For Sohail and the Qu'an indeed says that Jesus is a God! And the strange Quranic theology!

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Oct 29, 2006 at 10:48

My dear Sophail the real question here is why do we have such bizarre amalgam in the Qur'an in regard to the story of Jesus:

1. We are told that Jesus is only a prophet of Allah (I did already told you that the rerasons given by Allah as in Jesus breathing air and eating food are irrational reasons to conclude that he was just a man and not a God but again simple and profound Aristotelian logic was beyond your Allah).

2. We are also told that Jesus was able to create life by breating life into clay birds this indeed makes him a God.

3. We are also told that Jesus was lifted by Allah which would mean that he did not die and a being that does not die is a God.

4. Allah declares that the Trinity is Allah, Jesus and Mary which is not really the real Christian Trinity.

So where did Muhammad get all this strange and contradictory information from?

Well, we know that all of these ideas about the nature of the Christ were already being debated by Christians in the Middle East in the late antique period including Arias of Alexandria, Nestorians, Jacobites, Melkites, Gnostics etc...

Now the question now would be how did Muhammad the poor theologian transmit such information in the Qur'an?

1. May be during his travel to Syria he did discuss and listen to what Christians in the Middle East were saying about the matter. I very much doubt that this is what really happened, because after the Arab invasion of the Middle East the extant Syriac, Coptic and Greek sources are _silent_ about anything to do with Muhammad visiting Syria. The people of the Middle East had no clue who those invaders were. Those Arab invaders called themselves not Muslims and not Arabs but: al-Muhajiruun go figure!. As for the story of Bohira (see the Sira) I suspect that this was made up and should not be regarded as real history.

2. The second possibility is that may be Muhammad learned about such information from Christians living in th HIjaz. However, the Christian and Jewish sources are silent about any such communities in either Mecca or Medina.

3. Last: I suspect and I agree with Wansbrough that the origin of Islam is from Mesopotamia and not Arabia and that the Arab polity that invaded the Middle East in the early 630's had no defined religion as of yet and Islam was already being formed from the sectarian debates among Chistians and Jews and the end result was Islam. The Arab polity selected Islam as the religion of the emerging Arab state. I do belive that this is indeed what happened. But this detaches Islam from Arabia and Muahammad from the Qur'an. This fits very nicely with the extant evidence that we have.

So much for poor theology!

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