The Christological Impasse: The Messiahship of Jesus in Christian-Muslim Dialogue

There is a contention between Islam and Christianity. The contention is the Messianic Claim of Jesus Christ. The term “Messiah” comes from the Hebrew Mashiach, which conveys the meaning “Anointed One”. The Christian perspective is that Jesus is the promised Messiah (in Greek, the word is Christos, hence “Jesus Christ). Islam holds Jesus in high esteem but rejects His Messiahship in the Christian sense. This research aims to educate, rather than persuade, by focusing on factual explanations rather than theological debates that can exacerbate the already strained relationships between adherents of the two religions. Existing studies comparing the Islamic and Christian views of Jesus have mainly focused on the sources of information about Jesus in both religions, with little attention paid to a comparative analysis of the Messiahship of Jesus Christ from both the Bible and the Quran. A historical approach was employed in this work, incorporating painstaking comparison, and various books were consulted. The analyzed points were then verified through careful comparison and synthesised for this work. The work revealed that Muslims’ view about Jesus is scattered throughout the Quran rather than in a cohesive narrative. According to the Holy Quran, Jesus, Isa ibn Maryam (Jesus, son of Mary), was born by God’s command to the Virgin Mary. Though Jesus is a prominent figure in the two major religions, beliefs about the nature and life events of this noble Messenger differ. The work recommends that leaders of the two religions should devise modalities through which the conflicts can be explained to each other, and then allow everyone to make decisions, using these, to bring about peaceful coexistence among adherents of these religions.