Gabriel Said Reynolds (The Qur'an and its Biblical Subtext) argues that the best way to understand the Qur'an is as a moment in the reception of Biblical tradition. While I imagine that at least many Islamic readers are not going to be swayed much by the idea that the Qur'an even has intertexts, I find the argument interesting perhaps in its way of addressing just how one goes about dealing with intertexts.
Reynolds' first case study concerns the question of prostration of the angels in Qur'an. He begins with God's intention (2.30) to make a khalifa ("caliph") upon the earth. This word, Reynolds contends, creates problems for the early mufassirun, in that through one optic it seems to indicate a likeness to God that Muslim theologians have historically rejected entirely (guided in part by declarations in Qur'an about God's unlikeness to anything that is not God). In light of this, Reynolds argues, most of the translators chose to receive khalifa as "successor" and attempted to understand human beings as inheritors of the earth from the angels. This of course avoids the potential problem of likeness to God but only at the cost of pressing the question of why the angels became disinherited in the first place.
They were disinherited, Reynolds notes, for refusing to bow to human beings. To refuse to translate khalifa as vicegerent creates the very discomfort about the command to bow to humans. For the Quranic term for prostration (sajada) is closely associated with worship, as indicated by the word for the place of prostration, the mosque (masjid). Some Muslim commentators speculated that Shaytan mocked Adam and so God commanded the prostration merely to reveal the pride. Others understand the prostration to be something permitted in a previous era but abrograted to Islam. Reynolds finds, and he thinks many others would find, those glosses unsatisfactory.
On the basis of the problem he observes here, Reynolds raises an ancient biblical tradition in which readers gloss Psalm 8:4, "what are human beings that you spare a thought for them, or the child of Adam that you care for him?" In the Babylonian Talmud, that verse is glossed in conjunction with Gen. 1:26, "let us make man in our own image." Genesis Rabba 8:9 shows angels moved to wonder and perhaps even worship: "when the Lord created Adam, the angels mistook him [for a divine being]." Several early Christian writings likewise contain a narrative of angels bowing to Adam, a tradition that becomes more accentuated in light of the early Christian typology where Adam figures as an ante-type of Christ. The Cave of Treasures in fact has what seem to be linguistic overlaps with Qur'an, where the angels bow to Adam not because he looks divine but because of the authority God gives him. It also has the devil refusing to bow to Adam becuase (again in language redolent of Qur'an) the devil is made of fire and man of clay.
Thus, although the proposal creates problems for Islamic theology, Reynolds nevertheless concludes that khalifa is least problematic, in Quranic and textual terms, if we understand it as the imago Dei from Genesis 1:26.
I have no desire to enter into an apologetic and counter-apologetic discussion with Muslim friends of mine (even though it would be disingenuous to say I do not find Reynolds convincing). Instead, I find Reynolds most instructive as an instructor in how to discern a discussion between texts. For biblical scholars, the question of what constitutes an "echo" is one whose contentions reveal that there is a methodological confusion at large (at least broadly if not in the case of many individual writers). Richard Hays has opened a tremendous area of research by his thoroughgoing suggestions about the exegetical self-awareness of the NT vis-a-vis the OT. Some feel that his suggestions reach too far, and others that there is no way to constrain possible readings. Reynolds, I think, can be used to discern, at least in sketch form, a way of thinking about these. Notice:
1) There is a problem in Quranic language. It seems to affirm here what it denies elsewhere, either in affirming man as vicegerent while denying him any likeness to God, or in affirming him as a successor while denying any thick account of why the succession had to happen in the first place.
2) There is a text that bears enough of a broad similarity to make it, in Reynolds' judgment, worth trying out.
3) It discovers even "tighter," verbal or syntactical links between the "background" passage and the passages being evaluated.
4) Finally, upon trying it out, it seems not only to alleviate some of the textual tensions but to give an account of how such tensions might have arisen in the first place. There is a fullness not only to the reading given but of the plausibility that other readings might have ever arisen elsewhere. This "fullness" is a category difficult to formalize, and that is almost certainly due to the fact that it is an aesthetic judgment. The faculty of judgment cannot ever be factored out of such work. But it may help to reinforce the point that such judgments are aesthetic, since there are at least a few readers who seem to think judgment is not what they are doing.
Reynolds' method, at least in the cases he reviews, performs beautifully. He makes an argument whose power might tempt one to think it is easy to do what he does. But the fragments of arguments made over intertexts for the New Testament allow no such conclusion. In light of the previous generation's work on the so-called fictionality of the limits of texts, questions of intertextuality are often especially frought with difficulty. Those difficulties led to the brutalization of texts in the later half of the twentieth century. Reynolds, however, has performed readers of the great texts of the world a service in helping to see how some of those difficulties might be overcome and intertextual relationships healed, at least a little. This seems to me a worthy venture, for such relationships are beautiful and instructive. They delight and teach, and in so doing they yield a significant part of the pleasure that reading gives.
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