Jesus, Prophet of Islam - The Islamic Bulletin

10 Jesus, Prophei ofIslam

Each of the four Gospels contains a large nurnber of

descriptions relating events that rnay be unique to one

single Gospel or common to several if not all of thern.

When they are unique to one Gospel, they sometimes

raise serious problems. Thus in the case of an event of

considerable importance, it is surprising to find the event

rnentionedby only one evangelist;Jesus' sAscensioninto

heaven on the day of Resurrection, for example. Else­

where, nurnerous events are differently described ­

sometimes very differently indeed - by two or more

evangelists. Christians are very often astonished at the

existence of such contradictions between the Gospels ­

if they ever discover them, This is because it has been

repeatedly said in tories of the greatest assurance that

their' authors were the eyewitnesses of the events they

describe! 1

Fortunately, there are other sources of knowledge concerning Je­
sus, sorne of which have survived the repeated atternpts of the es­
tablished Church to either suppress or destroy them:

In the early days of Christianity, rnany writings on Je­

sus were in circulation. They were not subsequently re­

tained as being worthy of authenticity and the Church

ordered thern to be hidden, hence their name 'Apocry­

pha'. Sorne of the texts of these works have been well

preserved because they 'benefited frorn the fact that they

were generally valued', to quote the Ecumenical Trans­

lation.The same was true for the Letter of Barnabas, but

unfortunately others were 'more brutally thrust aside'

and only fragments of thern rernain. They were consid­

ered to be the rnessengers of error and were rernoved

from the sight of the faithfùl. WorkssUch as theGospels

of the Nazarenes, the Gospels of the Hebrewsand the

Gospels of the Egyptians, known through quotations

taken from the Fathers of the Church, were neverthe­

less fairly closely related to the canonic Gospels. The

same holds good for Thornas's Gospel and Barnabas's

Gospel. 2

As regards other sources, the discovery of the famous Dead Sea

Serolls has thrown new light on the nature of the society into which

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