The archaeological discovery that destroyed Islam
The Megiddo Mosaic (dated to around 230AD) was an exciting archaeological discovery that provides evidence of the early beliefs and creeds of the early church. It includes a symbol of two fish, which is likely a reference to Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 but the most significant bit of the mosaic was the inscription “To the God Jesus Christ” which corroborates both Biblical and early extra-Biblical historical evidence that Jesus Christ was worshipped as God by the early church.
Now, my atheists friends would say “This does not prove that these things are true though!” and I would 100% agree, which is why this piece is not aimed at atheists. It is aimed rather at our Muslim friends whose Quran claims that Jesus’ message was that people worship the one true God and He never claimed to be that God. The standard Muslim explanation for Christians believing Jesus is divine or that God is triune is that Emperor Constantine (who became emperor in 306 AD) somehow forced these pagan ideas into the true Christianity.
“This is what happened. When Allah raised `Isa (Jesus) to heaven, his followers divided into sects and groups. Some of them believed in what Allah sent `Isa as, a servant of Allah, His Messenger, and the son of His female-servant. However, some of them went to the extreme over `Isa, believing that he was the son of Allah. Some of them said that `Isa was Allah Himself, while others said that he was one of a Trinity. Allah mentioned these false creeds in the Qur’an and refuted them. The Christians remained like this until the third century CE, when a Greek king called, Constantine, became a Christian for the purpose of destroying Christianity. Constantine was either a philosopher, or he was just plain ignorant. Constantine changed the religion of `Isa by adding to it and deleting from it. He established the rituals of Christianity and the so-called Great Trust, which is in fact the Great Treachery. He also allowed them to eat the meat of swine, changed the direction of the prayer that `Isa established to the east, built churches for `Isa, and added ten days to the fast as compensation for a sin that he committed, as claimed. So the religion of `Isa became the religion of Constantine, who built more then twelve thousand churches, temples and monasteries for the Christians as well as the city that bears his name, Constantinople (Istanbul). Throughout this time, the Christians had the upper hand and dominated the Jews. Allah aided them against the Jews because they used to be closer to the truth than the Jews, even though both groups were and still are disbelievers, may Allah’s curse descend on them.”
(Tafsir Ibn Kathir on Surah 3:55)*
*Granted, the above Ibn Kathir explanation, while completely nonsensical and ahistorical, leaves room for the fact that Jesus was acknowledged to be God or part of a trinity before Constantine but the standard Muslim preacher’s explanation is still likely to be that those things were Constantinian inventions, Mohammed Hijab’s interview on the Towards Eternity YouTube channel is a perfect example of this.
That explanation can no longer work because we now have archaeological evidence clearly showing Jesus was worshipped as God about 70 years before Constantine.
Our Muslim friends are in a bigger mess now because the Quran says Allah helped the followers of Jesus until they became uppermost,
“He (i.e. Allah) told Jesus, “I will save you from your enemies, raise you to Myself, keep you clean from the association with the disbelievers, and give superiority to your followers over the unbelievers until the Day of Judgment.”
(Surah 3:55)
And again,
“O ye who believe! Be Allah’s helpers, even as Jesus son of Mary said unto the disciples: Who are my helpers for Allah? They said: We are Allah’s helpers. And a party of the Children of Israel believed, while a party disbelieved. Then We strengthened those who believed against their foe, and they became the uppermost.”
(Surah 61:14)
Now we see from the Bible that Jesus’ followers worshipped Him as God,
“ And Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
(John 20:28)
And again,
“looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ..”
(Titus 2:14)
And again,
“by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ”
(2 Peter 1:1)
We see from secular history that Jesus’ followers worshipped Him as God,
“Christians were ‘meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang an alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god..”
(Pliny the younger, c.110AD)
We have seen from the archaeological discovery that in the mid 3rd century (c.230AD), Jesus’ followers were worshipping Him as God.
This thus leads to the question, WHICH FOLLOWERS OF JESUS DID ALLAH HELP ACCORDING TO THE QURAN?
The only followers of Jesus who we know to be prominent in the first, second and third centuries before Constantine are the ones who worshipped Jesus Christ as God or the divine Son of God. Absolutely nothing in their beliefs would line up with the Quran or Islam so why did Allah help them spread their heresy and disbelief? Why did Allah make them superior even when they were in rebellion to him? In Ibn Kathir’s commentary cited above, he reaches the conclusion that Allah helped the Christians become superior even though they were disbelievers but this ignores the fact that Allah promises to make them superior until the day of resurrection, so his explanation of the verse still makes no sense.
So here we have yet another dilemma.
If Allah helped the Christians worshipping Jesus as God (an unforgivable sin in Islam) and made them superior till the day of judgment, then Allah is himself amplifying a heresy and diminishing his own true religion, the religion of Islam, which makes no sense. He would be on the one hand, helping Christianity expand and on the other hand ordering Muslims to go and fight Christians to subjugate them (Surah 9:29) which would be just plain evil and demonic!
If the true Christians who believe in a Christianity commensurate with Islam and to whom there is no single reference to throughout history were in fact helped by Allah but no longer exist today and are now unheard of then Allah has not kept his promise to make them superior until the day of judgment. Either way, Islam is screwed. Allah is either self-contradictory and evil or unable to keep his promises.
This is the dilemma the Constantine narrative helped to avoid. So Allah would have helped the true pre-Constantine Christians become uppermost but Constantine now infused his pagan nonsense into it and it still remains uppermost till today despite the pagan infusion. Now the Megiddo Mosaic has firmly slammed that door shut and shown the “pagan infusion” was not pagan at all but rather orthodox, Biblical Christian belief which at the very least predated Constantine by more than half a decade!
In conclusion, there has been no group or version of Christianity where Jesus is not divine and as such there is no version of Christianity that lines up with what Jesus preached according to the Quran. As a result, any followers of Jesus Allah helped would definitely have been disbelievers from an Islamic point of view. The origin of the belief in Jesus’ divinity being Constantine has been shown to be conclusively false by the Megiddo Mosaic so Allah either worked against his own religion in making Christians uppermost till the day of judgment or has failed to keep his promise to the Christians who believed in Jesus’ message according to the Quran because they no longer exist and there is no trace or memory of them in human history.
Either way, Islam has a problem.
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