Islamic position
The fifth sūra of the Qur’an is called al-Māʾida, “The Table”, after four verses near its end (5:112-115) in which the disciples of ʿĪsā ask for a table to be sent down from heaven, and he asks God for it, and God grants it with a warning. It is the only miracle in the Qur’an that the disciples request, and the only one that comes with a threat attached. This page gives the passage, what the commentators made of it, and the gospel scenes it has been compared with.
The passage
“When the disciples said, ‘O ʿĪsā son of Maryam, can your Lord send down to us a table from heaven?’ he said, ‘Fear God, if you are believers.’ They said, ‘We wish to eat from it, and to have our hearts set at rest, and to know that you have told us the truth, and to be witnesses to it.’ ʿĪsā son of Maryam said, ‘O God, our Lord, send down to us a table from heaven, to be a festival for us, for the first of us and the last of us, and a sign from You; and provide for us, for You are the best of providers.’ God said, ‘I will send it down to you. But whoever of you disbelieves after that, I will punish him with a punishment I have not inflicted on anyone in the worlds’” (5:112-115).
The disciples
The disciples (al-ḥawāriyyūn) appear in the Qur’an as the men who answered when ʿĪsā asked, “Who will be my helpers in the way of God?” and who said, “We are God’s helpers; we believe in God; bear witness that we are Muslims” (3:52; 61:14). They are believers, and the Qur’an says God inspired them to believe (5:111). Their request here is not unbelief; they say they want their hearts set at rest, the same words the Qur’an gives Ibrāhīm when he asks to see how God gives life to the dead (2:260). ʿĪsā’s first answer, “Fear God”, is a prophet’s caution against asking for signs; his prayer, once they explain themselves, asks for the table as a festival and a sign, and for provision. The Qur’an does not say whether the table came down. The commentators are nearly unanimous that it did, and they describe it: fish and bread, fruits of Paradise, a meal that fed the poor and the sick. Some, among them Mujāhid and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, held that when the disciples heard the warning they withdrew the request, and that the table never came.
The warning
The threat in 5:115 is the severest in the Qur’an, and it is attached to a meal. The sense is that a sign asked for and given leaves no excuse: those who disbelieve after seeing it are worse than those who never saw. The gospels say the same of the towns that saw the signs and did not repent: “it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgement than for you” (Matthew 11:21-24). In Shafaat’s telling, the warning is the reason the disciples’ faith is tested so hard afterwards.
Compare
Commentators ancient and modern have connected the table with three gospel scenes, and the Qur’an names none of them. The feeding of the multitudes (Mark 6:30-44; 8:1-10; John 6:1-14) is a meal from heaven for a crowd, after which the crowd in John asks for a sign “that we may see it and believe you” and is told of the bread from heaven (6:30-33). The Last Supper (Mark 14:22-25; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26) is a meal with the disciples that became the Christian festival, which matches “a festival for the first of us and the last of us”. Peter’s vision of a sheet let down from heaven with food on it (Acts 10:9-16) is a “table” of a kind, and the word the Qur’an uses, māʾida, is a loanword from Ethiopic, where it was used of the Christian altar table. Each parallel fits part of the passage and none fits the whole. What the Qur’an has done is to keep the memory of a meal from God that the disciples shared with him and that became their festival, and to strip it of the meaning the church gave it. There is no body broken and no blood poured out; there is bread from the best of providers, and a warning to be grateful.
Why it matters here
The Last Supper is the root of the Christian sacrament and of the doctrine that his death was a sacrifice. The Qur’an’s table is a feast and a sign, given at the disciples’ request, with no death in it. The Gospel According to Islam sets the table in section 16, before Caesarea Philippi, and the last supper in section 23, where the words over the bread and the cup are given as the gospels have them and the note explains how the measure reads them.
Sources
- Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, and Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr, on 5:112-115.
- Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext, on the table.
- Arthur Jeffery, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ān, under māʾida.
- Matthias Radscheit, “Table”, in Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān.