Source: TW
If you want to get to grips with what Mohammed peddled to his audience, and fully comprehend original Islamic theology (prior to the Hadith retcons), you have to understand that Islam began as a Christian heresy. Once you realise this, it makes more sense. Let’s dip into that.
The Islamic tradition claims Mohammed battled polytheistic pagan idol-worshippers. That’s likely fiction. Historically, Mohammed vied with Jews and Christians, which is why the Quran talks about their beliefs so much, whereas it doesn’t delve into supposed “Meccan” paganism. To run his scam, and persuade Jews and Christians to follow his new religion instead of their existing ones, Mohammed had to depict both Judaism and Christianity as flawed, and Islam as a celestial correction Allah had sent down for humanity to follow. He did this via Jesus.
Mohammed claimed both Jews and Christians were wrong about Jesus and thus displeased Allah. His narrative went like this: Allah gave Jews the Torah, a true revelation. But Jews corrupted his teachings. So Allah sent Jesus to be the Messiah, bring the Gospel, and get them in line. Screenshot of Quran 5.46 in Pickthall’s translation. Jesus being the Messiah sent to fulfil the Torah is straight-up Christianity (I know “Messianic Jews” are a thing, but they’re very much a fringe group). It’s the main way Mohammed distinguished his religion from Judaism, theologically. It also introduced classic antisemitism. By doing that, whenever Mohammed wanted to trash Jews instead of courting them, he could bring out traditional Christian accusations of Jews scheming against Jesus and causing the crucifixion. The first screenshot here shows a relevant Quran passage: https://twitter.com/Ibrahim_S_Amin/status/1589263876050550790/
So far, so good, at least for Mohammed’s purposes. In theory, he’d provided a reason people should follow his religion instead of Judaism. But that wasn’t enough. He couldn’t just promote Christianity, which already claimed Jesus as the Messiah. That’d ruin his plan. That’s where the heresy part came in. He had to swerve away from mainstream Christianity and depict it as likewise being flawed, an inferior and corrupted version of Allah’s true teachings. Mohammed’s solution was to say, yes, Jesus was the Messiah, but he wasn’t divine. This led him into somewhat clumsy theology, because he was taking a belief system in which Jesus was the son and incarnation of God, removing that aspect, but keeping the rest so he could trash Judaism too. E.g. He still preached the virgin birth, but just as a random miracle. Screenshot of Quran 4.171 in Pickthall’s translation.
Understanding this foundation of Christian heresy helps us understand other aspects of Islamic theology. For example, we can see how the Christian version of Jesus now gets his role divided between his Islamic version and the Quran. Jesus is still the Messiah, sure. But he’s no longer “the Word” or “Logos”, as described at the beginning of the Gospel of John. Instead, he brought Allah’s word in the form of “the Gospel” (see Quran 5.46 above), Christians corrupted it, so Allah gave Mohammed the Quran. Screenshot of John 1.1-2 in the Revised Standard Version.
People who are familiar with the doctrine of the “uncreated Quran” will see a parallel here – in both cases, the Word / Logos was supposedly with God since the very beginning. In Christianity, that’s Jesus. In Islam, the Quran.
Earlier, I referred to Mohammed running a scam. That’s my assessment of the man. I know some ex-Muslims see him as mentally ill and deluded, but to me things like Quran 8.1 and 33.53 are too blatantly fraudulent – a dishonest cult leader lying for his own benefit. From that perspective, we don’t have to try and explain what Mohammed actually believed about the Torah, the Gospel, Jesus, and all the convolutions he makes in his rending and rendering of Jewish and Christian theology. He just cobbled together a Christian heresy to scam people.