DIFFERENCES

How the Faiths Judge Each Other's Revelation
Jews believe that with the Lord's revelation as contained in the Hebrew Bible, God's word is complete. Judaism does not accept that God spoke to prophets or messengers beyond the Jewish prophets.

Christianity and Muslim do believe that God continued to reveal Himself. In fact, for Christians Jesus Christ is the living embodiment of God's Will -- the Word made incarnate. But Christians do not accept that Muhammad was God's prophet; they, too consider God's Word as presented by the death and resurrection of Jesus to be final and conclusive.

Islam, then, is the only faith that accepts the divine revelation of both Jews and Christians as contained in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. That is why Muslims refer to Jews and Christians as 'People of the Book.' However, Muslims also consider their revelation as contained in the Qur'an the final word of God -- and the purest form of divine revelation to date. Indeed, Muhammad is considered the 'Seal' on the long line of prophets that began with Adam.

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Jesus as Son of God
One of the most important differences between Christianity and Islam is that Muslims do not accept the divinity of Jesus. In fact, they maintain that Jesus himself never claimed to be the Son of God, and that his presumed divinity is an erroneous interpretation by his followers after Jesus' assumption into heaven. To Muslims, Jesus was divinely inspired, not God made incarnate.

The denial of the divinity of Jesus is important in the Qur'an, because it goes to the heart of the difference between monotheism and polytheism. As described in the segment on Arabia prior to Islam, Muhammad faced a widespread pagan cult in Makkah that Arab tribes were prepared to defend to the death. For Muslims (and for Jews), the fact that God is One is an article of faith that is enshrined in the Ten Commandments; this tenet implies that there cannot be another divine being other than God Himself.

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The Christian Holy Trinity
Likewise, Muslims reject the concept of the Trinity -- God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Qur'an does refer to the Holy Spirit but as an instance of divine inspiration or angelic intervention, not as a divine substance in and of itself. At the same time, the Qur'an dismisses the Mariamist heresy that had gained currency in the late 6th century in Roman Arabia and beyond. According to this Christian heresy, the Holy Trinity consisted of God the Father, Mary the Mother and Jesus the Son. Surah 5 ("The Dinner Table") asks rhetorically: "O Jesus son of Mary, did you really say to men, "Take me and my mother for two gods besides God?" (Q 5.116).

To early Islam, these Trinity concepts may have been uncomfortably close to the pagan trinity of Allah, the Syrian mood goddess Allat and the astral deity al-'Uzza that were patron gods of the Quraysh tribe, revered throughout the Hijaz.

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Summary

Ultimately, though, all three faiths believe that the ultimate redemptive value of man lies in the path to God. For Muslims, this path is defined in the Qur'an and requires absolute, total submission (muslim) to God. For Christians, the path is faith in the essentially redemptive value of Jesus' sacrifice and resurrection. For Jews, the path is the wholehearted implementation of the Law as contained in the Torah.

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