Quranic Jesus - a miserable failure
Reply #8 - September 07, 2015, 12:00 AM
I do have a theory about this interesting issue (as usual, I have loads of theories). My view, which I have not seen anybody else assert, is that the Christology of the Qur'an is totally misunderstood. I contend that what you see in the early surahs is an archaic form of anti-Chalcedonian thought in which Christ (the rabb) and the Father (the rabb) have been merged and completely assimilated, indivisible. Thus there is no human Jesus left, nor are there any sacraments that would be dependent on a priesthood and a separate Jesus.
That is why there is no Jesus in the early surahs, a baffling fact which nobody has been able to adequately explain (it's not just that he's not mentioned positively, he isn't even mentioned negatively). Incidentally, it also may explain why the Qur'an strangely says "We" despite constantly going on about the oneness of God -- what is emphasized by the plural is that God is a completely indivisible trinity, where the deity only incarnates as one, not ever as a separate being like Jesus. This view emerged and was asserted as a counter to the tritheist 'heresy' that raged like wildfire among the Arabs at the end of the 6th century.
When you see Jesus reappear in the Qur'an, it is in the much later surahs, and in my view this is a secondary hodgepodge assimilation of prevailing Jesus narratives to the much older Quranic theology that you see in the early surahs. This secondary Jesus is very generic, and I call him an "instance of the Quranic messenger function," i.e. it is the logic of the Quranic messenger typology that is just being given names, with the underlying prophetic function driving the theology.
That is why when Jesus shows up he's pretty much just like the other prophets, and gets killed by the treacherous Jews just like the others ... except, interestingly, he doesn't exactly get killed by them. There are a few key points (virgin conception being the biggest) where Jesus could not entirely be assimilated to the generic messenger function, and this is one of them. When people wonder why the Qur'an is so confusing about how and why Jesus died (if he did), I think this is because the Quranic narratives are really an example of *incomplete assimilation* of the Jesus narratives to the underlying archaic Quranic Christology, which left no space for a human Christ. Jesus, therefore, could only reappear as an instance of the Quranic messenger function, a generic human prophet.
Topic: Quranic Jesus - a miserable failure