DID ALLAH/MUHAMMAD KNOW JESUS CHRISTS NAME? Muhammad claimed that the Quran was a revelation given to him from heaven but many of its teachings show a somewhat obvious dependence on the Christianity of pre-Islamic Arabia. In fact there is nothing in the Quran which is genuinely original or which cannot be shown to have parallels in the varying religious convictions found throughout the region. He was exposed on an annual basis to the hordes of pilgrims who came to the fairs at Mecca which made the town a receptacle for all kinds of floating knowledge. Muhammad appears to have absorbed and retained within his memory as much of this as he could. A study of the teaching of the Quran shows the Prophet of Islam to have been more familiar with Jewish rabbinical works and apocryphal Christian writings than the contents of the Old and New Testaments. A little-known book titled The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy (because the only manuscripts of the book are in Arabic) makes Jesus speak from the cradle, a phenomenon repeated in the Quran (Surah 19:29-30), while The Gospel of Thomas, another apocryphal composition of which a Syriac version was known to exist prior to Muhammads time, records other miraculous works of Jesus repeated in the Quran, such as the creation of clay birds which came to life at his command (Surah 3:49). Although the common Christian Arabic name for Jesus has always been Yasu`, derived from the original Hebrew Yashua, the Quran uses the name `Isa, obtained most probably from the Nestorian Isho. There are no other records anywhere in Christian history to possibly suggest the strange name for Jesus in the Quran. As Arabic is a Semitic language closely allied to Hebrew one would have expected his name to have been the same Yasu` as the Christians used. In fact the full Nestorian Syriac title for Jesus was Isho Mshiha, Jesus Messiah, and it is interesting to find that the most common Quranic title for him is very similar, namely al-Masihu `Isa (Surah 3:45).
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 05:14:48 +0000
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