Today, many millions of Christians celebrate Easter. They will say, He is Risen”….but how could God ever die?
If Jesus, peace be upon him, were God All Mighty incarnate, then that would require God to have been born, and then killed. And to say this is blasphemy!
By definition, God is eternal, without a beginning or an end. He is The Creator–the Creator does not resemble His creations. Nor is God begotten. And certainly, he is above beyond being slain by men.
In Christianity, it is taught that God is the One who preserves the universe, and that Satan is his opposing duality, the force of evil that actually does wield authority. If this is true, then would not the absence of God for three days of his death, which is to say the absence of God, have triggered outright chaos and devastation, for if God were dead, then Satan would fill that vacuum, according to the logic. Even if only for 3 days, this would have been the inevitable outcome, according to the logic. And surely, history would have remembered this hell on earth, if it could have even survived it.
Jesus, Peace be Upon Him, was a prophet, and one of the best of prophets and Messengers. He never claimed to be God. If his ministry was about worshipping him as God, then why did he instruct his companions to pray to God? Why did he constantly make reference to God, as opposed to speaking of God All Mighty in the first person, which is to say to refer to himself throughout his ministry as God Almighty?
They say that there are two scriptures where Jesus said he was God. When he said: “if you have seen me, then you have seen the Father”. And, when questioned by the Sanhedrin at his trial, when questioned, are you the Son of God, and he responded with, “I Am”.
As per these examples, my response as a scholar and a Muslim is, first, to point out the history of transcription and translations, which can be attributed to the early Roman Catholic Church, which not only established which books to include in the Bible (a process known as canonization), but also that transcribed and translated the scripts from their original form, and language (Greek) into Latin drafts,, from which later developed the myriad linguistic versions of the modern Bible. And of course, few Evangelicals place any degree of trust in, or credence with, the Vatican. In fact, they generally despise it.
Second, even those original Greek scripts were translations from the prophet Jesus’ language, which of course was the Syriac Language, the language in which the Injil (or Holy Book revealed to prophet Jesus, peace be upon him), was revealed.
According to history, and the Syriac language that prophet Jesus spoke, the prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, referred to God as “Allaha”. See the obvious resemblance? If Jesus, peace be upon him, referred to God by this name, then obviously he was not referring to himself. Otherwise, he would have spoken in the first person when referring to God. The message throughout the Gospel would have been, I am your Lord and your God. Worship and obey me. Cast out demons in my name. Pray to me for repentance. And the like. But none of these were themes spoken by the prophet Jesus, peace be upon him–not even according to the corrupted Bible that exists today.
In Islam, we are taught that Allah has always spared the prophets and Messengers from tragic ends. We are told that God delivered the Prophet Lot from Sodom before God destroyed it and all of its people. We are told that Allah cooled the fire when the Wicked King Nimrod cast the prophet Abraham into it for having proclaimed the Oneness of God in a place where the people worshipped many false gods. We are even taught that the Prophet Job, peace be upon, was restored to an even greater state of health, prosperity, and status after having been afflicted with the worst of calamities.
And, in the case of Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, we are taught that his youngest companion asked if he could be martyred in Jesus’ place, and that Allah made that companion to look identical to Jesus, and was martyred in prophet Jesus’ place. Then, Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, was later raised up to the 7th heaven, where he remains until the day of his return, to defeat the Anti-Christ.
Some may say, well that is too tall a tale to believe. But to them, I respond with the question: which is more plausible, and which is harder to believe? That God All Mighty can be reduced to a man, a man who was born and who died, a man with the human traits of dependencies (such as food, drink, sleep, even oxygen) and involuntary urges (such as needing to relieve himself); that a man who throughout his whole recorded life made reference to God, beyond and apart from himself, and who was assassinated in the most brutal of ways, to remain dead for three days–that that man was the literal incarnation of Allah? Does this require greater faith than to believe that God Almighty could have easily altered the appearance of the companion, so that he would by martyred instead of Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him? Perhaps, in the end, the answer depends on who you ask, as far as opinion is concerned. And those opinions, of course, emanate from a place of one’s beliefs. And, ultimately, one’s faith.
