Paul’s own titles, and the tafsīr of Yā Sīn

The tradition turned first to the titles Paul claimed for himself. Paul is said to have been sent “to the Gentiles” to preach to them the “good news”; he “was entrusted with the preaching” of the message he claimed from the gospel.¹ In his own words he was “not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles”.²

Since Paul claimed that ʿĪsā ibn Maryam had sent him to all nations with particular teachings, it is logical to say that he named himself an “apostle” and used the title to raise his own name.³ The following passages from the New Testament show it plainly:

His letters open on the title: “called to be an apostle”, an apostle “not of men, neither by man”.⁴

Paul claimed more than the title. He described his call in the words the prophets of Israel used of theirs. God, he writes, “separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen.”⁵

The phrasing answers to Jeremiah, ordained “a prophet unto the nations” before he was born, and to the servant in Isaiah, called “from the womb.”⁶ Dale B. Martin drew the conclusion plainly: Paul believed he had been called to be a prophet, and spoke of the event as the prophets spoke of their calling.⁷ The claim the hadith rules out is the claim Paul made.

On the strength of the hadith recorded by al-Bukhārī and Muslim, Islam plainly denies Paul’s so-called “apostleship” and disputes the claim that he was a “messenger of God,” since he lived in the period between ʿĪsā ibn Maryam and the Messenger of God ﷺ.

Ibn Isḥāq and the tafsīr of Yā Sīn

In several reports of the early Islamic tradition, Paul’s name appears among the figures associated with the spread of the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, though never as a disciple. Ibn Isḥāq, the early Muslim historian, mentions Paul as a companion of Peter, sent by ʿĪsā ibn Maryam to convey the teaching of tawḥīd to the Romans:

Those whom Jesus son of Mary sent, both disciples and those who came after them, in the land were: Peter the disciple and Paul with him (Paul belonged to the followers and was not a disciple) to Rome. Andrew and Matthew to the land of the cannibals; Thomas to the land of Babel, which is in the land of the east; Philip to Carthage and Africa; John to Ephesus the city of the young men of the cave; James to Jerusalem which is Aelia the city of the sanctuary; Bartholomew to Arabia which is the land of Hijaz; Simon to the land of Berbers; Judah who was not one of the disciples was put in place of Judas.⁸

The report is also cited by al-Ṭabarī in his Tārīkh and in the Tafsīr of al-Qurṭubī.⁹ It must be understood that narratives of this kind rest on no decisive revelation. They depend largely on Isrāʾīliyyāt, Jewish and Christian traditions that seeped into early Islamic exegesis and history.

Another interpretation of interest in classical discourse links Paul’s name with Sūrah Yā Sīn (36:14), which speaks of three messengers sent to a people who rejected them. Some exegetes such as al-Baghawī and Ibn Kathīr¹⁰ mention that two of the messengers were John and Paul, and the third Simon Peter. Such interpretation shows the early tendency of some exegetes to match the Qurʾānic narrative with the history between revelations, an approach also much influenced by Isrāʾīliyyāt.

The appearance of Paul’s name in these commentaries cannot be taken as confirmation of his teaching, still less as recognition of his “apostleship” within the frame of Islamic belief. It is better seen as an early effort by some exegetes to connect external history with the text of revelation, without any doctrinal validity resting on sound Islamic sources.

Ibn Kathīr, for instance, stresses that the city meant in the verse is not Antioch, as more than one of the salaf stated. He also cites various other opinions on the names of the three who were sent, which do not mention Paul at all. The word used in the verse is mursalīn (“those sent”), and not rasūl in the sense of a Prophet or Messenger sent by God.

The term can refer to someone sent by a Prophet, such as the ḥawāriyyūn (الحواريون, “the disciples”) sent by ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, and need not mean a Prophet or Messenger himself.¹¹ If the city is not Antioch, the connection with Paul falls of itself, and with it the effort to make him part of the Qurʾānic narrative.

1. Galatians 2:7–10. ↩
2. 2 Corinthians 11:5; the passage is set out under Curses for dissenters, and the break with Barnabas. ↩
3. See also 2 Corinthians 11:1, where Paul admits that his argument may look like “folly,” an irony that reflects the rhetorical unease in defending his standing as an apostle. ↩
4. Romans 1:1; 1 Corinthians 1:1; Galatians 1:1. The openings are set out under A self-appointed apostle. ↩
5. Galatians 1:15–16. ↩
6. Jeremiah 1:5; Isaiah 49:1. ↩
7. Dale B. Martin, notes on “Luke” and Paul, 2019, “Was Paul “Converted”?,” published on this site with his permission: “Luke” versus Paul: the notes of Dale B. Martin. ↩
8. Alfred Guillaume (trans.), The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 653. ↩
9. Ibn Isḥāq, al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah; al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk, vol. 1, p. 123; al-Qurṭubī, Tafsīr al-Qurṭubī, on Sūrah 61:14. ↩
10. See al-Baghawī 12; Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr on Q 36:14; see also Samuel Zinner, The Gospel of Thomas in the Light of Early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Esoteric Trajectories (Brill, 2011), pp. 112–113. ↩
11. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, on Sūrah Yā Sīn, verses 13–14. ↩