Islam and the deity of Jesus

Lack of awareness of the affirmation of "the Christology of divine identity" in the midst of Second Temple Judaism misses resources that could be profitably brought into a later discussion.

Some of the best writing on Islam comes not from scholars of Islamic Studies but rather from scholars of other fields that bear similarities to the religious context out of which Islam emerged.

One of the key themes of the Qur’an and other early Muslim writings is the denial of the deity of Jesus Christ. This theme was prominent in the mosaic inscriptions running around the colonnades within Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock already in 691 A.D. (see my article on “Jesus” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān), and it has remained strong up to the latest posts on YouTube and X.

A thorough understanding of the deity of Jesus that Islam denies, however — surprising in view of the denial’s importance for Muslims — is rarely found in the writings of academic scholars of Islamic Studies. This is partly due to specialization, of course. After years of preparation to learn Classical Arabic and then to read the Islamic sources, few of us have the capacity to also become familiar enough with the thought of Second Temple Judaism to explain the terms in which the deity of Jesus was first accepted and articulated. That has been left to New Testament scholars, in my experience best exemplified by Richard Bauckham, professor emeritus of New Testament Studies at the University of St. Andrews.

Dr. Bauckham has set out his understanding of the deity of Jesus, a view he calls “the Christology of divine identity,” in a series of publications beginning with God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (1998). Studies dedicated to evidence for his approach from the letters of Paul and from the book of Hebrews are found in Bauckham’s collection Jesus and the God of Israel (2008), and from the Gospel according to John in his The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple (2007).

But Bauckham’s presentation of the deity of Jesus that I am describing in this short column appeared in a 2018 collection titled Monotheism and its Complexities: Christian and Muslim Perspectives. A pdf of this book is offered by Georgetown University Press for download here. “Complexities Surrounding God’s Oneness in Biblical Monotheism” (pages 7-18) is Bauckham’s explanation of the understanding of the deity of Jesus in the New Testament.

A major strength of this article is that it is not written as a response to the Islamic denial of the deity of Jesus in the terms that Muslims used in the seventh century and later (as if this is the proper starting point for the discussion), but rather as a careful explanation of the deity of Jesus in the terms in which it was first proclaimed in the first century. So it is primarily in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic terms that it must be interpreted, not Arabic. What’s interesting is that when Bauckham explains the deity of Jesus in the context of its original affirmation, many of his most meaningful points seem to anticipate the objections to the deity of Jesus that Muslims would advance six centuries later in the name of monotheism.

Briefly, Bauckham’s explanation of biblical monotheism begins with the Shema‘ of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and the list of “qualities that indicate the way [God] relates to people” in Exodus 34:6-7. The biblical writers were more interested in who God is than in what characterizes divine nature, Bauckham asserts, and they highlighted God’s unique identity as the only Creator of all things, the only sovereign Ruler of all things, and the One who is worshipped exclusively.

The earliest Christians — all Jews — saw the same key monotheistic features reflected in Jesus Christ, so they included Jesus in the unique divine identity. I will save the details of this affirmation for later columns, and here simply mention some of the statements Bauckham makes that bring Islam to mind. As far as I know, Bauckham was not responding out of familiarity with Islamic polemic or theology. For him the context was the Jewish theology of the first century.

Paul affirmed the Shema‘ and did not “add” Jesus as a divine being separate from the one God of the Shema‘. Instead he affirmed that the unique identity of God “consists of God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Jesus was not a created being but to the contrary had a role in the creation of all things. As such he was not God’s assistant “but himself belonged eternally to the unique identity of the one God.”

When the first Christians worshipped Jesus, they did not see him as an alternative or distinct object of worship alongside God, writes Bauckham. They did not infringe Jewish monotheism, because in their experience Jesus himself belonged to the unique identity of the one and only God. When Paul wrote in parallel in 1 Corinthians 8:6 about “one God, the Father,” and “one Lord (Gk. kurios), Jesus Christ,” he was affirming Jesus as YHWH — not trying to suggest two gods but rather “including Jesus in the identity of the one God, whose name is YHWH.” Bauckham suggests that identifying YHWH with Jesus was much more significant for Paul than calling Jesus God (Gk. theos, cf. John 1:1, 20:28), because “YHWH is the personal name of the one and only God.”

Bauckham’s treatment of the “Word” in the prologue of the Gospel according to John is even more evocative of Islamic themes. “Word” in John 1:1-3, 14 must be seen against the background of the Hebrew Bible, in which the heavens were made “by the word of YHWH” (Psalms 33:6). “This creative Word of God was evidently already with God in eternity ‘before’ the creation,” writes Bauckham, “but it was not something other than God. It was God’s own Word.”

The Gospel therefore asserts both a distinction between God and his Word and an identification of the Word with God. The Word was God’s agent in creation who belongs to the Creator’s identity (John 1:3; cf. Colossians 1:16, Hebrews 1:2). The literary progression of the prologue reveals the Word to be a personal subject, first a human (1:14) and then “God the only One” (1:18). It would strike the Jewish reader very odd if the Gospel meant by “the Word” no more than the words God speaks, notes Bauckham.

Readers with a good knowledge of Islamic sources and current Muslim discourse will likely immediately recognize the points at which Bauckham’s explanation of the understanding of the deity of Jesus in the first century is relevant to Islamic expressions in the seventh century and since. Bauckham was not responding to Muslim polemic, but the situation of Second Temple Judaism bears similarities to the religious context out of which Islam emerged. As far as I know, no scholar has explicitly applied the insights in Bauckham’s explanation to a discussion of Islamic theology. Readers, if you know of such writing, please let me know. In the meantime, I hope in future columns to fill in details from Bauckham’s separate articles on the Christology of divine identity in John’s Gospel, the letters of Paul, and the book of Hebrews.