Did the Christians make Jesus into God? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Fatoohi starts with a chapter on how Jesus was a spiritual Messiah and not a militaristic one. Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us what it means to be a spiritual Messiah or even what it means to be a Messiah. He says only a minority of the population became Christian and so it was easy for Paul to turn Jesus into a God.
Then he says this:
As the Jews did to their Messiah before Jesus, Christians changed the nature of their Messiah, Jesus, after him. But the Jews always believed that the Messiah was a human being, so Christianity’s claim that the Messiah was divine is unhistorical.
Fatoohi, Louay. Jesus The Muslim Prophet: History Speaks of a Human Messiah Not a Divine Christ . Luna Plena Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The Christians also always believed Jesus was a human being and that the Messiah was a human being. If anything, the first heresies did not deny the divinity of Jesus. They denied His humanity.
Jesus taught the oneness of God. He realized that he was going to be turned into a god, so he used the expression “son of man” as one way of emphasizing his human nature. Yet ironically, and as irrationally as it may be, this very term was hijacked by those who promoted his divinity and turned it into another way of saying “son of God” in the Christian sense, i.e. as another confirmation of Jesus’ divinity.
Fatoohi, Louay. Jesus The Muslim Prophet: History Speaks of a Human Messiah Not a Divine Christ . Luna Plena Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Fatoohi seems to go back and forth. At first, he argues no one would have turned Jesus into a God since that goes against Judaism. Then He regularly has throughout the book that during Jesus’s ministry, He had to show that He wasn’t God regularly. So which was it? Were the Jews wanting to turn Him into God or not?
Besides that, who was disputing His human nature? Fatoohi still has this assumption that one can’t be both God and man. He doesn’t back this.
The Trinity was developed centuries after Jesus, yet it also became a fundamental doctrine of Christianity. Anyone who has any doubts about the fact that Christian theologians have substantially changed Jesus’ image after him need only learn about how this alien doctrine was developed and incorporated into Christian theology.
Fatoohi, Louay. Jesus The Muslim Prophet: History Speaks of a Human Messiah Not a Divine Christ . Luna Plena Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Unfortunately, he gives us no resources on how to do this. Most any good book on church history would help you with this. He had earlier referenced Larry Hurtado. A shame he doesn’t mention him here. Richard Bauckham is another great mind to read on this topic.
Anyway, I have done this research. I find it consistent with what I read in the New Testament. It’s definitely much more so than the Qur’an which can’t even get the definition of the Trinity right.
And with that, we’re done with this one as the only other section is an appendix of Qur’an verses on this and well, that’s fine if you’re a Muslim, but I see no reason to take it seriously.
So on to another book!
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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