Part V
In this part . . .
No story of the historical Jesus makes sense without some attention to the “Christ of faith,” the one Christians actually have been worshipping for 2,000 years. There have actually been many Christs as each age has probed the significance of the man in terms that made sense to them.
Throughout this part, you see how the concepts and artwork of Christ changed as the Christian Church went from the persecuted minority to the imperial religion. You trace the interest in Jesus’s human nature from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and see how different Jesus started to look after he was taken to the “new worlds” by European empires. Finally, you preview more than 100 years of Jesus films to see how he has looked on the silver screen.
Chapter 16
In This Chapter
● Following the spread of early Christianity
● Imitating and adoring Jesus
● Journeying with Jesus to new worlds
● Exploring other religions’ views of Jesus
Jesus, the Palestinian Jewish preacher, ended up with a global audience. Today, Christians number more than 2 billion believers, which is about a third of the world’s population. How did the spread of Christianity occur? You find out in this chapter. I help you track Christians’ first forays into the Mediterranean region, pivot from the period of the imperial persecution to the imperial adoption of Christianity, view the various ways that Jesus was worshipped, see the conflict and creativity as Christ was made over into an agent of empire, and discover what other religions say about Jesus.
Crowning Jesus as Cosmic King
Early Christians came to believe that Jesus ruled the universe with God. In their eyes, he was already a cosmic king and was painted in contrast to the earthly rulers. And within three centuries, the emperors arrayed against Jesus came to embrace him as well. This coalition of heavenly and earthly power presented both opportunities and serious challenges for followers of the humble Jewish carpenter from the Galilee, as you find out in the following sections.
The spirit-driven life of Jesus's followers
Christians in the first century believed that Jesus was alive and well. It wasn’t that they believed he had risen and was simply twiddling his thumbs somewhere up in heaven. No, they wrote in their letters and gospels that he was “at the right hand of God,” which was their way of saying that Jesus was God’s power in the world (Mark 14:62; Acts 5:31; 7:55-56; Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:15-23; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 12-13; 1 Peter 3:22). They believed that Jesus would return soon, and they even prayed for it (as in 1 Corinthians 16:22). As I explain in the following sections, they believed that Jesus’s spirit had filled them and was working in them as they took the gospel to whoever would listen. And their identification with Jesus only deepened as they began to be persecuted by the Roman authorities for worshipping Jesus as God.
Spreading the Word
Taking the message of the risen Jesus on the road was central to the gospel because the earliest believers wanted to gather in all the nations before Jesus returned. The following things propelled them:
● The interpretation of prophecy: Jesus’s followers believed that one day all nations would worship God (Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6 are echoed in Luke 2:32 and Acts 13:47). They wanted to help that prophecy come true by converting all the nations.
● The failure of the Jewish mission and the success among non-Jews: Many Jews rejected the claim that Jesus was the messiah, while many Gentiles (non-Jews) accepted it. In fact, the early Christians came to believe that God’s promise extended to Jews and Gentiles (Romans 9-11; Acts 13:44-52). Later Christians kicked the Jews out of the equation entirely, saying that God had picked a new “Israel” (the Christians) that didn’t include the old one at all. (In recent decades, several Christian churches have disavowed that teaching.)
● The sense that they had been commissioned by Christ: Early Christians came to believe that Jesus had commanded them to gather believers all over the world (Mark 13:10; Matthew 28:16-20; John 17:18; 20:21-22; Acts 10:42-43).
● The desire to share forgiveness: After being inspired and motivated by God’s mercy and forgiveness, Christians wanted everyone to feel the love (Romans 5:1-21; 2 Corinthians 4:1-15; 5:11-21).
Motivated by these beliefs, early Christians began traveling throughout the Mediterranean, North Africa, and as far east as India to spread the good news about Jesus. Our evidence for how they did this is limited to Paul’s letters, the later Acts of the Apostles, and apocryphal acts of apostles that date even later. Several apostles went in different directions (Galatians 2:7-9; Mark 6:8-11), taking their wives with them (1 Corinthians 9:5) and possibly earning their keep by preaching and miracles (1 Corinthians 9:3-18).
Worshipping Jesus as God and becoming martyrs
The Christian belief that Jesus is divine grew out of the resurrection experience (see Chapter 15). By 112 CE, we have Roman evidence that Christians were singing hymns to Christ “as to a God” (from the Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus in Turkey, Pliny the Younger, Letter 10.96). This new belief in Jesus is a problem for Pliny because it means that these folks won’t pray and offer incense and wine to the Roman gods and to the image of the emperor. Those Pliny can’t torture into recanting, he executes for insubordination and atheism (which literally means “without [the right] gods”).
When Christians resisted Roman religion, it set them apart from other imperial subjects, including their own families. This caused social tension that occasionally erupted into political trouble and led rulers to execute early Christian leaders, including the following:
● The Hellenist deacon Stephen (Acts 7:54-60)
● James the brother of John, who was a member of the Twelve (Acts 12:1-3)
● Peter, a member of the Twelve, and Paul, an apostle to the Gentiles after Jesus’s death and resurrection (John 21:18-19; Acts 21:10-11; 1 Clement 4-5)
Because Jesus had been executed, Christians understood that they too might die (Q 12:4-9; Mark 8:34-38; Revelation 7:9-17; 17:6). They wanted their deaths to testify to their faith. That’s why they’re called martyrs, or “witnesses” — their choice to resist pressure and remain true to their faith was a compelling witness to Christ.
Stories proliferated about how these martyrs had been “perfected” by suffering death as Jesus had. Consider what Ignatius of Antioch said on his way to the lions (yes, wild animals were a common death sentence back in the day!): “Let me become an imitator of the passion of my God” (Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 6.3). People came to view the martyrs as the crucified Christ, such as the believers who reportedly saw Christ in the slave girl Blandina’s body on the cross (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.1.41, 55-56).
The persecutions were only occasional and local in the first centuries of Christian history but escalated dramatically in the third century, when Rome began to blame Christians for all its troubles. Rome began to suffer military defeats at the hands of “barbarians,” and its citizens began to wonder why the gods had lifted their veil of protection. The Christian atheists were targeted in empirewide persecutions under the emperors Maximinus (235-238), Decius (who persecuted Christians between 250 and 251), Diocletian (his persecution occurred from 303-305), and Galerius (305-311).
The conversion of Constantine
The Roman Emperor Constantine, who reigned from 306-337, took many pro-Christian steps during his reign that had an enormous impact on the history of the West. As the story goes, Constantine’s conversion to Christianity came on October 28, 312 CE, during the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome. He had a vision of a cross of light in the sky and the Greek words en touto nika (“in this conquer”). Taking this vision to heart, he inscribed the symbol of Christ (a form of the cross) on his flags and his soldiers’ shields and won the battle, effectively taking over the entire Western Empire (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 27-32).
Emboldened by his success, Constantine returned the favor by legalizing the Christian religion in the Edict of Milan in 313 CE. He even supported the construction of Christian basilicas, such as Old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and later the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (see Chapter 20 for more on this holy site). He also convened the bishops of the East and West at the Council of Nicaea so that he could help them get their act together regarding teachings about God’s relationship to Jesus (see Chapter 15 for more on this meeting of the bishops).
Despite these major pro-Christian moves, Constantine didn’t take the final step to become Christian himself until the end of his life. Clearly, the political advantages of unifying the Christians and solidifying their status were a bigger priority for him than taking the baptismal plunge. Plus, most of the Roman leadership was still pagan, so until his death, he had to walk a fine line between his new religious beliefs and the traditions of the empire.
Sanctioning Christianity
After 60 years of power shifts between pagans (who worshipped the Roman gods), Arians (who thought that Jesus was of lower rank than God the Father), and Nicene Christians (who thought that Jesus was of the same substance as the Father), Theodosius, the latest emperor, had had enough. He made the Christianity practiced by the Bishops of Rome and Alexandria the only legal religion in the empire in 380 CE.
This switch from persecuted religion to official religion rocked the Christian world. Instead of being executed for their beliefs (as I explain in the earlier section “Worshipping Jesus as God and becoming martyrs”), now people were being rewarded with power and prestige for being Christian. People felt that God’s kingdom had fused with the Roman Empire (for the impact of this belief on artistic representations of Jesus, see Chapter 17). It took great intellects like the North African Bishop Augustine to remind
Christians that no human nation, however glorious, is the be-all and end-all. Augustine thought that the only “city” that could fulfill human hopes was the city of God — not Rome, and not even the Christian Church (Augustine, The City of God). As you’ll see, that lesson was often forgotten in Western history.
Bringing Jesus into Daily Life
Popular portrayals of and devotions to Christ after the fall of the Roman Empire focused less on political power and more on lifestyle choices. The average Christian, for instance, met Jesus in the Eucharist (also known as Holy Communion today), relived his life through spiritual disciplines, and revered him for his love and sacrifice, as I show you in the following sections.
Celebrating the presence of Christ
From the fourth century on, the one place that most Christians felt they encountered Christ was in the bread of their Eucharistic liturgies. The prayer of the service was directed to God the Father, but Christians believed that they encountered Christ in the bread and wine, which they understood to be the “body” and “blood” of their Lord (based on the accounts of the Last Supper in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul; see Chapter 14). Reverence for Christ’s presence in the Eucharist began to grow in the Eastern and Western churches.
Imitating Christ
Christians showed their devotion to Christ by imitating his life. They had always done this: some by adopting lifestyles as itinerant preachers, others by enduring martyrdom (which I cover earlier in this chapter), and others still by caring for the poor and sick. But when the era of martyrdom ended and conversion became desirable (just after the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, whom I discuss earlier in this chapter), serious believers had to find other ways to show their Christian values.
Sacrificing worldly desires
One path that many Christians took to mimic Jesus’s life was asceticism, from a Greek word for “physical exercise.” Only these Christians weren’t going down to the gym every day to work out. Instead, they were renouncing the “desires of the flesh.” They demonstrated their commitment to their spirits by exercising vigilance over their bodies. For instance, they restricted their diets, secluded themselves in caves, and abstained from sex. Some thought these folks were crazy, but others considered them to be holy.
Practicing poverty and tending to the sick
Not everyone thought that it was a good idea to hole up in a cave and disengage from the secular world. In a different way of imitating Christ, several individuals embraced particular attributes of Christ (such as poverty, itinerancy, and simplicity) and founded movements with like-minded devotees.
Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), for example, was perhaps the most well known and well loved. He was raised in a wealthy Italian family, but he renounced it all in order to live a life of voluntary poverty and itinerant preaching. Famous for nursing lepers and receiving the stigmata, or the wounds of Christ (see Chapter 14 for more about stigmata), Francis modeled his life on Jesus’s life. He did so in conscious contrast to both the secular power of his family and the growing wealth and political power of the Church.
Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) is regarded as a “Doctor of the Church” in the Catholic tradition because of her prominent role of advising popes during a period of schism. She adopted such a strict ascetic life (living only on the Eucharist for a time) that her death at a young age was probably due to complications from anorexia. But she also experienced a “mystical marriage” with Christ that led her to go out on the streets and tend to the sick and the poor, tasks that she identified with Jesus’s work during his life.
The legend of the blood libel
The devotion to the sufferings of Christ unfortunately had a dark side. This dark side came from the way this devotion perpetuated a fear of the Jews, because as the gospels record it, "the Jews" supposedly were responsible for Jesus's death (Chapters 13 and 14 explain how unhistorical that charge is). Any devotion that focuses on Jesus's suffering has the potential to stir up animosity toward the Jews and a fear of the threat they supposedly posed. In truth, however, the Jews were the ones who were threatened by Christians, because Christians were in power. Nevertheless, Christians projected their paranoia in a particularly insidious legend called the blood libel.
This legend is a weird reversal of the crucifixion narrative. Christians imagined that, come Passover, Jews would kidnap a Christian child and take it into a back room where they would slit its throat and drain the blood to use in baking the Passover matzah (or unleavened bread). There was never any truth to this rumor, and it was absurd to boot. After all, consuming the blood of animals is prohibited in Leviticus 7:26-27, so obviously human blood is out of the question too! But, unfortunately, this legend was like an undying ember that could be fanned into flame whenever Good Friday rolled around or a Christian child went missing.
Starting in England in 1144, there have been over 150 cases of blood libel accusations, where innocent Jews were arrested, accused of killing a Christian child, and, tragically, often executed. The most recent cases took place in Russia (1911) and in Germany under Hitler (1933-1945), and this appalling legend lives on in anti-Semitic propaganda today.
Loving Christ
The Middle Ages (from the 5th century to the 15th century) saw a new development in the West — an explosion of interest in the human person visible in everything from the exuberant stained glass in Gothic cathedrals to the literary humanism of the great medieval scholastics. It also led to a new focus on Jesus the man that stressed his suffering for others and cultivated a response of grateful love.
Celebrating the human Jesus and imagining his suffering
One of the most famous medieval expressions of Jesus’s humanity was the intimate portrait of the baby Jesus with his mother that began popping up in the 1200s. The first “Madonna” wasn’t today’s cone-wearing, Kabbalah-practicing singer, but rather Jesus’s mother (from the Italian mia donna, or “my lady”). In the same century, Francis of Assisi popularized the Christmas creche, which is the manger scene in which animals and shepherds join the holy family at Jesus’s birth. (See the earlier section “Practicing poverty and tending to the sick” for an introduction to Francis of Assisi.)
The Middle Ages also saw an emphasis on the suffering of Christ, such as artistic depictions of his death (see Chapter 17) and devotional practices like imitating Jesus’s final walk to his crucifixion. The nearby sidebar “The legend of the blood libel” reveals the dark side of this empathy.
Finding a soul mate in Jesus
In the 1500s, great medieval monastics, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, and mystics, such as John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, prayed fervently for a union with Christ and, through him, for a union with God. While their intense romantic language has fallen out of favor with modern folks, their image of the soul searching for its rest continues to frame the Western quest for spiritual satisfaction even as that quest moves beyond Christianity.
Imposing the Message of Jesus in an Age of Empire
The gospel charge that says Christians should take Jesus’s message abroad was reinvigorated when Christian empires such as
Spain and England consolidated from the 16th to the 19th centuries. When they managed to mount enough military muscle to expand beyond their borders, they took the Christian message with them. All these countries had practiced their expansionist impulses on the European continent first, but when the territory they desired was controlled by Muslims (during the Crusades, 1095-1492) or by non-Christians (during the exploration of Asia, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere), it added a new kind of religious motivation to the mix.
Taking Jesus's message to the colonies
The discovery of the “new world” in 1492 and the improved seafaring traffic to Africa, Asia, and Australia during the next three centuries gave Europeans access to unprecedented populations of unbelievers. Unlike during the Crusades, Christians during this time had the political, military, and economic muscle to colonize the regions and organize them for the enrichment of the home country. So for 450 years, the European nations carved up Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Australia as they battled with each other at home for dominance. And where their merchants and military went, their missionaries went as well, spreading Jesus’s message.
The colonizers believed that their culture and religion were superior to what they found on “pagan turf.” So, in a process that combined education, persuasion, and outright force, Christ came to these cultures as part of the imperial machine. It’s ironic, given that the historical Jesus was crucified by the empire of his day.
The language of the New Testament was part of the problem. Its various books envisioned a future in which Jesus would return and usher in a new age. These books used the rhetoric of the Roman Empire to envision this new kingdom. They imagined Jesus arriving at the end of time as a judge on a heavenly steed and crushing his enemies. They pictured a new earth centered in a restored “new Jerusalem” that would be a true kingdom of justice and peace (Revelation 18:1-22:5). The imperial imagery made it easier for the Europeans to imagine that they were ushering in the new age.
Their subjects, of course, often saw it otherwise, and several of the missionaries agreed. For example, the Dominican friars Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566) and Antonio de Montesinos recognized the brutality of their fellow countrymen and challenged it in the name of Jesus. They couldn’t square the beatings and killings with the gospel message of Jesus, no matter how much the imperial rhetoric of the New Testament seemed to authorize it. They also saw how counterproductive it was to their mission: Who would want to join a religion whose representatives abused them? So they challenged their governments to improve the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants in the colonies. These missionaries acted out of concern for the people and out of disappointment that the new Jerusalem they hoped to build in the new world was looking like just another greedy and destructive human kingdom.
Mixing different Versions of Christ in postcolonial cultures
The term postcolonial describes the period after an empire has left a colonized area. This term refers especially to when the European empires withdrew from their colonies in the mid-20th century and the indigenous peoples achieved political emancipation. Their cultural inheritance from Europe proved somewhat more difficult to dislodge, however. Some indigenous Christians wanted to remain Christians, but their Christ already looked different.
For instance, during the colonial period and in its wake, the values and traditions espoused by the empire and the indigenous values and traditions blended and battled, forging new hybrids. Like cars that mix electricity and gas, these hybrid cultures blended European and indigenous elements in a sometimes combustible mix. For example:
● In Latin America, the hybrid Christ mixed elements of a biblical liberator and a Marxist revolutionary in a grass-roots movement called liberation theology. Like the Jesus of the gospels, this Jesus was a champion of the poor rather than a friend of the wealthy elites.
● In African cultures, ancestors are revered and Jesus was ranked among them. Among African women, Jesus was portrayed as lover, life giver, and Mother Africa herself, who was ravaged by Europe.
● Many Asian Christians understood Jesus as an analogy to their religious prophets, like a western Dalai Lama or bodhisattva.
● In America, slaves and their heirs viewed Christ as a new Moses who was freeing them from their southern Egypt and as someone who had shared their profound physical sufferings.
None of these hybrids seems combustible at first glance. But each dislodged a Christ that Europeans or Americans controlled, so they often made the former colonizers uncomfortable. On top of that, the hybrid Christs often criticized the colonizers directly. Take the African American Jesus: As a kind of Moses, he was freeing the slaves not from an Egyptian Pharaoh but from Americans, and Americans weren’t used to thinking of themselves as the biblical bad guys. Even when the new hybrid Christs didn’t take the West on directly, they added new and diverse global voices to the mix, images that challenged westerners’ long-dominant views of Jesus.
Viewing Jesus in World Religions
Jesus is worshiped as God among Christians, but the other major religions of the world don’t view him in this way. Some nevertheless respect him as a moral teacher and prophet. There’s even one Christian denomination that has a different view of Jesus from other Christian groups.
Jesus in Mormonism
In 1830, Joseph Smith, Jr., founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, popularly known as the Mormon Church; its Web site is www.lds.org). The 13 million or so current LDS members view their church as the authentic form of Christianity that was restored in these latter days. LDS members accept the Christian Bible as revelation, but they also believe that whole parts of the story are missing and that corruptions entered the text in the translation process, and so additional divine revelation was needed. The supplementary revelation is in three books: the Book of Mormon, the Doctrines and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. Revelation continues in the office of the President of the Church, who is considered a living prophet.
Mormon views of Jesus differ from mainstream Christianity in a number of ways. For instance, in LDS belief:
● The Book of Mormon, compiled between 600 BCE and 421 CE by Israelite descendents in the Western Hemisphere, prophesies Christ and records events in the Americas around his birth, death, and resurrection visit.
● The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit aren’t one as was determined at the Council of Nicaea (see Chapter 15). Instead, they’re three separate Personages (three individual beings) of different rank. Heavenly Father and Son have physical bodies (glorified and resurrected ones) while the Holy Ghost doesn’t. Heavenly Father is married to Heavenly Mother, and they literally procreated all human spirits. Jesus’s human birth was in turn a literal birth accomplished by Heavenly Father and Mary.
● Jesus, as Jehovah, took a principal role in the premortal life, leading the Israelites of the Old Testament. When folks needed atonement for the inevitable sins that they all would commit as part of their earthly test, Jesus stepped up to the plate, enabling everyone to be divinized. His great act of atonement for human sin was the obedience he demonstrated to his Father’s will in both the Garden of Gethsemane, where he sweat blood (see Chapter 14) and in his death on the cross.
He continues his redeeming work in the postmortem spirit world, saving the ancestors of LDS converts. According to LDS teaching, Jesus is going to restore his kingdom on the American continent.
● Some 19th-century Mormon leaders taught that Jesus was married, like all good Mormons, and some even taught that he had multiple wives (including Mary Magdalene and Martha; see Chapter 10 for contrary evidence). But this teaching has gone in and out of favor in the decades since.
● Jesus was the firstborn of the spirit children. All people are just like him. In other words, everyone has a premortal spiritual existence (born of Heavenly Father and Mother), everyone gets time on earth to practice obedience, and everyone gets the chance for spiritual exaltation or godhood, achieved through the performance of Temple rites and the atoning act of Jesus. The Mormon Jesus is the Elder Brother in the family of believers. He’s a “Father” in terms of his obedience, but he’s not to be confused with the Father. He’s not a unique divine-human intermediary but a supreme example of what everyone can be.
Check out Mormonism For Dummies by Jana Riess and Christopher Kimball Bigelow and published by Wiley, for more background.
Jesus in Judaism
In Judaism, Jesus is viewed neither as the messiah nor as the son of God. He isn’t divine at all. Instead, Jews simply recognize Jesus as a first-century Jewish man whose teachings often sound much like the positions of other rabbis of the period. Some view Jesus as one of a number of failed messiahs in Jewish history; like the others, Jesus failed to usher in the messianic age because there’s still a lot of suffering in the world.
Jewish traditions about Jesus in the Babylonian Talmud were compiled sometime in the seventh century CE in a region that wasn’t under Christian control at the time. Free of the constraints of Christian imperial religion, the Babylonian rabbis could afford to be more open in their assessments of Jesus and his followers. The Talmud preserves several separate traditions:
● Jesus’s mother was an adulteress who had an affair with a Roman soldier.
● Jesus fled to Egypt and picked up magic there.
● Jesus was a rabbinic student who went astray or a rabbi who led his students astray.
● Jesus was tried fairly for blasphemy and idolatry, but no one came to his defense.
Each of these traditions confronts a gospel claim: that Jesus was the son of God and son of David, that he was a legitimate healer and teacher, and that he was arrested and tried hastily and illegally on trumped-up charges. While these are all late traditions and don’t tell us much about the historical Jesus, they do tell us a tremendous amount about later historical debates between Jews and Christians in a region where the playing field was relatively level.
However, the playing field wasn’t level at all in the Christian Byzantine Empire or in Western Europe. Christians’ horrific treatment of the Jews over the centuries in the name of Jesus has understandably shaped Jewish views of the man. His death becomes their death sentence, or at the very least a license to harass them. The gospels share the blame for this, even while the authors of some of the worst passages were most likely Jewish themselves.
For example, the author of Matthew has the Jewish crowd cry to Pontius Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), and later Christians took that literally, using it to justify obscene violence against people they labeled “Christ-killers” or deicides (God-killers).
It wasn’t just that “the Jews” were perceived to be guilty of that past deed; it was also the fact that they weren’t Christian. Their very existence raised a kind of perpetual question mark over Christianity, suggesting that Christian beliefs may be wrong, which is what Christians couldn’t tolerate.
This makes the stakes very high today whenever people take a look at the gospels’ portraits of Judaism or the quest for the historical Jesus. There are a lot of places where Christian biases for Jesus can become prejudices against Judaism. For example, a Christian who ponders why God sent Jesus might answer that Jesus had to correct a corrupted Jewish religion or supplement a deficient Jewish revelation. These interpretations target Jewish belief and practice as the culprits — the reasons why God intervened. That’s why it’s so important to reconstruct the Jewish Jesus carefully and to recognize that Jesus was killed not by “the Jews” as a group, still less the Jews of all time, but rather by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate with the collaboration of a few leading Jewish aristocrats.
For general information about Judaism, check out Judaism For Dummies by Ted Falcon and David Blatner (Wiley).
Jesus in Islam
A core belief of Islam is the absolute unity, or tawhid, of Allah (Allah is the name of God in Islam). While Christians share this belief, the Christian belief in Jesus as God’s son and the Holy Spirit as the third member of the Trinity strikes a Muslim’s ear as shirk (a violation of tawhid). So, the surahs (chapters) of the Qur’an consistently refer to Jesus as “son of Mary” rather than the “son of God” epithet usually found in Christian creeds.
Given the Muslim’s view of Jesus, it’s interesting that the Qur’an preserves the tradition that Jesus was a great miracle worker. After all, in Christian belief Jesus’s status as a miracle worker is taken as proof of his divine connections. Surah 5:110 is an example of Jesus’s miracle working. It tells the story of Jesus making birds out of clay and breathing life into them, which mirrors a tale told among Christians in the apocryphal Arabic Infancy Gospel (see Chapter 9).
Even more interesting is the Qur’anic view of Jesus’s crucifixion in surah 4:157-158. In this passage, Jesus isn’t actually crucified and therefore doesn’t die: “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so” to the onlookers. Allah raises Jesus up to himself without allowing Jesus to suffer anything. His exemption from suffering and death makes sense in the Qur’an because of the strong theme that God never abandons his prophets to such a fate.
Some Christians at the time were saying something similar — that Jesus didn’t die on the cross — but unlike the Qur’an, they were also saying that he couldn’t die because he wasn’t really human to begin with. These folks were called Docetists, and they thought that Jesus was completely divine (I discuss them in Chapter 15). Within the Muslim faith, that notion would be shirk because Muslims don’t believe that Jesus was divine at all, nor do they believe that Mohammed (their great prophet to whom the Qur’an was revealed) picked up stories like this from other people like the Docetists. Instead, they believe that the words of the Qur’an came directly from Allah.
Muslims recognize Jesus as a prophet and as one of the most important messengers of Allah. They believe in Jesus’s importance because he had an authentic scriptural revelation (the Injil, or gospel, from the Greek euangelion) and because he had not only an audience but also an enduring community of followers (as did Abraham, Moses, and Mohammed). However, a final prophet was needed to clarify the revelation, as the Qur’an claims the Torah and gospel predict (Qur’an 7:157; Muslim commentators gloss this verse by pointing to the “prophet like Moses” promised after Moses in Deuteronomy 18:15 and the advocate that Jesus promises will follow him in John 14:16). Muslims believe that Mohammed was that final prophet and (through the Qur’anic revelations) that he set right the distortions that people had introduced to Jesus’s message.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Islam, check out Islam For Dummies by Malcolm Clark (Wiley).
Jesus in Eastern religions
Hinduism is one of the oldest of the major world religious traditions, predating Christianity by several centuries. As Hindus encountered Christian missionaries in India in recent centuries, two notions about Jesus cropped up. They said that
● Jesus was one of many incarnations (avatars) of God, particularly Vishnu, who would regularly revisit earth in one form or another to reinvigorate Hindu teaching.
● Jesus had spent time in India himself (those hidden years mentioned in Chapter 9) and received his teaching from Hindu teachers.
Buddhist views of Jesus are a little less specific and historical than Hindu traditions. Buddhists, for example, distinguish between verbal doctrines and intuitive, clear seeing. The verbal doctrines are methods of delivery, which are more or less useful depending on the circumstances, while the clear seeing is where truth lies. Buddhists view the verbal doctrines about Jesus, which are at the center of Christian creeds and orthodoxy, as having utility but not truth. According to Buddhists, if these verbal doctrines are blindly followed or made ends in themselves, they lose their utility because they no longer deliver a living message.
In a Buddhist’s eyes, Jesus is more like a bodhisattva than the Buddha because bodhisattvas train ceaselessly in method and wisdom and make any sacrifices necessary for the sake of others’ spiritual progress. They aspire to complete Buddhahood and dedicate themselves to helping others achieve it, too. Jesus’s behavior looks like that to many Buddhists. Buddhists wouldn’t be inclined to view Jesus as a Buddha himself, though — as one who is capable of perfect compassion and wisdom — because they would not want to grant a major figure in another religion the status of their ultimate authority figures (a tendency in most religions!).
Check out Buddhism For Dummies by Jonathan Landaw and Stephan Bodian (Wiley) for general information about Buddhism.