Musings, ruminations, thoughts and discussions on life & living, music, religion, politics, love, philosophy, and all other eccentricities of this sort.

Wednesday 17 October 2007

“Break their bonds asunder…”

Each radical religious break from convention has come due to social, economic, political, and other factors at that time. This makes each such religion a contextually grounded, living, breathing response to the circumstances from which it emerged. Sometimes it drew upon and added to thoroughly documented traditions of the time (Judaism, for instance, with the God of Micah seen as the same as the God of Noah despite hugely differing portrayals of the Deity). At other times these religious responses arose from and then broke away completely (such as with Christianity), or emerged from totally different circumstances and drew upon elements already present (such as Islam).

Jews documented their nationalist history extensively (though most likely from their captivity in Babylon onwards, and thus drawing upon Babylonian myths and legends too) and certainly knew their religion thoroughly. They proved eloquent in these matters and consummate at exegesis, midrash and religious debate.

So when people presented Yeshua‘ (Jesus) as THE Messiah expected by the Jews they had a fight on their hands, not least of which because nothing in Judaism predicted a messiah who would die before emancipating them. Earliest Christians naturally came from Jewish stock. Accordingly they drew upon Jewish history (they had to so that others would engage them in debate). Gentile Christians, therefore, had to subsume the entire Tanakh as their Old Testament in order to establish Jesus’ place within history — only to break him away from it.

Of course, Muhammad had a much more radical, even grandiloquent, solution: simply to declare that the Jews and Christians had corrupted their holy books and had strayed from their true path. Therefore he had no need to argue with them on their own religious grounds.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i knew you'd have a blog. And i knew it would be dedicated to Islam.

Anonymous said...

Salamu aleikum brother

something doesn't make sense...and am not yet sure what hmmm...by the way, you got an interesting blog.

Kodanshi said...

As I say in my tagline, I dedicate my blog to “life & living, music, religion, politics, love, philosophy, and all other eccentricities of this sort”.

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