This OP is going to be under construction for quite some time.
full text "Occultism in the family of Mohammad"
http://religionresearchinstitute.org/Mohammad/occultism.htmin-forum full text, for quoting or discussing other elements of the article
http://islamchristianforum.com/index.php?topic=1784.0"After the negative experiences which depressed Mohammed, Khadijah sent him to her cousin, Waraqa, to convince him that Mohammed was called to be a prophet of Allah. Waraqa succeeded in his task and became responsible for most of the Qur’anic verses at the beginning. Waraqa inserted Ebionite doctrines about Jesus in the Qur’an, stating that Jesus was a prophet, and that He was not crucified, but God made someone to resemble Jesus. That one was crucified because the crowd thought he was Jesus. This doctrine was first initiated by Simon, the magician from Samaria, who later founded a heresy which took his name, Simonianism. In reality, Simon created the root for such doctrine, before it was developed by the Gnostics in later times. Here, I present Simon the magician’s idea about Jesus, which Hyppolytus reported in “The Refutation of all heresiesâ€:
Jesus Christ being transformed, and being assimilated to the rulers and powers and angels, came for the restoration (of things). And so (it was that Jesus) appeared as man, when in reality he was not a man. And (so it was) that likewise he suffered, though not actually undergoing suffering, but appearing to the Jews to do so.[xxx][30]
The idea that the people crucified someone whom God made to resemble Jesus was embraced by some heresy-believing groups which were known to have immoral values, such as free sex and connections with occultism. Waraqa belonged to one of these cults.
Waraqa was one of the founders of the group called Ahnaf. In the first narration of the life of Mohammed, written by Ibn Hisham in the 8th century A.D., we read:
The Honafa’, or Ahnaf, was a small group started when four Sabians at Mecca agreed. Those four were Zayd bin Amru bin Nafil, Waraqa bin Naufal, Ubaydullah bin Jahsh, and Uthman Bin al-Huwayrith.[xxxi][31]
The four founders of Ahnaf were all related to Mohammed. They were descendants of Loayy, one of Mohammed's ancestors. Furthermore, Waraqa bin Naufal and Uthman Bin al-Huwayrith were cousins of Khadijah. We know this from Mohammed’s genealogy presented by Ibn Hisham.[xxxii][32] Ubaydullah Bin Jahsh was a maternal cousin to Mohammed. Mohammed married his widow, Um Habibeh. All this reveals the close connection between Mohammed and the founders of the group.
This group was unknown outside Mecca, but Umayya bin Abi al-Salt, a maternal cousin of Mohammed, is considered by some to be a member of the group. He lived in the city of Taif. We know many people joined them. They belonged to different religions, and thus had various doctrines. Each religion contained some form of polytheism, paganism and occultism. This makes them the most unlikely group in history to claim that they espoused the faith which Abraham and other prophets in the Old Testament professed and preached. It’s ridiculous that Muslims would believe that this pagan group represented the true and devout faith.
The myths which they believed and incorporated into their poetry were also written into the Qur’an because Mohammed belonged to the group from the time he was a youth. He boasted that he believed in their creed, and he was known to have connections with many members of this group. He was influenced by their teachings, as well as by the immoral concepts and the use of slogans of sex to draw people to them, such as a paradise of free sex. All this reflects Mohammed’s deep affiliation to this group. Mohammed used their ideas. In the Qur’an we encounter some of the same myths.
It was not known if this group called themselves Honafa’ or Ahnaf, or if they were called this by the society as such, but they knew the terminology had a negative meaning and reflected negative behavior. The word hanif means “astrictive, confined, awry, biased and errant.†The Arabic word comes from the verb hanafa which means “to become Astrictive.â€[xxxiii][33] Although the Qur’an would convey a positive meaning to the term hanif today, it was not so at the time of Mohammed. Jawad Ali, the Iraqi scholar I referred to earlier, says, “The Hanaf is straying from the right way.†Jawad Ali quotes many old Islamic authors who maintained this was the meaning of hanif at the time of Mohammed.[xxxiv][34] According to Jawad Ali, the word also is derived from an Aramaic word that means "atheist, guileful, hypocrite, infidel or perverted."[xxxv][35]
No matter how you look at it, the term hanif was a negative one at the time of Mohammed, as we see it in the Arabic and Aramaic languages. This suggests that since the group's members were called by this term, not by themselves but by the society in which they lived, is a reflection on their immoral conduct and the perversions in which they participated."
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Ebionites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites#Jesus"The majority of Church Fathers agree that
the Ebionites rejected many of the precepts central to Nicene orthodoxy, such as
his pre-existence, divinity, virgin birth, atoning death, and physical resurrection.[5]
The Ebionites are described as emphasizing the oneness of God and the humanity of Jesus as the biological son of both Mary and Joseph,
who by virtue of his righteousness, was chosen by God to be the messianic "prophet like Moses" (foretold in Deuteronomy 18:14–22) when he was anointed with the Holy Spirit at his baptism.[4][59] Origen (Contra Celsum 5.61)[60] and Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica 3.27.3) recognise some variation in the Christology of Ebionite groups; for example that while all Ebionites denied Christ's pre-existence
there was a sub-group which did not deny the virgin birth.[61]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites#JesusExcept for Muslims incredible belief, that Moses prophecy was actually of Muhammad, that M.O. is altogether familiar to those of us that work with Muhammad's followers.
Perhaps that sub-group mentioned in the last sentence was the influence of Khadijah's cousin Waraqa bin Nufal.
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Excerpts
Chapter XXIII.—Doctrines and practices of Simon Magus and Menander.
"This Simon, then—who feigned faith, supposing that the apostles themselves performed their cures by the art of magic, and not by the power of God; and with respect to their filling with the Holy Ghost, through the imposition of hands, those that believed in God through Him who was preached by them, namely, Christ Jesus—suspecting that even this was done through a kind of greater knowledge of magic, and offering money to the apostles, thought he, too, might receive this power of bestowing the Holy Spirit on whomsoever he would,—was addressed in these words by Peter: “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God can be purchased with money: thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter, for thy heart is not right in the sight of God; for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.
He then, not putting faith in God a whit the more, set himself eagerly to contend against the apostles, in order that he himself might seem to be a wonderful being, and applied himself with still greater zeal to the study of the whole magic art, that he might the better bewilder and overpower multitudes of men. Such was his procedure in the reign of Claudius Cæsar, by whom also he is said to have been honoured with a statue, on account of his 348 magical power.
This man, then, was glorified by many as if he were a god; and he taught that it was himself who appeared among the Jews as the Son, but descended in Samaria as the Father while he came to other nations in the character of the Holy Spirit. He represented himself, in a word, as being the loftiest of all powers, that is, the Being who is the Father over all, and he allowed himself to be called by whatsoever title men were pleased to address him."
3. For this purpose, then, he had come that he might win her first, and free her from slavery, while he conferred salvation upon men, by making himself known to them. For since the angels ruled the world ill because each one of them coveted the principal power for himself,
he had come to amend matters, and had descended, transfigured and assimilated to powers and principalities and angels, so that he might appear among men to be a man, while yet he was not a man; and that thus he was thought to have suffered in Judæa, when he had not suffered. Moreover, the prophets uttered their predictions under the inspiration of those angels who formed the world; for which reason those who place their trust in him and Helena no longer regarded them, but, as being free, live as they please;
for men are saved through his grace, and not on account of their own righteous actions.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.ix.ii.xxiv.htmlChapter XXIV.—Doctrines of Saturninus and Basilides.
4. "He appeared, then, on earth as a man, to the nations of these powers, and wrought miracles.
Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them."
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.ix.ii.xxv.htmlTell me that isn't straight out of the Muhammadan's playbook!
http://islamchristianforum.com/index.php?topic=628.msg2542#msg2542http://islamchristianforum.com/index.php?topic=628.msg2915#msg2915And a more fabled up version
http://islamchristianforum.com/index.php?topic=628.msg2917#msg2917http://islamchristianforum.com/index.php?topic=628.msg2923#msg2923http://islamchristianforum.com/index.php?topic=628.msg3034#msg3034Simon Magus
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13797b.htmsimon magnus father heresies_____________________
docetismmuhammad and docetismhttp://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05070c.htm"A heretical sect dating back to Apostolic times. Their name is derived from dokesis, "appearance" or "semblance", because they taught that Christ only "appeared" or "seemed to be a man, to have been born, to have lived and suffered."
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Docetism is not properly a Christian heresy at all, as it did not arise in the Church from the misunderstanding of a dogma by the faithful, but rather came from without. Gnostics starting from the principle of antagonism between matter and spirit, and making all salvation consist in becoming free from the bondage of matter and returning as pure spirit to the Supreme Spirit, could not possibly accept the sentence, "the Word was made flesh", in a literal sense. In order to borrow from Christianity the doctrine of a Saviour who was Son of the Good God, they were forced to modify the doctrine of the Incarnation. Their embarrassment with this dogma caused many vaccinations and inconsistencies; some holding the indwelling of an Aeon in a body which was indeed real body or humanity at all; others denying the actual objective existence of any body or humanity at all; others allowing a "psychic", but not a "hylic" or really material body; others believing in a real, yet not human "sidereal" body; others again accepting the of the body but not the reality of the birth from a woman, or the reality of the passion and death on the cross. Christ only seemed to suffer, either because He ingeniously and miraculously substituted someone else to bear the pain, or because the occurence on Calvary was a visual deception. Simon Magus first spoke of a "putative passion of Christ and blasphemously asserted that it was really he, Simon himself, who underwent these apparent sufferings."
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05070c.htmhttp://carm.org/docetismDocetism was an error with several variations concerning the nature of Christ. Generally, it taught that Jesus only appeared to have a body, that he was not really incarnate, (Greek, "dokeo" = "to seem"). This error developed out of the dualistic philosophy which viewed matter as inherently evil, that God could not be associated with matter, and that God, being perfect and infinite, could not suffer. Therefore, God as the word, could not have become flesh per John 1:1,14, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.. " This denial of a true incarnation meant that Jesus did not truly suffer on the cross and that He did not rise from the dead.
The basic principle of Docetism was refuted by the Apostle John in 1 John 4:2-3. "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; 3and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; and this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world." Also, 2 John 7, "For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist."
Ignatius of Antioch (died 98/117) and Irenaeus (115-190), and Hippolatus (170-235) wrote against the error in the early part of the second century.
Docetism was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
http://carm.org/docetism
