What would Jesus say about Islam?

[Livenotonevil]

That’s not true at all - the Church of Jerusalem still exists today with Apostolic Succession from Saint James in the Orthodox Church, and considering that at the Council of Jerusalem James spoke up and condemned the Jewish works of the Law, by no means can we say he was a Judaizer.

Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[HarryStotle]

Because James and the Jewish Christian Church remained in Jerusalem until the Romans destroyed the city in 70 A.D.
Who knows what Christianity would have been if that hadn’t happened.

I guess you missed the part where Jesus prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem. And he foretold a number of precursor events that would give the Christian community in Jerusalem time to leave before the actual destruction.

Now our Church is based on a New Testament half written by a guy who never even knew Jesus.

That would be Paul, I suppose. How are you so sure he “never even knew Jesus?”

I mean given that your posts have been completely written by a guy who also doesn’t know Jesus, nor the Scriptures, it seems.

 

[HarryStotle]

Who knows if Christianity was really supposed to drift into a totally different religion as opposed to a Jewish sect.

Jesus disagrees with you…

"Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will my Church.

Notice he doesn’t say anything about founding a Jewish sect.

 

[thephilosopher6]

Jesus would condemn almost every aspect of the Satanic religion of Islam.

 

[po18guy]

Jesus prophesied long ago about all future religions:

Matthew 7:15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves."

Note: ravenous wolves shed innocent blood.

Matthew 24:11 “And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.”

As well, Jesus speaks through His mystical Body, the Church. Perhaps the first example:

2 Peter 2:1 “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false
teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies,
even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift
destruction.”

Islam denies Jesus as anything other than prophet.

 

[BornInMarch]

It depends.

If you ask a Muslim this question, then he’d say “Jesus would approve of Islam and would see it as the culmination of Allah’s plan”.

If you ask a Christian this question, then he’d say “Jesus would consider Islam to be a corruption of God’s true teachings”.

 

[abucs]

Well I guess it depends on the individual people.

Jesus did say ‘If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet’.

Of course, the secular political correct religion of today would oppose Jesus’ words because apparently they know better.

 

[josh987654321]

I’ve been wondering about this for a while. What would Jesus say about Islam, Mohammed (his teachings)?

Galatians 1:6-9

There Is No Other Gospel

6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel— 7 not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9 As we have said before, so now I say again, If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.

God Bless You

Thank you for reading.

 

[josh987654321]

It depends.

No it doesn’t, In truth, Muhammad was a false prophet who made obviously false claims 600 years later such as denying Jesus’ death on the cross.

Unfortunately the serious and sometimes obvious problems with this false prophet cannot be openly exposed in places like the Middle East (Martyrs who are now saints have tried) since Muhammad instituted the death penalty for both apostasy and blasphemy.

“For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

God Bless

Thank you for reading.

 

[BornInMarch]

It may be easy to say “Well the Muslims are just wrong”, but they can just as easily retort “No, we’re right. You’re the ones who are wrong”. From there it will go around in a circle until Jesus personally tells us which one is right. If you say “Jesus did tell us. In the bible he told us Christians are right”, then a Muslim can reply just as easily “In the Koran Jesus told us that Muslims are right”.

You need to understand that people who disagree with you hold their convictions just as surely as you hold yours, and that they consider you just as wrong as you consider them.

Hence, it depends. If you ask a Christian and a Muslim you’ll get two different answers to the question and both will be able to point to their holy scriptures and claim that Jesus supports their view.

It’s good that you think your view is right (nobody holds a view because they think it’s wrong) but you need to answer why you’re sure of that.

 

[josh987654321]

From there it will go around in a circle until Jesus personally tells us which one is right.

Not true, just as the militant atheist, who if Jesus appeared before them and told them personally, they would call it a hallucination.

I agree to try and present well reasoned arguments (If you want to help with that I’m all for it), but the thing I don’t like which I feel is implied, is moral relativism. I might make a good case for Christ, I might make a poor one. Does that change the truth that Muhammad was and is a false prophet and that Islam is a lie? It doesn’t. Does it mean that both our views are equal and equally valid? certainly not.

God Bless You

Thank you for reading.

 

[poche]

From the Gospel of Matthew 24:clock5:

5 because many will come using my name and saying, “I am the Christ,” and they will deceive many.

 

[jas84173]

The Word “Church” in the Greek it was written is not the same meaning of the word as we understand it.

 

[HarryStotle]

The Word “Church” in the Greek it was written is not the same meaning of the word as we understand it.

Well that depends upon the meaning that you suppose “we” understand by the word “Church,” and the meaning that you ascribe to the Greek form of the word.

Apparently, Jesus meant something by it and he wasn’t likely speaking in Greek. What would you suggest Jesus meant by whatever word he said to refer to what became translated as Church?

 

[jas84173]

I know he wasn’t speaking in Greek. But the vast majority of the New Testament was written down in Greek. Actually I think all of the New Testament was. It is significant that this is the first occurrence of the word Church (Ecclesia) in the New Testament, the only passage but one (Matthew 18:17) in which it is found in the whole cycle of our Lord’s recorded teaching. Its use was every way significant. Partly, doubtless, it came with the associations which it had in the Greek of the Old Testament, as used for the “assembly” or “congregation” of the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:16; Deuteronomy 23:1; Psalm 26:12); but partly also, as soon at least as the word came in its Greek form before Greek readers, it would bring with it the associations of Greek politics. The Ecclesia was the assembly of free citizens, to which belonged judicial and legislative power, and from which aliens and slaves were alike excluded. The mere use of the term was accordingly a momentous step in the education of the disciples. They had been looking for a kingdom with the King, as its visible Head, sitting on an earthly throne. They were told that it was to be realised in a society, an assembly, like those which in earthly polities we call popular or democratic. He, the King, claimed that society as His own. He was its real Head and Founder; but, outwardly, it was to be what the word which He now chose described. And this Church He was about to build. It need hardly be said that the word ecclesia did not lend itself so readily as the English equivalent does to the idea of building. The society and the fabric in which the members of the society meet were not then, as they are now, described by the same term. The similitude was bolder than it seems to us. Like the “city set on a hill” of Matthew 5:14, like the “vine” of John 15:1, it may well have been suggested by the scenery in the midst of which the words were uttered. For there upon one rock rose the ruins of the old Canaanite city of Hazor; and on another the stately palace built by the Herodian princes, and still, as the Castle of Shubeibeh, covering an extent of ground equal to that occupied by the Castle of Heidelberg (Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, c. 11). Once started on its way, the similitude became the fruitful source of new thoughts and phrases. The ecclesia was the “house of God” (1Timothy 3:15); it was a “holy temple” (Ephesians 2:21). All gifts were bestowed for the work of “edifying” or building it up (1Corinthians 14:3-4; Ephesians 4:12). Those who laboured in that work were as “wise architects or master builders” (1Corinthians 3:10). But Christ, we must remember, claims the work of building as His own. Whatever others may do, He is the supreme Master-builder. As in His sacerdotal character, He is at once Priest and Victim, so under the aspect now presented (consistency of metaphors giving way to the necessities of spiritual truth) He is at once the Founder and the Foundation of the new society.

 

[HarryStotle]

And your point would be?

So what, exactly, is the difference between the way Christ would have used the word “Church” and the way we use it today that motivated you to claim that difference would be significant in some way?

You may also want to connect this simplified explanation to your observations about Paul not knowing Christ with the implication that Paul invented something that Christ would not have.

Interesting that you used a number of Paul’s Letters to explain the meaning of “Church” to the ancients. So, apparently, Paul knew what he was doing when he helped establish Christ’s Church?

 

[jas84173]

Paul may have considered himself an apostle, but it seems that few if any of the other movement leaders agreed. Not even Luke, Paul’s sycophant, whose writings betray a deliberate, if ahistorical, attempt to elevate his mentor’s status in the founding of the church, seems to consider Paul an apostle. Luke makes it clear there are only twelve apostles, one for each tribe of Israel, just as Jesus had intended. In recounting the story of how the remaining eleven apostles replaced Judas Iscariot with Matthias after Jesus’s death, Luke notes that the new recruit needed to be someone who “accompanied [the disciples] all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, starting with John’s baptism, right up to the day [Jesus] was taken from us” (Acts 1:21). Such a requirement would clearly have ruled out Paul, who converted to the movement around 37 C.E., nearly a decade after Jesus had died. But that does not deter Paul, who not only demands to be called an apostle—“even if I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you,” he tells his beloved community in Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:2)—he insists he is far superior to all the other apostles. “Are they Hebrews?” Paul writes of the apostles. “So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one (though it may be foolish to say so), with greater labors, more floggings, more imprisonments, and more often near death” (2 Corinthians 11:22–23). Paul holds particular contempt for the Jerusalem-based triumvirate of James, Peter, and John, whom he derides as the “so-called pillars of the church” (Galatians 2:9). “Whatever they are makes no difference to me,” he writes. “Those leaders contributed nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6). The apostles may have walked and talked with the living Jesus (or, as Paul dismissively calls him, “Jesus-in-the-flesh”). But Paul walks and talks with the divine Jesus: they have, according to Paul, conversations in which Jesus imparts secret instructions intended solely for his ears. The apostles may have been handpicked by Jesus as they toiled away on their fields or brought up their fishing nets. But Jesus chose Paul before he was born: he was, he tells the Galatians, called by Jesus into apostleship while still in his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). Simply put, Paul does not consider himself the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the first apostle.

 

[jas84173]

The claim of apostleship is an urgent one for Paul, as it was the only way to justify his entirely self-ascribed mission to the gentiles, which the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem appear not to have initially supported. Although there was a great deal of discussion among the apostles over how strictly the new community should adhere to the Law of Moses, with some advocating rigorous compliance and others taking a more moderate stance, there was little argument about whom the community was meant to serve: this was a Jewish movement intended for a Jewish audience. Even the Hellenists reserved their preaching mostly for the Jews. If a handful of gentiles decided to accept Jesus as messiah, so be it, as long as they submitted to circumcision and the law. Yet, for Paul, there is no room whatsoever for debating the role of the Law of Moses in the new community. Not only does Paul reject the primacy of Jewish law, he refers to it as a “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on a stone tablet” that must be superseded by “a ministry of the Spirit come in glory” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). He calls his fellow believers who continue to practice circumcision—the quintessential mark of the nation of Israel—“dogs and evildoers” who “mutilate the flesh” (Philippians 3:2). These are startling statements for a former Pharisee to make. But for Paul they reflect the truth about Jesus that he feels he alone recognizes, which is that “Christ is the end of the Torah” (Romans 10:4). Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all, Jesus claimed to have come to fulfill the Law of Moses, not to abolish it. Far from rejecting the law, Jesus continually strove to expand and intensify it. Where the law commands, “thou shall not kill,” Jesus added, “if you are angry with your brother or sister you are liable to [the same] judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Where the law states, “thou shall not commit adultery,” Jesus extended it to include “everyone who looks at a woman with lust” (Matthew 5:28). Jesus may have disagreed with the scribes and scholars over the correct interpretation of the law, particularly when it came to such matters as the prohibition against working on the Sabbath. But he never rejected the law. On the contrary, Jesus warned that “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19).

 

[jas84173]

Paul’s lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care. He repeatedly boasts that he has not learned about Jesus either from the apostles or from anyone else who may have known him. “But when it pleased God … to reveal his son to me, so that I might preach him to the gentiles, I did not confer with anyone, nor did I go up to Jerusalem [to ask permission of] the apostles before me,” Paul boasts. “Instead, I went directly to Arabia, and then again to Damascus” (Galatians 1:15–17). Only after three years of preaching a message that Paul insists he received not from any human being (by which he quite obviously means James and the apostles), but directly from Jesus, did he deign to visit the men and women in Jerusalem who had actually known the man Paul professed as Lord (Galatians 1:12). Why does Paul go to such lengths not only to break free from the authority of the leaders in Jerusalem, but to denigrate and dismiss them as irrelevant or worse? Because Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought, that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly get away with preaching them. What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality. Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’ dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making: Christ. Although “Christ” is technically the Greek word for “messiah,” that is not how Paul employs the term. He does not endow Christ with any of the connotations attached to the term “messiah” in the Hebrew Scriptures. He never speaks of Jesus as “the anointed of Israel.” Paul may have recognized Jesus as a descendant of King David, but he does not look to the scriptures to argue that Jesus was the Davidic liberator the Jews had been awaiting. He ignores all the messianic prophecies that the gospels would rely on many years later to prove that Jesus was the Jewish messiah (when Paul does look to the Hebrew prophets—for instance, Isaiah’s prophecy about the root of Jesse who will one day serve as “a light to the gentiles” (11:10)—he thinks the prophets are predicting him, not Jesus). Most tellingly, unlike the gospel writers (save for John, of course), Paul does not call Jesus the Christ (Yesus ho Xristos), as though Christ were his title. Rather, Paul calls him “Jesus Christ,” or just “Christ,” as if it were his surname. This is an extremely unusual formulation whose closest parallel is in the way Roman emperors adopted “Caesar” as a cognomen, as in Caesar Augustus.

 

[jas84173]

Paul’s Christ is not even human, though he has taken on the likeness of one (Philippians 2:7). He is a cosmic being who existed before time. He is the first of God’s creations, through whom the rest of creation was formed (1 Corinthians 8:6). He is God’s begotten son, God’s physical progeny (Romans 8:3). He is the new Adam, born not of dust but of heaven. Yet while the first Adam became a living being, “the Last Adam,” as Paul calls Christ, has become “a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45–47). Christ is, in short, a comprehensively new being. But he is not unique. He is merely the first of his kind: “the first-born among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). All those who believe in Christ, as Paul does—those who accept Paul’s teachings about him—can become one with him in a mystical union (1 Corinthians 6:17). Through their belief, their bodies will be transformed into the glorious body of Christ (Philippians 3:20–21). They will join him in spirit and share in his likeness, which, as Paul reminds his followers, is the likeness of God (Romans 8:29). Hence, as “heirs of God and fellow heirs of Christ,” believers can also become divine beings (Romans 8:17). They can become like Christ in his death (Philippians 3:10)—that is, divine and eternal—tasked with the responsibility of judging alongside him the whole of humanity, as well as the angels in heaven (1 Corinthians 6:2–3). Paul’s portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright bizarre to Jesus’s Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean into a divine, preexistent, literal son of God whose death and resurrection launch a new genus of eternal beings responsible for judging the world has no basis in any writings about Jesus that are even remotely contemporary with Paul’s (a firm indication that Paul’s Christ was likely his own creation). Nothing like what Paul envisions exists in the Q source material, which was compiled around the same time that Paul was writing his letters. Paul’s Christ is certainly not the Son of Man who appears in Mark’s gospel, written just a few years after Paul’s death. Nowhere in the gospels of Matthew and Luke—composed between 90 and 100 C.E.—is Jesus ever considered the literal son of God. Both gospels employ the term “Son of God” exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title, not a description. It is only in the last of the canonized gospels, the gospel of John, written sometime between 100 and 120 C.E., that Paul’s vision of Jesus as Christ—the eternal logos, the only begotten son of God—can be found. Of course, by then, nearly half a century after the destruction of Jerusalem, Christianity was already a thoroughly Romanized religion, and Paul’s Christ had long obliterated any last trace of the Jewish messiah in Jesus. During the decade of the fifties, however, when Paul is writing his letters, his conception of Jesus as Christ would have been shocking and plainly heretical, which is why, around 57 C.E., James and the apostles demand that Paul come to Jerusalem to answer for his deviant teachings.