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The people and faith clearly could think metaphorically or as God as a transcendent being before Islam.
@MaiqTheTrue is probably right in the sense that if you wanted to pick up the canonical texts and not run into an embodied God you'd fail with the OT and NT (assuming Jesus is God). They have a lot of language about an embodied God - just as they have more transcendent visions - because the books were written over a long time and don't agree with each other or even themselves.
Islam as a late redaction that emphasizes strict monotheism can cut out a lot of the embarrassing references (when the author even knows about them). It polemicizes against the other religions because of this too. Qur'an 5:75 rejects the deification of Jesus and Mary (why Mary is added is a question for another day) by pointing out that they can't be deities because they "both ate food".
This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e.
Well, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that re: the Christian texts.
Jesus is treated as a taking on of flesh by a God who is not material. And the old testament has things like Jeremiah's, "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" among others. I'd be inclined to argue the deliberate lack of depiction in the design of the ark etc. is gesturing towards God's immateriality as well, which would make it hard to argue that it's some late development. The New Testament, at least, you can't pass off as a contradiction between different authors. It's just a more complex position.
Yeah, Jesus' eating food isn't a problem; the contrary position would be worse, in light of Hebrews 2:14 and 17.
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Interestingly, Islamic doctrine contains quite a bit of self-contradictory falsehood about what Christians believe. In Mohammed’s time there were definitely Christians in Arabia, so it’s unclear why.
Not just Christians. There's the claim that Jews think Ezra is the son of God that people have puzzled over since.
The likely reason is that the author didn't have the Bible in front of him but was going off oral tradition (which explains the stew of both canonical sources and apocryphal ones, and straight up legendary elements or how the Qur'an could conflate two Marys). Reynolds also suggests that the author is weighing in on theological debates nearby churches had, things could have become extra garbled by disagreement by the time they got to the author.
Mohammed’s time is too late for massive theological disagreement- my main point was ‘the Quran is definitely not dictated by the angel Gabriel, and probably not double checked either(like the kind of book an illiterate man makes up)’.
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There are a lot of Christians in America today, but there are a ton of false beliefs (both by non Christians and even sometimes by other Christians) about what they believe. I'm not too surprised that sort of thing happened in Mohammed's time as well.
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