COURTESY:
Beyond
Mere Christianity
C.S.
LEWIS AND THE BETRAYAL OF CHRISTIANITY
Brandon
Toropov
Darussalam
Publishers and Distributors
Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia
Table of Contents
ONE:Why ‘Mere’? I 11
TWO:What is ‘Q’? I 19
THREE:‘Natural Law’ I 33
FOUR:Jesus and the Magicians I 47
FIVE:The Problem of Illogicality I 59
SIX:The Mechanics of Salvation I 73
SEVEN:What about Paul? I 89
EIGHT: Context I 97
NINE:There Is No god but God I 115
APPENDIX A:Q and the Qur’an (Textual
Note) I 119
APPENDIX B:Common Questions I 133
APPENDIX C:Note to Agnostics and Atheists I
136
BEFORE EACH chapter, there is a
brief passage like this that tells you a little bit about my journey to Islam.
I came to Islam after three decades of restless dissatisfaction
with conventional Christianity. Although I’ve read a lot of conversion stories
since I embraced Islam in March of 2003,I haven’t found many that cited the
Gospels as a point of entry to the Holy Qur’an. That is how it was for me.
If you are a Christian reading this book, please
know that what follows is not meant disrespectfully, but is offered only in the
service of a deep, shared love of the Messiah.
ONE:
Why ‘Mere’?
THE DEEPEST AND
BITTEREST curse of ancient China, supposedly, was ‘May
you live in interesting times.’ Those of us who have lived as Christians in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have, for
reasons that may mystify us, found ourselves living in very interesting
times indeed. In recent years, uneasiness
about Islam has been increasingly impossible to
ignore in the United States, Europe, and Australia. In particular, one
hears a great deal today about a‘war,’
‘conflict,’ or ‘clash’ between Islam and
Christianity. The topic is so prominent in the
media that many people assume that there is something irreconcilable
between these two approaches to God. It is not surprising, then, that so
many Christians of good will have concluded that Islam and Christianity
are fundamentally incompatible.
Yet, if, by ‘Christianity’,
we mean ‘that which Jesus Christ meant to convey
to his hearers’, I believe that these people of good
will may well be mistaken when they tell us
that Islam is incompatible with Christianity. What’s
more, I believe we can now make the case that the
historically oldest Gospel verses reflecting the reported sayings of Jesus are
entirely compatible with Islam.
This is a book for Christians, and
about Islam. These days, anyone who writes such a
book should expect to face a skeptical audience, and that is just as
well. Skepticism about important matters is healthy. What’s more,
the author of a book like this one
should probably expect only thoughtful Christians to accompany him to the end
of the page, or, God willing, beyond. Only thoughtful people are willing
to examine their own religious assumptions closely.The thoughtful,
skeptical Christian, then, is the audience for this book. That
you have read even this far suggests that
you are a thoughtful Christian. So please
complete the equation and be as skeptical as you
possibly can as you make your way through these pages.
What, specifically, is there to be skeptical
about? We can start with the title. The
book is called Beyond Mere Christianity for
two reasons. First, in response to C.S.
Lewis’ influential 1952 work, Mere Christianity, which
stands as a masterpiece of Christian apologetics and perpetuates, I
believe, a long-standing betrayal of the ministry of Jesus.The second reason,
perhaps less obvious, is that a case can be made, based on current,
responsible Gospel scholarship, that Jesus was calling his people to the
Salvation that lies beyond the worship of the merely created, and that relies
instead on the direct worship of the Creator. I believe emphatically that
this variety of direct worship is Islam, and that the
authentic words of Jesus emphatically invite us to move beyond
what is conventionally understood as Christianity for this Salvation, and
enter with no delay the ‘house’ of Islam (to borrow a
metaphor from Lewis). Which room we choose to occupy once we’re
inside, of course, is up to us.If you’re a Christian, and you find
that you are skeptical about these points, then we’re ready to move
on.
The word ‘Islam’ means, simultaneously,
‘submission’ and ‘peace’. This faith demands in no uncertain terms
that its adherents reject anything and everything that conflicts with
obedience to God. It does not mandate blind
obedience to any human authority. I believe that someone who
scrupulously follows this religion’s command of submission to God Alone
is in fact adhering completely to the authentic teachings of Jesus, at
least to the degree that they are reflected in the surviving
Gospels. I also believe this religion is precisely the same one he preached and
practiced. Holding and expressing this view has led me
into any number of interesting life experiences, many
of which involved heated discussions with
Christians who believed a) that I had no right to
describe myself any longer as a follower of Jesus, and b) that
Islam and Christianity have far more separating them
than they have in common. This book challenges thoughtful
Christians to consider the discussions that
follow before coming to a final conclusion on a) and b), above.
If you are a Christian, the idea that Jesus
practiced the same faith that today’s
news broadcasts hold responsible for so
many of the world’s problems probably seems
far-fetched to you.
It certainly seemed far-fetched to me when I
first encountered it. Yet many contemporary
Christians have reached life-changing personal conclusions about
the Gospel message and its relation to
Islam. A prominent American sheikh, Yusuf Estes, is an
obvious example, and there are many others. The American television
news magazines usually don’t share the stories of these
converts to Islam with the world at large, and
their motivations sometimes seem mysterious to non-Muslims who
encounter them. From personal experience, though, I strongly suspect that
most of these people found themselves, at the end of the day,
deeply concerned about the consequences of calling Jesus ‘Lord’
without obeying his instructions—found themselves far more concerned about that
command, in fact, than about any media coverage of geopolitical issues. So we
changed our lives.
People like us do indeed exist in
North America, Europe, and Australia. There are more of us than you
may imagine. This book is here to give
you a clear answer to the question we hear
over and over again:‘Why?’Why would a Christian
believer choose to embrace this faith, over all the other possible faith
choices? Why pursue the one system of worship that most of today’s
commentators agree is ‘at odds with Christianity’? Why leave the familiar
congregations of friends, relatives, and members of the clergy — congregations
whose concern and support sustained us for so long, and who would rejoice if we
were only to renounce Islam and return to the way of life of which they
approve? The pages that follow,
aim to answer these questions.
Two flawed understandings of Islam
can present a major challenge for anyone trying to
come to terms with it. First and foremost
is the notion that it is an anti-Christian faith. It is not.
Christians often express profound surprise at Islam’s extraordinary
reverence for Jesus, and for the special
status that Christians enjoy under traditional Islamic law. The
second misconception is the common notion that Islam is rooted in
violence. Outsiders studying the actual teachings of the
faith are usually caught unawares by its
ceaseless promotion of mercy and forgiveness over
violence and revenge. Even if political upheavals, irresponsible media
coverage, and the lunacy of religious extremists have sometimes combined to
obscure these two core truths of Islam—as a cloud may
seem, for a time, to blot out the sun—they remain core truths
nevertheless. I hope my work here does these
truths justice, but if it does not, the responsibility lies
not with Islam, but with me.
I was born in Los Angeles, California, in
1961.
My parents did not practice Christianity, but
other relatives and friends did, and the teachings of Jesus Christ emerged
early in my life as the ‘true north’ of my spiritual journey.
I was drawn to the Gospels at a young
age–eleven–and I read them compulsively.
I still have the red King James Bible I bought
as a child; my own handwritten note on the front page proclaims June 26, 1974,
as the date I accepted Jesus as my personal savior.
TWO:
What is ‘Q’?
(Jesus) spoke out: ‘I am indeed a servant of
God. He has given to me the Book and made me a Prophet. Wherever I go, His
blessings follow me.’ (QUR’AN19:30)
THERE IS, IN TERMS OF LITERAL CONTENT,
little for a mainstream Christian to object to in the passage from the
Qur’an you just read. Virtually all Christian theologies
accept Jesus’ role as Prophet, or Messenger of God.
If ‘Book’ means an authentic Divine
Revelation, surely no Christian would dispute
that Jesus received this. But that is the content. The
context is a different matter. The very fact that the words in
question appear in the Qur’an, rather than in the Gospels, is enough to give
many people pause.
Most contemporary Christians simply do
not believe that Jesus was a practitioner
of the same religion practiced by Muslims. To be more
specific: Most Christians do not believe that Jesus’ actual mission
and teachings, by whatever name we may choose to
call them, would be recognizable to a contemporary Christian, or even to
a fair-minded neutral observer, as those of the Prophet Muhammad (PB UH).
If you were to switch on a time machine and
set out to test the matter, ninety-nine out of a hundred Christians would
probably predict that your journey back through time would prove definitively
that Jesus was not, in fact, a Muslim. The problem is that most of
those ninety-nine peo- ple would have a hard time describing, in even the
vaguest terms, what a Muslim actually believes.
We don’t have a time machine, of course,
and perhaps it would be better for us
not to wish for one. How many of us
would actually risk making such a trip for the first
time, risking the possibility that we might never
return to the certainties of our present lives? It might be
safer and more practical to plan a
different kind of journey. It might be better—at least for
those of us who are not particularly brave
about journeys—if Jesus could gain
access to the time machine and approach us.
Fortunately, we are in a position to ask Jesus
to make just that kind of journey through time for us. We can
appeal to a kind of ‘hard
evidence’—evidence, at any rate, that
should be of interest to thoughtful Christians. The evidence
to which we can appeal, the journey Jesus makes on our behalf,
resides in the Gospels, in words attributed to
Jesus himself. We can evaluate these words
on their own merits. Then we can
compare these words to the core principles of
Islam.You will be reading, in this book, a number of New Testament scriptures.
When a passage like this comes up, it will appear
in this kind of bold type, and indented. Quotes of
prominent Christians are in bold type, italics and indented, while
passages from the Qur’an are in italics style and indented.
Now, it is a common, and probably a
fair, complaint from Christians that Muslims sometimes ‘pick and choose’
their way through the New Testament in discussions about Jesus. Some Muslims
cite the Gospel of John one moment to prove some prophecy or other, and
then, the next moment, dismiss the sixteenth verse of the
third chapter in that same Gospel,
which describes Jesus as the only begotten
Son of God. Similarly, some Muslims appeal with
great enthusiasm to St. Paul’s advice to women to cover their heads
in public, but ignore the portions of his epistles that emphasize Jesus’
role as the sacrificial Savior of humanity.
This kind of flip-flopping exasperates the
Christians and embarrasses Muslims, or ought to. Selective criticisms like
these ignore the question ‘How did you come to
prefer that passage over this one?’ They are demeaning
to people of any faith or tradition, because they suggest that religion is
little more than a rhetorical game in which an opponent’s fundamental beliefs
can be uprooted easily—if only one
knows what to ignore. No one, I think, is convinced by
these kinds of arguments. Of course, this book relies
to a certain extent on my own Biblical
interpretation and arguments. But you should understand that, for
the purposes of consistency, historical authenticity, and
clarity, this book is different from other Islamic assessments of
the Gospels. This book
relies primarily on a very narrowly defined group of verses, verses
that are not to be found in the Gospel of John or in any of the
Epistles. So when a thoughtful Christian asks, ‘Why do you
prefer verse X over verse Y?’ the
answer can be a clear one:
‘Because
responsible scholars believe verse X to be older
in derivation, and therefore more likely to be authentic.’
The verses in question, known as
Q verses, are the passages many of today’s scholars believe to be the
earliest surviving expression of the oral
tradition of sayings attributed to Jesus. Make no mistake: This is
your father’s (and grand- father’s, and great-grandfather’s) New Testament. Yet
the focus here is on Gospel verses that
were, in all prob- ability, compiled long before
the text surrounding them was.
The remnants of a lost, but
identifiable, ‘sayings gospel’ called Q (from the German Quelle, or
‘source’) do appear in Matthew and Luke. What, you may ask, was a ‘sayings
gospel’? This was, scholars
believe, an ancient document consisting of instructions
attributed to Jesus, ‘sayings’ that generally lack
narrative material. A sayings gospel would have carried material that
eventually found its way into the Gospels
we are familiar with—but a sayings gospel would have
made no attempt to tell the life story of Jesus.
A little background is in order.
a)
The Gospel of Mark, most scholars believe, is the
oldest extant Gospel.
b)
Intriguingly, Matthew and Luke depend on Mark for much, but
not all, of their material.
c)
(The Gospel of John does not depend on any
other Gospel in a textual sense; it is
independent in a way that the other three Gospels are not. It is also compiled
later.)
d)
When we remove the influence of Mark and look at what Matthew and
Luke still have in common, we find dozens of obviously parallel verses in
Matthew and Luke—verses that often give us nearly verbatim expressions of the
same saying. Many scholars feel these parallel verses constitute clear
evidence of a sayings gospel that
supplies Matthew and Luke with a substantial amount of their content.
These parallel verses,
known as the Q verses,
appear to reflect a lost manuscript that
is almost certainly older than even Mark’s Gospel.
This all sounds, perhaps, more complex
than it actually is. The simplest explanation for the situation we are
examining is known as the Two Source Theory.
This theory holds that the authors of Matthew and Luke made use of two important
written sources—Mark and the lost gospel we now
call Q—in developing
their own accounts of the life of Jesus. Here is a simple visual
summary of the Two Source Theory on the next page, which
is not my creation; this theory is familiar to virtually all responsible
contemporary Gospel textual scholars, and has been a topic of scholarly
discussion for many years. Now, even this brief
summary of Q is
enough to stir up any number of intricate scholarly debates,
and this book is not meant to be about scholarly debates. You
should know, however, that the analysis of the development of the Gospels you
have just read reflects the findings of some
of the most accomplished researchers and scholars
working in the field of New Testament textual studies. See The
Complete Gospels, edited by Robert J. Miller, HarperSanFrancisco,
1992.
The Q scholarship suggests that the ways most
Muslims have, down the centuries, envisioned the message, identity, and
priorities of Jesus are, broadly speaking, historically correct.
Specifically, Q tends to confirm Islam’s
image of Jesus as a distinctly human Prophet. It tends to confirm Islam’s depiction of
the mission of Jesus as following the theological principles of the Qur’an.
It tends to confirm Islam’s rejection of the
doctrine of the Trinity.
And it tends to confirm
Islam’s claim that the surviving scriptures
of Christianity have been tampered with
in a way meant to dilute an uncompromisingly rigorous monotheism.
This particular variety of monotheism, Islam has
always insisted, was the driving force of all the great prophetic missions,
including that of Jesus. This
particular variety of monotheism allows for no such formulation as
‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’.
These connections between the
message of Islam and the message of Q are my observations, not the observations of
the textual scholars who have done such
meticulous work over the years identifying the
early Gospel verses. Those scholars are writing about textual research. This
book is about Jesus and Islam. You may agree with the
evidence offered in the pages that follow. You may
disagree. In the end, it doesn’t really matter
how popular or unpopular the analysis offered here proves to
be. What matters is that thoughtful Christians have the opportunity to
evaluate it fairly and make their own decisions.
What exactly do I mean
when I maintain that Jesus called his people ‘to Islam’? Let me put it as clearly as I can.
I believe that Jesus was, as a matter of historical probability,
calling his listeners to a faith system whose guiding principle is
that the Creator, not the created, must be
worshipped and obeyed. It is a corollary of this belief that
God’s will, not human will, should be done on earth. I
believe later manipulations subverted that teaching
and pointed the religion of Jesus toward the principle of
sacrificial atonement for the sins of
mankind. I believe that the Q verses
of the Gospels tend to confirm these beliefs of mine.
Occasionally, people wonder if it is possible to
‘boil down’ the complex textual issues raised
by Q scholarship
to a single sentence. Here is the sentence I’ve come up with:
Today’s best New Testament experts
believe that some Gospel verses appear to
present a more historically accurate picture of Jesus than
other Gospel verses do.
That is to say, today’s scholarship identifies certain
passages—the Q passages—as not
only instructive, but historically is more relevant than other
passages. Yet most Christians are
totally unaware of this research, or of its momentous implications.If you
were to tell the members of any Christian congregation of the
existence of such verses J and then ask them
what they believe the earliest layer of
Gospel verses teaches J most of them would answer
that the earliest verses must somehow
emphasize Jesus’ status as the only begotten Son of God. And yet they
would be mistaken. Of course, reasonable people may disagree on the age
and authenticity of the sayings that form the center piece of this book. Everyone
must agree, though, that the words in question do appear in
the Gospels found in every Bible, and are
binding on every Christian. And for anyone who is truly
committed to the task of following the words of Jesus, that should be enough. To
learn more about why so many scholars are so insistent now about the early
dating of the passages in question, see Appendix A. For now, please
understand that this book puts forward a very narrow ‘slice’ of the
New Testament, and emphasizes the sayings
that appear within that slice. As you evaluate
that ‘slice’, bear in mind that the most accomplished Biblical scholars of
our day—none of them Muslims, by the way—regard the Q verses in Matthew and Luke as
the closest we are ever going to get to the teachings of the historical
Jesus, barring the discovery of some
previously unknown ancient text.
Some people who hear my reasons for
believing as I do react with great anger, and many of these angry
people attempt to discredit the scholarship behind Q. They are missing the point. Whether the Q theory is persuasive to
you depends on your interpretation of the evidence. Yet even if you reject all
the work of all the Q scholars,
this book may nevertheless be of interest to you, assuming two and
only two facts:
First, that you are a thoughtful Christian
capable of making decisions for yourself about
important matters (such as whether or not Jesus preached publicly about
his own sacrifice for the sins of mankind).
And second, that you do not
reject the Gospel verses in question. This second point is
extremely important, and worth emphasizing.
Even if one were to disagree vehemently with
the scholars on the dating of the Q verses, one would
have a very hard time indeed disputing
their presence in the New Testament. They are there,
whether or not one accepts Q as a source
for the Gospels, and whether or not they are convenient to contemporary
Christian theology. It is possible, of course, that some people may feel uncomfortable with the whole
idea of certain Gospel passages being older or more authoritative than other
Gospel passages.
If it is easier to think of
the verses that appear in the pages that follow
as simply coming from certain portions of the Bible—portions that the
author happens to prefer over other portions—that is just as
well. There is nothing ‘new’ here. There is only an attempt to
refocus, or perhaps focus for the first time, on something very old, on
some vitally important parts of Jesus’ message. If you consider the study of
the Gospels to be an important part of your spiritual life, I hope you will consider
continuing on to the next chapter. If, on the other hand,
you believe that what we find in
the Gospels does not have any bearing on
your spiritual life, you may want to stop here.
For most of my adolescence I studied the
Christian scriptures on my own, and I did so obsessively.
When I say I read the scriptures obsessively, I
mean that I was drawn to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John like a
magnet.
There are plenty of notes and highlights in that
old Bible of mine in Psalms, in Ecclesiastes, in Proverbs—but most of the notes
and underlining are in the Gospels. But I sensed, even at an early age, that
there were some internal problems with the texts I loved so dearly.
THREE:
‘Natural Law’
‘So, whosoever accepts guidance, it is only for
his own self, and whosoever goes astray, he goes astray only to his (own)
loss.’ (QUR’AN 39:41)
‘And whomsoever God wills to guide, He opens his
breast to submission, and whomsoever He
wills to send astray, He makes his breast closed and constricted, as if
he is climbing up to the sky. Thus God puts the wrath on those who believe
not.’ (QUR’AN, 6:125)
HOW DO HUMAN BEINGS
determine for themselves what is right and
what is wrong? What is that process and how does it
operate? There are Christian scholars and theologians who teach as Christian
doctrine the principle that humanity itself instills a basic, enduring, and
predictable moral sense in human communities. This moral sense, we are told, is
God’s consistent, impossible-to-ignore standard of behavior, a
standard that is always clear to the human
community. For instance, C.S. Lewis, the author
of Mere Christianity, and the most celebrated modern Christian
writer in English, insists on this view.
Even a tyrant, we are told,
consistently ‘knows right from wrong’ (regardless of whether he
chooses to acknowledge the distinction to himself). We know this;
the argument goes, because the tyrant will attempt to present at least the
appearance of virtue to the outside world. This understanding of right
and wrong action may be something a person employs
selectively, but, we are told, it is reliable. Even a hypocrite,
the theory holds, has a fundamental sense
of propriety. Hypocrites claim to act by one set of standards
(because they know these standards are right, or regarded as such),
but actually act by a different set of standards (which they
know to be wrong).Even a sadistic person, we hear, will, after having
crushed a helpless victim to steal
away some advantage, claim that the action was justified, or ‘fair’,
given the situation he or she faced.
If there are exceptions
to this notion of an enduring, fundamentally
human moral sense, we are told, it is only because of the rare individual who
lacks any ability to perceive right or wrong, or any ability
to ‘fake’ that perception. Such a person, the theory goes, is
nothing more than an anomaly, a chance result like that
which shows up on the far end of a bell curve. Just as the
occasional person may be color-blind or may have
trouble singing in the proper key, there may be a statistically insignificant
number of people born who lack this fundamental, consistent human ability to distinguish
right from wrong. Such ‘amoral’ people are, supposedly,
something like genetic aberrations— freaks of nature. Yet human beings as a
group, we are assured, have a distinct, enduring, and consistent capacity to
distinguish right from wrong.
This inherent
ability to tell right from wrong is
sometimes referred to as ‘Natural Law’, or the ‘Law of Human Nature’. The phrase suggests
a static, predictable moral standard (or law)
that is, though often ignored, consistent and
predictable (or natural) for the overwhelming majority
of real human beings like you and me.This doctrine has
become an important pillar of what we now
call mainstream Christian theology. God has set a clear, consistent
standard of right and wrong that humanity, if it does not always
obey, definitely understands without any problem. Islam regards
this notion as incomplete. Jesus Christ
regards it as incomplete too, and you will see
why in a moment.
Islam envisions each human being as possessing
a) free will, and b) a soul that knows what is good
for it and what is bad for it, a soul
that God has inspired to advise us to choose the
good. Some people, however, use free will in
such a way as to make themselves increasingly deaf to the
soul’s advice. And this is the part, a Muslim
might argue, that Lewis leaves out.Lewis ignores the possibility that
when human be- ings make choices, those choices
will either degrade the soul or purify it.Islam holds
that people who consciously make choices
that support the soul’s inherent longing for
righteousness are dynamically brought toward the moral clarity God
intended for them, becoming more and more certain
about what is right and what is
wrong.
On the other hand,
people who consciously make choices that
oppose their own souls’ inherent longing for
righteousness do violence to their own souls. They imagine themselves safe
from God’s plan, immune from accountability to Him. And
this is folly.So. God knows all and understands all; God has also granted
humankind free will. We are left, as the result of our own
choices, with a steadily improving or stead- ily deteriorating
ability to distinguish right from wrong. Submission to the
Will of the One God, Islam holds, improves
the ability to distinguish good choices from bad ones. Resistance to the Will
of the One God degrades this ability. A firm, obstinate, long-term policy
of resistance to the Will of the One God leads one to worship one’s own desires
first and foremost, and to abandon even the charade of moral
authority. This is true catastrophe. Our ability to distinguish right
from wrong, Islam holds, is not consistent and predictable, but
variable. This ability to distinguish right from wrong is part of God’s
Plan, of course, but from our point
of view it depends upon our own choices and thoughts.
If we persist in the
delusion of self-sufficiency and independence from God,
Islam tells us, we will eventually be engulfed
by our own delusion, and those delusions will eventually take over
our lives and our very ability to reason. If we
persist in worshipping our own desires as though they were god—thereby
ignoring God—a truly horrifying thing happens. Those desires
become the rulers of our lives.
This whole process, Islam insists, is
dynamic. We are constantly in motion. The question
is, in which direction? A tyrant, an alcoholic, a drug addict,
a serial killer, or anyone else in an advanced stage of self-absorption
and self-worship will eventually cease even to pretend that
he or she is under any obligation to
distinguish right from wrong. Such a person will
eventually cease to believe that such distinctions are important. These
people, Muslims believe, advance themselves toward their own doom. Once again:
the question is one of movement. It is as if someone were asking us, ‘Where are
you going?’ and then helping us to travel in what-ever direction we
ourselves identified. There is
a destination of darkness, darkness that accumulates as the direct
result of a personal choice to embrace
it. Think of Adolf Hitler, who was not
merely unstable, but increasingly unstable as
the Second World War ground on. In his final days,
Hitler railed even against the German people he once claimed
to have been the Master Race. What greater perversion
of his own ‘standards’ can we imagine? Or think of the
late-stage John Belushi, whose beastly behavior near
the end of his life shocked even the Hollywood of the
early 1980s (a community not easily shocked). Belushi, in his final months,
terrified some very jaded people, some of whom had
known him for many years.People with such ‘moral
standards’ do not inherit them at birth; they
earn them, usually through years of patient, persistent,
soul-destroying effort. People who reach this bleak and
horrifying point reach it, not because they
have a genetic flaw akin to that
which imparts color-blindness or a bad ear for
pitch, but because they choose, over and over again,
to go astray. And the choosing becomes easier with each choice. Aleister
Crowley, the self-proclaimed Satanist, embraced a world-view in which
‘do what thou wilt shall be the law
of the land’. Surely he was not born
with such beliefs. Surely he had to
strive to attain them.
This idea of striving is quite important.
Some kind of striving is seen, in Islam, as
a constant feature of human nature. One
is either striving toward the purification
of one’s own soul, or striving toward its degradation.
To persist in the former is true victory; to persist in the latter
is the ultimate defeat. And this, the oldest
Gospel verses suggest, is the understanding of
human moral vision that Jesus wishes us to
have.
‘And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be
abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be
exalted.’ (MATTHEW 23:12)
If we are honest with
ourselves, we will admit the challenging nature of a
verse such as this one. The Bible tells us
that we are reading the words of Jesus J but somehow the
words do not seem to match up easily with
what we may have been taught about Jesus. In fact, this is the kind of
verse we may have read dozens, hundreds of times
without really ‘getting’ what it is trying
to say. There are many Gospel passages like
this, passages we are likely to rush past or
‘file’ for future study if we can’t instantly apply
them to our lives. What if we were to linger over a verse like this for
awhile?
Is it possible Jesus is saying to us
that a moral view that relies on the promotion of selfish, narrow
interests will lead, in predictable measure, to spiritual loss? Is it possible
Jesus wants us to understand that a moral view that rejects
selfish obsession will lead, just as predictably, to
spiritual gain? Perhaps Jesus is warning us to beware of the kind of
striving that is based on self-absorption, on
self- promotion, on self-obsession.
Elsewhere, Jesus tells us to keep our eyes open to
the light, that we may gain more light.
This is another ‘difficult’ saying. Please
take a moment to read the words below closely
and prayerfully J even if you have read them
many times in the past. It’s possible
that, like me, you read them dozens of times without
quite grasping what they meant.
‘The light of the body is
the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole
body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy
body also is full of darkness. Take heed there- fore that
the light which is in thee be not
darkness.’ (Luke 11:34-35)
Again, we must be
willing to sit quietly for a while with passages
like this one. We cannot speed-read such words. We have to come to
them on their own terms and be willing to take
our time in considering them. Some teachings are
meant to be contemplated for a while. Once we
have slowed down enough to sit with these words, once we have asked God
for guidance, we may feel them entering us at a depth. Having
stopped to listen carefully to these words, we may conclude that
they have something to do with moral perception, with determining what is
right in our lives and what is wrong in our lives. Aren’t these
words really telling us that moral vi-
sion, like moral blindness, perpetuates and strengthens itself? Notice the
words: ‘flooded with light.’ In these sayings, Jesus seems to
be telling us that those who strive
hard for righteousness will have not
just a reward, but a cumulative reward. By the same token, he
tells us that those who strive in the other direction
will have not just a penalty, but a cumulative penalty that pushes them
into a ‘negative zone.’ He is talking about a dynamic process, about a
soul in motion.
We may eventually conclude that
these words are all about our ability to listen to the
promptings of our own soul. Again—you may find that you
agree with this interpretation; you may
find that you disagree with it. The only
mistake, I think, lies in letting empty force of habit cheat
us out of the chance for a direct encounter with
the teachings of Jesus Christ. Consider yet another ‘difficult’
passage from the Gospels.
‘For I say unto you, That unto every
one which hath shall be given; and from him
that hath not, even that he hath shall be
taken away from him.’ (LUKE 19:26)
As a matter of practical experience, this
passage makes no sense. I have no apples—two apples must be taken from
me. How can one take something away
from a person who has nothing? Yet when we consider the
idea of the soul that knows what is good
for it and what is bad for it, the soul that
we listen to ever more closely or
deafen ourselves to ever more obstinately, is the saying
really that puzzling? These words may well make
the only possible sense J the ultimate sense. This important verse,
when we compare it to those we have examined already, may become
a little clearer to us. If we sit with it for a time, it may begin
to speak to us. And what it says
could sound something like this: Our choices magnify themselves. When we listen to our souls and
strive to acquire favor with God, we are granted more of His favor. When we
strive in the other direction, we dig ourselves into a hole.
Jesus tells us in other
sayings that it is what we sustain in our heart,
ultimately, that makes true success possible for human beings.
Consider these words.
‘For where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also.’ (MATTHEW 6:21)
‘A good man out of
the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that
which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure
of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of
the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.’ (LUKE
6:45)
It is as though Jesus were asking
us: What are you doing with your heart? How are you investing it? Are you
using it to build up a surplus, or to bring about a deficit in your life? Where
are you going? He also tells us, as though with a nod and a
wink, of the woman who conceals leaven in fifty measures of flour.
How it grows for her! May I ask you to take just a
moment right now to pray to God for guidance in
discerning the real mean- ing of the important verses you have read
in this chap- ter? Perhaps you should do so
before you continue with the next chapter of this book.
If the words in question were my words, I would understand and respect your
decision to decline this request of mine to pray for guidance. But if Jesus
said these words, as the Bible tells us is the case, then
it is surely fitting for us to ask our Creator for His help in
understanding these teachings. After all: Why would Jesus have said these
things if we were not meant to understand them
and apply them in our lives?
I CAN so clearly remember reading the
account in the 22nd chapter of Luke where Jesus withdrew from the disciples,
prayed, and returned to find them fast asleep.
Who, I wondered, could have possibly observed him
praying ... and then related the incident so that it eventually could be
included in the Gospel of Luke? There’s another passage in the Gospels where
Jesus supposedly includes the words ‘let him who reads understand’ in one of
his spoken discourses, which seemed odd to me. And there was yet another spot
where the New Testament author assured first-century Christians that their
generation would see the second coming of the Messiah—a passage I found
difficult to square with modern Christian doctrine. These and other queries
about the New Testament arose while Iwas still quite young, certainly before I
was fifteen. Had someone manipulated the Gospels? If so, who? And why?
I ‘filed’ my questions for later, and
decided that the real problem was that I was not part of a vigorous Christian
faith community.
Part 2 of documentary
FOUR:
Jesus and the Magicians
‘It is
not (possible) for any human being to whom God has given the Book and wisdom
and prophethood to say to the people: ‘Be my worshippers rather than God’s.’ On
the contrary (he would say):‘Be devoted worshippers of your Lord, because you
are teaching the Book, and you are studying it.’ Nor would he order you to take
angels and Prophets for lords. Would he order you to disbelieve after you have
submitted to God’s will?’ (QUR’AN 3:79-80)
WHO WAS JESUS? Or—if we prefer the present tense, as
many do—who is he? What would Jesus have told
us two millennia ago, what would he tell us today, about his
ministry, his mission, his objectives, his identity? These are
fateful questions, questions that challenge us.
If the Christian writer C.S.
Lewis and the other mainstream scholars and
theologians of Christianity are correct, Jesus would say to
us, ‘I am God Incarnate, the second person of the Trinity.’Lewis supports
this view of Jesus with words to this effect: ‘Two
thousand years ago, a man appeared among the Jews claiming to
be God, a man whose words and deeds profoundly
unsettled the religious authorities of his day, and whose mission continues to
unsettle all of mankind. In evaluating this
man’s career, there are only two possibilities for us. We may consider
him a lunatic, or we may consider him the Son of
God. There is no middle ground. And who will maintain that
Jesus was a lunatic?’Now, I must be honest and admit that this line of argument
has irritated me for many years J because it reminds me so much of
a magician’s performance.
Magicians, when they wish to
make it appear to a paying audience that they have supernatural
powers, often employ a series of careful misdirections: an unexpected flare
from some flash powder, a pretty lady in a
revealing gown, a loud noise from offstage, even
something as simple as a gesture or a
word. Magicians employ these misdirections, not for the sake of
simple showmanship, but with a purpose, and while holding a subtle
goal in mind.Consider, for instance, the case of a card magician. The
aim is to distract an audience member who
has been called up onto the stage for
just a moment, just long enough to manipulate the deck, and then
to move quickly enough to convince her that she
has freely chosen a card on her own.
In fact, however, the magician has ‘forced’ a
predetermined card on her.This is the magician’s principle of misdirection.
Lewis engages in very similar sleight-of-hand withhis
‘lunatic-or-Son-of-God’ argument, which appears in his book
Mere Christianity.Of course, there is no thoughtful, spiritually
awareperson—Christian or otherwise—who can read the Gospels with an
open mind and an open heart, and come
away from that experience convinced that Jesus
was a lunatic. And so the believer finds herself holding a ‘card’ that
she did not choose, a ‘card’ that has been forced
upon her, a ‘card’ that informs her that Jesus is the
only begotten Son of God, the human component of the
Trinity—as (she is assured) he himself claims to be.The
thoughtful Christians, however, must be prepared to
appeal to the most authentic words of the Gospels to determine the truth or
falsehood of such matters.
Once we resolve that much firmly in
our hearts, we may find that we really are brave enough to pose the question
for ourselves: Who is Jesus? Does he say, ‘I am the only begotten Son of God
and the second person of the Trinity’? If we
examine this fateful question carefully, we reach an extraordinary
conclusion. We may look through the Gospels for as
long as we please, but we will have
a very difficult time indeed locating any verse in which
Jesus says this.
Now, Islam teaches that Jesus Christ forcefully
rejected claims that he was divine. Most mainstream Christians who
disagree with the teachings of Islam do so because of its emphatic insistence
on this point. We certainly have a right to be
skeptical about Islam’s claims about this issue. It is only fair for us
to demand evidence from the Gospels, and not from any other
source, before we conclude that Jesus rejected the divine
role that so many believe he was born to play in human
affairs. So the question becomes: Can we find even one Gospel
passage that plausibly suggests Jesus rejected today’s prevailing understanding
of his mission? Can we find a verse that shows him denying that he was
the divine incarnation of God, the second person of the Trinity?
If we cannot find such a verse, then
the discussion is over. Islam has failed to support its
claims. If we can find such a verse, we are
perhaps obliged to look a little more closely at what
Islam has to say about Jesus.We have, I think, both the right and the
duty to determine whether or not Lewis, as he spreads out his deck of
cards for us, is trying to distract us with his
lunacy-or-divinity argument—and if he is, what he might
be trying to distract us from. Misdirection is fine for entertainment,
but it has, we must admit, no place when it comes
to the important business of
determining one’s own path to salvation.
Well. What could Lewis be eager to
direct our attention away from? Perhaps from Gospel passages like this one
J in which Jesus explicitly denies any claim on divinity:
‘And
when he was gone forth into the way, there
came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good
Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And
Jesus said unto him,
Why callest thou me good? There is none good but
one, that is, God.’ (MARK 10:17-18)
If Jesus was God, why in the world would he say
something like this? Did he somehow forget that he himself was God when
he uttered these words? (A side note—I had a discussion with
a woman who assured me that this passage in
Mark was not really in the Gospels, and
who refused to believe that it appeared there
until I gave her the chapter and verse
number and she looked it up for herself!)Have we ever gone to
church and heard a homily or sermon exclusively devoted to Mark 10:18?If
our answer is ‘no,’ perhaps it is fair to ask why thatis so J and
to ask what other Gospel passages our
magician may be attempting to distract our attention from. Perhaps the
magician would prefer to distract us from the italicized
words that appear in the following Gospel passage J words with which
Jesus makes clear
that all of the truly faithful are (metaphorically speaking)
Children of God:
‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless
them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and
pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father which
is in heaven: for he maketh his
sun to rise on the evil and on the
good, and sendeth rain on the just and
on the unjust.’ (MATTHEW 5:44-45)
Or perhaps the magician is
eager to distract us from Gospel passages like this one
J in which Jesus draws our attention away from reverence of him,
and towards obedience to God Alone:
‘And it came to pass, as he spake
these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and
said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the
paps which thou hast sucked. But
he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that
hear the word of God, and keep it.’ (LUKE
11:27-28)
Or perhaps we are meant to be distracted
from this Gospel passage J in
which Jesus reminds us that it is God Alone who forgives sinners:
‘Then his lord, after
that he had called him, said unto him, O
thou wicked servant, I for- gave thee all that debt,
because thou desiredst me. Shouldest not thou also have had compas-sion
on thy fellow servant, even as I had pity on
thee? And his lord was wroth, and deliv-
ered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all
that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father
do also unto you, if ye from your hearts
forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.’
(MATTHEW 18:32-35)
In this parable, does Jesus say that he
himself will deliver us over to the torturers if we
do not forgive those who wrong us, after
we ourselves have been forgiven?Or does he
say that his heavenly Father—ourheavenly
Father!—will deliver us over to the torturers if we choose to persist in
this hypocrisy? We are entitled to ask: Is this heavenly Father he speaks of
the same as, or different than, the Father referenced elsewhere as the
Father of all the faithful, the One who causes
the sun to rise and the rain to fall on all of us?
To be sure, all these passages appear in the New
Testament, and they are all easy enough to look
up and consult. But if you have ever
tried to engage members of the clergy in a discussion of
these passages (as I have), you will find that a very interesting
thing takes place when you try to talk about these passages. St. Paul
keeps popping up.You may begin by talking about the words of Jesus, but
somehow you will always end up talking about the words of St. Paul. And this, I
submit, is misdirection.
The faith Jesus preached was not
Paulism, and no amount of legerdemain can possibly alter this fact.
We should not have to ask for any special
permission to focus on the authentic words of Jesus,
and only on the authentic words of Jesus. And if we are
willing to focus only on the authentic words of Jesus, we may eventually
conclude that they paint a picture of Jesus as a human Prophet, a
picture that is startlingly similar to the picture offered in the Qur’an.
Christians around the world repeat the
Lord’s Prayer faithfully every day, attributing its
exquisite words to Jesus himself. We are
entitled to ask: Does this prayer require
the faithful to appeal to Jesus himself? To
the Trinity? To the Holy Spirit? Or does it require the faithful to appeal
to ‘our Father’?We are entitled to ask: To whom was Jesus praying when he
spoke these words? Himself? Certainly not! And it is
not ‘my Father’ that Jesus appeals to J but‘our Father.’ And
we are entitled to ask: Why was
he even speaking these words, if he himself was God?
In the end, our own
honest answer to the question ‘Who is Jesus?’
need not be much more elaborate or sophisticated
than a simple ‘I don’t know.’ That may very
well be the best answer as we make
our way through the Gospels. It’s certainly not an answer to be
ashamed of: ‘I don’t know.’ And it is far better than answering as though the
question we were facing were actually ‘Who does St. Paul say Jesus is?’The only
answer that is worthy of shame, when we are asked ‘Who
is Jesus?’ is the one that elevates the force
of our own habit over the actual
words of the Gospel. We may well face grave difficulties if we con-
sciously choose to answer this question out of force of habit when we
know better.C.S. Lewis and the theologians of
what is today known as mainstream Christianity may
want us to answer that question out of force of
habit, of course. They have their reasons. They have made their own choices.
And they have arranged the deck as they
see fit.Whether we accept the card
that has been extended, and then tell ourselves that
we have chosen it freely, however, is up to us.
At eighteen, I headed East for college and
entered the Roman Catholic Church. In college, I met a beautiful and
compassionate Catholic girl who was to become the great love and support of my
life; she was not particularly religious, but she appreciated how important
these matters were to me, and so she supported me in my beliefs. I do a great
injustice to her seemingly limitless resources of strength, support, and love
by compressing the beginning of our relationship into a few sentences here.
I asked the campus priest—a sweet and pious man—
about some of the Gospel material that had given me trouble, but he became
uncomfortable and changed the subject. On another occasion, I remember telling
him that I was focusing closely on the Gospel of John because that Gospel was
(as I thought then) a first- person account of the events in question.
Again, he stammered and changed the
subject and did not want to discuss the merits of one Gospel over another; he
simply insisted that all four were important and that I should study all of
them.
This was a telling conversation, and a fateful
one, as it turned out.
FIVE:
The Problem of Illogicality
‘Beware!
Sincere true obedience is due to God
alone!’ (QUR’AN 39:3)
IS GOD ILLOGICAL when it comes to dealing
with humanity? When pressed to explain some hard-to-grasp point of
mainstream Christian doctrine—
a)
what the Trinity means, for instance, or
b)
whether Jesus really promised his followers that he would
return to them during their lifetimes, or
c)
why an omnipotent God should require the sacrifice
of a human being before delivering salvation to repentant
sinners—some people have
offered a particular, distinctive kind of answer. And their
an-swer has to do with illogicality. Human logic, the argument
goes, can never expect to grasp divine logic—and this certainly seems
hard to dispute. Yet the argument does not end there.
Mainstream Christian teachings—such as the
Trinitarian formulation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are com- plex
and counterintuitive, we are told, because
God Himself has, for His own reasons, created a reality that is
strange, mysterious, and unpredictable. So it should not surprise us when His
religion is strange, mysterious, and unpredictable. Therefore, when we
come across a component of the Christian faith
that seems to us to contradict our own instinct,
experience, or common sense, we must train ourselves to step
back and accept this apparent illogicality as evidence of God’s handiwork.
When a thoughtful person ponders this
explanation, he or she may at first wonder whether it is being offered
seriously. But C.S. Lewis, the most respected Christian writer of
the twentieth century, was a famous
proponent of this view, and he certainly meant it seriously. In his
book Mere Christianity, Lewis briskly
dismisses the complaints of those who find orthodox explanations of
Christianity unsatisfying ‘because simplicity is so beautiful,
etc.’ Then, Lewis suggests that such skeptical
people have simply failed to notice the true nature of things.
‘Besides being complicated,’ Lewis writes, ‘reality, in my experience, is
usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not
what you expect J Reality, in fact, is
usually something you could not have guessed. That
is one of the reasons I believe
Christianity. It is a religion you could
not have guessed.’ [C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (New York:
HarperCollins Edition 2001), p. 41]Those are important words, and
I hope you will consider them very closely. Lewis
really does want his hearers to join him in
believing that any theological principle that appears disorganized, unclear,
inconsistent, inaccurate, or logically indefensible is a reflection of the
mysterious reality that surrounds us J and thus a
reflection of God. Lewis was—and is—not alone in this belief.Yet he does
not continue his claim by saying that the more
illogical and unpredictable a doctrine is, the better it reflects God. Why he
shouldn’t continue in this way, though, is not easy to say.
Please understand: When he
makes this argument, Lewis is not advancing
some radical claim that he himself has invented. He is
outlining a classic position of mainstream Christianity.
Suppose we were to say
to a dozen traditional theologians that the
doctrine of the Trinity is hard for us to understand, and
hard for us to explain to others. Suppose we were to ask those theologians for
help in understanding and explaining the Trinity. Each and every one of them
would explain to us, using some formulation or other, that the very
illogicality of the doctrine is what identifies it as ‘mysterious’ as
Godlike.Consider the Catholic Encyclopedia’s terse
response to this all-important question. It says of the Trinity: ‘A dogma so
mysterious presupposes a Divine revelation.’ (The Catholic
Encyclopedia, 1912, Vol. 15, page 47)And that, apparently, is that!
Well, suppose we were to press the
matter? Suppose we were to demand to know,
from those dozen traditional theologians, why three Gods are an
essential component of a religion that aims to obey the First
Commandment (which forbids worshipping anything other than
God)? Suppose we were to demand some
clearer understanding of why the Trinity should be so closely connected to
the mission of Jesus? What should we expect to be told? Here is what the
Baltimore Catechism tells us:‘It is there, and that is all.
We see it and believe it, though we do not understand
it. So if were fuse to believe
everything we do not understand, we
shall soon believe very little and make ourselves ridiculous.’
(Baltimore Catechism, 2004, Catholic.net; Lesson 3: On the Unity
and Trinity of God, Question 31)I am afraid
we must expect to be
ordered—sometimes more tactfully than others, but always on essentially the
same terms—ordered to believe whatever we do not
understand about the Trinity, and to stop asking
inconvenient questions.This, we must understand, is the
final message of the theologians: not to dig
too deeply into the matter, not to inquire after
details too closely. The theologians, if we press them, will say something
along the following lines to us: ‘This whole issue is
a mystery. God is mysterious, and so is the
world He has created, and so is His Triune
nature. So please don’t keep asking this question, because you are not
entitled to a clear answer to it. The simple fact that the
dogma is beyond our comprehension will have to do.’ If my
version of the theologian’s ‘subtext’ here
sounds exaggerated to you, rest assured that it is only the tone
that has been heightened. The logical content of what you
just read is in fact the official response to questions that countless millions
of Christians have been taught not to ask, among them:
‘What is the historical origin of
the Trinity?’
‘Why must we believe in a Trinity,
rather than, say, a Unity—or a Duology or a Quadrology?’
‘Where in the Bible does Jesus mention
the Trinity by that name?’
If you doubt what I am saying, all
that is necessary for you to verify is for you to ask your
pastor or priest the questions I have just posed. Take careful note of
the answers you receive, and then determine for yourself whether they
conform to the outlines suggested in this chapter. At the end of the day, I
believe you will find that you have been told, in one way or another, that the
Trinity and its origin is a mystery, and that you must believe in it because it
is a mystery. You will also find that you
have been told, directly or indirectly, to stop asking
what verse in the Bible demonstrates Jesus’ familiarity with
the specific word ‘Trinity’. The answers you hear may be long. They
may be short. They may be polite. They may be brusque.
But they will, I believe, match the patterns set out here.
So that is what we read
and hear a great deal about when we examine the
difficult questions of Christianity:
its ‘mysteries’. At this point, we
must, I submit, have the courage to examine
another under-examined ‘mystery’ about the Christian faith J and,
what is more, we must summon the courage to take upon
ourselves the responsibility for its resolution. The ‘mystery’ is this: Do the
words of Jesus support Lewis and the others on this matter of illogicality and
incomprehensibility somehow mysteriously reflecting God? Or
do the words of Jesus contradict him on this point? If we summon
the courage to ask those questions, we may just discover that something
important has in fact been overlooked in the discussion.
Because the Jesus we encounter in the
most ancient Gospel passages, for some strange reason, makes a
point of emphasizing how accessible the Divine message
is meant to be.
‘Ask_it will be given to you. Seek_you will find.
Knock_it will be opened for you.’ (LUKE11:9)
‘Let the one who has ears listen!’
(LUKE 14:35)
‘Get behind me, Satan: for it is written, ‘Thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou
serve.‘ (LUKE 4:8)
‘You, (God), have hidden these
things from the wise and the learned C but
revealed them to the untutored.’ (LUKE 10:21)
‘You scholarly experts_damn you! You have hidden
the key of knowledge. You yourself haven’t entered, and you have
stood in the way of those who want to get in.’ (LUKE 11:52)
Are these verses really
the words of a man who believes that the core religious
principles of his faith are divine because they are hard to understand? Are
these really the words of a man who is preaching that God is both three
and one simultaneously? Are these really the
words of a man who believes his mission is rooted in mystery?
How can we possibly reconcile these verses with Lewis’ description of
Christianity—as ‘a religion you could not have guessed’? What is unguessable or
mysterious about these words? The verses seem to me to suggest quite
the contrary of Lewis’ suggestion: that Jesus is
trying to get us to pay attention to something
of fundamental importance, something singular and utterly
impossible to ignore. This ‘something’ is, at
least, impossible to ignore for those who open their
eyes, open their ears, humble their hearts, and avoid
anything remotely resembling spiritual arrogance, as he instructs. There are,
as we have seen, two paths.
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ (MATTHEW 5:3)
‘Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye
shall mourn and weep.’ (LUKE 6:25)
His command to us is
not that we believe, obediently, something
we could not have guessed. Instead, he challenges
us to choose which path we are going to walk: that which leads
to the Kingdom of God, or that which leads to
weeping and grieving.
Islam holds that God
Himself is beyond human comprehension. Islam insists
that His revelations could very easily consume a lifetime’s study. But the
central facts of the believer’s relationship with God—that He is
unambiguously One, that he demands heartfelt repentance and obedience from
human beings, that He alone is worthy of worship—are, in Islam, so
simple as to defy misrepresentation. The accessibility of these
essential facts to a humble heart is, in the early Gospel
verses as in Islam, a given.
The willingness of a ‘great thinker’ to respond
to the Divine message is another question. God, we are told in Q, has hidden
knowledge from those who claim high status and
wisdom J and has granted His guidance to ‘the untutored.’
If we look closely at the early Gospel passages,
we will have a difficult time persuading ourselves that Jesus’ aim is
to preach something mysterious, difficult, or illogical. Yet
Lewis and the others insist that the true
faith is mysterious, difficult, and illogical—something ‘you could
not have guessed.’ Jesus warns people
frankly to repent their disobedience to the
One God:
‘Woe unto you, Chorazin! Woe unto you,
Bethsaida! For if the
mighty works that had been done in you had been done in Tyre and
Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.
But it will be better for Tyre and Sidon
at the judgment than it will be for you.’ (LUKE 10:13)
He warns people to fear God alone:
‘And I tell you, my friends: Don’t be afraid of
people who kill the body, and after that
have no more that they can do. But
I will tell you the person you ought to
fear! Fear the one
who, after He has killed, has the power to cast into hell.
Yes; I am telling you, fear Him!’ (LUKE
12:5)
He warns people to stop worshipping
that which has been created:
‘Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for
yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,
and where thieves do not break through nor steal.’ (MATTHEW
6:19-20)
He insists, with peculiar
intensity, that people should make every possible
effort to attend to the business of fulfilling the
will of the Creator while there is still time to do so:
‘Jesus said unto him, No man,
having put his hand to the plough, and looking
back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’ (LUKE 9:62)
Not once, however, does
Jesus warn people, as C.S. Lewis does, to repent their failure
to embrace the doc- trine of the Trinity.
Now, these
sayings of Jesus are simple, and momentous, instructions. But
they are not mysteries, and nothing an honest man or woman who could do them
can possibly turn them into mysteries. And this is where Lewis and the others
lead us astray. Indeed, for those people who would formulate mysteries where
none actually exist, the Jesus we hear in the earliest verses of the
Gospel has nothing but contempt.
‘You scholarly
experts_damn you! You have hidden the key of knowledge. You yourself haven’t
entered, and you have stood in the way of those
who want to get in.’ (LUKE 11:52)
That sweet campus priest eventually married my
girlfriend and me, and we settled in suburban Massachusetts. We each moved
ahead professionally and became grownups. We had three beautiful children. And
I kept reading and rereading the Bible. I was drawn, as ever, to the sayings
about the lamp and the eye, the Prodigal Son, the Beatitudes, the importance of
prayer, and so many others—but I had steadily more serious intellectual
problems with the surrounding ‘architecture’ of the New Testament,
particularly with the Apostle Paul.
Was it Christianity I was following? Or
was it Paulism?
In the mid-1990s, my wife and I both
became deeply disenchanted with the Catholic Church,in part because of a truly
terrible priest who gavevery little attention to the spiritual needs of his
community. We later learned that he had been covering up for a child abuser.
SIX:
The Mechanics of Salvation
‘God will bring all things (to view), whether
they are as small as a mustard seed or (high) in the heavens or (buried deep) in
the earth. God is well aware of all things, to their tiniest details.’ (QUR’AN
31:16)
IN THE BIBLE I bought for myself when I decided
to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior back in 1974 (I
was thirteen), there is written, in my young hand, a slogan I may
have heard from a pulpit in those days, or read
in a tract somewhere. It reads:‘Jesus didn’t come to
help you get it together. He came to get it together for
you.’Whoever came up with it, the basic
idea is still valid for most Christians,
even if the tone feels a bit dated now. This
saying is, in fact, the essence of main-stream Christianity.
Certainly it is the essence ofLewis’
Christianity.The basic idea behind the saying
is that the mechanics of salvation are extremely simple,
featuring only one ‘moving part’, acceptance of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
as savior. This is what I believed as an adolescent, and this is
what the majority in contemporary Christianity believe
today. Here are just a few examples
of prominent Christians through the centuries
who have said precisely the same thing, using
different words:
‘But God demonstrates His own
love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for
us.’—ST. PAUL (ROMANS 5:8)
‘Jesus, whom I know as my Redeemer,
cannot be less than God.’—ST. ATHANASIUS
‘As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved
us; as God alone, he would not; Incarnate, he could and
did.’—MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
‘I have a great need for
Christ; I have a great Christ for my need.’
—CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
These are just a few of
the hundreds of examples one could supply of this type of
teaching. It is the core of contemporary Christian doctrine. Now if
salvation really is this simple—if it really does have
only one moving part—then there is
certainly a huge advantage for the Christians who are saved in this way.
They can leave (as it were) all the driving to
Jesus. The thoughtful Christian, however, is entitled to ask
a question about all this. This person is entitled to ask whether Jesus himself
embraced the view that he did not come to help us ‘get it together,’ but
rather to ‘get it together for us.’
It can be quite difficult to ask such a
question, either privately or in public. Force of habit
and social con- formity can be such very strong forces! Most
Christians have been conditioned—perhaps from their parents, perhaps from
years of observing how churchgoing people behave,
perhaps from a combination of the two—not to ask such
questions. We may even have been conditioned to believe that posing such
questions would make us ‘bad Christians’.
Yet we
have to ask these questions. And here is why: If
we withdraw obediently when someone discourages us from
exploring what Jesus actually taught about human
salvation—and if we then live our lives under this code of
obedient withdrawal, then I am afraid Christianity as a creed is pretty
much meaningless for us. This variety of ‘Christianity’ asks
us to accept Jesus as a Savior, as
a Son of the Omnipotent, All-Knowing God,
but forbids us to compare his actual teachings
with those of the religion that bears his name. Now, if this
is not a perversion of Jesus’ mission, then nothing is a
perversion of that mission. After all, these are
teachings that must, by the faith’s own
definition, be divine in nature! Surely we are entitled, and
obliged, to study them very closely indeed. So please J if you consider
nothing else that I have suggested in this book, please
J please do take a moment to consider
the following two sentences closely before
proceeding any further. What we are about to discuss
here are the preserved teachings of Jesus Christ on the subject of human
salvation—not the teachings of St. Paul, or St.
Thomas Aquinas, or Thomas à Kempis, or
Malcolm Muggeridge, or the Pope, or Franklin Graham. The
teachings of Jesus, by definition, must matter to Christians.
Consider. What if we were to find
something in the earliest, most historically relevant teachings of Jesus that
showed us clearly how he envisioned the mechanics of salvation? If we
were to encounter such information, what would our
attitude toward the opinions of St. Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas,
Thomas à Kempis, the Pope, Malcolm Muggeridge, or Franklin Graham
have to be? For a true Christian, the answer is obvious. What those
men all had to say about salvation would simply have to wait for a moment. All
of them, every single one, would have to wait
while we listened to Jesus.Anyone who believes
otherwise simply cannot claim to be a Christian in any
meaningful sense of the word.So: Did Jesus embrace the
view that he did not come to ‘help us get it
together,’ but rather to ‘get it together for us’?
‘Enter ye in at the
strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is
the way, that leadeth to de-struction, and many
there be which go in there at. Because strait is
the gate, and narrow is the way, which
leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’ (MATTHEW
7:13-14)
If Jesus did advocate what
I wrote in the front of my Bible, the view that he came
to ‘get it together for us,’ it is odd that he should place
such heavy emphasis, as Islam does, on the
fateful consequences of the choices we make as individuals as
we travel the road of our life. It is these choices, he
assures us, which will determine our salvation. It is simply not possible
for any intelligent person to misinterpret his meaning here. After we
read these words, a question appears. What,
specifically, is ‘narrow’ about the act of accepting Jesus Christ as
one’s personal savior? Isn’t the act of accepting Jesus
Christ as savior a comparatively simple,
straightforward decision, one that has been engaged in by
hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people down the
centuries? What is difficult or rare about that choice? Why
does Jesus agree with the doctrines of
Islam by telling us that the path to destruction
is wide and easy to travel, but the path to salvation is much more
challenging? Once Jesus has ‘gotten it together’ for us, and we
have accepted him as our savior, is
the
traveling of this
narrow path he speaks of still a
requirement for salvation? If so, doesn’t that mean the mechanics of salvation
may be different than we might at first have believed,
that it may have more than one moving part? If not, why does Jesus
mention this path at all?
‘When the unclean spirit is gone
out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest,
and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from
whence I came out; and when he is come, he
findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth
he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked
than himself, and they enter in and dwell
there: and the last state of that man
is worse than the first.’ (MATTHEW 12:43-45)
If Jesus did embrace the
view that he came to ‘get it together for
us,’ it is hard to understand why he is so keen for us to grasp, as Islam
is keen for us to grasp, the vital importance of
our maintaining a constant guard against negative
forces. These, it is clear, are forces that
may rush into the mind and soul of
even someone who has sincerely repented and believed.Once Jesus has
‘gotten it together for us,’ and we have accepted
him as our savior, we are, apparently,
still subject to being defiled by these forces—in a way
that leaves our last state worst than our
first, and our very souls in grave peril.If our ‘last
state’ is worse than our ‘first,’ we
are clearly headed for Hell. Doesn’t that mean that the
mechanics of salvation may be different than we might
at first have believed, and may have more than one
moving part? If salvation has only one moving part, why
does Jesus mention this danger at all?
‘Not
everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’
shall enter the kingdom of heaven_only the one who
does the will of my Father
in heaven.’ (MATTHEW 7:21)
This is an odd teaching
indeed for a religion built around the principle
of acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord. If
Jesus did embrace the view that his role
was to ‘get it together for us,’ it is hard to see why he
would tell us, in the plainest possible words,
that simply appealing to him as lord is, on its own,
not enough to win us salvation. And exactly how
different is this kind of appeal, which Jesus clearly regards as
insufficient, from the act of proclaiming him
one’s personal savior? Once Jesus has gotten it
together for us, and we have accepted him as our
savior, is his command to perform the will of God in order to attain salvation
still binding upon us?If we fail to do the will of his Father
in heaven, is our salvation imperiled?If it is, doesn’t that mean that
the mechanics of salvation may be different than we might at first have
believed, and have more than one moving part?If it isn’t, why does
Jesus mention this requirement, and not mention, at a time when it would be
perfectly appropriate to do so, his own soul-saving role
as the only begotten Son of God? Why does he choose instead to emphasize
so very strongly the necessity of obeying the will of Almighty God?
The central reality of
Christianity, we are told, is that Jesus Christ died to redeem
humanity, thereby giving those who believe in him
a fresh start with the Al- mighty.
Suppose we were to ask:
Why should we need a fresh start in
the first place? C.S. Lewis, and a great
many who agree with him, would offer this
answer: ‘Humanity has fallen from grace and is, as a result, inherently
sinful. The only thing that can reverse
such a fall is the blood of Jesus Christ.’ If they are right, then
we have found the answer to the all-important question of eternal
salvation. If they are right, we have encountered a momentous and important
piece of information, certainly a piece of information that should be of
interest to every human being on earth. If they are right, we have
a responsibility to try to share this information, this Good News,
with every member of the human family. Before we accept such
a responsibility, however, we have the right,
and the duty, to ask the question that is
somehow always neglected: Do the words that the Gospels attribute to
Jesus support this theory?
‘Agree with
thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him;
lest at any time the ad-versary deliver thee to
the judge, and the judge de-liver thee to the officer,
and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say
unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out
thence, till thou hast paid the
ut-termost farthing.’(MATTHEW 5:25-26)
Can this parable of Jesus, so rarely
taught or analyzed in church congregations, be understood as anything
other than a parable of salvation and damnation? Can ‘prison’
represent anything other than Hell? Can the ‘judge’ represent
anyone other than God? Can the ‘adversary’ who
may hand us over to the judge ‘at any moment’ be
anything other than our own inevitable death? Is it
really the blood of the crucified Jesus
that saves us while we are on our way to court? Or J is
what saves us our own choice to come to terms
with the adversary? In this parable of Jesus,
salvation lies in our decision to acknowledge
the reality of our own impending death, our
willingness to ‘settle’ our case before the judge renders a
binding decision that we know we will not
enjoy. What saves us
is our own eagerness to ‘pay up’ by
repenting and doing good deeds in this life, thus
avoiding punishment in the next. What saves us is our own conclusion that
we had better accept the ‘terms’ we are
being offered, submit to the hard facts of
the situation, and strike the best deal we can before
we get to ‘court’.
This pragmatic submission to the Reality of
the situation we all face is, as it turns out, the guiding
theological principle of Islam. And it is, to the careful reader of Q, Jesus’ guiding theological
principle, as well.We have a right,
and a duty, to ask: Where, within this parable, are
we told of the atoning action of the blood
of the Son of God?We have a right, and a duty, to ask:
If Jesus shared a parable of salvation with us, and
left out the part about his own sacrifice
for mankind, is the problem with Jesus J or is the
problem with our theory of his sacrifice for mankind?
We cannot seriously maintain
that it is simple ‘coincidence’ that
Jesus fails to mention the atoning action
of the blood of the Son of God in any of
these sayings. Nor can we regard as ‘coincidence’ the
stark and disorienting fact that not a single word promoting the
theology of redemption in Christ’s sacrifice appears in any of the most ancient
Gospel verses. Instead, in Q, we hear
Jesus rebuking Satan when Satan tests him by referring to him
as God’s son. In Q, we
hear Jesus forecasting the doom of people who listen to his
instructions for living and fail to take action on
them. If he meant to forecast the doom of
those who fail to accept his sacrifice
for mankind, surely he would have done so! In Q, we hear Jesus refer to
himself as the Son of Adam—not at all the same thing as being the only begotten
Son of God. These facts cannot be accidents. They cannot be coincidences. They
cannot be happen stance. The early evidence is quite clear. Notions of Jesus’
sacrifice and his ransom for all mankind of a human being who was
God Incarnate simply were not part of the earliest Gospel. These concepts were
added later, long after the conclusion of Jesus’ ministry.
If we read the earliest
Gospel verses with both a functioning heart and a
functioning mind, we cannot honestly say to ourselves that Jesus really
saw his own mission as that of ‘getting it together for us.’ We must
instead conclude that he was much more interested in finding ways to get us to
guard against evil—to get us to choose to turn over and over again to God—to
get us to commit ourselves to discerning and submitting to God’s will—to get us
to listen to our own soul’s advice—to get us to purify ourselves under the
guidance of Almighty God—to get us to repent our
sins before we are brought before the Judge.
‘Without Jesus’ sacrificial death,’ a
contemporary American pastor preached recently, ‘there would be no
Christianity.’His words echo the sentiments of C.S. Lewis
and the vast majority of Christian clergy and theologians. If Chadwell
and all the rest of these people are correct,
then the clear Gospel instructions for
salvation that you have read in this chapter—instructions
have noth- ing whatsoever to do with Jesus’ sacrificial death— presumably
belong to some other faith. If the experts insist
that these teachings have no place in Christian-
ity, then they may be sure that these
teachings are en- tirely in keeping with Islam. If we are true
Christians, we must accept as authoritative what Jesus
actually taught about salvation.And if
we are truly interested in what Jesus
actually taught on this subject, we cannot
escape noticing that his message is a great deal
like—is, in fact, identical to—what Islam teaches.
Eventually I found it necessary to immerse
myself ina faith community. I joined, and became active in the local Protestant
denomination, a Congregational Church.
I led Sunday School classes for children,
and briefly taught a Gospel class on the Parables for the adults. In the Sunday
School classes for the kids, I stayed right with the curriculum I had been
given; but in the adult class, I tried to challenge the participants to
confront certain parables directly, without filtering everything through the
Apostle Paul. We had interesting discussions, but I sensed some resistance, and
I didn’t try to teach an adult class again. My wife eventually joined my
church.(She is a member there today.)
SEVEN:
What about Paul?
‘For all have sinned, and
come short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His
grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.’—THE APOSTLE PAUL (ROMANS
4:23-24)
‘Giving thanks unto the Father,
which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of
the saints in light, who hath delivered us from
the power of darkness, and hath trans* lated us into
the kingdom of his dear Son, in whom we have redemption through his blood, even
the forgiveness of sins.’—THE APOSTLE PAUL (COLOSSIANS 1:12-14)
WHEN I DISCUSS Jesus
with mainstream Christians, some questions tend
to come up again and again. The most
common questions sound something like this:
‘What about St. Paul? What about all the other
great Christian thinkers and theologians and scholars who have labored down the
centuries and developed great systems of thought and great systems of
philosophy around accepted Christian theology? Doesn’t
their work revolve around the idea of Jesus being the only begotten Son
of God and the sacrifice for mankind?
Aren’t you ignoring them?’Not at all. It is quite
impossible to ignore Paul, because he is a gifted rhetorician and a
theologian of extraordinary and enduring influence. It is equally impossible,
however, for a thoughtful Christian to obey
Paul if Paul is at odds with Jesus. Mainstream Christianity,
following Paul, does in fact tell us that there is a
Natural Law (also known as a Moral Law)—an inherent law of wrong
and right that the vast majority of human beings can perceive
plainly, and that they want, deep down, to follow.
Mainstream Christianity tells us that there is a Law reflecting the Divine,
a Law that humans cannot possibly expect to obey properly
without the sacrifice of the Lamb of God.
It is because we are sinful, because
we cannot expect to fulfill the demands upon us, we are told,
that we come short of the glory of God.
This is Paul’s position, and the
position at which mainstream Christian theology begins. Yet
even though we understand what Paul
is saying, we must also understand what Jesus is
saying.
Jesus has, as we have
seen in Chapter Three, a much deeper and richer
conception of human moral perception than Paul
and the other Christian
theologians do. Jesus explicitly rejects, as we have seen in Chapter Five,
his own claims on divinity. He is
clearly a prophet (that is, a messenger from
God); he is not himself God, and he says so.Jesus
maintains, as we have seen in Chapter Six,
that complete submission to the will of God,
before death overtakes us and we are held accountable for our sins, is
the criterion for salvation.And we may rest assured
that whether we are ready now or not to admit this fact to
ourselves, or dis- cuss it with others, we will ultimately be held
account- able for what we know, and what we choose
to ignore, about the teachings of Jesus.
So let us suppose that Paul tells
us—just as C.S. Lewis and a thousand other great
Christian thinkers tell us— that you and I can never,
no matter how hard we may try, live up to
the demands of the Natural Law that God has placed
within our hearts.Let us suppose that Paul and
a thousand other great thinkers tell us that God
Himself became a hu-
man being in order to make
it possible for us to have those demands met on our behalf. Even
if Paul and a thousand other great thinkers warn
us that we are lost if we do not
conform our minds to their notions of salvation J Even if Paul
and the others insist on all of this, weare bound to
listen to Jesus.
Jesus overrules Paul, and there simply cannot be
any dispute on this point J except from people who reject Jesus.
This fact has been systematically ignored—
and/or purposefully obscured—for two thousand
years. So I hope you will forgive me for
repeating it here.What Paul and the others say
to us is intriguing and (potentially) very important.
However, if we do not grant Jesus Christ the final word on matters of ul-
timate importance, we must take a moment to ask our- selves exactly
what kind of Christians we are. Do we follow men?
Or do we follow Christ?
It is imperative that we
make a conscious effort to compare the world view
that Jesus presents with the world view that
Paul and the others present. We can- not assume
that the two world views are identical simply
because we have been raised to believe they are identical. In fact, they are
not identical.The mere fact that our fathers,
mothers, grand- mothers, and grandfathers (and anyone else who came
before them) believed something to be the case does not
make it so. Jesus and Paul do in fact offer very dif- ferent
world views, even if our parents and grandpar-
ents did not notice this.And if the world view of Paul is in conflict with the
world view of Jesus J then Jesus must be granted pri- ority,
whether or not that priority is popular.
‘(Jesus) said to him,
‘What is written in the Law? How do you
read it?’ And he answering said, ‘You shall love
the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
strength, and with all your mind; and your
neighbor as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You
have answered correctly: do this, and you shall
live.’ (LUKE 10:26-28)
Imagine Paul to be correct. Suppose
the love of God, love so strong that it amounts to complete
submission, is not enough to secure salvation. Suppose there
were another requirement for spiritual success than the one
mentioned in the Gospel passage above.Imagine that salvation did
demand ‘the redemp- tion that is in Christ Jesus’
(ROMANS 4:24), ‘redemp- tion through his blood, even the
forgiveness of sins.’ (COLOSSIANS 1:14)Imagine salvation did require God
Himself to take human form and shed His blood in
order to forgive our sins and make eternal life possible for
us.Why in the world would Jesus, when answering his questioner in the passage
above, fail to mention this fact?Jesus makes it abundantly
clear: the young man has answered correctly!If the young man
had not answered correctly, andhad left out the
part about the blood and the sacrifice and
God taking human form J would Jesus have said,‘You have answered
correctly: do this and you shalllive’?
So. What about Paul?The problem is
not, cannot be, that Jesus is not listening
closely enough to Paul.The problem must therefore be that Paul
is not lis-tening closely enough to Jesus.
The more research I put into the subject of the
early history of the Gospels, the more I found myself thinking of that
conversation about the Gospelof John with my priest. I realized that what he
had been unwilling or unable to tell me was thatthe author(s) of the Gospel of
John had been lying. This was manifestly not an eyewitness account, though it
claimed to be.
I was in a strange situation. I was certainly
enjoying the fellowship of the Christians at my church, who were all
committed and prayerful people.Being part of a religious community was
important to me. Yet I had deep intellectual misgivingsabout the supposed
historicity of the Gospel narratives.What’s more, I was, more and more
undeniably, getting a starkly different message from the Gospel sayings of
Jesus than that which my fellow Christians were apparently getting.
There came a point at which I was fascinated by
the apparent intersection of the Christian mystic tradition and that of the
Sufis and the Zen Buddhists. And I had even written on such matters. But there
seemed to be noone at my church who shared my zeal for these issues.
In particular, I was interested in the research
being done that indicated that the oldest strata of the Gospels reflected an
extremely early source known as
Q, and that each of the individual sayings of Jesus within it needed to
be evaluated on its own merits, and not as part of the narrative material that
surrounded it. The narrative material, I learned— material accounted for, among
other things, the crucifixion narratives that form the core of conventional
Christian theology—was in fact added many years later. I started focusing
much more closely on these verses, and using them as a criterion by which to
evaluate those parts of the New Testament that had for years seemed cold and
foreign to me.
EIGHT:
Context
‘My Lord! Relieve my mind, and make my task easy
for me, and untie my tongue, that they may under- stand what I say.’ (QUR’AN
20:25-28)
‘YOU HAVE NOT,’ IT MAY
BE OBJECTED, ‘given us the context of all these sayings. You
have only quoted very short passages of scripture. You are deliberately omit-
ting key portions of the Gospel message in order to mislead people.’ This is
another common reaction from Christians to the points I have raised here.In
fact, it may be the most common justification for turning away from
the approach discussed in this book. The argument
is that one Gospel verse is simply not complete without
connection to, or comparison with, another Gospel
verse.
It is extremely important
for us to understand, then, that this argument arises
from a deeply flawed understanding of the way the Gospels were written.
The best (non-Muslim!)
Biblical scholars in the world now agree: Before there was a story
of Jesus, there were Gospels. The best (non-Muslim!)
Biblical scholars in the world now agree
that the individual Gospel sayings I am citing here
must stand, and be interpreted, independently.The original sayings of Jesus
were not ‘hard-wired’ to other verses, as we may have
been taught, and they are certainly not ‘hard-wired’
to the later writings of the Apostle Paul.
It is not necessary for you to take my word on
the matter to resolve this extremely important issue for yourself. We are
talking about a central finding of modern New Testament
research. We are talking about a finding
that is quite clear for anyone willing to take a moment appeal to
the scholarship J and not even recent scholarship, but
the scholarship of six or seven decades ago. We are talking,
at this point, not about whether Islam agrees with
Christianity, but about the objective facts of contemporary textual analysis of
the Gospels. Here is the proof.
• ‘It is one of the points made by recent
criticism that the characteristic method of Gospel compi-
lation was just this artless collocation of
origi- nally independent units, and that the more
ef- fort after continuity there is, the more advanced is the stage
of development from the original tradition.’—’A New Gospel,’ C.H. Dodd, Bulle-
tin of the John Rylands Library (1936), reprinted in New Testament
Studies, (Scribners, New York,1956), p. 12-52.
The more comprehensible the narrative is—the
further removed the Gospel passage in question is from the original
tradition, from the ‘originally independent’ units. The more artful
the narrative is, the less authentic a given account is likely to
be.So if someone insists that we must ‘interpret’ (for instance) Jesus’
description of the requirements of salvation in Matthew
5:25-26 by first reminding ourselves that such a
verse cannot be ‘understood properly’ without recourse to some other
Gospel verse or story J
J that person is_from the
viewpoint of modern scholarship_simply mistaken. Actually, we must begin
by asking ourselves what such a passage means when viewed as a single unit. We
cannot assume that it was originally composed as part of some
larger narrative whole. It was not.
To make this point in
public is to be considered, in some quarters, a ‘bad
Christian’. Yet is it really ‘good Christianity’
to ignore the painstaking Biblical scholarship of the past
century? Surely one does not become a
‘better’ Christian by obediently closing one’s eyes to facts
when ordered to do so.We now know that we draw closer to the
historical Jesus when we evaluate ancient Gospel sayings independently,
without the benefit of narrative continuity J
because that is how they were originally collected.
Rather than pretend this important fact does not exist, we must use
this fact to gain a greater understanding of the original Gospel message.
Whether it is popular for us to say so or not,
whether our priest or pastor wants to admit it in
front of the congregation or not, whether
raising the fact is convenient to our
loved ones or not, the very first
Gospels were collections of Jesus’ sayings. They were not stories. These
early Gospels largely avoided storytelling. They
simply reported what Jesus said at various points during his ministry.
Early believers remembered individual sayings of or brief
exchanges with Jesus, and shared them with each
other in conversation, then memorized them. This
oral tradition eventually became a written tradition. As
thoughtful Christians, we should, of course, be interested in what Jesus
actually said. I hope you will agree that if
someone claims to be a Christian, but is not interested in what
Jesus said, that is a very strange variety of Christianity indeed! And so
we should be interested in determining which sayings
were in fact contained in those earliest Gospels.
The creation of the later Gospels—including
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—was not, as we may have been taught, a matter of
someone ‘starting from scratch’ or writing under the spontaneous
‘inspiration’ of God. Rather, these traditional Gospels came
about through the careful drawing together and amplifying of
various existing traditions. The individual
sayings were gathered into discourses, and,
eventually, surrounded by narrative material—by a story. This means that,
when we consider the
authenticity of the various Gospel sayings in Q, the smallest
possible unit of the text is often the
most important. The ‘explanatory’
or ‘story’ material that may surround that
small unit of text, when it shows
up in the traditional Gospels we have today, is, by
definition, somewhat suspicious. Why? Because all the narrative material within
the Gospels is, by definition, of later origin than the brief
sayings that were memorized and transmitted orally by the first
believers.
Even if it is difficult to do, we
must learn to look past the ‘story’ of the Gospels, and focus
intently on the individual sayings themselves, if
we wish to understand Jesus’ actual
mission. We have, however, been taught by religious authorities for most
of our lives to accept the narrative material that surrounds
a Gospel saying as undisputable truth, or even as
historical reality. If a certain passage says that Jesus
said such and such in order to explain thus and
so, then that (we have been taught) is how it must have
taken place. But if God gave us the
Gospels, as He did, He also gave us
minds—and we should hold as self-evident that He wants
us to use both of them.
Once we look past the
narratives, we may focus directly on what remains
of the memorized versions of the early individual sayings of Jesus.
Refusing to do this is not a sign of faith, but rather a sign of
obedience, and the two are not identical. Fortunately, the earliest versions of these sayings appear to
have been preserved for us in Q. How accurately they have
been preserved, we will never know. But
they are there. And they are earlier
than what surrounds them.That is why I have only quoted very short Gospel passages in
this book, and avoided cross-referencing them to
other Gospel passages.
At this point, I often hear the
following: ‘What you say about the scholarship and the
textual development of the Gospels seems interesting. But
still somehow, I cannot escape the feeling that
the texts in questions have been man handled.’ And
this is true. They do appear to have been man- handled. But
it is not modern scholars who have been doing the manhandling.
To explain what I mean,
I must give you some background information J and
apologize in advance to you. I have been fortunate enough to have the
opportunity in my life to study the world’s religions fairly closely.
Some historical patterns in the development of religious
culture are impossible to ignore, and I am about to share a few of
them with you now—but I want to say ahead of my time that
it is not my intention to denigrate anyone’s faith
or to attack any person’s conception of God.
My intent is only to call attention to the simple facts
of history, facts that may be confirmed by
consulting any good encyclopedia or responsible textbook on
comparative religion. If we study these facts, we may
be able to come to some conclusions
about how the real manhandling of the message of
Jesus took place. Consider that J
• Many faith movements from before
Christianity promoted the idea that the suffering and death
of someone else makes salvation possible.• Long before Jesus, the
god Attis, in Phrygia (contemporary Turkey) was regarded
as the only begotten son of God and
the savior of mankind. On March 24th of each year, he
supposedly bled to death at the foot of a pine tree. His
blood was believed to bring forth new life from the
earth. Each spring, his worshippers celebrated his triumphant
rising from the dead.• Long before Jesus, the god Abonis of Syria
was regarded by his followers as having died
to attain redemption for all mankind. Each spring, his worshippers
celebrated his triumphant rising from the dead.• Long
before Jesus, followers of the Egyptian god
Osiris celebrated, each spring, his triumphant rising from the
dead. They also celebrated his birthday—on December 29th.•
Long before Jesus, the Greek demigod Dionysius was regarded
as the son of Zeus. His followers celebrated his triumphant rising from
the dead at the spring equinox. His Roman
incarnation, Bacchus, had a familiar birthday: December 25th.• Long
before Jesus, followers of Mithra, the
Persian sun-god, celebrated his birthday on December 25th. Their religious
rituals included a Eucharistic supper at which believers participated in
Mithra’s divine nature by means of a holy meal of bread and wine.
C.S. Lewis makes (understandably)
brief reference to these traditions in Mere Christianity. He
does so as part of a sweeping historical survey of human
religious experience. Rather than offer his readers the
specificsof these faith systems—specifics that I have just shared with
you—Lewis tells us that these movements were precursor faiths to
Christianity: rough drafts, if you will, of
humanity’s eventual attempt to bring itself closer to the
(as-yet-unborn) Jesus Christ.This is either supreme intellectual laziness or
deliberate deception. And Lewis’s was not a
lazy mind.So let us acknowledge the
facts. The paganconstituencies played a major role not only in
the development of the Gospels, but also in the later theological doctrines,
rituals, and sensibilities of the Christian Church. These influences betrayed the
original message of Jesus. The influences of those pagan groups, fortunately,
appear to be entirely absent from the
early Gospel passages we find in Q. And that is
why I pay such close attention to them,
and to the rigorously monotheistic pattern of
worship they outline—and why I believe you should, too.
We have been looking at
the ‘context’ supplied by human religious history before
Jesus. Religious history after Jesus’ ministry, however, is just as revealing.
This, too, is a source of ‘context’. Of particular importance is this
fact:
The doctrine of the
Trinity was formally imposed upon Christianity over three
centuries after the birth of Jesus, by the Roman Emperor Constantine.
At the Council of Nicea in 325 came the first
formal approval of the doctrine that God
was ‘triune’ in nature, a move that paved the way for the
ruthless persecution of those who rejected this doctrine. The Council was
summoned by the Emperor, and not by any religious
figure within the Christian community, a fact that sheds some
insight on the political importance of this event. Constantine did not invent
the Trinity, but he had some distinctly earthbound reasons for
backing the three-in-one formulation, chief among them unity
in his kingdom. As one resource puts it:
‘As it exists today the doctrine (of the
Trinity) developed over the centuries as a
result of many controversies J These controversies were for
most purposes settled at the Ecumenical Councils, whose
creeds affirm the doctrine of the Trinity. Constantine
the Great, (who called) the first council in
325 AD, arguably had political motives for
settling the issue, rather than religious
reasons.’[Source: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)]
Those groups who dared to
disagree with the emperor’s formulation were quickly
labeled heretics and, eventually, exiled or eradicated.
What kind of man was this
Constantine, this ruler who played such a fateful role in the
global development of Christianity? I am afraid the
image he presents in history is not a particularly
flattering one J if we are willing to look beyond the careful euphemisms of his
traditional biographers. Constantine was a genocidal tyrant who used violence
on the large and small scale to pursue his (sometimes
mysterious) objectives. He murdered his own son and
wife for reasons no one has been able to piece together; he
slaughtered literally thousands of political opponents; he
was known to be an enthusiastic fire
worshipper. And he was baptized as a Christian only on his deathbed. And
yet, regardless of how deeply his own personal commitment to the faith went (or
didn’t), this ruthless, pragmatic, and possibly sociopathic head of state
was, after Christ himself and the Apostle Paul,
probably the most influential man in the history of the faith.This
fact is worthy of close consideration by every follower of Jesus.
The case can be made, in
fact, that Constantine outranks both Jesus and Paul in
influence. It is Constantine’s Nicene formulation of the
Trinity that has governed, in a determining way, most Christian
theology for the past seventeen centuries. Many people today act as though this
historical reality is as natural an outgrowth of the mission of
Jesus as the rain falling and the grass growing. It is not.Anyone who
maintains that the Gospels them- selves support
Constantine’s brand of orthodoxy must confront an awkward question: How
are we to account for the fact that no one preached the Nicene formulation
before the time of Constantine?No responsible historian of
Christianity disputes the stark and enduring changes in
Christian theology that took place in the centuries following Jesus.These
changes did not spring from thin air. Rather,they culminated in
Constantine’s council. They carried distinct political
benefits for the Emperor‘s regime. And
they are simply impossible for a
modern, thoughtful Christian to come to terms with without accepting at least
the possibility of apostasy—that is, formal betrayal of the theology
Jesus himself followed, the theology of total
submission to the One Creator God.
The remarkable thing is that so much of that
original theology is still evident in the earliest Gospel verses. Look at the
teachings we find in Q ...
and ask yourself how closely they match the ‘context’ of
Constantine. In Q,
Jesus warns us to fear only the judgment of a single God:
‘And I say unto you my friends, Be not
afraid of them that kill the body, and after
that have no more that they can do. But I will
forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he
hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say
unto you, Fear him.’ (LUKE 12:4-5)
This is identical to the Islamic
principle known asTaqwa. Compare:
‘To Him belongs all that is in the
heavens and the earth. God’s retribution is
severe. Should you then have fear of anyone other than God?’
(QUR’AN 16:52)
In Q, Jesus warns
humanity plainly that earthly advantages and pleasures should not be the goal
of our lives:
‘But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have
re- ceived your consolation. Woe unto you that are
full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that
laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.’ (LUKE 6:24-5)
This is identical to Islam’s
warning that we must not be fooled by the allures of Dunya,
or earthly life. Compare:
‘The desire to have
increase of worldly gains has preoccupied you so much (that you have
neglected the obligation of remembering God)— until you come to your graves!
You shall know. You shall certainly know (about
the conse- quences of your deeds). You will certainly have
the knowledge of your deeds beyond all doubt. You will be shown hell, and
you will see it with your own eyes. Then, on that day, you shall be questioned
about the bounties (of God).’ (QUR’AN
102:1-8)
Perhaps just as revealing, Q teaches nothing whatsoever of
the Crucifixion, or of the sacrificial
nature of the mission of Jesus ... an intriguing omissionindeAendd!consider the
following chilling words:
‘And I say unto you,
that many shall come from the east and
west, and shall sit downwith Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But
those who believe they own the kingdom of heaven
shall be cast out into the outer darkness. There shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ (MATTHEW8:11-12)
There is context J and there
is betrayal. Each of us must decide for ourselves which
is which.Those of us who are unwilling to accept the pagan remnants of
Constantine as the permanent foundation of our religious faith may,
as our detractors claim, not be ‘real Christians’.Then again
J one never knows. We may be.
The more I looked at the Q sayings, the more impossible it became for
me to reconcile the notionof the Trinity with that which seemed most authentic
to me in the Gospels. I found myself face-to-face with some very difficult
questions:
• Where in the Gospels did Jesus use the
word‘Trinity’?• If Jesus was God, as the doctrine of the Trinity claims,
why did he worship God?• If Jesus was God, as the doctrine of the
Trinity claims, to whom was he praying, and why?
The more I tried to ignore these questions,
the more they haunted me.
In November of 2002,I began to read a
translation of the Qur’an. I had never read an English translation of the
entire text of the Qur’an before. I had only read summaries of the Qur’an
written by non-Muslims.(And very misleading summaries at that.)
Words do not adequately describe the
extraordinary effect that this book had on me. Suffice to say that the very
same magnetism that had drawn me to the Gospels at the age of eleven was
present in a new and deeply imperative form. This book was telling me,
just as I could tell Jesus had been telling me, about matters of ultimate
concern.
The Qur’an was offering authoritative guidance
and compelling responses to the questions I had been asking for years about the
Gospels.
The Qur’an drew me to its message because
it powerfully and relentlessly confirmedthe sayings of Jesus that I felt in my
heart had to be authentic. I knew as a fact that somethinghad been changed in
the Gospels.I knew too that that something had been left intact in the text of
the Qur’an.
NINE:
‘There is no god but God’
‘To Him belongs all that is in the
heavens and the earth. God’s retribution is
severe. Should you then have fear of anyone other than God?’
(QUR’AN 16:52)
A MUSLIM IS, literally, one who
submits to the will of the One God.
Today, a Muslim is someone who
is willing to say, of his or her own free will, ‘I believe
that there is no god but God, and that
Muhammad (PBUH) is the messenger of God.’Adherents of
Islam do not view Muhammad (PB UH), or any other
prophet, as divine. They believe Jesus was aprophet of
God, not God incarnate. They believe Muhammad
(PBUH) was a prophet of God, not God incarnate. They do, however, view the
Qur’an, the text that was revealed to Muhammad (PBUH), as divine in nature.This
may seem at first to be a difficult claim. Yet
you should know that, if you agree with Jesus when he tells
us that God knows everything that is in
every human heart, and is aware of everything we think
or plan or do J
‘For there is nothing covered, that shall
not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not
be known.’ (LUKE 12:2)
C then you already agree with the
Qur’an.
If you agree with Jesus
when he tells us humans will be held
accountable after death for their deeds, and that
those whose evil deeds are heavy in
the balance will meet a fate very
different than of the righteous J
‘A good tree cannot
bring forth evil fruit, neither can a
corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that
bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast
into the fire.’ (MATTHEW 7:18-19)
C then you already agree with
the Qur’an.
If you agree with Jesus
when he rejects Satan’s attempt to call him ‘Son of
God’ and forcefully insists that ‘there is no god but God’ J
‘And Jesus answered and
said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou
serve.’ (LUKE 4:8)
J then you already agree with
the Qur’an.
These are the basic principles of Islam. If you
still believe that Jesus’ mission is incompatible with Islam, then you
may want to consider reading the Qur’an J to determine
for yourself whether or not it conflicts with the
teachings of Jesus.Muslims have no difficulty whatsoever celebrating Jesus
as a great Prophet; his insistence on the
points you just read are, we believe, not footnotes to a
sacrifi- cial rite, but the main thrust of the
true faith. Look at them again.We can hide nothing from
God.We will be judged on our thoughts,
words, and deeds in the life to come, and
there will be conse- quences for our choices in this
life.We are obliged to worship God Alone.
Do you believe that there is
no god but God? Most Christians I talk to will
intuitively answer ‘yes’—because it is very
difficult indeed to imagine Jesus giving any other
answer. There remains only the question of whether you believe Muhammad
(PB UH), like Jesus, to have been a
messenger of God. Jesus told us: ‘By their fruits shall you know them.’
The ‘fruit’ of Muhammad (PB UH)’s mission was and is the
Qur’an. I have been telling you, in this
book, about some of the many areas where the Qur’an matches up
seamlessly with the historical mission of Jesus. But it would be a mistake to
take my word, or the word of any human being, on a matter of
this importance. A great reformer once said: ‘We all have to do our own
believing, because we will all have to do our own dying.’ For my
part, I became a Muslim because I
knew I had to do my own believing, not anyone else’s. I
became a Muslim because Jesus insisted that it was not enough
merely to say ‘Lord, Lord,’ but far more important to do as he instructed. Do
as he instructs. Evaluate
the fruits of Muhammad (PB UH)’s mission for
yourself. Read the Qur’an. And make your own
decision.
APPENDIX A:
Q and the Qur’an(Textual Note)
MANY MODERN SCHOLARS
believe that what matches up between the
Gospels of Matthew and Luke (once the earlier Gospel
of Mark’s influence is removed) is so frequently in agreement that
it suggests a common source. This hypothetical common source, designated Q, is believed to be even
older than the Gospel of Mark, on which Matthew
and Luke also clearly rely. The final version of Gospel of
John dates from approximately100 years after the birth
of Jesus, and has no connection to Q.The remnants of this early Gospel, imperfectly re- constructed
by extracting parallel passages from Mat- thew and Luke, provide our best
perspective on the ministry of the historical Jesus.
The following excerpt is, I think, a
responsible overview of modern
Q scholarship. It is reproduced by permission.
THE SAYINGS GOSPEL Q(Q) comprises a hypothetical
collection of Jesus’ sayings, hypothesized in accordance with the two-source
hypothesis to be a source of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The
symbol Q comes from the
first letter of the German word for source, Quelle. The two-source hypothesis
forms the most widely accepted solution to the synoptic problem, which posits
that Matthew and Luke drew on two written sources, as shown by textual
correspondences between their works. The Gospel of Mark forms one source, and Q the other. The existence
of Q follows from the
argument that Matthew and Luke show independence in the double tradition (the
material that Matthew and Luke shared that does not appear in Mark).
Accordingly, the literary connection in the double tradition is explained by an
indirect relationship, namely, through use of a common source or sources. Arguments
for Luke’s and Matthew’s independence include: Matthew and Luke have different
contexts for the double tradition material. It is argued that it is easier to
explain Luke’s ‘artistically inferior’ arrangement of
the double tradition into more primitive contexts within his
Gospel as due to not knowing Matthew.The form of the material sometimes appears
more primitive in Matthew but at other times more primitive in Luke. Independence
is likely in light of the non-use of the other’s non-Markan tradition,
especially in the infancy, genealogical, and resurrection accounts. Doublets. Sometimes it appears that doublets in Matthew
and Luke have one half that comes from Mark and the other half from
some common source, i.e., Q. Even if Matthew and Luke are independent, the Q hypothesis states that
they used a common document. Arguments for Q being a written document
include: Exactness in Wording. Sometimes the exactness in wording is striking.
For example: Matt. 6:24 = Luke 16:13 (27/28 Greek words). Matt. 7:7-8 =
Luke 11:9-10 (24/24Greek words).There is commonality in
order between the twoSermons on/at the Mount.The
presence of doublets, where Matthew and Luke sometimes present two
versions of a similar saying, but in different contexts. Doublets often serve
as a sign of two written sources.Certain themes, such as the Deuteronomistic view
of history, are more prominent in Q than in either Matthew or Luke individually.
—Source: Wikipedia
(www.wikipedia.org)
Modern reconstructions of Q make for important and fascinating reading
for anyone interested in Jesus’ message; one text of the
hypothetical Gospel appears in Robert J. Miller’s The Complete
Gospels (HarperSan- Francisco, 1994.) Reading this book is
not meant to be a substitute for reading Q. The
following parallel passages of Q and the Qur’an
will, however, give a good sense of Q’s remarkable compatibility with
Islamic theology—a compatibility that cannot, I think be dismissed
as coin- cidence, and that has not, I think, been widely noticed.I
do not believe that Q is the
infallible Word of God, but I do believe it is an
important step forward in Biblical scholarship of which all Christians should
be aware. Most of the passages cited in this book are from Q. (Mark 10:18
is an exception to this.) All the Q passages I have referenced are
cited below, followed by parallel passages in the Qur’an.
Consider reading each Gospel passage out loud, and then reading the
complementary teaching from the Qur’an. Do the passages sound as though
they are issuing from the same Source J or
from wholly different religious traditions?
‘The light of the body is
the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole
body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy
body also is full of darkness. Take heed there- fore that
the light which is in thee be not
darkness.’ (LUKE 11:34-35)
‘Clear proofs have come to you from
your Lord to open your eyes—so whosoever sees, will do
so for the good of himself, and
whosoever blinds himself, will do so against himself.’ (QUR’AN 6:104)
‘For I say unto you, That unto every
one which hath shall be given; and from him
that hath not, even that he hath shall be
taken away from him.’ (LUKE 19:26)
‘Whoever brings a good
deed shall have ten times the like thereof to his
credit, and whoever brings an evil deed shall have
only the recom- pense of the like thereof, and they will not be wronged.’
(QUR’AN 6:160)
‘For where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also.’ (MATTHEW 6:21)
‘As for whoever has exceeded the limits
and preferred the life of this world, surely his abode will be the Fire
(in the hereafter); and as for whoever has feared to stand
before his Lord and restrained the desires of his self, surely his
abode will be the Garden (in the
hereafter). (QUR’AN 79:39-40)
‘A good man out of
the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that
which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure
of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the
heart his mouth speaketh.’ (LUKE 6:45)
‘From the land that is
clean and good, by the will of its Cherisher, springs
up produce, (rich) after its kind: but from the
land that is bad, springs up nothing but that
which is niggardly: thus do we explain the
Signs (by various sym- bols) to those who are grateful.’
(QUR’AN 7:58)
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.’ (MATTHEW 5:3)
‘Salãmun ‘Alaikum (peace be upon you) for that
you persevered in patience! Excellent indeed is the final home!’ (QUR’AN,
13:24)
‘Woe unto you that laugh now!
for ye shall mourn and weep.’ (LUKE 6:25)
‘So let them laugh a little
and (they will) cry much as a
recompense of what they used to earn (by
committing sins).’ (QUR’AN 9:82)
‘And I say unto you my friends, Be
not afraid of them that kill the body, and after
that have no more that they can do. But I will
forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he
hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say
unto you, Fear him.’ (LUKE 12:4-5)
‘To Him belongs all that is in the
heavens and (all that is in) the earth and perpetual sincere obedience is
(due) to Him. Will you then fear any other than
God?’ (QUR’AN, 16:52)
‘Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for
yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.’ (MATTHEW
6:19-20)
‘O my people! Truly, this life of the
world is nothing but a (quick passing) enjoyment, and verily, the Hereafter
that is the home that will remain forever. Whosoever does an evil deed, will
not be requited except the like thereof, and whosoever does a
righteous deed, whether male or female and
is a true believer, such will enter Paradise, where
they will be provided therein (with all things in abundance)
without limit.’ (QUR’AN, 40:39-40)
‘Jesus said unto him, No man,
having put his hand to the plough, and looking
back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’ (LUKE 9:62)
‘Wavering between belief and disbelief!
Belonging neither to this nor to that! Whom God allows to go
astray, you have no ability to find a way for him.’ (QUR’AN,
4:143)
‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless
them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and
pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you, that ye may be the children of
your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun
to rise on the evil and on the good,
and sendeth rain on the just and on the
unjust.’ (MATTHEW 5:44-45)
‘Repel the evil deed of another with your good
deeds. You will see that the one with
whom you had enmity will become your close friend.’ (QUR’AN 41:34)
‘And it came to pass, as he spake
these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and
said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the
paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea rather,
blessed are they that hear the word of God,
and keep it.’(LUKE 11:27-28)
‘It is not (possible)
for any human being to whom God has given
the Book and Wisdom and Prophethood to say to the
people: ‘Be my worshippers rather than God’s.’ On the
con- trary (he would say): ‘Be devoted worshippers of your
Lord, because you are teaching the Book,
and you are studying it.’ Nor would he order you
to take angels and Prophets for lords. Would he order you to
disbelieve after you have submitted to God’s
will?’ (QUR’AN 3:79-80)
‘Or what man is there of you, whom if his
son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or
if he ask a fish, will he give him a
serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good
gifts unto your children, how much more
shall your Father which is in heaven
give good things to them that ask him?’ (Matthew 7:9-11)
‘How many creatures exist
that do not carry their provisions along with
them! God provides for them just as he provides for you.’
(QUR’AN29:60)
‘Then his lord, after
that he had called him, said unto him,
O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee
all that debt, because thou desiredst me.
Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy
fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him
to the tormentors, till he should pay all
that was due unto him. So likewise shall
my heavenly Father do also unto you, if
ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother
their trespasses.’ (MATTHEW 18:32-35)
‘... Let them pardon and turn away (overlook
faults); What! Do you not wish that God should forgive you? And
God is Oft-Forgiving, All- Merciful.’ (QUR’AN 24:22)
‘Enter ye in at the
strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is
the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be
which go in thereat. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is
the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there
be that find it.’ (Matthew 7:13-14)
‘And (have we not)
shown him the two high- ways? Yet he does not pursue
the uphill path. What will tell you what the
uphill path is?’ (QUR’AN 90:10-12)
‘When the unclean spirit is gone
out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest,
and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from
whence I came out; and when he is come, he
findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.’ (MATTHEW 12:43-44)
‘Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of
mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind, from the evil of the Sneaking
Whisperer who whispers in the hearts of mankindJ’ (QUR’AN 114:1-5)
‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou
art in the way with him; lest at any time
the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the
judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be
cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou
shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.’
(MATTHEW 5:25-26)
‘To whomsoever then the admonition has
come from his Lord, then he desists, he
shall have what has already passed (as a profit),
and his affair is in the hands of Allah; and
whoever returns (to it) — these are the inmates
of the fire; they shall abide in it.’ (QUR’AN 2:275)
‘For there is nothing covered, that shall
not be revealed; neither hid, that shall
not be known.’ (LUKE 12:2)
‘He knows very well whatever they conceal
or reveal even when they cover themselves with their
garments. God certainly knows the inner- most (secrets) of the hearts.’
(QUR’AN 11:5)
‘And Jesus answered and
said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt
thou serve.’ (LUKE 4:8)
‘Children of Adam, did We not
command you not to worship Satan? He was
your sworn enemy. Did We not command you to
worship Me, and tell you that this is the straight path?’ (QUR’AN 36:60-61)
‘O People of the Book!
Do not exaggerate in your religion nor
utter anything concerning God except the truth. The
Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of God,
and His word which He conveyed unto Mary,
and a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and
say not ‘Three’—Cease! (It is) better for you!—God is only One God. Far is it
removed from His Transcendent Majesty that He should have a
son. His is all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth. And God is
sufficient as Defender.’ (QUR’AN 4:171)
APPENDIX B:
Common Questions
Do Muslims accept Jesus Christ?
THEY DO ACCEPT and revere him as a
Prophet of ex- tremely high rank, and as one of the
most important figures in human history. They do
not regard him as the only begotten Son of God.No person who
rejects Jesus Christ can be properly called a Muslim.
Practitioners of the Religion are obliged to
accept, and show deference and respect to the mission
of Jesus Christ—just as they are obliged to accept, and show deference
and respect to the missions of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Lot,
and other familiar Prophets of the Bible. The
lives and experiences of these remarkable men (and,
interestingly, of the Virgin Mary) are set out in great detail in
the Qur’an.
Do Muslims accept the Bible?
Muslims believe, and have held as a matter of
faith for many centuries, that the text of the Christians Bible,
including the four ‘official’ Gospels, was corrupted over the centuries by
short-sighted human beings who had their eyes set on temporal gains (such
as political or social influence).This is also the view of the best modern
scholars of the Biblical texts. In the various texts of the Gospels alone—texts
that are, by the way, written in Greek, and not in the Aramaic that was
actually spoken by Jesus—there are over three thousand textual
dis-agreements, and clear evidence of extensive alteration by many hands
over a period of many years. Muslims regard the Qur’an as the unaltered
Word of the Living God. They do not place the Bible in this category.
Does the Qur’an condone or encourage
violence against innocent people?
No. It expressly forbids such actions.
It also expressly forbids suicide. Disobeying its instructions on either
of these points is a grave sin that exposes one’s soul to the
prospect of eternal hellfire.
Did the Prophet Muhammad (PB UH) teach
hatred or intoler-ance?
No. He taught precisely the contrary. A famous
saying of his is: ‘There shall be no harm for harm, no revenge for
revenge.’ He may be the only political figure in his- tory who, on
assuming the role of emperor, proceeded to grant general amnesty to factions
that he knew full well had plotted his assassination. He also
vigorously protected the religious rights of non-Muslim groups under his
protection.
Why don’t Muslims excommunicate people who
seem to violate (or seem to advocate the violation of) these teachings?
There is nothing to excommunicate them
from. There is no hierarchy or mediator within the Religion; believers
are individually accountable for their own decisions to obey, or to disregard,
God’s instructions.
APPENDIX C:
Note to Atheists and Agnostics
Every responsible voyager across unknown
territory has to establish a contingency route of some kind. Suppose you
were scaling a mountain no one had ever climbed—you would have to develop
a primary strat- egy, and then a secondary strategy for reaching your
destination in case of miscalculation, unforeseen circumstances, or simple
bad luck.So. You have never died before. What is your backup
plan?
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