James the Brother of Our Lord and Islam’s Jesus

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Over the years, I have been fascinated and followed up on the study of the history of the early church in Jerusalem, before the Romans razed the city. The work of people like Professors James Tabor (in North Carolina) and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Robert Eisenmmann and even Bart Ehrmann. And, as such, the story of James, the brother of Jesus (SAW) and the dynasty—as James Tabor calls it—that headed up the church in Jerusalem.

And further study of the Jerusalem Church led by James reveals how it really did follow Jesus the way Muslims today understand him. and have always felt that there was a “Christianity” that predated or was an alternative to Pauline Christianity. Here’s a video distilling James Tabor’s thought on the issue. He points out that while Muslims reject all the Pauline affirmations about Jesus, there is little about the view of Jesus represented by what he calls The Jesus Dynasty, that conflicts with Islam’s perception of Jesus. He comes to the conclusion that the Christianity that we know from the Q Source (the words of Jesus himself, as distilled by modern scholars from the New Testament in its current form); the Epistle of James (which is in the New Testament); and the Didache (about the earliest manuscript of church rules and principles that archaeology has turned up) and other early sources represents a version of the Jesus faith that can unite Jews, Christians and Muslims:

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