ChapterTen Jesus in Hadith
and
Muslim Traditions
The Hadith are another source of knowledge about Jesus, peace be on him, about which many students of Christianity have been kept in the dark. The Hadith consist principally of records of eyewitness accounts of what the Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and bless ings of God be on him, said and did during his life-time. The Ha dith have always been carefully distinguished from the Qur'an which is the revelation which was revealed to the Prophet Mu hammad by God through the angel Gabriel. Thus the Hadith litera ture complements the Qur'an and even contains commentaries on passages from the Qur'an - but the two are never confused with each other. The Qur'an is the Word of God. The Hadith contain the words of people. Faced with the impossibility of verifying their own texts, a highly sophisticated pseudo-scholarship was set up by the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Christian missionaries in the last century to discredit the Muslim Hadith literature - which had al- . ready undergone the most scrupulous checking and verification in the history of recorded scholarship, for, unlike the officiallyaccepted Gospels of the New Testament - and indeed the Gospel of Barnabas for that matter - which purport to record sorne of the actions and words of Jesus, peace be on him, during his Iife-time-- but which in the absence of any early records are incapable of being thor oughly authenticated - a hadith which records the words or actions of the Prophet Muhammad, may Cod bless him and grant him peace, is not accepted as being reliable unless it can be traced back through a chain of human transmission made up of reliable peo ple, from person to person, back to someone who was a compan ion of the Prophet Muhammad and who actually witnessed the event or heard the words which the hadith describes or relates.