Dajjal as the Real Jesus

In his book Islamic Antichrist , Joel Richardson claims the Dajjal, the Islamic Antichrist, will in reality be the real return of Jesus. The primary reason he makes this claim is because many Muslims believe the Dajjal will claim to be the Jewish Messiah, just as Jesus will. Richardson doesn’t spend very much time trying to point out similarities with the Dajjal and the real Jesus since there are virtually no similarities. The two characters are very different in their attributes and actions, and the reason they are so different is, as we have seen, the Dajjal is based on the biblical and extra-biblical Christian views of the Antichrist.

When attempting a comparison of these two figures, Richardson highlights only two items. The first is that the Dajjal is believed to be the Jewish Messiah, like Jesus; and second is that the Dajjal “defends Israel” from the Mahdi in the same way Jesus defends Israel from the Antichrist. I think this second point should be called into question since it takes a bit of imagination to understand the hadiths about the Dajjal’s actions as “defending Israel.” With that being said, even if we accepted these two premises as true, all this really proves is that the Dajjal is modeled after the early Christian views of the Antichrist and it is not a prophecy of the return of Jesus hidden in Islamic traditions.

Even if someone doesn’t believe the Antichrist will claim to be the Jewish Messiah, no one would disagree that this was the earliest view of the church and it was certainly the prominent view at the time the hadiths were written. In other words, the Islamic hadith writers believed the Christian Antichrist would claim to be the Jewish Messiah and that is the reason the Dajjal also claims to be the Jewish Messiah. Similarly the Bible says the Antichrist will gather the nations to Armageddon in Israel to fight the last battle, a battle in which Jesus defeats the Antichrist. Given all we have discovered in this chapter, it is no surprise then that the Islamic hadiths also place their last battle in Israel where Isa, their version of Jesus, destroys the Dajjal. That is an exact match! This is very simple—the hadith writers were basing the Dajjal on the Antichrist, not Jesus. 

I would invite you to consider how irresponsible Joel Richardson’s theory about the Dajjal is. He is taking a character, who is unambiguously molded after the Antichrist, and telling Christians not just that the Islamic version of events will more or less come to pass, but that when they do, they should embrace the Dajjal as their savior!  Even if there is the slightest chance that the Antichrist will actually claim to be the Jewish Messiah or Jesus Himself, then Richardson’s theory is setting up the Christians who take his theory seriously for disaster. I will spend a considerable amount of time in the last chapter of this book explaining how much damage this theory could cause.

Conclusion

In this section we have looked at Islamic eschatology in detail.  We saw that the writers of the hadiths based their end times doctrine partly on the Bible and partly on the extra-biblical beliefs of Christians at the time. We have seen that the Islamic Isa is based on Jesus, the Dajjal is based on the Antichrist, and the Mahdi is based on the so-called Last Roman Emperor. We have looked at the theories of Islamic Antichrist proponents like Joel Richardson who believe the Islamic version of the end times will actually come to pass more or less like the hadiths say, but that Isa is really the False Prophet, the Mahdi is the Antichrist, and the Dajjal is the real Jesus. I hope I have presented enough to show the flawed reasoning behind this theory and that the simplest explanation, which is that the hadith writers were simply plagiarizing Christian sources, is the correct one. There is absolutely no reason to expect the Islamic version of the end times to come to pass or to be true in any way.