Religion
In reply to the discussion: 10 Reasons to believe Jesus Preached Islam [View all]flyingfysh
(1,990 posts)People forget that a major branch of Christianity at the time was Arian, which is now called a heresy. This branch maintains that Jesus was not divine, but was God's highest creation. At one time the majority of Christian theologians were actually Arian. The Nicene Creed was an attempt to squelch the differences. The Arians decided that if you understood the phrasing just right, they could in fact agree to it. Many passages such as "Why do you call me good? There is none good but God." can be read as Jesus denying divinity. Of course, there are others, including the entire book of John, which reads the other way.
Several years ago the Moslems produced a movie intended to explain Mohammed to the West (the entire movie was done without actually showing an actor playing Mohammed), and it shows an episode where Mohammed was fleeing his pursuers, and found refuge with a local Christian king. The king tells the pursuers that Mohammed's ideas and his own Christian ideas were very close to each other, and tells them "Not for a mountain of gold would I give him up to you". If this Christian were Arian, this makes sense; the churches in that area tended to be Arian.
The name Arian comes from a priest in Alexandria, named Arius, who disagreed with his bishop Anastasias, who subscribed to the idea that Jesus was divine. The Arians lasted for hundreds of years, and gradually died out. The exact history here is something scholars know about.