Islamic Movie About Jesus
Iranian film director, Nader Talebzadeh, just released a movie called Jesus, the Spirit of God, a movie presenting the Muslim understanding of Jesus. A Middle East Times article about the movie states that this “is the first film giving an Islamic view of Jesus Christ, in a bid to show the ‘common ground’ between Muslims and Christians.”
According to the article, Jesus is not the one who is crucified, but Judas–which is what the Koran teaches. Jesus is rescued by God and taken up into heaven before he is crucified.
I’d be interested in seeing this movie if it’s ever available in the U.S. Should be interesting to see if it makes news in the wider media.
01 Feb 2008 markus
Markus Watson
huh! man Jesus looks like he has some cool high lites in his hair, heh… hey any other people to see the house? email or call me.
Yeah, kind of a creepy looking Jesus. He looks older than 33…
I have a strict Muslim co-worker who I have spent hours and hours with talking about the differences in our religions. To me this idea that Judas died on the cross and Jesus left the earth in the upper room before heading to the garden to be arrested is insidious.
From a theological perspective you gain just about everything you need to subvert Christianity. Jesus never died and rose again, so there is nothing like a substitutionary death and resurrection. Also, each great man of God, in the Islamic faith has miracles that prove they are sent by God. When you remove the cross you get Jesus’ greatest miracle being the resurrection of Lazarus. Also with the change to the last supper you lose all of John’s teaching’s on the Holy Spirit.
The place of attack / point of dialogue / opening now rests on Jesus’ statements about his own divinity. The Muslim will say that Jesus never made statements about being God. Now you need to make sure you don’t draw their attention to any of the statements of Jesus’ trail or post resurrection as the Muslim will believe they are also false. You need to go to the I AM statements in John. You need to go to the reaction the Jews had to Jesus’ statements.
Also explaining the trinity is also important. I tried to approach the subject from the direction of the Roles of God. The Holy Spirit is how God communicates with us today. That Jesus was how God entered our Reality and interacts with reality (such as creating this reality). The Father is the ‘part’ of the Godhead that directs and decrees. I then have to say that this shattering of the Godhead borders on and perhaps passes into heresy from a Christian perspective but that the reason I wanted to bring it up is that Muslims will believe that God speaks to us today with Angles in dreams. We would say that God could do that, but that he sends his holy spirit to do that today. We no longer need God to send Angles to his people. He can send himself in the form of the Holy Spirit because of the Work of the Christ. (Always loop it back to the Christ). When God interacts with reality he doesn’t do it from afar, he enters reality, and touches it. His foot touches the ground. His lungs breath in air. His arms embrace friends. God is not distant he is here. As for God the father, the Muslim is most comfortable with Him. But they will have wrong understandings of him as well.
Finally it’s interesting to note that the Muslim believes that in the final day the 12 greatest prophets will be raised back to life. They will all bow down to Mohammad and declare him to be Allah’s greatest prophet, and then Mohammad will, in humility, step aside, and let Jesus the second greatest prophet judge the living and the dead.
Once you get a Muslim to tell you this one point(don’t ask them, get them to tell you think) I then leave them with the fact that because of this I spend my life studying and striving to be a follower of this man Jesus, because I also believe that in the final days he will judge the living and the dead. I also say that our dialogue should continue between us because we both hope and pray for the day when Jesus will come and judge this world and we can be separated from this burden of sin and godlessness that inhabits our world. But, I have to remind the Muslim, in the end we will never see eye to eye because we both believe different things about who Jesus is.
This is also why I have a hard time telling a person I know who is a Muslim that I am a Christian. I tend to tell them I am a follower of Jesus. The langue / parsing difference to them is big.
With that said, I would love to see the movie.
Thanks for sharing all that, Ted! That’s really cool! I actually never knew any of that about Islam, and I like hearing your strategy for engaging their theology. Heh… 10 years ago it was Scientologists; today it’s Muslims!
My friend from work says he will get a copy of the movie for you. He also recommended another which he will also forward.
Very cool!!