Muslims scour early church history to find a particular group of Christians whose beliefs were similar enough to Islam, in order to prove the Quran’s assertion that Jesus’ followers were all Muslims (Cf. Q. 3:52; 5:111).  

Some of these Muhammadans think they have found such individuals, namely, Arius and his followers!

For instance, notice what the following dawagandists claim in respect to Arius:

At the other end was the Byzantine World, which though claiming to profess a divinely revealed religion, had in fact polluted the monotheist message of Prophet Jesus (PBUH) with the sediments of ancient Greek and Roman pagan thoughts, resulting in the birth of Christianity. Way back in 381 A.D., the Greco-Roman Church council had rejected the doctrine of Arius of Alexandria, to which most of the eastern provinces of the empire adhered, and in its place the council had coined the belief that God and Jesus are of one substance and therefore co-existent. Arius and his followers had held the belief in the uniqueness and majesty of God, Who alone, they said has existed since eternity, while Jesus was created in time. (The World before the Prophet Muhammad: by Al-Balagh Foundation; bold emphasis mine)

And:

Arius

The leader of the Apostolic Church, which continued to affirm belief in One Reality, was at this time a presbyter known to history as Arius. He followed the teaching of Jesus – peace and blessings of Almighty Allah be upon him – implicitly, and refused to accept the innovation introduced by Paul.

“Follow Jesus as he preached” was the motto of Arius. His importance can be gauged by the fact, that, his name had become a synonym of Unitarianism even today.

Although the early life of Arius is hidden in mystery, it is recorded that in 318 CE, he was in charge of the Church of Baucalis in Alexandria. Arius was no “bustling schemer” as his enemies would have people believe, and even they were forced to admit that he was a sincere and blameless presbyter. He remained aloof from the alliance which the organized Church had made with the Emperor Constantine.

At his time, Trinity was accepted by many of those who called themselves Christians, but no one was sure what it actually meant. After more than two centuries of discussion, no one had been able to state the doctrine in terms which were free from equivocation. Arius stood up and challenged anyone to define it. Arius, by the use of reason, and relying on the authority of the Scriptures [sic], proved the doctrine to be false.

Arius began his refutation to the doctrine of Trinity using the following argument: if Jesus – peace and blessings of Almighty Allah be upon him – was in reality the “son of God”, then it followed that the father must have existed before the son. Therefore, there must have been a time when the son did not exist. Therefore, it followed that the son was a creature composed of an essence or being which had not always existed. Since God is in essence Eternal and Ever-existent, Jesus – peace and blessings of Almighty Allah be upon him – could not be of the same essence of God. Arius backed his arguments with numerous verses from the Bible which nowhere teaches the doctrine of Trinity. If Jesus said:

“My father is greater than I,” John 14:28

Then to believe that God and Jesus were equal, argued Arius, was to deny the truth of the Bible. 

The arguments of Arius were irrefutable [sic], but Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, by virtue of his position, excommunicated him. However, Arius had such a large following that he could not be ignored by the Pauline Church [sic]. The controversy which had been simmering for nearly three hundred years came to its boiling point. The Pauline Church was troubled and annoyed that so many of the Eastern bishops supported Arius, whose greatest ally was Eusebius of Nicomedia, for they were friends and both of them had been students of Lucian. (Umar Hassan, The Hidden Truth: Trinity. – Answering Christianity; emphasis mine)

ARIUS PROVES ALLAH IS A FALSE GOD AND MUHAMMAD WAS AN ANTICHRIST

Unfortunately for these Muslims, appealing to Arius to salvage their religion only ends up proving that Muhammad was a false prophet and that Allah is a false god, and here are the reasons why.

In the first place, Arius did not oppose Paul, nor did he reject the inspired letters of this blessed and holy Apostle. Rather, Arius wholeheartedly appealed to Paul’s sacred writings and thought he was being faithful to them.

Secondly, the incoherence and contradictory assertions of these Muhammadans stick out like a sore thumb since in one breath they claim that the Bible does not teach the Trinity,

“… Arius backed his arguments with numerous verses from the Bible which nowhere teaches the doctrine of Trinity…”

And yet in the next breath they assert that Arius opposed the Pauline Christians who were supposed to be the Trinitarian group. If this is the case then Paul must have been the one who introduced the Trinity to his followers, otherwise how could these Trinitarian believers be classified as Pauline Christians if he didn’t? Does this even begin to make sense?

This would further mean that the Holy Bible does indeed teach (or at least establish) the doctrine of the Trinity seeing that 13 of the 27 New Testament books were composed by Paul!

The foregoing highlights just how stunningly unintelligible and inconsistent Umar Hassan’s claim is. It is on the same level of the Quran in respect to its contradictory and incoherent composition.

Finally, and more importantly, Arius’ theological and christological views do not comport with that of Islam’s, unless Muslims want us to believe that Muhammad taught that Jesus was the first and greatest creature God made, being God’s uniquely begotten Son by and through whom God created the heavens and the earth, and everything within them.

I will let noted biblical critic and agnostic/atheist scholar Bart Ehrman explain Arius’ views:

Arius of Alexandria

ARIUS WAS BORN AROUND 260 CE, right about the time Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria were engaged in their back-and-forth over questions of Christology. Arius came from Libya but eventually moved to the city of Alexandria and became intimately involved with the vibrant Christian community there. In 312 he was ordained as a priest and was placed in charge of his own church. In that capacity Arius was answerable to the bishop of Alexandria, who, for most of his time there, was a man named Alexander.

The controversy over Arius’s teachings broke out in 318 CE.⁴ We know about the dispute from a letter written in 324 by none other than the Roman emperor Constantine, who had converted to Christianity in the same year Arius was ordained (312 CE) and who, in the years that followed, became increasingly committed to seeing that the Christian church should become unified, in no small measure because he saw the church as a potentially unifying force in his fragmented empire. By 324 the church was not at all unified, and much of the rancor and debate focused on the controversial teachings of Arius.

According to Constantine’s letter, Bishop Alexander had asked his priests for their opinions about the theology expressed in a particular passage in the Old Testament. Constantine does not indicate which passage this was, but scholars have plausibly argued that it was Proverbs 8, a text we have encountered on a number of occasions, in which Wisdom (whom Christians identified as Christ) is portrayed as speaking, indicating that she was a fellow worker with God in the beginning, at the time of creation.

Arius’s interpretation was one that may well have been acceptable in the theological climate of orthodox Christianity during the century or so before his day, but by the early fourth century it proved to be highly controversial. He, like other interpreters, understood the Wisdom of God to be the same as the Word of God and the Son of God—that is, the preexistent divine Christ who was with God at the beginning of the creation. But in Arius’s opinion, Christ had not always existed. He had come into existence at some point in the remote past BEFORE THE CREATION. Originally, God had existed alone, and the Son of God came into existence only later. He was, after all, “begotten” by God, and that implied—to Arius and others who were like-minded—that before he was begotten, he did not yet exist. One further implication of this view is that God the Father had not always been the Father; instead, he became the Father only when he begot his Son.

In Arius’s view, everything except for God himself had a beginning. Only God is “without beginning.” And this means that Christ—the Word (Logos) of God—is not fully God in the way that God is. He was created in God’s own image by God himself; and so Christ bears the title God, but he is not the “true” God. Only God himself is. Christ’s divine nature was derived from the Father; he came into being at some point BEFORE THE UNIVERSE WAS MADE, and so he is a creation or creature of God. In short, Christ was a kind of second-tier God, subordinate to God and inferior to God in every respect.

As we have seen, Christological views such as this were not merely academic exercises but were connected at a deep level with Christian worship. For Arius and his followers it was indeed right to worship Christ. But was Christ to be worshiped as one who was on a par with God the Father? Their answer was clear and straightforward: absolutely not. It is the Father who is above all things, even the Son, by an infinite degree.

Bishop Alexander was not at all pleased with this response and considered such views heretical and dangerous. In the year 318 or 319 he deposed Arius from his position and excommunicated him along with about twenty other church leaders who were Arius’s supporters. As a group these exiles went to Palestine, and there they found several church leaders and theologians who were willing to support them in their cause, including a figure with whom we are already familiar: Eusebius of Caesarea.

Before explaining the alternative view embraced by Bishop Alexander, and describing the events that led up to the Council of Nicea that Emperor Constantine called to try to resolve these issues, I set forth Arius’s teachings in some of his own words. You may have noticed that we very rarely have the writings of the heretics themselves. In most instances we have to rely on what the orthodox opponents of heretics said, since the heretics’ own writings were generally destroyed. With Arius, we are in the happy position of having some of his own words, some of them in letters he wrote and others in a kind of poetic work he produced called the Thalia. Unfortunately, the actual text of the Thalia is not preserved for us in a surviving manuscript, but it is quoted by a very famous church father of Alexandria, Athanasius. And it appears that when Athanasius quotes these passages, he does so accurately. I present a few that show Arius’s particular views of Christ as not equal with God the Father but fully subservient to him:

[The Father] alone has neither equal nor like, none comparable in glory.

[The Son] has nothing proper to God in his essential property For neither is he equal nor yet consubstantial with him.

There is a Trinity with glories not alike; Their existences are unmixable with each other; One is more glorious than another by an infinity of glories.

Thus the Son who was not, but existed at the paternal will, Is only begotten God, and he is distinct from everything else.⁵

Unlike the unbegotten Father, Christ, the Son of God, is the “begotten God.” He is greater than all else. But he is removed from the greatness of the Father by an “infinity of glories” and so is not “comparable in glory” to the Father.

In a letter defending his views to Bishop Alexander, Arius is even more explicit about his understanding of the relationship of God and Christ: “We know there is one God, the only unbegotten, only eternal, only without beginning, only true, who only has immortality. . . . Before everlasting ages he begot his unique Son, THROUGH WHOM he made the ages and all things. He begot him . . . a perfect creature of God, but not as one of the creatures—an offspring, but not as one of things begotten.”⁶

And so, Arius maintained that there were THREE SEPARATE DIVINE BEINGS—which he calls by the technical name hypostases but which now, in this context, simply means something like “essential beings” or “persons.” The Father alone has existed forever. The Son was begotten by God before the world was created. But this means that he “is neither eternal nor coeternal . . . with the Father.” God is above, beyond, and greater than all things, including Christ. (Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee [HarperOne, 2014], 9. Ortho-Paradoxes on the Road to Nicea, pp. 339-343; bold and capital emphasis mine)

Here is a summary Arius’ views:

• God created the Person whom later became Jesus of Nazareth as the first and greatest of all his creatures.
• God made this first created Being his Son before all ages.
• God then created the ages and everything contained within them by the agency of his Son.
• The Son was born from the virgin Mary and died on the cross for sinners.
• The Son then physically arose and ascended into heaven where he sits enthroned with the Father as the Lord of creation.
• There are three divine Beings, two of whom were created, namely the Father, the Son whom the Father created, and the Holy Spirit whom the Father brought into being through the agency of the Son.

Seeing that none of Arius’ beliefs are in anyway compatible with present Islamic theology or the current text of the Quran, this means that Arius and his disciples were not only Jesus’ true followers but they were also the true Muslims. As such, the Islam promulgated by Muhammad is a bastardization, a corruption, of the true Muslim faith taught by Jesus and his Arian followers.

After all, Muhammad denied that his deity is a father, or that Jesus is his unique Son that created the universe and then became man to die on the cross to redeem it, and who then rose again to ascend into heaven to reign alongside his Father as Lord over all creation (Cf. Q. 4:157; 5:18; 9:30; 17:111; 18:26; 19:88-93; 25:2; 39:4; 72:3). And yet, Arius affirmed all these points.

Hence, if Arius was correct then Muhammad was wrong and the latter was therefore a false prophet and an antichrist since he contradicted the message of Jesus’ true Muslim disciples as represented by Arius and his followers.

FURTHER READING

EBIONITES TO THE RESCUE?

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