Diarmaid MacCulloch: belief

Transcript context

…Why is Islam sometimes, at least at the intellectual level, so obsessed with Mary? You can debate whether she was a saint or a prophet. In a way, the role in Christianity is much more circumscribed. Oh, I wouldn’t say that. She appears more in the Holy Quran than she does in the Bible, of course, but that is clearly the influences on the creation of this book, which are probably forms of Christianity. Miaph is like Christianity in what is now the Arabian Peninsula. Yes, she’s there and she is named, unlike, I think, any other woman in the Quran. The relationship is therefore complex and interesting, but so is that of Jesus to the other prophets within Islam. He is given a place of great honor, and naturally, also his mother gets it. Mary’s position in Christianity is, as you know, complex. It is a construction of the later church on extremely scanty evidence in the New Testament. The picture of Mary in the Gospels is not entirely positive. The picture of Jesus’s relationship with his family, with his brothers and sisters is not entirely positive. On one occasion in the Gospels, they turned up to say, “Hi, we want to see him.” Jesus looks around and says, “Well, actually, these people are my brothers and sisters.” Implication: you’re second class. One’s got to deal with that. The church ignored it as it created an increasingly central place for Mary as Queen of Heaven, the linchpin of salvation. It ignored the fact that the foundations in the New Testament are scanty. It took the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, actually, to look at the Bible and look back at that and gleefully, in some cases, see that Jesus could be quite offhand with his mother and his family. Now, one needs to ask, why does the New Testament treat family members like this? I think one way you can account for it is by saying that the New Testament is written by the winners in a very particular conflict, and that is the conflict as to who is going to lead the church after Jesus. Is it going to be the family? Is this going to be a dynastic religion? James, the brother of the Lord, is one of the first people who are powerful within the church. Or is it people who, like Paul of Tarsus, never actually met in his earthly life Jesus? The balance in that conflict is eventually won by the general number of disciples, not the family. So, you would expect the text created by that side of the battle to be somewhat dismissive of Jesus’s family. The same thing is true of Islam, of course, between who is going to be in charge of the faith in future. Sunni Islam against Shia Islam have two different answers to that question. It’s not dissimilar to what happened within Islam. If I think of the 12th and 13th centuries in England and France, parts of Spain, there are so many just incredible cathedrals or religious structures built, many of them still with us. What accounts for so many marvelous creations in what, in a sense, is a relatively narrow window of time?…

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