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A Stranger Is Calling: Jews, Christians and Muslims as Fellow Travellers

Anton Wessels sets out his aim at the start of this volume as being that of reading the Bible together as Muslims, Jews and Christians, and this laudable goal informs the structure of the material he examines. What is perhaps the dominant theme is set out in the opening chapter, where God is conceived of as the stranger who is also the Deus absconditus, and is followed by an examination of a number of other themes central to biblical narrative and which are to be found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The themes selected are drawn mostly from the Hebrew Bible, and are examined through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic interpretation with occasional references to modern sources. Wessels takes as the linchpins of his analysis of biblical themes the concepts of divine alterity and justice as he seeks to unearth commonalities of meaning through what one might term an interreligious hermeneutic. Accordingly, each theme is examined with reference to the interpretations given in Jewish sources, Christian texts and the Qur’an along with various classical Muslim exegetes, all against the backdrop of current and historical interaction between the three faiths. Methodologically, Wessels seeks to establish thematic links between the various interpretative sources on the basis of language, imagery and narrative commonality. The text presents considerable detail, and Wessels brings his own knowledge of the sources to bear on his task of unearthing semantic commonality, though there are points in the text where one is left wondering whether this is not an eisegetically written narrative theology rather than a more exegetical mining of the texts. Occasionally, conclusions are drawn that seem counterintuitive to the point of stretching credibility. Thus, speaking about the nature of Islam, Wessels states: