Christian devotional writing often gathers verses into a list of what the believer is “in Christ”: accepted, secure, significant, a child of God, “one spirit” with the Lord. Nearly every line of such lists comes from the letters of Paul. This page makes a different list. It sets down what ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him said about himself and about God, in the Gospels the churches themselves accept, and then sets beside it what Paul said about him. The two portraits are not the same man. One is a servant of God who prays, obeys, does not know the hour and calls God “my God”. The other is a heavenly being in the form of God, by whom all things were made. The first is the Messiah of the Gospels and of the Qurʾān. The second is the Christ of Paul.

“The Lord our God is one Lord” #

Asked which commandment came first of all, ʿĪsā did not name himself, or a Trinity, or faith in his death. He recited the creed of Israel.

28And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? 29And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: 30And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.¹

These are the words of Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema, which every observant Jew of his day recited morning and evening: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD”.² ʿĪsā called it the first of all the commandments, and said “our God”, counting himself among those who worship. The scribe repeated it back to him, adding that God is one “and there is none other but he”, and ʿĪsā told him he was “not far from the kingdom of God”.³ The scribe was not told that he had missed a second or third person of the Godhead. He was told that he was close.

When Satan offered him the kingdoms of the world in return for worship, ʿĪsā answered with the same law: “Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”⁴ Him only. He did not add “and me”.

“Why callest thou me good?” #

A man ran up to ʿĪsā, knelt, and called him “Good Master”. The answer he received is one of the most uncomfortable verses in the Gospels for the doctrine that ʿĪsā is God.

17And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? 18And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.⁵

Matthew, writing later and using Mark, softened the exchange. In his version the man asks “what good thing shall I do”, and ʿĪsā answers “Why callest thou me good?” in the King James text, but the oldest manuscripts of Matthew read “Why askest thou me concerning the good?”⁶ The change shows that the plain sense of Mark troubled the copyists too. Whatever else the words mean, they draw a line between ʿĪsā and the one God who alone is good, and ʿĪsā stands on the near side of it.

“The only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” #

The Gospel of John gives ʿĪsā the most exalted language of the four, and it is to John that missionaries go for “I and my Father are one”. Yet John also preserves the prayer in which ʿĪsā defines eternal life itself:

3And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.⁷

There are two in this sentence: the only true God, and the one He sent. The God ʿĪsā prays to is “the only true God”; ʿĪsā himself is His messenger. This is the shape of the Muslim testimony of faith, which names God and then His messenger, and it is the shape of the Qurʾān’s description of ʿĪsā: “The Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allāh”.⁸

The oneness John speaks of is a oneness ʿĪsā prays his disciples may share: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us”.⁹ No one takes the disciples to be God because of it. When his opponents accused him of making himself God, his reply in John was not to claim it but to cite Psalm 82, where the judges of Israel are called “gods”, and to ask why they objected “because I said, I am the Son of God”.¹⁰ A “son of God”, in the language of the Hebrew Bible, was a servant God had chosen: Israel, its kings, its righteous. Ismaʿil Raji al Faruqi made the point about “I and my Father are one”: “Any righteous person could claim what Jesus did,” he wrote, “in the sense of total compliance with God’s will.” The Semitic titles his disciples gave him, mar and maran, “lord” and “our lord”, were used “among Semites” of “anyone in authority”; it was the Christians who came after them who took the titles as proof that he was God.¹¹

“My Father, and your Father; my God, and your God” #

After the empty tomb, in John’s account, ʿĪsā sends Mary Magdalene to the disciples with a message about where he is going.

17Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.¹²

Even in the Gospel that calls him the Word, at the end of the story, ʿĪsā has a God, and it is the same God as his disciples’. He calls them his brothers. The Qurʾān reports him saying exactly this to the Children of Israel:

إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ رَبِّى وَرَبُّكُمۡ فَٱعۡبُدُوهُ ۗ هَـٰذَا صِرَٰطٌ مُّسۡتَقِيمٌ

“Indeed, Allāh is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him. That is the straight path.”¹³

The servant who does not know the hour #

Again and again the Gospels show ʿĪsā depending on God for what he knows and does. “I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.”¹⁴ “My Father is greater than I.”¹⁵ And of the day of judgment:

32But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.¹⁶

One who does not know the hour is not all-knowing. One who can do nothing of himself is not all-powerful. One who says that another is greater than he is does not claim to be his equal. The church answered these verses with the doctrine of two natures, a divine one that knew and a human one that did not, worked out at Chalcedon in 451, four centuries after ʿĪsā spoke. He himself never offered it. He spoke as a servant, and in Gethsemane he prayed as one: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”¹⁷ Two wills, and he submits his to God’s. That is what the Arabic word islām means.

“A man that hath told you the truth” #

ʿĪsā described himself in John as “a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God”.¹⁸ Peter, preaching in Jerusalem at Pentecost in the first public sermon Acts records, described him the same way.

22Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know:¹⁹

A man, approved of God; the miracles are God’s, done through him. This is the Christology of the disciples who had walked with him, and it is the Christology of the Qurʾān, in which ʿĪsā heals the blind and the leper and raises the dead “by permission of Allāh”.²⁰ When ʿĪsā asked his disciples who they said he was, Peter answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”.²¹ He did not answer “Thou art God”.

What Paul said about him #

Paul never met ʿĪsā in his lifetime and quotes almost none of his teaching. What he offers instead is a heavenly figure, revealed to him in visions. In a hymn in Philippians he describes Christ as one “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God”, and then applies to him a verse of Isaiah in which God swears by Himself, “That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear”.²² In Paul’s hymn the knees bow “at the name of Jesus”, and the tongues confess “that Jesus Christ is Lord”. Words that Isaiah reserved for the God of Israel are transferred to a man.

The letter to the Colossians, which many scholars believe was written in Paul’s name after his death, goes further.

15Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: 16For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:²³

“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” the same letter says.²⁴ Set this beside the man in Mark who will not be called good, who does not know the hour, and who names the Shema as the first commandment. The creator of thrones and dominions is not a figure ʿĪsā ever described. The steps by which Paul raised him, from “Lord” to a heavenly being close to an angel, are traced in “Lord” before the Spirit, and Christ as an angel and Seven doctrines: God, the cross and faith.

The Qurʾān on ʿĪsā #

The Qurʾān honours ʿĪsā more than many Christians expect. It names him the Messiah, the Word of God and a spirit from Him, born of a virgin, a worker of miracles, raised up by God. What it refuses is the step Paul took. Its first words from ʿĪsā, spoken from the cradle, are these:

قَالَ إِنِّى عَبۡدُ ٱللَّهِ ءَاتَىٰنِىَ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبَ وَجَعَلَنِى نَبِيًّا

“[Jesus] said, ‘Indeed, I am the servant of Allāh. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.’”²⁵

On the Day of Judgment, the Qurʾān says, God will ask ʿĪsā whether he told people to take him and his mother as gods besides God, and he will answer: “Exalted are You! It was not for me to say that to which I have no right. … I said not to them except what You commanded me — to worship Allāh, my Lord and your Lord.”²⁶ The Qurʾān’s ʿĪsā and the ʿĪsā of Mark and John say the same thing about who God is. Only Paul’s Christ says otherwise, and Paul’s Christ never spoke in the Gospels at all.

In short #

ʿĪsā named the Shema, “The Lord our God is one Lord”, as the first commandment (Mark 12:29).
He refused to be called good, since “there is none good but one, that is, God” (Mark 10:18).
He called the God he prayed to “the only true God” and himself the one sent (John 17:3).
He had a God, the same as his disciples’ (John 20:17), and did not know the hour (Mark 13:32).
Peter called him “a man approved of God” (Acts 2:22).
Paul made him one “in the form of God”, and Colossians the creator of all things (Philippians 2:6; Colossians 1:16).
The Qurʾān’s ʿĪsā says “I am the servant of Allāh” (Maryam 19:30).

How ʿĪsā taught his disciples to pray, and to whom, is on The prayer ʿĪsā taught, and the prayer Paul taught. What he taught about sin and forgiveness is on Original sin: what ʿĪsā taught and what Paul added.

Mark 12:28–30 (KJV). ↩
Deuteronomy 6:4 (KJV). ↩
Mark 12:32–34. ↩
Matthew 4:10 (KJV), quoting Deuteronomy 6:13. ↩
Mark 10:17–18 (KJV); also Luke 18:19. ↩
Matthew 19:17. The reading τί με ἐρωτᾷς περὶ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ (“why do you ask me about the good?”) is that of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and is followed by the modern critical texts. ↩
John 17:3 (KJV). ↩
Sūrah al-Nisāʾ 4:171. Qurʾānic verses are rendered after Saheeh International. ↩
John 17:21 (KJV). ↩
John 10:33–36 (KJV), quoting Psalm 82:6. ↩
Isma’il Raji al Faruqi, Al Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life, 2nd ed. (Herndon, Virginia: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1992), p. 22. ↩
John 20:17 (KJV). ↩
Sūrah Āl ʿImrān 3:51; the same words are given at Maryam 19:36 and al-Zukhruf 43:64. ↩
John 5:30 (KJV). ↩
John 14:28 (KJV). ↩
Mark 13:32 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 26:39 (KJV). ↩
John 8:40 (KJV). ↩
Acts 2:22 (KJV). ↩
Sūrah Āl ʿImrān 3:49; al-Māʾidah 5:110. ↩
Matthew 16:16 (KJV). ↩
Philippians 2:6, 10–11 (KJV); Isaiah 45:23 (KJV). ↩
Colossians 1:15–16 (KJV). On the letters written in Paul’s name, see Two Pauls. ↩
Colossians 2:9 (KJV). ↩
Sūrah Maryam 19:30. ↩
Sūrah al-Māʾidah 5:116–117. ↩