The Arabic Islamic literary tradition of the premodern period contains several hundred sayings and stories ascribed to Jesus. What I have entitled The Muslim Jesus is a collection of these sayings and stories. As a whole, they form the largest body of texts relating to Jesus in any non-Christian literature. In referring to this body of literature, I shall henceforth use the phrase “Muslim gospel.”
In bringing this collection together and presenting it to Western readers, my aim is primarily to introduce an image of Jesus little known outside Arabic Islamic culture. It is an image that might be of interest to those who wish to understand how Jesus was perceived by a religious tradition which greatly revered him but rejected his divinity. Hence, the Jesus presented here will in some ways be similar to the Jesus of the Christian Gospels, in others not. How and why this Muslim gospel arose is the subject of this Introduction.