Learning from Muslims and Jews: In Search of the Identity of Christ from Eighth-century Baghdad to Seventeenth-century Hague

Abstract

AbstractIn past iterations of ecclesiastical historical writings and teachings, there has not always been sufficient acknowledgment of the encounters between Christians and their religious Others. This article is an exercise in diachronic comparative interreligious encounter: a Muslim-Christian engagement in the eighth century CE and a Jewish-Christian epistolary exchange in the seventeenth century CE. The former took place in Baghdad in the court of a caliph, whereas the latter took place between individuals in London and the Hague, between Baruch Spinoza and Henry Oldenburg. While it might be tempting to highlight the narratives of conversion away from one religion into another—whether from Christianity to Islam, Christianity to Judaism, or vice versa—in current historiography, it also seems that quotidian realities of interreligious exchange often do not lead to such conversions, and yet leave the participants better informed and further enlightened about the practice and pursuit of their own religion. The following two accounts are neither triumphalist nor tragic. Patriarch Timothy and Caliph al-Mahdī's exchange in eighth-century Baghdad shows the degree to which divine identity and Christian apophasis mattered. The letter exchanges between Spinoza and his interlocutors also show the degree to which divine mystery as ontological demarcator for both the doctrine of the Trinity and corresponding Christology, as well as Spinoza's repudiation of both, mattered. Lastly, these two examples of interreligious engagements show a pathway of encounter which does not dismiss or cancel the religious Other.