The Muslim Answer to The Passion of the Christ

Published Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 in Culture & Society

A director who shares the ideas of Iran’s hardline president has produced what he says is the first film giving an Islamic view of Jesus Christ, in a bid to show the “common ground” between Muslims and Christians. According to the article, Nader Talebzadeh sees his movie, “Jesus, the Spirit of God,” as an Islamic answer to Western productions like Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ,” which he praised as admirable but quite simply “wrong.” The film is also being made into a major 20-episode television series to be broadcast over state-run Iranian national television this year.

“Gibson’s film is a very good film. I mean that it is a well-crafted movie but the story is wrong — it was not like that,” Nader said, referring to two key differences: Islam sees Jesus as a prophet, not the son of God, and does not believe he was crucified.

Wheaton College scholar Nicholas Perrin respectfully refutes the Islamic film version of who Jesus is, explaining how in the film Jesus Christ is viewed merely as a prophet but not as Son of God. And as for the Iranian filmmaker’s position that Jesus Christ was never crucified? Quoting from his latest book, Lost in Transmission: What We Can and Cannot Know about the Words of Jesus (Thomas Nelson, Inc., January 2008), Nicholas Perrin provides firm evidence to suggest that the New Testament can, indeed, be trusted and that it clearly says that Jesus Christ is Son of God.

Some say Christians should not enter into theological debates between the tenants of faith between the two dominant world religious, Christianity and Islam, but Perrin disagrees, saying, “When people succumb to that temptation of ignoring challenges to their faith, they are in the end demonstrating that they are more committed to the feeling of having a lock on truth than they are to truth itself. No one should be more ready than the Christian to explore the truth; No one should be quicker to say, ‘We need to have a discussion about this.’”