Comparing and Contrasting Apostolic Succession and the Concept of Isnād
By Michael Lofton
I just saw a clip of Alex O’Connor discussing the Biblical canon and how it was determined which books would enter the canon. In the clip, he compares apostolic succession in Christianity with the concept of isnād in Islam. As someone interested in comparative religion—particularly Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—this caught my attention.
This is a fairly common comparison, but I do not think the two concepts should be treated as equivalent.
An isnād is a chain of narrators that traces a report back to Muhammad or one of his companions. In many ways, it resembles the “telephone game,” where a message is passed from one person to another across generations. This concept is central to hadith studies, in which hadith are reports concerning the words, actions, approvals, or habits of Muhammad.
In hadith scholarship, the isnād is carefully examined to determine whether a report is authentic and can genuinely be traced back to Muhammad. This process is especially important in Islam because the Qur’an does not provide a comprehensive interpretive framework on its own. Hadith literature helps Muslims understand how Muhammad and the early Muslim community interpreted the Qur’an, as well as their views on a wide range of legal, ethical, and theological matters.
Scholars scrutinize each narrator in the isnād, evaluating factors such as honesty, memory, and reliability. If a narrator is found to be dishonest or unreliable, the authenticity of the hadith is weakened. Over time, Muslim scholars developed an extensive methodological system for classifying hadith according to their reliability.
Once a hadith is deemed authentic, it can serve as an interpretive tool for understanding both the Qur’an and the Sunnah—the normative example, practice, and way of life of Muhammad.
This is not the same as the concept of apostolic succession within Christianity. In much the same way that the Qur’an does not provide a complete interpretive framework for understanding itself, the Bible also does not offer a fully comprehensive system for its own interpretation. For this reason, some Christians appeal to apostolic succession as a means of safeguarding sound doctrine.
Apostolic succession is the belief that a bishop receives ordination from another bishop, who in turn was ordained by another bishop, in a chain ultimately tracing back to the apostles. Some assume that apostolic succession therefore guarantees the faithful transmission of orthodox doctrine from one bishop to another. At a basic level, I can understand why someone might see a similarity between this and the Islamic concept of isnād. However, this understanding of apostolic succession is ultimately inaccurate.
Apostolic succession does not guarantee a word-for-word transmission of teachings originating from Jesus or the apostles. By contrast, the concept of isnād—at least in theory—attempts to preserve a verbatim report of something said by Muhammad or one of his companions.
Additionally, apostolic succession does not necessarily guarantee even a general transmission of teachings originating from Jesus or the apostles. There are many historical examples of bishops with apostolic succession disagreeing with one another on matters of doctrine. For instance, North African bishops in the early third century claimed that their practice of rebaptism was apostolic, while Rome claimed that its prohibition of rebaptism was apostolic. The disagreement hinges on a doctrinal difference, not just a disciplinary one. Similar disagreements persist today among apostolic churches regarding issues such as the papacy, the Filioque, the Immaculate Conception, original sin, and purgatory.
For this reason, it should not be claimed that apostolic succession guarantees that the teachings or doctrinal statements of a bishop have been transmitted through an unbroken chain of instruction going back to the apostles. In many cases, a bishop may have been ordained by another bishop with whom he had little direct theological interaction. In other cases, a bishop may have inherited certain teachings or practices from his predecessors without receiving the entirety of his theological outlook through that line of succession.
I suspect that people often confuse apostolic succession with apostolic Tradition—the idea that certain teachings can be traced back to the apostles either explicitly or in a more implicit or developmental form. I would certainly grant that there is a relationship between apostolic Tradition and apostolic succession, and many have argued that the latter serves as one of the vehicles through which the former is transmitted.
But apostolic succession is fundamentally the claim that one’s episcopal ordination traces back to an apostle, not that all—or even most—of a bishop’s teachings have been transmitted through a continuous chain of bishops stretching from the apostolic age to the present. Apostolic Tradition, by contrast, concerns the transmission of teachings believed to originate with Jesus or the apostles, though not necessarily through apostolic succession itself. Other mechanisms of authority and transmission may be invoked to defend apostolic Tradition, but apostolic succession alone does not guarantee it.
In short, an isnād is a chain of narrators intended to preserve and transmit, as accurately as possible, a saying or observed action of Muhammad or one of his companions. The claim is that the report was taught and memorized from one person to another through an unbroken chain of transmission.
Apostolic succession, by contrast, refers to the transmission of episcopal ordination from one bishop to another, ultimately tracing back to the apostles. It is not necessarily the claim that a particular teaching—whether verbatim or even in a more general sense—has been passed down through an unbroken line of ordinations.