Their books

Their scriptures

As for the scripture revealed to Jesus (peace be upon him), it is the Gospel (Injil), as the Noble Qur'an states, where God Most High says of Jesus:

And He will teach him the Book and wisdom, and the Torah and the Gospel. (39)

The revealed Gospel did not contain many legal rulings on the lawful and the unlawful. Rather, it centred on matters of belief and morals which Christ (peace be upon him) proclaimed in order to free the Israelites from their burdens of sin and their alterations. We know nothing reliable about the revealed Gospel as an authentic religious document; the hand of alteration and substitution has reached it. The Jews took this as a justification for their disbelief in Christ, since in their view he had been commanded to follow Moses (peace be upon him) and the Torah, yet he departed from it in certain matters, among them replacing the Sabbath with Sunday, permitting the eating of pork, dispensing with circumcision, and other rulings (40).

The Noble Qur'an has depicted the state of the Jews and the Christians after they had altered the Torah and the Gospel, and their mutual accusations, in His words:

The Jews say, "The Christians stand on nothing," and the Christians say, "The Jews stand on nothing," though they both recite the Book. (41)

Moreover, we do not know whether the Gospel revealed to Jesus was written down by Jesus himself or dictated by him to someone else. What we have in our hands now, however, are those Gospels which are regarded as accounts

(41) Al-Baqara: 113.

(39) Al Imran: 48.

(40) See Muqaranat al-Adyan: al-Masihiyya (Comparative Religion: Christianity), p. 174.

of Jesus (peace be upon him) and his teachings. For this reason no Christian today claims that the four Gospels now in existence were dictated to Jesus by revelation; rather, they were composed by four men, who composed them at different dates.

The Christians' Holy Scripture comprises two parts:

(a) The Old Testament, containing the Torah and the religious books of the Jews as we set them out in the previous chapter.

(b) The New Testament, comprising the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, together with their teachings, their history and other material from the time of Jesus and after.

The Christians, however, accuse the Jews of altering the Torah by interpreting it and adding commentaries and glosses to it. The Christians therefore resorted to interpreting the Torah in the light of their Gospels, so as to serve their belief about Christ and his divinity. Hence the New Testament became the Christians' more important book.

Some researchers hold that the word "Injil" goes back to a Greek root meaning the reward given to one who brings good tidings, and that it was then used for the good tidings themselves. Jesus used it in the sense of "the good tidings of salvation". This usage continued and was extended until it became a title for the teachings of Christ which he proclaimed for the salvation of man from sin.

The name then settled as a title for the Christians' holy books, so that one came to say the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke, and so on (42).

The New Testament contains twenty-seven books, which can be classified under three divisions:

First: the historical books.

These tell of the life of Jesus (peace be upon him) and his disciples. This division comprises the four Gospels.

Second: the didactic books.

These are the letters that the first teachers of Christianity sent to various regions, calling people in them to Christianity.

(42) See Muqaranat al-Adyan: al-Masihiyya, p. 174.

Third: the Revelation of John the Divine

It tells of a waking vision of John concerning Christ and his mission, and of Christ's continuing contact with the men of the Christian religion.

The New Testament, with the Gospels it contains and in its present form, is regarded as the final version approved by the Church in 325 CE, after bloody disputes among the Christians themselves over the authenticity of their religious books.

At this point we wish to draw attention to an important and significant matter: the New Testament in its present form is the work of certain Christian clergy and the expression of a particular point of view. It is a formulation of a particular creed or doctrine that had spread among the Christians before the date of its composition, namely the doctrine of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus, held by Paul and his followers and later adopted by the Church for reasons we shall mention below.

It is clear from this that the Christians' present holy books were composed, or became authoritative and acquired official status, about four centuries after Christ. On this point we cite the view of a priest who embraced Islam, named Abdul Ahad Dawud, who says:

"These twenty-seven books or letters, composed by eight writers, were not officially admitted as a whole into the number of the holy books until the fourth century, by the endorsement and ruling of the general Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

Therefore none of these letters was accepted and authenticated by the Church and the whole Christian world before that date.

Then there came to Nicaea, from the Christian communities in the various parts of the globe, more than a thousand spiritual envoys, bringing with them dozens of Gospels and hundreds of letters for scrutiny. There the four Gospels were selected from more than forty or fifty Gospels, and the twenty-one letters were selected from countless letters, and they were ratified.

The body that chose the 'New Testament' was the body that affirmed the divinity of Christ; or rather, the selection of the books of the New Testament was made on the basis of rejecting the

Christian books that contained teachings not in agreement with the creed of 'Nicaea', and burning them all." (43)

From this it is clear that the source of the Christians' beliefs is not Christ himself, nor the revelation sent down to him, but the Church and the Christian clergy long after Jesus (peace be upon him).

The source of Christianity in its beliefs is therefore in truth a human source, not a divine one as they claim; and this is the view of trustworthy scholars among the Christians themselves.

Here, with regard to our purpose of distinguishing milla from nihla in Christianity, through its own documents (that is, the New Testament), through its origin and development, and through the continuing critical studies of its heritage, we find ourselves in a clearer position, and one that makes this purpose less laborious to achieve, than our position with regard to Judaism. It is no rash venture for any scholarly inquiry, relying on those studies, to say that Christianity in its present form, and with the original documents now in our hands, is a nihla both in its content and in the attribution of that content. Nothing of the meaning of milla remains in it except the historical aspect, which, for now at least, we have no way of knowing reliably except by relying on the Noble Qur'an.

The Christians differ from the Jews in the claim of an unbroken chain of transmission, since they are all agreed that the Gospels in their hands are not the Gospel revealed to Jesus (peace be upon him). Indeed, they all pass over any mention of that Gospel. Rather, these are biographies or histories composed by four men, some of whom were his contemporaries and some not, at different times, the largest of them no more than twenty-eight pages in length. The first of them is:

The Gospel of Matthew

Matthew, as they say, was one of the disciples and a companion of Jesus (peace be upon him). He died in Abyssinia in 79 CE, having made it the base for spreading his mission. He composed his Gospel nine years after Jesus (peace be upon him) was raised up, and wrote it in Aramaic, or in Hebrew as Ibn Hazm says; but that copy was lost and no trace of it has been found.

Then a book appeared in Greek which was said to be a translation of the Gospel of Matthew, and it is of this that we have copies now. But neither its translator nor the date of its translation is known, which casts doubt on

(43) Muqaranat al-Adyan: al-Masihiyya, p. 174.

the soundness of its attribution to Matthew. And we know that any doubt about a religious source lessens its value as a document to be relied on in belief and in the fundamentals of religion.

Then the Gospel of Mark

It was composed, as they say, by Mark the Harunite, pupil of Simon Cephas son of Thomas [sic], called Peter, the pupil of Christ (peace be upon him). He composed it twenty-two years after Christ was raised up, writing it in Greek while he was in Antioch. Mark made Egypt the base of his mission and was killed there in 62 CE.

The Christian sources are confused about the soundness of its attribution to him. While some sources assert that it was written after 62 CE, other sources assert that Mark was killed in Egypt in 62 CE. How, then, can the Gospel date from after the death of its author?

They also disagree as to whether Mark wrote his Gospel himself, or dictated it to someone else, or whether it was composed by one of his pupils on the basis of sayings he had received orally from his teacher.

Others hold that Peter, the chief of the disciples and Mark's teacher, was the one who related it from his pupil. This is implausible and unusual: how could the matter be reversed, with a teacher relating from his pupil? There are also those who hold that it, and the Gospel of John, were composed by Paul (44).

The Gospel of Luke

Luke was neither one of the disciples nor one of their pupils; he was a pupil of Paul, and Paul never saw Christ. That is, he belongs to the followers of the followers. He composed his Gospel in Greek in Antioch, in the lands of the Byzantines.

And the Gospel of John

It is the most obscuring of them on the question of the divinity of Christ. Researchers consider it most likely that the Gospel attributed to John was composed by one of the later Christians after Christ, and not by John the disciple, as is mistakenly supposed. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states:

(44) Injil Barnaba: Dirasat hawla Wahdat al-Din (The Gospel of Barnabas: Studies on the Unity of Religion), p. 35, edited by Sayf Allah Ahmad Fadil, Dar al-Qalam, Kuwait, 2nd ed., 1983.

"As for the Gospel of John, it is without any doubt or question a forged book, by which its author sought to set two of the disciples against each other, namely Saint John and Saint Matthew. This forging writer claimed in the book itself that he was the disciple whom Christ loved, and the Church took this sentence at face value and declared that the writer was John the disciple, and put his name on the book explicitly, although its author was certainly someone other than John. This book is no different from certain books of the Torah which have no connection with those to whom they are attributed.

We feel pity and compassion for those who spend their utmost effort to link, by even the flimsiest tie, that philosophical man who composed this book in the second generation with the disciple John, the Galilean fisherman, for their labours are lost to them in vain, since they grope without guidance." (45)

It seems that Ibn Hazm fell into the same error, attributing this Gospel to John the pupil of Christ; and Ibn Hazm's own words confirm that error of falsely attributing this Gospel to John the disciple. He says:

"And the fourth: a history composed by John son of Zebedee, one of the pupils of Christ, some sixty-odd years after Christ was raised up, and he wrote it in Greek ... and this same John is the one who translated the Gospel of his companion Matthew from Hebrew into Greek." (46)

It is clear from Ibn Hazm's statement that John composed it more than sixty years after Christ was raised up. That is a long period: it is hardly conceivable that John should have been a companion of Christ and then lived more than sixty years after him, composing his Gospel only after that, especially as Ibn Hazm says that John died of poison.

Nor is it reasonable that John should have composed his Gospel at an age of more than a hundred years, if we take it that John was over forty years old when Christ was raised up.

Al-Shahrastani, in Al-Milal wa al-Nihal (Religions and Sects), seems to have fallen into the same error, for he said: "Then four of the disciples gathered, and each of them compiled a collection which he called

(45) See Muqaranat al-Adyan: al-Masihiyya, pp. 180 ff.

(46) Al-Fasl fi al-Milal, vol. 2/3.

the Gospel; they were Matthew, Luke, Mark and John" (47). Perhaps he and Ibn Hazm both took over the Christians' account at face value.

This Gospel, then, was either composed by a Christian man named John, and the similarity of names is what led historians into this confusion, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica says; or it was falsely attributed to John the disciple in order to promote the ideas it contains.

From this we see that the Gospels, to say nothing of the other letters, were all written from memory, after the time of the events they relate and outside the place where those events occurred. This explains the variation and contradiction in their narration of the facts of those events. All of this makes the question of the chain of transmission and the text, in the case of Christianity, beside the point, calling for no discussion or debate.

(47) Al-Milal wa al-Nihal, 1/202.