ABSTRACT
One element of confusion that seems to frustrate Muslim and Christian attempts to understand each other is that we tend to take “scripture” and “prophecy” as key common terms. The principal reason for taking the Gospel of John as our guide is its focus on a concept that is more fundamental than either of those: Word. For all the differences between us that it highlights, John’s Gospel demonstrates a fundamental structure common to Muslim and Christian thinking about God and God’s revelation: the eternal divine Word, an essential aspect of God’s very essence, has been expressed in a particular moment of human history; that Word – claimed to have been expressed in “flesh” in Jesus or in Arabic in the Qur’an – is seen by its respective community as God’s defining and universal revelation to humanity. John’s highly developed theology of the Word provides a structure that helps clarify our disagreements rather than simply dissolving them in superficially similar concepts of prophecy and scripture.
