The Nature of the Original Revelation to Jesus

Al-Kairanawi devotes substantial attention in Izhar al-Haqq to the question of what the original message of Jesus actually was and how it relates to the Christianity that became institutionalized through the Roman Empire. Drawing on both Islamic sources and the findings of European critical scholarship, he argues that a gap exists between the religion of Jesus as he taught it to his disciples in first-century Palestine and the religion that bears his name as formulated by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and subsequent councils. This gap is not merely a Muslim assertion; it had become a recognized problem within European theological scholarship by the nineteenth century, and al-Kairanawi was aware of these internal Christian debates.

The Islam of Jesus, as al-Kairanawi presents it, was essentially the same religion that all the prophets brought: strict monotheism, submission to the will of Allah, observance of the moral law revealed through Moses, and preparation for the Day of Judgment. Jesus addressed primarily his own people, the Children of Israel, calling them back to the authentic faith that had been obscured by rabbinic elaboration and communal compromise. He performed miracles, taught with extraordinary authority, and deepened the ethical teaching of the Torah by directing attention to the inner states of the heart that the outward law expresses. None of this original teaching, al-Kairanawi argues, contains anything that requires a Trinitarian or incarnational interpretation.

The transformation of this prophetic teaching into a religion centered on the divinity of Christ and redemption through his death and resurrection was, on al-Kairanawi's account, a multi-stage historical process. Paul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus during his ministry, played a pivotal role in developing theological categories that went well beyond what Jesus's disciples had originally understood him to teach. The Greek-speaking Gentile communities that Paul founded had intellectual and religious frameworks that interpreted the figure of Jesus differently from Jewish-Palestinian Christianity, and these Gentile interpretations gradually came to dominate the tradition as Jewish Christianity declined. The councils of the fourth and fifth centuries gave formal expression to the Pauline-Gentile reading and declared the earlier Jewish-Christian interpretations heretical.

Al-Kairanawi's reconstruction of early Christian history draws on both classical Islamic theology, which had always maintained that Christianity as practiced represents a departure from Jesus's actual teaching, and the emerging historical-critical scholarship that was challenging the traditional Christian narrative of a single unified apostolic tradition. He was aware that some European scholars, particularly those in the German theological tradition, had begun asking precisely these questions about the relationship between the 'historical Jesus' and the 'Christ of faith.' While the methods and conclusions of that scholarship were very different from his own, the convergence of the questions being asked gave al-Kairanawi's historical arguments a contemporary resonance that traditional Islamic theological refutation alone could not have achieved.