/lit/ - Literature

>>13653650
The Qu'ran claims Alexander the Great found the place where the sun sets. Apparently it was in a murky pool and by it lived a people. On that basis, believing in any strand of Islam is retarded.

>>13653670
How do Imams justify that kind of thing?

>>13653670
Pretty much no Muslim or Muslim scholar believes or ever believed it's Alexander the Great or that the sun setting in the water means something other than the horizon.

>>13653650
A lot of Protestant groups are unironically closer to Islam theologically than they are to Christianity, especially the non trinitarians like Mormons, Jehovah's witnesses, or 7th day Adventists. They are still abrahamic religions but just aren't Christians and I think people ought to make this distinction more

>>13653681
Obviously modern day Muslims don't believe that because it would be ridiculous to in the face of all the scientific evidence against it. When you read the passage it is abundantly clear that "where the sun sets" is used as a marker for a location and it is said that a people live there.

>Until, when he reached the setting of the sun, he found it set in a spring of murky water: Near it he found a People: We said: "O Zul-qarnain! (thou hast authority,) either to punish them, or to treat them with kindness."

And a lot of Quranic commentators have said that it was Alexander the Great, but it's irrelevant anyway because nobody found the place where the sun sets.

>>13653741
JW's and Mormons think Jesus is another god

>>13653746
>Obviously modern day Muslims don't believe that
No, I mean ever, not just contemporary

>And a lot of Quranic commentators
No, a couple of loons

>>13653741
Islam denies that Jesus was crucified, which is the defining tenet of Christianity.

>>13653792
Do they? I thought they just claimed he was a prophet instead of literally being God

>>13653802
Muslims believe Judas was arrested and taken for Jesus after Jesus prayer for God to save him

>>13653802
>That they [the Jews] said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah";- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not:- May, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise;-
It's funny because (a) Jews would never say they killed "the Christ" since they don't believe Jesus was the christ, (b) It's Christians who focus on Jesus's crucifixion, not Jews and (c) All of the historical evidence, including that of the early Christians, which the Qu'ran endorses, says that Jesus of Nazareth was put to death by crucifixion in the first century.

>>13653670
But what does it mean?

>>13653821
Caiaphas was troubled precisely because Jesus is the Messiah, the high priesthood was appointed by the Romans and depended on them for power

>>13653816
>>13653821
Oh weird, why would they think that? Doesn't really effect their beliefs. So they think Jesus just stopped preaching and.... went back to carpentry? Or what?

>>13653855
Muslims believe he ascended to heaven (a physical cosmos in Islam) and will return to lead Muslims against Dajjal, the false Messiah

>>13653849
Bullshit. He put Jesus to death for claiming to be the Messiah.

>>13653865
Isn't Islam just another Christian heresy? I'm wondering why it isnt

>>13653885
Its assertions about Jesus are heretical and historically illiterate, but it's not right to categorise them as Christians since they deny the most fundamental tenets of Christianity such as the crucifixion, despite the fact that this is what all of Jesus's earliest followers believed.

>>13653866
John 18:14

>>13653885
Because Islam has pretty much nothing in common with Christianity except belief that Jesus is the Messiah and because Muslims don't use the term Christian

>>13653904
*Paul's. Paul had a personal "revelation" and taught this

>>13653917
The gospel of John is the most embellished and exaggerated of them all. Despite this the verse does not say what you tried to claim:

>It was Caiaphas who had advised the Jews that it would be expedient that one man should die for the people.

Does not say

>Caiphas believed Jesus was the Messiah

>>13653931
Claiming to be the Messiah is not a capital offense in Judaism, hundreds of people were doing it at the time and would continue to. What made Jesus different is that he actually was

>>13653922
Muslims like to blame Paul for "destroying Jesus's message" but the fact is that all of the evidence, even from anti-Pauline sources, says that the followers of Jesus believed he was crucified and rose from the dead.

Now there was a rupture in the early church between Peter and Paul, for the former believed that the OT law should be observed while the latter claimed it was completed in Christ. But that was the only disagreement: whether the OT law is obsolete. Nowhere in any writings is it said that Peter actually believed that Jesus was not crucified, even in the books which support Peter's position regarding the disagreement. You don't think anybody would have documented such a huge disagreement between the two?

We have a lot of literature dealing with this topic: the four gospels, acts, the epistles (both pro-Pauline and anti-Pauline epistles), Jewish and Roman sources, the Church fathers, and the analysis of modern day historians who have researched this topic. All of them point to one conclusions: the early Christians were in complete agreement that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and killed for claiming to be the Messiah.


TL;DR:
The split in the early church has nothing to do with the crucifixion, but the OT law. The early Christians were in unanimous agreement that the crucifixion had occurred.

>>13653995
>cites a bunch of Greek fabric composed by Paul's disciples

>>13653670
>>13653672
>>13653681
>>13653746
All credible academics believe Ḍū‘l-Qarnayn is Alexander, but that doesn't really undermine the Qur'an. This is a very modern criticism. No ancient Christian or Jew would have had a problem with this. This is because the Alexander legend in the Qur'an actually has its origins in Talmudic and Christian extra-Biblical legends about Alexander. In these stories, the figure of Alexander is employed typologically as the image of the archetypal pious ruler. Much more important than the historical details is this motif which the Qur'an, in appropriating the Alexander legend, employs for its own purposes. Likewise, the image of the Sun setting in a pool is clearly a reference to the horizon and is also found in earlier legends. To say that the author of the Qur'an believed that the Sun set in a spring in the West and yet rose somewhere else in the East is silly, especially in light of other Qur'anic and extra-Qur'anic (hadith) descriptions of the Sun which clearly consign it to the heavenly sphere. Also, the Qur'an (18:86, 90) does not only describe Alexander as finding the place where the Sun sets but also the place where it rises. This is clearly a hyperbolic allusion to the extent of Alexander's conquests.

>>13653964
It was a different political climate in those times. The Israelites were under heavy pressure from Rome because of the various zealot movements springing up in Judea, where Messiahs rose up and tried to overthrow the Roman government in Israel. In Josephus many of these failed revolutions are documented. For the Jewish rulers, war with Rome was to be avoided, so they treated people claiming to be the Messiah as terrorists. Of course we know what happened not long after Jesus's death: the Jews had a full on revolution and Rome defeated them and destroyed the temple. You have to consider this historical context.

>>13654023
>All credible academics believe Ḍū‘l-Qarnayn is Alexander
Ah no

Muslims have always had a problem with it since Alexander wasn't a man of God

>>13654023
The Jewish priesthood were appointed by Rome, basically Vichy. Same reason Herod flipped out over the Messiah

>>13654071
Second part meant for
>>13654038

>>13654013
There's no evidence that the gospel of Mark, for example, was a Pauline gospel. In fact most historians take Mark (and Matthew if I recall correctly) to be aimed at the Jews, which would have put them on Peter's side of the dispute.

Besides that, we have anti-Pauline sources in the New Testament such as the Epistles of Peter and James which say nothing about the Quranic view of the crucifixion, and indeed contradict it. If this disagreement existed between Peter and Paul then there would have been some mention of it, but there isn't, because it didn't exist. I have to reiterate: EVERY SINGLE TIME THE DISPUTE IS MENTIONED IT'S IN REGARDS TO THE OT LAW. If another, larger, dispute existed in regards to the crucifixion it would have been mentioned.

>>13654082
No one thinks Peter is actually by Peter. If James is by James and it is meant to be overtly anti Pauline (rather than just incidentally), it would condemn Paul by name.

Matthew is aimed at Hellenized Jews, it's in Greek, not Aramaic. Mark is aimed at Greeks

>>13653650
All other types of islam I imagine

>>13654132
>No one thinks Peter is actually by Peter.
That's not true, it is a contested topic, but that wasn't the point of what I was saying anyway.
>If James is by James and it is meant to be overtly anti Pauline (rather than just incidentally), it would condemn Paul by name.
It doesn't have to. It rejects Paul's and contradicts Paul's theology in regards to "saved by faith" and the OT law. The Epistle of James is on Peter's side of the dispute in the early church, yet, as we would expect, it makes no statement endorsing the Quranic view of the crucifixion. The Ebionites, who are direct descendants of Petrine Christianity, also believed in the crucifixion. You just have to face the facts: the early church was split in regards to the OT law, but not in regards to the crucifixion.

>>13654217
Ebionites didn't have Greek epistles lol their work was in Hebrew, please stop identifying Greek philosophy sects with non Greek speaking fishers

>>13654240
I didn't say the Ebionites had Greek epistles, so good job knocking down that strawman.
>please stop identifying Greek philosophy sects with non Greek speaking fishers
What? The Ebionites were descendants of Petrine Christianity; they loved James and Peter and rejected Paul. They believed that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and put to death. My only point in bringing them up was to demonstrate that even the most anti-Pauline sects in the early church believed in the crucifixion, showing that it is not something Paul just arbitrarily made up, but rather an event that found unanimous agreement in the early church.

There's nothing more to say at this point. You're just going against all of the historical consensus and all of the early sources. You've made this conspiracy theory up ad hoc to justify the fact that the Qu'ran simultaneously endorses Jesus's early followers and contradicts what they believed about him. I hope you'll research this with an open mind because I think my case is quite unequivocally established.

>>13654023
Why does the Quaran bother discussing Alexander at all?
Is it just a big metaphor?

>>13654023
You could have saved all this and just said

>It's a metaphor

You don't even have to read what you're replying to, that can answer anything

>>13655009
It's not exactly a metaphor either, it's a literary device. The anon is gently saying try interpreting books like the Qu'ran and the Bible as literature, you'll get more out of them than hoping they're more like a Bill Bryson history book.

>>13653670
t.never read Jung