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Jesus v Muhammad
By Alan Hood | July 31, 2007
Comparing the lives of two people who were integral to two religious groups with the largest and most volatile followers is not an easy task. The lives of these two people were not chronicled while they were alive if in fact they were alive at all. We must rely on the text of these two religious organizations that may have had ulterior motives when the chronicles were written. I will begin with the life of Jesus whose birth makes the zero year of the calendar we follow today, or maybe it doesn’t because of some discrepancies in the tale or the math. I will then chronicle the life of the last prophet of the Islamic religion, Muhammad or Mohammed as our syllabus would suggest. I find the spelling different in many places but most often I see Muhammad so I will go with that.
Jesus was born to a Jew Named Mary who was a virgin at the time of conception, setting up the whole divine conception theory held so dearly by Christians. Some chapters of the Bible state that the birth of Jesus took place in the town of Bethlehem while other chapters don’t begin the addressing Jesus until he was already an adult. Jesus was said to have grown up in the small town of Nazareth where he most likely training to become a carpenter like his “father” Joseph. According to the Bible when Jesus was a young boy of just 12 years he wondered off from his parents while they are in Jerusalem and goes to a temple to discuss religion. When his parents find him he says “Didn’t you know I would be in my father’s house?” Little else is know of the life of Jesus until he was approximately 30 years old when his first act as a as a minister is to be baptized by John the Baptist. It is also believed that when Jesus is baptized it marks the moment when Jesus goes from human to divine. Jesus begins his ministry with the followers of John the Baptist and he selected 12 of them to be his disciples. Two of Jesus’ disciples Mathew and John are also authors of the Bible. Jesus began his ministry by working miracles for all of his followers to see, including things like healing the sick, walking on water, and tuning water into wine. As Jesus’ popularity grew among the local towns people so did the anger of the current occupiers of Israel the Romans. The Romans felt threatened by Jesus because he claimed he was the Messiah who would liberate the Jews for the rule of the Romans. The Jewish leadership at the time also felt angered by Jesus and his interpretations of Jewish law and the fact that he spoke outwardly about his own divinity. And then we come to the end, the day before Jesus was executed for blasphemy he gathered his disciples for a Last Supper where they shared bread and wine and Jesus told them of the end and that one of them would betray him. The next day Judas Iscariot led the Romans to Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, fulfilling the prophecy. Jesus was then found guilty by a Jewish priest and handed over to the Romans for execution. Jesus was crucified in front of his mother and a few female disciples and suffered on his cross for six hours before crying out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Muhammad was born in the town of Mecca but his father died before he was born so the beginning of his life was spent with only his mother. When Muhammad was only five or six years old his mother took him on a journey to visit relatives and his father’s grave in the town of Yathrib. During the return trip his mother fell ill and died very quickly. Muhammad’s nurse then took him to live with his paternal grandfather who was an important man in the town of Mecca. This was also to be a very short stay for Muhammad, as his grandfather died just 2 short years later. Muhammad was then placed in the care of his uncle who was a man of very modest means. Muhammad was forced to make his own way by working as a shepherd, and later accompanied caravans to trade centers for his uncle. While doing business for his uncle the merchants recognized him as a person who cold be trusted and nicknamed him El-Amin. When Muhammad was in his twenties he went to work for his distant cousin who was a wealthy merchant in Mecca, and 15 years his senior. After Muhammad impressed the woman with his abilities, she proposed marriage and the two were wed. Muhammad was uneasy with the way his life and the lives of the people were going so he started to make long trips to a mountain cave where he would meditate. During many of these meditation sessions Muhammad was given the words of god and wrote them down in what is now the Qur’an. When Muhammad took his message to the people he gathered a modest group of followers and also the anger of the Quraysh, Mecca’s dominant tribe. The Quraysh refused to trade with Muhammad and his followers to the point that they were all starving. So they left Mecca and went to Yathrib, now known as Medina. When he arrived in Yathrib he was employed as a moderator for the townspeople who had endured a long civil war. Muhammad was successful and stayed there for 6 years, building the first Muslim community. But Muhammad still had problems with the people of Mecca and the fought 3 battles over the next 4 years, until a treaty was signed giving the Muslims freedom to move around Arabia as they saw fit. After the treaty was broken Muhammad and his followers decided to take Mecca once and for all. When they Marched into Mecca they had no resistance and Muslims have controlled it ever since. Muhammad returned to live in Medina until the final years of his life when he made one last pilgrimage to Mecca just 3 months before his death.
After the deaths of both men their movements took on very different forms, Jesus was seen as the savior of all Christians and he died for their sins. Muhammad is seen as the last prophet of God and is not really worshiped like he was a God. Muhammad made it known that Muslims were to worship only one god and nothing else, where Jesus claimed to be the son of God and felt that he should also be worshipped. People will believe some pretty incredible things and the deaths of both men have brought about extremist action from both religious groups in their names. Muhammad had a greater impact on his followers while he was alive than Jesus did. Muhammad brought his people their Qur’an and gave them all of the secrets to their religion. Jesus walked around performing miracles and claimed to be divine, and then when he supposedly made the ultimate sacrifice for his people he cried out that he had been forsaken. Jesus’ message is being carried out better today than when he was alive because people believe the tale better now than they did from him. Muhammad’s message while better when he was alive is still being carried out by many everyday because he isn’t the colonization of the religion, God is.
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