Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain. But who or what do Muslims worship? Is their “Allah”, an Arabic expression which means ‘the god’, the same being as the Lord God of the Bible?
Is Allah Almighty God?
Muslims certainly claim to worship the same god as Abraham did. They claim Allah’s continuity with the God of the Bible. And of course you will find politicians and multi-faith pundits also saying, ‘Christians and Muslims worship the same God!’ But is such a view tenable?
In around four minutes and by the grace of God we look at the scriptures in which the Father speaks of the Lord Jesus as his ’beloved son’ and where the Lord and his apostles confirmed his identity. We compare this evidence with that of the Quran, in which Allah denies having a son (a bit beneath his dignity, he says).
It is hard not to draw the obvious conclusion. View the video for yourself.
This video was shot on location at the East London Mosque in Whitechapel.
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Islam, Christianity, and Judaism believe that there is only ONE God. That is the whole point. But watching this video naively, you would think that the speaker was putting questions to the god Allah (perhaps on the telephone) to see if he matched the description of ANOTHER god, God. That is potentially a step backwards from monotheism.
Who knows God ? Of course different traditions imagine him differently, and pass on their ideas of what seems to be somebody different, and these ideas develop as time passes. You can see this very well in the New Testament. In fact, the phrase “begotten son” does not appear at all in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. By the time John was written, he was expressing doctrine which had developed in the Church, and Jesus was by then the only begotten son, but not yet part of the Trinity. Stephen (for it was he) has no choice but to quote John when he wants to show that Jesus is God’s only begotten son . Following the Gospel of John, Paul and the rest of the New Testament has very little to say about “only begotten son” , except notably Hebrews, which is now thought to be a forgery, and not by Paul.
Ignoring John, in what sense was Jesus the son of God ? Well, are we not all God’s children, and were we not all taught to pray to “Our Father” ? As a man, not a woman, but one of God’s children, Jesus would be a son of God rather than a daughter of God. However, he described himself much more often as a son of Man .
Quite a few Christians over the centuries have rejected ideas like the Trinity, and like Jesus being literally the son of God (claims made, of course, for Hercules and Alexander the Great and many others). In more recent years, many people (some quite prominent) within the mainstream denominations such as the Church of England have had their doubts about the Virgin Birth (and so Jesus would not be the begotten son of God).
To the early Muslims, the idea of God having a son by a mortal woman was one of the pagan ideas which they were fighting from various sources. Roman Catholicism has, of course, gone its own way by making Mary sort of immortal, very nearly a goddess. Rather as Protestants later rebelled against Catholic abuses, the Muslims firmly re-established the one and only God which Abraham was supposed to have recognised (although the early Israelites do appear to have placed credence in other gods too in early parts of the Bible). Their attitude is therefore not surprising and not altogether unreasonable. But Christians, Muslims and Jews all do their best to describe what God might be like.
Meanwhile, philosophers may try to prove whether or not God exists, and some come up with a proof that he does, but never with any detail of his exact nature. This is left to the traditions of the individual religions, which of course vary .
It appears Mohammed met some heretical Christians who did actually worship Mary alongside Jesus. Either that or he just got the wrong end of the stick.
Christians are taught to pray to ‘Our Father’ but it does not follow that all people are ‘God’s children’ except in the broadest sense.
The Bible teaches that those outside the faith are the children of wrath or the children of disobedience, a way of saying that outwith the fellowship of the Almighty.
When Jesus called himself ‘the Son of man’ that is a reference to Daniel 7:13. It is a divine title. See my article here.
Another explanation is that in the colloquial Aramaic of Jesus’ time, “son of man” had come to mean “one”, in either of two merging senses, “people” or “myself”.
For example :
1. “Of course, one always enjoys good food in pleasant surroundings”.
2. “ Actually, one has never enjoyed anything more delicious than freshly shot pheasant at Balmoral”.
It has been suggested that Jesus was using “son of man” mainly (if not entirely) in that sense, and not as an important religious title. After all, nobody in Galilee seemed surprised or outraged at what he was saying. Afterwards, however, the Church linked it with the religious usage, in Daniel especially.
You* could say that this is a mistranslation into the Greek of the Gospels, which should never have survived, because it is as extraordinary an expression to use so routinely in Greek as it is in English. It does at least verify that the writers in Greek had been interviewing witnesses who knew what Jesus actually said (more or less) in Aramaic. (I have to say “more or less”, because the Gospels do undeniably vary).
*i.e. one, anyone, anybody, any son of man. Why say “any body” ? The ordinary German word for “one” is “man” .
There are some examples of this “one” use of son of man in wrtings in Aramaic a little later than Jesus, but admittedly not a great deal of written Aramaic from the time of Jesus survives, and this conversational usage would seldom find its way into writing.
Luke (3:38) says that Adam was the son of God, so in that sense all males (including Luke, Stephen, and Jesus) can be described as sons of God. One is a son of God.
No Rox, because when the Lord used that expression before the Sanhedrin at his trial, they understood exactly what he was saying:
Mar 14:61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
Mar 14:62 And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.
Mar 14:63 Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses?
Mar 14:64 Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.
Did one notice that one wrote “mainly” and “in Galilee” ?
When things were going normally, nobody was outraged by it, only in Jerusalem.
Was Mark himself actually at the trial, or did he depend on the report in the Jerusalem Herald, I wonder. In fact, as in Tudor times, nobody knows what pressure Jesus was under when he was questioned, or what he eventually confessed to, and in exactly what words. They wanted him guilty of something and out the way, which is what was arranged.
No. We accept the Gospel accounts. If we don’t, we have no account at all.
Of course, according to the Gospel accounts, the Temple authorities wanted Jesus out of the way.
They were looking out for something to accuse him of.
And he provided it, by confirming that whenever he had called himself ‘The Son of man’ in his ministry, it was Daniel’s divine vision he was identifying with.
Apart from scepticism, I’m not sure what your problem is here.
There is only ONE God!
Just adding a man into as God NEVER works!
Please show me where Jesus claims that he is indeed God.
If there is only ONE God then logically Allah can be that God.
How about Christian Bibles in Arabic that refer to God as Allah?
Your argument is very weak.
You can’t even find a single verse in the Gospels to confirm claim by Jesus that he is indeed God and then you try to judge Allah!
@Rox
Although Muslims tell us they believe in one God, this god is not the Bible God Yahweh. Allah’s nature, attributes and teachings all diametrically oppose the God of the Bible.
The god of the Quran is the god most familiar to Mohammed,named as Allah, who was the “greatest” of the 360 pagan gods held on top of the Kaaba.Its,name was given as Hubal and was dedicated to the moon. Allah is a contraction of two words, Al Ilah meaning “the god”. The word for god in Arabic is Il lah not Allah. Allah had intercessing “daughters” the goddesses, Al Lat,Al Uzza and Al Manet,who were also prayed to in times of war, infertility and want.
The origins of the Islamic god are pagan,Mohammed just used his already worshipped god Allah, plus his familiar pagan rites and rituals found within the practices of Ramadan, and encompassed them into his invented religion he called Islam.
Mohammed was a false prophet,his ways and example prove this conclusively, false prophets as Jesus tells us deceive many, and will be known by their fruits.
If there is only one genuine unique God, he must be the same for everybody, but it goes without saying that his attributes are differently construed between Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, and others.
I don’t suppose Georgia would dispute that Jesus adopted the God of the Jews, who was already familiar to him and to his early disciples (although he and Jesus were later given a more Hellenistic feeling by Jews and Gentiles from elsewhere in the Roman Empire). In fact, we go on using the Old Testament and its prophecies (as does Islam partly, in its own rewritten form).
When it came to constructing a set of rituals suitable for large-scale public use, a lot of this was borrowed from the official Graeco-Romano religion (as well as from Mithraism etc), particularly some which is more evident nowadays still in Roman Catholicism. In Italy particularly, there are sites and rituals dedicated to the Virgin Mary which were mainly inherited from Juno (the consort of their principal god), and in England holy wells were often taken over from Celtic goddesses (very often ascribed to St Anne instead, who, being Mary’s mother, is very unlikely to have been a Christian as it happens).
That far, and also further back, the story is very similar to the Muslim story as Georgia tells it. Jehovah did not start by being a unique god, any more than Allah did !
“Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord; neither are there any works like unto thy works”. Ps 86:8
“God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods”. Ps 82:1
“For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward”. Deut 10:17
“Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders? “ Exodus 15:11
“Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods: for in the thing wherein they dealt proudly he was above them”. Exodus 18:11
“Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works: but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images”. Exodus 23:24
[ So “gods” did not just mean the idols of gods which did not exist — the idols were only the images of actual gods (so it was thought by Jews at the time) ] .
Similarly:
“The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire “ Deut 7:25
So that the lesser gods will get no more worship or sacrifices.
“The LORD will be terrible unto them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth; and men shall worship him”. Zephaniah 1:11
O give thanks unto the God of gods: for his mercy endureth for ever. “ Ps 136:2
When Georgia tells us that the name “Allah is a contraction of two words, Al Ilah meaning ‘the god’ , one might as well say that the English Christian name “God” (far more common than “Yahweh” in Christian circles) is taken from “the god” meaning a god. This sort of thing isn’t going to get us very far. Any civilisation which decides that there is only one god is going to call him “God”, more or less, in their language.
No Rox.
‘If there is only one genuine unique God, he must be the same for everybody.’ Yes, but not everyone knows him. You don’t, for starters.
But after that, just because I worship one creator God and a Muslim worships a being who says he is the same, it does not logically follow they are the same being. The one I worship could be (and I believe is) the eternally existent Almighty Yehovah, whose name means ‘I am that I am’. The one Muslims worship could be (and I believe is) a demonic imposter, the Arabs’ pagan moon-deity dressed in new clothes.
“ I worship one creator God and a Muslim worships a being who says he is the same, “
But surely, if you believe in just one god, you don’t also believe in another “being” who could pretend to be that god ! Monotheism is believing in just one god, not in a whole panoply of gods and goddesses and demons and demi-gods and beings and nymphs and so on. Even praying to (or “through”) an array of saints is very suspicious .
Metaphorically you could say that “Allah” is an impostor, but really that is only because you and a Muslim view the attributes of the one God differently. If you both say that you know the true god, who really is to say which of you is right about it ? You really share much more in having this belief than you disagree about.
This does need to be looked at from both points of view, and from the point of view of the public at large, or there will always be these most unfortunate conflicts over it.
Of course Christians believe that there are angels, some of whom, following Lucifer, rebelled and were expelled from heaven and are now referred to as demons or devils. So certainly one of those could, and has, become worshiped by the Arabs as their moon-god.
@Dave G
Jesus confirmed He was God many times throughout the N.T.
The Sanhedrim members knew exactly what Jesus meant, when He claimed to be God, which is why He was condemned to death.
Further reading on this is found in the link below.
http://www.apologeticsguy.com/2012/01/did-jesus-say-he-was-god/
Mark (14:60-64). the record of Jesus’ cross-examination:
Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The high priest tore his clothes. “Why do we need any more witnesses?” he asked. “You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as worthy of death. (63-64).
Jesus didn’t claim to be God. This was claimed on his behalf afterwards.
Nonsense.
Mark 14:61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? 62 And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.
John 8:58 Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.
Please try to speak the truth, and if you are just ignorant about stuff, shut up. You are close to being barred.
John is not a synoptic gospel. It is not in dispute amongst most Christian scholars that it does not really give a more-or-less historical account like the other three gospels (a synopsis of the life of Jesus), but was written to illustrate some of the doctrines which the Church had incorporated into Christianity by that time, for example “In the beginning was the Word”, the logos, which is a hellenistic rather than a Jewish concept. Necessarily any account of the life of Jesus must have been written afterwards, but this one was very much afterwards.
In Jewish belief, to be the Messiah was not and is not the same as being God (no more than being Mohammed is the same as being Allah). Nor is to be the son of God (in any sense) the same as being God. Sitting on the right hand of power surely gives the impression of sitting on the right hand of God, and nobody at that time had any idea that you could sit on the right hand of yourself.
I am speaking the truth when I tell you that the idea of the Trinity as we know it didn’t catch on for some 200 years.
My main point was a very simple one. At no time did Jesus say “I am God” in so many words. Even in your quote from John, you need to apply later doctrine which did not exist at the time to construe that this is what he meant.
I hope you will not consider this reply to be untruthful, ignorant, and beyond the pale.
Oh dear. I thought you might know, or at least look up, how the Mark account goes on:
Mark 14:63 Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses?
Mark 14:64 Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.
In two ways, by the expression ‘I am’ and by identifying as Daniel’s ‘Son of Man’ (look it up) our Lord had made himself equal with God.
Similarly, the next verse in the John account (Your comments on his Gospel are ridiculous. He was an eyewitness) says:
John 8:59 Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.
They did that because of the ‘I am’ expression again. We do not look forward to find out what that meant, we look back to the Burning Bush.
Exod 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
Rox, you are Biblically and theologically so ignorant that your trolling is beginning to be of no value to anyone.
In fact Georgia had quoted Mark 14:63 – 64 before as well as you, and it reflects Daniel, but this would still only be a claim to being the Messiah, not a claim to being God.
Good to have my picture back.
The High Priest and the Sanhedrin understood differently. That is why they decided the Lord was guilty of blasphemy.
Thank you Georgia. Trying to force divinity upon Jesus despite his refusal to be part of attempts of blasphemy is very deceptive indeed. Messiah is not God and “son” was certainly not anything to do with god gene being transferred to Jesus.
Clearly Jesus could have said “I am God”, “I am God in human form”, “I have come here to die for the sins of the world and not just for the Jews or lost sheep of house of israel”.
We have many interpretations of “son of God”. Luke refers to Adam as son of God.
We all know that we have no originals and John was written long after the departure of Jesus.
God had plenty of opportunities to warn people about sending himself or his son to kill himself for the “sin” of man.
Noah’s flood becomes totally meaningless if we carry on believing that God arranged to have himself or his son killed for the sin of adam and eve.
That is just ignorance of the Gospel scriptures, scriptures of course which the Quran endorses!
John 8:57 Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? 58 Jesus said unto them, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am’.
‘I am’ is the name of God. Jesus said he was God.
59 Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.
Again, later on, Jesus said:
John 10:30 ‘I and my Father are one’. 31 Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. 32 Jesus answered them, ‘Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me’? 33 The Jews answered him, saying, ‘For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God’.
And in front of the Sanhedrin:
Mark 14:61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, ‘Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed’? 62 And Jesus said, ‘I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven’. 63 Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, ‘What need we any further witnesses’? 64 ‘Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye’? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.
Why not recognise and believe in Jesus as who he says he is, the eternal King, and have all your sins forgiven?
Naturally ignorance of “Gospels” can be a two way process. It is quite amazing that John is being quoted without a single piece of original in a language familiar to the disciples.
There are many insertions and changes to the copy manuscripts. The classic cases are “comma, son of god….comma, holy ghost/spirit…..”.
Would any learned person ask from another…” are you the messiah..comma…son of god/blessed one?” NO!
Reading the synoptic gospels and John horizontally will bring out the many discrepancies that are being “ignored”. I don’t need to list them here.
I know what “I AM” is! But we are talking about deliberate translation “errors”…the message was simple Before Abraham was I AM meant that God was there before Abraham and also it implies that all life form was in the mind of God including that of you me and Jesus. Therefore, “I AM” conceptualised You, me, Jesus and Abraham and when Abraham was born as a living breathing human, the “spirit” of you me and Jesus was out there.
The verse has nothing to do with the divinity of Jesus.
John was clearly written later to promote an element of antiSemitism and the famous son of god/god.
Was Jesus the son of God or the son of god the father?
Please try answering it. Thanks.
By the way…why “I and the Father are one”? Why not “I , the holy spirit and father are one”?
Gospel of Mark has something very obvious about divinity when a man addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher”…
If you read the few verses linked to it, you will know that Jesus is not God.
Thank you.
Why do you pour scorn on the Gospels and claim it contains errors and discrepancies when the Quran endorses it?
Surah 3:3. It is He Who sent down to thee (step by step), in truth, the Book, confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind, and He sent down the criterion (of judgment between right and wrong).
Surah 5:68. Say: “O People of the Book! ye have no ground to stand upon unless ye stand fast by the Law, the Gospel, and all the revelation that has come to you from your Lord.” It is the revelation that cometh to thee from thy Lord, that increaseth in most of them their obstinate rebellion and blasphemy. But sorrow thou not over (these) people without Faith.
Surah 6:115. The word of thy Lord doth find its fulfilment in truth and in justice: None can change His words: for He is the one who heareth and knoweth all.
“Trying to force divinity upon Jesus despite his refusal to be part of attempts of blasphemy is very deceptive indeed”
The Jews thought differently, which is why they sentenced Jesus to death on a charge of blasphemy, precisely because Jesus forgave people their sins, which only God can do.
“We all know that we have no originals and John was written long after the departure of Jesus”
There are no “originals” of the Quran, but that does not stop Muslims claiming it as true.
John was one of the two eye witnesses of Jesus’s ministry, his writings are within 40 years of Jesus’s death. Where are the eye witness accounts of Mohammed’s claims to prophet hood?
There are non,Muslims take it at face value that he was who he claimed to be, and the ahadiths appeared 200 years after his death.
Who is more likely to be trustworthy, an eye witness, or someone who claims to have received his evidence by oral transmission after 200years of waiting?
“We have many interpretations of “son of God”. Luke refers to Adam as son of God”
Adam was not born supernaturally, he was created out of dust i.e. material, and he was not born from a virgin mother.
One major reason why Jesus is referred to as the Son of God because that is the way He was prophesied by the angel Gabriel to Mary Luke 1:32.
Rox@
You need to read what I have written, again.
The god of the Quran is the god most familiar to Mohammed, which was Allah. Mohammed worshipped this god before Islam, and he worshipped this god after Islam, nothing changed, he even kept all the pre Islamic pagan rituals known as Ramadan, and the pagan relic, called the Black Stone, touched and kissed by Muslims to this day only because Mohammed did.
The word for god in Arabic is Ilah,not Allah, but the word Ilah is not used in the Quran to denote the Islamic god, Allah is the name given, because this was the name of the god most familiar to Mohammed. Allah is the name of a god, it is not the name for god.
The name given for God in the Bible is in letters YHWH,known as Yahweh. If the Quran was from the Bible God, the word Yahweh would be word given to denote God, not Allah. But it is not, precisely because of the reasons given.
The God of the Bible has a different nature, attributes and teachings to the Islamic Allah, they are not consistent with each other,when they should be if they were the same being.
Taken at face value, Allah will appear to be same divine entity as in the Bible, it is only on further, deeper inspection that this proves not to be the case.
Using your logic, they should have named Jesus YHWH.
By the way, where do you find Yhwh in the Tanakh and in what context?
Surely, the books you use refer to Ilah yhwh alaah allah as God, right?
Surely all your books must stop calling the deity God and refer to Him as Yhwh.
Unfortunately, by trying to turn a man into God your logic falters.
What is the precise job description TODAY of god the son, god the father and god the holy spirit? You will find that two of them are redundant.
Don’t be silly. Jesus is a Greekified form of the Hebrew name Yeshua which means ‘He saves’.
There is a Hebrew word for ‘God’ (Elohim) and a Greek word for ‘God’ (Theos). And there is the name of God.
Christians can love God as Father, follow God as Son, and be filled with God as Holy Spirit. Even the Koran speaks of the Holy Spirit.