Revisiting Wansbrough’s Perspective on the Qurʾān’s Synoptic Problem


The occurrence of variant versions of the same story is not uncommon in the Qurʾān. In response to this phenomenon, different approaches have been developed; one of which was Wansbrough’s variant traditions hypothesis. The hypothesis, which emerged mainly from an analysis of three accounts of the prophet Shuʿayb’s story in the Qurʾān, posits that the different tellings of the same story existed as independent pericopes that later found their way into the text of the Qurʾān, a claim that has many implications on the authorship and composition of the Qurʾān. Consequently, the reactions to this hypothesis were varied. In this paper, I present one of the critiques to the hypothesis, that of Stewart. Then, I employ elements of textual criticism to provide further ways for viewing the variant traditions. I do this by drawing attention to empirical evidence from the Near East, pre-Islamic poetry, orality theory, and to some of the internal characteristics of the Qurʾān. The general conclusion is neither surprising nor new: Wansbrough’s findings regarding the genealogy of the variant traditions and the authorship of the Qurʾān are far from self-evident.