Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (13 page)

This moral guilt comes through clearly in the Qur’an when it says that there are among the People of the Book (the Qur’an’s term for groups that have received written revelations from Allah—principally Jews and Christians) some “evildoers” who claim that what they recite is divine revelation, when actually it is of their own devising: “Then the evildoers substituted a saying other than that which had been said to them; so We sent down upon the evildoers wrath out of heaven for their ungodliness” (2:59). These “sayings” that are substituted one for another apparently involve Jews and Christians’ passing off human writings as inspired Scripture: “And there is a sect of them twist their tongues with the Book, that you may suppose it part of the Book, yet it is not part of the Book; and they say, ‘It is from God,’ yet it is not from God, and they speak falsehood against God, and that wittingly” (3:79).

This warning appears to be in connection with the Christian proclamation of Christ’s divinity, since immediately following it comes an oblique reference to Christians’ worshipping Christ as God: “It belongs not to any mortal that God should give him the Book, the Judgment, the Prophethood, then he should say to men, ‘Be you servants to me apart from God.’ Rather, ‘Be you masters in that you know the Book, and in that you study.’ He would never order you to take the angels and the Prophets as Lords; what, would He order you to disbelieve, after you have surrendered?” (3:80-81).

This passage clearly identifies the orthodox Christian understanding of the divinity of Christ as a sinful deification of a human being and a twisting of Jesus’ message. In the Qur’an, the true Christians are those who hold Jesus to be a merely human prophet who taught the absolute oneness and singularity of God. This Christianity, however, has long since vanished from the earth. Mainstream Muslim belief is that orthodox Christianity is nothing more than a subterfuge, a massive hoax designed to fool the believers and lead them astray.

Some of those who engage in this subterfuge not only recite false revelations but write them down and even sell them to the ignorant and unwary: “And some there are of them that are common folk not knowing the Book, but only fancies and mere conjectures. So woe to those who write the Book with their hands, then say, ‘This is from God,’ that they may sell it for a little price; so woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for their earnings” (2:79).

Oddly enough, however, even while charging that the Christians “have forgotten a portion of that they were reminded of,” the Qur’an directs Christians to determine the question of whether or not Islam is true by consulting the Gospel, “wherein is guidance and light”:

And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing. So let the People of the Gospel judge according to what God has sent down therein. Whosoever judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the ungodly. (5:46-47)

The Qur’an refers to the “Gospel” in this and other passages as if it were a book delivered to Jesus, in much the same way as the Qur’an was said to have been delivered to Muhammad. Jews and Christians will find prophecies of Muhammad’s coming in their own scripture—that is, in the unadulterated Torah and Gospel that Muslims say taught Islam but have vanished from the earth. Allah says: “My chastisement—I smite with it whom I will; and My mercy embraces all things, and I shall prescribe it for those who are godfearing and pay the alms, and those who indeed believe in Our signs, those who follow the Messenger, the Prophet of the common folk, whom they find written down with them in the Torah and the Gospel” (7:156-157).

Not only are Christians thus directed to consult their own scripture in order to determine the veracity of Muhammad’s prophetic claim, but Allah even tells Muhammad to do the same thing:

So, if thou art in doubt regarding what We have sent down to thee, ask those who recite the Book before thee. The truth has come to thee from thy Lord; so be not of the doubters, nor be of those who cry lies to God’s signs so as to be of the losers. (10:94-95)

These passages put Muslims in an awkward position. The Qur’an itself says that the gospel contains “guidance and light” and tells Christians and even Muhammad to consult it; and yet the New Testament does not confirm Muhammad’s message; indeed, it teaches numerous doctrines that Islam denies (notably the divinity of Christ). Muslim theologians have found a solution to this conundrum in claiming that the true Gospel that was delivered to Jesus Christ (as the Qur’an puts it) is not the New Testament of Christianity. The Muslim charge that Christians have corrupted their scripture is pointed: Those who changed the text are supposed to have done so in order to remove references to Muhammad and correspondences to Islamic doctrine. So the Gospel that was delivered to Jesus the Muslim prophet contained “guidance and light,” but the New Testament does not.

Twentieth-century translator of the Qur’an, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, explains: “The
Injil
[Gospel] mentioned in the Qur’an is certainly not the New Testament, and it is not the four Gospels, as now received by the Christian Church, but an original Gospel which was promulgated by Jesus as the
Tawrah
[Torah] was promulgated by Moses and the Qur’an by Muhammad al Mustafa.”
¹⁰²

The existence of this “original Gospel which was promulgated by Jesus” is a staple of Muslim belief. Extrapolating from the Qur’an’s claim that Christians “have forgotten a portion of that they were reminded of” and have altered the scripture they received from Jesus, Islam generally teaches that the New Testament, as it stands today, is a corrupted version of the true gospel, altered at the hands of venal churchmen.

Gospel of Barnabas: the real deal?

There is, however, no documentary evidence whatsoever of this original Gospel. Not only has it never been found, nothing corresponding to it is even referred to in early Christian literature. No documents, whole or fragmentary, have been found to support the idea that there ever existed an account of Jesus’ life that conformed to Islamic doctrine about him.

Some Muslims point to the Gospel According to Barnabas, a relatively wordy text that exists only in a couple of manuscripts that date from the sixteenth century. Iran’s Basij Press claimed in May 2012 that a copy of the Gospel of Barnabas in the possession of the Turkish government actually dated from the fifth century, and claimed far-reaching implications for this: “The discovery of the original Barnabas Bible will now undermine the Christian Church and its authority and will revolutionize the religion in the world. The most significant fact, though, is that this Bible has predicted the coming of Prophet Mohammad and in itself has verified the religion of Islam, and this alone will unbalance the powers of the world and create instability in the Christian world.”
¹⁰³

Some Muslim websites contain claims that early Christians accepted it as part of the canon of Scripture. However, says one such site, the first ecumenical council—Nicaea in 325—“ordered that all original Gospels in Hebrew script should be destroyed. An Edict was issued that any one in possession of these Gospels will be put to death.”
¹⁰⁴

This is utterly fanciful—the Council of Nicaea didn’t even deal with issues pertaining to the canon, much less violently suppress possessors of some Muslim proto-Gospel. (Claims of this sort have become popular in recent years, though, thanks in part to Dan Brown’s anti-Catholic historical fiction
The DaVinci Code
.) Still, Islamic apologists in the U.S. frequently refer to the suppression of the Scripture at the Council of Nicaea as if it were established historical fact. Somewhat ironically, Islamic tradition contends that the caliph Uthman collected all the manuscripts of the Qur’an in the year 653, standardized the text, and burned all the variants (although this incident is highly questionable from a historical standpoint).

In any case, we find not even a mention of a Gospel of Barnabas until the sixth century, and no extant copy older than the sixteenth. It is no more likely to be the original Gospel, or even an accurate account of Jesus’ life, than the libretto of
Jesus Christ Superstar
. Numerous small errors destroy its credibility: For example, it records that “Pilate was governor in the priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas” when Jesus was born; Pontius Pilate did not actually become procurator of Judea until the year A.D. 26. It refers to “casks of wood” that are “filled with wine,” even though the storage of wine in wooden casks did not begin until several hundred years after the time of Jesus, and even then only in Europe.

No, the Gospel of Barnabas shows all the signs of being produced to fill a need: a need for a Muslim Jesus. It contains all the teachings about Jesus found in the Qur’an and
hadith
, along with material from the canonical Gospels that is recast in order to fit into this Islamic framework. Accordingly, in it Jesus excoriates as “impious” the idea that he is divine:

As God lives, in whose presence my soul stands, I am not the Messiah whom all the tribes of the earth expect, even as God promised to our father Abraham, saying: ‘In your seed will I bless all the tribes of the earth.’ But when God shall take me away from the world, Satan will raise again this accursed sedition, by making the impious believe that I am God and son of God, whence my words and my doctrine shall be contaminated, insomuch that scarcely shall there remain thirty faithful ones: whereupon God will have mercy upon the world, and will send his Messenger for whom he has made all things who shall come from the south with power, and shall destroy the idols with the idolaters who shall take away the dominion from Satan which he has over men. He shall bring with him the mercy of God for salvation of them that shall believe in him, and blessed is he who shall believe his words.
¹⁰⁵

In describing this coming messenger, who is, of course, Muhammad, Jesus sounds more like John the Baptist than himself, saying: “Unworthy though I am to untie his hosen, I have received grace and mercy from God to see him.” He says that the messenger “shall destroy every false opinion of me, and his faith shall spread and shall take hold of the whole world, for so has God promised to Abraham our father. And that which gives me consolation is that his faith shall have no end, but shall be kept inviolate by God.”
¹⁰⁶

When Jesus reveals that Muhammad is the “blessed name” of this messenger, the crowd cries out, “O God send us your Messenger: O Muhammad, come quickly for the salvation of the world!”
¹⁰⁷

The Gospel of Barnabas is so clearly inauthentic that, although it remains popular in some Muslim apologetic quarters, most Muslim scholars today follow Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s lead, contenting themselves with charging that the New Testament has so clearly been tampered with that it no longer had any value as a record of Jesus’ teachings. (Of course, they do not offer an unaltered version of what they say is Jesus’ original message; indeed, they cannot do so.)

In any case, believing that the original religion of all the prophets is Islam, and that Christianity is a corrupt version of the true message of Jesus, Muslims accordingly enter into dialogue with Christians regarding them as at best ignorant, at worst deliberately rebellious. It should therefore come as no surprise that virtually all Muslim attempts at outreach to Christians are actually thinly veiled invitations to accept Islam, not genuine efforts at dialogue and mutual understanding. Islam simply does not consider Christianity, a deliberately twisted version of the original message of their prophet Jesus, or Christians, the “vilest of creatures” (Qur’an 98:6), as worthy of respect. Some individual Muslims may accord Christians that respect, of course, but if they do, it is respect that springs from their common humanity, not from the teachings of Islam.

Most Catholics who engage in interfaith dialogue regard their dialogue partners as equals, and assume that they’re returning the favor. But mainstream Islam does not mandate regarding orthodox Christians as equals, but instead as rebels from the true faith and the true God. Catholics who enter into this dialogue should be aware of this. The extreme religious chauvinism of Muslims makes genuine dialogue as equals essentially impossible.

It bears noting in conclusion that this chauvinism goes far beyond any Catholic view of Protestantism (in any of its forms) as a corrupted and incomplete version of the true teaching of Christ. Whereas Catholics can recognize in separated Christians a shared divine revelation and a common confession of the salvific work of the Son of God, Islam sees in Christianity only apostasy and idolatry. Furthermore, Islam holds apostates and hypocrites in furious contempt, prescribing death for both. However dimly a Catholic may regard the errors of Protestantism, he recognizes that he is bound to regard all Protestants in charity—a virtue that is notably absent in Islam’s commands about how to treat unbelievers.

6

A Common Desire for Justice?

Catholics may be tempted to dismiss the revisionism of Islam’s replacement theology. After all, we have serious theological disagreements with adherents of all other faiths, too, but we can make common cause with them—for example, on moral issues, as we have done with Muslims in the past. When it comes to contemporary debates in the moral sphere, Catholics might wish to look past theological disagreements to the many moral beliefs they presume Christianity and Islam hold in common.