Explaining the Quran by Report

Ibn Kathir commentary belongs to the school that explains scripture by transmitted material rather than by grammar, theology or allegory. The order of resort is explicit: first look for a verse elsewhere in the Quran that explains the verse in front of you, then for a hadith of the Prophet bearing on it, then for the recorded opinions of the companions, then of the generation after them. Only when those are exhausted does independent reasoning have a place, and he is sparing with it.

The most visible consequence is his treatment of the stories that earlier commentators had used freely to fill in narrative gaps, material drawn from Jewish and Christian tradition about the prophets and the beginning of the world, known in the discipline as the isra'iliyyat. He does not simply omit them. He reports them and then names them for what they are, distinguishing what has support in the transmitted sources from what does not and warning the reader against the rest. That is a methodological position with a history behind it: he studied with Ibn Taymiyya, whose criticism of accumulated interpretive tradition shaped a great deal of later Sunni argument, and the commentary carries that outlook into the reading of every chapter.