Monday, January 14, 2008

Jesus, The Spirit Of God: The Jesus Of Islam

A director who shares the ideas of Iran's hardline president has produced what he says is the first film giving an Islamic view of Jesus Christ, in a bid to show the "common ground" between Muslims and Christians.
Nader Talebzadeh sees his movie, "Jesus, the Spirit of God," as an Islamic answer to Western productions like Mel Gibson's 2004 blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ," which he praised as admirable but quite simply "wrong".


Talebzadeh was noted as saying in the interview "It is fascinating for Christians to know that Islam gives such devotion to and has so much knowledge about Jesus."

The bulk of “Jesus, the Spirit of God”, which won an award at the 2007 Religion Today Film Festival in Italy, faithfully follows the traditional tale of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament Gospels, a narrative reproduced in the Holy Quran and accepted by Muslims.
But in Talebzadeh’s movie, God saves Jesus, depicted as a fair-complexioned man with long hair and a beard, from crucifixion and takes him straight to heaven.
“It is frankly said in the Holy Quran that the person who was crucified was not Jesus” but Judas, one of the 12 Apostles and the one the Bible holds betrayed Jesus to the Romans, he said. In his film, it is Judas who is crucified.


You can read more here.

Some questions:
-How do we deal with the differences in the two accounts? One must be wrong yeah?
-How do we know which one is correct? By what standard can we know?
-Did Jesus really die on the cross or is Islam correct in that He was never crucified?
-Is it of any significance that both Muhammed and Joseph Smith were "overcome by darkness" before they both recieved revelations from angels?

3 comments:

Roland said...

Makes you wonder who the 'man of perdition' listed in scriptures might be.

j razz said...

Here is a great sermon on the "man of perdition" text if you care to read. It is by a Puritan named Thomas Manton and it retains its older english verbage.

j razz

Laz said...

There's been an Interfaith group that has been trying to get started here in my hometown. They seek to celebrate the common ground shared by the 3 major religions.

I wonder if Galatians 1:8 ever makes it to these meetings?

A Muslim cleric did manage to crack a Jewish joke without starting a riot though, I guess they consider that progress?