Some years ago, I published, on Christmas Eve, an article in The New York Times Magazine entitled “Jesus Before He Could Talk.” In a psychological or literary reading of the Christmas story, as opposed to a historical or theological one, I wrote,
The silence of the central character, the infant Himself, deserves particular attention. True, nobody expects the infant Jesus to speak, and the artistic maturity of the canonical Gospels is such that He never abuses His divine power to perform nature-defying tricks of precocity. (Not so the apocryphal gospels: in the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” to name one example, the 2-year-old Jesus brings a salted fish back to life.)…
The instinct to protect an endangered infant is hard-wired into the human species, a response that begins in the body, not the mind, in held breath and tensed muscles. A writer of fiction or drama who is able to activate this circuitry can achieve vivid emotional effects….When we, the audience, know something about a character that the character does not know about himself, a powerful dramatic tension results; when the oblivious character is an infant in mounting danger, this tension engages, in addition, the latent, instinctive parent in every adult.1
My remarks, in that article, are obviously all predicated on the assumption that what any writer, even of sacred scripture, should most want to do is build suspense, build tension, go past the argument-following mind to the instinct-driven body. Given this assumption, I gave the canonical Gospels high marks for building suspense by preserving the expected speechlessness of an infant and for the danger that mounts around him and faulted the apocryphal “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” for making Baby Jesus not just a talker but also a precocious little wonder-worker.
But must this assumption always apply? In this book, we have already seen several examples of Allah’s determination in the Qur’an to forestall suspense, to deliberately “spoil” or “give away” the story. Clearly, what is normative in the kinds of fiction, drama, and cinema we know best is not normative for Him. It is the moral of any story that makes it worth His telling, worth His calling a given story to Muhammad’s attention, and, accordingly, He builds the moral into any story that He tells from the very beginning.
So it is in the story that Allah tells of the infant Jesus and his mother.
And mention in the Book Mary, when she withdrew from her people to an eastern place.
She set up a screen to veil her from them.
And We sent her Our Spirit, which appeared before her as an immaculate human.
She said: “I take refuge in the All-Merciful from you, if you fear God.”
He said: “I am but a messenger from your Lord, to bestow upon you a son most pure.”
She said: “How can I have a son when no man has ever touched me, nor am I an adulteress?”
He said: “Thus did your Lord speak: ‘It is a matter easy for Me. We shall make him a wonder to mankind and a mercy from Us—a decree ordained.’ ”
So she conceived him and withdrew with him to a distant place. And labor pains came upon her by the trunk of a palm tree.
She said: “I wish I had died before this and become a thing utterly forgotten!”
He called out to her from beneath her: “Do not grieve. Your Lord has made a brook to flow beneath you. So shake towards you the trunk of the palm and it will drop down on you dates soft and ripe. Eat and drink and be of good cheer. And if you happen to see any human being, tell him: ‘I have vowed to the All-Merciful a fast, and will not speak a word today to any human being.’ ”
And she came to her people, carrying him.
They said: “O Mary, you have committed a monstrous act! Sister of Aaron, your father was not an evildoer, nor was your mother an adulteress.”
She pointed to him.
They said: “How do we speak to an infant in his cradle?”
He said: “I am the servant of God. He brought me the Book and made me a prophet, and made me blessed wherever I may be. He charged me with prayer and alms-giving as long as I live, and to be dutiful to my mother. And He did not make me arrogant and wicked. Peace be upon me the day I was born, the day I die, and the day I am resurrected, alive!”
This is Jesus, son of Mary: a statement of truth, concerning which they are in doubt.
It is not for God to take a child—Glory to Him! When He determines any matter, He merely says to it: “Be!” and it is.
God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him.
This is a straight path.” (Qur’an 19:16–36)
Allah quotes Jesus at only a very few points in the Qur’an. The words spoken by the newborn Jesus in this passage loom large within that small complement of quoted words. That Jesus speaks as an infant is only the first of many corrections that Allah makes in the received Christian account of Jesus’s origin, character, and mission.
Thus, as Allah tells that story, Mary has no husband, while in three of the four canonical Gospels, Joseph is both her husband and Jesus’s legal father. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, although both include Jesus’s virgin birth, Jesus’s genealogy is explicitly reckoned through Joseph. Jesus is a Jew of the tribe of Judah, descended through Judah’s son, Perez, and, generations later, through King David down to Joseph and only through him to Jesus. In the Gospel according to John, which includes no account of a virgin birth at all, Jesus is referred to quite routinely at 6:42 as the son of Joseph. By telling the story of Jesus and his mother without Joseph as his guardian and legal father, Allah corrects the received account to mute the centrality in it of Israel and of Jesus as Jewish while sharply underscoring the virginity and holy purity of Mary.
Just as in Allah’s telling of Moses’s story Israel as a people was less important than was Moses himself, so also here: in Allah’s telling of Jesus’s story, his identity as a Jew of royal descent plays no part at all. What matters is that Jesus is a Muslim who has received his own “Book” from Allah himself and indeed while still in his cradle.
Within the two Gospels that do include Jesus’s virgin birth, Mary’s virginity is not celebrated as such, any more than menopause is celebrated in the Genesis account of Isaac’s miraculous birth to Sarah and Abraham. Neither Gospel implies that Jesus’s virgin birth entailed a vow of virginity for Mary. The Gospel of Luke may imply that Mary married Joseph so soon after conceiving Jesus that no public scandal could be occasioned. She was, after all, betrothed to him at the time when the Angel Gabriel appeared to her, and betrothal was a state nearer to marriage than engagement is in our world. In the Gospel of Matthew, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream, after Mary’s pregnancy has first become apparent, and says:
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20–21)
The Gospels are written in Greek, and Iēsous is the Greek form of the name Joshua, a sentence name in Hebrew meaning “Yahweh is salvation” and the name of Moses’s first lieutenant and later, by Yahweh’s power, the conqueror of Canaan. In any case, in this account, too, Jesus’s birth occasions no scandal because Mary does have a husband and so the world at large assumes that Jesus’s birth to the two of them came about in the natural way.
In the Qur’an as in both of the biblical accounts, Mary’s conception, like Sarah’s, comes about through the power of God, and it is God’s power to create life—rather than the women’s respective biological conditions—that matters. The Sarah/Mary, menopause/virginity connection is further underscored in the Gospel of Luke when the Angel Gabriel, after delivering his momentous message to Mary, goes on to say:
“Your cousin Elizabeth also, in her old age, has conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible to God.” (Luke 1:36–37)
(The final phrase, italicized in the New Jerusalem Bible, is a loose quotation of Jeremiah 32:27.) That nothing is impossible for God is the point in the Gospel accounts that makes closest contact with the Qur’an, for in the Qur’an, where Mary has no male partner at all, God undoubtedly looms even larger than He does in the Gospels.
Allah looms large in the Qur’an’s account of Jesus’s conception for another reason—namely, that it is not the Angel Gabriel, as Allah tells the story, who announces to Mary that she is to conceive by the power of Allah but rather “Our Spirit, which appeared before her as an immaculate human.” Mary protests to this “immaculate human” that she has had no contact with a man, just as she does to the Angel Gabriel in the Gospel of Luke. In Luke, the angel replies in elevated tones:
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God.” (1:35)
Allah’s likeness replies more tersely and peremptorily, quoting Allah: “Thus did your Lord speak: ‘It is a matter easy for Me.’ ”
And Allah then resumes the narration, underscoring Mary’s isolation and her dependence upon Him. Having already withdrawn from her family to “an eastern place,” she now withdraws further to “a distant place” where, all alone, she goes into labor and groans, “I wish I had died before this and become a thing utterly forgotten.” It is at this point, before his birth, that Jesus begins to speak from within Mary’s womb, forthrightly instructing his mother to expect the miraculous and comforting intervention of Allah:
“Do not grieve. Your Lord has made a brook to flow beneath you. So shake towards you the trunk of the palm and it will drop down on you dates soft and ripe. Eat and drink and be of good cheer. And if you happen to see any human being, tell him: ‘I have vowed to the All-Merciful a fast, and will not speak a word today to any human being.’ ”
A majority of Muslim commentators interpret the voice that calls out “from beneath her” as the voice of the unborn Jesus. Do dates and water alleviate the pangs of childbirth? Perhaps they did in this instance. Allah says nothing about Mary’s parturition itself and nothing further about the behavior of the date palm. We may assume that it performed as, from the womb, Jesus said it would.
The next stage in the story, as Allah tells it, is Mary’s return home. Having left home before Allah’s messenger appears to her, Mary has retreated very far since her pregnancy began and may now have been absent from her family for more than nine months. How does her family receive her when she returns with a baby in her arms?
To digress for a moment on her genealogy, Mary—Miriam in Hebrew, maryam in Arabic—has the same name as another Miriam/maryam in both the Old Testament and the Qur’an, namely, Moses and Aaron’s sister Miriam. As Allah tells the story of Jesus’s mother, she, too, has a brother named Aaron, unmentioned in the Gospels. Their father coincidentally has the name, Imran, that Muslim tradition assigns to the father of Moses, of Aaron, and of their sister Miriam. (His biblical name is Amram.) According to The Study Quran, Allah’s inclusion of Aaron in His account of Mary’s homecoming, correcting the Gospel’s omission, may refer to a half-brother or may be intended to suggest somehow that Mary is related to the earlier Aaron and so to the earlier Imran.
In any case, this “sister of Aaron” faces a family dismayed as she returns home an unaccompanied mother. What can she say to them? She is “fasting” from speech at her son’s command, so she can only point to him, at which moment he astonishes them by delivering, from the cradle, his already quoted inaugural speech:
“I am the servant of God. He brought me the Book and made me a prophet, and made me blessed wherever I may be. He charged me with prayer and alms-giving as long as I live, and to be dutiful to my mother. And He did not make me arrogant and wicked. Peace be upon me the day I was born, the day I die, and the day I am resurrected, alive!” (Qur’an 19:30-33)
Rather like Moses in his confrontation with Pharaoh, Jesus begins by identifying himself as a Muslim (a “servant of God”) obligated to pray and give alms like any other Muslim. What makes him exceptional is that Allah has made him both a prophet and, as he has been given a “Book,” also a messenger. It is because of this that he can pronounce upon himself the traditional honorific blessing “Peace be upon him” (pbuh). But in so doing, Jesus takes care, in Allah’s telling, to locate himself securely within the standard human arc of birth-death-resurrection. Everyone will rise on “the Day,” so when Baby Jesus speaks of being “resurrected, alive!” he is not laying claim here to anything remotely like resurrection in the portentous Christian understanding of the term.
But can even an infant divinely empowered to speak as an adult be entrusted with an entire “Book”? Fortunately, even determined suspension of disbelief does not in this case require that we imagine a chunky bound volume dropped by the power of Allah into Jesus’s cradle. “Book,” here, like every other element in the set of stories that Allah tells about Muhammad’s prophetic predecessors, must be understood to conform to what “Book” means in the prophetic work of Muhammad himself—namely, Allah’s unchanging message. As entrusted to Baby Jesus, it would not be the written Gospels as Christians know them.
In this connection, we should recall that not one of the canonical Gospels nor even any of the various apocryphal gospels claims to be the work of Jesus as the scribal, quill-on-papyrus author. The canonical Gospels—the four that are a part of the Bible—all narrate the death of Jesus and so are understood to be the work of others writing about him afterward. We speak commonly of the (plural) Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But more traditionally, the four have been referred to in Christianity as the (single) Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, etc. The point of the word according is that the Gospel itself—the “Good News” of Christian revelation—was brought by Jesus himself through his life, death, and resurrection. The Good News was thus his Good News in the first instance. The traditional Four Evangelists then merely delivered their versions of what they understood to be his message. In the qur’anic episode, what was entrusted to Jesus might be seen as this single Gospel, not yet corrupted by Christian hands.
As I’ve said, Muhammad is known and, in fact, celebrated in Islam as an illiterate prophet. His followers recorded what he recited as dictation from Allah through the Angel Gabriel during the final twenty-two years of his life, collated what they had recorded after his death, and Caliph Uthman finally promulgated the written Qur’an as we now know it. Unlike Muhammad, Jesus was literate, according to the Gospels. In Luke 4:16–22, he reads in the Nazareth synagogue from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, concluding dramatically: “This text is being fulfilled today even while you are listening.” In John 8:6, he writes in the dust with his finger. But had Jesus been as illiterate as Muhammad, he could still have preached the same Gospel and stood in the same relation to the later written Gospels.
The larger correction of the Gospels that Allah delivers through the Qur’an is the implicit assertion that Allah entrusted the Gospel to Jesus as he entrusts the Qur’an to Muhammad or, in other words, that Jesus’s relation to the Gospel parallels Muhammad’s to the Qur’an. A Gospel or Gospels that read that way would, clearly enough, not read like the Gospels that Christians honor as scripture, so Allah delivers, in effect, a major challenge to the trustworthiness of the Gospels as Christians know them.
Baby Jesus’s cradle speech, though it addresses all these larger confessional issues, actually does not address the Imran family’s concern that Mary may have disgraced her worthy parents and them as well. We may perhaps assume that they were so stunned and humbled by her son’s words from the cradle that they refrained from further indignation toward her.
It is a striking fact that Mary is the only woman named in the Qur’an and that she is named there more than seventy times, many more times than she is mentioned in any of the Gospels. A great many of these references to her, however, come simply by their inclusion in many iterations of the phrase “Jesus, son of Mary,” and many of these, in turn, are pointed assertions that Jesus is indeed the son of this woman rather than the Son of God.
Interestingly, the designation “Son of God” is actually rare in the Gospels and does not necessarily confer divinity on a man so designated. Thus, tracing Jesus’s genealogy back through Joseph to Adam, the Gospel of Luke concludes: “son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God” (Luke 3:38). Adam, never considered as divine, is nonetheless a true son of God. When Jesus teaches the hallowed “Lord’s Prayer,” he makes all his hearers children of God by urging them to begin their prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven….” It is true, however, that the Gospels—at least the Gospel of John—claim a unique and exceptional filial status for Jesus. John 3:16 reads:
For this is how God loved the world:
he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
but may have eternal life.
It is this claim of a relationship tantamount to divinity itself that Allah’s repeated designation of Jesus as “son of Mary” is intended to correct. And yet in other ways Allah dwells with greater insistence on the holiness of Mary herself than any of the Gospel writers do.
Nothing that Allah says about Mary will more sharply startle Christian or Jewish readers than something he reports Himself asking about Mary in a question to Jesus:
Remember when God said to Jesus son of Mary: “Did you really say to people: ‘Take me and my mother as two gods, instead of God?’ ”
He said: “Glory be to You! What right have I to assert what does not in truth belong to me?
If I had said it, You would have known it;
You know what is in my soul and I know not what is in Your soul, For it is You Who are the All-Knower of the Unseen.
I said nothing to them except what You commanded me:
‘Worship God, my Lord and your Lord.’
I was a witness to them while I lived among them,
But when you caused me to die, it was You Who kept watch over them.
You are a witness over all things.
If You torment them, they are Your servants,
And if You forgive them, it is You Who are Almighty, All-Wise.” (Qur’an 5:116–118)
The context for the closing statement just above is Allah’s evocation for Muhammad of the “Day when God gathers all the messengers together, and He will ask: ‘What was the response to you?’ ” (5:109). The context, in other words, is the Last Judgment, when all Allah’s prophets or messengers will be on hand to testify regarding their acceptance or rejection by the respective peoples to whom Allah sent them. With this statement, Allah clarifies for Muhammad what Jesus’s message truly was to the Jewish people, including, of course, those Jews who founded Christianity. Jesus’s message to all of them was identical to the message that Muhammad is delivering to the people of Mecca and Medina, and on that “Day” Christians will merit severe punishment if they have wantonly distorted Jesus’s true message by divinizing him.
That Allah should wish to make this point to Muhammad is no surprise. What is surprising is that a claim of divinity should need to be repudiated for Mary as well. Why should a claim need to be repudiated, Christian readers will ask, when Christians have never made one in the first place? To answer speculatively and, for a change, historically, that claim might have to be repudiated because of the character of what was in the seventh century the grandest building in the known world, certainly the grandest in Europe or the Middle East.
This was the magnificent Basilica of Holy Wisdom (in Greek, Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire. Any outsider visiting that awesome edifice and observing the stunning prominence afforded Mary—as Theotokos or “God-bearer”—in its glittering mosaics might well imagine that just as Jesus was adored as Christos Pantocrator, “Christ the Ruler of All,” in its dome, so also was she adored who had borne him.2 Centuries later, Protestantism would find fault with the early church for “Mariolatry”—namely, treating Mary as a virtual goddess. We may well recognize a kind of Muslim proto-Protestant radicalism in Allah’s care to deny divinity to the mother when denying it to the son.
And yet while denying the divinity of Mary, Allah lingers more over her holiness than the biblical Gospels do. Upon conceiving her, Mary’s mother dedicates her to God with the words:
“My Lord, I pledge to You what is in my womb. It shall be dedicated to Your service. Accept this from me for it is You—You Who are All-Hearing, All-Knowing.” (Qur’an 3:35)
This passage continues as, after giving birth, she says:
“My Lord, I have given birth and it is a female”—and God knew best what she had given birth to—“and a male is not like a female. I have called her Mary. I seek refuge in You for her and her progeny from Satan, ever deserving to be stoned.”
God accepted her offering graciously and caused her to grow up admirably, and entrusted Zachariah with her upbringing. Whenever Zachariah entered in upon her in the sanctuary he found food by her side.
He said: “Mary, from where do you have this?”
She said: “It is from God. God provides for whomever He wills, without reckoning.” (Qur’an 3:36–37)
Mary is not like the angels who visited Abraham and did not eat because they were spiritual beings who required no food. Mary requires food, but Allah provides for her directly. And a bit later the angels say to her:
“O Mary, God has chosen you, made you pure and chosen you above all the women of the world. O Mary, pray constantly to your Lord, and bow down in worship, and kneel alongside those who kneel.” (Qur’an 3:42−43)
Of God’s direct provision of food to Mary, there is not a word in the Gospels, and this angelic paean to Mary has no Gospel parallel either. There is an exchange in the Gospel of Luke, however, including a poem spoken by Mary about herself that might be a relevant parallel to these qur’anic celebrations of Jesus’s mother.
Mary has just arrived at the home of Elizabeth, her six-months-pregnant cousin, to help her through the final three months of her pregnancy.
Now it happened that as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She gave a loud cry and said, “Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honored with a visit from the mother of my Lord?” (Luke 1:41−43)
Mary’s reply is a poem with repeated allusions to the Old Testament prophets, all italicized in the New Jerusalem Bible translation:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord
And my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour;
because he has looked upon the humiliation of his servant.
Yes, from now onwards all generations will call me blessed,
for the Almighty has done great things for me.
Holy is his name,
and his faithful love extends age after age to those who fear him.
He has used the power of his arm,
he has routed the arrogant of heart.
He has pulled down princes from their thrones and raised high the lowly.
He has filled the starving with good things, sent the rich away empty.
He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his faithful love
—according to the promise he made to our ancestors—
of his mercy to Abraham and to his descendants for ever. (Luke 1:46−55)
We may concede that between them Elizabeth and Mary celebrate Mary in their words nearly as much as Allah celebrates her by His actions from the moment of her conception down to the messages He sends to her through His angels, but it is one thing for women to celebrate Mary in God’s name and quite another for God to celebrate her Himself.
As we have seen before, it is Allah’s way to be involved step-by-step in any significant action involving one of His prophets. This could scarcely be clearer than it is in Jesus’s summary-in-advance of the miracles that He will perform in his public life. Speaking in the manner of a prophet to His people, he says:
“I bring you a sign from your Lord. I will fashion for you from clay the likeness of a bird, and I shall breathe upon it and it will become a bird, by God’s leave. I shall cure the blind and the leper and revive the dead by God’s leave. I shall reveal to you what you eat and what you store in your homes. In this assuredly is a sign for you, if you are true believers. I confirm what lies before me of the Torah and to make licit for you some of what had been made illicit. I come to you with a sign from your Lord. So fear God and obey me. God is my Lord and your Lord; so worship Him, for here lies a path that is straight.” (3:49–51)
Christians in Muhammad’s day read some of the apocryphal (extra-biblical) gospels as widely as they read the canonical (biblical) Gospels; and so when correcting Christians’ received beliefs about Jesus, Allah sometimes corrects an apocryphal gospel. As it happens, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas 2:2–4 contains an episode in which the child Jesus creates a dozen clay birds and then makes them fly away with a clap and a shout. Inasmuch as the passage above is spoken before even the miracle of the clay bird has been performed, we must hear it as spoken by Jesus either as a baby or as a small boy. As quoted by Allah, Jesus corrects the Infancy Gospel of Thomas regarding the number of clay birds brought to life.
Much more important, little Jesus stresses that any miracles he will seem to perform will have been performed by Allah’s leave. He stresses, in other words, that he will have no godlike powers of his own. Though Jesus’s hearers are to obey him as the messenger of Allah when, for example, he relaxes one or another stricture of Jewish religious practice, it is Allah alone—“my Lord and your Lord”—whom they are to worship, “for here lies a path that is straight.”
The phrase “straight path” being always a synonym for Islam, the fact that so significant a summary should be proclaimed by Jesus as a baby or, at most, a small child only underscores that Jesus will do nothing except as an instrument of Allah.
In discussing how Allah corrects the canonical Gospels’ accounts of Jesus by denying his divinity, we have spoken so far about Christians and Christian scriptures. But is Allah also correcting Jews in this regard? The answer is clearly no. Israelite monotheism became so absolute around the time of the Babylonian Exile as to rule out any role even for Satan. Later, probably under Persian influence, Satan did emerge as a powerful being, though ultimately subordinate to Yahweh. During the final pre-Christian centuries, Jewish speculation began to make further room for a different, benign ancillary or auxiliary power alongside the unmediated power of God. After the rise of Christianity, however, with its celebration of a divine messiah, Rabbinic Judaism decisively repudiated belief in any supernatural power alongside the power of God, with Satan as a limited exception developing gradually over several centuries’ time. The core Rabbinic belief came to be summarized and rhetorically signaled by the phrase “no two powers in heaven.” The Jewish condemnation expressed by this phrase, almost a kind of mantra, is virtually indistinguishable from the Muslim condemnation expressed in a term we encountered previously, shirk, “association” in Arabic—namely, the association of any second god or godlike being with God himself. The sin of unrepentant shirk is the one sin, according to the Qur’an, that cannot be forgiven.3
Could the Jews of Arabia then have accepted Muhammad as the latest of their prophets more easily than could the Christians? Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that it would have served the Jews’ temporal happiness to do so:
The choice of Jerusalem for the first kebla of prayer discovers the early propensity of Mahomet in favor of the Jews; and happy would it have been for their temporal interest, had they recognized, in the Arabian prophet, the hope of Israel and the promised Messiah. Their obstinacy converted his friendship into implacable hatred, with which he pursued that unfortunate people to the last moment of his life; and in the double character of an apostle and a conqueror, his persecution was extended to both worlds.4
Gibbons in his arch, de haut en bas manner condescends insufferably to the Jews and almost equally so the Muslims, Muhammad in particular. But his “enlightened” condescension aside, the Jews of Arabia would have had no difficulty denying divinity to Jesus of Nazareth, as they had long since done, and asserting—as in effect Muslims before Muhammad that there is no god but God. It was accepting Muhammad—as the last of God’s prophets that presented an obstacle, for that acceptance entailed accepting the Qur’an as a scripture superseding their own much larger set of scriptures and pleading guilty to the Qur’an’s charge that they had failed by negligence or malice to preserve their own scriptures. This they declined to do, and in retrospect one may doubt that their long-term “temporal interest” would have been served had they taken Gibbon’s advice.
Two matters need to be dealt with before we conclude this chapter on Jesus in the Qur’an as against Jesus in the Bible and on the implications of that difference for our understanding of God in the Qur’an. The first matter, which can be addressed with some brevity, is the teachings of Jesus. The second, much more tangled and charged matter is his death (if ever) and his resurrection (and if so, when).
These two matters command nearly the entirety of the four biblical gospels. By contrast, the story of Mary’s virginal conception and parturition and of Jesus’s childhood are no more than a relatively brief prologue, and at that in only two of the four. Christian tradition has referred to Jesus’s childhood as his “hidden life” because the Bible has so very little to say about it. The overwhelming bulk of the biblical gospels falls, in each case, into two divisions:
First, the miracle working of Jesus and, even more, his teaching during what is classically called his “public life.” He was commonly addressed as “rabbi” or “teacher” by his disciples, and much of his teaching and storytelling was imparted in the course of conversations either with his Jewish disciples or with his various Jewish opponents. His miracles, too, typically have a clear didactic purpose. Through Jesus’s teaching and these “signs,” his disciples gradually come to recognize his identity not just as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah but also as something breathtakingly more than that.
Second, the story of his condemnation, torture, and death by crucifixion (called, together, his “passion”), followed by his miraculous return to life and mysterious appearances to his disciples (called, together, his “resurrection”). Jesus’s condemnation and execution seemed at the time completely incompatible with all traditional expectations for the Jewish Messiah, much less with any identity even more exalted than that one. In the Gospels, Jesus’s disciples are understandably troubled and confused about who he really is. Their slowly dawning awareness of once unthinkable possibilities creates much of the suspense that the Gospels clearly aim to create.
Jesus touches on a great many concrete aspects of human life in the course of his teaching: agriculture, business, banking, war and peace, marriage and divorce, motherhood and fatherhood, many aspects of religious practice, and finally death, burial, and the afterlife. Among the salient emphases in his teaching are
—his recurrent focus on the poor and the ethnically or socially marginalized and despised in society
—his related (and repeated) attention to children and to women
—his confidence that God, frequently referred to as his Father, is about to establish His sovereignty (His “kingdom”)—a transformation that does not eliminate the next world of heaven or hell but begins in this world as great tribulation precedes anticipated triumph and exaltation. He instructs his followers to pray to their heavenly Father that this kingdom may come “on earth as it is in heaven”
—his constant exhortation to forgive harm done by one to another not just once or twice but “seventy times seven”
—his celebration of sincerity and humility and his condemnation of hypocrisy and pride, especially where religion is concerned
—his embrace of his own identity as a Jew coupled with his transcendence of ethnicity and even family by his praise of virtuous men and women from outside Jewry and even from among the Jews’ oppressors or enemies
—his call for trust in God as opposed to the anxious pursuit of security through wealth or power
In the following passage from the Qur’an, Allah acknowledges Jesus as an example but stresses first, that he is only an example; second, that he is not the only example that Allah could have provided; and third, and most important, that he is principally an example by being a good Muslim:
He is but a servant on whom We conferred Our grace, and We made him a model for the Children of Israel.
Had We willed We could have created you as angels, to take your place on earth.
Jesus is a portent of the Hour, so be in no doubt regarding it, and follow Me, for this is a straight path.
Let not Satan bar your way: to you he is a manifest enemy.
When Jesus came with evident signs, he said: “I come to you with wisdom, and to make clear to you some of what you differ about. Be pious before God and obey me. God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him, for this is the straight path.” (43:59–64)
Jesus, as Allah characterizes him, has the right to say, “Worship God and obey me,” a sentence already quoted once from Qur’an 3:50. Jesus teaches with a divine grant of authority, in other words, more or less as he does in the Gospels. But as for the distinctive themes enumerated above (in an incomplete list), Allah never touches on them with any specific reference to Jesus. He cites rather the extensive doctrinal factionalism that had arisen among Christians by Muhammad’s day.
At this point, however, a genre issue becomes relevant. If attention is directed to Christianity’s way of taking Jesus as a moral model (as in “What would Jesus do?”), a more relevant comparison than that of Jesus in the Gospels to Jesus in the Qur’an is Jesus in the Gospels to Muhammad in the Hadith.
Hadith is the term for Islam’s painstakingly assembled body of tradition about what Muhammad said and how he acted in an immense variety of human situations. Taken to be the perfect or complete man, Muhammad constitutes a model for all human behavior and the starting point for Islamic jurisprudence. In the Qur’an, by contrast, Muhammad is only very rarely mentioned by name. To be sure, he is omnipresent in the Qur’an as the Prophet to whom Allah addresses all that He says. But to the extent that moral guidance structurally parallel to that which Christianity derives from Jesus is to be sought in Islam, it will be found in the hallowed Hadith rather than in the holy Qur’an. A Jesus/Muhammad, Gospel/Hadith comparison would be a worthy subject but would call for another entire book.
From the list of Jesus’s teachings just above, I have postponed to this moment the two that are most definitive, for these are the two that bear most directly on the last subject of this chapter—namely, the Bible’s and the Qur’an’s sharply different accounts and interpretations of Jesus’s death, destiny, and religious significance. The two omitted biblical teachings are as follows:
First, Jesus’s belief in (and enactment of his belief in) the merit of vicarious suffering—that is, suffering that one man or woman accepts in place of another or others.
Second, his signature, scandalous teaching that if slapped on one cheek, one should “offer him the other as well” (Matthew 5:39)—that is, one should return violence with nonviolence. This, again, is a teaching that Jesus both preaches and, by enduring his crucifixion without protest or resistance, enacts.
Expiation or atonement is action undertaken to avert deserved punishment by some kind of substitution for it. The Old Testament, particularly in the Book of Leviticus, makes elaborate provision for the expiation of sin by animal sacrifice. In Leviticus 5, for example, various offenses are listed for which Yahweh requires the expiatory sacrifice of a female sheep or goat. But what if a given sinner cannot afford to sacrifice an animal?
“If he cannot afford an animal from the flock as a sacrifice of reparation for the sin he has committed, he will bring Yahweh two turtledoves or two young pigeons—one as a sacrifice for sin and the other as a burnt offering. He will bring them to the priest who will first offer the one intended for the sacrifice for sin. The priest will wring its neck but not remove the head. He will sprinkle the side of the altar with the victim’s blood, and then squeeze out the rest of the blood at the foot of the altar. This is a sacrifice for sin. He will then offer the other bird as a burnt offering according to the ritual. This is how the priest must perform the rite of expiation for the person for the sin he has committed, and he will be forgiven.” (Leviticus 5:7–10)
This minor sacrifice, just a pair of birds, suffices for the listed minor offenses against ritual purity. For many graver offenses, no expiatory sacrifice is allowed, and the penalty for guilt is often death—in effect, the sacrifice of the perpetrator.
Yet expiation even for the taking of a human life remains conceivable, and with it the notion of expiatory human sacrifice. This is the notion darkly hinted at in a set of poems in the Book of Isaiah. One of them speaks of “a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering,”
one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze,
despised, for whom we had no regard.
Yet ours were the sufferings he was bearing,
ours the sorrows he was carrying,
while we thought of him as someone being punished
and struck with affliction by God;
whereas he was being wounded for our rebellions,
crushed because of our guilt;
the punishment reconciling us fell on him,
and we have been healed by his bruises. (Isaiah 53:3–5)
Carrying this line of thought a large step further, if one man can atone by his suffering or death for the sins of many, who if anyone can atone for the sins of all mankind for all time? No one, it might seem, except God Himself, who made the world and placed Adam and Eve and all their myriad descendants within it. This is the traditional expiatory logic of the cross. Yahweh becomes a Jew, accepts undeserved suffering and death by crucifixion, and thereby wins forgiveness for the sins of all men and women for all time. They need not be punished, for He has been punished in their place.
But does the sacrifice of a pair of pigeons really take away the guilt of the sinner who brings the pigeons to the officiating priest? Since the sin was against Yahweh, the sacrifice erases the guilt only if Yahweh chooses to regard it as erased. And, accordingly, the sinner will bring the pigeons to the altar only if he trusts that Yahweh will indeed erase the guilt once the sacrifice has taken place. Atonement thus requires faith and consent on either side.
To be sure, there are kinds of sin for which reparation can be simply and materially made. A thief may restore what was stolen or even, in expiation, reimburse the victim twice what the stolen item was worth. And yet obviously not all crimes are susceptible to such reversal. Rape and murder are irreversible in their effect, and in such cases can punishment inflicted on a third party actually accomplish anything at all to either atone to the victim for the grievous wrong inflicted or somehow take away the guilt of the perpetrator?
One major school of Christian thought has always answered yes, believing that the character of God is such that he does indeed accept vicarious suffering as expiatory and redemptive and does regard guilt as truly expunged by forgiveness. The suffering of Christ on the cross is the supreme redemptive sacrifice—“ransoming sinners,” to use a classic phrase, from the otherwise deserved punishment of hell. But redemptive as well is the suffering of any Christian who accepts Jesus’s challenge:
“If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:24–25)
In countless ways, this soteriology, or theology of redemption, has become an ideal of nobility penetrating Western culture far beyond conscious Christianity. The story of a scorned outsider, abandoned by all, who seems to lose everything but then gains everything in the end and for the good of everyone is the master plot of a thousand Hollywood movies. The sacrifice of life itself out of love, as in the closing moments of the 1997 film Titanic, carries forward the same secularized ideal of vicarious suffering that thrills in the final words of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. In that novel, Sydney Carton loves Lucie Manette, who is married to Charles Darnay. Charles has been wrongfully sentenced to death in the Paris of the French Revolution. But Sydney, who bears a remarkable, entirely coincidental resemblance to Charles, has himself smuggled into the prison as Charles is smuggled out. Christ-like, Sydney dies to save Charles, and the novel ends with his last words: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”5 Sydney Carton, one of the countless Christ-figures of Western literature, owes his romantic appeal, if we take the long view, to centuries of Christian literary conditioning. He appeals, in the end, because the West has believed in a God who wanted and celebrated redemptive self-sacrifice. Why does God want this? At the end of the reckoning, simply because this is what God is like.
And yet, in the Qur’an, Allah makes clear that God is not like that at all. Again and again, He makes clear that on “the Day” of His judgment each man and each woman will be rewarded for what he or she has done to merit heaven and punished for what he or she has done to merit hell and for that alone. No one will be either punished or rewarded for what someone else has done. However nobly tricked out, two wrongs do not make a right. Allah is just not like that. And, accordingly, there is no room in Allah’s correction of Christian scripture for Jesus’s redemptive death on the cross or even, as it turns out, for Jesus’s physical death in the first place. Just as ruling out any husband for Mary makes her virginity and Allah’s unique role in the conception of Prophet Jesus unmistakable, so here: by denying altogether that Jesus actually died on the cross, Allah rules out any possibility of Jesus’s death being anything other than ordinary, inevitable human death, thus any possibility of its being redemptive in the Christian sense of that word.
What then did happen on that day when—at least as it appeared to all witnesses—Jesus died? As Allah explains, the Romans played no part; they are never mentioned. Responsibility lay entirely with the Jews, but their rejection of and plotting against Jesus, whom Allah does refer to elsewhere as the Messiah, was just the latest of their rejections of Allah’s prophets, and in the end Allah foiled their plot:
The People of the Book ask you to bring down upon them a book from heaven. But surely they asked Moses a thing even more outrageous than this. They said to him: “Show us God face to face,” and were struck by lightning for their sin. Then they took up the worship of the calf even after clear signs had come to them. But We forgave that sin and granted Moses manifest authority. And We raised above them the Mountain in accordance with their covenant and We said to them: “Enter the gate in prostration,” and We said to them: “Do not transgress the Sabbath”; and We took from them a most solemn covenant.
Therefore, by renouncing their covenant, by blaspheming against the revelations of God, by killing prophets unjustly and claiming: “Our hearts are sealed”—rather, it is God Who sealed them with their blasphemy—they believe not, except a few. So also by their blasphemy and their terrible words of slander against Mary, and their saying: “It is we who killed the Christ Jesus son of Mary, the messenger of God”—they killed him not, nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them. Those who disputed concerning him are in doubt over the matter; they have no knowledge thereof but only follow conjecture. Assuredly they killed him not, but God raised him up to Him, and God is Almighty, All-Wise. Among the People of the Book none there are but shall believe in him before his death, and on the Day of Resurrection he shall be a witness against them.
Thus, through the wrongdoing of the Jews, We forbade them certain delectable foods which had been made licit to them; by reason, too, of their obstructing the path to God, repeatedly; their taking usury, though forbidden to do so; and their devouring the wealth of people dishonestly—to the unbelievers among them We have readied a painful torment.
But those steeped in knowledge, as also the believers among them, believe in what has been revealed to you and what was revealed before you. And those who perform the prayer, who pay their alms, who believe in God and the Last Day—upon these we shall bestow a glorious recompense. (Qur’an 4:153–162)
Allah’s rejection of Christian claims of divinity for Jesus coincides exactly, as we have already noted, with Rabbinical Judaism’s rejection of the same claims. But since, according to Allah, Jesus, while making no such claims himself, was both the Messiah and a prophet of Allah, the Jews of his day had every reason to accept him. That they not only rejected him but sought to kill him as, according to Allah, they had killed earlier prophets, was the latest of their sins. Jewish dietary laws themselves are part of Allah’s punishment for this latest sin. But Jesus’s vindication will come on the “Day of Resurrection” when the Jews will all believe in him as he becomes “a witness against them.” Allah, we might say, is anti-Christian but fiercely pro-Christ.
Is He also anti-Jewish? It may be passages like this one, with its condemnation of the Jews for usury and financial predation, a charge with so long and brutal a history in Europe, that Edward Gibbon had in mind in the delicately anti-Semitic passage quoted above. And yet, in the end, the same “straight path” lies open to Jews that lies open to all, with on the last day the prospect of a “glorious recompense.”
If Jesus did not actually die on the cross, how was it made to appear to the witnessing Jews that he did? Was someone else crucified in his place? Muslim commentators have speculated about this possibility for centuries, and various candidates have been proposed. Was he crucified but then taken down from the cross alive after all the witnesses had departed? Further speculation has occurred about variations on that possibility as well. Since that dark day, has Jesus lived on in heaven with Allah? Or has he died in some other way and, if so, when? Allah leaves no doubt that Jesus is but a mortal man, a point that He stresses repeatedly, and so Jesus must die as all mortals do. But, again, at what point? Within the Qur’an itself, Allah leaves all these questions unanswered, and we must do so as well.
Our point is that the effect of Allah’s foiling the Jews’ plot, as He describes it, radically undercuts the Christian celebration of Jesus as the sacrificial “Lamb of God,” dying that others may have eternal life. Such was not the assignment that Allah gave to Jesus as his second-to-last prophet. Jesus’s calling—begun with his holy mother’s calling—was to witness that there is no god but God, to pray and pay alms, and to summon his people, the Jews, to do the same: all of that, and nothing more than that. Like all the Muslim prophets before him, he was sent to a people who had not heard or were not properly responding to Allah’s “signs.” The Jews’ obligation was to respect and not slander Jesus’s mother and to receive Jesus’s message dutifully as a message from Allah Himself, just as the Jews’ obligation in Muhammad’s day was to receive His message, the Qur’an, and His messenger, Muhammad, in the same spirit.
Such is the message—the invitation and the linked ultimatum—that Allah has placed before all mankind from the earliest generations:
Remember when your Lord took away from Adam’s children the seeds from their loins, and made them witness upon themselves: “Am I not your Lord?” They answered: “Yes, we witness”—lest you should claim on the Day of Resurrection: “We were unaware of this.” Or else you might claim: “But our ancestors too were once guilty of polytheism, and we are merely their later seed. Will You therefore destroy us because of the works of falsifiers?” Thus do We clarify Our revelations; perhaps they will turn back. (7:172−174)
Allah punishes no one for anyone else’s failure to submit. And no one, from the beginning, has lacked the opportunity to submit. Before Allah sent prophets to deliver reminders and warnings, Allah himself served the first universal notice and delivered the first universal warning. Everyone has had a fair chance. Any who have missed their chance have only themselves to blame.
Given that Allah’s message in the Qur’an is true and given that Allah does not change, it can only be that Allah’s message to all His previous messengers has been the same as His message to Muhammad. It is a simple message, a clear message, a reasonable message, even a natural message. How can it ever have been lost if not through malice or culpable neglect? But Allah is, above all else, Compassionate and Merciful, and his Compassion and Mercy are manifest to perfection in His having at last consigned His original and unchanging message in one pure, final, crowning formulation to his ultimate prophet, Muhammad, the perfect Messenger of His perfect Mercy. This is what God in the Qur’an is like.