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المسيحية البولسية: الانحراف الكبير الأول
Within two decades of Isa ibn Maryam (peace be upon him) being raised to the heavens, the community of his followers experienced a theological rupture that would permanently alter the trajectory of his message. At the center of this transformation was Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, a figure who had never accompanied Isa during his earthly mission and who claimed authority through a personal visionary experience rather than direct prophetic transmission.
Isa (peace be upon him) was sent as a messenger to Banu Isra'il, confirming the Torah before him and calling his people back to the pure worship of Allah alone. The Quran presents his mission with clarity: "And when Isa son of Maryam said, 'O Children of Isra'il, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you, confirming what came before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad'" (As-Saff 61:6).
His earliest followers, the Hawariyin (disciples), understood him as a prophet within the Israelite tradition. They maintained the Sabbath, observed dietary law, practiced ritual prayer, and upheld the fundamental creed of all prophets: that none deserves worship except Allah. This was not a new religion but the continuation of the message carried by Ibrahim, Musa, Dawud, and Sulayman (peace be upon them all).
Paul introduced several doctrines that had no precedent in the teaching of Isa or any previous prophet. The most consequential was the doctrine of vicarious atonement, the claim that Isa had died specifically to absorb an inherited sin passed down from Adam. This concept reframed the entire prophetic message: instead of submission to Allah through righteous action, salvation became a matter of belief in a sacrificial event.
Alongside this, Paul progressively elevated Isa's status in ways the Hawariyin would not have recognized. His letters, which form a substantial portion of the New Testament, consistently blurred the line between the prophet and the One who sent him, attributing to Isa roles and titles that in the strict monotheism of the Israelite tradition belong exclusively to Allah.
Equally radical was Paul's dissolution of the Shari'ah, the religious law that governed the lives of the believers. The specific ritual obligations, dietary restrictions, and codes of conduct established by the Torah and affirmed by Isa were replaced with a faith-based model of salvation requiring no practical submission. By severing the link between belief and action, Paul's framework moved the community away from worship as expressed in lived obedience, a principle that every prophet from Adam to Muhammad (peace be upon them all) had taught without exception.
The Quran identifies this pattern of textual and theological corruption as a recurring failure among scripture-bearing communities. Allah says: "So woe to those who write the scripture with their own hands, then say, 'This is from Allah,' in order to exchange it for a small price. Woe to them for what their hands have written and woe to them for what they earn" (Al-Baqarah 2:79).
Ibn Kathir, in his tafsir, explains that this verse addresses the deliberate alteration of divine revelation, where human additions gradually become indistinguishable from the original text. This is precisely the mechanism by which Paul's interpretive letters came to carry the same authority as the words of Isa himself, and eventually eclipsed them.
The Quran also addresses the specific theological claim directly: "They have certainly disbelieved who say, 'Allah is the Messiah, son of Maryam,' while the Messiah said, 'O Children of Isra'il, worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord'" (Al-Ma'idah 5:72). The verse draws a sharp line between what Isa taught and what was later attributed to him.
By the end of the first century CE, two distinct communities existed among those claiming to follow Isa. One stream, represented by groups later called the Nazarenes and Ebionites, maintained strict monotheism, continued to observe the law, and insisted that Isa was a prophet, not divine. These communities preserved what was closest to the original message.
The other stream, shaped by Pauline theology and increasingly influenced by Hellenistic philosophical concepts such as the Logos doctrine, moved steadily toward the synthesis that would be codified at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. It was this second stream that gained Roman imperial support and institutional power, while the monotheistic communities were progressively marginalized and suppressed.
Ibn Taymiyyah noted in Al-Jawab al-Sahih that the earliest followers of Isa were upon tawhid, and that the corruption entered through those who had no direct connection to the prophet's teaching. He regarded the Pauline divergence as the foundational deviation from which later innovations, including the Trinity, naturally followed.
Islam regards this process not as the development of a religion but as its corruption: the gradual replacement of divine revelation with human speculation, shaped by the social, political, and philosophical pressures of the Greco-Roman world. The sending of Muhammad (peace be upon him) was, in part, the divine response to this long process of distortion, restoring the original message in its final, preserved form. The Quran does not present itself as a new teaching but as the confirmation and correction of what came before, completing the prophetic cycle that began with Adam and was carried faithfully by every messenger Allah sent.