“Equivocating” can not take a direct object, so I was definitely not “equivocating” Islam and definitely not “equivocating” “judaism.” No equivocating about that.
Don’t shoot the messenger. I was reporting a bit of paradoxical theology. I did not intend to denigrate Christianity. The irony is that Islam, a monotheistic religion, turned Jewish morality inside out. Christianity, after undergoing a maturing process, followed the moral code of Judaism.
The messiah according to Jewish belief is a human, born of two human parents. He is considered as someone with the ability to dramatically transform things for the good, but he is not considered divine.
Thanks for the clarification.
If I remember correctly, the reason why Islam takes its form the way it does is because Mohammed tried to be Jewish to begin with, but after being rejected by the Jewish sect he was attempting to join, he invented his own religion that took on the superficial shape of Judaism (dietary laws, strict monotheism, etc.).
Christianity, on the other hand, was an outreach of a Jewish radical to Gentiles, in order to keep Judaism from being eliminated from the Earth and avoidance of a return to the days of Noah.
Syncretism caused a bunch of problems, surely, but still the Jewish people survived because of these Gentile allies and the Gentile preservation of Jewish texts, which otherwise would have been lost to history.
Jesus, a simple carpenter who became a healer, accomplished what the Jewish priests and warrior Zealots could not: the spread of Judaism across the entire world.