Ali Ataie – Professor discusses the Son of Man Who was he
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AI: Transcript ©
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to Vlogging Theology.
Today, I am delighted to talk to professor
Ali Atay from Zaytuna College. Welcome back, sir.
Thank you so much, Paul. Good to see
you. Salaam alaikum. Walekum as salaam. Now
professor Ali Atay has kindly
agreed to do a pretty long presentation,
on the following, the the son of man,
this phrase we see,
in Daniel 7, it's a book in the
Old Testament.
Who was he according to Jews, Christians, and
doctor Attai himself?
The presentation will cover,
Daniel itself, authorship, dating, etcetera,
and comments on Paul's Christology, his understanding of
Jesus, as well as Mark's
and the Enochic tradition. This this we're gonna
explain what that is about and also its
influence on the gospel's
use of this enigmatic title. If it is
a title,
son of man.
And, also, some, he'll be talking about the
historical Jesus as an apocalyptic
prophet,
and Mohammed
as a a Danielic son of man, peace
be upon them both. So, doctor Alyotai will
explain in more detail what that is. This
is a a very significant
major
and quite massive, arguably,
contribution. So,
this video may be, cut up into into
shorter,
fragments. But, we'll we'll see how it goes.
But, over to you, sir, and,
perhaps you could introduce us and take the
subject away. Thank you. Thank you so much,
Again, thank you, Paul. It's an honor and
a pleasure to be back on Blogging Theology,
the best channel on YouTube, of course.
If you're listening to this channel for the
first time and you're a seeker of knowledge,
my advice to you is simply to subscribe
to this channel. That's number 1. And number
2, keep an open mind. You'll definitely learn
something, whether you agree or not. I think
you'll learn something. It's going to be educational
and enriching for you.
And I said this last time and I'll
I'll say it again. My intention is certainly
not to disrespect Christianity
or antagonize Christians, God forbid.
I criticize Christianity because I'm a Muslim.
I disagree with Christianity and sometimes I vehemently
disagree,
but academic criticism and disagreement,
even if it's emphatic and impassioned,
should not be mistaken for disrespect or denigration.
Also, I want to say briefly that the
views that I expressed today are not necessarily
those of
Zaytuna College. I'm not here as a representative
of the college. I'm here as an independent
speaker.
These are my own words. These are my
own thoughts.
Okay. So as you said, brother Paul, today,
we wanna focus on the person of the
the son of man mentioned in the book
of Daniel chapter 7
and
how Daniel chapter 7 is related to the
New Testament gospels and who is the son
of man,
in my opinion.
And then in the future,
I will at least
attempt to make sense of Daniel chapter 9,
which is one of the most difficult passages
in the entire Bible to understand.
So if you're a Christian, you're certainly gonna
hear things today,
that are going to, you know, bother you.
And that's okay. That's that's life.
All I ask is that you seriously think
about Mhmm. What I'm going to say.
Don't be, you know, dismissive or or immature.
You know, one of my professors always used
to say, never stop thinking. Right? Never stop
thinking. So just just think about these things,
at the very least.
So we we can't talk about both chapters
today, Daniel 7 and 9, because we simply
lack,
sufficient time.
And with Daniel 7, you'll see there is
a lot of background information,
that we need to cover,
in order to adequately understand my contention.
Even with this said, I'm sure after today's
session, many Christians will say, well, what about
Daniel chapter 9? Daniel chapter 9 predicts the
very year of the crucifixion of the messiah
and how convenient that he didn't talk about
that. I will talk about that, but they're
just gonna have to be patient.
Daniel chapter 7 and chapter 9, in my
opinion, are horrendously
misinterpreted
by Christian writers and apologist. And I'll demonstrate
this
inshallah.
Okay. So let's talk about the son of
man. But before we look at the actual
text
of Daniel 7,
let's first answer the question,
what does the Aramaic construct phrase
bar in ash or son of man even
mean? I mean, what does it mean literally?
Well, it simply means a human being. Okay?
A mortal,
a man, literally a son of a human.
Okay? So the this phrase also appears in
Hebrew
in the Tanakh as Ben Adam. You'll find
it many times, for example, as you know,
in the book of Ezekiel
and other books as well.
We also find it in numerous hadith of
the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. For
example, in the hadith Qudsi, a sacred hadith
related by Imam Abu'issa Tilmidi,
the prophet, peace be upon him, is reported
to have said,
So so ibn Adam in this hadith,
is the exact equivalent of the Hebrew Ben
Adam,
which is equivalent to the Aramaic Bar Inash.
It simply means a human being. You ibn
Adam. Oh, human being. And this obviously
includes the female gender,
as well. Now,
Christians claim that that the son of man,
okay,
the human being described in Daniel 7,
is to be worshiped as God,
because he is God, essentially, according to them.
He's Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, God
who became man.
And so once again,
and not surprisingly,
Christians want to superimpose their trinitarianism
upon a rigidly monotheistic
Hebrew text.
And by doing so, they impute their shirk,
their avodozara
upon the prophet Daniel, as if the prophet
Daniel recognized
the divinity of the son of man, as
if the prophet Daniel had a vision
of the second person of a triune God.
So this is unequivocal blasphemy.
And as I said in previous discussions,
this Christian, eisegetical method,
destroys the plain and obvious meanings of the
Tanakh's theological
Pesuchim. So God is not a man, nor
is he the son of man. Well, who
says that? Well, according to Christians, Jesus says
this because according to Christian claim,
Jesus revealed the Torah to Moses. Right? Let's
let's go back again to our theological anchor,
Numbers 23/19.
And I make it a point to mention
this verse in every single podcast.
God is not a man that he should
lie.
Meaning a man who claims to be God
is a liar. And the verse continues, uven
adam,
uven adam vieth nacham, nor is God the
son of man
that he should repent. This is called synonymic
parallelism. This is very common in Semitic rhetoric.
The purpose is emphasis.
So no ish or ben adam. They're synonymous,
meaning human being is God, period. But this
Also in this verse,
as well as in the rhetoric of the
Tanakh in general, there's antithetic parallelism. So ish
and el
are opposites.
Says Hosea. So man and God are opposites.
Then Adam and El are opposites.
And if a reader of the Tanakh does
not understand its rhetoric, then he will make
grave mistakes in interpretation,
like Matthew does. I mean, Zechariah 9:9,
right, says that the king of Zion
will come riding on a donkey,
riding on a donkey's colt. Right? I mean,
it's just 1 donkey. This is parallelism. Matthew
didn't notice this, and he had Jesus ride
2 donkeys. On 2 animals simultaneously,
which is rather painful, I would have thought.
Yeah. I mean,
he's riding he's sitting on 2 donkeys.
But anyway, here's my contention regarding Daniel chapter
7 and I'll save you the suspense. I'll
give you my contention now and then I'll
show you how I got there.
The bar in ash, right? The son of
a human being mentioned in Daniel 713,
the one whom Daniel saw in his famous
night vision, the one who was brought near
to God, says Daniel,
and is given deen, which is the exact
Aramaic word used in the text. Deen is
also an Arabic word. And remember, the the
Arabic word, a dean, is most equivalent,
to the word mishpat mentioned in Isaiah 42
according to Geusenius.
Remember the ebed of Isaiah 42 will bring
deen, divine religion to the umiyim, to the
goyim,
the Gentiles.
This son of man of Daniel's vision is
most coherently identified, in my opinion,
as the Gentile prophet and messenger of the
Abrahamic restoration,
the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and
his nation, his ummah.
Or in the words of the Quran, Muhammad
Okay? So according to Daniel,
the nation of the son of man will
decisively
vanquish
the 4th beast of Daniel's vision. So what
is the 4th beast? We'll get into all
of that. So, you know, hold on to
your kufis, your hijabs, and your yarmulkes. So
this is going to be a long and
bumpy ride.
In in addition to this, I will demonstrate
I'll at least try to demonstrate
how both the Jewish and Christian positions
regarding the identity of the son of man
are simply untenable. And basically, the Jewish position
is that the son of man
is Israel in general, as a nation.
Or more specifically,
the highly anticipated,
yet always belated, the the Medichamashiach
ben David. Right? The Davidic,
king messiah who is yet to come according
to them.
And even though he tarries, I shall wait,
said Maimonides,
800 years ago.
The Christians also contend that the son of
man is the Davidic King Messiah,
but that he already came and that he
was Yeshua HaNutzri, Jesus the Nazarene,
peace be upon him. Of course,
Jesus was neither the literal descendant of David
nor the literal son of a man, right?
The virgin birth precludes
both of these claims.
However, if we take Adam to simply mean
human being, right, Ben Adam,
then Jesus is the son of a human
being. He's the son of Mary.
To say that son of man means God
is ridiculous. It's like saying man means woman,
which unfortunately,
a lot of people are accepting now. Up
means down, black means white. So words have
definitions, right? A definition
delimits or demarcates
something. I mean, if words lose their definitions,
then we lose all meaning. Then anything can
mean anything and we might as well,
stop talking. So son of man does not
mean God. God does not mean son of
man. They are opposites. Now, Christians will point
out that in the gospels,
okay, Jesus, peace be upon him, seemingly refers
to himself
as the son of man on multiple occasions.
And I agree with that. The New Testament
Jesus obviously does do that.
But of course, it's not nearly this simple.
The New Testament Jesus also predicts another son
of man to come in the future, and
Jesus talks about him in the 3rd person
and clearly in distinction
to himself.
So historically, this has been a very, very
sticky and enigmatic
topic. Nobody really knows
what's precisely going on here with the son
of man passages. Okay? So we'll try to
unpack,
some of these things. We'll only scratch the
surface and obviously, we can only speculate
and try to connect
some of the dots.
Okay. So I want to begin
sort of setting the table as it were
theologically.
Okay?
So I mentioned in the previous podcast
that that Paul's Christology,
not you, Paul. Paul of Paul of Tarsus.
But you know the Christology, by the way,
but it's not the same as the apostle
Paul's, though.
There. Yeah. Paul's Christology in essence
was a composite of Jewish and Greek ideas.
Okay? That is to say Jewish and pagan
beliefs. And by pagan, I simply mean non
Jewish. I'm not using the word pagan necessarily
in a derogatory sense.
Okay. So Paul created this new hybrid religion,
and religion in the Hellenistic world
tended to be syncretistic.
I mean, they would mix and match different
elements. This was normal.
And Paul was schooled in Hellenistic philosophy. Paul
quoted pagan poets
according to the new testament to support his
Christology.
He quoted pagan poets in the new testament
to support his Christology. This is something that
Christian apologists
don't like to talk about. And most casual
bible readers are not even aware of this.
They just read the text. They don't know
what Paul's saying. Paul quoted the hymn
to Zeus by the pagan poet and stoic,
Aretus of Soli, according to Acts 17 28
at the Araucus.
And he also quoted the poet Menander
in 1 Corinthians
1533. I mean, talk about the satanic verses.
Whoops.
No. I'm I'm just kidding.
Paul made Christ, right, the Jewish messiah,
the locusts, the intersection of 2 pagan beliefs.
So Christ is both the dying and rising
savior man god,
as well as the divine mediator between the
God and humanity.
And by the God, I mean
the perfect being who is at the top
of this ontological
hierarchy or pyramid
that permeates all existence. So this this hierarchy
or or chain of being
is absolutely central to both middle and neoplatonism.
Okay? And I wanna make a request
of the audience to study middle and neoplatonism,
and you will come to know
the true origins of the trinity. I mean,
Christian apologist will say that the doctrine of
the trinity is firmly grounded in the Tanakh.
In my view, that's a red herring.
They wanna throw you off the scent of
Greek metaphysics.
Then study Philo of Alexandria.
Okay. So he was a Jewish middle platonic
philosopher
living in Egypt in the 1st century. He
died around 40 of the common era before
the writing of the new testament.
Okay. There's no doubt
that Philo's writings influence the doctrine of the
trinity in a significant way.
Even William Lane Craig admits this. You know,
doctor Craig is their champion. They're the Christian
apologist. You know, they love him. The early,
Christian Greek fathers, they used Philo's
writings as a basis with which to formulate
their logos Christology. People like, Justin and Irenaeus.
Eusebius,
who was Constantine's sort of spin doctor,
even claimed that Philo met Peter. Right? I
mean, it's a total fabrication. I mean, this
was Eusebius' way of bolstering
Philo's
authority similar to Paul claiming that he met
with Peter, and James. Maybe he did. I
mean, it doesn't end well according to Acts
21.
But Craig says that
the dogma at Nicaea was quote, a synthesis
between John's gospel
and the thought of Philo of Alexandria
and the Middle Platonism
that he represented, end quote. I mean, I
would go even further and say that
John's gospel itself was clearly influenced by middle
platonism.
Oh, yeah. So so
so doctor Craig even downplays, in my opinion,
the reality
of the vast influence that Greek metaphysics had
on both Christian doctrine
and Christian scripture, and we'll and we'll see
that. Okay? But this this is a common
this is a common place in,
historical theologies. It's not just you you and
William Lane Craig. This is very, very standard,
understanding and explanation of the origins of the
way the doctrine is formulated.
So Yeah. This is very, very standard. Very,
very standard. Across the board.
Right? So any honest historian or theologian, you
know, they will point this out. So so
so according to this platonic metaphysical system, at
the top of this hierarchy of being
is the one. Right? Tahen as Plotinus
referred to him. The the church father origin
of Alexandria called him the autotheos.
Right? The very God. And, of course, Philo
called him Hathias with the definite article,
the God, and this is also what John's
gospel calls the father.
Hathias.
Okay. With the definite article.
You know, the
the author of John's gospel never refers to
Jesus or the son as theos in an
absolute and unqualified
way.
And Thomas' so called confession in John 20
is not an exception to this. So John
refers to Jesus as the logos
and a theos, a God. So if you
look at John 1:1, right? N r k
ein halagas
kai halagas prasthan thean. Right? So so in
the beginning was the word and the word
was with the God. Is a definite article
here in the accusative.
And a god
was the logos.
So middle Platonism explains what John meant here
much more coherently
than Tanakhic Judaism or trinitarianism.
In middle Platonism, the logos was believed to
be the second god, a second level of
being who's generated
from, within the one himself in pre eternality.
So since the logos was generated or caused
by the god,
the logos is not as great as the
God. The logos is the divine mediator
between the God and humanity.
Hence, you know, the father is greater than
I, says John's incarnated logos. Yet he also
says the father and I are 1. So
so Christian apologist
armed with the nomenclature
of Nicaea,
they went back to these texts and said,
oh, okay. When he said the father is
greater than I, the logos was talking about
his posthesis,
his person. But when he said the father
and I are 1, he was referring to
his usia,
his essence. So they incorporate this convoluted language
and retroactively
import,
a trinitarian
hermeneutic
upon John upon John's gospel
and thus completely decontextualize it. I mean, it's
a nice little
slide of hand, but read John in its
context. Right? John's underlying metaphysic is middle platonism.
And in fact, 7 years before John wrote
about the logos,
Philo wrote about the logos.
And Philo referred to the logos as
a second god, deuterostheos.
And Origen would use the same phrase
some 200 years later, but still before Nicaea.
You know, he said the father is autotheos,
the very god, the son important point because
the main language that John uses actually has
a precedent in,
in the pagan language found on the lips
of Philo of Alexandria. So it's not a
it it's this continuity, this connection is really
important, I think. It is very important. And,
you know, Origen also, he uses like you
said, he uses that phrase from Philo,
that the logos is a second god. The
Johann and Jesus, right,
or John's logos refers to his father as
my god. Right?
My god so in in Mark and Matthew,
Jesus, you know, the cry of dereliction,
My god. My god. So the logos who's
supposed to be god, capital g according to
trinitarians,
has a god. So this is clearly 2
gods.
And both men, Philo and Origen, they hail
from Alexandria.
And, you know, the name says it all.
You know, this is why Imam al Ghazari
vehemently
condemned the metaphysical positions
of the Hellenistic Muslim philosophers of his day
because he recognized that platonic metaphysics
acted as a gateway to the theological deviations
and idolatry of the people of the book,
both Jews and Christians of the past. Not
just Christians, but also Jews. And as I
said for Philo, the logos was the highest
of the intermediary
beings.
Okay? The begotten son of God, he says.
Philo says, He says his firstborn.
He says the celestial high priest,
right, who is often symbolized in the Tanakh
by an angel.
This is according to Philo. The logos, as
the mind of God, as it were, was
neither uncreated in the same sense as the
God, nor created in the same sense as
the cosmos.
The logos was caused from the very essence
of the God,
meaning the logos was eternally
generated, I e begotten,
not made
before all the ages. Sounds very, very familiar.
Sounds like the Nicene Creed. You know, Justin
Martyr,
the father of Logos' theology, he he admits
that there are disturbing parallels between his Christology
and the pagan myths of Bacchus, that's Dionysus,
and and Hercules and and Asclepius and Perseus
and Mithras.
And in his dialogue with Tryffo, Justin accounts
for these similarities by claiming, well, the devil
sort of emulated
the prophecies of Christ by inventing these sort
of fake fables
about their pagan gods in order to cause
Christians to go astray. I mean, Justin also
says that the angel that
Jacob wrestled in Genesis
and beat no less was the pre incarnate
Christ, the logos.
So so John 11 is the beginning of
the prologue of John's gospel. That's called the
hymn to the logos. How does the hymn
end? Right? So the most authentic reading according
to new testament textual critics like the United
Bible Society, Nesli Allen, and so on and
so forth, is the following. So it's John
118,
right? John 118. That's the end of the
hymn to the logos. It says,
So no one has ever seen God.
And the context clearly suggests that John is
talking about the first level of being, the
father,
the God.
Because then he says,
a unique God,
a one of a kind God,
a uniquely generated god. Now John is talking
about the logos. The logos is another god
because he was seen. The first god he
mentioned has never been seen. Right? The
it goes on to say, who is in
the heart of the father. It says,
That one exegetes
or explains or reveals
the Father. So the son is the divine
mediator.
And then John 3 16, For God so
loved the world, He gave His only begotten
son. The son is a savior man god,
a human sacrifice.
So then the second level of being referred
to as the logos by middle platonic writers
such as Philo and John is still a
divine being. He is a theos. He's a
god, but he's not haphaos.
He's not the god or the autotheos,
the very god. So this is called henotheistic
polytheism.
Okay? This is not the
yesiduth. This is not the Unitarian, you know,
monotheism of the Tanakh,
nor is this the trinitarian
monotheism of the 4th century
of the common era. This is a henotheistic
polytheism.
This is what the gospels and Pauline epistles
teach in my view. Okay?
The gospels,
suffused with Greek ideas
and influenced by Paul's gospel,
teach that Jesus is another God, a lesser
God, who mediates between the unseen perfect being
and humanity
by becoming a human sacrifice. So he is
the son of God, not God the son.
Right? And, of course, Paul wrote first Timothy
chapter 2 verses 5. Really, that's pseudo Paul.
Right? First Timothy 2, 5, and 6. But
this represents Paul's thinking, for there is one
god and one mediator between god and man,
the man Jesus Christ, and then he goes
on, who gave himself
as a ransom for all people. So we
have the mediating logos
dying for our sins. Now, Paul never referred
to the mediator as the logos, but clearly,
this is the concept he has in mind.
Paul, did refer to Christ as the wisdom
of God, Theosophian.
And of course, Philo had already identified
chokmah in the old testament, divine wisdom,
as being the logos explicitly.
Right? Like in Proverbs chapter 8, right? The
personified
and expressive
logos according to Philo spoke of its origin.
The lord possessed me at the beginning of
his way. Before his work of creation, I
was poured forth from eternity,
from before the creation of the earth. And
Paul,
being a highly Hellenized Jew that he was,
echoed this Philonic
sentiment.
I mean, Paul wrote to the Corinthians that
he was speaking of the wisdom of God
in mystery,
which was ordained by God before the ages
of our glory.
In the in the pseudo Pauline book of
Colossians, the author said, and He, the son,
is before all things. And by Him, all
things are held together. This is middle Platonism.
This is stoicism.
Okay? Additionally,
and again, in imitation of middle Platonism,
Paul envisioned a henotheistic
and hierarchical
scheme of divinity
with God our father at the top and
then the Lord Jesus Christ, the wisdom of
God, I e the logos just below him.
Right? So Paul wrote in 1st Corinthians.
He says, So he says the head of
every man is Christ.
And the head of of the woman is
the man. Right? So the feminist, they don't
they don't like this verse.
It's an extraordinary passage because the hierarchy, the
divine hierarchy and the human hierarchy
is is ontological.
We're we're dealing here with Jesus after his
resurrection, after the ascension.
This is the theology that Paul really believes
in, and that is God, Christ,
and then subservient to that man and woman.
And, it is there's nothing Trinitarian about it
at all. On the contrary, it is is
as you say. Exactly. It's a hierarchy of
being. And the head of Christ is
theos, he says at the end.
The God. Yes. Okay. So father is the
God. Jesus Christ is the Lord. These 2
are not ontologically equal for Paul. Okay. And
that's what I could just just say, so
just so people understand here how Christians deal
with this. I've, I I've had the honor
and the privilege also to speak to professor
Dale Martin from,
Yale University. He's one of the world's great,
New Testament scholars. He's also a Christian theologian
and a Trinitarian.
And he discusses this very, very passage and
how he deals with it in his, most,
recent work, which is addressed to these whole
all these hermeneutical issues. How do we how
do we be Trinitarian Christians in the light
of what you're saying, doctor Aliothai?
And he says, well, when you read passages
like that, what you do is you read
them in a Trinitarian
way, and you insert
the the son and father language. You understand
it in that way. You read it in
a trinitarian way. So he's very explicit. He's
very open and candid about what you do.
You don't take Paul's meaning. You take the
later meaning, and you read it in.
And and he's very he's very open about
it. He's very, yeah, he's very honest and
open. That is exactly how how you read
it. I mean, on on the surface, the
plain meaning here is very clear. You know?
The one who has authority over Christ, a
God, is the God. Yes. And this is
further made clear by Paul's statement. He says
whether Paul or Apollos or Kephas or the
world or life or death
or things now or things to come, all
things belong to you and you belong to
Christ and Christ belongs
to God.
Yeah. Right? It's very good. Finally, we read
in the pseudo Pauline book of Ephesians,
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, The
God Just think about this thing. The God
of our Lord,
Jesus Christ, the Father of glory. Again, in
John, the logos, the Johann and Jesus
refers to the father as my God, as
well as the only one who is truly
God in in John 17:3.
Of course, trinitarians will disagree with these assertions.
They will quote Paul's famous hymn to Christ
in Philippians 2 as being sort of a
proof text of their position that Paul maintained
that Christ was essentially
equal to God. So Paul said,
he said that Jesus Christ he said, being
in the form of God did not think
it was robbery to be equal with God.
But but here's a problem. If if Christ
was God,
the God, why would he even consider the
notion that it was robbery to be equal
to himself? This is nonsense.
You you see, Paul was neither a Trinitarian
nor a Unitarian.
Okay? So from from the greater context of
the passage, I mean, it's clear that Paul
believed that Christ was somehow divine, in fact,
worthy of worship.
It seems to me that when Paul wrote
that Christ was both the morphetheu,
the form of a god, and the morphe
doulu, the form of a servant, he meant
a physical god, a deity in the appearance
of human flesh. However, Christ as lord and
savior
did not consider it robbery to be equal
to the God precisely
because he was not the God.
Christ was the divine son of God whose
level of authority on earth was equal to
the God because the latter sent him to
communicate his will, to die for the sins
of humanity.
So for Paul, Christ was not equal to
God. Sorry. Christ was equal to God, but
not identical to God. And this is a
very, very crucial distinction. I'll say it again.
For Paul, Christ was equal to God, but
not identical.
Okay? Therefore, Paul was a Hellenized,
you know, Jewish, you know, soft polytheist, a
henotheist, really. He was neither a Trinitarian
nor a Unitarian. Now, the major difference between
Paul and John
on one side and Philo on the other
is that Paul and John believed that the
wisdom or the logos had incarnated into human
flesh as a Jewish messiah,
while Philo did not speak of specific incarnations.
But Philo did say that the meaning of
the statement,
man was made in the image of God.
He said that man was made in the
image of the second God, the logos. Right?
Adam was made in the
Adam was not made in the image of
the god because the god is the supreme
and absolutely
transcendent mystery.
Just as John said, no one has ever
seen God because he is the absolutely transcendent
mystery. The logos who is seen reveals him.
So even there, there's a bit of a
similarity. And just one last thing before we
get to to Daniel sort of laying down
this sort of,
theological,
foundation here is that
and this is all related to Daniel and
the son of man, by the way. I'll
get to that. In my view, and this
is something that maybe
many Muslim du'as, many many Muslim callers to
the faith will not agree with. Okay? In
my view, Jesus is portrayed as a divine
being,
a god,
in all 4 gospels in the New Testament.
Okay. This is my view that he is
the divine son of God and savior who
will eventually judge mankind
in all four gospels. This is how the
gospels present him.
He's not the God, right? The closest he
gets to the God is in John, but
he never actually reaches him.
The the new testament Jesus is clearly inferior
to the God
whom he calls the father, but he's also
clearly not just a man.
Okay. So the gospels were not written by
trinitarians.
That's anachronistic.
Nor were they written by Pharisaic Jews,
nor were they written by Jamesonian, you know,
Nazarenes or Ebionites. So I don't believe that
the 4 gospels are teaching a theology that
is totally consistent with Islam or Unitarian Christianity
or traditional,
Judaism. I believe that Jesus attains divine status
in different ways in the gospels. Right? But
nonetheless, he is a divine being in all
4 gospels. Right? Yep. So you know you
know how it is. Mark
Yeah. Mark Mark has, explained this in great
detail that Jesus brought in some sense, and
this is a crucial caveat.
Yeah. Nowhere is Jesus Yahweh in any of
the gospels. But
according to the understandings of the use of
this language in the Greek or Roman world
and even in Judaism at the time, the
the language of divinity was very elastic and
could and did apply to human beings as
well. And and within that kind of matrix,
Jesus does find the setting, but not as
Yahweh. Jesus is never Yahweh in the New
Testament, he would say. Yeah. Yeah. And we
do see that evolution of Christology in the
gospel. I mean, the earlier the gospel,
the later Jesus becomes the divine son of
God in the timeline. Or to put it
another way, the later the gospel, the earlier
Jesus becomes divine. Yes. Now the under the
underlying influences of Mark's gospel, which is the
earliest of the quartet,
are Greek metaphysics,
Enochic tradition, and Pauline Christology.
So Judaism is very much sort of in
the back row. It's just kind of a
veneer.
The disciples in Mark are are totally inept,
unable to understand anything. You know, they're cowards
who forsake Jesus and flee.
Why?
Because they're Jews. Mark is making a statement
here.
You will not understand Jesus, at least his
Jesus, the Mark in Jesus through Jewish eyes.
You need Greco Roman eyes.
And at the end of Mark, it is
a Roman Centurion
who confesses
at the foot of the cross, truly this
man was a son of God.
You see, he gets it, not the Jewish
disciples.
In Mark, Mary and Jesus's family think he's
insane.
You know, if Mary was visited by an
angel, why does she think Jesus was insane?
Why? Because she was a Jew. So Mark
is telling us that
Jesus is the son of God really in
a Greco Roman sense. Now, what is the
Roman conception of the son of God? You
know, Augustus was called the son of God.
He was a divine being, but no Roman
believed that Augustus was equal in all respects
to Jupiter, to Zeus who is the god.
Okay? So keep that in mind. So so
so when we study,
Jewish history, we see that that pre Christian
North African
and Palestinian Judaism had already been significantly
influenced
by Greek metaphysics
ever since the beginning of the Hellenistic period
in the 4th century BCE. So Philo and
Paul and John, they're just sort of the
tip of the iceberg.
The invasion of all things Greek and Palestine
even led to a massive
inter Jewish conflict,
right, with Maccabean purists on one side
and then the the Syro Grecian, the, you
know, the Selassid Empire
along with their Jewish sympathizers on the other
side. I mean, there were Jewish men. I
don't know how on earth they were able
to do this, but there were Jewish men
who reversed their circumcisions
so that they could look like greens. Like
a wrestler in the gymnasium and stuff. I
never got that, but I thought let's not
to probe too much into these details, but
somehow they did it. Some somehow they managed
to pull it off. Some kind of reconstructive
surgery,
and they were able to, like, yeah, you
wrestle in the gymnasium, compete in the Greek
Olympics. Yeah. In the end, the Maccabees gained
the upper hand, at least politically. Yeah. And
in 164 BCE, the temple was repaired and
cleansed and rededicated to God, thus Hanukkah was
born.
Okay. So so now let's talk about Daniel.
So
the general consensus
of modern scholars is that right around this
time, 167 to 164 BCE,
the second half of Daniel the second half
of the book of Daniel was written. Yep.
Which described what's known as the shikut shomayim,
which is the which is an abomination that
causes desertion or causes one to be awestruck.
It's often translated as
the abomination of desolation. Yeah. Now according to
most scholars, this refers to the Selassid king
Antiochus or Antiochus, however you want to pronounce
his name. Yeah. Antiochus the 4th when he
erected a statue of Zeus
on the temple grounds. Itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And he and he slaughtered a pig apparently.
However, even after the Maccabean victory,
the allure of of platonic metaphysics
continued to seduce Jewish thinkers in the region
well into the Christian era.
Okay? Now one thing I wanna mention before
we continue is the issue of the dating
of the book of Daniel. Okay. So conservative
Christians and Orthodox Jews believe
that the prophet Daniel wrote the book of
Daniel
in the 6th century BCE. So the the
book of Daniel is 12 chapters.
Chapters 2 through 7 were written in Aramaic.
Okay. So then chapter 1 and chapters 8
through 12
were written in Hebrew.
Of course, Aramaic and Hebrew are both Semitic
languages and thus very close.
Interestingly,
chapters 2 through 7, right, so the Aramaic
section,
they form a literary structure called a chiasmus,
a type of mirror parallelism, right, like ABC,
CBA, right, like that. And it's very common
structure in Semitic rhetoric. So that is evidence
of a single author.
But but the question is, were the Jews
widely speaking Aramaic in the 6th century BCE?
Maybe, maybe not. And here I recommend the
scholarship of, doctor John j Collins
who is a specialist in Hellenistic Judaism. Oh
oh, John j Collins is coming on blogging
theology in a couple of weeks' time, Barbara.
Oh, really?
Yes. Wow. He's
but I've, he's the world's egg the foremost
expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, professor of
all tests at Harvard University. He's a really
I'm just so thrilled. Anyway,
we'll be speaking to him soon, God willing.
Yeah. He's a really unique guy to his
personality and the way he speaks also. But,
yeah, like you said, Judaism,
Jewish apocalypcocalypcocalypcism.
And his commentary on Daniel, which is part
of the Hermonia
commentary series, is is just beautiful. I mean,
it's used at the the graduate school level.
I think his work is definitive when it
comes to the, historical features of Daniel.
Okay. So it's it's been established
that the book of Daniel uses later Aramaic
linguistic features. And and he mentions this, like
vocabulary,
forms of nouns,
forms of pronouns. When I say later, I
mean later than the 6th century BCE, much
later, in fact. Now how did scholars establish
this? By comparing so in 1962,
a corpus of Aramaic legal documents was discovered
in Samaria
That was dated to the 4th century BCE.
It's called the Samaria
papyri.
Right? So Collins and and many others concluded
that the Aramaic of Daniel is later than
that of the Samaria papyri.
The Aramaic of Daniel is is even later
than the Aramaic of Ezra, the book of
Ezra.
However, when compared to the Aramaic of the
Dead Sea Scrolls,
Daniel's linguistics
are slightly older, slightly more archaic.
But still, argues Collins,
the Aramaic of Daniel is much closer to
the dead sea scrolls than it is to
the Samaria papyri.
Also, the linguistic features of the Hebrew of
Daniel
strongly suggest a date much later than the
6th century BCE.
So this is a general consensus. And once
again, just as we saw with Deuteronomy and
Isaiah,
there's a huge disparity
between what historians say about Daniel's dating and
what confessional,
Jews and Christians say about it. Big, big
difference. I mean,
they're centuries apart. In America, we would say,
they're not even in the same ballpark. Right?
I don't know if you use that expression.
In UK, probably not. Unfortunately, we do now
these days. Like, many Americanisms have seeped into
England. But anyway It seeped. Yeah. That's what
happens. Yeah.
Now now chapters 1 through 6 of Daniel,
okay, are stories.
Their genre is is narrative,
and they're told in the 3rd person.
Most scholars date their composition to the end
of the 3rd century BCE.
And chapter 7 through 12 are visions,
unveilings.
The genre is called apocalypse,
and they're told in the first person, and
most scholars date their composition
to between 167164
BCE.
Doctor Christine Hayes at Yale, she points out
that there are, quote, tremendous
historical
inaccuracies
in Daniel.
Okay? For example, the book of Daniel says
that Belshazzar
was a king, a Melech of Babylon,
but he was never a king. He was
a prince regent.
Also, he was not defeated by
Darius the Mede. Who is that? Who's Darius
the Mede? As the book of Daniel says,
he was defeated by Cyrus the Persian.
Historians
point out many other things as well. And
Hays also points out that ancient apocalyptic
literature was usually pseudonymous.
In other words,
a later writer would pretend
to be an imminent
figure, a prophet or patriarch of the distant
past. In other words, a forgery. Right? I
mean, we see this with
apocalyptic writings attributed to Adam and Enoch and
Abraham as well. Now as a Muslim then,
if I'm going to take the position that
the that the book of Daniel
contains true prophecy, how do I square that
with the historical consensus regarding Daniel as well
as with the Quran's claim that the biblical
text has suffered a degree of textual corruption?
Well, in my view, it's quite simple. The
book of Daniel was indeed written well after
the 6th century BCE. I mean, this is
where almost all of the evidence
points.
Okay?
So I do not believe that a a
prophet wrote the book of Daniel.
Okay?
The author, whoever it was,
got some of the historical details wrong
because he was not an inspired writer, and
he he was writing about events many centuries
later.
However, he must have preserved
many of the actual inspired words
of the prophet Daniel.
And that's, again, speculation. But if we're going
to take this position, this this is going
to be how I'm going to look at
it. So so just like I did with
Isaiah,
I think I'm taking a more sort of
reasonable position
with respect to Daniel because I believe in
prophecy, and I take but I also take
historical consensus into consideration.
So is historical consensus always right? No.
But but we would need good reasons, historical,
logical, literary,
and otherwise in order to oppose it. So
this is unlike the fundamentalist on the one
hand who just ignore decades decades of research
of of Daniela like historians,
and then you have sort of really rigid
secular historians on the other hand who do
not even entertain
the notion of prophecy.
Okay?
So let's get into the the text of
Daniel a little bit.
The author of Daniel told us that in
the 1st year of the of the rule
of king Belshazzar,
so he means something like 538,
537
BCE, something like that according to the historical
timeline. He says, the prophet Daniel experienced a
fantastic vision by night
in which he saw 4 distinct beasts coming
up from the sea.
Okay? And he described the first beast as
being
in in the Aramaic,
like an ari,
qasad. Right? Like a lion
with eagle's wings.
The second was ladov, he says, like a
bear, kadub in Arabic, with 3 ribs in
its mouth.
The third was kimmar, like a leopard, kinemir,
with 4 heads
and 4 wings on its back. And the
4th beast was a terrifying monster,
with iron teeth and 10 horns.
Now Daniel said that he saw
a a karenzaira,
right? A little horn
spring up among the 10 horns
causing 3 other horns to be torn out
by the roots.
This horn had eyes like a man.
It was speaking great words, meaning pompous, arrogant,
even blasphemous
words.
And then after experiencing something like a beatific
vision of God,
whom Daniel calls the ancient of days, the
meaning the eternal one, Daniel saw millions
of ministering angels, the vanquishing of the first
three beasts, as well as the eventual
death and destruction of the 4th beast
who is yet speaking the great things, right?
And the next two verses are key. So
this verse 13 and 14, Daniel
7. So Daniel said, I saw in the
night visions and behold, one like a son
of man,
right, kavar in ash, came with the clouds
of heaven and came to the ancient of
days, and they brought him near before him.
And then he says,
in the Aramaic he says, Valayyahiv
shultan
and he, meaning the son of man, was
given authority.
Vikar and honor.
The malku
and and rulership,
the kulameyaumayya
walishanayya
layiflahhun.
He says, so that all all people, all
nations, and all languages
should obey him.
And it continues, his authority is an everlasting
authority, which shall not come to an end,
and his rulership shall never be destroyed. So
we notice as Muslims how close Quranic Arabic
is actually,
is is to Danielic Aramaic. So it's Bar
Inash, ibnun Nas or ibnul Insan, ibn Adam.
Atik Yomim. Right? Atik
Shultan is Sultan. Yaqar is Wakar.
So on and so forth.
Is alsina.
But here's a big question.
What did Daniel himself
intend by the phrase son of man,
Bar enash?
Did he intend the Davidic Messiah?
The name David does not appear once in
the entire book of Daniel.
The word Messiah does not appear in chapter
7.
Did he intend an angel,
a divine being of some sort,
some of the above, none of the above.
Now, the Christian claim is obvious. Right? The
Christian claim is that the son of man
is Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, or
rather the Christian Jesus, the Jesus of Christian
faith.
And as we said, son of man is
a title that, that Jesus gives to himself
in the New Testament. I'll come back to
that later.
Christians further claim that the Aramaic verb yiflachun
in Daniel 714,
this is from pelach,
should actually be rendered as worship
rather than obey or serve. Right? So the
King the King James version famously has worshiped
literally in its translation. Yeah. But I noticed
in in a modern translations like the, the
NRSV, a standard academic one,
it doesn't, have worship. It has serve
or obey as you
Yeah. So so let's quickly, lay the Christian
claims to rest about this verb before we
continue.
So so here's here's the Christian argument in
a nutshell.
The verb pelech is used 9 times in
the Tanakh, all in Daniel. Okay? And 7
of those verses, it is used to denote
the worship of deities, of gods.
While in two places, Daniel 714 and 21,
it's used to denote the service or obedience
rendered unto the son of man.
Therefore, consistency
demands
that the meaning be worship here as well.
In other words, the son of man is
worthy of actual worship as god or perhaps
a divine being. So that's that's the argument.
Seems like a good argument. Now let me
tell you why the Christian argument is wrong
with all due respect.
The translators of Daniel,
probably working before the Christian era, rendered the
original Aramaic,
yiflakhun,
into the Greek,
duleosusin,
from the from the
from the word dulos,
meaning a servant.
This is precisely why most English translations, as
you said, read serve. Even the gospel authors
record Jesus repeatedly using the word
to denote a servant who serves a human
master.
Because the the word dulos in in normal
ancient Greek means slave, actually.
It can be euphemistically translated as sermon. It
also means slave normally.
Right.
Slave. Exactly. So here so here I would
argue that that that overarching
theological consistency
must override the argument
for linguistic
consistency. I mean, if I said I revere
God and I revere my mother, I'm not
using the the verb revere
in the same sense in both places.
So so translating yiflahun
as serve or obey in the context of
the son of man
is much more theologically
consistent and contextually coherent
than to suggest that the prophet Daniel was
indicating
that someone other than the ancient of days
will be worshiped as a divine being. I
mean, that's idolatry.
But speaking of linguistics,
Jasonius mentions
that the Hebrew verb avad
is equivalent in meaning to the Aramaic.
Okay? Now if you look at Jeremiah 277,
Jeremiah says about Nebuchadnezzar. He says,
He says, all nations will serve him, and
that's the verb.
So Jeremiah is not saying that all nations
are going to worship
Nebuchadnezzar
as God. I mean, that's ridiculous.
They will serve him. They will obey him.
But I think the clincher is in the
book of Psalms. So Psalm 146:3.
Psalm 146:3.
It says, do not trust in princes.
Do not trust in princes.
Theven adam shayin lo teshuah
nor trust in the Son of Man
in whom there is no help.
Psalm 146:3,
Do not trust
the son of man.
He cannot help you. No human being this
is what the psalmist is saying.
No human being, no son of man can
help you.
Right? So if we say in our prayer,
iyakanabudu
wa iyakanastayin,
when we pray to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
Only you, we worship. Only we ask for
our help. We seek supernatural help only from
God.
The Hebrew word here for help is teshua,
which is translated in Greek as soteria,
which means salvation.
There is no salvation
in the son of man,
only in God,
meaning the son of man is not divine.
I mean, this is what the Psalm is
literally
saying. The son of man cannot save you.
He needs to be saved. He's not the
savior. He needs a savior.
And so God obviously is not the son
of man. God is God. Man is man.
Okay?
Now chapter 7 then tells us that that
Daniel was initially,
like, totally perplexed about this vision. Right? Therefore,
he decided to ask one of the angels.
It says literally one of the standing ones,
Kaameya
or Ka'imun,
about its interpretation. And the word for interpretation
here in in Aramaic is fashar, which is
related to the Arabic word tafsir.
So Daniel was told that the 4 beasts
are 4 kings.
Okay. He says,
4 kings
that shall arise
in the earth.
Now with respect to the 10 horns of
the 4th beast specifically,
the angel who was later identified as Gabriel
or Gebriel Gabriel,
he tells Daniel that there are also 10
kings and that the little horn, the karenzaira,
shall rise after them. Okay? The little horn
who will speak, you know, these great things,
it says, will fight against the saints of
the most high,
nakadisheil
yonin,
and oppress them by changing their sacred times
and laws.
The saints will live under his control for
time,
times, and half a time.
Okay? But eventually, the saints will destroy the
horn and consume his dominion.
Then all rulership and authority under the entire
sky
will be given to the saints of the
most high,
and all peoples will obey him, I e
the son of man.
Okay. Now, according to Jewish, according to the
Jewish exegetical tradition,
who are the 4 beasts, specifically?
Who is the son of man?
And who is the little horn, specifically?
So the exegesis of Daniel
completed by Rashi
represents
what most Orthodox Jewish authorities
believe today. So according to Rashi, the 4
beasts symbolize
4 kingdoms or empires
that will oppress the Jewish people. So the
lion is Babylon.
The bear is Persia. The 3 ribs in
the mouth of the bear are 3 Persian
kings.
The leopard is Greece. The four wings and
heads of the leopard refer to the division
of Alexander's kingdom into 4 provinces with each
ruled by one of his successors.
The 4th beast, right, the terrifying monster is
the Roman Empire.
Okay? And that Rashi further stated that the
10th king of Rome was Vespasian
who destroyed the temple. So he's the 10th
horn.
And the terrible karenza'aira,
the the little horn, was Vespasian's
eventual successor, Titus,
who was the general who led the attack
upon the temple
in 70 of the common era. And as
Rashi says, blasphemed and entered the heikal, the
temple, with arrogance. And Rashi also mentioned that
this was the opinion of the Talmudic rabbis.
And Rashi also said that Titus also intended
to cause the Israelites to transgress
in the matter of their sacred holidays and
laws. Okay? So that's the standard Jewish opinion.
Now when it comes to the identity of
the son of man, the Bar Eneesh,
mentioned in verse 13,
Rashi said,
Hu Melech HaMashiach,
right? He is the King Messiah.
Now concerning verse 14, the very next verse,
however,
Rashi said that the Son of Man was
Israel
likened to a man.
So which is it? The Messiah or Israel?
Now, orthodox rabbis defend
Rashi's opinion and point out that there's no
contradiction in his statements, right? So in Daniel's
vision, the son of man is clearly being
contrasted,
with 4 beasts that all symbolize various nations.
For Rashi, the final nation to come, Israel,
is likened to a human being
because Israel is, in his words, humble and
innocent. Israel is the most
humane and merciful when compared to the other
nations who are animalistic and ungodly.
Therefore, according to the Jewish understanding,
just as the previous nations were led by
various kings and rulers,
the nation of Israel will also be led
by their king, the Melech HaMashiach ben David,
the Davidic king messiah.
So for them, the messiah is really part
and parcel to the coming Israelite nation
who will destroy the 4th beast and rule
the world.
His authority will be universal.
All peoples will serve and obey him.
The messiah will be the final and definitive
religious leader of the whole world. So that's
that's the Jewish position in a nutshell.
Now does Daniel 7 say David or messiah?
No.
Did Isaiah 42 say David or messiah? No.
Does Isaiah 53 say David or Messiah? No.
This is speculation.
Now,
it was the last part of verse 25
that really puzzled Rashi. Okay. So this is
Daniel 725.
He called it an obscure ending about which
the commentators hold diverse views.
So this was concerning the phrase in Aramaic.
It says,
time, times,
and half a time.
Right? That the saints will live under the
control of the little horn
for time, times,
and half a time or three and a
half times.
What does this mean? So the book of
Daniel contains several numbers and, you know, these
kinda cryptic
spans of time that have caused,
I think, numerous scholars and historians and exegetes
to basically lose their minds trying to figure
figure this stuff out. I mean, it's a
big mystery with massive difference of opinion.
Now Rashi seemed to take the opinion of
Sadia Gaion, right, who said that this expression
of time,
you know, 3 and a half times, corresponded
to the 1,335
days
mentioned at the very end of the book
of Daniel.
So 3 and a half times is the
same as 1,335
days. So in Daniel 12:12, it says,
blessed is he that waits and comes to
1,335
days.
And almost everyone agrees that a day in
Daniel means a year.
Okay? So like in Daniel 9, the 70
weeks are actually
70 weeks of years, so 490
years. But we will ignore Daniel 9 today.
It's gonna give us a big headache.
Well, Rashi mentioned
that other commentators,
pointed out the fact
that according to,
right, the the numerical value of the expression,
I will hide my face in Deuteronomy 31
is 1,335.
So in Rashi's opinion, this 1,335
year period
actually began
with the discontinue
with the discontinuation
of of the daily
sacrifices
6 years prior to the destruction of the
second temple.
Okay? So it follows then that the end
of this period,
God will reveal his face as it were
with the coming of the son of man,
the Davidic messiah and his universal Israelite nation.
So the temple was destroyed in 70 of
the common era by general Titus under the
Papazian,
which means that the sacrifices ended 6 years
prior
64 CE.
Now if we move forward in time,
1,335
years from 64 CE,
we come to the year 13 99
of the common era.
Okay?
13/99.
Now Sadia and Rashi died in 942
and 110 5 respectively. So they never saw
the year 13/99.
Okay? So were they right?
What happened in the year 13 99? The
answer is to use a Yiddish word, bupkis.
Nothing.
No Davidic messiah.
I've learned a new word today. I've learned
a new word. New word. No defeat of
the Roman empire.
So what we have here is like, what
Yoda said, perhaps a prophecy misread.
Okay?
Now, today,
over 600 years later, the Jews continue to
wait for their Messiah. The 4th beast, I.
E. The Roman Empire,
that the Davidic Messiah was supposed to destroy
and inherit her kingdom is no longer on
the earth.
Yet, no Davidic Messiah arrived, the supposed son
of man. I mean, even if a Jewish
man were to appear in our times claiming
to be the Davidic messiah, there would be
no way of verifying
his Davidic lineage. The records of all tribes,
possibly with the exception of the Levites, are
lost to history. I mean, we can only
conclude that the nation that Daniel saw in
his vision was not Israel under the messiah.
Besides,
Israel as a nation already existed
prior to even the Babylonians.
The nation of the son of man, however,
must emerge
during the Roman period. It is last
chronologically.
Okay? And this is where the Christian apologist
will make a suggestion.
Okay?
The Christian apologist here will say,
perhaps Daniel saw the Christian nation
under Jesus.
Right? So there are 2 major problems with
this.
Number 1, according to the Synoptics,
Jesus himself predicted the future coming of the
Son of Man and his kingdom or nation
of God on earth, and we'll get into
that.
Number 2,
the Pauline Christians
who eventually
became,
trinitarians
converted the Roman empire rather than defeating it.
Okay? So they, in essence, became part of
the 4th beast.
So it's clearly absurd with all due respect
to claim that the rigidly monotheistic
prophet Daniel envisioned the Christian Jesus
being worshiped as god or a god
and a nation under this supposed son of
man that not only blasphemed God, but their
anti Jewish theology and open idolatrous
practices, but were also guilty of massive persecution
of the Jewish people in the form of
exile and massacre and blood libel and torture.
So so I do agree that Daniel saw
the Christian nation, but it was not
as the son of man and his nation,
but rather as an extension
of the 4th beast. And by the way,
this is a standard Jewish exegesis. Okay? So
orthodox rabbis
state explicitly
that the 4th beast,
whom they call Edom, okay, they they refer
to the 4th beast as Edom, he's so
terrifying
because he keeps changing and morphing and adapting.
So, you know, despite 13/99
coming and going,
today, orthodox Jews believe that Edom is very
much still alive. I mean, he has to
stay alive because their messiah hasn't come yet.
According to the rabbis,
Edom became the holy Roman Empire,
then the Catholic church.
And then it morphed and divided again,
growing 2 additional organs, the Eastern Orthodox
and and and and protestantism,
then 100
and 100 of subdivisions.
In short,
Edom is a cipher
in the Talmud for Christianity.
And I noticed, by the way, sheikh Abdul
Hakim Murad in his writings,
which can be very kind of esoteric at
times. He he he refers to the Edomites,
and this is a cipher for Christians. He
he's not being explicit here.
Like, he doesn't he doesn't refer to Muhammad
upon him. He was about the praised one
and the, the I d I a mohitsu
uses his language,
which you've just decoded for us. Yeah. Yeah.
It's like that in the Talmud as well.
Edom,
the 4th beast is Christianity.
Okay? And and and the and the messiah
will this is according to orthodox Jewish eschatology.
And the messiah will eradicate
Christianity
according to
orthodox Jewish eschatology.
This is what Isaiah 27 is talking about
according to the rabbis. If you look at
Isaiah 27:1,
right, it says,
in that day, the lord will punish with
his sword,
his fierce,
great, and powerful sword,
Leviathan,
the gliding serpent,
Leviathan,
the coiling serpent.
He will slay the monster of the sea.
So the rabbis point out. They say the
sword is called
fierce, great, and powerful, 3 adjectives, because the
sword of the messiah
will rid the world of the doctrine of
the trinity,
father, son, holy spirit,
and leviathan,
the gliding serpent of the sea is Christianity.
This is what the rabbis teach. This is
not my view. This is what the rabbi
sees. I mean, you could ask Rabbi Tovia
Singer. I guarantee you this is what he'll
say. Okay? I guarantee it. They point out
that the earliest symbol of Christianity
was not the cross. It was a fish.
Ichthys. Ichthys, the gliding serpent of the sea.
Now, personally, I don't believe that the 4th
beast is Christianity
beyond the fall of the Roman Empire. Okay?
So in my view,
Daniel saw a nation that would arise during
the Roman period
that would eventually deal a death blow to
the Romans. I mean, this nation would kill
the 4th beast.
He saw a nation headed by a leader
that would uphold and champion the true light
of monotheism of tokid
and take it to the world take it
to the world in in a way that
Israel could only dream, I mean, quite literally.
I think he saw a nation that provided
shelter and protection
to the Jewish people who had fled from
the lands of the 4th beast.
So he saw the most praised nation of
Ahmad, that is Mohammed, whom I believe is
the the bar in Nash. Now I'll come
back to that in a minute here, But
let's go back to something I said earlier
because this is now important for understanding how
son of man is being used in the
new testament.
I said that when we study Jewish history,
we see that pre Christian North African and
Palestinian
Judaism
had already been significantly
influenced
by Hellenistic metaphysics and Greek mythology,
really, and Greek ever since the beginning of
the Hellenistic period in the 4th century BCE.
Now the prime example of such influence, in
my opinion, are the Enochic writings.
And and you'll see how I'm going to
tie this back to the the son of
man. So the the the saga of the
patriarch
Enoch
described in 1st, 2nd, and third Enoch. And
probably many viewers
watching right now have never even heard of
the books of Enoch.
Even even before we got I mean, who
was Enoch? Now I mean, he obviously mentioned
in Genesis in the,
Old Testament.
So
just very briefly, who was Enoch allegedly in
the in Genesis? Who who was this person?
Yes. Yeah. So Enoch was an an antediluvian.
That means pre flood patriarch. I think he
was the grandson of Noah.
And there isn't much written about Enoch. I
mean, you know, in Genesis chapter 5, it
simply says that he walked with god and
then he was not,
for god took him. And that's that's all
it that's all it really says. Yep.
But but I think that,
the the book of first Enoch and I'll
explain first Enoch. I think it's essential for
first Enoch,
and I'll explain first Enoch. I think it's
essential for understanding how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John understood the son of man
mentioned in Daniel 7
as being the sort of second divine being
who shares a throne with God and judges
humanity at the end of the age. And
Enochic literature was quite popular among Jews in
the intertestamental
period,
that's between the two testaments,
as well as among early Pauline Christians, Hellenistic
Christians. I mean, the author of Jude
actually quotes directly
from 1st Enoch.
Large portions of the book of the watchers,
which is the first section
of First
Enoch, were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls,
which predate the New Testament.
Patristic authorities like Justin Irenaeus
Tertullian,
they cite First Enoch in their writings. Tertullian
explicitly calls it scripture.
Right?
Eventually, however, First Enoch was declared heretical, and
that's why it's not in the the Jewish
or Christian canons. Although, I think the Ethiopian
church considers it,
canonical. Now now there's a verse in the
Quran. Okay? And this is very often attacked
by Christian apologists.
I'm not really going with this. Okay. Yeah.
As being historically inaccurate.
Yep.
The verse says, and the Jews say, Uzair
is the son of God while the Christians
say, the Messiah is the son of God.
And most often Uzair
is translated as Ezra because they sound kind
of the same. And so critics are quick
to point out that, you know, no Jew
ever said that Ezra was the son of
God. The Quran is
is simply wrong here. And then the verse
continues, in this, they, meaning Jews and Christians,
but imitate
what the unbelievers of old used to say.
That's chapter 9 verse 30 of the Quran.
And you might say, well, wait a minute.
In the Tanakh, the phrase son of God
is used as an in an honorific
sense. And I think that's true. And I
think the Quran recognizes this usage
in another verse, not in this verse, but
in another verse in chapter 21 verse 26,
it says, and they say the most compassionate
has begotten a child.
Subhanahu bal Ibadu mukramun.
Glory be to Him.
Rather, they are servants raised to honor. This
is an honorific title. And this is in
a Surah called Al Anbiya, which means the
prophets.
However, in the previous verse, 9:30, about Uzair,
which is which is in a surah that
strongly denounces idolatry,
I would contend that the phrase son of
God is meant in a pagan sense, in
a Greek sense, a Hellenistic sense, not in
the Jewish sense.
In other words, Christian and Jewish elements
have made Christ and Uzair,
respectively,
sons of God by ascribing divinity to them.
And by doing so, they have entered into
a type of polytheism.
Now keep that in mind. I actually I
actually think that,
I actually think that Uzair mentioned in 9:30
of the Quran is the divinized Enoch.
Right? Also known as Metatron.
But that's a different topic.
Right? In fact, a famous Karaite apologist. Right?
Abu Yusuf Yaqub al Kirksani, right, in his
famous book. It's called Kitab al Anwar
walmoraqib.
He says that just as Christians,
starting specifically with Paul, he says, were guilty
of ascribing divinity to Jesus.
Rabbinical Jews were equally guilty
of deifying and worshiping the angel Metatron.
Now in 3rd Enoch because there's 3 Enochs.
Right? I've gotta I've gotta say sorry. I
was gonna I gotta interject. Yeah. Tim Winter,
professor Tim Winter, Cambridge University Muslim Reaver,
Abdul Hakim Murad, in a lecture
which you can see on YouTube, which I
really recommend.
I've watched it a number of times. He
says, at Cambridge University
Library, there are a mass of medieval
Jewish manuscripts at Cambridge University
which,
focus up up contain prayers to Metatron as
a divine being. This is a very widespread
practice Yeah. Apparently, according to Cambridge University,
in medieval Judaism. And it's that that the
Quran is actually getting to. And he he
offers an explanation based on the linguistic
elements of that. So this is a widely
attested practice.
Even we have the evidence at Cambridge University
in medieval manuscripts
today. So I think it's an important point
just to establish this is not some kind
of theory. This is is a well evidenced
religious practice in in many mainstream
medieval Judaism, actually.
Yeah.
And when you read the Enochic literature, the
idolatry gets even more pronounced. Like in 3rd
Enoch, which is written in the 2nd century,
the common era,
Metatron
is explicitly called the lesser Yahweh.
Right? Which is very interesting because, you know,
Uzair in Arabic I mean, the the root
the root meaning of Uzair means to help,
right, in Hebrew and in in in Arabic,
and it seems to be in the diminutive
in Arabic. So it seems like it means
little help little helper of god or something.
God's little helper or right hand man or
something like that. Maybe this is what the
Jews and the Hijaz were referring to to
Metatron.
But 3rd Enoch also calls him the prince
of the universe. Right? The Sarha Olam. So
if he's a prince, who is his father?
The king is God. He's the son of
god.
And it says that the the king crowns
and clothes Metatron in a garment of majesty,
and there are indications in the Talmud that
there were Jews who took to worshiping
the the angel Metatron as a junior god
or rather son of god in the Greek
or Christian sense.
Okay? And, of course, the famous, 14th century
rabbi,
Nissim of Girona, he approved of of praying
to angels. And as you said, this is
all over medieval Jewish
literature.
Yeah.
So as a lesser Yahweh, Metatron had become
a logos figure akin to the Christian Jesus.
But but I digress. But now but now
the question is, who was Enoch and what
does he have to do with the son
of man? Right? So I mentioned
earlier that Enoch was, you know, a sage,
the the sorry, the grandfather of Noah.
And he walked with God, and he was
not. God took him. A very
intriguing, quite mysterious
now sometime during
the pre Christian Hellenistic period, so maybe the
second
or 3rd century BCE, what's known as the
intertestamental
period,
a Jewish writer or writers wrote First Enoch.
Okay. So 1st Enoch is basically like episode
1
of the sequel to Genesis 5. Right? So,
you know, God took Enoch.
What happened to him? Right? So you have
first Enoch,
but also a sequel to another intriguing passage
in Genesis 64
where it says that the sons of God,
the b'nai Elohim,
came in unto the daughters of men
and they bore children to them. That's 6:4
Genesis.
And the offspring of these sons of God
and daughters of men are called the Nephilim.
Now, first, Enoch
says that the sons of God were fallen
angels
called the watchers who procreated with human women
and produced these Nephilim who were these extremely
violent sort of cannibalistic giants.
Among the watchers were angels like Shemi Hazza
who taught mankind sorcery,
and Asael who taught them warfare, and Ko
Kabel who taught them astrology.
And then God sent down the 4 arch
archangels to fight the watchers
and the Nephilim. And so some of them
were killed and some of them were locked
in an underground
prison. And of course, if you're a student
of history and literature, much of this sounds
very familiar. This sounds like
Greek mythology. You know?
The the famous Hollywood film. I think it's
called dogma or something a few years ago
with some some stars, which featured all these
characters by.
It sounds like a Hollywood movie because it
was a Hollywood movie, but
but it was originally it was written by
Enoch. Well, whoever he was. Yeah. Yeah. And
it's it's it's sounds like the Homeric. It
sounds like the the theogony of Hesiod. I
mean, you in the theogony of Hesiod, you
have you have Zeus. Right? You have the
sons of Zeus, the Bene Elohim, like Ares
who teaches mankind warfare just like the watchers
do.
In the Theogony, there's this massive battle between
the titans and the Olympians
called the Titanomachia
where the titans are locked up in an
underground prison called Tartarus,
very similar to what we find That very
word is used in the new testament to
describe *. It's translated English as *. Hades,
yeah. Exactly.
And and first, Enoch also tells us what
happened to Enoch after he ascended
in a section called the book of parables.
And what is most significant for our purposes
is that 1st Enoch
extensively describes the enigmatic person of the son
of man
mentioned in the book of Daniel. So in
1st Enoch, the son of man is described
as preexisting before creation as the elected concealed
angel,
a divine judge who sits upon his throne
of glory,
a second divine being alongside the ancient of
days
and the Messiah.
So from these descriptions, it can be demonstrated
that Jewish writers
during this period had already begun the
trend of identifying Daniel, son of man with
the Messiah and deifying him.
So the the Danielic son of man character
had evolved
or rather devolved into some sort of second
or lesser god.
Eventually,
Enoch is unequivocally told, you are the son
of man. So according to first Enoch,
Enoch was a messianic figure who preexisted as
an angel before coming to earth as a
man, was raptured into heaven by God,
and finally exalted the chief angel
and enthroned as a divine judge so you
have his translation into heaven, his exaltation,
and eventual
apotheosis.
Now rabbinical Judaism
eventually rejected 1st Enoch because of its obviously
incorrect messianism,
incorrect angelology.
It was highly fanciful and mythological.
And the rabbis also pointed out that the
word Elohim in the Tanakh could also refer
to powerful men like Moses. It's called Elohim
in Exodus 71.
So the b'nei Elohim in Genesis 6 were
not the sons of God. They were simply
sons of powerful men or oppressive rulers who
are * women, so they have a way
of dealing with these texts. Now when it
came to the early Christians,
first Enoch was viewed by many as scripture.
As I said, the author of the book
of Jude in the New Testament quoted directly
from first Enoch 19
in in Jude 114.
This, of course, begs the question, if 1st
Enoch is heresy according to Christians, why did
the author of Jude, whom Christians believed to
have been inspired by God,
to quote a heretical book? Did God inspire
Jude to quote heresy?
The Christian response is something like, no. Because
not all of first Enoch is heresy. So
the Pauline Christians
were sort of able to pick and choose
what they wanted to take from first Enoch.
Okay. With this in mind,
there's actually an alternate way of interpreting what
Paul actually believed about Jesus according to some
scholars.
Okay? Now personally, I don't agree with this,
but I think it's important
to mention in this context. So it's possible
that Paul believed
that Christ was a preexistent
angel
before he incarnated into the man, Jesus of
Nazareth.
Then after his resurrection,
Christ was,
again exalted by God who made him Lord,
that is a divine being worthy of worship,
and even placed him at his right hand
to be his chief mediating angel
just like Enoch became the Metatron.
Interestingly, Jehovah Witnesses maintained this very Christology. I
mean, they identified the angel as being Michael
whose name means who is like God.
And at one point, Paul even seemed to
refer,
to Christ as an angel of God,
Although the meaning here is a bit disputed.
That's in Galatians 414.
According to a scholar named, Susan Garrett,
okay, this verse is a striking example of
what she calls angelomorphic
Christology.
She states that while commentators usually assume that
Paul was speaking hypothetically,
she says, there is good reason to suspect
that Paul is claiming
that the Galatians received him as God's angel,
namely Jesus Christ. In other words, Paul is
making the startling claim that when he first
preached his gospel to the Galatian,
he was united with Jesus Christ whom Paul
identifies
as God's chief angel,
end quote. And along the same lines,
Margaret Barker
argues that the that that pre Christian,
Palestinian Judaism was not totally monotheistic.
And her book is called The Great Angel,
A Study of Israel's Second God, which is
beloved to Mormons, by the way. The Mormons
love this book. I really love it. And
this traces the roots of trinitarianism
to Jewish beliefs in a high God, El
Elyon, and subordinate yet divine
sons of God, Bene El Elyon, whom she
identifies as the angels. And she goes on
to say that one of these son of
God angels incarnated into human flesh as Jesus
of Nazareth,
who who became the savior of the world.
Now did Paul actually believe that Jesus was
an incarnated divine angel? Probably not. I mean,
I don't agree with Barker on these points,
but pre Christian Jewish slippage
into a type of polytheism
as a result of Hellenistic influence did occur.
And angelomorphic Christology
among Jews was a reality. And we see
that in the Enochic tradition.
So 2nd temple Judaism and beyond included angel
worship,
first at the popular level and then at
the level of the,
scholars.
And it still does today, by the way,
in the mystical tradition. That's a different subject,
but this continues, the the these practices even
today. Continues even today. I mean, Kabbalistic Judaism,
you'll find this
everywhere. Now now now here's something that's crucial.
I don't think there's any doubt that the
messianism of the writers of the new testament
gospels, their beliefs about the messiah,
there's almost no doubt that they were influenced
in some way by Enochic tradition. Okay? Enochic
apocalypticism.
Okay? I mean, there are many scholars who
wrote about the scope and extent of this,
significance, but it's undeniably there. So Mark, for
example and I don't believe that Mark believed
that first Enoch was canonical or absolutely correct
because he couldn't. Again, in first Enoch, Enoch
is explicitly identified as the son of man
and messiah.
However, Mark continued in this sort of pre
Christian trajectory
of Hellenistic Judaism
of conflating the Messiah with the son of
man
and then exaggerating his status to the point
of assigning divinity to him. The difference is
that Mark believed that Jesus was that divine
messianic son of man, not Enoch. Or to
say it another way, Mark had picked up
the trend
of divinizing
Daniel, son of man, among certain Hellenized Jews.
And we see this divinization in 1st Enoch
where the son of man is described as
an enthroned
preexisting divine judge and Messiah. And it's possible
that Mark himself was a Hellenized Jew just
as Paul was a Hellenized Jew. Although Robert
Eisenman has a very interesting
take on this. He says that
Paul was a Herodian,
which means he was sort of half Arab,
half Greek or something, And that Paul was
the the spouter of lies mentioned in the
Dead Sea Scrolls while James was the teacher
of righteousness, but that's a different topic. Perhaps
you can ask doctor Collins about his thoughts
on that, but Robert Eisman, really interesting, believes
that the the Quran community was the initial
Christian,
community, and they're talking about James and Paul.
I've never found that very terribly persuasive, but
yeah. Yeah.
And now according to Mark,
at at at Jesus' trial in Mark 14,
we're told that initially,
okay, the chief priest and council
could not find any evidence of a capital
crime. But when Jesus was asked directly by
the high priest
if he was the Messiah, Jesus quoted from
Daniel 7.
He said, I am and you shall see
the son of man seated at the right
hand of power and coming in the clouds
of heaven.
Okay? And we're told by Mark that at
these words,
okay, the high priest rented his garments and
declared Jesus' speech blasphemous.
I think that this tells us that according
to Mark's Christology,
Daniel, son of man, was viewed by Mark
as a divine being.
Okay? He's not the God, but he is
a divine being. He is the eschatological
divine judge of humanity.
Hence, the charge of blasphemy.
I think this is the overarching
point that Mark is making, even though the
dialogue
between the high priest and Jesus
in the Markan narrative is very incoherent.
It's actually a very confusing passage.
So I don't believe that Mark means to
say
that Jesus committed blasphemy
because he claimed to be the Messiah in
a very strictly Jewish sense. That is a
Messiah who is a human being in all
respects.
So despite the fact that the mark in
Jesus
displays the lowest Christology of all the 4
gospels, he is nonetheless more than a mere
man
in Mark's gospel. This is my position. Okay?
Jesus is divine in some way
in all 4 gospels. I'll give you some
examples. For example, in Mark 2,
when Jesus says to the paralyzed man, your
sins are forgiven,
a group of rabbis standing nearby say that
this is blasphemy because only God can forgive
sins. Now critics of the gospels will point
out, well, what the rabbis
must have meant
if this story is even true. I mean,
if this story is even true, it's a
big if. What the rabbis must have meant
is that only priests can forgive sins
on behalf of God and that Jesus committed
blasphemy for not claiming for for for claiming
a priestly
role, not a divine role. But I I
of Matthew's parallel when he uses that very
passage. I mean, he actually then has the
crowds
glorifying God who had given such authority
to men. So it is understood in in
that delegated sense rather than divine sense, ironically,
in Matthew, which has a higher Christology,
than Mark. Yeah. That's, that is ironic. But
but but I I think I think what
Mark intended to say was that Jesus was
the divine son of God who can directly
forgive sins. Why do I say this? Because
right after this, the mark in Jesus says,
I want you to know that the son
of man has authority on earth
to to forgive sins.
So Mark believed that the son of man
was a divine being. This was trending during
his time and Mark picked up on that
trend. It was trending among Hellenistic Jews.
Or later in the same chapter,
the mark in Jesus makes an amendment
to the law of Moses.
Now, again, a critic might say, well, as
a messenger of God, Jesus has the authority
to do that. The Quran even says that
Jesus made certain amendments, right, to the law
of Moses. He was a prophet and a
messenger. But again, I don't think that's what
Mark intends to say.
How do we know? It's because the mark
in Jesus again relates his actions to the
son of man. He says the son of
man is lord even of the Sabbath. You
know, he doesn't say, you know, as a
prophet of Israel, I can do these things
by God's permission or something like that. Also,
you know, why does David call the messiah
my my lord if he's David's son, etcetera.
Mark is making a point that Jesus is
the divine son of God.
And and also according to n David Litwa,
he has a book called Iesus Deus. I
think it was his dissertation.
He says that the transfiguration
of Jesus
in Mark 9 is exactly the same sequence
of events
in the transfigurations
of Demeter and Dionysus and others. You know,
the flesh becomes light, people get scared, and
then the transfigured person is called son of
God or is worshiped, exact correspondence.
Okay?
So going back to the trial of Jesus.
For Mark,
when Jesus says that he is the Messiah
and that the high priest will see the
son of
man. I think essentially what the mark in
Jesus is saying to the high priest is,
I am the divine being who will judge
you when I return to set up my
kingdom.
You see, Mark had first Enoch in mind
because that's what Enoch will do according to
first Enoch, 45, 46, 51.
But for Mark, Enoch is not the divine
judge, son of man, and Messiah. It's Jesus.
Now, did the autograph author of Daniel believe
that the son of man was divine? The
original author of Daniel?
It seems clear to me that the original
author of 1st Enoch did. For him, the
son of man was a divine judge who
shares God's throne. In fact, the name Metatron,
right,
is a combination, probably a combination of the
Greek preposition
meta, meaning after or behind, and thronos, throne.
So something like a throne behind the throne
of God. Right? But what about Daniel? Did
Daniel believe the son of man was divine?
It seems highly unlikely,
given the fact that Daniel was written during
a time of Jewish theological purification and revolt
against polytheism,
idolatry, and the general influence
of Hellenism.
So Daniel, as a Jewish prophet, would never
accept the divinity,
so called divinity of the son of man.
Now, as Muslims,
we believe that Jesus, a peace be upon
him, was a true prophet of God. Okay?
The Quran tells us that Jesus would never
command people to worship him and he certainly
would never make false prophecies.
And Jews agree with us. I mean, if
Jesus was a nabi emet, right, a nabi
sadiq, a true prophet,
he would call to the worship of the
one true God, not himself,
because God is not a man.
And he would be truthful in speech. Right?
A true prophet doesn't need miracles and he
doesn't need to be Jewish or an Israelite.
Like Noah and Lot and Job and Abraham,
the friend of God, not Jewish. And then
like Nathan, Nehemiah, Obadiah, no miracles other than
foretelling the future.
So the mark in Jesus
the mark in Jesus, not what we believe
was the true Jesus,
the mark in Jesus makes false prophecies.
Okay? And as Muslims, we cannot
attribute these words
to the prophet Jesus, peace be upon him.
Mark put false words into the mouth of
Jesus
in order to support his Christology,
really his eschatology.
That's what I believe. And these words are
false because they have been falsified.
They are demonstrably false, and there's no good
way around about Mark 13
talking about here Mark 1313.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm gonna I'll I'll
get to these verses. And I think no
no amount of apologetical
gymnastics or textual smoothing over
can really save these statements. I mean, if
I told you in the year 2000
that the world would end in 2015,
okay, and then 2015 comes and goes, then
then I'm a false prophet.
I mean, there was an early 19th century
American preacher named William Miller who predicted that
the second coming of Jesus,
right, the
would occur
on October 22, 18 44. Right? It was
called the great disappointment. I mean, people were
totally invested in this movement. Lives were shattered.
Right? I mean, Joseph Smith junior, right,
the the Mormon prophet who died in 1844,
coincidentally, the same year is the great disappointment.
He he said in 18 32
that Independence, Missouri will be the new Jerusalem
and a new temple to the Lord will
be built there in this generation, meaning his
own generation.
Okay? He said, quoting the biblical Jesus, this
generation will not pass away
until a house shall be built unto the
lord. This is recorded in doctrines and covenants,
section 84. This is a Mormon source.
Okay? The early Mormon leaders immediately after Smith,
they said that this phrase, this generation, meant
that people who were alive in 18/32
would see this temple.
So this sounds familiar. There are some standing
here who shall not taste death until they
see the son of man coming with great
power. A 190 years later, no temple, no
new Jerusalem.
So what happened? Oh, it is there, but
it's spiritual.
It's invisible.
We can't see it. Right?
So this is the result of cognitive dissonance.
You know, when one's beliefs are suddenly falsified,
one way of mitigating that tension is to
radically
reinterpret things. So what does Deuteronomy
18/22
say?
If a prophet speaks in the name of
the Lord, but his prediction did not happen
or come true, you will know that the
Lord did not give that message.
Okay? That prophet has spoken without my authority
and need not be feared.
Okay? The mark in Jesus says that his
generation
will witness the coming of the Son of
Man with his great kingdom. And even CS
Lewis said that Jesus may have made a
mistake here, as you know. I mean, Mark
was writing around 70, okay? It was the
time
of the first Jewish war with the Romans,
Okay? It was it was 40 years after
the departure of Jesus. That's one generation.
The temple had just been destroyed or was
about to be destroyed. So the writing is
sort of on the wall, as they say.
Mark believed that it was the end of
the world. He believed that the second coming
of Jesus was imminent
as did Paul. You know, it's now or
never and they were both wrong. They're falsified.
Now, according to the dominant view of historians,
and I agree with them broadly,
the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish prophet
who was a herald of someone who was
to come after him, whom Jesus calls the
son of man. Right? So the earliest sources
of the gospel, so like q and Mark
and m and l, they all portray Jesus
in this way, as an apocalypticist.
John, not so much. John is later. In
the synoptics, Jesus predicts that the son of
man will come and bring judgment upon the
evil forces
of the earth, and people need to repent
in order to prepare for this. This message
is consistently found in Mark, q, and m
and l. Personally, I'm I'm convinced
that this is the right answer historically. Right?
There I mean, there were historians who said
that Jesus was a Pharisee. He was an
Essene. He was a protozelot, and he was
a he was an Essene and a protozelot,
a Sadducee, etcetera, etcetera. What I find most
compelling historically
is this now dominant position that Jesus was
an apocalyptic
Jewish prophet
who was the herald of someone who was
to come after him whom Jesus called the
Son of Man. I think that's right.
A Christian will say, but Jesus calls himself
the Son of Man.
And yes, he does. And this is what
the writers
of the gospels
put into the mouth of Jesus. I mean,
I believe they wanted Jesus
to be the son of man.
The gospel writers even have Jesus say that
the scriptures
predicted that the son of man must suffer
and be killed.
And there's nothing in Daniel 7 or the
entire Tanakh,
I. E. The scriptures for that matter, that
mention that the son of man will be
killed unless you're making some very, very dubious
intertextual assumptions.
I mean, the real Jesus would not make
such an error, but the Pauline influenced gospel
writers certainly would and they did.
And,
you see it was Paul who first wrote
that Christ died
for our sins according to the scriptures
and that he was buried and rose again
on the 3rd day according to the scriptures.
What scriptures?
According to Paul,
Paul did not inherit this teaching from human
witnesses, right? He said that this information was
directly revealed to him by someone he believed
was the resurrected Christ. And Paul calls it
my gospel. And Paul's gospel significantly
influenced the gospel writers. And, of course, Paul's
enemies are clearly Jamesonian and Nazarenes. I mean,
we talked about that tension in the previous,
podcast.
However,
the gospel writers simply could not ignore
the multiple early and independent traditions
in which Jesus spoke of the son of
man as a future leader
who will bring judgment upon the earth, someone
clearly other than himself. And these statements pass
the criterion of dissimilarity.
In other words, it seems unlikely
that the gospel writers and early Pauline Christians
would have made them up. Therefore, historians give
them a bit more weight. But look what
Mark did in his gospel. So Mark essentially
made Jesus into a false prophet. Okay? And
that's what's known as a nave shaker. Right?
So remember something important.
Most historians
basically agree
the words of the Quran,
okay, the words of the Quran
were written down,
or sorry, the words of the Quran were
first uttered by the historical Muhammad, peace be
upon him, whether you believe he was a
prophet or not. Okay? He is the earthly
source
of the Quran. This is the dominant position.
The Quran is written down and constantly recited
and constantly memorized during the Prophet's life. And
you can't pray without the Quran. And Muslims
in Medina were praying 5 times a day,
you know, day after day, week after week,
month after month, year after year,
around 6
50, so like less than 20 years after
the prophet's death,
the the codex committee of Uthman,
which consisted,
entirely of eyewitnesses to the prophet, standardized the
text based upon the dominant reading of the
prophet himself. I mean, doctor Sean Anthony says
that the earliest extant
manuscripts of the Quran are dated to before
656
of the common era. Of course, the Birmingham
manuscript can be dated to the Meccan period
of the prophet's life. Jesus, however, peace be
upon him,
saw none of the 4 gospels
that claimed to preserve his words. There's a
big, big difference. So whether you believe the
gospels were inspired scripture or not, Jesus never
saw any of them. This is a fact.
In other words,
the prophet Muhammad knew what al Fatiha was.
He knew what
al Baqarah was. He knew what Ayatul Kursi
was. He knew what Surah Yaseen was. But
if you took a time machine back to
Nazareth
in 30 of the common era
and asked Jesus to recite Matthew chapter 23,
he would have no idea what you were
talking about. So when it comes to words
attributed to Jesus after his departure,
we must be discerning and critical
as some of the actual words are there
and some are clearly not. We have to
separate the wheat from the chaff. And so
the criteria of historiography,
become useful.
You know, the gospel writers,
they wrote these words in faraway lands,
lands far away from the events that they
were describing and wrote them in the language
that was most likely foreign
to Jesus and his disciples. I mean, I
said earlier that both the biblical Jesus and
biblical Paul made false prophecies. This is true.
But the difference between these two men, Jesus
and Paul, is that we have the actual
words of Paul that he wrote or dictated
during his life.
Okay? The gospels, on the other hand, were
written after Jesus' departure.
So this is really important. In other words,
Paul was wrong
according to
Paul, but Jesus was wrong according to Mark
and Matthew.
That's a big difference. Okay?
I mean, Paul believed in an imminent second
coming,
not because he got that from Jesus. It's
easy to make that error because chronologically,
Jesus came before Paul.
But in reality, the mark in Jesus got
this from Paul because the mark in Jesus
was after Paul. Now let's go back to
Jesus'
trial in Mark.
So so at his trial, okay,
the Mark in Jesus
misunderstood the context of Daniel 7 and then
pronounced the false prophecy.
And when I say the mark in Jesus,
again, I mean mark, not the true Jesus.
You know, the mark in Jesus said to
the high priest, and you shall see.
Right? Obsesthe. That's the Greek verb, second person
plural. You all shall see the son of
man seated at the right hand of power
and coming in the clouds. Did this happen?
Did Caiaphas
and the council
see the second coming of Jesus on the
clouds?
And were they judged by Jesus in the
new kingdom?
The answer is no.
Daniel saw the son of man coming in
the clouds, meaning he saw the coming of
an exalted nation. The clouds are symbolical.
They they represent praise and God's protection.
Why would Caiaphas see the clouds?
That's what Daniel saw in his vision. I
mean, imagine Caiaphas on his deathbed. I don't
know when Caiaphas died, but imagine that he
lived long enough to see the destruction of
the temple. Now imagine that Caiaphas, you know,
somehow got a copy of the gospel of
Mark in his hands and he reads it.
And he reads that Jesus said to him
that he would see the son of man
coming in the clouds, he would be totally
confused. Now now Luke, writing 20 years after
Mark,
edited Mark in a very telling way.
Right? So Luke actually wrote in his prologue,
as you know, that his gospel is better
than the other gospels, more accurate. In Luke,
the Luke in Jesus response to the council
like this. He says, but from now on,
the son of man will be seated, right,
kathemonos,
passive verb, will be seated in the place
of power at God's right hand. At first
glance, this sounds like what the mark in
Jesus said. But line up the Greek of
both texts and you'll notice that they're completely
different
for a very specific purpose.
No more and you and you all shall
see.
No more coming in the clouds of heaven.
Luke changes Mark and basically tells us
that this, you know, sitting of the son
of man at God's right hand is something
unseen,
and therefore, no longer falsifiable.
Alright? It's going to happen in the spiritual
realm. Again, cognitive dissonance. It's the spiritual kingdom
of God as if Daniel was talking about
some spiritual or invisible nation.
Right?
Luther's
I just wanna say,
for any of you who's wondering what, doctor
Ali Atay is saying here, are these speculations
of an individual? No. This is, for my
own reading, this is very standard analysis of
the way,
failed eschatology
is then made
spiritualized. It's made present, and it's the future
Imminence goes. You see exactly as you say
in Luke. You see it in John, of
course, even more so. So this is very
standard stuff that, doctor Ali Atay is giving
us here. It's not, it's not just your
view, but it it's something that, many Christian
scholars
also have observed in their honesty and in
integrity, wanting to give us, an objective analysis
of what's going on in the text. So
Right. I wanted just to stress that. People
wondering, is this just some idiosyncratic theory? It's
not.
Believe me. It's it's main very mainstream.
Yeah. Yeah. And and Luke, you know, Luke
does
does further damage control in in 17, 20,
and 21. So Luke says that one day,
the Pharisees asked Jesus,
when will the kingdom of God come? And
Jesus replied, the kingdom of God can't be
detected by visible
signs.
You won't be able to say here it
is or it's over there for the kingdom
of God is already among you. Right? Or
in another translation, the better translation
because it says, that the kingdom of God
is within you, right? It's invisible,
right? Now interestingly,
there is a Christian eschatology called preterism.
No. Okay? And I discovered this
quite recently. So preterism teaches
that Jesus, as a supposed son of man,
did come during that generation
because this is the plain and obvious reading
of the text. They admit this.
But he came in the form of judgment
upon the Jews by destroying the temple in
70 CE.
So this is also called the 70 AD
doctrine,
that all prophecy of the bible was fulfilled
by 70 CE, the second coming, the judgment,
the kingdom of God on earth, all by
70. Okay?
And so even the book of Revelation is
not talking about the future, but events prior
to 70 CE. Everything ends at 70 CE.
So preterism is a way of saving
the biblical Jesus from making false prophecies. And
the but that's that's the point of this
whole doctrine is precisely to save Jesus some
error. And Yeah. Yeah. That's It's a much
more honest and accurate way of understanding the
plain text of the gospels. But their conclusions,
I think, are totally out of whack. So
according to them, the second coming of Jesus
and the kingdom of God brought by Jesus,
the supposed son of man, is essentially
the destruction of Jerusalem, the humiliation of the
Jewish people, and the worship of Jesus as
a God, which is total idolatry.
This is the great thing that Daniel saw.
This is just impossible.
And you know what's ironic? And I I
really want the viewers to think about this.
And And if you're a Christian, you're probably
not gonna like this, but I think I
need you to hear it.
And I say this with all due respect.
Please don't be offended.
Islam is the vindicator of Jesus. Okay? And
I mentioned this before and and but here's
a slightly different angle to it. In the
new testament, Jesus makes false prophecies and he
commits blasphemy.
Islam defends Jesus against these charges.
Islam.
Islam and only Islam.
Jesus, as a true prophet,
knew the correct context of Daniel 7. He
knew that the coming of the son of
man in the clouds in the vision of
Daniel
meant a great nation of holy people
led by a great leader
would arise during the Roman period
who would bring deen, that's the word used
by Daniel, judgment or the true religion upon
the earth. As Isaiah said, Mishpat de'aretz
deen al haqfil'ard.
This nation is something real.
It's something tangible. It's discernible. It's not invisible.
It's not, you know, phantasmic.
And Jesus, the real Jesus,
was talking about the son of man in
Daniel, the one whose nation would destroy the
4th beast, not someone who would join the
4th beast
and not the mythical and highly contrived and
blasphemous,
divine son of man of first Enoch that
Mark appropriated.
I don't believe that Jesus said that his
generation
would live to see the son of man.
This is Mark ad libbing to something
that Jesus did say because Mark interpreted his
times to be the end of time. This
is Mark's error that even Luke tried to
correct or smooth over a little bit, as
we saw. And by the time you get
to John, in 90 to a 100 CE,
you have what's known as realized eschatology,
which is a spin on the eschatology of
Paul, Mark, and Matthew. Because by 90 CE,
it was painfully obvious that the plain meanings
of Paul, Mark, and Matthew had been falsified.
The the Johann and Jesus tells Pilate, the
Roman governor, you don't have to worry about
me. My kingdom is not of this world.
Right?
So atheist historians
atheist historians, they often ridicule
the biblical Jesus for making false prophecies.
I mean, they make a mockery of him.
They compare him to William Miller
and CT Russell, the founder of the Jehovah's
Witnesses. They compare him to Harold Camping and
his so called rapture day.
They call it the failed apocalypse of Jesus
when they're laughing at the biblical Jesus.
And Jews reject the biblical Jesus because
not only did he make false prophecies,
but he also made divine claims, especially in
John. And so according to Deuteronomy
13 18,
Jews are justified in rejecting him.
Right? It is the message of Muhammad
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam that exonerates Jesus, peace be
upon him, of these disturbing charges. According to
the Quran,
Jesus never claimed divinity.
And he predicted the coming of Ahmad, the
prophet Muhammad, who came 600 years later,
well beyond the generation of Jesus. In other
words, the Quran is saying that Jesus did
not expect that things would come to an
end so quickly.
So while I believe that Jesus was still
an apocalypsist, and I'll explain that,
there was a future aspect to his teaching.
But let me restate things again for the
sake of clarity. So most modern scholars, okay,
using the criteria of modern historiography,
conclude
that historically speaking,
Jesus of Nazareth was most likely some sort
of apocalyptic Jewish prophet, a human being in
all respects
who taught a more liberal interpretation of the
law, not the end of the law, who
cleansed the temple and thought of himself as
being the herald
of the powerful son of man
and the coming kingdom of God on earth.
Historians will also say that Jesus
predicted
that the coming kingdom would manifest
during his own generation
and that he probably thought that he would
be declared king of that kingdom
at some point. So the son of man
would bring the nation or kingdom
and that Jesus, at some point, would be
king or ruler over that nation. So we
should take note that this is not the
true Jesus. This is only the dominant
historical construction. Okay? Yet this modern historical construction,
although we as Muslims don't totally agree with
it, it's much closer
to the Jesus of Islam
than the Jesus of Christian confession. And here's
an important point.
Where our Christology
does clash
with the general consensus of historians,
like the event of the crucifixion,
we are prepared to present
textual evidence
and use logic and reason
to robustly
demonstrate the claims of the Quran. For instance,
I would argue
that the subtext behind Paul's letters to the
Galatians and Corinthians
could plausibly reveal that the Jamesonian Nazarenes in
Jerusalem,
that is to say the actual disciples of
Jesus and his family members,
denied that Jesus was crucified.
I would argue that even the gospels are
making statements that are meant to counter other
Christian claims
regarding the alleged crucifixion. I mean, I can
make that argument. I won't do it here.
This is not the occasion.
So I I wanna say a few more
things about the historical Jesus
because this is so important.
And and I'm obviously not saying that the
Jesus of Albert Schweitzer or Bart Ehrman or
Dale Martin or Dale Allison is the true
Jesus. They don't even say that. Right? The
secular historian admits that he does not have
access to the true Jesus because Jesus lived
in the past. We have no access to
the past.
The the best That's a really important that's
a really important point, though, by the way.
It's something that Dale Marsden brilliantly makes. Barthemon
also makes the same point. Historians don't have
access to the past. It's gone. What they
what they're doing is reconstructing,
their understanding based on what evidence there is.
Yeah. And it's they they say it's only
probable. At most, it's only probable. Yeah. They
don't have access to the real Jesus is
beyond them.
And the chronicles
claims to disclose the real Jesus.
Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah, that's the best
a historian can do is construct a Jesus
based on, like you said, probability. Right? And
this is what this is what Ehrman said
when you interviewed him as well. You know?
So how does how does this work? So
Jesus was probably not born of a virgin.
Therefore, historically,
he was not born of a virgin. Jesus
probably did not perform miracles.
Therefore, historically, he did not perform miracles. So
secular history is a game of probability.
So secular historians certainly don't affirm miracles because
miracles are by definition
the least probable occurrences. That doesn't mean that
miracles are impossible. So we as Muslims do
believe in miracles
because we believe in God who is all
powerful
And God can cause what theologians call,
khawarikal adat, which are
breaches or really rare occurrences of customary physics.
So, yes, miracles are the least probable events,
so we shouldn't expect secular historians to affirm
miracles.
Right? I mean, they're looking at the world
through a monocle. We're using bifocals. Right? It's
like secular scientists
are the same way. Here's what the universe
is and how it is,
how it happened,
but but why the latter is only answered
by wahi, by revelation.
Historians also say that Jesus was probably crucified.
I mean, many Jews were. You know, what's
the difference? Paul and the 4 gospel writers
say he was. Therefore, historically, he was crucified.
And here, the Christian apologist gets really happy.
Right? And they say, see you Muslims, it's
a historical fact that Jesus was crucified and
even your beloved and honorary Sheikh, Bart Ehrman,
says so. Right?
Well, what that means is that it is
simply more probable that he was crucified based
upon the existing evidence.
Ehrman will also say that it is not
a historical fact
that Jesus was resurrected
or that, according to Matthew,
that the
and have debated the likes of their My
view would be that the crown's claim about
the about the crucifixion is impossible to falsify.
The crown's claim is that it appeared to
them that he had you know, it's not
possible to falsify it. I don't know. So
it's it remains logically impregnable.
Whether or not it happened, of course, is
a matter of faith, but,
it it possibly can be disproved, the crown's
own statement, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And
and and I would go on to say
that the the resurrection is not historical. You
know? If you wanna believe that, that's fine.
It's your faith conviction. And it's not like
Christians believe this without evidence. They have some
historical arguments that they will trot out, but
it can't be a historical fact because the
preponderance of evidence will never will never swing
in the direction of a miracle. And maybe
it happened, but it's not scientific history. It's
sacred history. And, you know, the the historicity
of the crucifixion is is actually a separate
topic that I would love to address on
a future podcast.
But for now, I'll just say this. I'll
I'll just say this and then I'll move
on. Yep. I mean, look, there are there
are several bonafide historians
who who believe that Jesus never even existed,
let alone crucified.
I mean, these are called mythicists. They they
don't even affirm some minimalist
historical kernel
from which the mythical Jesus emerged. For them,
Jesus is myth from a to z, like
Romulus or Zeus. And there are now at
least 2 peer reviewed books that argue that
Jesus was a myth who was euhemerized.
So and and they point out that
the first undisputed
non Christian mention of Jesus occurs 81 years
after the end of Jesus' life. That's Pliny
the younger. I mean, antiquities 18 of Josephus
Is that Josephus
mentioned? Yeah. No. It's plainly the younger. So
Josephus antiquities 18 is probably a total fabrication.
So the first the first undisputed It's interpolated.
I I thought that there was a con
a a an original stuff where he mentions
him in passing, and that was interpolated later,
mentioning the Messiah and everything else. But I
I don't get into that now. I
Some some scholars we have about you know,
some of it is interpolated. Some say the
whole thing's a fabrication, but the first totally
undisputed non non Christian mention is 81 years
later. And you compare this with the first
non Muslim mention of the name Mohammed.
Right? The chronicles of of of of Thomas
the presbyter,
that was in 6:40. That's 8 years after
the prophet's death. Although there's something called the
China Ya'kobi,
which is a document written by a Christian
in North Africa. And he said that, you
know, this army is coming in. They have
an Arab, a prophet. That was in 634.
So that's 2 years after the prophet. Although
it doesn't name him. It doesn't say Muhammad.
It says the prophet of the of the
Saracens.
Now most historians disagree with myth mythicism,
and I disagree with it. Yeah. But but
let's not pretend that questioning the historicity of
Jesus' crucifixion
is some crazy wild eyed revisionist nonsense. I
mean, there were Christian groups
that denied the crucifixion in the 1st in
the 1st century of Christianity.
Yeah. So the question is
Exactly. The the question is why didn't they
just read the new testament? I mean, 4
out of 4 gospels say that he was
crucified, so does Paul. Of course, the answer
is there was no new testament.
So there's a good historical argument to be
made for denying the crucifixion, and I will
make that argument. It's just that the preponderance
of evidence doesn't seem to favor it at
least right now, but who knows? You know,
archaeology
has been sort of the the the bugbear
of trinitarian Christianity.
And, you know, let's wait and see what
they find out. But I will address the
the issue in the future inshallah. I think
people will be very surprised.
So crucifixion aside,
the dominant historical perspective regarding Jesus
is closer to the Islamic position
than to the Christian position and this is
very obvious.
Again, in a nutshell, Jesus was a human
being, not divine, never claimed to be divine,
an apocalyptic prophet who
predicted
that the son of man would come and
establish his nation on earth and that the
son of man would come during his own
generation. Now as a Muslim, I agree with
everything there except the last statement,
but I can tell you why I disagree.
Historically,
I believe Mark was influenced by Paul and
was convinced
that that the Jewish war with the Romans
was basically the end. Now Christians disagree with
almost everything I just said,
All of those points.
Now, as believers in God and prophecy and
miracles and the hereafter,
both Muslims and Christians
will also affirm sacred history and the theological
criteria, okay, that goes with that. So, okay,
so there's secular history,
and its criteria and then there's sacred history
and its criteria. So what are those? So
I mentioned them earlier.
Basically, that a potential prophet
must affirm the fundamental theology
of the Abrahamic prophets
and is true in speech. He doesn't need
miracles
nor does he need to be a certain
race or tribe.
Okay? Christians believe that the text of the
gospels, the New Testament
is authentic and accurate.
Okay?
Therefore, the biblical Jesus fails here on both
accounts.
So there is no reason at all to
believe in the words of the biblical Jesus
if you believe
the text is sound.
If you believe the text is sound, then
the biblical Jesus makes false prophecies
and committed blasphemy.
Now, with respect to the temple cleansing,
this was also something that early Pauline Christians
would not have wanted to say about Jesus.
I mean, for them, you know, Jesus was
a meek and gentle lamb
led to the slaughter, not some violent cleanser
of the temple who was turning over tables
and chairs, whipping people with with a cord.
No. This was during Passover week, so thousands
of people either saw or heard about him
doing this. It's in all four gospels. It's
mentioned twice in John's gospel. So so Jesus
probably did cleanse the temple. However, I believe
that Jesus' action was meant to be a
prophecy
to all Israel that due to their widespread
rejection of their prophet messiah, Jesus son of
Mary, as well as their murder of James,
perhaps, Jesus' brother in 62
of the common era, and just their general
disunity and disbelief,
God would soon punish them by allowing the
Romans
to destroy their temple. The destruction of the
temple was inevitable. So that's the bad news.
However, the good news, and that's what gospel
means, the good news, eventually, the bar in
ash,
the son of man, will come with a
law like Moses.
He's a prophet like Moses. And with spiritual
and military power
and true monotheism will spread from the east
to the west,
at a pace that continues to baffle historians
even today. Right? For as lightning flashes in
the east and shines into the west, so
it will be when the son of man
comes, says the Matthean Jesus.
The message of the son of man
will validate the major theological and legal principles
of the Jewish people. It'll also correct and
refine aspects as well. It will offer protection
to the Jewish people,
as people in the book, Jews who are
living under the oppressive dominion of the 4th
beast, it will exonerate the Jews of the
Christian charge of Christicide,
let alone deicide, like killing God. So so
in reality, a greater good will come about
for the Jewish people. You know, the the
Bar and Nash
will complete the mission of Israel
and take the light of El Echad, of
Towhid, to the nations.
In the meantime, the Jews need to repent
and prepare for the son of man, And
when he comes, they must follow him. Okay?
When he comes with spirit and power and
true oneness
of God, the Jews must follow him irrespective
of his race. He is the anti type
of Cyrus who was chosen by God according
to God's will. Okay. So I believe that
Jesus' action of of cleansing the temple was
a foreshadowing of what would occur in 70
CE. You know, it's kinda like Jeremiah
walking around Jerusalem wearing an ox yoke to
foreshadow captivity in Babylon.
And I think that many Jews in Jerusalem
probably misunderstood
or misinterpreted
Jesus' action
as Jesus somehow claiming to be the king
of Israel, a king Messiah,
or made this claim for him because they
hated him for expelling them. I mean, Mark
says in 11/18 that it was because of
this event
that the scribes and Pharisees, that the scribes
and chief priests first sought to kill him.
I mean, John disagrees with that.
And I think this misattribution
that Jesus is claiming to be the king
of the Jews
eventually reached the ears of the Roman authorities,
which may have caused them to get involved.
How involved, it's impossible to know for sure.
But I think that
I believe that God then intervened and raptured
Jesus in some way after some alleged crucifixion
event because Jesus has a role to play
in the true end times, but we can
get into that,
later. But so so in my view, Jesus
was apocalyptic.
Okay? He was an apocalyptic prophet. He was
the ultimate,
that is to say, the final Israelite
prophet, but I don't believe that he taught
that the kingdom of god nor the son
of man would come within his generation.
I believe that he predicted the the destruction
of the temple within his generation,
and I believe that the gospel writers incorrectly
assumed
that the destruction of the temple somehow necessitated
the immediate coming of the son of man
and his nation and that the son of
man was Jesus in his second coming. This
was Paul's influence.
Okay? In the gospels, Jesus says that the
son of man will usher in the kingdom
but it also seems that Jesus expected himself
to rule that kingdom. How can this be?
Well, in Islamic eschatology, it works perfectly fine.
When Jesus returns towards the end of time,
he will be the leader of the Muslim
Ummah, the Ummah of Mohammed, the son of
man.
The nation established by the son of man
will be led by Jesus.
Now, let's
I'm actually coming down towards
the end here.
Let's return to Daniel 71314
and
try to identify the son of man here.
So again, Daniel 713 says, I saw in
the night visions and behold, one like a
son of man came in the clouds of
heaven and came to the ancient of days
and they brought him near before him.
Okay? Now, while describing the night journey and
ascension of the prophet Muhammad,
the Quran says, Thumma dana fatadallafakanaqabaqawsani
o adina
fa'awha ilaabdihima'awha
Basically, that the prophet was brought near to
God.
The prophet then experienced
the beatific vision of God, much like Daniel
did. And then Daniel says, and he was
given authority and honor and rulership
so that all people, all nations and languages
should obey him. His authority is an everlasting
authority,
which shall not come to an end. Does
the Quran describe the prophet Muhammad along these
lines? And the answer is yes.
Right? So 7158 of the Quran,
Say, O humanity, I am the messenger of
God sent to you all,
619
of the Quran.
He is the one who sent his messenger
with true guidance
and the religion of truth, making it prevail
over all others,
even to the dismay of the polytheists.
21107,
we did not send you except as a
mercy unto all the worlds.
Chapter 4 verse 65,
they have no real faith until they make
you a judge in all of their affairs.
944,
we exalted and raised your remembrance.
3363,
God and his angels send blessings of peace
upon the prophet. Now look at Mark 838,
which historians single out specifically as indicating
that Jesus and the son of man are
clearly 2 different people. So in in Mark
838, the mark in Jesus says, whosoever shall
be ashamed of me
and of my words, right, tus emus logos,
my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,
of him shall also the Son of Man
be ashamed when he comes
in the glory of his father
with the holy angels.
So father here in the context of Judaism
means lord. Right? Isaiah
says,
right? You are the lord our father,
our father who art in heaven, etcetera.
Is is Mark 838
exactly what
same But it's probably something close to what
he said. The son of man will restore
the words that is the true teachings of
Jesus. The son of man will come in
his lord's glory,
or doxa or praise with angels, God and
his angels,
bless and praise the son of man. This
is what the Quran said. He is the
most praised son of man, the most praised
human being. He's Muhammad. He's Ahmad. I mean,
that's literally what his name means, the most
praised. Humanity praises him. The angels praise him.
God praises him. Right? The Quran further says,
the famous verse 616,
Waifqaala'isabdulumalayam
yaa bani israelaini russullallahuilaykum
musaddiqalimabayniya
deaminatoura wubashilabi
rasoolinyaadimin
baadiismu'ahmad
And remember the 616, and remember when Jesus,
the son of Mary, said,
oh, Israelites, I am the messenger of God
sent to you,
confirming the teachings of the Israelite prophets and
giving you good news, that's the gospel, and
to evangelize you of a messenger to come
after me whose name is most praised.
K. This verse is very close to the
dominant position of historians. Jesus was a son
of Mary, a human being, not divine, who
preached the Israelites. He confirmed the major principles
of Jewish law and theology and he predicted
a messenger of God who would come after
him whose name will be most praised. This
is the son of man
with his nation.
In my opinion, this is not referring to
the paraclete of John's gospel.
Many modern Muslims, they say that, Oh, here,
Ahmad means paraclete.
The Paraclete in John, is John's way, I
think, of mitigating
a sort of no show second coming of
Jesus in the flesh in his generation.
As I said,
it's a so called realized
eschatology.
So the gospel of John
turns the future son of man into the
paraclete, the holy spirit. And so he did
come. Like in John 2022,
it says Jesus breathed on the disciples and
said, receive ye the Holy Spirit. So I
think it's a total fabrication. I mean, if
Jesus spoke of a paraclete, then the synoptics
should have mentioned it. You know, the paraclete
passages are like the I am statements for
me. If Jesus truly said, I and the
father are 1 and before Abraham was I
am, it is utterly inconceivable
that the Synoptics did not record any of
these. So no, in 616 of the Quran,
the human messenger that Jesus predicted
was the one whose name was exalted by
God and his angels.
This is Muhammad, the son of man, the
quintessential
ibn Adam al insan and kamil.
Now the Quran further says,
it says, this is
in chapter 48, I believe verse 29. It
says, Muhammadur Rasool Allah waladina ma'ahu ashiddawwalakuffarruhamaobaynahum
tarahumrukaansujadan
yabtahhunah
Says Muhammad is a messenger of God and
those who are with him are fierce against
unbelievers
and compassionate among each other. I think it's
4829.
You will see them bowing and prostrating,
seeking grace from God and his pleasure. Their
faces contain the traces of their prostrations.
That is their similitude in the Torah.
Okay. Now, Torah here, right, does not simply
mean Pentateuch
or Chumash.
Right?
It means the entire instruction or teachings
given to the children of Israel. In fact,
the rabbis
refer to the entire Tanakh and Talmud
as Torah min Hashemayim,
the teaching from the heavens. That's the Tanakh
and the Talmud together. So that's the broadest
sense of the word Torah. So according to
this Koranic verse, there is a similitude
in the Jewish scriptures
that describes the prophet Mohammed and his nation
as being devout,
saintly, and obedient to God.
What is this similitude? The son of man
coming in the clouds, the saintly nation that
is both fierce and compassionate
that Daniel saw was symbolized as a great
man coming in the clouds.
The Quran continues, same verse.
And their similitude in the gospel
is like a seed
which sends forth its shoot and strengthens it
and rises firm upon its stock,
delighting the sowers.
That he may enrage the disbelievers.
Jesus says in Mark 4,
and there are parallel passages
in Matthew and Luke, to what shall I
like in the kingdom of God? The Malkutha
d'Alaha in Aramaic.
What parable should I use to illustrate it?
Okay? So he's talking about the kingdom of
God on earth that the son of man
will bring. He says, It is like a
mustard seed planted in the ground. It is
the smallest of all seeds, but when it
is sown, it grows up and becomes greater
than the herbs and shoots out large branches
so the birds of the air may may
nest under its shade. Did Jesus say these
words exactly? Probably not, but something very close
to it. The Matthean Jesus gives us the
parable of the tares. This is from M,
special Matthean material.
Matthew 13/24,
the kingdom of heaven Again, this really means
a godly kingdom on earth in this world.
This
is the meaning of kingdom of heaven. The
kingdom of heaven is like a man who
sowed a good seed, is like a man.
Right? Karbar enesh,
is like a man. That's the son of
man. The kingdom of heaven is like a
man who sowed a good seed in his
field.
A few verses later, the Methion Jesus says,
The field is the world. The good seed
is the sons of the kingdom. And the
sower of the good seed is the son
of man.
Again, the similitude of Muhammad and his companions
in the gospel is like a seed according
to the Quran.
Okay. Now, the last thing that we have
to do is
identify
the little horn
and the 1335
year riddle,
how we can sort of deal with that
in a bit
in a more coherent sort of way. And,
again, my conclusions do not work perfectly, but
but nothing works perfectly when when you're looking
at Daniel.
And and Jews and Christians have done no
better with these highly enigmatic
texts. I mean, getting the math to work
somehow with all of the details has been
extremely difficult, especially with Daniel 9 that we'll
look at in the future, Inshallah. Now in
my view, Rashi's identification of the son of
man as being the Davidic Messiah is incorrect.
I mentioned this earlier.
Just as Jews would point out to Christians
concerning Isaiah 53,
the word messiah does not appear anywhere in
the text of Daniel 7, okay?
However, I agree with Rashi's identifications of the
4 beasts.
However, again, his identification of Titus
as being the little horn is quite tenuous
for several reasons. Firstly,
Titus was
the 10th Roman emperor, not Vespasian,
meaning that the little horn should have followed
Titus.
You might say, well, close enough. Well, okay.
Well, secondly, while Titus did in fact lead
the attack on the 2nd temple
and parade, you know, the temple's menorah and
the law of the Jews
through the streets of Rome upon his return
according to Josephus, there's no clear indication that
he spoke the highly
emphasized great things
that Daniel really emphasized.
Now with respect to Titus'
changing of the sacred times and laws, Rashi
said that Titus only intended to do this.
Also, it's not clear at all how Jewish
exigits explain
how the Jews,
after living under the control of the little
horn for 3 and a half times,
defeated the little horn and took control of
his dominion. This was supposed to happen
under the Davidic Messiah no less. If this
is yet to happen, then the Jewish exegesis
becomes untenable.
As already stated, Rome is gone and David's
line is lost.
My contention is that there are 2 candidates
that fit the description of the little horn
better than Titus. Our first candidate is none
other than Constantine.
So Constantine's conversion
was the beginning of the Christianization of the
Roman Empire. Okay? He followed 10 Roman kings
or emperors. How? Well, the number 10 in
biblical numerology symbolizes
strength, power, and perfection. Maybe this is how
Daniel's using it.
That is to say the little horn will
appear well into the Roman period when Rome
is firmly established as a world superpower for
generations. I mean, it's speculative, but but possible.
But what does it mean that Constantine's rise
will uproot 3 other horns
or 3 other kings? So in 293
of the common era, the emperor Diocletian
instituted the tetrarchy, right, the rule of 4.
So the empire was divided into 4 districts,
right? And ruled by 2 Augusti and 2
Caesars. And 3 12 of the common era,
these were Maximinus
dasa, Licinius,
Maxentius, and Constantine,
right? By 324,
after a series of civil wars, including,
the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the battle
of Mardia, the battle of
Chrysopolis,
Constantine emerged as the sole ruler of Rome.
He uprooted
3 kings.
He uprooted 3 horns. And Constantine built a
new Rome in Byzantium.
Now, we should notice
that in addition to opposing the people of
God,
the main crime of the little horn in
Daniel 7 was speaking great things. That is
like so highly influential
or highly consequential words of blasphemy.
Okay? There isn't even a hint in Daniel
7 that the little horn would destroy the
temple.
Okay? That you can say something like that
about Daniel 9, but not 7. But what
were these highly influential words of blasphemy?
I think the answer is a Nicene Creed.
Okay? It was indeed Constantine who presided over
the infamous Council of Nicaea in 325
where Jesus the Nazarene
and monotheistic
prophet Messiah
was officially declared to be God, right? The
creed states that Christ was begotten from the
father uniquely. This is from the essence of
the father, God from God,
light from light, true light from true true
God from true God, begotten not made, co
substantial with the father through whom all things
in heaven and earth became. The one who
for the sake of us human beings and
for the sake of our salvation,
came down and became flesh and dwelled in
man, suffered, rose on the 3rd day, ascended
into heaven and will come to judge the
living and the dead. I mean, absolute kufur
from start to finish. I'm just being honest.
I'm not trying to be disrespectful.
The creed further explicitly anathematized the Arians,
who seem to have maintained that although Christ
was the best of creation, he was nonetheless
creation. I think it was one of Cappadocian
fathers, maybe Gregory of Nyssa, who famously described
Arius' theology as Jewish as if that's a
bad thing. I mean, the creed further
stated, and those who say there was once
when he was not
and before being begotten, he was not and
out of non being he became
or he is from another essence or substance
or the son of God is created, changeable,
alterable.
These, the universal and apostolic church
deems accursed. So these are grievous These anathema,
anathematized. Anathematized. That's the Greek Yeah. So these
are grievous and highly influential words of Constantine's
counsel,
and and they're the greatest blight upon monotheism
in the history of the world probably. And
what makes them especially odious is the fact
that they attribute deity
to the Jewish Messiah
whose teachings in reality epitomized
the radical oneness and uniqueness of God and
who himself was a humble servant of his
Lord. In the words of the Quran, the
messiah would never disdain to be a servant
of God. Okay? Constantine's creed demolished the Shema
of the Torah, which is the most explicit
and celebrated
expression of true monotheism in the entire Tanakh.
Of course, by adopting pagan holidays,
such as the birthday of the Sol Invictus
on December 25th into the empire,
Constantine changed the sacred times and laws just
as Daniel predicted. Constantine enacted legislation
recommended by the church.
Okay? In both Palestine
as well as the lands of the Roman
Empire,
Constantine's great words persecuted
both Jewish and Christian monotheists,
the saints of the most high, the katishay
Elyonin,
for nearly 309
years. So Nicea was in 325.
Okay? In 326,
Constantine entered Jerusalem
and persecuted the monotheist, the Moahidun,
in the holy city.
So if we take the Aramaic word edan,
meaning time, to be 100 years, okay,
This could mean that the the the armies
of the son of man would arrive sometime
during the last half a time period. Sometime
within the final 50 years of time,
times, and half a time. And they did
in 634 CE, the nation of the son
of man, Muhammad,
arrived
armed with both the weapons of war and
the penetrating
truths of the word of God, Abrahamic monotheism,
and the holy city of Jerusalem was liberated
by the armies of the son of man
from the tyranny of the 4th beast. Now
the two shortcomings of this are number 1,
the math isn't perfect.
And number 2, the Roman Empire did not
die definitively
in 634 of the common era despite losing
Jerusalem.
However, you could argue, like, by the 6
seventies, right, the Muslim armies had conquered many
of the lands
previously controlled by the Byzantines, and so the
oneness of God was becoming a global phenomenon.
I mean, the turning point of power, one
could argue,
was the 6 70s. And that is exactly
three and a half centuries after Constantine
rose to power. Time, times,
and half a time.
Okay? And this
leads me to my second candidate for the
office of the Danielic little horn,
and I'll end with this,
and that's Hadrian.
Okay? So Hadrian was the 14th emperor. So
the 10th was Titus And then you have
3, Domitian, Nerva and Trajan, then Hadrian.
So the imagery of the little horn supplanting
the 3 could mean something like he was,
I don't know, worse than the previous 3.
I don't know exactly.
Now now from a Jewish perspective,
I remember the Israelites were the Muslim ummah
during that time. Right? And Jerusalem was the
monotheistic capital of the world. From a Jewish
perspective,
Hadrian
basically represents
everything that Israel condemns,
everything that divine revelation condemns.
So first of all, Hadrian was an open,
you know, sexual deviant. He had a 16
year old boyfriend
named,
Antinous
who died suddenly and Hadrian
named a city after him, Antinopolis, and declared
him to be worshiped as god, as a
god. I mean, there were temples
all over the empire. And statues to him
all around the empire. Everywhere.
Worship
throughout the Roman Empire. It's pretty serious. Boyfriend
that was being worshipped.
Yeah. I mean, statues for 100 of years.
I mean and he also rebuilt the Pantheon
in Rome, which was, like the temple to
all the gods. So he was a mushlik
par excellence. They would say, a pagan, an
idolater, absolutely anti tohid, Right? And Hadrian was
also obsessed with, you know, Greek culture and
philosophy even though he was a Roman. He
he would travel to Alexandria, which was the
intellectual capital
of the world. He would engage in debates
with philosophers.
And interestingly, Hadrian had something in common with
Antiochus IV, whom I believe is described
in Daniel 9. So the little horn of
Daniel 7 is Hadrian and the perpetrator of
the abomination of desolation in Daniel 9 seems
to be Antiochus 4.
What do these 2 horrible men have in
common? They both massacred thousands of believers
and the one true God, and they both
defiled the sacred grounds of the Jewish temple
by building a temple to Zeus. So they
both committed the abomination
of desolation. And in the synoptics, Jesus prophesizes
this future abomination of desolation done by Hadrian,
I believe.
And this is something the biblical Jesus gets
right.
But Hadrian was worse
than Antiochus. He was worse than Titus. Hadrian
killed nearly 600,000
innocent Jews, according to the Roman historian,
Cassius Dio. And he turned the holy city
of Jerusalem into a pagan city, which he
renamed Aelia Capitolina
after his clan alias and after his god,
Jupiter Capitolinas.
And then he had
the Sanhedrin dissolved. He banned the Jews from
Jerusalem.
He banned circumcision and Jewish holidays and scripture
study. All of these things were outlawed. I
mean, this guy was demonic.
Now, if we take this, the last I'll
mention, if we take the opinion of Sadia,
right, that time,
times,
and half a time
of Daniel 7 is the same
as the 1335
year period mentioned in Daniel 12, then something
very interesting happens here.
So remember, Daniel 7 predicts that the little
horn of the 4th beast will oppress the
people of God for this period of time,
1335
years.
At the end of this period, the 4th
beast will be definitively
vanquished
by the nation of the son of man.
So Hadrian came into power in 1 18
of the common era, and the Roman Empire
fell
on May 29,
14 53
when Ottoman forces took the city of Constantine
called Constantinople.
Thus, the persecution of Tawhid, the persecution of
Abrahamic monotheism
initiated
like none other by Hadrian,
the little horn of the 4th beast came
to an end exactly
1335
years later. So 1453-118
is 1335
on the dot.
Okay? So
that's that's an interesting coincidence if it is
a coincidence.
Wow. So that's my that's my spiel.
That's your spiel. Well, that's, an extraordinary tour
de force, as they say.
Doctor, Alietai, thank you, so much. And,
and considerably shorter than, I was expecting. So
I don't know.
That that's that's fine. Well, thank you very
much. There's a wealth, as always, a wealth
of information, and you did allude several times
to the possibility of talking about
the crucifixion, the electric crucifixion, Daniel 9, and
and so on. And there's,
hopefully, further, opportunities to do that, certainly working
on blogging theology. So,
maybe we'll, conclude it there. And,
finally, thank you very much indeed
to Doctor. Ali Atay for your
extraordinary scholarship, your polymath,
encyclopedic,
knowledge,
of the Abrahamic faiths, something,
I know, our viewers, really appreciate because they
tell me so repeatedly.
They they appreciate all that you do, sir.
So, thank you very much. Is there anything
you wanted to say in conclusion, or are
we Just just thank you, Paul. Thank you
very much.
May Allah reward
you. And also to the viewers, subscribe to
this channel. Again, best channel on YouTube and
and and I I mean that. And may
may Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala bless all of
you. Thank you so much. Alhamdulillah. Thank you
very much. Until next time.