Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Attitude Toward Christianity 443
text in which – without referring to Christian theologians, their writ-
ings, or any other source – he concisely speaks about what he sees as the
common foundations of the Christian denominations concerning the
person and nature of Jesus and presents the doctrinal differences about
this that, as can be read between the lines, are a visible expression of
the implausibility of Christian belief. In Ibn al-Qayyim’s presentation,
what Christians have in common is that they do not see in Jesus a mes-
senger of God. Rather, as he states, they unanimously declare that Jesus
is verily God, primally eternal (qadīm), and timeless (azalī), and that
they attribute to him the creation of heaven and earth, the angels and
the prophets, and the sending of the envoys whom he has empowered to
perform miraculous acts as proof of their prophetic mission. The Chris-
tians, Ibn al-Qayyim maintains, also agree that Mary was pregnant with
Jesus and gave birth to him as her corporeal son, so that he sojourned
among the humans and they thereby were able to see him.^106 Despite
these doctrinal views, which are affirmed by all Christian groups along
with the doctrine of the Trinity, notes Ibn al-Qayyim, the Christians do
not take a unified standpoint in essential questions of belief. He strong-
ly affirms that no community can be found in which there is a greater
conflict of views in regard to its object of veneration and worship, to its
prophets and their religion than among the Christians.^107
Ibn al-Qayyim explicitly identifies this alleged intramural dispute
with the ideas that the Jacobites, Melkites, Nestorians, and Arians have
about Jesus’ nature, whereby he sketches the Arian confession – which
he summarizes as maintaining that Jesus is just a servant of God and
a created being – as a positive deviation for which the other Chris-
tian denominations had threatened the Arians with death.^108 By con-
trast and without exception, he devalues as “drivel” (hadhayānāt) the
Christological teachings of the Jacobites, Melkites, and Nestorians,^109
which he argues were formulated by the scholarly elite (khawāṣṣ) of
the respective denominations but are incomprehensible to the broad
masses of the faithful. The latter, Ibn al-Qayyim contends, hold that
God lay with Mary and that she bore him a son; he also accuses them
of agreeing to the doctrines of the khawāṣṣ without intellectually pen-
etrating them.^110
106 Ibid., p. 533.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., p. 536.
109 Ibid., p. 537.
110 Ibid.
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