The Bible, the Koran and science - The Holy Scriptures examined in the light of modern knowledge, by Maurice BUCAILLE

Ideas, arts, societies.

Thanks to an objective study of the texts, Maurice Bucaille overturns a number of received ideas about the Old Testament, the Gospels and the Koran, seeking to distinguish in this set what belongs to Revelation from what is tainted with errors. or human interpretations. Its examination sheds new light on the Holy Books.

At the end of an enthralling reading, it places the believer before a crucial point: the continuity of a Revelation emanating from the same God, with different modes of expression over time. This leads to ponder the factors which, nowadays, should spiritually unite and not divide Jews, Christians and Muslims.

BIOGRAPHY OF Maurice BUCAILLE

Maurice Bucaille devoted years to the study of sacred texts, Arabic and hieroglyphs. A former surgeon, he personally contributed to the investigations of mummies. He is the author of The Bible, the Koran and Science , Reflections on the Koran , Mummies and Pharaohs .

Maurice Bucaille, born July 19, 1920 in Pont-l'Évêque (Calvados) and died February 17, 1998, was a French doctor.
Author of several books, Bucaille is best known to Muslims for his concordist theories favorable to the Koran, in which he claims to demonstrate that the Koran is consistent with modern scientific theories, while the Bible is full of errors and inconsistencies. His exegesis has been unanimously criticized by scientific commentators for its lack of objectivity, inasmuch as he would require the Bible to conform strictly to current scientific knowledge, which he would not require of the Quran.

Biography
Son of Maurice and Marie (James) Bucaille, Maurice Bucaille practiced medicine as a gastroenterologist from 1945 to 1982. In 1973, Bucaille was appointed family physician to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. At the same time, some members of the family of President Anouar el-Sadat of Egypt were also among his patients.

In 1976, he published The Bible, the Koran and Science, which sold millions of copies and was translated into several languages, where he maintained that the Koran contained many scientific discoveries. In 1987, he published another book titled: Mummies of the Pharaohs: Modern Medical Investigations; he himself took part in the work of medical investigation of the mummies.

Concordism for the Koran and the hadiths
Bucaille is one of the references of Muslim concordism, a system of exegesis which consists of interpreting the Koran in such a way as to try to bring it into line with the results of modern science3.

Conformity of the Koran, "true word of God", to scientific theories
The Bible, Quran and Science describes the Quran as being in accord with scientific facts and modern knowledge about the creation of the universe, earth, space, animal and plant kingdom, human reproduction, etc. which were revealed fourteen centuries ago to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Bucaille affirms that - unlike the Bible and the Gospels which reveal things which are in total contradiction with current modern and scientific knowledge, in particular with regard to the creation of the Earth, the date of the appearance of the man on earth (which can be deduced from the genealogies enumerated in the Bible), the account of the deluge, or the genealogy of Jesus, reported by the Bible in a manifestly erroneous way4 - the Koran states that in Islam, science and religion are "twin sisters".

According to Maurice Bucaille, the Bible contains monumental scientific errors and not a single one is found in the Koran, which its descriptions of natural phenomena would make compatible with modern science. Bucaille concludes that the Koran revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, an illiterate man and incapable of proving facts that will be confirmed, fourteen centuries later, by modern science, is the true word of God.

Comparison between the Koran and the "errors" and "inconsistencies" of the Bible
Bucaille maintains that, because of its oral transmission, the Old Testament would have been distorted as well as because of numerous translations and corrections, without daring to think that these additions and modifications could have made it possible to obtain the inspired text. He highlights, in his words, "the many disagreements and repetitions" in the Old Testament and the Gospels. The term "parabola" is absent from this analysis.

In his book, Maurice Bucaille argues that he relies on many criticisms of the Bible, such as the "documentary hypothesis". With regard to the Koran, Bucaille relies in particular on the historical works of Muhammad Hamidullah, according to which the Koran "was both recited by heart, as it was revealed, by the Prophet and the believers around him and fixed in writing by the scribes of his entourage” which ensures their authenticity. Below, he gives the argument of the similarity of the different historical versions of the Koran known today, such as the copies attributed to the Caliph Othman (companion of the Prophet and third Caliph of Islam) and other very old copies, Source insufficient.

Bucaille explains that the biblical statements do not conform to the well-established scientific knowledge of his time. Thus, in chapter III of the first part of The Bible, the Koran and science, entitled "The Old Testament and modern science", Bucaille is willing to admit that as the Bible affirms in chapter 1 of the book of Genesis verses 1 and 2 "that at the stage when the earth had not been created, what will become the universe as we know it was plunged into darkness". On the other hand, he asserts, "to mention the existence of the waters at this time is pure and simple allegory". He also sees a “scientifically unacceptable” picture in the assertion in verses 6 and 7 that God split the waters into two parts, one part seas and the other part sky.

That said, as far as the Koran is concerned, Dr. Bucaille affirms that it is in perfect harmony with contemporary science. Thus, in the third part of this same work entitled "The Koran and modern science", he explains that the mention in the Koran (sura 21, verse 30) "of a process of separation (fatq) from an initial mass whose elements were initially welded together (ratq)" is nothing other than the phenomenon explained by astrophysicists under the name of "Big Bang". Bucaille also examines this postulate of the Koran (sura 41, verse 11), according to which following the separation (fatq), the universe had become smoke (dhukhân). According to him, it is in truth, an “affirmation of the existence of a gaseous mass with fine particles, because this is how the word smoke (dukhân, in Arabic) must be interpreted. Smoke generally consists of a gaseous substrate with, in more or less stable suspension, fine particles which may belong to the solid and even liquid states of matter and be at a more or less high temperature. »

Bucaille concludes that this gaseous mass described is the primitive nebula, which he defines as follows:

“At the earliest times on which it is able to pronounce, modern science has every reason to consider that the universe was formed of a gaseous mass composed mainly of hydrogen and partly of helium in slow rotation. This nebula then split into multiple fragments of considerable dimensions and masses, so much so that astrophysicists can estimate them to be on the order of one to 100 billion times the current mass of the Sun. »

Finally, let us add that Maurice Bucaille maintains that the statement of the Koran (sura 79, verse 2-33) according to which the rest of the universe was constituted before our planet, is strictly true.

Regarding the description of creation and the cosmos, the Koran does not take up any of the superstitions or biblical "teachings", which leads the journal Études orientales to say that, if there is a scientific miracle in the Koran, it is perhaps be there to see it.

Study of Bukhari's collection
As for the hadiths; after studying Bukhari's book, compiled some two centuries after Muhammad's death, Bucaille concludes that only a small number of passages conform to the data of modern science.

Popularity of Bucaille's concordism among Muslims
According to Jean-Pierre Filiu, Bucaille's work, The Bible, the Koran and science - where "he claims to oppose the factual inconsistencies of Christian texts to the conformity of the Koran with modern science" - is therefore very popular among Muslim preachers, to the point that Libya has ensured its dissemination in French-speaking Africa, through its World Association for the Islamic Appeal.

Necessity for Muslims to demonstrate that the Bible has been "corrupted"
According to Ron Rhodes, this popularity of Bucaille's theories among Muslims is explained by the dilemma they have to face when they are confronted with the Bible: on the one hand, they are in fact enjoined (sura X, 94) to refer to the scriptures that preceded the Koran, of which the Bible is a part (sura IV, 136); on the other hand, if they follow the teaching of the Bible (in particular on Jesus, and on the Trinity), then they must reject what the Koran tells them, and they cease to be Muslims.

Therefore, according to this author, the only possible solution to this dilemma consists in seeking to demonstrate that the Bible has been “corrupted” by the Jews and the Christians, and that it therefore contains many “untruths”. For scholar of religions Stephen Neill, adds Ron Rhodes, the fact that the Jewish and Christian Holy Scriptures differ from the Koran in many respects necessarily implies - from the point of view of Muslims - that the Bible must have been "corrupted". .

Role of Bucaille in this demonstration
However, Bucaille brings precisely this kind of "demonstration" (and all the more so since he is a scientist, a doctor from a country with a Christian tradition), since he affirms in particular that, if a revelation undoubtedly appears in the Old Testament, we only know it in the form that the Jews were good enough to leave it to us, after having manipulated these texts as they saw fit. It is therefore the human interventions in the Bible, the interpretations which appear there, which would explain the “gross errors” of this one, which one would not find in the Koran.

By affirming on the other hand not to have found a single scientific error in the Koran, Maurice Bucaille underlines its pre-eminence in relation to the Bible; according to him, the West should therefore begin to study the Koran so as not to ignore the miraculous information it contains on the creation of the universe and of Man, as well as on God himself.

Refutation of the theories of Maurice Bucaille
Methodological remarks
The concordist theories of Maurice Bucaille have been the subject of criticism. Thus William F. Campbell, director of the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), maintains that Maurice Bucaille does not evaluate the Koran according to the criteria by which he judges the Bible: Bucaille would require it to conforms to the requirements and the scientific language of the 20th century, when he would consider it acceptable that the Koran be written without this same scientific rigor, because, he writes about verses 27 to 33 of sura 79, the Koran "is expressed in a language that suits farmers or nomads of the Arabian Peninsula”. "The objectivity claimed by Dr. Bucaille thus remains completely theoretical".

Case of the Creation story
Maurice Bucaille, for example, criticizes the Bible when it describes Creation, dividing the process into "days" (Hebrew: yom): he underlines that "we know perfectly well nowadays that the formation of the universe and of the earth […] was carried out in stages over extremely long periods of time”, therefore considering the biblical text as “unacceptable”. The Bible describing the creation of the universe in six days, with God resting on the seventh day; direct allusion to the week of the seven terrestrial days according to Bucaille. However, supposing that the word day is to be interpreted in a much longer sense, the sacerdotal narrative would nonetheless remain unacceptable because of the succession of episodes which is in formal contradiction with elementary scientific notions, he tells us in conclusion, even if some Bible scholars attribute to the word day the equivalent of 1000 years based on Psalm 90, 4 which says that a day of the Lord is like a thousand years, which however does not settle the question durations, nor that of succession.

On the other hand, he does not hesitate, when he approaches the Koran, to re-examine the meaning of the word, admitting that the six "days" (Arabic: yawm) of Creation described in the suras of the Koran must be understood as designating a "completely different period of time" from the usual meaning of the word "day". Indeed, he explains that the word would have several meanings in Arabic, the most common meaning being "day", specifying that it "tends to designate daylight rather than the length of time between a sunset and that of its the following day ". The other meaning is "period of time" unspecified but still long. To support his statements, he gives two examples of Koranic verses:

sura 32, verse 5: “…in a period of time (yawm) the measure of which is a thousand of what you count”;
and sura 70, verse 4: “…in a period of time (yawm) whose measure is 50,000 years”.
Regarding the sequence of events, he affirms that the Koran does not define a precise order of creation of the heavens and the earth, which allows Maurice Bucaille to consider that the description of Creation made by the Koran does not contradict the truth. scientific, when, in his words, the Bible's description of it is "a gross error".

Similar view
In And God created Darwin: Theory of evolution and creationism in Switzerland, regarding the definition of the word yaoum, Mallory Schneuwly Purdie considers that it is possible to follow Maurice Bucaille and "to admit that the Koran envisages, for the creation of the world, long periods of time which he figures at the number of six", specifying however in a note: "We are aware of the controversies surrounding Bucaille, in particular for his partiality in favor of the Koran, a book to which he grants a " place quite apart because of the guarantee of authenticity it offers" while he considers the Old Testament and the Gospels to be riddled with errors. According to the author, the Koran and the sunna provide necessary insights to the writings that preceded them and the knowledge of modern science makes it possible to enhance the authentic status of the Koranic revelation”.

Analysis of the mummies of the Pharaohs
In 1974, he researched the reasons for the death of Merenptah, Ramses II and other Egyptian mummies. He wrote his conclusions in his book The Mummies of the Pharaohs and Medicine.

This work received the silver medal of the Diane-Potier-Boès prize awarded in 1988 by the French Academy, not on the basis of its scientific veracity, but awarded for "a work dealing with the relations between Egypt and France , or failing that devoted to the history or civilization of Egypt”

His work on the death of Merenptah and Ramses II has been widely criticized by the community of Egyptologists. They pointed to a “lack of seriousness” in the analyses, as well as the desire to have their research “concord” with the Koran. Today the scientific consensus concludes that Mérenptah died of atherosclerosis and not drowned as Maurice Bucaille had asserted.