Elijah Muhammad taught that two thousand years after the coming of Moses, Jesus came to the Caucasian race to reform them, but they rejected His rule. Jesus was not miraculously born of a virgin, as the Bible and the Qur'an teach. Rather, said Elijah, "The real truth that the Christians hate to confess is that Joseph had gotten the child, Jesus, by Mary while he was married to another woman and at that time had six children by the first marriage. So Master Fard Muhammad (God in Person) has taught me."[22]
Elijah also stated that the angelic prophecy, "He shall save His people from their sins" (Matt. 1:21), does not refer to Jesus of Nazareth saving His people (in Muhammad's mind, the white people) from sin. Rather, it refers to "a modern-day Jesus," Fard Muhammad, who comes to save the black man.[23] Much of the New Testament was not just reinterpreted by Elijah Muhammad, but totally rewritten.
He claimed that Jesus died, not by being crucified on a cross, but by being stabbed in the heart by a police officer in Jerusalem with a large hunting knife or small sword. Elijah claimed that Jesus was standing in a spread-eagle position, with His back to the wooden wall of a storefront. The Jewish authorities offered twenty-five hundred dollars in gold to anyone who brought Jesus to them dead and fifteen hundred dollars if He were brought in alive. The officer told Jesus, "They are going to kill you anyway, so why not let me kill you and make the twenty-five hundred dollars as I am a poor man and have a wife and family to care for?" Jesus agreed. He "knew that he would be killed but did not care."[24]
The sword blow through the heart literally pinned Jesus to the wall. The blood stopped circulating so quickly that Jesus' arms were frozen in the stretched-out position. Thus, Elijah corrects a popular misconception: Jesus "died in the form of a cross and not on the cross!"[25] Afterwards, His father Joseph (not Joseph of Arimathea) "mortgaged all of his little land and embalmed Jesus in a liquid in a glass tube. As long as the air does not get to him, he will be there just as he was the day he was killed two thousand years ago. He is buried in Jerusalem."[26] Any talk about Jesus' resurrection is dismissed by Elijah Muhammad as ignorant foolishness.
The six thousand years of white rule was said to have ended in the year 1914 (a year which is also important to Jehovah's Witnesses). However, no visible changes occurred that year. Elijah explained, "A few years of grace have been given to complete the resurrection of the Black man," because "they (so-called Negroes) have been made so completely mentally dead by the enemy (white race) that the extra time is allowed."[27] He did not sayhow much extra time is permitted, but his books (written in the 1960s and early 1970s) state several times that America should be destroyed by the 1970s or 1980s.
Elijah's books read much like those of Jehovah's Witnesses, warning that the total destruction of America and the literal removal of the wicked (for the NOI, the white race) will come any time now. The devils who have overrun America will be utterly destroyed, swiftly and irretrievably. "The black nation and our God, Who is the Originator of the universe, have decided to remove the troublemakers from our planet Earth, as there is no way of the black nations getting along in peace with this wicked, grafted race known as the white race."[28]
Elijah stated that after the white race has been decimated, the black race will resume its former position as world rulers: "The Black man is the true owner of the earth. Now the God of Justice Has Risen up to Deliver the rule back to the Black Man and give him a place in the sun that justifies his ownership."[29]
22. Ibid., 157-158.
23. Elijah Muhammad, The True History of Jesus as Taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, compiled by the Coalition for the Remembrance of Elijah (Chicago: Coalition for the Remembrance of Elijah, 1992), 20. Note that in this reference, Muhammad wrongly cites Matt. 1:23, which the author correctly refers to as Matt. 1:21.
24. Muhammad, True History, 13.
25. Ibid., 14.
26. Ibid.
27. Muhammad, Our Saviour, 13.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 200.
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