriguing claim about the Qur'an, suggesting that despite Islamic insistence that the meaning of the text lies solely in the words, "Qur'anic decoration"—geometric and floral imagery—may "add another layer of meaning." This is undoubtedly one of the best single volumes on the history of sacred text in the Abrahamic faiths, and many readers will find it an invaluable resource. (May)
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From Booklist

That God revealed himself to Abraham, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all agree. But Peters' concern here is to explain how each of the three Abrahamic communities came to gaze back on the great patriarch through its own sacred book. Mere scholarship cannot penetrate the mystery of revelation, but careful scrutiny of scripture does expose clues as to how theophanies survived in oral traditions until fixed in a written text, later edited, collated, and ratified by each religious community. To be sure, the process that produced scripture looks different in each of the three faiths in view. As Peters transports his readers to first-century Yabneh, fourth-century Nicea, and eighth-century Medina, in turn, he opens to view the complex labors of often-forgotten scribes, editors, and translators. Some devout readers may view Peters' work suspiciously, distrustful of often-conjectural explanations of how fallible humans shaped and collated the word of God. But many readers will appreciate this probing interfaith investigation for the insight it offers into sacred books that both link and divide the world of faith. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691131120
• ISBN-13: 978-0691131122
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #746,111 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

F. E. Peters

Francis Edward Peters is Professor Emeritus of History, Religion and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. A native of NYC, where he attended Regis H.S. and still lives, he was trained at St. Louis University in Classical Languages (AB, MA) and in Philosophy (Ph.L.), and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in Islamic Studies. Peters, though formally trained as both a classicist and an Islamicist, is best known as a historian of religion, a field where he was a pioneer, and is now the leading scholar, in the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is a subject on which he has written more than twenty books, most notably the two volume The Monotheists (Princeton, 2003), The Children of Abraham. A New Edition (Princeton, 2004) and The Voice, The Word, The Books: The Sacred Scriptures of the Jews, Christians and Muslims (Princeton 2007). His most recent, Jesus and Muhammad: Parallel Tracks, Parallel Lives appeared from Oxford University Press in 2010, and he has contributed as well to the Oxford Bibliographies Online. .

In addition to his more than forty years teaching everything from Homer to Hasidism in the classrooms of NYU (where he chaired both the Classics and the Middle Eastern Studies departments and won a number of teaching awards), as well as accepting visiting professorships and guest lectureships at many of America's and the Middle East's top universities, Peters has been featured on CBS' TV series Sunrise Semester and on a variety of TV documentaries and served as New York's WPIX TV anchorman for the original moon landing. He has three audio courses on tape and CD in the Barnes and Noble Portable Professor series. He is presently serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York City and has assisted in curating public exhibitions at Holy Cross College, The British Library and The New York Public Library.