I don't know where to place these thoughts, so I guess I will place them here
For lovers of history of religion only
Muhammad, the founder of Islam, is blamed for saying that the Jews regarded Ezra (‘Uzzair) as the Christians regard Jesus, that is, as the son of God. In terms of everything we know of Judaism, that is plainly wrong. However, it is a curious fact that the Zoroastrian text oddly called the Ulema-I-Islam also ascribes to the Jews a belief which, though perhaps not quite as heretical as that, is quite as bizarre: that Job - of all people! - is the Messiah and the Mediator between God and man, in the same position as “Gusha” (Pahlavi for “the Saviour”) is for the Christians. It is particularly weird that both Muhammad and the anonymous Persian author, who seems to have written only a little later - the text is said to be dateable to the seventh century, shortly after the collapse of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire - should ascribe to the Jews belief in a mediator, an intermediate figure between God and man, which both compare with the figure of Jesus. There is no question whatever of Muhammad being influenced by Persian ideas, of which he was almost wholly ignorant; except for a few loan-words, Zoroastrianism has a lot less to do with Islam than either Christianity or Hebraism. And neither can the author of the Ulema-I-Islam, whose view of Islam was at best sketchy, have absorbed his view from the Qur’an; besides, if he had, why would he pick Job rather than Ezra? Either both writers, independently, tended to assimilate Jewish belief to Christian, which seems possible but strange - why, when the Jews ignored the Trinity and Jews and Christians were as often as not at each others’ throats? Or else there was a Jewish tendency to adopt some Christian ideas, adapting them to Jewish writings, which has not survived. Think of how many Jewish communities and libraries must have vanished down the centuries. The Qumran caves alone have yelded a whole tradition of Jewish thought which, to the best of my knowledge, has left no trace in modern Judaism at all. The early Christian writer Hegesippus mentioned seven separate Jewish schools of thought, “Essenes, Galileans, Hemerobaptists, Masbotheans, Samaritans, Sadducees, Pharisees.” (Eusebius, History of the Church 4.22.6; they are also mentioned, mostly with different names, by Epiphanius.) Of these, only the Pharisees - the ancestors of modern Talmudic Judaism - and a minuscule remain of Samaritans have survived; of most others we cannot even be sure what they preached. There is also the fact that, while Ezra may seem a comparatively minor figure to Christians, to classical Jews he was a very major one: he was held to have completed the compilation of the classical Jewish Bible, and there was a firm belief that the spirit of prophecy had departed from the Jewish people after him. So he was a suitable figure to choose for a world-historical role such as that of mediator and, perhaps, messiah. As for Job, from the literary and imaginative point of view he is even more suited: he is the man who has complained to God Himself, who has brought the voice of human suffering and complaint to the very Throne. If we are to postulate any Jewish belief in a mediator between God and man, these two are indubitably quite suitable.
It is also possible to see why Muhammad wrote differently than the author of the U-i-I. Both writers, of course, were engaged in religious polemic, but from vastly different viewpoints. The Zoroastrian, although basically a monotheist, lived in a world where orders of angels and cosmic powers were a major reality of religion. He accepted, in a modified and weakened way, the need for a mediator; indeed, he seems to have regarded it as a philosophical necessity. ...One sect says: There ought to be a mediator who can say what is right and what is wrong. This saying is true in this way A person holds a book in his hand and (there are) the two eyes as on the face of men. Now as long as there is no mediator between his eyes and the book, that book cannot be read. That mediator is light, for this reason that the book cannot be read in dark. Now if a mediator is necessary for reading a book, a mediator is also necessary for the religion and for the true path... He then proceeds, not unreasonably, to place Zarathustra in that position. Muhammad, on the other hand, was the sworn enemy of anything that even remotely looked like polytheism. The whole work of his life was to remove mediators and idols - as he regarded them - of every kind, and to effectively place a naked man before a naked God. "The sins of every man have We bound about his neck," says Allah somewhere in the Qur'an (sorry, but I am terrible at chapter and verse). The idea of God taking on flesh revolted him less than the idea of God having a Son, and ever since then Islamic propaganda against Christianity has hammered at the Trinity constantly. Now if Muhammad took such a view of the Trinity, as he indubitably did, then he was quite justified in saying to the Jews of his time, who, like all Jews at his time, will have been strongly anti-Christian: "You claim to worship God alone. You claim to reject the Christian heresy. And yet here you are looking for a mediator again. How is that different from Christianity? How is the role you ascribe to Ezra different from that which Christians ascribe to Jesus?" This seems to me quite possibly what is at the back of that strange passage.
Muhammad, the founder of Islam, is blamed for saying that the Jews regarded Ezra (‘Uzzair) as the Christians regard Jesus, that is, as the son of God. In terms of everything we know of Judaism, that is plainly wrong. However, it is a curious fact that the Zoroastrian text oddly called the Ulema-I-Islam also ascribes to the Jews a belief which, though perhaps not quite as heretical as that, is quite as bizarre: that Job - of all people! - is the Messiah and the Mediator between God and man, in the same position as “Gusha” (Pahlavi for “the Saviour”) is for the Christians. It is particularly weird that both Muhammad and the anonymous Persian author, who seems to have written only a little later - the text is said to be dateable to the seventh century, shortly after the collapse of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire - should ascribe to the Jews belief in a mediator, an intermediate figure between God and man, which both compare with the figure of Jesus. There is no question whatever of Muhammad being influenced by Persian ideas, of which he was almost wholly ignorant; except for a few loan-words, Zoroastrianism has a lot less to do with Islam than either Christianity or Hebraism. And neither can the author of the Ulema-I-Islam, whose view of Islam was at best sketchy, have absorbed his view from the Qur’an; besides, if he had, why would he pick Job rather than Ezra? Either both writers, independently, tended to assimilate Jewish belief to Christian, which seems possible but strange - why, when the Jews ignored the Trinity and Jews and Christians were as often as not at each others’ throats? Or else there was a Jewish tendency to adopt some Christian ideas, adapting them to Jewish writings, which has not survived. Think of how many Jewish communities and libraries must have vanished down the centuries. The Qumran caves alone have yelded a whole tradition of Jewish thought which, to the best of my knowledge, has left no trace in modern Judaism at all. The early Christian writer Hegesippus mentioned seven separate Jewish schools of thought, “Essenes, Galileans, Hemerobaptists, Masbotheans, Samaritans, Sadducees, Pharisees.” (Eusebius, History of the Church 4.22.6; they are also mentioned, mostly with different names, by Epiphanius.) Of these, only the Pharisees - the ancestors of modern Talmudic Judaism - and a minuscule remain of Samaritans have survived; of most others we cannot even be sure what they preached. There is also the fact that, while Ezra may seem a comparatively minor figure to Christians, to classical Jews he was a very major one: he was held to have completed the compilation of the classical Jewish Bible, and there was a firm belief that the spirit of prophecy had departed from the Jewish people after him. So he was a suitable figure to choose for a world-historical role such as that of mediator and, perhaps, messiah. As for Job, from the literary and imaginative point of view he is even more suited: he is the man who has complained to God Himself, who has brought the voice of human suffering and complaint to the very Throne. If we are to postulate any Jewish belief in a mediator between God and man, these two are indubitably quite suitable.
It is also possible to see why Muhammad wrote differently than the author of the U-i-I. Both writers, of course, were engaged in religious polemic, but from vastly different viewpoints. The Zoroastrian, although basically a monotheist, lived in a world where orders of angels and cosmic powers were a major reality of religion. He accepted, in a modified and weakened way, the need for a mediator; indeed, he seems to have regarded it as a philosophical necessity. ...One sect says: There ought to be a mediator who can say what is right and what is wrong. This saying is true in this way A person holds a book in his hand and (there are) the two eyes as on the face of men. Now as long as there is no mediator between his eyes and the book, that book cannot be read. That mediator is light, for this reason that the book cannot be read in dark. Now if a mediator is necessary for reading a book, a mediator is also necessary for the religion and for the true path... He then proceeds, not unreasonably, to place Zarathustra in that position. Muhammad, on the other hand, was the sworn enemy of anything that even remotely looked like polytheism. The whole work of his life was to remove mediators and idols - as he regarded them - of every kind, and to effectively place a naked man before a naked God. "The sins of every man have We bound about his neck," says Allah somewhere in the Qur'an (sorry, but I am terrible at chapter and verse). The idea of God taking on flesh revolted him less than the idea of God having a Son, and ever since then Islamic propaganda against Christianity has hammered at the Trinity constantly. Now if Muhammad took such a view of the Trinity, as he indubitably did, then he was quite justified in saying to the Jews of his time, who, like all Jews at his time, will have been strongly anti-Christian: "You claim to worship God alone. You claim to reject the Christian heresy. And yet here you are looking for a mediator again. How is that different from Christianity? How is the role you ascribe to Ezra different from that which Christians ascribe to Jesus?" This seems to me quite possibly what is at the back of that strange passage.