craignait Jean, le connaissant pour un homme juste”), German (“Herodes aber fürchtete Johannes; denn er wußte, daß er ein frommer und heiliger Mann war”), and so on. They are able to translate the reference because they understand the rules of the language they were translating into, and Mark would have understood the rules of the original Greek in exactly the same way. Imagine he was working from some lost text in Aramaic, which used the same pronominal reference, or that he had some mental sentence which he wanted to translate into Greek. Thus, the rules cannot be arbitrary if the knowledge required to apply them is knowledge of human nature itself, including the nature that drives people to construct such stories.
Fourth, the cases where resolution is impossible are where no appropriate rule exists.
On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the LORD met him1 and tried to kill him2. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his3 feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” So he4 let him5 alone. [Exodus 4:24-26]11
Rabbinical interpreters have offered a wide range of meanings for this text.12 The first “him” could refer to Moses, or to his son, either of whom has been struck down by some illness caused by God. The second clearly co-refers with the first. But whether “his feet” refers to Moses’ feet, his son’s feet or God’s feet, is difficult to say. As for the fourth and fifth, logic suggests that the subjects are different, and also that the fifth “he” co-refers with the first and second (the attempt on his life is dropped). But whether it is Moses or his son is not clear. One translation has “it” for the fourth pronoun, meaning the illness that struck down Moses (or his son). The text is most likely corrupt, but that confirms the point that no appropriate rule exists.
Of course, a complete theory governing pronoun resolution is likely to be complex and difficult, and is a problem for computational linguistics, but it is not my purpose to offer a precise theory of co-reference resolution, or any general theory of how people signify and understand co-reference. My assumption is such a theory must be possible. There have to be certain well understood rules of communication, which allow both authors and translators to communicate reference by written or spoken signs, in whatever language they choose.
Proper Names
While pronoun resolution is difficult, proper names and definite descriptions are somewhat easier. For proper names, the rule is that tokens of the same name always co-refer, except when they have been disambiguated in some way. If there are two or more people called “Mary,” the rule is that the name should be further qualified by means of a patronymic or description. For example, Mary Magdalene is qualified as Magdalene, as is Mary the mother of James and Joseph, who is also called the other Mary (Matthew 27:61, 28:1).13 Likewise, where the reader might think that different individuals had the same name, or where it is not clear, a description may be added. Thus, John 11:2 states, “It was that Mary [the sister of Martha] who anointed the Lord with ointment,” in case we think she is a different Mary, although Luke does not say whether they are the same or different. Likewise, Acts 13:14 tells us that the Apostles came to Antioch in Pisidia, to distinguish it from the Antioch in Syria.
The ambiguity can also be resolved by the passage of time. There are two people called “Herod” in the gospels. The first, the infant boy slayer of Matthew 2, was Herod the Great (74 BC – 4 BC), whereas the person to whom Jesus was sent before his crucifixion (and the one who had John the Baptist murdered) was Herod the Great’s son Herod Antipas (Matthew 14:1; Luke 3:1). There is no overt disambiguation in Luke. Luke 1:5 says, “In the time of Herod king of Judea,” and Luke 3:1 says, “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee.” However, the infant killing episode took place at Jesus’ birth, whereas Luke 3 explicitly states that Jesus was about thirty.
The convention that non-disambiguated tokens of the same name co-refer gives rise to the following puzzle, Quran 3:33-35:
3:33 Indeed, Allah chose Adam and Noah and the family of Abraham and the family of Imran over the worlds—
3:34 Descendants, some of them from others. And Allah is Hearing and Knowing.
3:35 [Mention, O Muhammad], when the wife of Imran said, “My Lord, indeed I have pledged to You what is in my womb, consecrated [for Your service], so accept this from me.”
The context makes it clear that the “wife of Imran” is the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. But the list in 3:33 implies that Imran is the father of Moses, meaning that Moses is Jesus’ uncle! This apparent inconsistency was noticed by John of Damascus as well as Niketas Byzantios,14 who thought Muhammad had confused Jesus’ mother with Moses’ sister Miriam the prophetess, who “took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing.”15
The fact that there is a natural reading at all, that is, reading both tokens of “Imran” as having the same reference, and reading “wife” as meaning a woman who has undergone a legal marriage ceremony with the person she is wife of, suggests some sort of rule or heuristic for determining reference, and the logical difficulty of the natural reading implies, as Spinoza argues in another context, that the author of the scripture made an error in doctrine, or that he did not know how to express himself properly, both of which undermine the authority of scripture.16 Perhaps the natural reading is not the correct reading, but this requires defining what “correct” means here. For example, the traditional reading, probably following the commentary of Al-Baidawi,17 avoids the problem of Moses being the uncle of Jesus on the assumption that the first occurrence of “Imran” refers to the father of Moses, the second to the father of Mary. Dawood follows this in an explanatory footnote to his translation.18 Others have suggested that both tokens of “Imran” do refer to the father of Moses, but since “wife” in Arabic also means “woman,” “wife of Imran” must be read as “woman of Imran,” that is, a descendant of Imran, just as Luke 1 says that Elizabeth was “of the daughters of Aaron,” meaning a descendant of Moses’ brother Aaron.19A third interpretation is that both tokens of “Imran” refer to the father of Mary.20
The difficulty with any alternative reading, as Spinoza persuasively suggests,21 is it that it implies a correct interpretation, that is, a method or rule of interpretation, which we could systematically apply to every passage of the scripture, which other writers could emulate without going astray. Otherwise there is no method or rule for interpreting scripture, and “anyone could make up anything [i.e., any interpretation] he liked.” This is the precisely the difficulty with the interpretation of Quran 3.33–35. The first interpretation implies the rule that we may use the same proper name, without qualification or warning, to refer to different individuals. But if this rule were systematically employed, we would everywhere find sudden jumps like the one from Imran the father of Moses in 3:33 to the grandfather of Jesus in 3:35, which we generally don’t find, and the principle would hardly be recommended in manuals of style, or courses in clear speaking. The whole point of a proper name is for consistency of reference: unless indicated otherwise, repeated tokens of the same name have the same reference. The second interpretation implies that “sister of” is systematically ambiguous between a living relation and a descendant, yet there is no evidence of the term “sister” being used in this way in any other part of the Quran.22 The third, namely that “Imran” in 3:33 refers to the father of Mary, leads to the difficulty that the list does not include the grandfather or father of Noah, so why should it include the grandfather of Jesus? The point of the list is to mention all those individuals (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Imran) as chosen above all others by God. Also, why does the list not include Moses, who the Quran mentions more than any other prophet, if not because the Imran of the list is Moses’ father? Sale23 mentions a further interpretation by
