Scotch College

Getting a little bookish ...

Getting a little bookish

Friends visiting from overseas recently gave me a copy of The Muslim Jesus. Harvard University Press published this book last year. It's by Tarif Khalidi, Professor of Arabic and Director of the Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Cambridge, and it deals with the presentation of Jesus in Islamic literature.

It is not surprising that Islam deals with Jesus. After all, Mohammed died in 632 AD, by which time the Christian message about Jesus, as the Messiah of Israel and the Saviour of the world, was well established in the Middle East and spreading to the western fringes of Europe. During Mohammed's life Saint Columba was establishing his mission to evangelise Scotland from Iona.

In Mecca Mohammed was offended by the idolatry of many Jews and Christians. Seeking reform he met opposition and was forced to flee. Over this period of time he had the 'revelations' that were to become known as the Koran. The Arabic version of these revelations (the Qur'an) is the holy text of Islam, a book roughly the size of the New Testament.

Islam maintains special relationship

Islam maintains that it has a special relationship with both Judaism and Christianity since they are all 'People of the Book'. Being the youngest of these 'books' means that Islam has the opportunity to re-interpret earlier writings. Jewish people are familiar with this process. After all it was Christians, albeit almost all Jewish Christians, who wrote the New Testament, which provides a specific interpretation of the Jewish Bible.

Their Nazarene understanding of Judaism was durable. Better than any other Jewish sect, it survived a holocaust and the destruction of the central institution of Jewish existence, the Temple, in AD 66-70. Furthermore, it expanded rapidly in the Roman world.

Today that Nazarene understanding of the Hebrew texts has become so dominant that the Jewish Bible is most widely known as the Christian 'Old Testament'.

Although Islam, like Judaism and Christianity before it, affirms there is only one God, it re-interprets both Judaism and Christianity by claiming that the great figures of Israel, especially Abraham, Jacob, Moses and David, together with Jesus, were in fact all devout Moslems.

While affirming Jesus' virgin birth and ascension to glory, Islam emphatically denies any suggestion of the divinity of Jesus or the sacrificial nature of his death. Moslems are not encouraged to encounter the New Testament Jesus. If a Moslem does not encounter Jesus by reading the New Testament, where is she or he to hear the voice of this 'prophet'?

That is where my new book comes in. Khalidi catalogues 303 sayings of Jesus that are found in Islamic literature from the Koran itself to the writings of the great Yemeni scholar and lexicographer Murtada al-Husayni al-Zabidi who died in 1791.

The Jesus encountered in these late date references is scarcely a shadow of the Jesus encountered in the New Testament. This Jesus appears to have originated during the first century and a half of Islamic history (632-800 AD) and thus has its roots in 'primitive' Islam according to Khalidi.

The Holy Texts

We should note that the holy texts of the Jews have actually become Christian Holy Scripture. When published they are mostly sold, bound with the New Testament, to Christians as the 'Holy Bible'.

The opposite is true for Islam. Neither the Jewish Bible nor the Christian New Testament has been received. According to Khalidi where these earlier revelations do not accord with the Koran 'they must be judged corrupt'.

So both Old and New Testaments have been rejected, and their major figures, from Abraham to Jesus have been substantially recast. In this way the Koran contributes to an alternate vision of God.

A crucial point.

In The Christians, Bamber Gascoigne observes a crucial point. 'Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central event the suffering and degradation of its god'.

Saint Paul had already identified this in his first letter to the Corinthians (1:22-24).

He observes that Christ crucified is offensive to his fellow Jews, and a stumbling block to human wisdom, but Paul claims that in Jesus' Passion the wisdom of God is revealed.

Professor James Haire, President of the Uniting Church says 'We should not fear the Muslims or Buddhists around us - instead we should be fearful of being second-rate, wishy-washy Christians'.

To avoid that fearful outcome we need to encounter again the Jesus of the gospels and dialogue anew with our Buddhist and Moslem friends.

Rev Graham Bradbeer
Chaplain