Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (11 page)

Other Muslim sources offer other candidates for the one who was crucified and elaborate on the theme that someone was made to resemble Jesus. Ibn Kathir claims that the Jews compelled “the king of Damascus at that time, a Greek polytheist who worshipped the stars,” to have Jesus arrested. Jesus, in response, asked his companions: “Who volunteers to be made to look like me, for which he will be my companion in Paradise?”

When one young man agreed to take on this task, “Allah made the young man look exactly like ‘Isa, while a hole opened in the roof of the house, and ‘Isa was made to sleep and ascended to heaven while asleep.” Then, “those surrounding the house saw the man who looked like ‘Isa, they thought that he was ‘Isa. So they took him at night, crucified him and placed a crown of thorns on his head. The Jews then boasted that they killed ‘Isa, and some Christians accepted their false claim, due to their ignorance and lack of reason.”
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However the deception was accomplished, Muslim scholars generally explain that Jesus could not have been crucified because it would have been impossible for Allah’s prophet to be so defeated and destroyed. Considering, however, how often the Qur’an excoriates the Jews for killing the prophets,
⁸⁷
this explanation is curious, and raises more questions than it answers.

One of the most important questions that it raises concerns the Resurrection of Christ. Right after saying that it only
appeared
to the Jews that they had crucified Jesus, the Qur’an says that Allah “raised him up to Him” (4:157). Does this mean that he ascended into heaven? There is no such belief in Islamic tradition, although another Qur’anic passage also has Jesus saying: “Peace be upon me, the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I am raised up alive!” (19:33). These cryptic statements seem to assume that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, but this is nowhere stated in Islam; all that is stated positively is that he was not crucified. When Islamic authorities deal with the segments of these verses about Allah raising up Jesus to himself, they cast them in the future.
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Jesus, nephew of Moses

The third chapter of the Qur’an is entitled “The Family of Imran.” Imran is Amram, who was the father of Moses and Aaron (Ex. 6:20). Moses and Aaron had a sister, Miriam, who was a prophetess (Exod. 15:20). In Arabic, the names “Miriam” and “Mary” are identical:
Maryam
. Apparently confusing the two, the Qur’an records Mary the mother of Jesus as being born to Imran’s wife: “When the wife of Imran said, ‘Lord, I have vowed to Thee, in dedication, what is within my womb. Receive Thou this from me; Thou hearest, and knowest.’ And when she gave birth to her she said, ‘Lord, I have given birth to her, a female.’ (And God knew very well what she had given birth to; the male is not as the female.) ‘And I have named her Mary, and commend her to Thee with her seed, to protect them from the accursed Satan’” (3:35-36).

This is the same Mary to whom angels appear in the Qur’an’s version of the Annunciation: “When the angels said, ‘Mary, God gives thee good tidings of a Word from Him whose name is Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary; high honoured shall he be in this world and the next, near stationed to God” (3:45). Indeed, the Qur’an states that when Mary came to her relatives with the baby Jesus, they assumed that she had been unchaste, and in passing called her by a most striking title: “Then she brought the child to her folk carrying him; and they said, ‘Mary, thou hast surely committed a monstrous thing! Sister of Aaron, thy father was not a wicked man, nor was thy mother a woman unchaste’” (19:27-28).

Early on in their interactions with Muslims, Christians picked up on this confusion, and charged Muhammad with mistaking Mary the mother of Jesus with Miriam the sister of Moses, thereby making Jesus into Moses’ nephew. And so in a
hadith
, Muhammad is reported as being asked about this, and responding that “sister of Aaron” was merely a title of honor, and that the Qur’an never actually meant to say that Mary was Aaron’s literal sister at all: “The (people of the old age) used to give names (to their persons) after the names of Apostles and pious persons who had gone before them.”
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This is a deft explanation, but it leaves unanswered why Mary’s mother is “the wife of Imran,” unless this, too, was an example of someone being nicknamed with the name of an apostle and pious person.

What is much more likely, obviously, is that here as elsewhere the Qur’an appropriates half-digested and sometimes dimly understood biblical traditions, generally recasting them in fundamental ways, while often leaving traces of Jewish and Christian theology that remain unexplained in their new Islamic setting.

Traces of the truth

For example, “I will inform you too of what things you eat, and what you treasure up in your houses” (3:49) sounds like a summary restatement of half-remembered New Testament passages about the Mosaic dietary laws (such as when Jesus “declared all foods clean” in Mark 7:19) or the Eucharist, as well as perhaps the parable of the rich man who busies himself with building larger storehouses for his crops and is suddenly taken unawares, his soul required of him that very night (Luke 12:13-21), or the parable of the sower, in which Jesus exhorts his hearers to “look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matt. 6:26).

From the enigmatic Qur’anic text, however, none of this can be discerned, and so Muslim scholars have to guess at the meaning. The
Tafsir al-Jalalayn
sees this as yet another of Jesus’ miracles: that he knew what people were eating inside their homes, even though he wasn’t present. “I will inform you too of what things you eat, and what you treasure up, store, in your houses, and what I have never seen, and he would inform people what they had eaten and what they would eat. Surely in that, mentioned, is a sign for you, if you are believers.”
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Nor is this strange phrase the only vestige of authentic New Testament teaching in the Qur’an. In Qur’an 5:114-115, Jesus prays: “‘O God, our Lord, send down upon us a Table out of heaven, that shall be for us a festival, the first and last of us, and a sign from Thee. And provide for us; Thou art the best of providers.’ God said: ‘Verily I do send it down on you; whoso of you hereafter disbelieves, verily I shall chastise him with a chastisement wherewith I chastise no other being.’”

Many scholars of all creeds and perspectives have pointed out that the prospect of Jesus’ asking Allah for a table from heaven that “shall be for us a festival” bears more than a hint of Eucharistic theology. The philologist Christoph Luxenberg points out that Jesus prays that this Table from heaven be “a feast (‘
id
) for us and a sign (
ayah
) from thee” (5:114).”The Arabic word ‘
id,
” says Luxenberg, “borrowed from the Syriac, has been, in conformity with its Arabic meaning, correctly translated by ‘celebration’ [or ‘feast,’ in the liturgical sense].”
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The Jesuit priest Samir Khalil Samir, a noted scholar of Islam, points out that “according to unanimous scholarly opinion [the Arabic word ‘
id
] is a borrowing from the Syriac ‘
ida,
which signifies ‘Feast’ or ‘liturgical festival.’”

Fr. Samir uses this to explain the nature of this strange “Table from heaven”: “This
ma
’
ida
[table] is thus defined by two terms: ‘
id
and
aya,
a ‘Feast’ or ‘liturgical festival’ and a ‘sign.’ Is this not the most appropriate definition of the Eucharist of Christians, which is a festive celebration and a sacramental sign? Even more, it seems evident that in this passage we are dealing with a rather faithful description of Christian faith, otherwise not shared by Muslims.”
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Luxenberg further notes that the Qur’anic passage ends with a stern warning from Allah: “God said, ‘Verily I do send it down on you; whoso of you hereafter disbelieves, verily I shall chastise him with a chastisement wherewith I chastise no other being’” (5:115). He concludes: “Islam was not impressed by this divine injunction with its threats of the most severe punishments, not having grasped its significance. If the Muslim exegetes had understood these passages as the Koran intended them, there would have been a liturgy of the Last Supper in Islam.”

A Jesus smorgasbord

And so, although the Qur’an presents itself as the correction of the biblical record, in reality its teachings on Jesus are a curious amalgam of material from the New Testament and the writings of heretical and schismatic sects. In a certain sense, there is something for everyone: a bit of orthodox Christianity (the Virgin Birth, the idea of Jesus as the Word of God, even if improperly understood), a bit of Gnosticism (the illusory crucifixion), a bit of hyper-Arianism (the denial of Christ’s divinity) and Ebionism (the Qur’an calls Jesus “messiah” but rejects his divinity, as did the Judaizing Ebionite sect).

Islamic theology draws out none of the implications or the orthodox Christian understandings of these various privileges, titles, and singularities. All are suborned to the overarching principle that Jesus is not the son of God; the Virgin Birth is not a manifestation of the singularity of Jesus but only of Allah’s power. Compare, for example, the words of the angel Gabriel to Mary in Luke’s Gospel and in the Qur’an:

Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there will be no end. (Luke 1:30-33)

Mary, God gives thee good tidings of a Word from Him whose name is Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary; high honoured shall he be in this world and the next, near stationed to God. He shall speak to men in the cradle, and of age, and righteous he shall be. (Qur'an 3:45-46)

Although Jesus is to be “high honored” both “in this world and the next,” and even be “near stationed to God,” there is no hint in this that he is to be the son of the Most High, and even his title as Messiah doesn’t involve his attaining to the throne of his father David. Instead, “Messiah” in the Qur’an is essentially just a name, as it is indeed identified in this passage. Although the Qur’an frequently refers to Jesus as the Messiah (3:45, 4:157, 4:171-2, 5:17, 5:72, 5:75, 9:30-1), these references don’t carry the significance that they do in Christianity. There is no hint in the Qur’an or Islamic tradition that the Jews were expecting a savior, still less that Jesus was he.

There are traces, however, of the idea that the name “Messiah” has something to do with the way in which Jesus is “high honored.” One early Qur’an commentary containing exegesis from Ibn Abbas, one of Muhammad’s early followers, explains, “[T]he Messiah means the king (Jesus, son of Mary, illustrious in the world), he has standing and position amidst people in the life of this world (and the Hereafter) he has standing and position with Allah (and one of those brought near), unto Allah in the Garden of Eden.”
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Ibn Kathir records traces of the literal meaning of messiah, “anointed one.” As one touches in order to anoint, he sees the name as a reference to Jesus’ touching people in order to heal them: “Isa was called ‘Al-Masih’ (the Messiah) because when he touched (
Mash
) those afflicted with an illness, they would be healed by Allah’s leave.”
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Yet still there is no larger salvific expectation involved in this; no idea that the entire people are afflicted with a spiritual illness that Jesus would heal by his touch.

In another place in the Qur’an, Allah sends “Our Spirit that presented himself to [Mary] a man without fault.” This spirit then tells her, “I am but a messenger come from thy Lord, to give thee a boy most pure” (19:17, 19). That’s all Jesus is in the Qur’an: “most pure,” but most emphatically and insistently not the “son of the Most High.”

The Muslim Jesus is, however, a miracle worker. The miracle that he says he will perform when he speaks from the cradle, that of bringing clay birds to life, appears to be a reminiscence of a tradition that is recorded in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which dates from the second century:

And a certain Jew when he saw what Jesus did, playing upon the Sabbath day, departed straightway and told his father Joseph: Lo, thy child is at the brook, and he hath taken clay and fashioned twelve little birds, and hath polluted the Sabbath day. And Joseph came to the place and saw: and cried out to him, saying: Wherefore doest thou these things on the Sabbath, which it is not lawful to do? But Jesus clapped his hands together and cried out to the sparrows and said to them: Go! and the sparrows took their flight and went away chirping. And when the Jews saw it they were amazed, and departed and told their chief men that which they had seen Jesus do.
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As we have seen, since Islam has no concept of rational theology, the elements of the Islamic picture of Jesus that seem to make him greater than Muhammad—being the Word of God, being born of a virgin, sinlessness, the ability to work miracles, returning at the end of the world—are never considered as to their implications for Jesus’ identity or for his status vis-à-vis Muhammad. Islamic theology never attaches any significance to the fact that Jesus was born of a virgin, but Muhammad was not; the latter is still the last and greatest prophet, the “seal of the prophets” (33:40).