Thinking about the Da Vinci Code Book

(A speech given on 30.06.06 at Edinburgh Central Mosque)

by

Sr. Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood.

It is widely recognized these days that European, UK, American and Australian converts coming into Islam from a Christian background are no longer a rarity. I am not sure of the actual figures, but they are substantial.

All people who take on Islam as adults bring with them the sum total of their acquired knowledge, experience, background and culture. When they come across from Christianity they usually come with a pretty strong set of beliefs in God, sometimes sculpted by years of the disciplines of private prayer and communal worship, often sharpened by years of being sneered at or pitied by atheists, scientists, and the masses who just couldn’t care less about religion. They are sometimes bolstered by winning stout rounds of argument and discussion. This was certainly true in my case teaching teenagers in tough inner-city schools, where the arrival of each new year-group brought me yet another set of antagonists to confront and hopefully trounce! I had the slight advantage of age over these first-timer philosophical geniuses, and the practice every year. But I certainly didn’t always win!

When Christians become Muslims it often baffles their families and friends, for it seems so unreasonable that someone who has previously regarded worship of God as the highest possible behaviour, and believed Jesus to be the highest possible exemplar and most beloved Saviour and Son of God, and accepted that self-sacrifice in loyalty and service to him is the best and most important and noblest way to live, can suddenly drop these beliefs and take the huge step that rejects worship of Jesus as at best misguided and at worst as blasphemy.

But basically, Muslims do not believe that Jesus the Messiah or Christ was God. Usually, the path followed by Christians who become Muslim starts with the discovery of the logic that God so loved the world, His creation, that He did not send an only-begotten Son to die in order to save us from our sins, but taught that we still retain the responsibility for our own conduct, tempered by the confidence that God is pure Divine Love and Compassion. No sacrifice could possibly make God more forgiving than He already is. Such converts usually maintain that this is actually the message that Jesus taught, and that real Christianity lies in this belief and not what conflicting theologians of later centuries taught about him. I had the benefit of starting my professional career studying the machinations of my theological predecessors of the years up to 325 AD, culminating at the Council of Nicaea - at which the Creed recited to this day in Church of England communion services was formulated. One day I realized that I could no longer recite it with any honesty.

Some Christians have wrongly assumed that Muslims worship Muhammad, or regard him as vastly superior to Jesus. This is not so – both false beliefs are actually forbidden to Muslims. We worship only God, and are warned that attempting to compare the merits of His messengers is not an appropriate thing to do. (Surah 2.136). Over-loyalty to any individual earthly leader leads to sectarianism, confusion and division. We are told to make no difference between God’s messengers – their various talents and styles are unimportant; the only thing that matters is the message and what it communicates that there is only One True God, way beyond the ability of a human mind to comprehend, that without His deciding to reveal something of Himself nobody would be able to know anything about Him at all, that He wants us to love Him, and live the best lives we can in obedience to His will, and ultimately find Paradise and not Hell, and that in fairness towards us He has been choosing certain people - sometimes somewhat stunned and even reluctant people - to reveal His existence and will to guide humanity ever since humans became conscious beings. Of these, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad are probably the best known and the best loved, and for centuries after their deaths the teachings passed through them and the wonderful examples of their characters continue to change lives.

Muslims do not believe that Jesus should be encumbered with Trinitarian theology.

‘Worship only the Almighty, who begets no offspring and has no partner in his dominion, who has no weakness or limitation, and therefore no need of any aid.’ (Surah 17.111).

God does not need the intercession or sacrifice of anything in order to forgive. In the famous gospel parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15.11-32) Jesus taught that when a sinful youth came to the moment of realization and repentance, and turned back to God for forgiveness, he found God already rushing along the road with open arms to receive him back. We Muslims believe this. Allah said: ‘If (a penitent person) comes to Me walking, I go to him (or her) at the run.’ (Hadith Qudsi 15).

Christians know that Jesus faced three temptations in the wilderness before he commenced his mission - to turn stones into bread, to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple, and to be granted rule over all the kingdoms of the earth if he would but bow down and worship Shaytan. Muslim scholars interpret these three challenges differently - as temptations to think of himself as the Son of God, all of which he stoutly rejected. One of his famous replies was: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him Alone shall you serve.’ (Mt 4.10).

Jesus was reportedly once called ‘Good Teacher’, and asked point blank what it was a person had to do in order to gain eternal life. (Mt 10.17ff, with slight variants in the other versions) His very Muslim reply was the modest comment that there was only One Entity who was Good, and that was God, and that we should keep His commandments, and then we should love our neighbour as we love ourselves.

In the Qur’an we have: ‘The Almighty will say: "O Isa ibn Maryam, Did you ever say to the people, "worship me and my mother as gods beside Allah?" He will answer: "Glory to You! How could I say what I had no right to say? If I had ever said so, you would have certainly known it. You know what is in my heart, but I know not what is in Yours; for You Alone have full knowledge of all the unseen. I never said anything other than what You commanded me to say, that is to worship the Almighty, Who is my Lord….’ (Surah 5.116-7)

Jesus was also asked directly what a person had to do in order to be doing the work of God. He replied: ‘Believe in God, and him who He has sent.’ (Jn 6.28ff). This is what Muslims believe, that Jesus was indeed a messenger sent from God, one of a long, long line of chosen people, who included Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Amos, Job and Isaiah. Muslims believe further that Muhammad ibn Abdullah of Banu Quraysh (pbuh) was also chosen, called and sent with a mission by the same God, some six centuries after Jesus. Since then, although inspiring teachers and preachers have come a-plenty, there have been no more specially sanctified people chosen as intermediaries for God’s direct words, so it seems to be the case that as Muhammad had indeed been told by the Holy Spirit, he was the last.

When the publicity for Dan Brown’s book ‘The Da Vinci Code’ broke upon us, and then the book itself followed by the film (I have read the book but not seen the film as yet), I was already very familiar with much of the background theme material utilised by the novel. I assumed that Dan Brown must have gone along very much the same research trail as myself. The materials he used are not secret, but available to anybody who cares to do the spade-work.

I utilized the sources to present several theories in a dicussion of the origins of the Christian Church in my book ‘Mysteries of Jesus.’ I wanted to get people thinking. My original title was ‘Have the Christians really got it all wrong?’ but this was abandoned as being too confrontational, and I ended up with ‘Mysteries’. What Dan Brown did was utilize the various theories and create from them a highly successful novel – a novel being a work of fiction. My books, being semi-academic and drier reads, did not sell in millions but joined the texts on library shelves that include such matters as the Holy Grail, the Shroud of Turin, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so forth.

There are actually many mysteries concerning the life and person of Jesus, and the development of the early Church through to the Churches we have today. In previous centuries it was not always safe to discuss them.

Dan Brown’s book is a novel, action-packed, racy, and has to have villains, tension and drama. It is highly offensive to the Roman Catholic Church for several reasons – firstly, the murderous bad guys are supposed to be members of a religious secret society, intent on suppressing a devastating secret. This, for those inclined to believe that the plot is based upon reality, gives the Church a bad name.

The second reason is the one that also makes Islam offensive to Christianity – that if it could be proved that Jesus (a) was not literally the Son of God, and (b) that whether or not he died on the cross, his death (although a noble martyrdom) did not actually save us from our sins – then the whole of Christian doctrine as we now have it would be undermined, and ultimately the Church would be regarded as based upon an error or series of errors. Theories based on these things not only underlie Dan Brown’s novel, but also the entire history of the persecution of heretics, Unitarians, the Muslims in the Crusades, the Templars, and so on.

I try to think like an amateur detective. My starting point is always facts and artifacts rather than people’s memories or opinions, which can easily be inaccurate or misleading. Dan Brown took an artefact as one of his starting points - the famous picture painted by Leonardo Da Vinci of Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. Now, from St.John’s Gospel we know that sitting next to Jesus on this occasion was an unnamed person described as ‘the disciple who Jesus loved.’ If you show a copy of the Da Vinci picture to an unwary victim and ask him or her to point out to you which of the diners is supposed to be Mary Magdalene and which is the Apostle John, they will all point to the figure of the beautiful young woman sitting next to Jesus, the only woman in the picture, as the Magdalene. That’s the problem – for this is the person, the ‘disciple who Jesus loved’, who is supposed to be the Apostle John. In fact, no scholar has yet been able to put a name to the Beloved Disciple with certainty. In my own studies I came up with at least 4 possible candidates – but that is not the subject of my talk today.

What were my facts and artifacts? Firstly, I became surprised and suspicious about the lack of knowledge concerning the various human relatives of Jesus, and the supposed attitudes of his family and earliest companions towards him. As it happens, Jesus’ mother, the Virgin Mary, is mentioned far more times in the Qur’an than in the New Testament. Many non-Muslims, of course, have no idea that Jesus or Mary are mentioned in the Qur’an at all, and wonder what they might have to do with Islam anyway?

The fact that the Virgin Mary might have not remained ever-virgin, for Jesus had four brothers and at least two sisters, comes from a reference in St. Mark’s Gospel, chapter 6 verse 4. Were they Mary’s children, or perhaps the children of Mary’s husband Joseph by a previous marriage (as mentioned in several texts that are not included in the New Testament but are known as Apocryphal Gospels).

A second fact is the brief general impression given in the New Testament Gospels that Jesus’ brothers or half-brothers did not believe that he was to be regarded as the Son of God, and were embarrassed and alarmed by his mission. However, it is a fact that Jesus’ brother James was actually the first leader of the Mother-Church in Jerusalem (not St Peter, who was ‘only’first Bishop of the Church in Rome); James was martyred, and his place taken by other members of his family for over 100 years.

Then, there is the odd fact that the three important early historical texts that give vital information about that period – those of the Roman writers Tacitus and Suetonius, and the Jewish historian Josephus - give copious details about the years leading up to and after the time of Jesus, but the records of the years that would cover Jesus’ life are inexplicably lost.

Then, we have the artifacts – such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which took half a century from their discovery to be given in full translation to the public, thus leading many people to suppose that they contained material which might damage the Christian Church if known – ie. that the earliest Christians, who actually knew Jesus, viewed him as a chosen messenger of God but not as Son of God. This is backed up by early sermons, for example one reported of St.Peter: - ‘O people of Israel, hear these words; Jesus the Nazoraion, a man publicly shown by God to you through powerful works and signs that God did through him in your midst…this man you fastened to a stake by the hands of lawless men and did away with – but God resurrected him by loosing the pangs of death, for it was not possible for him to be held fast by it…..’ Acts 2.22-25).

Leaving that aside, it is a fact that the Gospels, which have plenty to say about Pharisees and Sadducees, do not even mention that most fervent and influential religious group of the years in which Jesus was supposed to have lived – the Essenes, the writers of these scrolls. Moreover, the scrolls do not mention Jesus at all, although their writers were highly messianic. They do mention a Teacher of Righteousness, but he seems to have lived in a previous century.

Then, we have various theories about relics. The two main suggestions about the Holy or Saint Grail were that it was either the preserved Cup of the Last Supper, or the chalice in which a disciple caught the blood of Jesus as he was tortured on the cross. Its legends became linked to the tales of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, Camelot, Glastonbury, and the Knights Templar.

However, the intriguing suggestion has also been developed that the Saint Grail really referred to a secret that had to be kept hidden by the Church or it would destroy it - that there was a ‘Sang Reyal’ or ‘royal bloodline’ of the descendants of Jesus. Dan Brown did not invent this theory, but it is the plot which underlies his novel. The trail leads through a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, their descendants marrying into the Merovingian royal family, the Cathars, Monsegur, and I guess to Rosslyn Abbey, a few miles from Edinburgh.

Going off at a tangent, some 50 years ago I first heard of the Ahmadiyyah sect of Muslims, and discovered that they claim that their founder was a direct descendant of Jesus, and that Jesus’ tomb can visited to this day, in Srinagar, Kashmir. I researched this a bit, and discovered their evidence was partly based on a diary kept by the intrepid Victorian-era explorer Nicolai Notovitch, who claimed to have seen documentary evidence in various Ladakh monasteries that Jesus had survived the crucifixion and traveled through Ladakh to Kashmir – a Jesus named as ‘Isa.

Muslims do not have the same problems when considering the offspring and descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)! He was not claimed to be divine, and there are no secrets – we are very happy for everyone to know of them. He had 6 children by his wife Khadijah and one by his Egyptian Christian wife Maryam, who was the daughter of a leading Christian Patriarch of Cairo. Only one of these children bore children that survived to adulthood, his daughter Fatimah, and from them there are now literally thousands of descendants, some of whom may well be here amongst our audience. One of the more famous descendants (through intermarriage with the Moorish line and Spanish royalty) is our own Queen, Elizabeth.

Of course, the bloodline-of-Jesus theory is quite independent of the issue of whether Jesus died on the cross or not, since his descendants were just as likely to have been conceived before that event as afterwards. The real issue for Christians is whether or not Jesus really was the incarnate Son of God, and whether or not his incarnation was God’s deliberate plan in order to save those who believed in him from their sins and bring them to everlasting life by the sacrifice of his crucifixion. Hence, the notion becomes as fundamentally threatening to Christianity as the controversy over the Satanic Verses was to Islam – the base-line threat there being that if the Devil could deceive our Prophet into including verses in the Qur’an that were not sent from Allah, the whole of the validity of the Qur’an would be undermined.

The history of the Church some centuries ago most certainly was bloodthirsty, and anyone who promoted the notion that Jesus was not the Virgin Born, Unique, Saviour and Redeemer of humanity was in grave danger of a very nasty death – not infrequently being burned alive. The Cathars suffered terribly, and so did the Knights Templar and Unitarians.

I would like to look at one mystery I examine in my text – that Jesus of Nazareth (or Yasu bar Nagara – son of the carpenter) might not have been the same person as the Muslim Prophet ‘Isa. Could ‘Isa have been the person referred to in the Dead Sea Scrolls as the Teacher of Righteousness (or one of them), who lived at a time prior to the Jesus who was crucified? The Dead Sea Scrolls actually speak of not one Messiah, but two – a Messiah of Israel and a Messiah of Aaron. The former was descended from the royal line of King David of the tribe of Judah, and the latter from the priestly Levitical line. Moreover, these Messiahs formed a series and were not just one individual. On the death of one Messiah, the role would be inherited by the next in line.

Christians will probably assume that Jesus, often styled ‘Son of David’, was the claimant for the Messiah of Israel title. That would of necessity rule him out as being the Teacher of Righteousness (or Zaddik), who was an Essene of levitical or priestly descent and served as an alternative High Priest to the corrupt puppet pontiffs put up by King Herod to serve Roman interests. It may well be that the Priest/Prophet Zechariah (who was slaughtered by Herod) was one of the first of these Messiahs of Aaron, followed by his son the Prophet John the Baptist (or Nabi Yahya), then John’s cousin Jesus (‘Isa), then Jesus’ brother James. The Davidic Messiahs seem to have been descendants of the Hasmonaean Royal line, through the rebel Hezekiah (another enemy of Herod), to Hezekiah’s son Judas of Gamala who led a revolt against Rome in 6 AD), then Judas’ sons Jacob and Simeon who were captured and crucified by the Romans in 46-48 AD, then Menahem who led the 66 AD Revolt of the Jews against Rome. It is interesting to note the detail that a man called Simeon was made to carry the cross of Jesus, and some early Christian sectarians actually believed he was crucified in his stead. It is interesting that the Roman Governor set free one of the prisoners on death row – a man who according to several early variants on Mt 27.16-17 also bore the name of Jesus, Jesus Barabbas – or Jesus, son of the father! The Qur’an retains vagueness on the subject of the crucifixion, merely commenting that there were many confused theories, the truth of which would all be revealed at the end of days. I have already quoted Peter’s sermon in the Book of Acts. The Qur’am has:

‘They (the Jews) boasted: "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary the Messenger of the Almighty"; but they did not kill him nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them. Those who hold differing opinions on this matter are full of doubts with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow - for most certainly they were not able to kill him. No, Allah raised him up unto Himself; Allah the Exalted in Power and Wise. And there is none of the People of the Book but must believe in him before his death; and on the Day of Judgment he will be a witness against them.’ (Surah 4.157-9).

Describing Jesus as ‘of Nazareth’ is interesting, and the fact that early Christians were called Nazarenes. Religious movements are not usually named after places. In the Greek, the word is often spelled Nazoraion, and the Jewish Talmud calls the Christians Notzrim. So what? Nazorean spelled with a ‘tz’ means Keeper, from the root word nazar which means ‘to keep or observe’ the commandments. A Nazirite with a ‘z’ means a ‘consecrated or separated one’. The Hebrew Nozrei ha-Brit (key terminology in the Dead Sea Scrolls) means ‘keepers of the covenant). The implication is that these Christians were distinguished from the pagan Gentile converts because they remained keepers of the Law revealed to Moses.

The Arab Christian writer Kamal Salibi, noting that claims that Jesus was a divine figure did lie behind one strand of passages in St John’s Gospel, possibly a documentary source (known to Christian scholars as the ‘I am’ sayings), suggested there were three sources that were confused and combined to form the ‘person’ who became known as Jesus of Nazareth – firstly the Prophet ‘Isa of the Qur’an (who lived some time before the Messiah Jesus and was not the man crucified in Jerusalem); secondly the messianic claimant and descendant of King David (Yasu bar Nagara or Son of the Carpenter), who was the man who did start a campaign resulting in his arrest and execution; and thirdly one of the gods of the Middle East who figured in the Ka’bah pantheon – who not only bore the names of ‘Isa and also Dhu Khulasa, but was also virgin-born, and died sacrificially and rose again for the salvation of his devotees.

Non-Muslims sometimes assume that the Qur’an was a book written by Muhammad, who was an uneducated man with very limited knowledge of Jewish and Christian texts. Others claim he was taught what he knew by the monks of Arabia, and got things wrong. As it happens, there were Christians and Jews, even prominent Rabbis, among the earliest and most devout converts to Islam. For at least 15 years he had contact with Waraqah ibn Nawfal, one of the cousins of his life-partner Khadijah, a prominent Christian scholar who had translated one gospel into Arabic. The Prophet’s close friend Salman had served as an acolyte to several Christian bishops including the Bishop of Mosul before his conversion.

Two prominent Rabbis who converted to Islam were Husayn b. Sallam of the Banu Qaynuqa, and Rabbi Mukhayriq of the Banu Thalabah. Husayn was a descendant of the Prophet Yusuf (Joseph), one of the most learned Rabbis of Madinah, an expert in the Torah, highly revered for his scholarship and knowledge of the teachings of the previous prophets, and one of those who had been convinced since the days of his youth that God was to send one more messenger, a final prophet. On the same day he converted the ten-year old little female scholar Zaynab bint Huyayy, daughter of a Rabbi, also converted – she went on to marry two leading Rabbis before taking the Prophet (pbuh) as her third husband and becoming known as Safiyyah. The wealthy Rabbi Mukhayriq felt such personal shame that his tribe refused to support the Prophet (pbuh) in battle and broke their pact with him that he made the Prophet (pbuh) his sole heir should he die on the battlefield. He did die, one of the martyrs of Uhud.

The notion that the Prophet’s material about Jesus was derived from garbled versions of apocryphal manuscripts rejected by orthodox Christians, especially the so-called Infancy Gospel – which was indeed written in Arabic - is based on one matter alone, surah 3.49, which touches on the narrative about Jesus making birds out of clay then causing them to fly. However, this is the interesting translation of this verse by Muhammad Asad:

‘And (appoint him) a Messenger to the Children of Israel (with this message): I have come to you with a message from your Sustainer. I shall create for you out of clay, as it were, the shape of your destiny, and then breathe into it, so that it might become your destiny, by God's leave; and I shall heal the blind and the leper, and bring the dead back to life, by God’s leave; and I shall let you know what you may eat and what you should store up in your houses. Surely in all this there is a message for you, if you are believers.’ (Surah 3.49). The word translated here as destiny is means literally ‘something like the shape of a bird’ or tayr; in pre-Islamic Arabic and in the Qur’an the word tayr is often used to denote fortune or destiny, whether good or evil. Out of the humble clay of their lives, ‘Isa would fashion for them the vision of a soaring destiny, and this vision, brought to life by his God-given inspiration, would become their real destiny.

In fact, no Muslim believes that Muhammad wrote, or that his mind created, the Qur’an - but that he simply caused to be written down the words brought to him by the angel over a period of 23 years. The Qur’an verses about Jesus have no clear parallel with any other writings at all, whether canonical or extra-canonical.

What does the Qur’an not say about Jesus? The name Jesus, (or Joshua or Yeshu), is Yasu in Arabic. The names Yasu and ‘Isa are quite different. The Qur’an

· nowhere calls him Yasu, and always calls him ‘Isa.

· It nowhere mentions his being a carpenter or son of a carpenter; it nowhere speaks of him as having any human father, let alone naming him as Joseph, of the line of King David. Both versions of Jesus’ family tree in the Gospels take his line through David, but make it clear that this was the line of Joseph (who was not actually his father anyway) and not Mary. Jesus’ mother is named as Mary in the Qur’an, and Jesus is invariably referred to as ‘Isa ibn Maryam.

If Jesus really was ‘of David’s line’, then it must have been the case that Mary and Joseph were themselves related – but although David is referred to many times in the Qur’an, Jesus is never linked to him, or spoken of as a descendant of his.

· The Qur’an never refers to any brothers or sisters, or any individual disciple of ‘Isa.

· It does not claim that he ever led a political movement, and denies the claim that he was put to death.

The Qur’an refers to Mary as a ‘daughter of Imran’ and a ‘sister of Aaron’, one of the things Christians might consider to be an example of a Qur’an mistake, since Mary’s parents were known to have been called Joachim and Anna, and Aaron (Harun) was an Old testament priest, the brother of Moses, who lived over 1000 years before Jesus. Some assume that Muhammad must have been confusing the Virgin Mary with another famous Maryam, one who was indeed the sister of Aaron. In fact, to name Mary as a ‘daughter of Imran’ refers back to the Biblical Amran, who was the father of Moses, Aaron and their sister Maryam – and the point of the reference is to indicate the Virgin Mary’s Levitical or priestly descent. As it happens, the Gospel of St Luke refers in exactly the same terms to Mary’s cousin Elisabeth as a ‘daughter of Aaron’ – and in her case Christians assume rightly that this means she was of priestly descent. Therefore the Christian Gospels themselves do contain the clue that since Jesus was virgin-born, he was not a descendant of David but, like his own cousin, John the Baptist, was a Levite of the House of Aaron. Levites did not intermarry with the tribe of Judah.

What does the Qur’an have to say?

· Mary was a siddiqa (5.17), which possibly signified membership of those known as Zaddikim or Righteous Ones.

· Her mother vowed her to the service of God in the Temple, and the person chosen by lot to be her sponsor was Zakariyya (3.37), the prophet who was the father of the prophet Yahya (13.38 etc), whom the Christians identified with John the Baptist even though Yahya and Yuhanan (the original Aramaic) are also entirely different names.

· Mary lived in the Temple, and received miraculous provisions from God. One day she secluded herself and left for the ‘east’, and the Holy Spirit appeared to her in human form as the visible angel Gabriel, announcing that she would bear a child.

‘She said: "O my Lord! how shall I have a son when no man hath touched me?" He said: "In this way: Allah creates what He wills; when He has decided a plan He but says to it `Be' and it is so!’ (Surah 3.47)

· She retained her virginity, the baby being conceived when God blew His spirit into her (21.91 etc).

· When she returned to her people, the Jews spoke ill of her for they assumed she had hidden herself to have an illegitimate child,

· but the baby was miraculously made able to speak to them that he would be a prophet with a special divine message.

What does the Qur’an say about him?

· Born of Mary, he was a chosen Prophet whose human person was a living manifestation of the kalima or word, since he was created by one word from God: ‘Be!’ (3.45)

· He was born pure, and like Adam, was a direct creation of God. This did not make him a Son of God, but did make him a very special person indeed.

· He was born at the foot of a palm tree, and since ripe dates were available for Mary to eat, the month of his birth was more likely to be September than December. The Christian Gospels hint at a similar time, since the shepherds were still abiding in the fields guarding their flocks by night, rather than folding them under cover as they did in the winter.

· Jesus became a Messenger from God to whom a special message was divinely delivered (19.27-33), the Injil – which should not be confused with any of the written gospels.

· He was a ‘spirit’ (or ruh) from God, and was inspired by the Holy Spirit – usually identified with Gabriel (2.87, 5.110) who acted as God’s agent.

· He was called the Messiah (or masih).

· He performed miracles and was able to raise the dead to life, but unbelievers denounced his miracles as tricks and magic.

· He had the gift of divination,

· and was a consecrated or ordained person (or muqarrab), sent as a Prophet to the Jews (3.49).

· His disciples were called the ‘people in white’ (al-Hawariyyun), and the community of helpers – (an-nasara or Nasarenes).

· Some people did consider him to be the Son of God, and some even thought of him as God in person (5.17,116) but he insisted that he was human and mortal.

· Some of his Jewish enemies claimed he had been put to death, which was believed by some Christian sects but not by others, but this was just an illusion (4.157).

· ‘Isa was caused by God to ascend into Heaven, from where he will return to bear witness against those who hold false doctrines about him on the Day of Resurrection (4.159).

· He prophesied that another messenger, called Ahmad, would follow him and be the last messenger (Surah 61.6) – this Muslims take to mean Muhammad since the names Muhammad and Ahmad both derive from the same root. Many Muslims feel that the references in St.John’s Gospel to the coming after Jesus of a Paraclete or Comforter do not refer to the Holy Spirit (which we interpret as the activity of God which never deserts the world), but to our Beloved Prophet.

‘The Comforter, the holy spirit which the father will send in my name, that one will teach you all things and bring back to your minds all the things I told you. (Jn 14.26ff)…..When that one arrives, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak of his own volition, but what things he hears he will recite, and he will declare to you all the things to come.’ (Jn 16.13ff).

So, may Allah bless us all with His guidance and forgiveness for our sins, and keep us ever in His sight, until that Day we stand before Him, and our eyes are opened, and our minds conceive of nothing but His amazing grace. Amin.