Article Citation: Dikko Bature Darma (2023). The Conception of Isā in Islam and Jesus in Christianity: A Comparison. DEGEL: The Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Islamic Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 & 2. ISSN 0794-9316
THE CONCEPTION OF ISĀ IN ISLAM AND JESUS IN CHRISTIANITY: A COMPARISON
By
Dikko Bature Darma
Abstract
For the Muslims, Jesus is one
of Allah’s messengers, just as Muhammad was, and due for the same honour and
respect. The majority of Christian denominations, on the other hand, have
adopted the divinity of Jesus and made it a cornerstone of their faith, thereby
making the position of Jesus as related to the Muslims, as a whole, different
from the Christians’ depiction. In Christian theology, the doctrine of Trinity
refers to the existence of three persons in one substance. The three persons of
Trinity are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And Jesus is the second
person of Trinity. In Islam, no one is considered to be a Muslim if he does not
respect or recognize Jesus as one of the mightiest prophets of God; Jesus as an
important figure is shown so much respect in Islam that whenever his name is
mentioned it will be followed by the phrase, ‘peace be unto him’; but Islam
repudiates the doctrine that he was God, or the son of God, or anything more
than being one of the servants of God.
Introduction
There are so many theories
and conjectures among the early Christian sects and among Muslim theologians on
the conception of Jesus Christ or Isā al-Masīh; his birth, his private life,
his ministry and the end of his life on earth. Moreover, Muslim and Christian
scriptures narrate somehow different stories about the life of Jesus on earth.
For instance, according to the New Testament accounts, Jesus was reported to
have been executed by crucifixion on the orders of Pontius Pilate. This is a
cardinal point of the doctrine of Orthodox Christian Churches that his life was
taken on the Cross, that he was buried and in the third day he rose in the body
and his wounds intact and walked about and conversed and ate with his disciples
and afterward taken up to the heaven bodily not spiritually, hence, the
Christian theological doctrine of blood sacrifice and vicarious atonement of
sins. However, some of the early Christian Gospels like Marcionite Gospel and
the Gospel of Barnabas did not believe that Christ was killed on the Cross. The
former denied that Jesus was born, and merely said that he appeared in human
form. The later believed that someone else was substituted for him and
crucified on the Cross.
The Qur’anic narrative, on
the other hand, depicts the end of life of Jesus on earth as much involved in
mystery as with his birth. The Qur’an teaches that Christ was neither crucified
nor killed by the Jews, but so it was made to appear to his enemies; and that
he was taken up to Allah. All Muslim sects agree on this point, however, there
are different opinions as to the exact interpretation of “Allah raised him up
unto Himself.” The majority accepted Muslim view holds that Jesus did not die
the usual human death, but still lives in the heavens. “Another school holds
that he died but not when he was supposed to be crucified and that his being
“raised up” unto Allah means that instead of being disgraced as a malefactor,
as the Jews intended, he was on the contrary honoured by Allah as His
Messenger” (see Yusuf Ali notes on Q4:158). Perhaps, this is the main reason
why some Muslim group rejects the idea of the second coming of Jesus in spite
of the fact that Qur’an Chapter 43 verse 61 is understood to refer to the
second coming of Jesus in the Last Days before the resurrection, when he will
destroy the false doctrines that pass under his name, and prepare the way for
the universal acceptance of Islam.
Jesus,
Christianity and the Bible: A Historical Overview*
Jesus of Nazareth, a
religious figure whom Christians consider to be the son of God and call “Jesus
Christ” in the belief that he is a Messiah who came to set the world aright. He
came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his brief ministry, his
disciples known as ‘the Twelve’ continued to worship together every day in the
temple of Jerusalem, revere the Torah, keep the Sabbath, and the observance of
the Law as devout, orthodox Jews. Some basic characteristics of the followers
of Jesus; they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and
dedicated their lives to the last days. “It seems that Jesus had recommended
voluntary poverty and special care for the poor that loyalty to the group was
to be valued more than families ties; and that evil should be met with
non-violence and love. Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman
authorities and must not even contemplate armed struggles.”[1]
Jesus followers grew on later
and continued to preach the gospel or good news of Jesus in the regions of
Palestine, such as Samaria and Gaza. They established congregations in the
Diaspora – in Damascus, Phoenicia, Cilicia and Antioch – where they made an
important breakthrough. Even though, the missionaries preached in the first
instance to their fellow Jews, they found that they were also attracting
gentiles, especially among pagans. In the Diaspora, Jews welcomed these pagan
sympathizers and the huge outer court of the temple had been deliberately
designed to accommodate crowds of gentiles who liked to participate in the
Jewish festivals. The pagan worshippers had not become monotheists. They
continued to worship other gods and participate in the local cults, and most
Jews did not object to this, since God had only demanded exclusive worship of
Israel. But if a gentile converted to Judaism, he had to be circumcised,
observes the whole Torah and eschew idol worship.
So, the arrival of significant numbers of
gentle converts in their congregations put the leaders of the Jesus sect in a
quandary. Nobody seems to have felt that gentles should be excluded, but there
was considerable disagreement about the terms on which they could be admitted.
Some believed that gentile Christians should convert to Judaism, take on the
Torah and face the dangerous ordeal of circumcision but others felt that, since
the present world order was passing away, conversion was unnecessary. The debate
became heated but eventually it was agreed that those gentiles who accepted
Jesus as Messiah need not convert to Judaism. They must simply shun idolatry
and follow a modified version of the dietary rules.[2]
One of the most forceful
champions of this new movement was Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in
Cilicia, who had joined the Christian movement some three years after Jesus.
He had never known Jesus
personally, and had initially been hostile to the sect, but had been converted
by a revelation which, according to him, convinced him that the Christos had
appointed him to be the apostle to the gentles. Paul travelled widely in the
Diaspora and founded congregation in Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, determined
to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth before Jesus returned. He wrote
letters to his converts, answering their questions, exhorting them and
explaining the faith. Paul did not think for a moment that he was writing
‘scripture’, because he was convinced that Jesus would return in his own
lifetime, he never imagined that future generations would pore over his
epistles. He was regarded as a premier teacher, but was well aware that his
explosive temperament meant that he was universally popular. Nevertheless his
letters to the churches in Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Philipp and Thessalonica,
were preserved and after his death in the early 60s, Christians writers who
revered Paul wrote in him name and developed his ideas in letters to the
churches in Ephesus and Colossae, and wrote supposedly posthumous letters
addressed to Paul’s associates, Timothy and Titus.[3]
As a Jew, Paul never
disregards the Torah, because this would have put him outside the covenant
which is the precious gift of the revelation of Sinai to Israel. Therefore, he
neither condemned Jews or Judaism per se but those Jewish Christians who wanted
the gentiles to be circumcised and observe the entire Torah. Paul was convinced
that he alone was in possession of the truth and his mixed congregation of Jews
and gentles were the true Israel.[4]
The Jesus movement became
more controversial after the disaster of 70 C.E., when Christians, like the
other entire Jewish group, were shocked to see Herod’s magnificent shrine
reduced to a pile of brunt, stinking masonry.[5]
But the Christians also saw its destruction as an apokalypsis, a
‘revelation’ or ‘unveiling’ of a reality that had been there all along but had
not been seen clearly before – namely that Judaism was finished. The temple
ruins symbolized its tragic demise and were a sign that the end was
approaching. God would now pull down the rest of the defunct world order and
establish the kingdom.
Hence, the destruction of the
temple spurred a literary effort among the Christians. By the middle of the
second century, nearly all the twenty-seven books of the New Testament had been
completed. Christian communities were already quoting Paul’s letters as though
they were scripture, and readings from one of the biographies of Jesus that
were in circulation had become customary during Sunday worship. The gospels
attributed to Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were eventually selected for the
canon, however there were many others. The Gospel of Thomas, for instance,
(c.150) was a collection of secret sayings of Jesus that imparted a redemptive
knowledge (gnosis). There were gospels of the Ebionites, Nazarenes and Hebrews,
that catered to Jewish-Christian congregations. “There were many ‘Gnostic’
gospels representing form of Christianity that emphasized gnosis and
distinguished a wholly spiritual God (who had send Jesus as his envoy) from the
demiurges, who had created the corrupt material world. Other writings did not
survive: a gospel known to scholars as Q because it was a source (German
quelle) for Mathew and Luke; various anthologies of Jesus’s teachings’; and an
account of his trial, torture and death.”[6]
Thus, in the first and the
second centuries there was neither canon of prescribed texts nor standard form
of Christianity. Marcion (c.100-165), who held many Gnostic ideas, had earlier
wanted to separate the link between Christianity and the Hebrew scriptures,
since he believed that Christianity was an entirely new religion; he wrote his
own gospel, based on the epistles of Paul and an expurgated reading of Luke.
This made many Christians deeply uneasy about their relationship with Judaism.
Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c 140 – 200), on the other hand, was troubled by
both Marcion and the Gnostic and insisted on the link between the old
scriptures and the new. He compiled a list of approved texts in which we see
the future New Testament been sown. It began with the gospels of Mathew, Mark,
Luke and John – in that order – continued with the Acts of the Apostles (a
history of the early church), included epistles by Paul, James, Peter and John
and concluded with the two prophetic descriptions of the end: Revelation and
the Shepherd of Hermas. But the canon was not fixed until well into the fourth
century. When some of Irenaeus’s chosen books such as the Shepherd of Hermas,
would be rejected and others, such as Hebrews and the epistle of Jude, would be
added to Irenaeus’s list.[7]
The Christian scriptures were
written at different times, in different regions and for very different
audiences, but they shared a common language and set of symbols, derived from
the Law and the Prophets as well as other texts. They brought together ideas
that originally had no connection with one another – son of God, son of man,
messiah and kingdom - into a new synthesis. The authors did not argue this
logically but simply juxtaposed these images so repeatedly that they merged
together in the readers’ mind. There was no uniform view of Jesus. Paul had
called him the ‘son of God’, but had used the title in its traditional Jewish
sense: Jesus was a human being who had a special relationship to God, like the
ancient kings of Israel, and had been raised by him to uniquely high status.
Paul never claimed that Jesus was God. Mathew, Mark and Luke, who are known as
the ‘synoptics’ because they see things together, also used the title, ‘son of
God’ in this way, but they also implied that Jesus was Daniel’s son of man,
which gave him an eschatological dimension. John, who represented a different
Christian tradition, saw Jesus as the incarnation of the Word and Wisdom of God
which had existed before the creation of the world. When the final editors of
the New Testament put these texts together, they were not disturbed by these
discrepancies. Jesus had become too immense a phenomenon in the minds of
Christians to be tied to a single definition.
In the end, no one knows who
wrote the gospels and were only later attributed to important figures in the
early church. The authors must be Jewish Christians, who wrote in Greek and
lived in the Hellenistic cities of the Roman Empire. They were creative writers
and skilled redactors who edited earlier materials. Mark wrote in about 70;
Mathew and Luke in the late 80s, and John in the late 90s. All the four gospels
reflect the terror and anxiety of this traumatic period. The Jewish people were
in turmoil. The war with Rome had divided families and communities and all the
different sects had to rethink their relationship with the temple tradition.
But the apokalypsis of the ruined shrine seemed so compelling to the Christians
that they felt inspired to proclaim the Messiahship of Jesus, whose mission,
they believed, had been bound up with the temple.
The Title
of Messiah/Masīh in Muslim and Christian Scriptures
In Christianity, Messiah
means “Christ”. The Greek word is Christos “anointed” which is
intimately linked with the thread of Old Testament teaching that hints that a
special Anointed One would come and set the world right.[8]
Messianic expectation in the prophecy of Isaiah (Isa 9:5, 11:1-5) is a Jewish
concept of a religio-political figure that will descend from King David family
to deliver Israelite from great distress and hardship. Such belief is also
reflected in Psalms 2, 72, 110 and other Biblical books such as the book of
Daniel (Dan 9:25).
Therefore, long before Jesus,
there had been hints in the Jewish literature about the expectations of a
righteous king of the House of David to come to establish an eternal kingdom in
Israel. There was that keen expectation in some circles of a Messiah (in Greek,
Christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel.
The word al-Masīh from
Arabic masaha (مسح) to wipe, pass the hand over
anything in order to wipe it;[9] is
an appellation for the Messiah, the Christ.[10]
The term al-Masīh (المسيح) appears in the Glorious
Qur’ān eleven times as a title referring only to Jesus. In 3:45 Qur’ān records
angels giving glad tidings to Mary that she would give birth to a son: “his
name will be al-Masīh Isa (Jesus)”. His attributes are mentioned in 4:71
that he was the son of a woman, a Messenger of Allāh; His Word bestowed on Mary
and a spirit proceeding from Him. Therefore, al-masīh was a great humble
worshipper of Allāh, and a mortal Messenger (4:72, 5:75). But the Jews boasted
claim that they killed Jesus al-Masīh (4:157) is mere illusion.
However, while in the Qur’ān
the title al-masīh is an attribute of Isa (Jesus) only,[11]
messiah in the Bible is also applied to priests, prophets, angels and kings who
have been anointed with oil by religious authorities (e.g., Exod 28:41,
40:12-15; Judg 9:8; Kgs 19:16).
Position
of Jesus in the Biblical and Qur’anic Accounts
The
account of birth, life and death of Jesus in the Bible is given in the New
Testament books. In all these, gospels’ stories present a mixture of divine and
human qualities in Jesus. The Biblical image of Jesus, like in our earlier
discourse, that he “is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31), and “the
Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:15). Hence, a
common usage in Christians’ prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have
mercy upon me”.[12]
Somewhere, Bible Christology presents Jesus as God Who, wrapping Himself in the
disguise of humanity, descended and took on Him a human form - Incarnation.[13]
These are the verses that declare the union of nature and the identity of the
essence of Jesus with God, in John 10:30; 14:9, 11 “I and my Father are one.”
Similarly, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” and “I am in the Father
and the Father in me” and so on. But, on the other hand, elsewhere in the gospel Jesus declared his human nature to the Jews,
a mortal being respectively in John 7:19 “Why go ye about to kill me?” and 8:40
“But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have
heard of God”. Moreover, there are other statements in the Bible that portray
him as a mere prophet of God and a humble servant, as for instance; “All things
were made by Him; and without was not anything made that was made”, and “That
they may believe that Thou hath sent me” and “My God, My God, why hast Thou
forsaken me”(John 1:3, 11:42; Matthew 22:1).
The
Qur’ān, on the other hand, narrates the account of the birth of Mary, the
mother of Jesus, of John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, and of Jesus, the
prophet of Israel who was rejected by his people chronologically in that order.
However, the account of Qur’ān regarding the position of Jesus mentioned in the
gospels can be seen summarily in the following Ayah of the Glorious
Qur’ān (4:171):
O
People of the Book! Commit no excesses in your religion: nor say of Allah aught
but the truth. The Messiah Jesus son of Mary was (no more than) a Messenger of
Allah, and His Word, which He bestowed on Mary, and a Spirit proceeding from
Him: so believe in Allah and His Messengers. Say not “Trinity”: desist: it will
be better for you: for Allah is One God: Glory be to Him (far Exalted is He)
above having a son. To Him belong all things in the heavens and on earth, and
enough is Allah as a Disposer of affairs.
In
this verse, the Qur’ān identified Isa (Jesus) as the servant of Allāh, and one
of His Messengers.[14]
In other words, he is neither Allāh nor the son of Allāh. His miraculous birth
was that his mother (Maryam/Mary) received a spirit from God (ruh min al-lah)
in her womb through the Angel, and that as a virgin she gave birth to Jesus
without a human father (19:29,
66:11-12). The idea that Jesus is the
‘Son of God’ is constantly countered by describing him in the Qur’ān as the
‘son of Mary.’[15]
Therefore, the virgin birth should not be supposed to imply that God was his
father. Saodah stresses that the creation of Jesus without a father is what
makes Christians not to believe that he was a human being.[16]
However, the Qur’ān emphasizes that the creation of Jesus was similar to the
creation of Adam, who came to life after God breathed His spirit into a
fashioned clay molded mud (15:28-29). Therefore, Jesus was only a mortal Apostle sent to the Jews, and his
role was to support the law and proclaim the arrival of another Messenger to be
called Aḥmad
(61:6). But, when the Jews started working on a
series of conspiracies against Jesus; (and went to the extent of convincing the
ruler of the time that Jesus was guilty of some crime and he gave an order to
his arrest.)[17]
God undid their evil plan, by the ascension, not Crucifixion,[18]
of the Jesus as mentioned in the following passage of the Qur’ān:
Behold! Allah said: “O Jesus! I will take thee
and raise thee to Myself and clear thee (of the falsehoods) of those who
blaspheme; I will make those who follow thee superior to those who reject
faith, to the day of resurrection: then shall you all return unto me, and I
will judge between you of the matters wherein ye dispute.[19]
Therefore, some Muslim
scholars argue that, the part of the above verse (‘I will take thee and raise
thee to Myself) means both the spirit and body of Jesus were raised up, which
means he was not dead. In this case, interpreting the raising was spiritual
only, and not physical, is erroneous.
Hence, the basic conceptual
conflict between the two irreconcilable principles: Islam on one hand, views
Jesus as a prophet of Allāh, and Christianity on the other hand attributes
divine qualities to him.[20] One
leading Christian scholar, Houssney, stresses this view where he writes:
The Jesus of the Qur’an is different Jesus,
one who may be a great prophet, but not the only Son of the Living God. In the
Qur’an, Jesus is not the savior of the world and God’s only mediator between
God and man.[21]
This is undoubtedly the most
‘dramatic’ aspect of the conflict between Islam and Christianity. Thus, Islam
challenged the core doctrinal teaching of the Christian faith. For it demanded
that Christians should first abandon the idea of the divinity of Jesus, which
the Qur’ān called “excessiveness” and to be submissive to the One and Only God
who presides over the whole universe as the Supreme Lord.
Conclusion
Looking at the position of
Isā the son of Maryam in Islam as a prophet of Allah as elaborated in the
Qur’an; it is then clear that the place of Jesus in Christianity as one of the
three persons in unity with God, according to Islam, tantamount to shirk
(associating partner with God), the opposing term of Islamic theological
foundation Tauhid (monotheism). In other words, the usage of the term in
a repeated pairing of Father and Son in some Biblical passages clearly
contradicts the theological doctrine of Islam. Therefore, in a simple term, the
conception of Isā in Islam and Jesus in Christianity do not only differ, but
they are contradictory.
Al- Faruqi, I.R.A (1967).Christian
Ethics. Montreal: McGill University Press.
al-Hadād, Y (1982).Al-Injīl
fī-l-Qur’ān. Jounieh: Librairie pauliste.
Ali, A.Y. (1993).The Glorious Qur’an: Text, Translation and
Commentary. U.K. Islamic Foundation.
Arinze, F (1997).Meeting Other Believers. Wiltshire:
Cromwell Press.
Armstrong, K., (2007).The
Bible: A Biography. New York: Grove Press.
Bellamy, J.A. (2002). “A
Further Notes on ‘Ῑsā.” JAOS (122):
587-8.
Cragg, K. (1985).Jesus and
the Muslims: An Exploration. London: Allen & Unwin.
Kelly, J N.D. (1958).Early
Christian Doctrines. London: A&C Black.
Kenyon, F. (1947).The
Story of the Bible. London: Butler & Tanner Ltd.
Khalidi, T. (2001).The
Muslim Jesus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Naik, Z. (2007).The
Concept of God in Major Religions. Riyadh: Maktaba Dar-us-Salam.
O’Collins, G., and Farragia
E. G. (2000).A Concise Dictionary of Theology. New Jersey: Paulist
Press.
O’Shaughnessey, T. (1953).The
Koranic Concept of the Word of God. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute.
Opeloye, M.O. (2001). Building Bridges of Understanding between
Islam and Christianity in Nigeria. Lagos: Free Enterprise Publishers Ltd.
Parrinder, G. (1965).Jesus
in the Qur’ān. London: Faber and Faber.
Penrice, J. (1987).A
Dictionary and Glossary of the Qur’an. Delhi: 1873 Repr., Roopak Printers.
Porter, J.R. (1995).The
Illustrated Guide to the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reeves, J.C. (ed.) (2003).Bible
and the Qur’an: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality. Atlanta: Society for
Biblical Literature.
Reynolds, G. S. (2010).The
Qur’an and Its Biblical Subtext. London and New York: Routledge Taylor and
Francis Group.
Richards, L.O. (1991).Expository
Dictionary of Bible Words. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing
House.
Ridgeon, L. (2000).Islamic
Interpretation of Christianity. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Rippin, A. (1993).
“Interpreting the Bible through the Qur’an.” In G.R. Hawting and A.A. Shareef
(eds.) Approaches to the Qur’an. London: Routledge.
Robinson, N. (1991).Christ
in Islam and Christianity: The representation of Jesus in the Qur’an and the
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* This section heavily draws from
the book of Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography. (New York: Grove
Press. 2007).
[1] Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A
Biography. (New York: Grove Press. 2007). 57.
[2] Ibid, 58-60.
[3] Ibid, 61
[4] Ibid, 62
[5] The Herodian dynasty ruled in the
Roman province of Judea. Herod began renovation of the temple of Jerusalem
around 19 BC; they continued for eighty-two years, and the Romans destroyed it
in the year 70 C.E, only seven years after its completion.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, 63
[8] Lawrence O. Richards, 162.
[9] John Penrice, 139.
[10] Ibid.
[11] That is why it is not allowable to
apply this appellation without restriction e.g al-Masīh al-Dajjāl, or
al-Kadhdhāb.
[12] Micheal Walsh, The Dictionary
of Catholic Devotions (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993),
143.
[13] The concept of Incarnation (Lat., incarnatio,
“being in the flesh”) is used in the Christian theology to refer to the mystery
of the union between divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. In
other words, Incarnation describes the state of a divine assuming a physical
body as a person, as explained in Mircea Eliade, (ed), The Encyclopedia of
Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), 156-160. See
also, J Windrow Sweetman, Islam and Christian Theology (London and
Red-hill: Lutterworth Press, 1947), 98-115.
[14]See also, Qur’ān 19:30.
[15] Oliver Leaman, The Qur’an: An
Encyclopedia (USA: Routledge, 2006), 305.
[16] Soudah Abd Rahman, The
Categories of Infidelity in the Qur’an, Journal of Islam in Asia, Vol. 10,
no.2 (Dec 2013): 134.
[17] Oliver Leaman, 306.
[18] The Qur’ān denies the death and
Crucifixion of Jesus where Allāh says about the Jews who claimed they killed
Jesus: “Where as they slew him not nor they crucified him but it was made to
appear to them [like that]” Q4:157-158.
[19] Qur’ān 3:55.
[20] To further illustrate this, let us
refer to Soudah, she writes: “According to them, the Trinity or the Holy
Trinity is the union of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in one God. They say they
do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, ‘the consubstantial
Trinity.’ The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but
each of them is God, whole and entire.” Soudah Abd Rahman, The Categories of
Infidelity in the Qur’an, Journal of Islam in Asia, Vol. 10, no.2 (Dec
2013): 134.
[21] George Houssney, “The Position
Paper on Insider Movement”, <http://biblicalmissiology.org/2010/05/03position-paper-on-insider-movement>
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