When
I was reading a post on VanguardNigeria
about how some Islamic Scholars described Jesus according to the Islamic
belief, I noticed some similarities between this belief and the ones held by
some Christian sects in the early days of Christianity.
Most
of us know that about 4000 years ago, an Aramaic tribe led by Moses founded a
religion to worship the God of their ancestors and that religion is Judaism.
Then 2000 years later, a man named Jesus rose from among this same people with
teachings and an ideology that seemed to threaten the authority of the leaders
of this religion. So they had him executed. However, his followers, who were
also Jews, continued to practiced his teachings within Judaism but when
persecution of them got to an extreme they moved out and carved out a new
identity for themselves which is Christianity.
As time went on and Christians multiplied, their understanding of Jesus
in relation to his divinity varied. Some of these beliefs about Jesus stood the
test of time and survived till today --- for instance the Christological
teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the
Oriental Orthodox Church --- while others fizzled out over time, but a few may
have metamorphosed into new religions and I suspect Islam may be one of them. I
know a lot of people won’t believe it and I too never considered this possibility
until those Islamic scholars opened my mind to it. They described Jesus as a
man who was a prophet of God but not a god himself; and who ascended into heaven
in the flesh but didn’t die (whether on the cross or not) and will come back to
this world to fight the devil (Dajjal) in Medina. These beliefs share
similarities with Arianism, Docetism, Ebionism and Psilanthropism, all of which
were different forms of Christology of early Christianity. Arianism, Ebionism and Psilanthropism teach
that Jesus was a mere human being; a prophet but not a god and never had a
virgin birth, and Docetism says that Jesus never died and his crucifixion was
an illusion.
I
believe Muhammad lived in a society where certain versions of Christianity strived;
contracted some of their teachings and combined them with the messages he
received from Allah to make his own ideologies. Of course, Christianity was
predominant in Arabia during the 6th century, a time Muhammad was born, and some literatures
indicate that Muhammad was a Hanif. Hanifs are native pre-islamic Arabs who practiced
monotheism and retained some elements of the Abrahamic faith. Anyway, Islam,
just like its counterparts, is not immune to diversity. Today, there are at
least two major Islamic sects and each of them believes it’s better than the
other.
As
you can see, every new religion is a revised or a hybrid or, as some people may
say, a distorted version of older ones. Traditionally, Muslims believe that
Islam began with Adam but we now know that its teaching about Jesus is a
variety of Christian beliefs that are considered heretical by major Christian denominations.
No comments :
Post a Comment