Redemption, Kaffarah, is one of the major beliefs of Christianity. Would Huzoor kindly explain as to how and when this belief became part of the Christian religion? And also please advise us whether this belief of Christians has been mentioned in the Holy Qur’an and the Ahadith of the Holy Prophet ﷺ. Well this belief as Kaffarah has not been mentioned in the Holy Qur’an, but the principle is mentioned and the claim is refuted of course. When the Holy Qur’an says, la taziru waziratun wizra ukhra, it clearly, positively refutes the concept of one man carrying the burden of another man.
Like the Bible itself says, each man would carry his own cross. So the fact is that the concept of Kaffarah has absolutely no ground in religious books, in the revealed books, neither in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament nor in the final book, the most complete book that is the Holy Qur’an. So as I earlier explained, these ideas do not appear like a bombshell suddenly. They evolve as the people degrade. In a sort of degeneration of society, of religious society, such new ideas crop up gradually like vegetative growth, like the phenomena of decay. So you cannot pinpoint that it happened at that very moment.
But the background is generally prepared in the early part. There are certain seeds which are sown there in the early part of the religious history which gradually grow and take root and then sprout and ultimately become a huge tree or a vast vegetation. In this instance, the fact that Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, was, according to the Christians of the early era as well, was put to cross, died upon cross, and despite the claim that he was a pious and holy man, his death upon the cross, once accepted, would put Christians in a very difficult situation to say the least. Having accepted this fact, they were faced with one of the two alternatives.
One was to defy Bible, the Old Testament, and declare that the entire Old Testament is hocus-pocus and it’s not the word of God. Had they done it? Because in the Old Testament it was written that anybody who claims to be from Allah while he is not, he would meet the accursed death upon cross or he would hang from the tree. That obviously was referring to apostates, so either they had to deny the truth of Bible as such and reject the entire Bible, or they were to accept that fact as well as the fact of crucifixion of Christ and his death and find some compromise in between. The only compromise they could think of was this, that although he died upon the cross alright, but he did not die a sinner’s death. He died the death of other sinners, not his own sins.
So this is how Kephara came into being. They said of course, Bible is true. All those who hang upon cross and die there, they die of sins, very grave sins, like referring to Allah or claiming that Allah has spoken to such a person while he is not, you know, such things, they are very grave sins. So they agreed, yes, this is correct. He died because of sins, but not his own, because of other sins. And the proof that he was an innocent person and he did not die the death of an ordinary sinner lay in the fact that the New Testament told them that after three days he was seen alive and walking about. So they said that is the proof that he was not an ordinary person, he was not an ordinary human being, he was superhuman as it later developed into the concept of son of God.
He was son of God and because as son of God he could not commit any sin or any crime, so naturally he must have died the death of other people’s sins for their sake. So now I am telling you in a few minutes what might have happened in a few centuries, but the idea cropped up here and there and ultimately began to take shape and turn into a philosophy. Things were picked from here and there and ultimately it developed into a regular dogma. But I can’t say at that particular point it so happened. Saint Paul is, if anybody, Saint Paul can be quoted to be the origin of all deviations from the right in beliefs and dogma of Christianity.
That is one person whom we can pinpoint. But again as you study Saint Paul you would come to realize that sometimes or perhaps often he is not doing it consciously to create mischief. What he is doing is he is a mystic, he wants to speak in cryptic language, he wants to speak in a way that some people understand and some do not. And he throws hints here and there, he is afraid of the Roman Empire, among the Romans he has to preach Christianity. He cannot defy the Roman law and claim that Christ escaped and defeated your law. You tried to put him to cross but he ran away. This was something which was even after the death of Christ, even after a few hundred years a crime because it defied the Roman law. And the Romans were very strict, very sensitive with regards to their law, particularly when it was violated by non-Romans.
So these people who did not belong to the heart of the Romans, the Roman land, I mean the Italy and other Eastern Roman Empire, who belonged to foreign conquered lands, they were very cautious in dealing with the government because at the slightest excuse they would sometimes invade cities and totally raze them to the ground, destroy huge populations. So Saint Paul, because he was the first man who with a missionary spirit started preaching Christianity among the non-Jewish people, he preached among the various peoples living in the vast Roman Empire.
So I think that of necessity he used cryptic language, through hints here and there, which were misunderstood. That is one possibility. And another is that because he himself was not a Jew, he himself was not close to Jesus Christ peace be upon him, he had not seen him, he had never seen him. All he did was he claims that he saw Jesus Christ in a vision. And that he sees, I think about three times, or maybe more, but I remember it, that three times he met Jesus Christ at different periods, I mean years apart. And he claims that whatever he learnt of Christianity he learnt from Jesus Christ as seen in the vision.
Now in the vision there are possibilities that either his own ego interfered, his own views interfered and got mixed up with the revelation, if it was a revelation, or maybe that he could not understand the vision completely. Because vision itself has a language which is to be interpreted. So there are so many other possibilities as well. And again, he was under the influence of a culture which was completely foreign to the Jews. And he inherited those views of those people where he lived, who had their own stories and tales and myths and so on, mixed with religious phenomena.
So he lived in an age where he received influences from various directions. And he was not directly taught by Jesus Christ peace be upon him. So there are possibilities that he misunderstood these things, and there are also possibilities we don’t know. That he advertently, consciously created a stamp of Christianity which he thought would become popular, like it happened in our own time. We know even those people who were the companions of Hazrat Masih Maud A.S. they succumbed to this temptation. So despite the fact that I am trying to think well of St. Paul, in the terms that he may not have committed those crimes consciously, but there are possibilities and you cannot completely rule them out.
For instance, the Lahori community, they saw a path open to them which was a path of least resistance. They thought if we do not claim that Hazrat Masih Maud A.S. was a prophet, then the main source of hatred against us would be removed. The result would be that as a Mujaddid he would be acceptable to every Muslim because as a Mujaddid they have accepted so many others as well. Although this was a path of least resistance which they adopted, but it so happened that Allah rejected that course and made us flourish instead who had adopted a difficult course. But that is not the point. The point is that many among them were the companions of Hazrat Masih Maud A.S.
It was the time of the writings of Hazrat Masih Maud A.S., a time of the writing and press and Hazrat Masih Maud A.S. had not only taught them, these companions, himself the true faith, he had also written the true faith in his books and they were published. Despite all this, when some people decided to adopt a course, nothing could prevent them because they thought it was a popular course. Intention as they had apparently was good. They loved Ahmadiyyat as they thought, they wanted to spread Ahmadiyyat as fast as they could and they adopted a course which they thought would become very popular and very soon. So what of St. Paul? He had never seen Jesus Christ peace be upon him, had only seen him in visions as he claims.
And he was very enthusiastic in his faith, this is true, there is no doubt about it. So he wanted to spread Christianity very rapidly and also he was bitter about the Jews because the Jews had been very cruel to Jesus Christ, not only to him but his followers later on and he thought that they had closed the doors of Christianity once and for all and no efforts whatsoever would become successful among the Jews anymore. So he said why not turn to the Gentiles, other people, and start preaching to them and with that he wanted some Gentile philosophy to go with, some philosophy which they could better understand and all he inherited of the other philosophies like Greek philosophy and the Latin philosophy, that is what he adopted in modulating that Christianity which we find today.
And this is what the Holy Qur’an refers to, where it says يُزَاهِئُونَ الَّذِينَ قَوْلَ الَّذِينَ مِنْ قَبْلِهِمْ that these people who say they are three gods, not one, they are not inventing something new, they are only imitating some people who had passed before them, they are borrowing this concept from other people who were before them and this is exactly what we find in these old philosophies, the concept of three gods, three deities is found in both Greek philosophy, in Egyptian philosophy and in some other myths as we find them, Hellenistic myths.
So not only in one place, the concept of three gods, three deities controlling the main stream of godhood, that is not only found in these philosophies but also in the Hinduism. There are three main gods, major gods, according to the Hindu philosophy, Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva. There are three gods fundamentally. There is a trinity found also among Hindus. So because he knew the philosophies of the Gentiles and he wanted to preach Christianity to the Gentiles, so he borrowed generously from their philosophy and started making a brand of Christianity which he thought would be more readily acceptable to these people.
That is what happened and as I told you earlier, the seeds are always sown in the beginning in some form. Some difficulties are faced, some misunderstandings have already taken root in the early part and then they begin to develop in favorable circumstances. So these were the circumstances in which St. Paul picked up the idea of Bible declaring that somebody who is a liar, a false prophet, he would hang by the tree and also the fact that he was seen three days after his so-called death and so on. So all mixing them together, he came up with the view that in fact it was for the concept of redemption of the sinners that he did it consciously and he was not a human being but son of God.
At that time, the mother of God was non-existent. As I told you, these things happened and developed over many, many centuries. It was only the Holy Ghost and Jesus Christ and God and no mother was necessary because in those philosophies, they really eternally lived together in coexistence in the early philosophies which they had inherited.
But later on, the concept of mother also appeared and the carnal delivery of a child who had half spiritual nature and half nature of the profane and the flesh that developed from those ideas which were shown and further developed by St. Paul. So all this is a vast area and many, many investigations have to be made in every direction. I’m just surmising.
