In answer to the video "The Significance of Jesus' Resurrection"
Many of the Prophets the Israelites were sent to were rejected, killed and opposed Matt23:37,Acts7 Jesus being one of them Jn8:37. He explained this wicked trend through The Parable of the Tenants Matt21:33-45 and foresaw their destruction and
"that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit".This powerful statement was meant at shutting their constant boasting of their lineage and choseness. He continued this way until the hatred and arrogance of the Jewish elite made him select a group of apostles from among his few followers to be his helpers in his mission. Jesus sensed unbelief in his group, this prompted him to select a smaller group from among them
5:111,61:14,3:52"But when Isa perceived unbelief on their part, he said: "Who are my helper to Allah?" The disciples said: "We are helpers of Allah: We believe in Allah and be (our) witness that we are submitting ones".This is a very important observation if one considers the depiction made in the NT of Jesus' disciples, they were the first to desert him in adversity and hardly understood any of his teachings. It is a fact that very few Israelites, to whom he was sent and whom he preached for, believed in him during his ministry Acts1:13-16. Throughout Jesus' ministry Allah defeated his enemies' conspiracies to allow him the fullfilment of his mission. Whether from the moment his remarkable prophetic experience began while still an infant, until he attained the peak of his physical maturity toward the end of his ministry, he was in Allah's protection
3:46,5:110"and when I withheld the children of Israel from you when you came to them with clear arguments".The term kahl refers to a middle aged man whose hair is beginning to turn gray. It is used for what is believed to be the ideal physical age of a man, defined as anywhere between 30 and 50 years. The scholars of Christianity since very early times have given all sorts of ages for Jesus' lifespan, from 33 years to 50 years. This is mainly due to the many difficult and inconsistent historical data present in the Gospels.
When his time finally came and the transmission of his message fulfilled, Allah saved him from the hands of his enemies by lifting him up. Jesus was not sent on a suicide mission and neither did he want to purposefully die as a human offering, something God explicitly abhors in both the HB, which he upheld to the letter as well as his early followers after him, and the Quran.
According to Islam, Jesus therefore succeeded 100% in conveying the message he was meant to convey. His mission was deep, intricate, far reaching and much more elaborate, pertinent, consistent and beautiful than what is attributed to him by the Greek authors. By relating the essential landmarks of his prophetic mission as well as the basis of the message he was commanded to faithfully transmit, saved his honor both physically and spiritually. It clears him of all slanders by his contemporaries and those that followed, as well as from the false teachings attributed to him that corrupted his message. It is ironic that Christians see Jesus in Islam as a failed prophet or fabricated figure, when it is they that depict him as such; from his humiliating ending at the hands of his opponents, to his teachings that were misappropriated and assimilated into the religion of a pagan entity, or the fabricated events in his life that dont stand to historical scrutiny, and the theological implications of his mission that are irreconcilable with the HB which is supposed to foreshadow Christianity.
This painstaking, sketchy endeavour is the result of Christians attempting to reconstruct Jesus as a heroic figure after his death, just as pagans in those times deified their dead emperors or called the living ruler "son of god", creating events that did not happen; Jesus' pre-existence, his co-creation of the universe with God, his miraculous birth, miracles, arrest, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, post-resurrection appearances, and reunion with God his Father were all the inventions of story tellers trying to restrospectively fit Jesus within both the Jewish messianic tradition and the writers' own greco-roman religious background. Islam, the religion of all prophets is a religion of success. Unlike the meaningless, devastating, disgraceful, helpless death of the invented central figure of Christianity, neither Muhammad nor Jesus were failures.
Whether Jesus' message survived now or not is irrelevant. The success of a prophet's mission of being the faithful conveyor of his God's message is independant of whether his addressees hearken his calls, mend their ways, preserve his message or attempt to kill him. All prophets attest to this reality. Prophets are not sent to cause forceful spiritual reform. Their duty is only to deliver the warnings and glad tidings, as here stated by the prophet Hud
11:57"But if you turn back, then indeed I have delivered to you the message with which I have been sent to you, and my Lord will bring another people in your place, and you cannot do Him any harm; surely my Lord is the Preserver of all things".It is then up to the people themselves to hearken the calls and act accordingly. If they do it is for their own benefit, if not it is their own loss. Both outcomes have no bearing on the truthfulness of a prophet or the accomplishment of his mission.
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