 Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem This week, our presentation will be on the relationship between Islam and Christianity. Our speaker last week touched on this in terms of the Christian and Old Testament and New Testament figures that are in the Quran, which are mentioned in the Quran, not just mentioned, but actually really fully discussed in the Quran. We'll be bridging between that and next week's discussion, which will be on interfaith relations, to discuss what are the similarities between Christianity and Islam. What are the differences between them? What is the relationship? Well, we know what the relationship is now, but what has been the relationship in the story? So that is what our speaker today will be discussing. And our speaker, I can get his name correct, is Dr. Ali Ataini. It's listed here, he's a PhD candidate, but he just told me that he is a PhD graduate now. At GTO in Berkeley, and he is now a professor at Tehtuna College in Berkeley, which I just learned this morning, is a first Muslim liberal arts college in America. Wow! So, in addition to teaching areas, also a popular area speaker and educator on religion, so please help me in welcoming Dr. Ataini. Thank you very much for having me. It's a great honor to be here. Just a little bit about me first, before I get into the topic. I do have a PhD, as was stated, I have it in something called Islamic Biblical hermeneutics. I did my dissertation on a Sufi interpretation of the Gospel of John. I have a master's in New Testament, focused on Biblical languages. So I'm going to be talking about, as was stated, the similarities and differences between the Islamic Christianity and kind of looking at it historically as well, and the sort of presentation of Christianity that is given in the Quran. So I want to begin by telling you what I think is something that we have in common, Muslims and Christians and Jews for that matter. What I believe is the heart of the Abrahamic tradition. So there's a story about a rabbi in the second century, named Hilal, a great pharistic rabbi and saint. He was asked, what is the Torah in a nutshell? So he quoted three verses. He quoted Deuteronomy 6.4, Deuteronomy 6.5, and Leviticus 19.18. We'll talk about those. And then he said, everything else is commentary. Which is not to say it's not important, but he's giving you the essence of the Torah. And it's interesting because a century earlier, according to the Gospel of the March, chapter 12 verse 29, a Jewish scribe comes to Jesus and asks him, what is the greatest commandment? And what does Jesus do? He quotes these three verses. So Mark records them in Greek, but Jesus said them in Hebrew because he's quoting the Old Testament. And in the Qur'an, Jesus is quoted as saying that I confirmed the theology of the Torah. Jesus said, Shema Israel, Adonai, Ilochan el Adonai Ichad. He hear, if you're a hero Israel, the Lord or God, the Lord is one. And then he continues, Be'e'a Haftah et Adonai, ilo Cheysab, Ilul vevabak, Lul kul nafsheh, Lul kul meodak, And you shall love the Lord by God with thy harp, soul, and strength. He says, love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these. So this is the essence of the Abrahamic teaching. Now, the prophet Muhammad, as you probably are familiar with him a little bit now at this point, this is the third week, Muslim believe he's the final messenger of God, he has many hadith attributed to him. This is one of the words that you should be familiar with, hadith, H-A-T-I-T-H. Maybe you've had this term in the past, something attributed to the prophet. And there's a hadith attributed to him where he said, لا تدفلوا جنة حتى تُقْلوا ولا تُقْلوا حتى تحبوا. Translation. None of you will enter paradise until you truly believe. And none of you will truly believe until you love one another. And then he said, shall I tell you of something that will increase your love? And his companion, they're called Sahaba in Arabic, his disciples, if you will. They said, yes. And he said, افشه السلام عليكم. Spread peace amongst yourselves. Spread peace amongst yourselves. So this is extremely important. This is the art of the tradition. There was a theologian named Fahradin Ar-Razi. Everyone say, I'm sorry. He was a Persian, he's very famous, Ar-Razi, Imam Ar-Razi, R-A-Z-I for those taking notes. And he was asked, much like Hillel was asked, what is the essence of Islam? And he said, اَلْ إِسْلَامُ He said, اِبَادَتُ لِلْخَالِكُ وَرَخْمَتُ لِلْخَبْ He said, Islam is worship of the Creator or adoration of the Creator and showing mercy towards His creation. So there's a lot of misconceptions that Islam is the God of Islam is a different God. Of course, you have to hear that a lot. Muslims worship a different God. Now, I would say in principle it is the same God. I think just a cursory glance or reading of the Qur'an makes it clear that at least the claim of the Qur'an is that the revealer of this text is the God of Abraham. So in principle the same God, I would say however when you get down to sort of the theological degree of things, there are differences between Jews, Muslims and Christians. It's interesting there was a late first century, early second century Christian sect called the Marcianites or Marcianism. The founder of the sect Marcian, he proposed this idea that the Christians worship a different God and the Christian than the Jewish God. The Jewish God is an inferior God. He called it Beldaboaf. He was vehemently anti-Semitic. He was a dosetist, he was a bitheist. So it was kind of trendy in Rome in the beginning of the second century. But then the proto-Orthodox church fathers like Justin Marder and Irenaeus and many others, they vehemently opposed this type of theology because they said no, it's the same God. It's the God of Abraham, Christians worship a different God. So they rejected that type of polemic but we theologize differently. For example, they would say that it's the same God but we believe that this God revealed itself in a unique way. So I would say the same thing. I would say that Muslims, Christians and Jews, they worship the same God in principle but there are differences when you study theology. How we theologize about God. The name of God in Arabic is Allah. Allah is simply, well in terms of opinion as to the etymology of that name. Some believe it's just the God because Al in Arabic is the definite article. So Al-Ilah became Allah. But that's a minority opinion. The dominant opinion is that the first two letters of the name Allah, which are alif and lamb in Arabic are cognate to the Hebrew alif lamet. So al, the word al in Hebrew means God, a God, a deity. So their names in Hebrew are called theophoric names. So names that have the name of God embedded within them as a suffix or a prefix. For example, Gabriel or Gabriel or the strength of God or Mika'el, Michael. And the name Michael is a rhetorical question. Who is like God? That's what his name means. Who is like God, Mika'el, Elijah, Eliyahu. My God is yahoo, one of the names of God according to rabbinical scripture and in the Tanath that he grew Bible. Anything that has alim in it, the L, right? L Ron Hubbard. No, just joking. I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. Sorry about that. Just be joking. You have to be careful when trying to tell me that they'll sue you. You have to be careful. You have to be careful. So this is an ancient Semitic name of God. So all Semitic languages, they called God some variation of this Aleph and Lamid. So in the Hebrew Bible, you find A'el, right? For example, in Hosea 119, it says, kia'anuchi A'el, belouish, indeed I am God and not a human being, A'el. Sometimes Elohim is used as sort of a more emphatic form, like in Deuteronomy 32, 17, I believe. It says, you know, the pagans, they sacrificed to Shadim, Shai'altim, to demons and not to Elo, not to God. So Elo, an emphatic form of A'el, is used in the Tanakh as sort of juxtaposition of false gods. Elo is A'el with emphasis. And then you have the very common Elohim. Like Genesis 11, the very first verse of the Torah says, bedeshi bara Elohim et Hashemayim, right? In the beginning, God with a plural created the heavens and the earth. So Muslim exegents of the Bible, Muslim biblicists, if you will, I'm one of them, and Jewish scholars will say that this plural is a plural of not numbers, but a royal plural. It's called a pluralist magistatist in Latin, right? It's kind of like when the Queen of England says, we declare, but she's only one person. But she's speaking from a vantage point of authority. Apparently, maybe not anymore, but the Queen of England. But God does. So God uses the plural for Elohim, Elohim, right? And then that's in Hebrew. Now, most scholars believe that Jesus, peace be upon him, spoke a language called Syriac, and he was probably very multilingual. I mean, the official language in the Roman Empire was Latin, but in that area in the ancient Near East, it was coined in Greek, right? So he probably knew some Greek. Paul is the first author of the New Testament. He wrote in Greek. The four Gospels are in Greek, right? The language of the general populace was Syriac, or sort of sometimes called late Aramaic, Christian Aramaic. And then the language of the synagogue Liturgy was in Hebrew. So he probably knew several languages, right? But when he would communicate to the people in Galilee, give his sermons, he probably did that in Syriac. So Christian scholars in the fourth century, they translated the Greek manuscripts, the four Gospels, into Syriac. Going back into the original language of Christ, because the originals are in Greek. And this fourth century translation into Syriac is known as a Peshitah. In Arabic it's called the Peshitah, which means like simple Syriac. And this replaced the Deotessorah notation. So the second century, a student of Justin Martyr, he actually harmonized all four Gospels and put them into a single narrative. He wrote it in Syriac. So that was quite popular. In fact, it was popular even into the Middle Ages and the Middle East churches. But most Christian scholars wanted to keep those Gospels separate, so it was translated into Syriac. Anyway, in Mark, Jesus says, according to the Peshitah, he says, shlam lezimna ve matiyath malkutha da allaha. He says, the hour has been fulfilled. The kingdom of God, malkutha da allaha, the kingdom of God is in heaven. So in Syriac, the language of Christ, the word for God is allaha. And this is the same, the cognate is allah in Arabic. So the Muslim claim, this is where I'm gonna get a little, maybe a little touchy. The Muslim claim is that all the prophets were Muslims because the word Muslim does not mean, does not literally mean a follower of Muhammad. If you read ancient, or not ancient, but orientalist literature about Islam, oftentimes Muslims are called Muhammedin, Muhammedin, meaning that they follow Muhammed. I don't necessarily have a problem with this term. However, the Quran does not use the term Muhammedin. It uses Muslim and the prophet himself was a Muslim. So the term Muslim is an active parcel of Islam. So Muslim is to Islam as Christian is to Christianity. So I'm mentioning that because I can't tell you how many times I've been asked, are you Islam? Not to God, that's kind of a deep question. I'm lying to Islam, wow, so I don't get an idea. Awesome. So the word Muslim means someone who submits to God's will with the intention of creating peace. So the word Muslim is actually related to the Hebrew shalom. They have a common etymology, Hebrew and Arabic and Syriac, all of these languages are sister languages. They have a common etymology. So Muslims will say that Abraham was a Muslim, that Moses was a Muslim, that David was a Muslim, that Jesus and Mary were Muslims, and that Muhammad was a Muslim. So the Qur'an also has a very clear criticism of Christian theology, right? Now there's a difference of opinion about the state of the New Testament. Like what is the Qur'an actually saying about the Christian scriptures? There's an ambiguity there. It's sort of an enigmatic relationship between the Qur'an and the Christian scriptures, the recognized Christian scriptures. Most scholars will say that the Qur'an is saying that the Christian scriptures have been corrupted in its text. There are different versions of them that scribes went in, they falsified things, right? There is an element of truth within them, but the Qur'an has been preserved and the Qur'an will confirm those authentic aspects of the New Testament. The minority opinion is that the New Testament is sound in its text, right? However, the quote unquote corruption comes in the post apostolic Christian exegetical tradition interpreting certain things, for example, the Gospel of John through the lens of Trinitarianism, which Muslims do not believe is a teaching of Christ. For example, I'll give you an example. Jesus says in John 10.30, the father and I are one, right? He says ha-pater kai ego heis esmen, the father and I are one from the Greek, right? This sort of standard normative, if you will, Muslim position regarding that is, well, Jesus could never have said that because that's a claim to deity and Jesus was a prophet and it's inauthentic. That's the most popular way of dealing with the text, or the lazy way of dealing with the text. However, there is an opinion, again, like I said, that the Qur'an is actually saying that the text in the New Testament is sound. So there isn't a problem with the text, there's a problem in the exegesis of the New Testament. So the father and I are one, Muslims will confirm that text and say, well, what does Jesus actually mean when he said that, right? Is he talking about an ontological oneness with God? What is he talking about? So we'd read the context. Jesus is referring to disciples and he says, no one can snatch them out of my hand, his disciples, and the father was greater than all is watching over them. No one can snatch them out of his hand. The father and I are one. So Muslims will say here, Muslim biblicists who engage in this type of hermeneutic of the New Testament, they will say that, in other words, entertaining the text is authentic. They will say the meaning of this passage is that Jesus and God, or if one will, they have the one in their attention that there's a mystical union between Jesus and God, not ontological union. Now, and evidence of that is found in the Qur'an. For example, there's a verse in the Qur'an that says, in Arabic it sounds like this. Ma yuti al-Rasul faqat ata'Allah. The literal translation is, whoever obeys the messenger of God is obeying God. So this does not mean that the messenger is ontologically the same person as God, that they share a being, that they share divine attributes. It means that the messenger is a sanctified agent of God, that he speaks with God's authority. So if we look at something like John, the prologue of the Gospel of John, where Jesus is called Theos, Theos means God, right? But it's interesting because a contemporary of John's Gospel, Philo of Alexandria, in his life of Moses, and Philo was obviously a Jew, he refers to Moses as Theos. So what's going on here with Greek during this period? Why are writers referring to men as Theos? So what Philo means there is that Moses is a divine agent, the lower case D, right? That Moses is the revelator of God's will, that he's a mystical union with God, that he only does those things that are pleasing to God, that when he speaks it is as if God is speaking, because he is the sanctified agent of God. So when we read something like John 1,1, for example, it says, in R.K. ain't halagas, in the beginning was the word. Kay halagas ain't pras tan feon, and the word was with the God, tan feon. Tan is a definite article. So tan feon, my convention is, every time the Gospel of John uses tan feon, or any gospel, for that matter, in the New Testament, when there's a definite article, it's a reference to the Father. And the word was with the God, Father. And then it says, kay feos ain't halagas, and a God, a theos, was the word, no definite article. And that's exactly how Philo uses that term in reference to Moses, that Jesus is a divinity with a lowercase d, he is a sanctified agent of God. He reveals God's will. The end of the prologue, it says something very beautiful, it says, no one has at any time seen God. And it says monogenes tayas, right? The one of a kind, divine agent, the unique sanctified agent of God, monogenes tayas, that who is in the bosom of the Father, the bosom of the Father, meaning he's in the heart of the Father, meaning he's beloved of the Father, that one exegis atop in the Greek, that one exegits him, right? So no one has at any time seen God, but there is this person called the unique sanctified agent of God, who's beloved of the Father, and that one reveals the Father. Gives us what's in Arabic is called ma'arifat, an intimate knowledge of God. In Hebrew, da'at ilo him. Like Jesus is that, to be honest with you, if I wasn't Muslim, I would probably revile Islam, if that's all I knew about, if that's the only type of information that was being presented to me about the religion. So I don't blame a lot of people for having misconceptions and hostility. I would also have hostility if I believed that what they were saying was true. So I think the key then is education. So wisdom with academic rigor, wa ma'arifatsit hasana as the Quran says, and also with exegits saying what beautiful exhortation, with a good attitude, with good comportment, right? And then, jadimum bil atihyahsan, and then engage with them. And jadim jidal, it can be translated as debate or discourse, academic inquiry to be critical, right? Some people have a misconception again that Muslims are not allowed to be critical about their own texts. You can't engage in textual criticism or higher Quranic criticism. No, that's something that our scholars definitely engaged in. In fact, they would say that the Quran itself invites upon itself this type of higher criticism. The Quran says, asalaya tadabbarun al-Quran, which means don't they penetrate the meanings of the Quran? To dub for an Arabic means to really analyze something extremely closely, right? So engage with people in ways that are good. You can translate it good. You can translate it better. You can translate it beautiful. Engage with people in ways that are beautiful. So this is what I think we need to do. I think we need to engage with academic sophistication and civility. And we need to, the goal I think is not necessarily to agree, but to at least understand the position of the so-called other. So the other point I wanted to make is from a historical standpoint, what is the Quran saying then about Christianity? So the Quran is, like I said, is critical of Christian theology. That's kind of across the board amongst Muslim scholars, unless one is a perennialist, which is sort of a new thing, but most traditional authorities would say that the criticism of Christianity in the Quran are really of Christian theology and whether it's criticized in the text of the New Testament or not, like I said, is a different sort of opinion. So the Quran, for example, will explicitly repudiate the Trinity, right? And exegents will say, for example, that the verse that says, don't say Trinity, God is one. That this was a historical development within the church. That's not the teaching of Christ. Also the idea of Christ being a divine incarnation. So Muslims believe, and similar to Jewish theology, that God is utterly transcendent of space, time and materiality. This does not mean that God is imminent in some sense, right? So the God of Islam is not some removed deity of Plago or Aristotle, where he's basically an absentee landlord, right? He never collects the rent. He should do whatever he wants, he'll never check up on you. He doesn't reach out to humanity. No, the God of Islam is an imminent deity. The Quran says, we are closer, royal plural, we are closer to the human being than his or her jugular vein, right? So closer than an internal organ. So God's imminent is there. A God of mercy and love are imminent, not God in physicality. As Muslims all will say that God incarnating into flesh and blood as it were is inconceivable because nothing is like God whatsoever. So there's a difference of opinion there. Also I just earlier about the God of Islam is a merciful God. This is evident, again, if you read the Quran, every chapter of the Quran begins with the reframed Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim in the name of God. The indiscriminately compassionate, the intimately loving. So Rahman is one of the most common names of God in the Quran. Rahman, right? And in Hebrew, Rahman, at least in rabbinical literature. And this word is related to Rechem. Rechem in Hebrew means the womb of a mother. So one of the greatest names of God in the Quran is related to the word for womb. So exegets have struggled with that connection and they'd said that things like the purest type of love on earth between human beings and the love of a mother for her child, right? And Rahman, the name of God, is on a form in Arabic, a grammatical form that is a type of superlative. God is infinitely more loving towards his creation than a mother is to her child, right? Muslims also believe that people are saved by grace, not by action. This is also a very, very common misconception that's perpetuated by non-Muslims. That Muslims believe that, you know, that if you're 51% good and 49% evil, oh, you just made it into heaven. 41% for 51% evil and 49% evil. Oh, you know, you're gonna go to hell. Just missed it. So salvation is by grace. I mean, there was a sort of rationalist movement with an early Islam called the Moritesiba movement and they actually took the Caliphate for some time, which is not considered normative or orthodox by Sunni orthodoxy. That did believe it's sort of a tit for tat, you know, literal sort of weighing of deeds on the day of judgment and God sort of becomes this huge cosmic calculator in the sky. But there are many, many hadith in the prophets which demonstrate that Muslims believe that salvation is through grace, that no one is worthy of paradise, right? It's only through grace. For example, there's a hadith in the prophet where he says that God, he called the two men out of hellfire, right? So two men from out of the hellfire and they come towards God as it were. Again, God does not occupy physical space, but this is just sort of a teaching moment that he's using. And God says to both of the men, okay, go back to hell. So one man reluctantly turns around and starts walking back but keeps looking over his shoulder at God. The other man turns around immediately and starts sprinting towards hell. So God says to the man who keeps turning around and God knows better obviously because God is all-knowing but the prophet is trying to make a theological point here. So God says to the man who keeps turning around, why do you keep looking at me? And the man says, well, you called me out of hell and I was hoping I didn't have to ever go back. And God says, you're right, go to paradise. And then he stops the man who's sprinting. Because why are you sprinting towards hell? And the man said, my whole life I disobeyed you, but this time I really want to obey you. And God says, good, go to paradise. So ultimately the decision is in God's hands. Even the prophet said, one time he was picking up some firewood, mentioned in a hadith. And he said, you know, to the companions that were there, he said, no one is entered into paradise by their deeds. And they said, not even you. They said, not even me, except that my Lord envelops me in his mercy. So this is the dominant position. This is the quote unquote, I can use these terms in here because I'm not in the academy. This is the orthodox, normative position of Islam. The vast majority of Muslims, this is what they believe that salvation is by grace. So, and that God is personal. So at this point, let's see who we're gonna hear. I think I'll stop yappin' and take some questions. Yes, sir. Does the Quran address the death of Christ? Ah, good question. Yes, that was on my mind here. Yeah, so the Quran, according to the dominant opinion, categorically rejects the crucifixion of Jesus. So the Quran says, So the children of Israel did not kill him nor crucify him. So the dominant opinion is that Christ wasn't crucified. That somehow God saved him. Now the Quran does not go into details as to what happened. And neither does the prophet. So later, Muslim scholars, they have these sort of theories as to what actually happened. So the most dominant theory, again, this is not the definitive answer. There is no definitive answer as to what actually happened. But the most dominant theory is that a disciple was transfigured to look like Christ and he was the one crucified. Now, if you look at Christian history, we know that there was a group in the first century called the Basilideans who actually believed that Simon of Cyrene was crucified. Instead of Christ, it's obviously a pre-Islamic belief prevalent in the Christian community. In the first century, early second century. Who's Simon of Cyrene? Well, if you read the three Gospels, the Synoptic Gospel, it says that when they were going to crucify Jesus, for some reason, the Romans pulled a man out of the crowd. And Christian tradition teaches that Jesus was just so exhausted he couldn't carry the cross. I didn't mention that in the New Testament. So it's quite enigmatic. But for some reason, they pulled this man out of the crowd and Simon of Cyrene and they compelled him to bear the cross. There was a group of Christians in the first century who said Simon was in fact crucified because they saw the death of the Messiah as sort of an oxymoron. How can the Messiah die? This was the main reason why most Jewish elements did not believe in Christ because according to their understanding of the Old Testament, the Messiah cannot be killed. You won't dash his foot against the stone. And it says in Psalm 91. Interestingly, none of the passages in the Old Testament that Christians will use as proof texts of the death of the Messiah, the most famous of which is called Isaiah 53, the suffering servant. The word Messiah does not appear in any of those texts. So the interpretation is somewhat open. But in Psalm 20, verse six, very interestingly, David writes in Hebrew, he says, I know that God will save his Messiah. He shall hear him from his holy heaven and save him with the saving power of his right hand. So I would say that the Muslim belief about the Messiah is in line with sort of pre-Christian Jewish expectations of the Messiah. So that's a dominant opinion that he wasn't crucified or killed. There's other opinions that it might have been Barabbas. So if you look at early Alexandria manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew, we're actually given the first name of Barabbas. So this whole incident of the Pontius Pilate releasing a Jewish prisoner, this seems to be sort of unhistorical. You have two sort of, on Yom Kippur, you have two lands, you kill one, you set one free. It's sort of something going on like that. But if we just entertain the story for now, apparently the Romans had this custom where they would release a Jewish prisoner as an act of goodwill before Passover. So they bring out two prisoners. One is in Barabbas and one is named Jesus of Nazareth. So according to the popular story in Matthew, who shall I release to you? The crowd cheers and they release Barabbas and they crucify Jesus. And what's interesting is the word Barabbas is not his name, it's a title. Barabbas and Aramaic is Barabbah. Barabbah means the son of the father. So Barabbas is not some ordinary brigand. He is a messianic claimant. He was from Galilee and the Galileans were known for two things, fishing and zealotry. Or as the Romans would say, fishing and terrorism. Because they would organize these insurrections against the Roman occupiers. Jesus is from Galilee. The Galileans also had this sort of accent that was very noticeable. Like if someone is from the south or something and they start speaking, it was very noticeable. And the rest of the Jews, at least the Jews in Judea would sort of characterize them as sort of peasants. They don't know anything and they're all violent. So that's why it says in the Gospel of Matthew that Peter spoke in Judea and Jerusalem. From his accent they said, are you Galilean? So that's where they said, no, you're his disciple then. Just from the way he spoke. But anyway, so Barabbas is a messianic claimant. Now early, as I said, early manuscripts of Matthew actually give us Barabbas' first name. Does anyone know what his first name was? Was also Jesus. So why did later scribes remove Barabbas' first name in the Gospel of Matthew? Because there might have been some confusion maybe. Who was actually crucified? Because you can imagine what his pilot is actually saying now. Who shall I release to you? Yeshua Barabbas, Jesus the son of the father. Or Yeshua Hamashiach, Jesus who is called Christ. It's the same name and the same title. Release Jesus and kill Jesus. What? So many scholars believe that the first name of Barabbas was removed for reverential reasons but it could be that it was confusion amongst the people in Jerusalem at the time as to who was actually crucified. However, there is a minority opinion that Jesus was in fact killed amongst Muslim scholars. It's a minority opinion. There's a good book on this by Todd Lawson. He's a good scholar of Todd Lawson. It's called Crucifixion in the Quran. And his contention is the first exegete ever to say that Jesus was replaced on the cross, which is called literal dosatism, by the way. The first exegete ever to say that was a Christian exegete, not a Muslim exegete. It was a man named John Damascene who was an eighth century Christian scholar who lived in Damascus. He was the first one to write a systematic reputation of Islam. So his interpretation of that text is that someone was replaced and then it seems like Muslim scholars would have followed suit after him. But there is a minority opinion that the meaning of the verse, they did not kill him or crucify him. It was made to appear so unto them is that Jesus might have been put on the cross, but he didn't die from his injuries that God seized his soul while he was on the cross and then returned it to him possibly three days later. This might explain why Pilate and the Gospel of Mark was so surprised that Christ had died already. You know, in the Gospel of Mark, it was only mentioned by Mark. They come back to Pilate and say, he's dead and he's just already. And he marveled at things. He made, his whole business is crucifying Jews, right? And Josephus says that at one point they actually ran out of lumber in Jerusalem because they're crucifying so many Jews. So he knew what it took to crucify someone to have him and what it took to kill them. Yet he marveled and this might explain Father into your hand to commend my spirit. It seems like he's sort of willingly giving up the ghost or knows it's gonna be taken from him and then returned to him. So there isn't anything like that. Because there's other places in the Quran where Jesus, or God says to Jesus, for example, inimutawafika, and you can very easily translate that as, oh Jesus, I'm going to take your soul from you. You don't have to twist the text. I mean, that's a primary definition of that active part of the, you know, you don't have to perform what I call, what do I call it, hermeneutical warboarding. If you choke the text enough, it'll say whatever you want to say. So I would say there is a genuine difference of opinion as to what the Quran is saying about the crucifixion. The dominant opinion seems to be, is, not seems to be, the dominant opinion is that Christ was not crucified. What happened? Nobody knows. There's a minority opinion that he might have been killed but his soul was returned to him by God and his resurrection is proof that he indeed was the Messiah and that he commissioned his disciples to go and spread the gospel. Both positions are correct according to the Quran. In my opinion, I mean, I think there would be some Muslims that would disagree with me on that. Oh, sorry, I tend to go on long and new friends. This is great. I noticed you called God the God. Oh, sorry. You called the God Islam, he. Yeah, one explanation. Well, Muslims believe that God has a white promise. No, I'm just joking. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. So in Arabic, as well as Hebrew, there's something I've to understand about the grammar. So every noun in Arabic and in Hebrew has a gender assigned to it, every noun. Sometimes it's obvious what's known as natural gender. And again, this is also a point of contention nowadays. But traditionally, a boy was masculine. So walaq is the word for boy, or Hebrew, yeled. So the ism al-ishana, the demonstrative pronoun would be masculine, right? So even the pronoun, demonstrative pronouns in Arabic and in Hebrew are gender-fied. So I would say had that walaq, this is masculine, a boy, right? Or in Hebrew I say ze yeled. This is a boy, natural gender. But sometimes there is no natural gender, right? For example, the moon, no natural gender. So Arabs in the distant past, and Jews in the distant past, they would just assign a gender. We don't really know why they would assign male or female, but they would just assign gender. So they decided the moon is masculine. And the sun is feminine in Arabic. So God does not have a gender. The Qur'an says, lesa kabithlihi shaylam. There's nothing like God whatsoever. There's nothing like God. So nothing in creation resembles God. So for male and female, if we're black and white, if we're made of matter, if I'm standing on something, if I'm breathing, none of these things apply to God. God is completely dissimilar to his creation, essentially. But the word Allah is grammatically masculine. It has a lexical gender. So because it has a lexical gender of masculinity assigned to it in the Qur'an, it says huwa, he is, he is, right? It doesn't mean God is male. And anyone who says God is male, Muslim scholars would say, that's an ephemem. He's, that position is not acceptable. They would consider that blasphemy to say God is male or female. But God uses a masculine pronoun because the word Allah has a grammatical gender. The grammatical gender of the name of God is masculine. It does not mean that God has a natural gender. The Prophet said he made an image of God. Yeah, so that's interesting because that is in Genesis too. And there's also a hadith of the Prophet. So it's not in the Qur'an, but there's a hadith of the Prophet where it says, basically God created Adam. And here Adam does not mean the person Adam. It's generic, the human being, Adam, right? God created a human being in his image, right? So Muslim scholars, and this, you know, Maimonides also gives us this verse. Maimonides does not believe in divine incarnation. He is anti-entropomorphism. Maimonides says, the meaning of this, as well as Imam Qasali, they both say that the meaning of this is, what is this image of God? The image of God is the ability to reason. That's God's, quote unquote, image. God doesn't have a physical image. So God created a human being with the ability to reason. Just as God has infinite knowledge, he's qualitatively omniscient. Human beings also have that ability. This is our differentia to use Aristotelian nomenclature. What makes the human being different from the animals? It isn't my physical strength. You know, put me in a room with a line, I'm done. It's not our, you know, my eyesight. The eagle can spot fish under water from two miles up in the air. So what makes us different? Why can we build skyscrapers? You do trigonometry. It's because of our intellect. So that's the so-called image of God according to Maimonides and according to Imam Qasali, who's sort of the Maimonides or Aquinas of Islam because God doesn't have a physical image. It's the ability to reason. Of course, there have been anthropomorphists in Islamic history that believe God has limbs and he sits on a physical throne and things like that. But it's considered a deviant position. That is, according to the normative Sunni and Shi'a understanding of theology. Yes? Dr. Lee? Oh, yes. Thank you, Dr. Maimonides. I believe I heard you say that Muhammad, peace be upon him, is considered a final messenger. Can you expand upon this? Yeah. So there's a distinction that Muslim scholars make between a prophet and a messenger. So a prophet in Arabic is Nabi, or Nabi in Hebrew. A messenger is called the Rasul. So the difference at a very basic level is that a prophet is someone who is guided by God to reaffirm the previous dispensary example I can use here, that Aaron is a prophet, right? But Moses is a messenger. Moses is receiving a revelation, right? Receiving the words of God, the law of God, and Aaron supports him, right? So if looking at it through that type of way, then every messenger is a prophet, but not every prophet is a messenger. So the prophet Muhammad is the final messenger, which makes him the final prophet of God. The final one who is going to bring a direct revelation from God, right? And if you look at history, I would say that really the last major religion was Islam. I mean, there have been other things since then. One can argue for more menace, for more Scientology, but I was the last major, and it's such an incredible impact on the world. That does not mean that there are not prophetic figures that come after him. I would say, for example, that Martin Luther King was a prophetic figure, but I wouldn't call him a prophet, right? So most of the time, a very technical definition of a prophet. They had to sort of fall between parameters of time, they have certain characteristics. However, the Quran says that every nation received a prophet. So the most, some 25 or so prophets are named in the Quran, but that's not by any means an exhaustive list. So, you know, the jury is out about Confucius, about Buddha, Krishna, these could have been prophets. They fall within an Aristotle, or played, probably not the later one, not the later one, it's kind of strange again. The ancient Greeks don't even know that. So, but the prophet said that, there's no prophet between Jesus and me. So again, the disciples are prophetic characters and the Quran praises them, right? But the definition of a Nabi, a prophet, and Judaism and in Islam is very technical, very specific. So the dominant orthodox opinion of Confucius is that prophecies close with Malachi, right? So, the prophet Muhammad is not a prophet, according to the dominant opinion in Judaism, because according to them, he doesn't sort of fit the criteria what they believe to be a prophet. One of those criteria is a prophet must completely confirm the Torah, right? So also this is, it seems to be one of the reasons why they deny Christ prophecy is that Jesus, even according to the New Testament, seems to sort of make amendments and addendums to the Torah at times, right? And for them, that's blasphemy, right? So like Jesus, he heals a man on the Sabbath. And I say, if you can't do that, that's impermissible. He says, well, if one of your animals fell into a hole, you pull it out, it's okay to do good things on the Sabbath. He's sort of, he's revising things. He's ameliorating the ball. He's making it easier. And that's what the Quran says he's doing, that Christ is doing. So the best opinion you'll get about Jesus from a Jewish perspective is that he was a great rabbi, but he's certainly not a prophet. He's not from the side, according to them. The most congenial opinion you'll get about Muhammad from a Jewish perspective is that he was a go'ayelit, which means like a redeemer or someone who was guided by God, but he's not a prophet. He sort of prepared the world for monotheism. He was an Arab prophet, maybe, but he's not a universal prophet. My monotheist actually writes, what is the purpose of Christianity in Islam? He says it's to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. They're raising awareness about the Messiah. But Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. I've decided that we're going to become followers of Muhammad. What teachings in the Quran are we going to have find the biggest barrier, acceptance? What teachings? I don't know, maybe dietary nutrition restrictions. If you like ham and eggs, I mean, I mean, you have to pray five times a day. It doesn't, it doesn't, you know, there are one out of five human beings on earth as Muslims. And I seriously doubt all of them pray five times a day. So it doesn't invalidate one's Islam, right? You can't say, oh, you're an Muslim because you don't pray five times a day. But if one wants to be an about follower, then they fast during Ramadan. That seems to be, I mean, in the first couple of days, you've got like a massive migraine. But then after a couple of weeks, you kind of get used to it. So it's a 30 day fast. And of course, if people are sick or pregnant mothers or children, they're exempt from fasting, people that have illnesses, you know. Pray five times a day in the dietary restrictions. And I don't see what else can be hampering. Yes? Perhaps one of the things we share is poor treatment of women, which is prevalent in the New Testament in my opinion. But Islam does not have a great feeling to me on that score. I appreciate it if you talk about that. Yeah, and you know, I don't have a good feeling about talking about women issues when I'm not a woman, to be honest with you. So I always encourage, is there a Muslim sister in the house? No. So I always encourage women to speak for themselves. But I would say that certainly there are Muslim countries, Muslim majority countries, where women are treated as sort of, well, less than men, they're considered, they don't have all the rights of men, basically. So this comes down to a fundamental understanding of sacred law of Sharia, all right. What is Sharia? What is Sharia, right? One of those words that people are scared of. Sharia, jihad, right? So Sharia, according to Rick Santorum. So Rick Santorum, he gave an impassioned lecture on the dangers of Sharia law and how it debases women and things like that. Long, an hour and a half lecture, very good actually, I guess. But then after the lecture, a Muslim college student approached it and said, Sharia Santorum, do you know the five, ma'asid as Sharia? Do you know the five aims of the Sharia, which is like Sharia 101? And he said, ma'asid, what? So that's like the equivalent of me giving this sort of critical deconstruction of Aquinas' summa theologica, from the breaking down the Latin, and over here he's wrong because of that, over here he's out of his mind, and then a Christian stands up and says, what are the four gospels? And I say, John, Paul, George, and Ringo. So, Sharia is, you know, it's, it's interpreted in vastly different ways. So some Muslims interpret Sharia in a way that oppresses women. Saudi Arabia, which is our ally, by the way, and a contributor to the Clinton Foundation. Anyway, they interpret the Sharia as being, that women can't drive cars. That's the only country that does that, maybe except for Afghanistan. If you go to Iran, half the, you know, one of those other words, Iran, the axis of evil, right? If you go to Iran, half of the physicians in the hospitals are women, and 60% of college students are women. If you ask the authorities in Iran, why is this so? They'll say, look, Sharia, the prophet said, Talib-ul-Erin, Faridatul al-Arakuni, Muslim al-Muslima, the acquisition of knowledge is an obligation upon every male and female Muslim. That's what they'll say. You go across the border to Afghanistan, you'll see villages where women never leave their homes, ever, they're in their house. And if you ask the authorities, why do you do this to women? They'll say, this is a Sharia. So you have these completely polarized understandings of sacred law, you know? So I would say that, speak to Muslim women, ask Muslim women how they feel about it, if they feel like they're oppressed. And a Muslim woman that works a job in America, oftentimes are opposed by their family members, because the sort of assumption is, who's forcing you to wear that? Do you have some father or brother that's forcing you? Actually, they say, no, actually, my father is opposed to it. This is what I chose to do, right? So, I would say that it depends on how one interprets the Sharia, certainly culture comes into play a lot in the Muslim majority world. Like, honor killings has nothing to do with Islam. There's nothing anyone can bring, no proof, no hadith, no Quranic verse that says that killing someone an innocent person is honorable. That's purely cultural, and it's done in Middle Eastern cultures, amongst Christians, amongst Hindus, and amongst Muslims. It's totally cultural. Female genital mutilation is not according to Sharia. That is a cultural practice and nothing to do with Islam. So we have time for two more questions. How do you spell Sharia? S-H-A-R-I-A-H. I mean, there are things in Jewish law, Jewish law is called halakha. You know, and if you study Jewish law, you'll read about stonings and amputations. But there are Jews in America that follow halakha. You know, so how do they interpret the law, their law, and how do the Constitution? Well, there's a principle in Jewish law that says that if you're living in a non-Jewish country, you have to follow the laws of those countries, of that country. And by doing so, you're actually following Jewish law. And it's interesting because people, they bring that argument up about Muslims, that the Sharia and the Constitution, they just, they're not compatible, right? But that same principle is in Islamic sacred law. If you're living in a non-Muslim majority country, and there's something lawful in Sharia, but unlawful in that non-Muslim majority country, then you must abandon the Sharia and stick to that law of the land. And by doing so, you're actually following the Sharia. Yeah, that's why I think people need to, they need to study Muslim tradition. A rejection of tradition becomes violent. We've seen this, I mean, I mean, I mean, this respect, but the products of information led to massive bloodshed all across Europe because of rejection of tradition. So I think there's an educational crisis amongst Muslims all around the world. People don't know what the traditional positions are on things. So what they do is they try to interpret the text by themselves without requisite knowledge. And it's absolutely Islam 101 that if someone is going to give some sort of teaching on anything on the Quran, they have to have a teaching license. Just like if someone wants to perform open heart surgery on someone, you have to have credentials. You know, so it's not enough to say, you know what, like Jesus was in Jerusalem, a rabbi surrounded him and say, under whose authority are you doing these things? They want to know the name of his rabbi. Who is your rabbi? And then Jesus in the gospel says, it's a really interesting way of getting out of slippery situations. So he says, who's John the Baptist? Is he a prophet or not? They go, oh, we don't know. And he says, I'm not going to tell you under whose authority I do these things. It's like when they bring him that denarius and say, you know, should we pay this to Caesar, render up to Caesar? So it's a brilliant answer what he has, what he says there. So this idea of what's called sennad or transmissional knowledge, right, is very important in Islam, that I have a teacher who gave me a teaching license, who had a teacher who gave him a teaching license that goes all the way back to the prophet. So this ensures sort of the weaning out of these sort of freelance, the so-called pseudo scholars who stand on the pulpit and just interpret the Quran incorrectly, you know. So we have to be very particular about our religious knowledge, who we take it from. Let us, you know, so this is one of the major problems with Paul according to the New Testament. Paul says in one of his letters, you know, he says, I don't need letters of recommendation. I have my apocalyptic of Christ, right? So according to the exegesis, Christian exegesis, James, who is the head of the Jerusalem Episcopate, he would send apostles of Jesus in Paul's wake to correct Paul's teachings with letters from James. Like, I have a teaching license, Paul doesn't. So Paul, he has this uncanny way of turning a weakness into a strength. So he says, I don't need a teaching license. I had my vision of Christ, right? And he might have had that, but that doesn't give one authority to teach. So someone comes up to me, for example, and says, I want to talk like in a mosque. And says, I want to give the Friday sermon today. So I ask him, what are your credentials? And he says, well, I had a dream last night. And, you know, I was speaking with the prophet in my dream. That might be true, but you can't get the sermon. You need to go and get some credentials. Or someone comes up to me and says, if I need an open heart surgery, they say, I'm a heart surgeon. Oh, where did you do your residency last night? The finer points of vascular surgery were revealed to me. I would say, maybe that's true, but no, you're not gonna operate. So, transmission of knowledge is very, very important. And I think that's something that Muslims today, and I think people in general, because the whole sort of way of the world now is sort of reinvent the wheel, think for yourself. Certainly you can think for yourself, but as one of my teachers said, you should have your left hand on tradition and you should write with your right hand. You know the tradition. You know what it is, you know how to interpret it. You don't transgress against it, because then you're left with people that just have no records of knowledge that are saying whatever they want, right? So. So we have time for one more question. Yeah. That's true that you're speaking of. We might call that the stomach succession. Yeah. Not to harp on something that hits us all the time in the news reports, in the real news reports. Sometimes we mentioned some of the Arabia, the Wahhabism. Yeah. Could you address a little bit of that because I think that's what we often at times get deluged with is, you know, we're difficult. Yeah. Yeah, Wahhabism is, it's a kind of puritanical, very exclusive interpretation. That really wasn't around 200 years ago. Relatively new sect. The reason why Wahhabism is oftentimes presented as being the dominant position or the normative position is because Mecca and Medina are in Saudi Arabia, right? And also, there are Wahhabi full-time propagandists that travel the world, you know, visit mosques and try to indoctrinate different Muslim mosques and different Muslim communities with their brand of Islam. And they also, obviously, Saudi Arabia is very rich. They get money from oil and from Pilgrimage, you know, billions of dollars every year. So I would say that it's very problematic interpretation of things. And that, you know, it's not, I don't consider it within the sort of parameters of traditional Islam. Traditional Islam, the Sunni Islam, is four schools of thought. They're called the Hanafi, the Maliki, the Shafi'i and the Hanfali. And for, you know, 1200 years, every Sunni Muslim belong to one of these schools of thought. It's like a university. And then suddenly now we have this other school that rejects many of the positions of those traditional schools. And so it, again, re-intests the wheel and has very strange positions on things that Muslims find very disturbing, to be honest with you. So, you know, and of course you have, you know, I would, again, not much of a, well, maybe I have a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I think one of the previous speakers said this before me that, you know, there's media bias in an agenda. I think that's obvious. And so, you know, justifying invasion of Muslim countries is difficult to get the public behind you to do that. So if you sort of aggrandize this threat of Wahhabi Islam, I mean, it's one country and it's by no means the dominant, it's a very small ideology compared to global Islam. But if you sort of aggrandize that and say, well, this is, you know, everywhere and most Muslims believe in the set of ideology, then it sort of justifies, you know, action in the, you know, perpetual action in the Middle East, but not in Saudi Arabia, apparently, because, you know, there's Trump hotels and, in fact, they can't be on the list. All right, so, let's join me again in a round of applause.