The Koran also describes Jesus as ... the word of God...
In the only cases I know of , Koran 3: 45, 4.171, Isa is the Word of Allah to Maryam. In John 1, The Word exists before Mary (or anyone or anything on Earth), and God creates the world through Jesus.
The word logos had a long heritage in the Greek language as denoting an animating and generating aspect of the Godhead. John's use of the word, then, is apt. Jews had long had their own use of the idea of "word" in connection with God and creation: God spoke the world into existence. John 1: 1-5 restates Genesis 1: 1-5, with the benefit of the fuller revelation of God allowed by John's acquaintance with Jesus, the man who is God:
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form or shape. There was darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” Evening came, and morning followed—the first day.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Jesus is nobody wholly-else's messenger. He was not zapped into being after the human race already existed (as you have argued elsewhere). He is the Word of God, period, not the Word of God on some temporal occasion, nor a word said to any specfic human being. Jesus is the Word of God through whom light was first spoken into being; Jesus is the Word of God through whom life was first spoken into being. Jesus is God participating now in that life he made through Jesus.
The Greek word logos may translate into the same word in English as the Arabic word, but the concepts could scarcely be more different. The Greek word also translates into the same word in English as the Hebrew word, but the Greek explains more fully what the Hebrew meant, according to the Christian reading of its own text and of the Jewish text.
The difference between Islam and Christianity is the difference being following a Jesus who is somebody else's agent and a Jesus who acts on his own behalf within God. Or, as Christian scripture records it, whether Jesus speaks "as a scribe" or as "as someone with authority."
Who is right, nobody would be foolish enough to ask me. But as to whether the two positions are the same or even reconcilable, any fool can see that they are not.
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edit on 6-3-2013 by eight bits because: (no reason given)
