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Originally Posted by torquemada It is ironic that the evangelical community thinks it proper to blacken Islam and Mohammed. It can be shown that Islam is an outgrowth of Ebonite Christianity, the tradition which came from the earliest Christians around James of Jerusalem, the brother of Jesus. Since the Christian churches have done their best to ignore the earliest Christians and James, it is amusing to note that therefore Islam probably comes closer to the earliest Christian beliefs than any current Christian church. An easy way to get in touch with this material is to read Hans-Joachim Schoeps' book JEWISH CHRISTIANITY. Of course Islamists won't like this. They think that God or Gabriel dictated to Mohammed the truth about everything. They would not like to be thought of as plagiarizers of the Jewish Christians. But it is clear that Islam is essentially a Jewish-Arabian version of biblical belief.

The theologians had simply taken on a new metaphysical ballast that was too heavy for them, as they lurched anew into the Apollinarian, Nestorian and Monophysite controversies. We can perhaps understand how easy it was for Mohammed to blow the whistle on the whole confusing game, with the simple, uncompromising assertion that God is One.—Theodosius: the empire at bay (or via: amazon.co.uk) / Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell, p. 50

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Originally Posted by torquemada it was indeed the excesses of the Greek theologians and their confusions which led to what I call "semitic revenge," the creation of Islam. Islam criticized Christianity because it had compromised the Unity of God and it criticized the Jews because they claimed God only for themselves. Islam is a universalized Judaism.

How infinitely less absurd Christianity would have been if it had only listened to the Judaizing Anti-trinitarianism (which was suppressed form the 4th century on, since the Council of Nicaea); how much more it could have had of Christ! For all the work of purifying Christianity is nothing other than a de-hallowing of the Holy Spirit, a throwing out of what this pernicious pagan has brought in, a smoothing out of the Trinity, of those three dreadful creases which had been introduced into the unity of Jahve by paganism. It is a return to better things in Gnosticism, Arianism, Unitarianism, a return to the unity of Jahve, to prophetic Judaism.... If Christianity is to become what it wants to be, it must renounce the desire to know anything that pure Judaism in Christ neither knows nor wishes to know: it must renounce symbols, dogmas, articles of faith, liturgy, worship; it must want to know nothing of creation, the Fall, redemption and justification, heaven and hell, the incarnation of God, the Three Persons of the Godhead, the single Personality of God; it must not hold on to a single item of religion's superstition. If Christianity is to come about, Christ must be the Master, revealing to the heathen that they are but men (Ps. 9:21).—Brunner, Our Christ, p. 373-4.