Islamic position
The position argued on this website is that the teaching of Paul of Tarsus departs, on the matters that count most, from the teaching of Jesus as the gospels record it: on the law, on what a person must do to be saved, on the person of Jesus, and on the meaning of his death. Most Christian scholars disagree and hold that Paul of Tarsus is a faithful interpreter of Jesus for a new situation. Both readings are set out here, each from the texts, so that the reader can judge. Claims about Paul of Tarsus rest on his seven undisputed letters only; see the seven letters.
The law
Matthew 5:17-19: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 23:2-3: do whatever the scribes and Pharisees teach you, for they sit on Moses’ seat. Luke 16:17: it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter in the law to be dropped.
Galatians 2:16: “a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” Galatians 5:2-4: “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you… You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ.” Romans 10:4: “Christ is the end of the law.” Romans 7:6: “now we are discharged from the law.”
What must one do?
Mark 10:17-19: a man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers, “You know the commandments,” and lists them. Matthew 19:17: “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Luke 10:25-28: a lawyer asks the same question; Jesus asks what is written in the law, approves the answer (love God, love your neighbour), and says, “Do this, and you will live.” Matthew 7:21: not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom, but the one who does the will of my Father.
Romans 3:28: “a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” Romans 4:5: “to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.” Romans 10:9: “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Who Jesus is
Mark 10:18: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Mark 12:29: the first commandment is “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Mark 13:32: of that day no one knows, not even the Son, but only the Father. John 17:3: “this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” In the synoptic gospels Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, speaks of God as his Father and the disciples’ Father, and never asks to be worshipped.
Philippians 2:6-11: he was “in the form of God” and did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself; therefore God exalted him and gave him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. 1 Corinthians 8:6: “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” Romans 9:5 is read by some as calling Christ “God over all”, though the Greek can be punctuated otherwise. Paul of Tarsus prays to Christ (2 Corinthians 12:8) and calls on his name (1 Corinthians 1:2).
The death
In the synoptic gospels Jesus announces his death three times and says the Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45); the saying is one verse, and its meaning is disputed. He forgives sins before his death and without reference to it (Mark 2:5; Luke 7:48), and the father in the parable receives the prodigal son back with no sacrifice at all (Luke 15:20-24). Repentance and mercy are enough.
For Paul of Tarsus the death is the centre: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3); God put him forward “as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” (Romans 3:25); “while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8); “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). The gospel he preached, he says, he received by revelation and not from any human source (Galatians 1:11-12).
Where the atoning death came from
Al-Fārūqī traces the idea to the religious world into which Paul of Tarsus carried the message. The mystery cults of Osiris, Adonis, Attis and Mithras, which filled the eastern Mediterranean in the first century, offered a god who took on the burden of the worshipper’s guilt by dying, and who rose; a baptism in water administered by priests called “fathers”; and a sacred meal in which the worshipper partook of the god’s death and resurrection by eating and drinking in his name. Tertullian, who knew these rites, thought the devil had parodied the Christian sacraments in them; the historian is more likely to read the resemblance the other way. “The crucified Jesus stepped into the place of the immolated god,” al-Fārūqī writes, “and the doctrine was given the emendations necessary for the new religious ideology.” What Jesus had taught, a transcendent God and a law to be kept, was Semitic; what the gentile churches received from Paul of Tarsus, a divine saviour whose death was a sacrifice and whose body was eaten in a sacrament, was the religion of the cults in a new name. The Qur’an’s refusal of the cross and of the sonship is, on this view, the refusal of that whole inheritance (al-Fārūqī, pp. 16-21).
The Christian reply
Christian interpreters answer that Jesus fulfilled the law and that Paul of Tarsus speaks against the “works of the law” as boundary markers, circumcision, food and sabbath, that separated Jew from gentile, not against the moral law or against obedience as such. Scholars of the “new perspective”, E. P. Sanders, James Dunn and N. T. Wright, argue that first-century Judaism was not a religion of earning salvation and that Paul of Tarsus’s target was ethnic exclusiveness, not good works. On the person of Jesus, they argue that the gospels’ Son of Man and the “I am” sayings of John imply what Paul of Tarsus states, and that the earliest Christians worshipped Jesus from the beginning (Larry Hurtado). On the death, they argue that Mark 10:45 and the Last Supper words (Mark 14:24) show Jesus himself gave his death a saving meaning. These are serious arguments and they are stated here as their authors make them.
Where this page stands
The replies do not remove the distance; they explain it. Matthew 5:19 blesses those who keep the least commandments, and Galatians 5:4 says those who seek to be justified by the law are cut off from Christ. A man asked how to inherit eternal life was told to keep the commandments; a man asked the same question by Paul of Tarsus would have been told to believe in the risen Lord. The Qur’an says of ʿĪsā that he came confirming the Torah (3:50; 5:46), that he was a servant who said only what he was commanded, worship God, my Lord and your Lord (5:117), and that he was neither killed nor crucified (4:157). On each of the four matters, the Qur’anic portrait stands with the Jesus of Matthew and Mark and against the Christ of Paul of Tarsus. That is the argument. The evidence is above, and the reader is asked to check it. The source of Paul of Tarsus’s gospel, by his own account, was a revelation to himself; the men who had walked with Jesus did not share it, and the next pages show how they received it. See James and the Jerusalem church.
Sources
- E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and Paul: A Very Short Introduction.
- James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle.
- Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.
- Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, for the case against.
- Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew.
- Ismāʿīl Rājī al-Fārūqī, Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, 1983), pp. 16-21, on the mystery religions as the source of the sacraments and the dying god.