Seeking help/advice on formulating a question about Muslim knowledge and opinion of the Biblical Jesus

Question

I would like to find out how much Muslims know about the Jesus character in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I realize I need to direct the question to a specific group, but really, I'd like to get a survey of every group possible. Maybe that's too ambitious.

I'm also trying to understand how Muslims identify the Bible Jesus with the Qur'an Jesus. In particular, I get the impression that very few Muslims actually know what's in the Gospels, beyond the things they reject, such as Jesus being the son of God and such. I'm trying to figure out how they reach the conclusion that the Bible Jesus is the same person.

Or, maybe I'm totally looking in the wrong direction. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to approach the subject? -- Including the kind of question I might look for on the main site, in case someone else has asked it. I'm not sure what question(s) to ask.

Answer 1

I would worry that any such question would be either too broad or imminently unanswerable. How much "Muslims" know about anything would vary widely between individual Muslims (there's a lot of us), and I'm not sure that limiting it to "official" doctrine would help since that presumes that established groups have official doctrine regarding any of the Bible accounts beyond "we mostly don't care what the Bible says unless the Qur'an also says it".

And of course there's still the issue of what you even mean by the "Bible Jesus"; in my experience, many people naturally presume that that refers to the common Christian interpretation of Jesus (Trinity, Son of God, God made flesh, and all that) but asking for a Muslim perspective, you'll inevitably get answers more or less cherry-picking the most "Muslim-like" elements from Christian history (e.g. Unitarianism or the Gospel of Barnabas) no matter how authoritative or representative they may be of any current Christian doctrine.

Meanwhile, if you're just asking something along the lines of "How do Muslims know that Prophet Isa is supposed to be the same person as Jesus in the Bible?", that seems rather trivial (the Qur'an explicitly refers to him as the Messiah and as the son of Mary, for example).

I can sorta see what you're going for in a question here and would love to see an answer, but I just don't see any way that it can be comfortably molded to work on the site. What you're asking for is a survey, and we just plain suck at surveys.