New Iranian Movie on Muslim Jesus and how to research in Qu'ran

(A duplicate of this post is in my Yahoo blog page for that audience.)

There's a new movie upcoming which is made in Iran about the Muslim Jesus. Actually, it's about the SHI'ITE version of Jesus in the Qu'ran, which is quite different from other Muslim sects. Frankly, the Shi'ites can't read Qu'ran very well on this topic.

Qu'ran doesn't really say Christ didn't die on the Cross. The Arabic hedges. Further, it doesn't name any replacement -- Shi'ites say Judas was hung on the cross instead, which history proves incorrect. But then, history proves the claim He didn't die on the Cross incorrect, too: 1) his enemies gloated over his death on the cross, 2) Roman chroniclers wanting to please Rome talked about it (i.e., Tacitus and Josephus), and 3) a BIZILLION wanna-be-bible 'gospels' of gossipy lies came out in wake of His Death, all of them wanting to cash in on the fame of his death. The more popular of these gossipy stories are called "Apochrypha", in theology. (Roughly akin to all the videos of Saddam Hussain's execution on Youtube, or any other popular real event. They didn't have video cameras or cellphones in the 1st century AD, so people wrote stories, rather than make pictures.)

So now, it becomes important to know the Qu'ran itself, if you're gonna watch the movie once it comes out.

• So go to faithfreedom.org 's forums and look up the following threads inside the
• "Quran and Hadith" topic:
• "86",
• "96",
• "Jesus is God says Koran". Passim in each one, you'll find this topic of whether Jesus died on the Cross discussed and exegeted (rightly AND wrongly), from the Arabic by both sides (pro-Islam and against).

You can evaluate the text itself even if you don't know Arabic well, by using the following online sources. If you already know Bible Hebrew it will be very fast and easy to learn the Arabic, slow to learn the idioms. (Arabic generally changes the Hebrew "m" to "n", and has the same roots). Here are online sources:

• openburhan.net . What you do, is select sura at left, then view the verse at right. You can click on the Arabic word, or on the Arabic below the translation. Or, click on the verse number to see all the variations in translation (use the literal one if you want to learn Arabic, for it follows the Arabic word order, even though the literal translation is often not the best one). Unfortunately, openburhan's Arabic-English translation is not helpful, EXCEPT that it sticks to root meanings: which means it doesn't really translate the word for you, but shows its SEMANTIC SPREAD. That's critical to languages like Hebrew and Arabic, as each word will be used in WORDPLAY, so semantic spread is a main literary feature of both Bible and Qu'ran. You cannot interpret either one accurately, absent knowing the semantic spread in the words used.
  
• At openburhan you can download a free Qu'ran Viewer which has Arabic, transliteration, and Yusuf Ali translation. I recommend it because although its search engine is limited to one word at a time, you get a READABLE Arabic alphabet (it's hard to read the letters, else), and you get all the occurrences of the word in Yusuf Ali (who tends to translate the same Arabic words the same way throughout). Download the AskSam version of Koran (only in English translation) if you want to do multiple-word searches. I also have Alim 4-in-1 Qu'ran software which has the hadiths (not always sahih), but it has a terrible search engine. Online Bible's Koran didn't work in my XP Professional Service Pack 2, so I can't recommend it yet.
  
• Project RootSearch at islamcity. Project Rootsearch demands you know the roots of the Arabic word (which are almost always the same as the Hebrew roots), and you can specify a verse to see that root. Then, pick the last three CONSONANTS (or last two) in the word, and you can access the classical Arabic dictionary there. You need CLASSICAL (not modern) Arabic to properly analyze the verse. Lane's dictionary is used, even though he's not Arab, so the Muslims respect it.
  
• Arabic Transliteration Search Engine at islamcity. This is really helpful when working with openburhan, and speeds learning of both Arabic and how to read the transliteration. The Search engine will bring up all occurrences of the same transliterated string. It also recognizes sound-alikes, which is helpful as transliteration is not standardized. What's MOST helpful about it, is that it ALSO will bring up all MORPHOLOGIES of the same words. That's the closest thing to what BibleWorks does, and you really need to see the morphologies. Speeds learning. I love this search engine, some folks really worked hard on it.
  
• University of Southern California's Muslim Compendium of Texts is run by Muslims. I've never been able to get its search engine to work, but supposedly the full Qu'ran and all the respected hadiths are there, plus the 'official' position on Islamic issues by 'official' Muslims. Frankly its misconception #2 is alone enough to make anyone DISbelieve in Islam, and itself is a kind of shirk (worst thing you can do in Islam, put anyone on par with God), so to be a Muslim you must be an apostate, lol. But you evaluate that for yourself.
  

After you do the research above, you'll see how cagey the Qu'ran itself really is about the nature and Deity of Christ, about His Death on the cross, etc. Since at the time Muhammed wrote the Qu'ran (no, he was not illiterate, Qu'ran dispels that myth too) the history about Christ had been out for 600 years, obviously anything in Qu'ran contradicting that history is a flat lie. Today's revisionists are trying to do the same thing, but you have 600 years! of people acting on the history of His Death, Burial and Resurrection so you know He really lived and people fought over Him. So duh -- this is a real person, and Qu'ran itself in the Arabic doesn't actually DENY the Bible, and says itself, that it's an UPDATE on the Bible (which is not true, but that claim is a claim that the Bible is valid).

Look: lots of myths are in Christianity which are not in Bible (i.e., Bible NEVER says there was a star in Bethlehem, as covered in Part IVa of Thinking series). So you'd expect that there would be a lot of myths in Islam, too. This idea of Christ not dying on the Cross is one of them. Enjoy the movie once it comes out. If there are Youtube videos made of it, I'll put them in my Youtube page, accessible from my homepage at http://www.geocities.com/brainout1/index.html -- just click on the "Jump to" drop down menu to go there.