Word of God in the Qur'an

John of Damascus and other early Christian writers have noted how much certain statements in the Qur'an resemble Arian and Nestorian teachings. The present study looks at these resemblances more in detail to discover what the Qur'an means when it calls Jesus word of God. The Qur'an itself understands word in several senses, but most frequently as God's decree. The Muslim commentators, too, commonly interpret word when used of Christ as the creative command by which God produced him in the womb of Mary without the help of a human father. The term then would be a title given to Jesus to show how he originated. A concluding chapter reviews the later development of word in Islamic theology and some of the Christians controversies about the Qur'anic meaning of the term.