In reality, there is not one New Testament manuscript containing the word periklytos in that passage. However, documentary evidence, or lack thereof, generally leaves Islamic apologists unmoved. The view that Islam is a correction of the false teachings of Christianity about Jesus is mainstream in Islam. Muslims even see the multiplicity of divisions among Christians as evidence that Allah is displeased with them over their distortion of his prophet’s message.
Enmity and hatred
Indeed, Muslims to this day point to the huge number of Christian sects as confirmation that Allah has stirred up “enmity and hatred” among Christians for “forgetting a portion of that they were reminded of.” There is a related idea among many Muslims that Christians (and, indeed, all non-Muslims) actually know better: They know Islam is true but refuse to accept it out of a desire for personal gain or from sheer perversity.
Muhammad’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq, whose biography is more fanciful hagiography than sober historiography, but nonetheless records a great deal that is illuminating about (among many other things) Islamic beliefs and assumptions, reports that at one time a group of Christians, including a bishop from southern Arabia, journeyed to see Muhammad. Along the way, the Christians argued among themselves, in keeping with the Qur’anic assertion that Allah had “stirred up among them enmity and hatred.” However, Ibn Ishaq is none too clear about the nature of the disagreements. He says that they “differed among themselves in some points, saying [Jesus] is God; and He is the son of God; and He is the third person of the Trinity, which is the doctrine of Christianity.” When they go in to meet Muhammad, he challenges them to draw down the curse of Allah upon those who are speaking falsehood. They ask for time to talk amongst themselves privately. During this private meeting, one of the Christian leaders says:
O Christians, you know right well that Muhammad is a prophet sent (by God) and he has brought a decisive declaration about the nature of your master. You know too that a people has never invoked a curse on a prophet and seen its elders live and its youth grow up. If you do this you will be exterminated. But if you decide to adhere to your religion and to maintain your doctrine about your master, then take your leave of the man and go home.97
Resuming their meeting with Muhammad, they present Christian doctrine to him and proclaim themselves to be true worshippers of God. Muhammad responds bluntly: “You lie. Your assertion that God has a son, your worship of the cross, and your eating pork hold you back from submission.”98 These are, in other words, manifestations of perversity, not conviction. The Christians decline Muhammad’s challenge, thus confirming his assertion of their insincerity. The Qur’an makes a similar charge: “And when God took compact with those who had been given the Book: ‘You shall make it clear unto the people, and not conceal it.’ But they rejected it behind their backs and sold it for a small price—how evil was that their selling!” (3:187).
There are all too many Muslim clerics who agree with the Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Qadhi, who several years ago harshly criticized Christianity in line with mainstream Islamic beliefs about Christ and Christianity:
Today we will talk about one of the distorted religions, about a faith that deviates from the path of righteousness . . . about Christianity, this false faith, and about the people whom Allah described in his book as deviating from the path of righteousness. We will examine their faith, and we will review their history, full of hate, abomination, and wars against Islam and the Muslims. In this distorted and deformed religion, to which many of the inhabitants of the earth belong, we can see how the Christians deviate greatly from the path of righteousness by talking about the concept of the Trinity. As far as they are concerned, God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three who are one. . . .
They see Jesus, peace be upon him, as the son of Allah. . . . It is the Christians who believe Jesus was crucified. According to them, he was hanged on the cross with nails pounded through his hands, and he cried, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” According to them, this was so that he would atone for the sins of mankind. . . . Regardless of all these deviations from the path of righteousness, it is possible to see many Muslims . . . who know about Christianity only what the Christians claim about love, tolerance, devoting life to serving the needy, and other distorted slogans. . . . After all this, we still find people who promote the idea of bringing our religion and theirs closer, as if the differences were miniscule and could be eliminated by arranging all those [interreligious] conferences, whose goal is political.99
“Love, tolerance, devoting life to serving the needy, and other distorted slogans.” Those who have wondered why there has arisen no Muslim Mother Teresa, no Muslim St. Francis of Assisi, no Muslim who has ever won renown for his charity or humility, need look no further.
Jesus saves us—from Christianity
In Islamic theology, the person who will correct the Christians’ “distorted and deformed religion” is Jesus himself. Muhammad prophesies a vision of the end times that has the Muslim prophet Jesus actually making war against Christians and Christianity: “The Hour will not be established until the son of Mary [Jesus] descends amongst you as a just ruler, he will break the cross, kill the pigs, and abolish the Jizya tax. Money will be in abundance so that nobody will accept it [as charitable gifts].’”100
He will break the cross because it is an insult to Allah’s transcendent power to suggest that one of his prophets could have been victimized, that Jesus was God in the flesh who died and rose from the dead for our salvation. He will kill the pigs because they represent the failure of the Christians to accept Muhammad’s new revelations and their attendant dietary restrictions; at this point, the world is to be conquered and Islamized entirely, and so no one will have any use for pigs at all.
He will abolish the jizya tax, which is the hallmark of the subjugated status of the People of the Book as mandated in the Qur’an (9:29). There will be no need to collect it anymore, because the People of the Book who remain alive at this time will all have converted to Islam. “Money will be in abundance,” as a true era of peace and happiness dawns upon the world, presumably amid the corpses of millions of pigs and Christians who refused to convert and were duly killed by Jesus himself.
“During his time,” says Ibn Kathir, “Allah will destroy all religions except Islam and Allah will destroy Al-Masih Ad-Dajjal (the False Messiah).”101
And thus the true age of peace will dawn: when Jesus has saved the world by destroying Christianity.
5
Are We All Muslims Now?
The Qur’anic “correction” of biblical stories, as we have seen, makes over Moses and Jesus into prophets whose teachings were congruent with those of Muhammad. But the Islamic critique of Judaism and Christianity doesn’t stop there.
One of the least-noted aspects of Islam is its thoroughgoing historical revisionism, aimed at the complete and utter delegitimizing of Christianity. Muslim spokesmen in the West routinely point to Jesus’ status as a prophet in the Qur’an as an indication of Islam’s ecumenical broad-mindedness. In reality, however, Islam treats Christianity as a perversion of the original teaching of Jesus (which is identical to the message of the Qur’an and Islam). This robs Christianity of any legitimate manifestation; to Islam, all Christians are essentially apostate Muslims.
In the Qur’an, not just Moses and Jesus but all the biblical figures who appear are presented as Muslims. Abraham, for example, of whom the Qur’an says: “No; Abraham in truth was not a Jew, neither a Christian; but he was a Muslim and one pure of faith; certainly he was never of the idolaters” (3:67).
It may seem preposterous to non-Muslims that the Qur’an makes this claim, since Abraham lived millennia before Muhammad. But actually, the claim presents no problem of anachronism for Muslims, because they consider Islam to be the original and true religion of all true prophets. Thus, any deviations from the substance of Islam in the message of a true prophet (such as are found in Christian and Jewish scriptures) are
simply evidence that the followers of that prophet altered his message.
Note the clear contrast with the way Christians view Judaism. Christianity originated as a sect of Judaism. The Jews at its foundation, Sts. Peter and Paul, and all the other New Testament authors except for St. Luke, read the Old Testament as Scripture. They understood it differently, particularly in regard to the messianic prophecies, than did the leaders of the Jewish people, but they wouldn’t have dreamed of claiming that its text had been tampered with, or that it was not reliably the word of God. Rather than re-writing Judaism to accommodate itself, Christianity has sought to harmonize its teachings with its Jewish roots.
In contrast to this accommodating and inclusive view, Islam views Judaism and Christianity as distorted and renegade versions of the true messages of Moses and Jesus. The people who originated them and the people who follow them today are perverse, rejecting the true faith even though they know it to be true. Islamic doctrine holds that the true teachings of Moses and Jesus corresponded to those of Muhammad, and that they delivered to the world written revelation—the original, unadulterated Torah and Gospels—that reflected this correspondence. These original texts have been lost, but fortunately, Muslims contend, the Qur’an contains the substance of their true messages.
The corruption of Scripture
In the Qur’an, the Christians have not so much fabricated as forgotten what Allah told them through Jesus. Despite the Qur’an’s dependence upon biblical material as one of its most obvious sources (and the only source that makes coherent much of what it says about Jesus), the Qur’an criticizes the Christians for not faithfully preserving the revelations they received: “And with those who say ‘We are Christians’ We took compact; and they have forgotten a portion of that they were reminded of. So We have stirred up among them enmity and hatred, till the Day of Resurrection; and God will assuredly tell them of the things they wrought” (5:14).
These charges are much milder than those the Qur’an levels against the Jews, who have not only “forgotten a part of what they were reminded of,” but also are busy “perverting words from their meanings,” which apparently amounts to a charge that they were willfully misinterpreting the Scripture: “So for their breaking their compact We cursed them and made their hearts hard, they perverting words from their meanings; and they have forgotten a portion of that they were reminded of; and thou wilt never cease to light upon some act of treachery on their part, except a few of them. Yet pardon them, and forgive; surely God loves the good-doers” (5:13).
Yet the Christians’ corruption of their own scriptures, according to the Qur’an, goes beyond simple forgetfulness. The Qur’an also asks of the Jews and Christians, “And who does greater evil than he who conceals a testimony received from God? And God is not heedless of the things you do” (2:140). Apparently, then, the Christians have not just forgotten a part of divine revelation, but are deliberately concealing some of what Allah told them. This implies a moral guilt that all Christians carry—or, if it is restricted only to the perpetrators of this corruption, at the very least the Christians of today are misled and ignorant of the true teachings of Jesus.
This moral guilt comes through clearly in the Qur’an when it says that there are among the People of the Book (the Qur’an’s term for groups that have received written revelations from Allah—principally Jews and Christians) some “evildoers” who claim that what they recite is divine revelation, when actually it is of their own devising: “Then the evildoers substituted a saying other than that which had been said to them; so We sent down upon the evildoers wrath out of heaven for their ungodliness” (2:59). These “sayings” that are substituted one for another apparently involve Jews and Christians’ passing off human writings as inspired Scripture: “And there is a sect of them twist their tongues with the Book, that you may suppose it part of the Book, yet it is not part of the Book; and they say, ‘It is from God,’ yet it is not from God, and they speak falsehood against God, and that wittingly” (3:79).
This warning appears to be in connection with the Christian proclamation of Christ’s divinity, since immediately following it comes an oblique reference to Christians’ worshipping Christ as God: “It belongs not to any mortal that God should give him the Book, the Judgment, the Prophethood, then he should say to men, ‘Be you servants to me apart from God.’ Rather, ‘Be you masters in that you know the Book, and in that you study.’ He would never order you to take the angels and the Prophets as Lords; what, would He order you to disbelieve, after you have surrendered?” (3:80-81).
This passage clearly identifies the orthodox Christian understanding of the divinity of Christ as a sinful deification of a human being and a twisting of Jesus’ message. In the Qur’an, the true Christians are those who hold Jesus to be a merely human prophet who taught the absolute oneness and singularity of God. This Christianity, however, has long since vanished from the earth. Mainstream Muslim belief is that orthodox Christianity is nothing more than a subterfuge, a massive hoax designed to fool the believers and lead them astray.
Some of those who engage in this subterfuge not only recite false revelations but write them down and even sell them to the ignorant and unwary: “And some there are of them that are common folk not knowing the Book, but only fancies and mere conjectures. So woe to those who write the Book with their hands, then say, ‘This is from God,’ that they may sell it for a little price; so woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for their earnings” (2:79).
Oddly enough, however, even while charging that the Christians “have forgotten a portion of that they were reminded of,” the Qur’an directs Christians to determine the question of whether or not Islam is true by consulting the Gospel, “wherein is guidance and light”:
And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing. So let the People of the Gospel judge according to what God has sent down therein. Whosoever judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the ungodly. (5:46-47)
The Qur’an refers to the “Gospel” in this and other passages as if it were a book delivered to Jesus, in much the same way as the Qur’an was said to have been delivered to Muhammad. Jews and Christians will find prophecies of Muhammad’s coming in their own scripture—that is, in the unadulterated Torah and Gospel that Muslims say taught Islam but have vanished from the earth. Allah says: “My chastisement—I smite with it whom I will; and My mercy embraces all things, and I shall prescribe it for those who are godfearing and pay the alms, and those who indeed believe in Our signs, those who follow the Messenger, the Prophet of the common folk, whom they find written down with them in the Torah and the Gospel” (7:156-157).
Not only are Christians thus directed to consult their own scripture in order to determine the veracity of Muhammad’s prophetic claim, but Allah even tells Muhammad to do the same thing:
So, if thou art in doubt regarding what We have sent down to thee, ask those who recite the Book before thee. The truth has come to thee from thy Lord; so be not of the doubters, nor be of those who cry lies to God’s signs so as to be of the losers. (10:94-95)
These passages put Muslims in an awkward position. The Qur’an itself says that the gospel contains “guidance and light” and tells Christians and even Muhammad to consult it; and yet the New Testament does not confirm Muhammad’s message; indeed, it teaches numerous doctrines that Islam denies (notably the divinity of Christ). Muslim theologians have found a solution to this conundrum in claiming that the true Gospel that was delivered to Jesus Christ (as the Qur’an puts it) is not the New Testament of Christianity. The Muslim charge that Christians have corrupted their scripture is pointed: Those who changed the text are supposed to have done so in order to remove references to Muhammad and correspondences to Islamic doctrine. So the Gospel that was delivered to Jesus the Muslim
prophet contained “guidance and light,” but the New Testament does not.
Twentieth-century translator of the Qur’an, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, explains: “The Injil [Gospel] mentioned in the Qur’an is certainly not the New Testament, and it is not the four Gospels, as now received by the Christian Church, but an original Gospel which was promulgated by Jesus as the Tawrah [Torah] was promulgated by Moses and the Qur’an by Muhammad al Mustafa.”102
The existence of this “original Gospel which was promulgated by Jesus” is a staple of Muslim belief. Extrapolating from the Qur’an’s claim that Christians “have forgotten a portion of that they were reminded of” and have altered the scripture they received from Jesus, Islam generally teaches that the New Testament, as it stands today, is a corrupted version of the true gospel, altered at the hands of venal churchmen.
Gospel of Barnabas: the real deal?
There is, however, no documentary evidence whatsoever of this original Gospel. Not only has it never been found, nothing corresponding to it is even referred to in early Christian literature. No documents, whole or fragmentary, have been found to support the idea that there ever existed an account of Jesus’ life that conformed to Islamic doctrine about him.
Some Muslims point to the Gospel According to Barnabas, a relatively wordy text that exists only in a couple of manuscripts that date from the sixteenth century. Iran’s Basij Press claimed in May 2012 that a copy of the Gospel of Barnabas in the possession of the Turkish government actually dated from the fifth century, and claimed far-reaching implications for this: “The discovery of the original Barnabas Bible will now undermine the Christian Church and its authority and will revolutionize the religion in the world. The most significant fact, though, is that this Bible has predicted the coming of Prophet Mohammad and in itself has verified the religion of Islam, and this alone will unbalance the powers of the world and create instability in the Christian world.”103
Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam Page 9