Christian writers have noticed for thirteen centuries that the Qur’an calls Jesus a word from God. John of Damascus, a Christian official at the Umayyad court who wrote in Greek around 730 CE, advised his readers to put it to Muslims directly: if you say Christ is the Word and Spirit of God, how can you call us associators?1
It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer. The answer is in the verses themselves.
What the Qur’an says
Islamic position
The phrase comes three times. The angels say to Mary: “O Mary, God gives you good news of a word from Him, whose name is the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary” (3:45). Of John the Baptist the angels tell Zechariah that he will come “confirming a word from God” (3:39). And in Sūrat al-Nisāʾ: “The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of God and His word which He cast to Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and do not say ‘Three’” (4:171).
Read 4:171 again. The same verse that calls Jesus a word from God opens with “only a messenger” and closes by forbidding the Trinity. Whatever the word means, it cannot mean what John of Damascus wanted it to mean, because the sentence that uses it rules that out.
Then 3:59 explains it: “The likeness of Jesus with God is as the likeness of Adam. He created him from dust, then said to him ‘Be’, and he was.” The word is kun, “Be”. Al-Ṭabarī, commenting on 3:45, gives this as the view of Qatādah, the Successor of Basra: the word “is His saying ‘Be’”.2 It is one of the readings he records, and it is the one 3:59 supports. Jesus is called a word because he came into being by a word, without a father, as Adam came into being without father or mother.
What John says
Scholarly consensus
John’s gospel opens: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Greek is logos. Fourteen verses later: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14).
The word logos had a long life in Greek thought before John used it. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who died around 50 CE, wrote of the logos as God’s instrument in making the world, and even called it a “second god”.3 Scholars dispute how much John drew from Philo. They agree that the idea of the logos as a divine being standing between God and the world was already in the air.
So John’s Word is a being. It exists before creation, it is with God, it is God, and it takes flesh.
Two phrases, two directions
Put the two side by side and the difference is plain. The Qur’an’s kalimah is a command God speaks, and Jesus is what that command brought into being. John’s logos is a person who existed before the command, and who became a man.
One makes Jesus the result of God’s creative word. The other makes him the Word himself. The first keeps the line between Creator and creature that the Qur’an never crosses: “Nothing is like unto Him” (42:11). The second crosses it in its first verse.
I think John of Damascus knew this. His advice was a debating move: catch your opponent on a shared word, and hope he does not read the verse it comes from. The move still turns up in modern apologetics, and it still fails on 4:171.
The hadith that uses the phrase
Islamic position
The Prophet used the phrase too, and he used it in a statement of faith. ʿUbādah ibn al-Ṣāmit reports that he said: whoever testifies that there is no god but God alone, without partner, that Muḥammad is His servant and messenger, “and that Jesus is the servant of God and His messenger, and His word which He cast to Mary and a spirit from Him”, and that Paradise and Hell are real, God will admit him to Paradise.4
The order matters. “Servant” comes first, then “messenger”, then “word”. The word is the third thing said of him, and it is said of a servant.
That is the Jesus of the Qur’an, set out more fully on the page on the Messiah in Islam. The birth by God’s command is on the annunciation and the birth. And the John who wrote “the Word was God” has his own page here, on John and the Jesus who speaks of himself, which looks at why the fourth gospel is so far from the first three.
A shared word, honestly read
There is real common ground. Both books say Jesus came from God in a way unlike other men, and both tie that to God’s speech. A Muslim can say that sentence and mean it.
Where the two part is the question John 1:1 answers and 4:171 answers the other way: is the word God, or is it something God said? On that, the Qur’an could not be clearer, and it gives the reason in the same breath: “Glory be to Him, that He should have a son. To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and on earth” (4:171).
Sources
- Daniel J. Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972)
- Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān
- Philo of Alexandria, Questions and Answers on Genesis
- Al-Bukhārī, al-Ṣaḥīḥ
Notes
- John of Damascus, On Heresies, chapter 100, in Daniel J. Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), which gives the Greek with an English translation. ↩
- Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, on 3:45, report 7061 (Maʿmar from Qatādah). The site’s translation is on the commentaries on the family of ʿImrān. ↩
- Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis 2.62. ↩
- Al-Bukhārī, al-Ṣaḥīḥ, Kitāb aḥādīth al-anbiyāʾ, 3435. ↩