Muslim Jesus: Great Prophet?

[DeistPaladin]

Question for Muslims:

My understanding of Islam isn't as extensive as of Christianity so perhaps some of Muslim subscribers or those more versed can answer this.

My understanding is that Jesus is considered a "great prophet" in Islam, second only to Muhammad.

I also remember reading in the Quran, I forget which verse, where Jesus says to Allah that he never told the Christians he was the son of God.

Finally, my understanding is that it was Paul who taught the heresy to worship Jesus as an intercessor-type deity and the Son of God instead of the Muslim idea that salvation and judgment were under the power of Allah alone, a role he delegates to no one.

So if my understanding is correct, wouldn't that make Jesus a catastrophic failure as a prophet?

I mean, let's review here. He's sent on a mission to be a prophet for Islam (worship Allah alone and seek salvation and forgiveness from Allah only). He's supposed to be a forerunner for Muhammad. So he spends his life teaching this message. Then, not more than a few years after he's gone, along comes the heretic Paul who convinces everyone to pay no attention to any of these teachings, not to anticipate the future prophet Muhammad and instead to worship Jesus and pray to him for salvation and forgiveness.

And when the dust cleared, Paul won and Jesus lost. The Christians heeded the teachings of Paul and created a mythical Jesus that fit more with Paul's description instead of the Jesus of recent history.

Short of the Christians immediately converting to Satan worship, I can't imagine a more dismal failure of Jesus' mission.

So my question is how is Jesus a "great prophet"?

As a follow up question, if he is a "great prophet", what is your idea of a failure as a prophet? How bad would you have to be?

[Confused Ape]

It really depends on how you define the word prophet.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/prophet

1. A person who speaks by divine inspiration or as the interpreter through whom the will of a god is expressed.
2. A person gifted with profound moral insight and exceptional powers of expression.
3. A predictor; a soothsayer.
4. The chief spokesperson of a movement or cause.

If you think of Jesus as definition number 1 he just taught what he regarded as God's will. It was then up to people to follow the teachings or reject them because God is supposed to have given humans free will. In this sense he was successful because he managed to give a lot of people the message he thought he had to pass on before his death.

If, on the other hand, you think of him as someone who could see into the future he was a crashing failure.

PS: I know you asked Muslims this question but their answer would probably depend on your own definition of prophet.

[WinterHold]

Mohammad is not better actually, God states that directly in the quran.
God says to mohammad, to say that he's nothing special, he & the prophets are all mere messengers, I'll quote directly soon, because I forgot where the verse is.

Miracle wise, jesus is greater than mohammad. He had obvious straight forward miracles, including the resurrecting the dead.(that's why people worshipped him in the first place).

Yep, the people had failed jesus. And god's promise to prophet is the following : do what you do best, call people to this religion. If they disobeyed, torment should hit them, a new prophet is to be sent, and the world should blossom again with new nations.

So the people had failed jesus, result ? group of bandits invade rome & set it on fire.

Dark ages hit europe

Devastating climate changes, leading to plagues & sickness.
The result, is a super torment that fell on rome (especially), for what they did to jesus..

I think that those davestating event are the main reason for the early islamic victories over rome .

the thing is, it's all about the people, the prophet is no superhero or a champion of god, he's a mere radio, telling people about god.
if people didn't believe, and they planned to hurt this prophet, it would be another invasion of rome, another plague,...etc.

[DeistPaladin]

If you think of Jesus as definition number 1 he just taught what he regarded as God's will. It was then up to people to follow the teachings or reject them because God is supposed to have given humans free will. In this sense he was successful because he managed to give a lot of people the message he thought he had to pass on before his death.

Fair enough but what does the adjective "great" mean?

If all you have to do is deliver a message, there is no qualitative assessment, especially relative to anyone else in the field. You either did or you didn't.

It's like being a "great breather". I did a "great" job walking across the room to my computer just now. Look, I'm about to do a "great" job hitting the "post" button...

[Minimalist]

I took a great dump this morning.

[DeistPaladin]

So the people had failed jesus, result ? group of bandits invade rome & set it on fire.

Dark ages hit europe

Religious leaders love to play the game of "heads I win, tails you lose".

Times are great: the blessing of the gods be upon us. We must continue to give them praise so they may continue...
Times are crappy: the gods are displeased with us. We must continue to give them praise so they will forgive us and lift the curse...

See also the logical fallacy of confirmation bias.

See also the selective way this logic is used. Or is there some explanation for why Allah has allowed the Muslim world to fall into a Dark Ages of their own following an age where Christian imperialists colonized their lands after zooming ahead of the Muslim world in technology.

[Minimalist]

Ooh. Ooh. I know D-P.

Insh'allah.

[Confused Ape]

Fair enough but what does the adjective "great" mean?

If all you have to do is deliver a message, there is no qualitative assessment, especially relative to anyone else in the field. You either did or you didn't.

I'm not a Muslim so I don't know what criteria Muslims use in order to regard Jesus as a great prophet. All I can say is that he succeeded in passing on what he regarded as God's message to a lot of people so he was just successful in this mundane sense. (All supposing he ever existed, of course.)

PS: The point of my post was asking what definition of the word prophet is being used when asking the question.

[DeistPaladin]

I'm not a Muslim so I don't know what criteria Muslims use in order to regard Jesus as a great prophet. All I can say is that he succeeded in passing on what he regarded as God's message to a lot of people so he was just successful in this mundane sense. (All supposing he ever existed, of course.)

...and glossing over just how the followers of Jesus decided only a few short years later to disregard all they knew regarding an obvious recent history of their leader only to invent a mythical Son of God that bore little resemblance to the man they were following?

[WinterHold]

So the people had failed jesus, result ? group of bandits invade rome & set it on fire.

Dark ages hit europe

Religious leaders love to play the game of "heads I win, tails you lose".

Times are great: the blessing of the gods be upon us. We must continue to give them praise so they may continue...
Times are crappy: the gods are displeased with us. We must continue to give them praise so they will forgive us and lift the curse...

See also the logical fallacy of confirmation bias.

See also the selective way this logic is used. Or is there some explanation for why Allah has allowed the Muslim world to fall into a Dark Ages of their own following an age where Christian imperialists colonized their lands after zooming ahead of the Muslim world in technology.

As I understand the "Confirmation Bias", it's more like "act a fool" policy, that is pretty pathetic, if a person thought in such way, and made his/her logic based on that.

Islam has a total different POV on the situation. Christianity is the religion that follows the Confirmation bias, Islam doesn't.

The system on earth is the following : human life goes through cycles of good & bad events. A believer would not be affected by those ups & downs, his/her faith should always be static ; not dynamic changing according to the situation, the Quran actually points at that in many verses, take this for example :

The human is created panicking, if he was touched by evil, he turns anxious, if he was touched by good, he's immune.

note : this is my translation. to find the verse, open up page 569, the arabic quran, to find the verse :

إن الإنسان خلق هلوعاً ()اذا مسه الشر جزوعاً () و اذا مسه الخير منوعاً

So, people who think this way (that you mentioned) are already criticized in the quran, because they didn't know how to overcome their human nature, & stop blaming god for everything. Mose disasters are caused by humans, not god. the quran also mentioned that.