Texts of Islam

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: Jesus The Son of Mary: Some Additions of Narrations About The Messiah, Jesus (PUH)

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This is a collection of Islamic hadith (narrations) about Jesus, drawn from Shia tradition and attributed to three of the Shia Imams — Al-Sâdiq, Al-Bâqir, and Al-Ridhâ. The text presents Jesus as a prophet whose miracles (healing, resurrection, multiplication of wealth) are consistently framed as acts performed only "by the permission of God," firmly subordinating him within Islamic monotheism rather than granting him independent divine status. Its content ranges from brief theological exchanges — Satan's temptation on a mountain, an infant Jesus interpreting the Arabic alphabet as divine allegory — to a lengthy moral parable in which Jesus helps a poor young man win a princess, only to reveal he arranged the entire trial to test whether the young man would ultimately choose spiritual poverty over worldly kingship. A distinctive Shia inflection appears throughout: the named sources are Imams central to Shia authority, and one passage ranks Ali ibn Abi Talib above companions of both Jesus and Moses as one who "never disbelieved for one glance of time." The most philosophically pointed claim is Jesus's declaration that he could cure every illness except stupidity, which he defines not as ignorance but as self-conceit — the belief that one's own opinion is always correct and that no one else holds legitimate claims. Readers interested in how Shia Islam incorporated and reinterpreted Jesus-traditions, or in the intersection of Islamic and Christian narrative material, will find this a concentrated primary source.

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: Jesus The Son of Mary: Some Additions of Narrations About The Messiah, Jesus (PUH)

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