Posted on 02/01/2009 9:13:06 PM PST by Milagros
1800-ask-islam
Q: Why are most terrorist attacks in the world comprised of Muslims killing Muslims?
Hmmm I’m more concerned with the WHAT as in WHAT do we drop on their heads, nuke? daisycutter? etc.
Answer ...because they never care about their people, they only (pretend to) "care" when they can use it against the infidels.
thanks, bfl
I believe there was no written Arabic at the time of Muhammad and the Kuran was first written down in Syriac. In its transposition to Arabic much was lost and much was added. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Moderate Muslims are considered apostate by the pure Islamists, and worse than Infidels.
“The first Moslems were actually part of a larger group of Jesus’ followers called the Ebionites.
comments?”
Wouldn’t surprise me. Mohammedanism is often thought of as a particularly successful Christian heresy.
Cronos: comments?
I disagree. A group identified as Ebionites were not Muslims. Their last mention is circa 5th century, about 200 years prior to the emergence of Islam. They were Jesus followers in the Old Covenant sense, i.e. they considered Jesus a Jewish messiah, a mortal human being anointed by God (and hence "son of God," a title used for anointed Jewish kings, and the angels). The Ebionites followed strictly the Jewish Law, and represent the so-called Judaiziers whom the Ealry Church Fathers condmened as heretics.
Whether some of them later on joined Mohammad and his followers is a matter of speculation, not fact. If they did they would have had to stop observing the Law, and cease being Jewish, which they refused all along, so it's not very likely.
I’ve never heard of the Ebionites, but I think the original quote says the first Moslems were part of the Ebionites, that is: a subset of them; as if to say the first Moslems came out of or from the Ebionites.
This is quite different than saying the Ebionites were Moslems.
The probelm of "Judiaziers" continued for centuries and the Pauline Church fought them to the bitter end. For one, they denied the divinity of Jesus because it is incompatible with Judaism. Secondly, they opposed all newly invented Christian feasts. This only intensified after Jamnia (c. 90 AD), when Judaism and Christianity even officially parted ways. Their presence loomed for centuries; this is documented by homilies such as the famous set of them by +John Chrysostom.
The Church of Jerusalem was destroyed after +James was stoned to death by the Jews as a "lawbreaker." His followers, the Ebionites, continued until the crushing of the earl 2nd century Jewish revolt and exodus form Palestine.
Many believe that an Arian priest had crucial influence on Mohammad, but that could have been an Ebionite priest instead because Ebionites shared some of the Christological heresy base with Arians and Gnostics. Again, for Ebionites to become Muslims (Islam appears in the 7th century), they would have had to renounce their Judaism, and would have to stop following Jesus as their messiah, which they were not willing to do. So, I seriously doubt that some of them eventually became Muslims, because that would require renouncing Judaism and Christ as their messiah.
“There were a lot of Nestorians and others in the area.”
Yup, especially Nestorians.
I don’t remember, but weren’ there a few scattered Arians of the non Gothic type down there? I have often thought that Islam took some from that also.
“I don’t remember, but weren’ there a few scattered Arians of the non Gothic type down there?”
There certainly were; mostly merchants of one sort or another. There were a group if indigenous Arabians who worshipped the Theotokos as a goddess too; all sorts of weird, heretical Christian offshoots down there. Mix that with Judaism and Arab paganism and you get...Mohammedanism! In many ways, Mohammedanism and Mohammedan are the classic examples of what +John Chrysostomos meant when he wrote:
“The desire to rule is the mother of heresies.”
Arabic existed 400 years prior to Islam. It was seldom written until the time of Muhammad, and he wrote the Koran in classical (old) Arabic, which is very different from modern Arabic.
Nestorian Christianity was big in the Gulf region (what is now the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar). There are Nestorian monasteries on the island of Sir Bani Yas off the coast of Abu Dhabi, and before Islam, Bahrain was inhabited by Nestorian Christians.
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