I have a few questions which I'm sure require intricate answers but here I go.
Isaac - father of Christianity?
Eshmael - father of Islam ?
The genesis flood wiped out all Gods people including Isaac's and Eshmael's descendants. Jesus searched his people's hearts to find a single soul pure of sin and evil which was Noah. Noah took his family upon the ark. All of Gods creations besides the animals(2 of each species) and Noah's family were destroyed. That leaves no men of Eshmael. How did Islam come into existence if all those of Eshmael were destroyed during th flood and does this mean that Noah would be the "new" father of Christianity ?
As noted, the great deluge is long before Isaac and Ishmael.
Further, Ishmael is credited in Islam as the father of the Arabs in the same way that Isaac was the father of the Israelites (i.e. the Jews). That Ishmael is the father of the Arab people is not a position held by Jews or Christians, as it's a particular belief in Islam.
Islam came into existence because Muhammad, a member of the Quraysh tribe (one of the many tribes of people on the Arabian peninsula), claimed to have received the direct word of God through the angel Jibra'il (Gabriel), what he preached was--according to Muslim teaching--recorded by his followers into the Qur'an (Muhammad was, himself, apparently illiterate). Muhammad claimed that the Quraysh and other Arab tribes were the descendants of Abraham through his son Ishmael, and that the black stone and its house located in the town of Mecca (the kaaba) was actually put there and built by Abraham and Ishmael. According to Islam Muhammad is the last of God's messengers or prophets, and that Islam is the universal religion established by God with Adam, and that it is what every messenger of God has taught, including Noah, Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ. Muhammad is the final messenger, but his message (according to Islam) is the same message that every other prophet taught; but that the message was lost or corrupted over time and so God sent new messengers to restore the true religion to the world.
Keep in mind, the above is what Islam teaches. What we can say for certain is that Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh tribe who as a trader encountered people of many different religious backgrounds, including Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans. And so he would have been fairly familiar with a lot of the basic stuff which Jews, Christians, and others believed, and these were almost certainly a major influence on Muhammad's own teachings. One example is that the Qur'an records an incident where a child Jesus fashions clay birds and they came to life, what is really interesting about this account is that it has an earlier source, in what we might call early Christian fanfiction, namely a text known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas). So-called "Infancy Gospels" which tell various amazing stories about Jesus as an infant or as a child were popular in antiquity, but they were regarded as popular fiction, not to be taken seriously. But some were clearly popular enough and circulated long enough for Muhammad to have become familiar with it and thus its inclusion in the Qur'an.
-CryptoLutheran
