The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature

Christian Century, Jan 2, 2002 by Sara Miller

The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature. Edited and translated by Tarif Khalidi. Harvard University Press, $22.95.

THERE ARE MANY JESUSES, despite the fact that there was only one. Permutations began appearing as early as the first century and have not abated, making efforts to uncover the historical Jesus, the real man from Nazareth, notoriously fraught and conflicting endeavors--as Christians who have tried can attest. The written record is incomplete and contradictory; archaeology can only assist and often merely confounds; scholars must detect and filter the "errors" of early accounts while keeping their own biases at bay. It is probably easier to meet Jesus in one's heart than to find him in the past--a venerable Christian theme, perhaps the most venerable.

More than a decade has passed since the Jesus Seminar published its study of the Gospels purporting to identify the authentic sayings of Jesus from the accumulated inventions of the evangelists. About a third of Jesus' teachings and deeds made the cut, consigning much of what Christians have been believing for 2,000 years to the dustbin of the dubious and the false. What remained of the man Jesus appeared, to some eyes, a little thin. The effect of this effort on the community of biblical scholars was predictable: conniptions, followed by factions. Among the statements declared inauthentic was this telling one: "Who do you say that I am?"

It may be possible to come at the problem from the opposite side--call it the fat Jesus. A study of the permutations themselves won't bring us closer to the historical figure, but what they tell us of our own longings and intentions could be invaluable.

Enter Islam, admittedly an unlikely place to look for answers to the conundrums of Christian history. In the Christian view, however, unlikelihood is the whole point; one dismisses it at one's peril. The portrait of Jesus that comes to us from Islamic literature ought not be dismissed either by traditionalists or by revisionists, despite the fact that this Jesus was himself no Christian at all. He was a Muslim prophet, a wandering ascetic, an exemplary spiritual guide and master--not a god but a man, like Muhammad, bearing God's word--appropriated from Christian history and reinvented for Islamic eternity. One can meet this remarkable Muslim in the 300 or so known citations of his teachings and deeds found outside the Qur'an. These have been newly collected, translated and annotated by Cambridge University Arabist Tarif Khalidi.

This work, at first glance a tiny scholarly tributary, provides three large services. It offers a likely map of the paths by which Christian legend, including the Apocrypha, made its way into another, younger religion and evolved as testimony to the latter's veracity. It reveals, almost by the way, the deep theological insights of Islam and the brilliance of its scholars, spiritual writers and men of letters, who put their own faith's wisest words on Jesus' lips. And it introduces a Jesus of startling dimension and complexity, at once likable, pitiable, fallible and alarmingly recognizable not as God but as us.

Islam, born some 600 years after Christianity (Muhammad died in 632 C.E.), found its genesis in a world overflowing with Christian lore and wisdom. Much else was percolating in the Near East at that time as well: Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Samaritanism. The stories and testimonies of early Christians seeped into the traditional Arabic literature beginning around the eighth century and were still being added and redacted in the 18th. There are many references to Jesus in the Qur'an, where he is venerated but made to conform rather woodenly to Islamic doctrine (the adoption of Jesus, but not of Christian beliefs about him, was itself a muscular theological feat which Khalidi addresses in his introduction). And it is well known by Muslims that the prophet Muhammad esteemed the prophet Jesus in singular fashion. But it is from the extraneous religious texts--the Hadith, or early Islamic wisdom literature; the biographies of prophets and saints; the devotional works; the Adab, or belles lettres; and various guides to ethics and conduct--that the more intriguing and delightful portrait of Jesus emerges. This is the Jesus of what Khalidi has named the "Muslim gospel."

The contours of this Jesus distinguish him from the New Testament Jesus in predictable but also novel ways. Khalidi reminds us that in the Islamic version of history Jesus was not crucified, nor did he die for humanity's sins. In this he resembles the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas and other apocryphal Christian scripts which accented the mystery Jesus came to reveal rather than his messiahship. Muslims aver that he was absorbed into heaven, but not resurrected. The Virgin Birth is accepted, and Jesus' mother is celebrated in Islamic art and appears in a few of the sayings. As a Muslim, Jesus speaks God's word in accord with various attitudes in Islamic belief, among them asceticism (early Islam), mysticism or spirituality of the heart (Sufism), and alternating sectarian views regarding law, sin, predestination and teaching authority.