One Figure Two Images: Jesus Christ in Islam and Christianity

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown raises many questions about the history of Christianity.  The theories proposed by the novel are unacceptable to many devout Christians, and many see the novel as a conspiracy.  One of the most controversial issues in the book is about the divinity of Jesus Christ.  In the novel, Jesus is depicted “as a historical figure of staggering influence” that was transformed into the Son of God at the Council of Nicaea for political reasons. Two other important issues raised related to Christianity are the Bible being a product of man, and Jesus having married Mary Magdalene and being a father.  As these ideas presented by Dan Brown conflict with the theology of Christianity, Christians identify The Da Vinci Code as complete fiction, whereas Muslims react differently to the novel as Islam agrees with some of these issues. It is important to be aware of the two different images of Jesus in Islam and Christianity to understand the different reactions to the novel.  I will start with an overview of Islam and Christianity comparing their monotheistic beliefs. Then I will focus on Christianity, and its teachings of Jesus.  I will further examine the different aspects of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament, and how his divinity was viewed by his followers in the early times. Then, I will provide the Muslim point of view, and what the Quran says about Jesus and His divinity.
Before exploring Islam and Christianity in depth, it is important to understand the distinction in their monotheistic beliefs.  Both religions believe in and pray to one God- the same God; however He manifests His existence in different ways.  In Islam, there is the Unity of God; He is beyond gender, and He is never addressed as the Father. On the other hand, in Christianity, God expresses Himself in ‘three manifestations’: The Father, the Son, and The Holy Spirit.  The Trinity “has its origin in the Father, proceeds through the agency of the Son [Jesus Christ] and is made effective in the world by means of the immanent Spirit.”  (Armstrong, 116-117)  There is also the deity of Jesus:  ‘He is God and man, He is not two but one Christ: He is One, not by converting the deity into humanity, but by the godhead taking up humanity”; “He is God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds, and man, of the substance of His mother, born in the world” (Who is the Christ?).  The fundamental purpose of Jesus’ putting off his divine glory and coming to earth in human form is to redeem men and women, and thus bridge the gap between God and humanity that sin has created.  Islam rejects both the Trinity of God and the Deity of Jesus in Christianity.  Muslims revere Jesus greatly as a prophet of God, but they reject His divinity as the Son.  Muslims agree that Jesus is born fatherless, but that does not mean that God is His father.   In agreement with the Bible which says, “[Jesus speaks:] O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:29-30), the Quran also states that “God- there is no God but He, the Living, the Everlasting, Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep; to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth… He is the All-high, the All-glorious” (Surah 2:256) (Frieling 127-128, and Butrus). 
	The main focus of Christianity is that one cannot comprehend God and experience His love without accepting Jesus as the Son and the Savior who died for the sins of the humanity: “No one who denies the Son has the Father, He who confess the Son has the Father also (1 John 2:23)” (Frieling 118).  The Gospels explain that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea, as it was foretold by the prophet Isaiah.  He was the long awaited Jewish messiah, and after His death and resurrection, a reform movement arose within Judaism and this movement led to Christianity.  Jesus’ execution by crucifixion was approximately in 30 C.E (Common Era).  “The Gospels were written after the death of Jesus by people who believed that He had been raised from the dead [three days after] and His death was part of God’s plan.” (Cory, 76)  The Gospel of Mark was written just after 70 C.E, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written between 80 and 85 C.E, and the Gospel of John was written between 90 and 100 C.E. (Cory, 80) The Christian Theological Tradition explains the composition of the Gospels in three stages:   
1) After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the people who had once traveled with Him wrote stories and sayings concerning Jesus’ ministry and teachings.  
2) Early Christian communities used these stories and sayings in worship and teaching, to admonish the wrongdoers. 
3) The writers of the Gospels collected these oral and written traditions, arranging them into a coherent narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
There is no real evidence to support that the Gospels were written directly or indirectly with the original twelve disciples.  Most biblical scholars have agreed on the authors of the Gospels as follows. The Gospel of Mark was written by John Mark, a companion of Peter in Rome; he was a Gentile (non Jewish) Christian.  The Gospel of Matthew was written anonymously about 85-90 C.E; the name was attached in the mid 2nd century when a church writer, Papias, was said to have written, “Then Matthew put together the sayings [of Jesus] in the Hebrew dialect and each one translated them as he was able”. The writers of Matthew were Jewish Christians.  The Gospel of Luke was written by Luke, a physician, Gentile Christian, and a follower of Paul.  The text does not offer many clues about the identity of its author like the other Gospels; and in his introduction it is clear that the writer was not an eyewitness to Jesus’ life, so he could not be one of the apostles.  The Gospel of John, written by John in Ephesus, contains long speeches delivered by Jesus in a poetic style. 
Although The Bible has human authors, it is seen as the Word of God recorded in the words of man who are inspired by God; it is not acceptable that the Bible is merely the word of man like The Da Vinci Code suggests. “In the various ways that the Four Gospels introduce the story of Jesus and in different emphases, there is one key and common point:  Jesus stands as the center of what God did and does for humanity and at the center of that story stand Jesus’ death and ultimately His Resurrection” (Bock, 161). The Gospels are not seen as the biographies of Jesus but each gospel is accepted as a particular author’s attempt to give permanent shape to his own conception of the career of Jesus and its meaning; thus it becomes understandable that they contradict at some points.  
The differences in the Gospels start with Jesus’ birth: Mark and John do not tell about the Nativity of Jesus at all probably because a birth story has the disadvantage of calling attention to the human side of Jesus, and despite agreeing on the big ideas, Matthew and Luke diverge in conspicuous ways on the details of the event. Two main differences are the Annunciation and the reason why Jesus was born in Beetlehem.  In Matthew’s Nativity, the angelic Annunciation is made to Joseph, Mary’s husband, while in Luke it is Mary.  Matthew explains that Joseph and Mary were residents of Beetlehem and Jesus was born at home, on the other hand Luke says that they were Nazarenes, and Jesus was born in Beetlehem because they were on a brief visit to Joseph’s ancestral home (Van Biema, 49).  The different emphases in the Gospels are as follows.  Mark’s Christology starts with the announcement of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and it is the only gospel that depicts Jesus avoiding crowds, and actively working to keep his true nature secret from people. In Mark’s version, Jesus passes the world quite unrecognized except by his opponents who crucify him; he is bright and the people are so ignorant and in the dark that they cannot comprehend the brilliance of Jesus.  Mark’s Gospel is the shortest with sixteen chapters excluding the reappearance of Jesus to his disciples who are no better than the others at understanding what Jesus and His message is about.   Matthew’s Christology states that Jesus perfected the law and has provided ethical teachings to guide His followers.  While Matthew has respect for the Jewish tradition and echoes the Old Testament many times including more than sixty direct quotations, he is nevertheless harsh with the Jews as they turned against the Messiah who was sent to rescue them.    In Matthew’s Passion narrative, Matthew’s bias produces the story of the Jewish crowd taking upon themselves and their descendants the guilt of the Crucifixion: “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and our children” (Matthew, 27:25).  Luke stresses the continuity between Judaism and Christianity and argues that the Old Testament testifies to the fact that the Messiah was destined to suffer.  He also suggests that those who suffer injustice in earth will receive more than the others after death.  (Luke 1:51-53)  Luke’s Christology pictures Jesus not only as blessing the poor and hungry but also cursing the rich and comfortable (Cory 83).  He also shows a special interest in women presenting them sympathetically.  However, although he has the highest number of verses (42 verses) concerning women, showing his regard for women’s roles in Christianity, he is not supportive of women’s leadership roles.  “…the Gospel of Luke typically portrays women in the role of followers: it deftly portrays them as models of subordinate service, excluded from the power center of the movement and from significant responsibilities.” (Brock, 37)  The Gospel of Luke attempts to establish the primacy of Peter over the other apostles, assigning Jesus’ first resurrection appearance to Peter, whereas in other gospels it is Mary Magdalene.  Thus, while Peter gains importance, Mary diminishes, losing her significance as the resurrection witness.  “In Luke’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene encounters only two messengers at the sepulcher scene and not the resurrected Jesus himself.  Luke reports that she and the women accompanying her see only ‘two men in dazzling clothes’. (24:4)” And these two men transmit the news that Jesus has risen. John seems not to have known many of the same stories in the other Gospels.  The basic structure of Jesus’ ministry is a three year period rather than one year implied in the synoptic gospels, and he visits Jerusalem four times instead of only one.  In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist appears as Jesus’ forerunner but he does not baptize Jesus, and the disciples have no missionary functions. 
After Jesus’ death there was considerable debate on his actual identity. About 25 years after his crucifixion, a schism occurred in the movements that were to form what we know as present-day Christianity as a result of St, Paul’s version of Christianity.  St. Paul saw Jesus as the Son of God who had come down to earth to die on the cross to redeem man.  Although in the first century the Messiah only meant one who would defeat God’s enemies and bring back God’s justice, to St. Paul and his followers, the term adopted a characteristic of someone who is divine as only God could have been responsible for the miraculous resurrection (Lunn, 97 and 102).  Not every follower of Jesus Christ shared the belief of St. Paul, and around 320 C.E there were two opposite views on Jesus - one placing him in the created order and the other placing him in the divine order.  Arius, presbyter of Alexandria and representative of the first view, did not deny the divinity of Jesus. However, he argued that it was blasphemous to think that Jesus was divine by nature due to the fact that “Jesus had specifically said that the Father was greater than he.” (Armstrong, 107)  Arius claimed that “the very fact that Jesus called God, ‘His Father’ implied a distinction: paternity by its very nature involves prior existence and a certain superiority over the son.” (Armstrong, 109)  He further argued that “If Jesus had not been a human being; there would be no hope for us.  There would have been nothing meritorious in his life if he had been God by nature, nothing for us to imitate.” (Armstrong, 110) While Arius placed Jesus in the created order, on the opposing side, Athanasius put Jesus in the divine order, and explained that:
“If Logos [Jesus Christ] were a vulnerable creature, he would not be able to save mankind from extinction… The Logos had been made flesh to give us life.  He had descended into the mortal world of death and corruption in order to give us a share of God’s impassibility and immortality.  But this salvation would have been impossible if the Logos himself had been a frail creature, who could himself lapse back into nothingness.  Only he who had created the world could save it, and that meant that Christ, the Logos made flesh, must be of the same nature as the Father.” (110) 
 
The debate about Christ was so intense that Constantine, who had legalized Christianity one year after the battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, had to intervene; and he summoned a synod to Nicea, Iznik in modern day Turkey.  At the beginning of the Council of Nicea on May 20, 325 the participating bishops held views between those of Arius and Athanasius. The view of Athanasius prevailed as Constantine was “breathing down their necks” for a consensus (Armstrong, 110).  Only Arius and two of his friends voted against, and for the first time, Jesus was “no mere creature [and] The Creator and Redeemer were one” (Armstrong, 111).  In The Da Vinci Code Fact or Fiction, Hanegraff explains that “the Council did not debate over whether Jesus was divine or mortal, but whether he was coeternal with the Father.”  He also objects to Dan Brown who wrote that Jesus’ divinity was a result of a close vote at this council.  Omitting the fact that it was still a vote, Hanegraff argues that “the vote was 300 to 2” (Hanegraff 15).

Even after the council, conflicts continued as Athanasius was unable to answer “how the Logos could be of the same stuff as the Father without being a second God” (Armstrong, 112).  The view seemed contradictory to the monotheistic nature of Christianity.  The solution was found by three theologians of Cappadocia of eastern Turkey: Basil, Bishop of Caesarea; his younger brother Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa; and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus (113). Their solution satisfied the Eastern Orthodox Church: “God had a single essence (ousia) which remained incomprehensible to us- but three expressions (hypostases) which made him known to us” (Armstrong, 115). The divine nature of God is unnameable; and the hypostates Father, Son, and Spirit should not be identified with God himself, as God is beyond our finite understanding.  Men experience God “as transcendent (the Father, hidden in inaccessible light), as creative (the Logos) and as immanent (the Holy Spirit)” (Armstrong, 116).  In his letter To Alabius: There Are Not Three Gods, Gregory of Nyssa explains that “One should not think of God splitting himself into three parts; that was a grotesque and indeed blasphemous idea.  God expressed himself wholly and totally in each one of these three manifestations when he wished to reveal himself to the world.  Thus the Trinity gives us an indication of the pattern of every operation which extends from God to creation’: as Scripture shows, it has its origin in the Father, proceeds through the agency of the Son and is made effective in the world by means of the immanent Holy Spirit” (Armstrong, 116-117).  The Trinity reminded Christianity that the reality that we called God could not be grasped by the human intellect.  The Trinity has been a debate issue between Islam and Christianity because Muslims believe that the Trinity contradicts with the single essence of God.

 After exploring the image of Jesus Christ in the Gospels and through ancient history, let us now look at the Islamic point of view.  Islam, meaning the submission to the will of God, is based on the teachings of the Qur'an composed of 114 Surahs. It was transmitted to humanity in a chain starting from God to the angel Gabriel and to the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammed was born in Mekke in Saudi Arabia in 570 AD.  He received the revelations that form the Quran in pieces over a period of 23 years.  Muhammed was 40 years old when the Qur'an began to be revealed to him, and he was 63 when the revelation was completed.  As soon as Muhammed began to recite the Quran and preach the truth that God revealed to him, he and his followers suffered persecution from unbelievers similar to the way that Jesus and his followers did.  They had to emigrate to Medine in 622, marking the beginning of the Muslim calendar (Christ Jesus and Islam?). The Qur'an is believed not to have been expressed using any human's words.  Prophet Muhammad is seen as the final Messenger of Allah, and therefore the Qur'an is the last Message which Allah has sent to humanity.  The Qur'an of today is believed to be the same as the Qur'an revealed to Muhammad.  

The Quran and the New Testament appear to be in agreement on the blessedness of Mary, the virgin birth of Jesus, the description of him as Messiah healing the blind, cleansing lepers, and raising the dead to life. However, they disagree about the infancy narratives of Jesus in the Quran.  The Quran shows Jesus speaking in his cradle announcing His prophethood, and animating clay birds.
Then will Allah say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Recount My favour to thee and to thy mother. Behold! I strengthened thee with the Holy Spirit, so that thou didst speak to the people in childhood and in maturity. Behold! I taught thee the Book and Wisdom, the Law and the Gospel and behold! thou makest out of clay, as it were, the figure of a bird, by My leave, and thou breathest into it and it becometh a bird by My leave, and thou healest those born blind, and the lepers, by My leave. And behold! Thou bringest forth the dead by My leave. And behold! I did restrain the Children of Israel from (violence to) thee when thou didst show them the clear Signs, and the unbelievers among them said: 'This is nothing but evident magic. (Surah 5.110, Yusufali)
 
As these infancy stories of Jesus do not exist in the New Testament, Christians see these stories as mere mythology.  Interestingly, the apocryphal gospels that are not credited in Christianity include similar stories to those of the Quran.  The Gospel of Thomas reads: “And Jesus made of that clay twelve sparrows, and… looked upon the sparrows, and said: Go away, fly, and live, and remember me.  And at this word they flew, and went up into the air…”  (Short, article).  The references to Jesus in the Quran can be divided into four main groups: birth and infancy stories, His miracles, conversations between Jesus and God and between Jesus and the Israelites, and the divine pronouncements on His humanity, servanthood, and why fanatical opinions about Him must be abandoned.  (Khalidi, 14)  
                  His sinless birth-which in the Qur’an takes place under a palm tree- and the words he speaks as an infant in the cradle are all signs, manifestations of divine favor shown to him and his mother.  His miracles are not narrated so much as listed as reminders of the power granted to him by God to cure the sick and raise the dead.  Unlike the canonical Gospels, the Qur’an tilts backward to his miraculous birth rather than forward to his Passion.  This is why he is often referred to as ‘the son of Mary’ and why he and his mother frequently appear together.  At his side, she confirms his miraculous pure birth.  But his ‘death’ is equally miraculous: he is lifted up to God, where according to later Islamic tradition he remained alive and waiting to fulfill his appointed role at the end of time, a role merely hinted at in the Qur’an (43:61).  (Khalidi, 14)

The Quran rejects the deity of Jesus as the God and man although it highly respects Jesus as a prophet.  Surah 3.59 says that, “The similitude of Jesus before Allah is as that of Adam; He created him from dust, then said to him: "Be". And he was” (Yusufali, http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/).  Surah 5.116 clearly shows Jesus as a man in a conversation between Jesus and God: 
And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of Allah'?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing, thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, Thou I know not what is in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden. (Yusufali)

Muslims believe that Jesus was condemned to crucifixion but was not crucified, instead raised to God to come back at the End of Time. “God does not let His prophets to suffer,” says Suleiman Mourad explaining why the Crucifixion is rejected (Personal communication, Oct. 4, 2004).  One thing very special about Jesus in the Quran is that He is the only prophet that did not die.
That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah";- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not. (Surah 4.157, Yusufali)

In Quran, Jesus informs his people about the coming of Muhammed although the Catholic Church does not accept this belief.  Surah 61.6 says, “And remember, Jesus, the son of Mary, said: "O Children of Israel! I am the messenger of Allah (sent) to you, confirming the Law (which came) before me, and giving Glad Tidings of a Messenger to come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad."” (Yusufali)   In the Quran, Jesus was never married nor did he have a child, although Islam is not against marriage of prophets as Muhammed had wives and children.  Shiites, a sect of Islam, believe that Muhmmed’s bloodline continued until the time of twelve imams who were His descendants: eleven of the twelve imams, either died because of natural death without having children, or were murdered.  Comparatively, the twelve imams resemble the twelve apostles in their roles as honored spiritual teachers.  The twelfth imam, ‘the Hidden imam- Muhammed Al-Mahdi’, was raised to heaven in 873 and it is believed that he will come back at the End of Time, just like Jesus (Frieling, 135-136).
Some disagreement between Islam and Christianity is mere quibble over inconsequential details.  One of such arguments is over the name of Jesus which is Isa in the Quran.  “Christian Arabs have always called Jesus Yasu after the Aramaic Yashua from which comes the Greek ‘Iesous’ and the English Jesus.  For reasons that have never been apparent Muhammed chose to call him Isa.” (Gilchrist, article)  In Christ in Islam, Ahmed Deedat claims that the original name of Jesus is Isa which derived from the Hebrew ‘Esau’, a very common Jewish name and used in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.  However, Gilchrist argues that there is only one Esau mentioned in Genesis and he was the brother of Jacob, the father of Israelite nation.  Jacob and Esau were enemies for most of their lives, and their descendants, the Israelites and the Edomites, were at war with each other; therefore, no Jewish children were ever named after Esau, for he stood against Jacob and was rejected by God (Hebrews 12:17).  Deedat’s interpretation of the name ‘Esau’ supports the suggestion that “the Jews in Arabic cunningly misled Muhammed by subtly perverting the true name of Jesus into the name of their forefather’s irreligious brother” (Gilchrist).   Christian polemicists argue that, “If Quran gives a distorted and inaccurate account of Jesus and Christian beliefs about him it cannot be of divine origin” (Robinson, 9).  Suleiman Mourad, a religion professor in Middlebury, does not accept the name confusion as a problem.  He explains that 'Isa' was not derived from Esau but from 'Isho' which is the original name of Jesus in Hebrews, and he adds that the theory that the Quran is not of holy origin is unacceptable (personal communication, Nov. 8, 2004).  
 	
Both Islam and Christianity call Jesus the Messiah; however the meaning of the word is different in two religions.  In Christianity, the Messiah is the “Anointed One” in a way that no other prophet is.  “Throughout the Scriptures of the earlier prophets …found constant predictions of the coming of God’s Anointed, one who would not be an ordinary prophet but the ultimate Savior of the whole world” (Gilchrist, article).   In Islam, the word has the sole meaning of anointed and ‘every prophet of God is anointed or appointed’ (Deedat, 13). In Christ in Islam, Deedat points out that the original Hebrew word masaha for the Messiah “was a general word denointing any kind of anointing and that it was used of priests, pillars, tabernacles, etc., which were set apart for worship and duly consecrated for this purpose” (Gilchrist).  The arguments between Gilchrist and Deedat in the article, Christ in Islam and Christianity, are representative of the conflict between religious Christians and Muslims.  Disagreements in many concepts arise from the differences in interpretation. An example is the interpretation of the verse “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).  Deedat says that “this does not mean that Jesus was one with his Father in omniscience, nature, or omnipotence, but only ‘one in purpose’ (Christ in Islam, 37) and he accuses Christians for being blind and adds that “spiritual blinkers are more impervious than physical defects” (37).  Gilchrist replies that the statement “I and the Father are one” made by Jesus “clearly means ‘one in all things’, and Jesus would hardly have made such a striking claim without qualifying it if he had not intended to convey the impression that there was an absolute oneness between the Father and the Son and that he therefore possessed deity…. The whole problem with Deedat is that, being a Muslim, he approaches the Bible with the presumption that Jesus is not the eternal son of God and could never have claimed to be such…  Deedat is thus totally unqualified and unfit to interpret the Bible… It is quite clear who is reading the book with ‘blinkers’ ” (Gilchrist). 
	After exploring Islam and Christianity and their image of Jesus Christ, it is doubtless that a Muslim and a Christian view of The Da Vinci Code would be disparate.  The main problems for Christians in The Da Vinci Code are the claims that ‘the Bible is of human origin’ and ‘Jesus is a mortal prophet’.  However, these do not sound fiction to Muslims as they believe that Jesus was a prophet, and the Bible which was the Word of God in origin had changed and became corrupt.  The Da Vinci Code was the bestseller for months in Turkey, a secular Islamic country.  However, while the book caused hot debates in Christian countries, in Turkey the novel is mostly read as a mere thriller.  Some Muslims see the novel as an unraveling of the mysteries of the Christian world, and their acceptance of the mortal Jesus and the revised Bible that had lost its Holy origin. 

Be it the Son of God or a prophet, both religions accept that Jesus was a figure of immense influence over masses.  Beyond this, all further arguments are superfluous as they fail to make a point over the fundamental differences of humanity.  The contradictions in the Gospels as I explained before can be overseen with the excuse of interpretation differences, then so can different portrayals of Jesus in the Quran and the Bible can be accepted because in their essence, the Holy Books do not oppose each other but how these religions become to be practiced with later additions to their origins cause the disagreements.  During my personal communication with Professor Wilson of Middlebury College, he told me that all human beings share 98 percent of their characteristics, differing in only two percent because of things like their political views.  When I asked him if our religious beliefs are in this two percent, he enlightened me with his point of view: “No, religion is only used to emphasize the differences.”  Without the fear of being persecuted, Dan Brown boldly questions the history of Christianity, the divinity of Jesus, and the trustworthiness of the Church.  It nevertheless provokes the reader to question the actual message that religion aim to communicate and contemplate on controversies that fail to change the essence of spiritual teachings.  The Da Vinci Code is a fiction novel, and the fact that it touches historical and religious subjects does not make Dan Brown a liar or The Da Vinci Code a conspiracy.  Dan Brown does not tell us what did happen but what might have happened, and who knows the reality of ages.   If he was able to stimulate interest in a non-Christian girl to search for the true nature of Christ and Christianity and an understanding the Christian faith, he has been successful in moving the two different parts of the world one inch closer.  

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