Chapters that stand beside The Gospel According to Islam but are not part of its main telling. The gospel itself is Ahmad Shafaat’s text, arranged as the method page describes, and nothing is added to it that is not marked. The bonus chapters are different in kind: they are compositions of this website, written in the forms the New Testament uses, to show what those forms say when the Qur’an is the measure. Each states the Islamic position, carries its own notes, and is labelled as what it is.
The chapters
- An Epistle unto the Congregation of Paul of Tarsus: a letter to the followers of Paul of Tarsus, written in the form of the Pauline epistles, salutation, thanksgiving, exhortation, autograph and benediction, with twenty-one footnotes giving the scripture behind each line. It is an English rendering, in the manner of the Authorised Version, of the Malay letter Epistel Kepada Jemaat Paulus.
What a bonus chapter is for
The New Testament is made of forms: gospel, letter, acts, apocalypse. Each form carries an argument in its shape as much as in its words; a letter from an apostle to a congregation claims an authority before it says anything. A bonus chapter takes one of those forms and fills it with the other side of the argument, so that a reader who knows the Pauline letters can feel what it is to be addressed in their own idiom from the position of the men who opposed them. It is a literary exercise with a serious purpose, and it is kept out of the gospel proper so that the two are never confused. Where a bonus chapter states a fact about the texts, the footnote gives the reference; where the canonical sources say the opposite of what the chapter’s voice asserts, the note says so (see the editorial note on Peter in the epistle).