Jesus, Muhammad, and prophetic finality

There are certainly considerable similarities as well as differences between Christianity and Islam concerning prophecy. In particular, with respect to perceptions of both Jesus and Muhammad from within each faith, and so prophecy in light of them, differences are very marked indeed. As Ipgrave notes, “Muslims and Christians believe that prophecy reaches its completion in Muhammad and Jesus respectively”, yet respective “scriptural material on these two figures is differently weighted” (Ipgrave 2005c, 100). This is also the case in regard to how the phenomenon of prophecy is understood to have ongoing relevance and application. Three key prophetic figures — Moses, Jesus, Muhammad — are viewed rather differently in each religion. Moses is an idealised mediator figure for whom there is a multiplicity of interpretive and reception perspectives, with an underlying motif of being an authoritative law-giver. For Christians, Jesus is the fulfilment of the Hebrew prophetic trajectory of salvific proclamation. The focus on being perceived the son of God, and so bringing salvation, is more important than his being a prophet as such. This undergirds the uniquely distinctive Christian perception of the Jesus figure, and is accompanied by the distinction between the earthly Jesus and the Christ of faith. By comparison, Muhammad is a prophet and ineluctably human: divine attribution is denied. But of course, Muhammad took on a functional community leadership role in a way that Jesus never did. And Muhammad is the last prophet as far as Islam is concerned: there cannot be any prophet after him (von Scheliha 2013). In the Qur’an, Sura 33:40 refers to Muhammad as the Messenger of Allah and the seal of the prophets. This is often understood to mean Muhammad was the last prophet. “Seal” (Ar. hatam) is understood as ultimate or final, implying there can be no other Prophet after Muhammad. Nevertheless, there have always been prophetic movements of one kind or another in Islam (Bobzin 2013). As to the end of the Hebrew heritage of prophecy, in which both Jesus and Muhammad are seen to stand, both faiths agree that subsequent to such “end” God no longer communicates revelation as had been the case heretofore. Nevertheless, the understanding of the “completeness” of prophecy is approached differently, theologically, even though phenomenological parallels can be drawn. Muhammad, as noted, is final for Islam. He ushers in a new era without further revelation or miraculous acts. He is the prophetic mouthpiece who delivers a fixed Qur’an as the authoritative source of divine rule or law, although pious reformers and interpreters are allowed with a view to discerning, explicating, and ensuring compliance with that law.

In respect of Jesus, from the New Testament perspective “the dominant element of the prophetic paradigm ... is the prophet as mediator of divine power and bearer of the divine Word” (Davis 2005, 65). Importantly, there is also the dimension of mediating intercessor that is accorded to the figure of Jesus; supremely so in terms of the cross and resurrection motifs. Relative to his own time, Jesus understood himself almost certainly as a prophet (see Mk 6. 1-6) in the classic Hebrew sense of the specially called individual. Jesus as, in effect, the “self-communication” of God is for Christianity both salvific fulfilment and the lens for the interpretation of revelation and salvation. The conflicting points of finality cannot be reconciled. The New Testament holds that Jesus, in embodying “God’s very being within creation”, means that biblical prophecy per se is relativised as preparatory to him, for “it is rendered both inadequate

Prophecy 117 and redundant once God finally chooses to convey the fullness of his Word into the world” (Ipgrave 2005c, 108). By contrast, the Qur’an (Sura 33:40) simply and directly asserts Muhammad as being “God’s Messenger and the seal of the prophets”, and in so doing affirms, in effect, his apostolic status and prophetic finality (Ipgrave 2005c, 110). Also, insofar as Islam holds that the Qur’an alludes to the way Jews and Ghristians have “corrupted what they have received” (on the presumption they received the self-same revelatory message as now Muhammad is voicing), it asserts “the finality of the revelation given through Muhammad” and the “affirmation of the completeness and perfection of Islam” that is given through Muhammad (Ipgrave 2005c, 111). Nevertheless, the Qur’an, and so Islam, accepts both Muhammad and Jesus (Isa) as messengers (rasul) and prophets (nabi). This is in contrast to Christianity, which proclaims Jesus as Christ and Son of God, but traditionally has not given Muhammad any prophetic or theological value.

According to the letters of Paul, while Jesus, the Christ, is unique, all Christians can speak prophetically for prophetic speech is about God’s will in the present. Only rarely is it about direct predictions of the future. In order to avoid any random arbitrariness of prophetic speech by those who are disciples or followers of Christ, this dimension of Christian religious life was critically reflected upon within the wider faith community in very early times (cf. 1 Thess. 5:21). Christianity can certainly speak of the prophetic dimension, or life, of Jesus, now continuing and fulfilling his prophetic office through Christian proclamation of God’s will, preaching about God’s kingdom, the forgiveness of the sin, and of the love of God and neighbour. This prophetic witness, and allied activities, is bequeathed to the ongoing life and role of the Church down through the ages. By contrast, from the Muslim perspective, Muhammad was, and is, the last Prophet as such; he is the focus and conclusion of the prophetic tradition. The community is to live in faithful discharge of the divine message and guidance he supplied. From the Christian side, although the phenomenon of prophecy originates in an encounter with the Divine, it is worked out in the context of human communities and societies wherein the prophetic word “is likely to be strongly contested, to generate divisions between people, and to be personally costly for the messenger himself” (Ipgrave 2005b, 67). The prophetic address often ruptures human relationships because it inevitably disturbs the status quo — and that experience was both shared by, and the common reaction to, Jesus and Muhammad.

The Theological Forum examined the primary Quranic reference, Sura 33:40, which affirms Muhammad as the Messenger of Allah and the seal (or last) of the prophets (Bobzin, 2013; Lang 2013). Of the two terms, messenger and prophet, the former (rasul) appears some 332 times in the Qur’an and the latter (nabi) 75 times. Furthermore, the term nabi (prophet) comes to the fore in the suras given through Muhammad, once he was leading the nascent Muslim community in Medina. The appellation of “prophet”, and so the prophetic task, is identified primarily with the Medinan phase of Muhammad’s religious leadership, guiding the development of the Muslim community as its pre-eminent statesman. By contrast, the messenger role and function, as a “warner” alerting his hearers to imminent danger and admonishing them to change their ways, is predominant during the pre-Medinan phase at Mecca. In this context he could be regarded as an ascetic preacher of repentance. For Christians, however, the ancient prophetic trajectory comes to fulfilment and final fruition in Jesus of Nazareth: he embodies the divine mission and purpose to which the former prophecy points, both historically and morally. Yet he is not the last of prophets; he is more than prophet — he is both messenger and (embodied) message. It is in this sense that he is named ‘Messiah’, yet the expectation is not concluded with the historical Jesus. It is a process and invokes new and further expectation: of return (and so final fulfilment) and of community (Church) engagement in the realisation of the Kingdom of God as present reality (cf. Bongardt 2013, 65). Thus, for Christianity Jesus is the final and unique point of the trajectory of divinely given prophecy: he is not one among others. However, if he is the last of the prophetic lineage, as it were, then Muhammad cannot be seen as prophet from Christian perspective. Baldly stated in this way, this poses a sharp issue for Christian-Muslim dialogue. Yet there have been other views promoting the view that, from a Christian perspective, there is no theological reason why Muhammad cannot be accepted as a legitimate prophet. For example, in respect to the essential message proclaimed by Muhammad — that of there being only One God, who is gracious and merciful, who seeks for humanity to live within a particular moral order marked by love and the discharge of obligations.

Speaking as a Christian interlocutor at the Building Bridges Seminar, Daniel Madigan noted the long avoidance and silence concerning Christian recognition of Muhammad as prophet. Madigan argued: “What one responds to, whether believer or not, is the image of the Prophet proposed by the community . . . Muhammad is God’s messenger” (Madigan 2005, 90). Madigan proposes an authentic reciprocity in which “Muslim acceptance of Christian faith about Jesus” would be balanced by “Christian acknowledgement of Muhammad” (Madigan 2005, 92). Thus far the exclusion of Muhammad from the Christian authoritative community of prophets has meant Christians, on the whole, have not been able to encounter Muhammad and the Qur’an with sufficiently adequate appreciation. Christian theology should engage with the other with the highest respect. For as its own scripture, and the witness of dialogical engagement testify, it is through encounter with the stranger, in which the “otherness” that is necessarily encounter is respected as strange or ‘other’, that awareness of one’s own identity is enriched by the engagement with another perspective. And this is reciprocal: the stranger, the religious other is likewise enriched by the encounter (Schmitz 2013, 61). There is nothing in the essential message of Muhammad inimical to that which Jesus proclaimed and stands for. In the context of dialogue, this is the way of affirmation through appreciation of close similarities, as opposed to rejection by way of emphasising irreconcilable difference.

In discussing the figure of Ghrist from an Islamic perspective, Mahmoud Ayoub (2005) limited himself to New Testament texts rather than take on the full spectrum of developed Christian theology since. The originating Muslim context in Arabia so far as its encounter with Christianity is concerned, was not that of Roman or Byzantine Christianity but rather

the devotion of desert monks and other pious men and women, living as hermits and in small communities in the Arabian desert. For these Christians, Christ was in the first place a saviour, a conqueror of demonic powers, a bringer of holiness. The Islamic Christology which grows out of this context, attested as it is by the Qur’an and by the prophetic tradition, needs to be taken seriously, and considered on its own merits, as a witness to the fuller understanding of who Jesus is for humanity.

(Ayoub 2005, 87)

The Qur’an refers to Jesus as the “word of God” (kalimat Allah - Q 4.171) “cast into Mary by God”, but this does not imply is being the Second Person of the Trinity; rather it points to his creation by divine fiat: “Islam thus distinguishes clearly between recognizing Jesus as the Word of God, on the one hand, and claiming that Jesus is God, on the other hand. It is the latter that is a problematic issue between Muslims and Christians” (Ayoub 2005, 88). Similarly, the Quranic reference to Jesus as spirit from or of God is not an echo of trinitarian language. Ayoub contended that the concept of Jesus as the “Word of God” has not been studied by Muslims, despite “the great amount of thought which has been devoted to the theology of the Qur’an as the Word of God” (Ayoub 2005, 88). This leads to missing the parallelism of the question of the createdness versus the non- or un-createdness of the Word of God — on the one hand with reference to Jesus; on the other with reference to the Qur’an.

Similarly, while Islam accepts the metaphorical idea of Jesus as a “son of God” with respect to a relationship of familiarity and closeness, there is no acceptance of any substantive or ontological identity: Jesus is a human, not a divine, being; certainly no admixture of the two. Nevertheless, Ayoub gives a highly sympathetic account of Jesus from a Muslim perspective when speaking, for example, of accounts of Jesus’ miracles which, he says,

point to the character of the Word of God which takes shape in Jesus as being itself a miracle of life, a vivifying and sanctifying divine force which cannot be restricted to the one event of his earthly life, but continues for ever as a source of life, blessing and guidance for humanity.

(Ayoub 2005, 88)

In his view, messianic claims pertaining to Jesus can be taken seriously by Muslims because the Qur’an indeed asserts “that Jesus as Messiah will eventually triumph over the forces of evil” which, in both traditional Islamic and Christian thought, is personified as the anti-Christ (Ayoub 2005, 89). And when speaking of the death of Jesus - his crucifixion which in the Christian narrative is followed by resurrection - Ayoub argues the Qur’an, and so Islam, is essentially neutral on detail. The key undeniable theological point is that no one can “put an end to all that Jesus did: as the life-giving Word from God, he could not be silenced” (Ayoub 2005, 90). Thus, a Muslim may legitimately affirm, with a Christian, the sense of life beyond death as represented by Jesus. Death is not the terminus for the life of faith in either tradition.

In taking account of another dimension of finality, Ayoub averred that “Christians and Muslims must abandon their exclusivist claims to one another and to others, and treat with one another on a basis of equality and mutual recognition” (Ayoub 2005, 89; cf. Ayoub 1997). Ayoub holds that, in fact, this is the position of the Qur’an, albeit often downplayed or denied both historically and in contemporary interpretations. But he nonetheless offers a sound theological challenge: “If God is loving and merciful, we need to be open to all the ways in which he may be speaking through different divinely chosen channels to our different contexts” (Ayoub 2005, 89). For Christianity, Jesus is an “ending” but the promised Holy Spirit indicates a (new) continuation, namely, “a continuing sense that divine guidance would be provided . . .” (Ipgrave 2005d, 125). A shift thus occurs: “Those who most fully display in Christianity a sense of being ‘sent’ with divine authority are no longer prophets charged with the Word of God but heralds of a new life flowing from the risen Jesus” (Ipgrave 2005d, 126). Multiple aspects to the image of Muhammad for Muslims, and the problem of Christian assumption that requires a comparison with Jesus, yield “a confusion of categories” (Madigan 2005, 95). There are radically different roles and functions that belong to each.

Despite it not being a Muslim perspective, there are Christians who presume Muslims regard Muhammad as, in effect, “a replacement saviour” (Madigan 2005, 95). Furthermore, Muhammad does not appear in the biblical material, though Islam claims he is alluded to. But Jesus - as well as Mary, his mother -is in both the Bible and the Qur’an, albeit differently so. The comparative scriptural exercise of the Building Bridges Seminar also examined texts referring to Mary, together with those referring to the end of prophecy whether in reference to Jesus or to Muhammad. Muhammad self-claims continuity and fulfilment of the prophetic trajectory, and this poses a challenge to “Christian finality” (cf. Gharaibeh and Middelbeck-Varwick 2013, 250). To the extent to which comparison is even valid, the motif of proclaiming a universal salvific message and action is common to both traditions. Indeed, this gave rise to the Islamic effort to provide apologetic proofs of prophethood. Furthermore, both faiths acknowledge Mary as the mother of Jesus, miraculously conceiving while yet a virgin, and she is regarded “an exemplar of obedience and holy living” (Ipgrave 2005c, 100). She is not herself a prophet, but is intimately involved in the prophetic trajectory and the Jesus narrative. She is differently portrayed in each tradition, as a result of major doctrinal difference concerning the person and work of Jesus, her son, in Christian and Muslim understanding.

Although, for Christianity, Jesus is viewed as something much more, if not other, than a prophet, in the Qur’an Jesus is placed as one in a line of a sequence of prophets sent by God, even though, after Adam, Jesus is the only

Prophecy 121 one who was directly created by God (Schmitz 2013). The Qur’an, interestingly, rejects two approaches to understanding the figure of Jesus: that which venerates Jesus on the cross as the Son of God, and that which refuses to acknowledge Jesus completely. As with all prophets, Jesus is the bearer of the message of God. But the Islamic understanding of what is a prophet differs from the Christian, which claims Jesus is not only a prophetic messenger but, in his person, teaching, and actions, he is or embodies the very message of God. Therefore, he is rightly called the Christ or Messiah - from the Greek and Hebrew, respectively, denoting the one anointed as God’s agent of redemption. For Islam, a prophet does not bring about an effect, such as the remission of sin or redeeming the relationship between God and humankind as such. But for Christianity, through Jesus, as the Christ - the “anointed” of God - the relationship between God and people is renewed. Jesus, the Christ, effects the redemption of God’s people, a function beyond that of the prophetic norm.

It is only up to a certain point that Jesus and Muhammad can be said to belong to the same category, that of being prophet. Thus, while for Christianity and Islam Jesus and Muhammad have a prophetic role and function, among other roles and functions, in both cases they are regarded as bringing the prophetic trajectory to an end: each is regarded as final. However, this is a contested finality. Nevertheless, there is a parallelism in the way that each faith regards its final prophet — how Muslims understand Muhammad, and Christians understand Jesus — as marking a closure of “the divine project of communication with humanity” (Ipgrave 2005d, 136). Significantly, and dynamically, for Muslims and Christians

the completion of revelation marks the gathering of a community around the Word which has been entrusted to them. It is the community’s responsibility to apply and interpret the guidance of that message to the situation of their own lives, to commend to others the promises and warnings it conveys, and to enter more and more deeply through its medium into union with the divine source from whose mercy it flows.

(Ipgrave 2005d, 140)