Yesterday evening I went along to an event on “The Muslim Jesus” put on by Cardiff University Islamic Society as part of their awareness week, as did several other members of the Christian Union. Between us, we were able to raise quite a number of questions about the Muslim version of events, which led to some interesting discussion.
The event began with a screening of a documentary of that title recently shown on ITV, explaining the place of Jesus in Islam. It’s worth watching, and I learned quite a bit from it, even though the repeated refrain of “Not many Christians realise…” gets a bit irritating – I don’t think that many Christians are ignorant that Islam hold Jesus in esteem as a prophet and contains versions of the Biblical stories, but perhaps I’m overestimating the general religious education of the church. I’ve embedded the first part from YouTube below, and there are links to the rest.
They also had a guest speaker to field questions as part of the discussion that followed, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. He claimed that there were other Gospels, written earlier than the canonical Gospels, that taught that Jesus didn’t die and rise. I asked him to give more information to back up this claim, since to my knowledge all the apocryphal “gospels” were written later, usually pseudonymously or with doubts about their authenticity, and with notably different theology, often gnostic. He then claimed that these gospels had existed, but all evidence of them had been destroyed by the church. It’s a bit hard to argue with an unfalsifiable argument like that – and also very hard to be convinced by such an argument! But we all agreed that it’s important to go back and consider the primary sources themselves.
(Wikipedia tells me a minority of scholars claim, controversially, that the Gospel of Thomas was written before the canonical Gospels. It doesn’t talk about Jesus death and resurrection, but it contains only supposed sayings of Jesus and no narrative of his life, so it’s misleading to say it teaches that Jesus didn’t die and rise).
Muslims believe that the Torah and Gospels originally taught the same message as Islam, but have been corrupted by Jews and Christians. One question I didn’t get to ask, but would be interested to put to Muslims, is whether the Qur’an could in principle become corrupted? If not, why didn’t God similarly preserve the Torah and the Gospels? If so, how do we know that the Qur’an can be trusted?
The other main bone of contention is Jesus’ death and resurrection. According to the Muslim version of events, Jesus did not die, but was taken up into heaven by angels. The Qur’an states:
That they said (in boast), “We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah”;- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not:- Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.
Qur’an 4:157
Islamic scholars apparently have different theories on how this divine sleight-of-hand happened. Some say that Judas was made to look like Jesus, and he was the one who died on the Cross. This still leaves the problem of explaining the empty tomb – if Judas died and was buried instead of Jesus, and wasn’t raised from the dead, why wasn’t his body still in the grave on the third day?
One of the Islamic society suggested that Allah did this to “test our faith” (the same kind of argument that Creationists sometimes fall back on when they’re getting desperate). The idea that the evidence might point to one thing, but this is only because God somehow miraculously and deceitfully rigged it is almost always the sign of a floundering argument!
(As an aside, this thought occurred to me recently: almost all of the theological differences between Islam and Christianity ultimately come down to the trinity and the incarnation. To expand, all other differences, over how we are saved, the possibility of assurance, the treatment of women, the nature of revelation, the relationship between religion and state, and so on, are all consequences of Islam’s rejection of God being three persons in one God, and of the Son becoming flesh and making his dwelling among us.)
Between the points raised by Pete, Dai, Sarah and a few other people and myself, I don’t think the Christian view of Jesus came out too badly, I’m glad to say, and I hope it was mutually informative. I took a few booklets from the stall the Isoc had up afterwards to look at. Hopefully the event will stir up further thought and discussion among both the Christians and Muslims who attended.