Start with what Muslims do believe about Jesus, because it surprises people. He was born of a virgin, he performed miracles, and the Quran calls him the Messiah. Muslims hold that he is alive with God now and will return. The Quran devotes more space to his mother Mary than the New Testament does, and one of its chapters carries her name.
What Muslims do not believe is that he was God. Here is why, argued as far as possible from the Christian sources, since those are the books the disagreement is about. Each entry gives the verse, the standard Christian reading of it, and the reason Muslims find that reading to be an addition to the text.
Jesus prays throughout the gospels. In the garden before his arrest he falls on his face and asks that the cup pass from him, and adds that it should be as the Father wills and not as he wills.[1] Luke says that he often withdrew to lonely places to pray, and that he once spent a whole night in prayer.[2]
Prayer is what a creature does towards its creator. A will that defers to another will is not the same will. Muslims read the scene in the garden as decisive: this is a man in distress, asking God for something, and submitting when the answer is no.
The strongest Christian reply is that the Son and the Father are distinct persons, so one may address the other without any difference of nature, and that Jesus prays in his human nature. The church later made this exact point by teaching that Christ had two wills, a human and a divine, at the Council of Constantinople in 680 to 681. Muslims observe that the doctrine was needed because the gospel scene reads as one will yielding to another.
“The Father is greater than I.”[3] Jesus says this to his disciples at the last supper, as he tells them that he is going away. The sentence is a comparison of rank, and it is stated without qualification.
The standard Christian reading is that he meant in his human nature only. Some of the church fathers explained the verse in other ways, for instance by saying that the Father is the source from whom the Son is eternally begotten. That reading, and the one about human nature, both require the doctrine of the Trinity and of 2 natures to be in place before the verse is read. Take the verse on its own and it says what it says.
The fairest form of the Christian objection is that scripture must be read as a whole, so a verse about the Son’s humility has to be set beside the verses that speak of his glory. Muslims agree that the whole should be read together. They add that the other passages are the ones that need explaining, and that no passage has Jesus describing himself as lesser than anyone else in the way he describes himself as lesser than the Father.
Asked when the end would come, he said that no one knows the day or the hour, not the angels in heaven, not the Son, only the Father.[4] Matthew has the same saying, though some early manuscripts of Matthew omit the words “nor the Son”, and Luke has no parallel to the saying.[5]
A being that does not know something is not omniscient. Luke adds that as a boy Jesus grew in wisdom, which fits a human mind that learns and does not fit a mind that knew everything from the start.[6] Christian theology has an answer, again through the 2 natures: the Son knew the hour as God and not as man, or chose not to exercise that knowledge. Some of the church fathers gave a different answer and said that he spoke of what he was not authorised to reveal.
Muslims note that the answer is always the same answer, and that it was worked out centuries later to reconcile texts that read more simply without it. The simple reading is that Jesus was a human being whose knowledge came from God, and who said plainly where it stopped.
The gospels contain no sentence in which Jesus says “I am God” or “worship me”. The verses cited instead are read as implications: “I and the Father are one”,[7] “before Abraham was, I am”,[8] and the like. Both come from the Gospel of John, which most scholars place last among the four, around the end of the first century. The earlier gospels contain nothing like them.
The objection is strong, and it should be stated fully. In both scenes his hearers pick up stones, and in the first they say that he makes himself God.[7] Yet in the same scene Jesus answers by quoting the psalm that calls those who received God’s word “gods”, which shows how loose such language was in his setting.[9] Elsewhere he prays that his disciples may be one just as he and the Father are one.[10] Each saying has an alternative reading that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus would have recognised, unity of purpose, pre-existence in God’s plan.
Muslims find it strange that the central claim of a religion would rest on inference when the man had every opportunity to say it plainly, and said so many other things plainly.
The Quran calls Jesus a word from God, a spirit from him, the Messiah, a messenger, a servant. It has him deny in the strongest terms that he told anyone to take him as a god. On the day of judgement God asks him whether he told people to take him and his mother as gods besides God, and he answers that he said only what he was commanded: worship God, my Lord and your Lord.[11]
Elsewhere the Quran tells Christians not to say “three”, and describes the Messiah, son of Mary, as no more than a messenger of God.[12] As an infant in the cradle Jesus speaks and says that he is a servant of God.[13] Muslim commentators have always read these verses as correcting the doctrine of the Trinity and of his divinity while honouring Jesus as a prophet of high rank.
For a Muslim this settles it, since the Quran is revelation. For a non-Muslim it does not, and I do not pretend it does. That is why the first 4 reasons come from the other side’s book.
The bottom line
A man who prayed, said the Father was greater, did not know the hour, and never plainly claimed the title. Muslims read those 4 facts the simple way and say: a prophet, honoured beyond nearly any other, and a man.
Christians read them through a doctrine that took several centuries to settle, and they have a coherent reply to each verse taken singly. The reply depends every time on the same framework of 2 natures, which the verses themselves do not state. The question is which reading needs the least added to it. On that test the Muslim reading has the shorter route from the text to its conclusion, and the Quran, for those who accept it, confirms where the route ends.
Notes
- Matthew 26:39.
- Luke 5:16 and Luke 6:12.
- John 14:28.
- Mark 13:32.
- Matthew 24:36, where the words “nor the Son” are missing from some early manuscripts.
- Luke 2:52.
- John 10:30 and John 10:31 to 33.
- John 8:58.
- John 10:34 to 36, quoting Psalm 82:6.
- John 17:11 and 17:22.
- Quran 5:116 to 117.
- Quran 4:171 and 5:72 to 75.
- Quran 19:29 to 30.