The Nature of Jesus: Prophet, Not God

Ibn Taymiyyah addresses the central theological difference between Islam and Christianity with characteristic directness: the Islamic position is that Jesus was a noble prophet and servant of Allah, born miraculously of the Virgin Mary by divine command, given a scripture (the Injil), gifted with extraordinary miracles including the healing of the blind and lepers and the raising of the dead by Allah's permission, and taken up to Allah at the end of his earthly mission. He was not crucified, contrary to the claims of the Jews and the later Christian narrative, but was raised alive by Allah. He is called in the Quran the Messiah, the Word of Allah, and a Spirit from Him, titles of honor and distinction that do not imply divinity but reflect the unique manner of his creation and the profound importance of his mission.

On the question of divine incarnation, Ibn Taymiyyah argues from multiple directions. Rationally, the idea that the infinite, self-sufficient Creator could unite with a finite, contingent creature in a personal union is incoherent. Divine unity (tawhid) means that Allah has no partners, no equals, and no parts. He is not composed of a divine nature and a human nature, because composition implies need and dependency, and Allah is entirely self-sufficient. The God who needs to become human to understand or assist humanity is not the Allah described in the Quran and the Torah alike: the one who sees and hears all things, who is closer to the human being than his jugular vein, and who has no need of any created thing. Ibn Taymiyyah marshals these rational arguments alongside Quranic verses that explicitly deny the claim of divine sonship and incarnation.

He then turns to Christian scripture itself to argue that the human Jesus, the Jesus who prays, who grows tired, who says 'My Father is greater than I,' is far more prominent in the Gospels than the divine Christ of Nicene theology. The Jesus who says he does not know the hour of the Last Day, who ascribes all his miracles to the will of his Father, who prostrates in prayer, who is tempted in the wilderness: all of this is incompatible with the claim of full and equal divinity. Ibn Taymiyyah does not deny that there are passages in the Gospels, particularly in the Gospel of John, that have been read as supporting divine claims. But he argues that these passages can be read in ways consistent with a prophetic rather than divine status, and that this less radical interpretation is more coherent with the overwhelming weight of the evidence within the Gospels themselves.

Ibn Taymiyyah also draws attention to the historical dimension: the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ was formally established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, more than three centuries after Jesus. Before Nicaea, there were Christians, including those who followed Arius, who denied the full divinity of Christ and understood him as a created being superior to ordinary creation but subordinate to the Father. The fact that such a council was necessary, and that it produced a creed that was contested by significant portions of the Church for decades afterward, suggests that the full divinity of Christ was not a universally held teaching from the earliest community of Jesus's followers but a theological development that became orthodox over time through institutional power as much as theological persuasion. This historical argument gives the Islamic position on Jesus additional context and force.