The Sayings and Unwritten Sayings of Jesus from Muslim Sources

Not all that Jesus said and did was recorded in the Gospels, nor written down elsewhere, since "the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (Jn 21:25).  The Gospels are a selection—and a divinely-inspired one—but only a selection.  Even Paul goes outside that selection: "It is better to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35) is found nowhere in the Gospels.

Early Christian tradition has passed down a number of non-Scriptural sayings of Jesus, such as "Wherein I find you, there I will judge you," and "He that is near Me is near fire.  He that is far from Me is far from the Kingdom."  (For a collection of these early agrapha, "unwritten sayings," see Montague Rhodes James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 33-37.)  

The farther we go from the earliest Fathers, the more tenuous any reported saying will be.  Yet that doesn't stop traditions from being claimed.  So it is that many Muslim authors have claimed to report sayings of Jesus, passed down by tradition, even if the sayings were not written down until over a thousand years after Jesus' death.

The most famous collection of these sayings, culled from a variety of Islamic sources, is by Michael Asín Palacios (1871-1944), a Spanish priest who deeply studied Islamic literature and spirituality.  He is best-known for arguing that there are Islamic sources for many aspects of Dante's Divine Comedy; another such cross-cultural work is his study of Sufism, entitled Islam Christianized.

The collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, which Asín Palacios gathered from his studies of Islamic literature, were published in two parts in the journal Patrologia Orientalis, Volumes 13 and 19, under the title "Logia et Agrapha Domini Jesu apud Moslemicos Scriptores, Asceticos Praesertim, Usitata" ("Sayings and Unwritten Sayings of the Lord Jesus Familiar to Muslim Writers, Especially Ascetics").  The articles include the Arabic text of the sayings, alongside an (often obscure) Latin translation by Asín Palacios.

I was intending to translate these sayings, from the Latin version, but I was beaten to the punch by Anthony Alcock, a scholar of Coptic literature.  His translation is split into three parts; the last two parts are found only on his Academia.edu profile, which requires a free account, but the first part can be found in various sites across the web.  I've provided links to these interesting translations below:

 

Logia et Agrapha Domini Jesu, Part One

Logia et Agrapha Domini Jesu, Part Two

Logia et Agrapha Domini Jesu, Part Three

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