The Sermon and the Sword: A Historical Comparison of Jesus and Muhammad

History divides cleanly at two lives. Jesus refused the sword and preached forgiveness to enemies; Muhammad built a community with law, treaties, and force when he judged it necessary. These are not slogans but patterns visible in the earliest sources. The Gospels present a rabbi who heals, forgives, and will not retaliate even to save his life. The sīrah, hadith, and early chronicles present a prophet who governs, arbitrates disputes, wages and ends wars, rewards loyalty, and punishes treachery. The contrast is not a contest of holiness; it is a conflict of methods. One aims to transform hearts without coercion. The other aims to transform society through authority. A serious comparison has to state the episodes clearly, cite the sources, and admit where historians themselves disagree. Only then can we speak of facts.

Jesus’ ethic comes to us in spare commands and enacted scenes. In Matthew, he teaches love of enemies, a refusal to retaliate, and radical forgiveness that does not keep score. He blesses the peacemakers and warns that “those who take the sword will perish by the sword.” In Luke, the Beatitudes sharpen the point: turn the other cheek, give without expecting return, forgive to be forgiven. The narrative matches the doctrine. Jesus does not hold office, raise funds for an army, or draft law. He refuses a political crown, accepts arrest, forbids his disciple’s strike, and dies praying for his killers. Whatever later Christians did with power, the primary texts make his personal stance unmistakable: mercy over vengeance, suffering over domination, conscience over rule.

Muhammad’s profile is different because his role is different. In Mecca he is a persecuted preacher; in Medina he becomes head of a new community with legal and military responsibilities. The Qur’an provides revelation rather than biography; for sequence and detail, early Muslims preserved narratives in Ibn Ishaq’s Sīrah, expanded by al-Tabari, and authenticated sayings and actions in collections like Sahih al-Bukhari. Those materials—taken seriously by believers and studied critically by historians—show a leader who arbitrated between clans, concluded pacts, fought battles, punished betrayal, and integrated religion with administration. He also married multiple women and accepted a Coptic bondwoman, Maria al-Qibtiyya, who bore him a son. To understand him only as a mystic preacher would be to erase the statecraft that defines his Medinan years.

The hard episodes must be named without evasion and without malice. The case of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe in Medina, is the most discussed. After the siege of the Trench, the tribe was judged to have broken its compact during wartime; male prisoners were executed and women and children enslaved. Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari transmit numbers that range into the hundreds; some modern scholars question the figures while not disputing the executions. The rationale offered within the sources is treason in the midst of existential war; the moral weight is still heavy, and the debate among historians is real. Calling the reports “fabrications” ignores the tradition’s own memory; treating every detail as beyond dispute ignores the mechanics of oral transmission and later redaction. The responsible path is to state what the earliest texts say and note the live scholarly arguments about scope and causation.

The assassinations of hostile poets are also recorded, though the attributions and chains of transmission vary. The killing of Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf, a Medinan Jewish poet accused of inciting enemies in wartime, is reported with pride by early Muslim narrators; Sahih al-Bukhari preserves accounts of the mission that slew him at night. The alleged killing of the poetess ʿAsmā’ bint Marwān appears in Ibn Ishaq and in later compilations; its isnād has been disputed by Muslim scholars for centuries, with some classing it as weak or unreliable. Here again the sober approach is to present the report, identify its source, and indicate the contest over authenticity. What is not contested is that Muhammad, as ruler, punished what he and his companions deemed treasonous speech during war—an action coherent with a polity’s survival logic, even if offensive to modern liberal scruples.

Concubinage and the Coptic connection belong to the domestic sphere but speak to the broader legal frame. Maria al-Qibtiyya, sent from Egypt’s ruler, is described in the early Arabic biographies and in Bukhari’s notices about the Prophet’s son Ibrahim. She is not counted among the legal wives but as an umm walad; her status reflects the seventh-century Near Eastern norms of slavery that Islam regulated rather than abolished outright. None of this is outside the moral world of late antiquity; none is consonant with modern egalitarian ideals. Stating both truths is part of being honest about history. It is also crucial to note that the same sources also record episodes of clemency—general amnesty on the day of Mecca’s conquest being the most famous—so that the record includes both severity and mercy under rule.

Apostasy is the sharpest point of divergence between the two figures. Jesus never commands punishment for religious defection; instead he laments unbelief and moves on, or he tells parables that leave judgment to God. In the hadith canon, by contrast, we find legal maxims like “Whoever changes his religion, kill him,” cited in Bukhari and elaborated by later jurists within a framework of public order. The narratives of the Meccan conquest include the execution of named men, including Abdullah ibn Khatal, despite a general amnesty; these individuals are described as having combined apostasy with murder or incitement. Islamic jurisprudence later narrowed, conditioned, or debated the rule; nevertheless, the difference remains: Jesus separates faith from coercion in practice; Muhammad, as lawgiver, treats certain forms of religious defection under the rubric of political treason.

When we lay these dossiers beside the Sermon on the Mount, the structural contrast is stark. Jesus’ program is interior and universal: commands that reach into motive, not merely behavior—anger as murder of the heart, lust as adultery of the eyes. It is deliberately unfit for running a state. It assumes vulnerability, welcomes loss, and defines victory as moral integrity rather than survival. Muhammad’s program is integrative and institutional: it fuses belief with law, rewards loyalty, punishes betrayal, and sets out rules of war, property, marriage, and inheritance. It assumes responsibility for the weak through structure and sees legitimate force as a necessary tool of justice. These are not caricatures; they are the plain implications of the texts.

Philosophically, we can say Jesus offers the ethics of conscience and Muhammad the ethics of order. The ethics of conscience refuses to instrumentalize violence even for good ends; it witnesses, persuades, and suffers. The ethics of order accepts, within limits, the use of coercion to protect a moral community; it legislates, punishes, and stabilizes. Both face paradoxes. Conscience without power is easily crushed by the ruthless. Order without conscience easily hardens into tyranny. The Gospel narrative embodies the first peril; the Medinan dossier illustrates the second risk. Neither pattern, taken alone, solves the human problem. A serious reader can admire the moral beauty of Jesus and the institutional intelligence of Muhammad without denying the costs of each method.

The strongest objections to this comparison come from within the traditions themselves. Believers will insist that Jesus’ apocalyptic horizon relativizes politics, or that Muhammad’s harshest measures met strict wartime criteria and often ended in mercy. They are not wrong. The Gospels push readers toward a kingdom not of this world, which makes nonviolence a rational wager rather than utopian fantasy. The hadith and sīrah also preserve many acts of forbearance, treaty-keeping, and post-victory clemency. But none of these observations erases the difference in center of gravity. In Jesus, the axis is forgiveness; in Muhammad, justice fused with governance. The evidence points there, and honesty requires we say so.

Modern ethics lives in their shadow. Liberal democracies are formally closer to Jesus on freedom of conscience and closer to Muhammad on the necessity of law. We criminalize treason but not heresy; we protect speech that wounds; we forbid violence except under due process. When we fail, we fail in both directions—sentimentalism that cannot act against cruelty and securitism that crushes dissent. The texts do not decide our policy; they expose our temptations. They also remind us what a human being can look like at the extremes: the saint who will not strike and the statesman who dares to judge.

If the word “facts” is to keep meaning, we must anchor it in the earliest sources and say exactly what they say. Jesus teaches enemies’ love and refuses coercion; he dies forgiving. Muhammad governs, marries, makes law, commands in war; he punishes betrayal, permits concubinage under his law, authorizes assassinations of certain wartime inciters in some reports, and treats apostasy under the logic of treason in the canonical legal aphorisms. Some reports are multiply attested; others are contested or weak. Good history neither sanitizes nor sensationalizes. It distinguishes between what is securely reported, what is probable, and what is doubtful—and still keeps the philosophical question in view: what kind of good can survive in a violent world?

A final clarity helps. To praise Jesus’ nonviolence is not to indict Muslims; to acknowledge Muhammad’s penal actions is not to defame Islam. It is to read the books as they stand and to let two lives teach two truths: that mercy without power is crucified, and that power without mercy decapitates. Civilizations that forget either lesson will repeat the worst pages of both histories. Civilizations that remember both might yet write better ones.

Citations 

• The Gospel according to Matthew 5–7; 26:50–54; 27:33–50; The Gospel according to Luke 6:27–36; 23:33–34.
• Ibn Ishaq (d. 767), Sīrat Rasūl Allāh, ed. and trans. A. Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), esp. Banu Qurayza narrative; reports concerning Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf; ʿAsmā’ bint Marwān.
• Al-Tabari (d. 923), Ta’rīkh al-Rusul wa’l-Mulūk (History of the Prophets and Kings), trans. series (SUNY Press), vols. on the Medinan period: expansions of Banu Qurayza, Meccan conquest, named exceptions to amnesty (e.g., Ibn Khatal).
• Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Jihad and Expedition (Maghāzī) and Book of Apostates (Ahkām/Ḥudūd sections as arranged in standard prints): reports on Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf; the maxim “Whoever changes his religion, kill him”; notices on the Meccan conquest and exceptions; entries on Ibrahim, son of the Prophet, born to Maria.
• Ibn Saʿd (d. 845), Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kabīr, trans. Aisha Bewley (The Women of Madina; The Men of Madina), for Maria al-Qibtiyya and marital/domestic details.
• W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953) and Muhammad at Medina (1956), for classic critical syntheses of the Medinan polity and the sources’ reliability debates.
• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Harvard University Press, 2010), for contextualization of early community formation and the political frame of punitive measures.
• Michael Lecker, “On Arabs of the Banū Qurayẓa and their Fate,” various articles, for critical scrutiny of the Qurayza dossier and numbers.
• Harald Motzki (ed.), The Biography of Muhammad: The Issue of the Sources (Brill, 2000), on hadith/sīrah transmission and degrees of reliability.