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Isa, the Incarnate Word, and the Traditions That Divide Over Him

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Isa, the Incarnate Word, and the Traditions That Divide Over Him

No figure is claimed by more traditions, or read more differently within them. Christianity, working out who it believed him to be, arrived at the doctrine of the incarnation: that in Jesus, God the Son assumed a human nature. The Council of Nicaea (325) declared him of one substance, homoousios, with the Father, against those who held him a creature; Chalcedon (451) defined him as one person in two natures, truly God and truly man, without confusion or division. That formula remains the mainstream Christian confession, and it is confession, not neutral fact.

Islam honours him as Isa ibn Maryam, a mighty prophet and the Messiah, born of the virgin Maryam; the Qur'an affirms the virgin birth as plainly as the Gospels do. But it is emphatic in two denials: that he is not the son of God and not divine, for God neither begets nor is begotten; and that he was not killed nor crucified, but it was made to appear so (Sura 4:157). This is the Islamic position, stated as such.

The Baha'i Faith reveres him as a Manifestation of God, one in a line that includes Abraham, Moses, Muhammad and Baha'u'llah, fully a channel of the divine, though without the incarnational claim.

Judaism, the tradition he was born and died within, does not hold Yeshua ha-Notzri to be the messiah or divine; the redemption the messiah was to bring, on its reading, has not come. One life, and these several verdicts.

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