Part 2. Why two other Abrahamic Faiths did not accept Christ and spoke back
Here is a deep dive on what happened from Rome’s blame game to Abraham’s children saying “no” and diverging in faith.
Before you read this, please read part 1 of the series, if you have not already. The first part ended with a simple factual line – It was Rome that executed Jesus. The Church blamed the entire Jewish race.
Now comes the next uncomfortable question.
If Jesus is so central to the Christian salvation offer, then why do the other two Abrahamic traditions refuse to accept him in the way that Christianity demands or at least insists? Why does Judaism say a firm “no” to Christ as Messiah and son of God. And also, why does Islam honour ‘Isa’ as a mighty prophet, yet insists that calling him divine is the biggest theological mistake you can make?
This is not gossip or an outlandish story. It is the VERY hinge on which two thousand years of the variety of conflicts and misunderstanding have turned and continues to burn the middle East – a region that never seems to have known peace in its real form.
I want to separate three things here though:
- What does Judaism actually owes its allegiance to really…
- What is Islam trying to protect when it says ‘God has no son’
- How the two other Abrahamic faiths reacting to the institutional Christ that the Church exported to the world
Judaism – Loyal to a God who needs no ‘equal partner’
There is a fundamental principle of Judaism that is still often forgotten or worse, brushed under the carpet:
Jesus was a Jew. And born a Jew to Jewish parents
His disciples were Jews.
The God he prayed to is the God of Israel
The entire faith of the Jews is anchored around a sentence that every Jewish child learns at a young age: “Hear O Israel. The Lord is our God. The Lord is one.”
Very clear – ONE. Not “three-in-one.” Not “one essence in three persons.”
Just ONE.
From that uncomprimisable center, a few things follow very naturally inside Judaism.
i) No human being is ‘made’/ ‘allowed to become’ God
You can be a prophet, a sage, or even a miracle worker. But you CAN NOT blur the barrier between human and God….between the Divine and the mortal.
The moment you say a human being is literally divine, you have crossed over to a zone that Jews call as ‘avodah zarah.’ It means ‘foreign worship.’ This, to them, is not just about difference in beliefs but becomes a kind of spiritual infidelity. So, when Christianity says, “Jesus is actually God, not just a messenger,” to a Jewish ear it sounds strange and it not the same as “extra respect for a special rabbi.” That concept is alien to them.
Instead what Judaism hears, very clearly, is “You are asking me to worship a human as if he is God.” That, to a Jew, means breaking the first commandment. And the response would be, “I cannot follow you there into that zone.”
ii) The Job Description (JD) of a ‘messiah’ is not met
Judaism also has a very concrete description/expectation of what Mashiach – a messenger – is supposed to do/deliver:
Different schools may phrase it differently, but the common JD checklist looks something like this in plain language:
- Gather the scattered exiles of Israel
- Restore full peace and justice on earth
- Rebuild or re-establish the Temple presence in a proper way
- Turn hearts toward God’s law in a stable, visible way
Let us take a look around – the Jewish people are still scattered. The world is not in peace. The wolf and lamb are not exactly sharing lunch in Gaza or Wall Street. Are they?? So from a Jewish perspective, Jesus simply did not finish the assignment. Their logic is – You can call him a teacher or a messenger. But you cannot crown him as the Son of God who is God himself.
The Christian theology responds to this with their belief of the “second coming.” But Judaism hears that as moving the goalpost into a future that nobody can verify.
iii) History in the name of Christ matters
There is a third layer that rarely gets discussed directly inside those ‘polite’ interfaith panels and conferences. It is very hard for a people to accept a figure who has been used as a weapon against them for centuries. Crusaders did not scream “for abstract love and peace” when they butchered Jews and Muslims. They screamed “For Christ!!”
Inquisitors did not burn people in the name of vague spirituality. They burned them “for Christ and His Church.” For a long time in Europe, the word “Christian” in Jewish memory did not mean “a person who follows Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.” It meant “person who will not let us live in peace, and who thinks God approves the cruelty inflicted by them upon others”
So Judaism’s refusal to accept the Christ of the creeds is not only theological. It is emotional and historical. You cannot spend centuries calling someone “Christ killer” and then be surprised when they are not very excited about your Christ.
Islam – Protecting a God who needs no “son”
Islam comes later in history, but it did not start with a blank slate. The Quran steps into a world where Jewish communities and multiple Christian sects were already present. It does not pretend they never existed. It speaks to them very directly.
Muslims believe that their God, Allah, spoke again through Muhammad. In that speech, Jesus appears as ʿIsa ibn Maryam‘ – Jesus, son of Mary.
i) What Islam happily accepts about Jesus
Islam is not ‘averse’ or ‘allergic’ to Jesus as a personality. It affirms some things that even some modern Christians hesitate or avoid discussing
- Miraculous virgin birth of Mary
- Jesus’s role as al Masih, the Messiah for the Children of Israel
- His special power, by God’s permission, to heal the blind and lepers and even raise the dead
- His return before the Day of Judgment to defeat the “false messiah” and restore justice
So, on the respect scale, Islam puts Jesus very high. For them, he is one of the five great messengers, along with Noah, Abraham, Moses and Muhammad.
ii) The RED Line – Tawhid and shirk
Now comes the non negotiable – Islam’s first pillar is the shahada.
“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is God’s messenger.”
The whole weight sits on the first half – there is no god but Allah. And from that angle, all the Christian talk of “Son of God,” “only begotten Son,” “second person of the Trinity,” and “God the Son made of flesh” is not seen as some poetic devotion. It is seen and rejected as shirk.
Shirk means associating ‘partners’ with God. Giving divine status to something that is not God. It is considered as the one sin that really cuts across the grain of reality. So, when a Muslim hears “Jesus is God,” the reaction is very simple – he cannot be God because God does not beget an equal. God does not split into parts. God does not die on a cross.
You can love Jesus, honour him, follow him as a prophet. You cannot worship him. This is the stance of Islam.
iii) Islam’s self-image is of ‘repairing’ what Jews and Christians ‘broke’
To give a simple and east-to-understand metaphor, Islam sees itself as a holistic repair job on a damaged pipeline. God sends prophets to this mortal world, indeed. People hear the message of these prophets, and then over generations add their own stories, distortions and get into power games. In the process, the message gets polluted and hence the need for a new prophet to clean it up.
From that perspective, Islam says:
- Jews are right about one God and the law, but wrong to reject Jesus as Messiah and to tie God too tightly to one ethnic group.
- Christians are right to honour Jesus and speak about mercy, but wrong to promote him as a god and to multiply the inner life and Singularity of God into Father, Son and Spirit.
Prophet Muhammad is presented as the last ‘repair engineer’ or ‘course corrector’ and the Qur’an as the final corrected schematic.
So, obviously, Islam does not “accept Christ” in the Christian sense. Islam took on the ‘task’ of bringing Jesus back down from a throne they believe, he never asked for and returning him to his real place in the line of prophets.
Different Paths but the Same Refusal
Judaism and Islam come to their “NO” to Christ in different ways.
- Judaism says.
“We have a covenant with YHWH. He is one. No human is/can be God. Our original messiah has not completed his work yet. So Christ does not match our criteria, and Christian history in his name is bloody.” - Islam says.
“We affirm Jesus as Messiah and great prophet, born of a virgin and full of signs of exaltation. But God has no equal, no son, no partner. To call him God is shirk. Prophet Muhammad is the final messenger who puts that misunderstanding to rest.”
Look closely though, and you will see the shared spine. Both are guarding a very strict monotheism. Both refuse to let a human being sit on God’s throne. Both have historical scars from Christian empires that came carrying cross and sword together.
So when Christianity says, “Jesus is God, and no one comes to the Father except through him,” it is not stepping into neutral space. It is stepping straight onto the exposed nerves of two entire civilizations.
This is NOT anti-Christian or against Jesus Christ
Judaism has a comparitively minor history of blood on its hands, though on a far smaller, more local scale than Christian or Islamic empires. In the Hasmonean period, when Judea briefly had its own dynasty after the Maccabean revolt, rulers like John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus used power in recognisably imperial ways. There are also scattered episodes in late antiquity where Jewish communities, briefly favoured by a Roman emperor like Julian, attacked local churches or pagan temples, but these are exceptions in a long history where Jews were usually the vulnerable minority, not the conquering power. So yes, Judaism is not spotless. No human tradition is. But when you zoom out over millennia, the dominant pattern is not Jews trampling others in God’s name. It is Jews being trampled by larger empires that claimed to speak for the same God.
What about Islam? When the early Islamic empires exploded out of Arabia, they also carried sword and scripture together. Cities were ransacked, temples and churches were broken or converted, entire populations were taxed, displaced or absorbed under the banner of the new faith. From the Levant to Persia to North Africa, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, Hindu and other communities all have their own memory of what that felt like. Crusaders marched east screaming “Christ”, Caliphs rode out shouting “Allahu Akbar”, and ordinary people in West Asia burned in the crossfire. The problem is what happens whenever any Abrahamic empire picks up the name of God and uses it as a flag to justify expansion, erasure and revenge
However in the context of the topic in discussion, there is one thing I want to keep absolutely clean – Judaism’s resistance and Islam’s resistance are not the same as “hatred of Jesus.” Judaism’s core belief is unequivocal allegiance to their one and only God. And the latter core quarrel is with what the Church did with the divinization of a prophet and with a doctrine of God that looks, from the Quran’s point of view, like splitting the sun into three bulbs.
So, what both are saying is, “We recognize some truth in your story. But we refuse the upgrade that God turned a messenger into the Almighty like Himself and a teacher into the ONLY valid passport to Heaven.”
From here on, Part 3 of this series will turn the spotlight fully on that upgrade.
We have seen how Rome killed a Jewish teacher and the Church blamed his own people – the Jews. We have seen why Judaism and Islam refuse Christian Christology. Next, we have to ask a more surgical question.
If Jesus never once said “Worship me as God,” how did Christianity end up building an entire monopoly claim on exactly that idea?? And what happens to a world full of many other faiths when any one religion says,
“Our God is the only God. You only reach the Divine if you stamp your soul with our prophet’s name”
REAL FREEDOM! 