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In the crash course in Islam offered by the media over the last six months, many Christians will have heard it said that Muslims regard Jesus as a great prophet—not divine, and superseded by Muhammad, but nonetheless a figure of respect. For the reader who wants to go beyond such bland generalities, there is a surprisingly large literature on Jesus in Islam, including a number of well-written, informative works on many aspects of the topic.1
Tarif Khalidi's The Muslim Jesus is the latest addition to this genre. Khalidi, a Lebanese Sunni Muslim professor at Cambridge University, has a limited agenda in this work, one which his predecessors did not take on: to introduce the non-Qur'anic Jesus, the one who appears in later Muslim piety. Unlike the more general books, The Muslim Jesus—although its title seems to indicate more—is basically a collection of, and commentary on, the sayings and stories about Jesus in medieval Islamic works in Arabic.
As such, the book might appear as a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, Khalidi neglects other Islamic languages (most importantly Persian). Moreover, he never brings up the big questions that are essential for the Christian reader, i.e., the origins of and reasons behind the Islamic rejection of Jesus as crucified, savior, and divine. The author's assimilation of this fascinating material does not go too much beyond appealing yet meatless statements such as "it is salutary to remind ourselves of an age and a tradition when Christianity and Islam were more open to each other" or that here we have "a unique record of how one world religion chose to adopt the central figure of another."
Despite this, The Muslim Jesus is a very good book. Khalidi writes in eloquent yet never pompous English (which he modestly attributes to his son's help with the translation), always striving to be comprehensible to the nonspecialist. Moreover, he has done valuable work simply in collecting, annotating, and translating this material. Thereafter, he lets the material about Jesus speak for itself, in order (I think) to make an important point: that the Jesus of Islam is a creation of Islam. In Khalidi's words, the Muslim Jesus is "a compound image," a figure "resurrected in an environment where he becomes a Muslim prophet." Thus, Khalidi explains, a wide range of Muslim authors used the figure of Jesus as a spokesman for their cause, be it asceticism, quietism, Shi'ism, or anti-Christian polemic. This point, too, is a critical one, and a welcome counterbalance to those polemical Muslim writers who insist, in the face of 150 years of scholarly research to the contrary, that all Islamic dogma was revealed in the lifetime of Muhammad. Refreshingly, Khalidi firmly rejects the idea that "Islam [sprung] fully developed from the womb of history."
The Muslim Jesus, which is never dogmatic in tone, begins with a basic 45-page introduction and continues with a presentation of 303 sayings attributed to Jesus or stories about him. Khalidi refers to this material as "the Muslim gospel." The phrase is a curious one, seeing that the Qur'an itself frequently speaks about the "gospel" as God's revelation to Jesus (as the Torah to Moses and the Qur'an to Muhammad). What Khalidi refers to as "gospel," however, is a collection of traditional sayings and stories that he has gathered from Muslim authors who wrote between the eighth century (the second Islamic century) and the eighteenth century (overlapping the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Islamic reckoning).
This material then, cannot be regarded as authentic to Jesus in any historical-critical sense, and Khalidi is more than willing to accept as much. He even goes so far as to suggest that the "Islamic Jesus of the Muslim gospel may be a fabrication." Yet the material will prove fascinating to the Christian reader for a couple of reasons: it provokes one to question how this material entered into the Islamic tradition, and it undermines the simplistic Muslim understanding of Jesus as a prophet like any other.
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