Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

Muhammad and Jesus:
An Essay in Comparison
Muhammad and Jesus, who figures by name more
prominently in the Quran than Muhammad, are both recognized
as in some sense the founders of the two religious communities
that claim more adherents than any others. Both men are deeply
revered among their followers and both have served as role models
for countless believers, but beyond that, they have little in common.
At the outset, it has already been remarked that it was Jesus’
life, and particularly his death and resurrection, that founded
Christianity, whereas it was Muhammad’s message that founded
Islam. Muhammad reported a revelation from God; Jesus was
God’s revelation. As his contemporaries remarked with amazement,
Jesus spoke on his own authority.
Placed side by side, the two lives show remarkable differences.
Jesus was born into a sophisticated religious and social milieu that
already had nearly two millennia of development behind it. He
read Hebrew and spoke Aramaic and likely some Greek. Though
not a bookman in what was already becoming a bookish society,
he had something of a local reputation as a scholar. Jesus is to us
and was to his Jewish contemporaries a rather familiar figure in a
very familiar landscape. Muhammad was not born and raised in a
vacuum, of course, but as far as our knowledge is concerned, he
might just as well have been. We know pitifully little of seventhcentury
Arabia, even less about the Hejaz, the region that nurtured
him and where his life unfolded, and almost nothing about Mecca,
his native town, save what is almost accidentally uncovered in the
Quran. Muhammad was barely literate, we guess—a minor merchant
we never see buying or selling. Jesus, whom we never see
doing carpentry either, functioned nonetheless in front of what is