Fundamental problem of mankind in Islam is ignorance.
Islam means “submission”. A Muslim is “one who submits”
Concept of a prophet in Islam is different than that in the Bible
Prophets in Islam have a higher status than all other people, being men chosen by God to lead mankind. The Quran uses the term to mean a divinely appointed leader, not necessarily one who prophesies
Prophets include Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Job, Moses, Jonah, Aaron, Solomon, David, Jesus (Quran 4.163)
Aqeeda in the Six Articles of Faith (what to believe) and Sharia in the Five Pillars of Islam (how to live)
Hadith literature is a vast body of literature that records the actions and sayings of Muhammad
Islam diagnoses the world with ignorance and offers the remedy of sharia, a law to follow. Christianity diagnoses the world with brokenness and offers the remedy of God Himself, a relationship with him that leads to heart transformation.
Christian obedience, devoid of threat and rooted in love, is what God truly wants
Allah intends man to pursue the relationship of a servant to his master, but not th relationship of a child with his father. Nothing in the Quran suggests that Allah desires intimacy with humanity. We are not his beloved - just one of his creatures.
The Jews and the Christians each say, “We are the children of Allah and His most beloved!” Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ “Why then does He punish you for your sins? No! You are only humans like others of His Own making. He forgives whoever He wills and punishes whoever He wills. To Allah alone belongs the kingdom of the heavens and the earth and everything in between. And to Him is the final return.” (Quran 5:18)
Islam teaches that Allah is ar-Rahman and ar-Raheem, the Gracious and the Merciful
The Shema: “The LORD our God is one”
- “One” or “echad” refers to a composite unity, like a cluster of grapes (Numbers 13:23) or day comprised of morning and evening (Genesis 1:5)
The church held no political or military power in its first three hundred years, subsisting on faith and perseverancce in the face of persecution
In AD 303, Emperor Diocletian ordered the destruction of a church and its Holy Scriptures, issuing edicts that the same be done to churches throughout the Roman Empire
After a supernautral encounter with a cross vision and a dream about Jesus in AD 312, Emperor Constantine immediately worked to reverse the persecutions of Diocletian, issuing the Edict of Milan in AD 313 which granted freedom of worship for all religions.
Council of Nicaea to address the growing division within the church on account of a man named Arius and the teachings he espoused - that Christ was a god but God (before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not)
Primary subject matter at this ecumenical council after 300 years of intermittent persecution was “Who is Jesus?”
Over 99% of bishops in attendance were in agreement that Jesus is no lowwer than God Himself. That he is not just human, not just a prophet, not just a god, but God: “very God of very God”
John 1:1-3 are immensely important verses for understanding the Christian view of Jesus
John 1 is full of theology from the Torah, emphasizing that this is not a new belief but a continuation of what God had done at the time of Moses.
John 1:14 “make his dwelling” among us is paralleled by the Word tabernacled among us (Exodus 40:34)
Jesus is “God with us”, the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Word through whom the universe was created
Jesus was a human as humans were meant to be: unbroken.
Muslims popularly hold two beliefs about prophets: that all prophets are sinless, and that Allah would hear the cries of prophets in persectuion and save them from death.
However, the Quran seems to teach that prophets did sin (Quran 28:15-16, 38:24-25)
and that they were often killed (Quran 2:61, 3:183, 5:70)
Muhammad is the perfect exemplar that Muslims seek to follow. The primary basis for accepting Islam is that Muhammad is a prophet of God, and the guidance that he brings, sharia, is interpreted largely from the records of his life.
Why is it so obvious that burning a Quran in Floria will endanger lives halfway acround the world, even if perpetrated by an obscure activist?
Why is it so obvious that burning dozens of Bibles and calling them “trash” will not provide any reaction of the sort, even if perpetrated by a government?
I believe the answer lies in the fact that the Quran has a different place in the hearts and minds of Muslims than the Bible does in the hearts and minds of Christians. Both scriptures are considered holy to their people but their uses are different, their histories are different, and their very natures are understood differently.
The Quran to Muslims is the eternal Word of Allah himself. Muhammad only relayed the words and had nothing to do with shaping the text
Some Muslims will consider Arabaic as Allah’s preferred language, the language of heaven
It is reported that when someone asked a question of Muhammad or when he faced certain problems, he would start perspiring and a recitation would come to him.
The Syriac word for “recitation” is quran, and Muhammad would pass this quran on to his followers, usually in small packets of verses. Muslims would then recite these passages in their prayers, committing them to memory. All these recitations were ultimately collected in a book and arranged in 114 suras. A sura can contain verses next to one another that were revealed two decades apart.
Because of its oral modality (dictated from Allah through Gabriel to Muhammad), there are almost no full stories in the Quran with the notable exception of the story of Joseph. This is why some devout Muslims are often able to refer to names of prophets but not to full life stories.
The overall meaning of the Quran seems straightforward: Jews and Christians still had their holy texts at the time of Muhammad, and they could follow the straight path by reading them.
What most Muslims envision when they say the Bible has been corrupted though are wholesale omissions or insertions of New Testament teachings, intentional alterations by ruling powers.
Muhammad’s third successor, the Caliph Uthman, had authority over the entire Muslim ummah from ~AD 644-655. Already by his time, variant recitations of the Quran were causing dissension among Muslims, and Uthman decided he had to do something before hostilities spread.
Within about twenty years after Muhammad’s death, the leader of the Islamic empire recalled all Quranic manuscripts, destroyed them by fire, and issued official, standardized copies. When this happened, devout companions of Huammad strongly resisted the recall of their texts, and the records of their dissent remain with us today.
The historical Jesus never sanctioned violence and endorsed absolutely nothing like the Crusades, whereas the historical Muhammad engaged in jihad as the greatest deed a Muslim can perform
One must divert attention from Jesus to justify violence in Christianity
One must divert attention from Muhammad to argue that Islam is a religion of peace, since he says that a Muslim who does not fight in jihad or at least express a desire to fight is a hypocrite
Position of notable Muslim intellectuals but is a minority position: Jesus only appeared to die
Jesus miraculously survived the cross, was taken down alive, placed in a tomb to heal, then escaped the clutches of the Romans
Similar but not the same as the Swoon Theory: Jesus somehow survived crucifixtion; he merely fell unconscious or “swooned”
Even if Jesus had somehow managed to survive the crucifixtion, his body would have been broken and mutilated, requiring desperate medical attention
Muslim position is the Theistic Swoon Theory: God miraculously preserved Jesus’ life on the cross. “If Jesus can perform the grand miracle of raising Jesus from the dead, why can he not perform a lesser mircale of preserving him from death?
Subtle traces of divine design (God didn’t want Christ to die)
Pilate’s wife’s dream
Pilate colluding with executioner
Pilate colluding with Joseph of Airmathea
Women bring medicinal aloes and myrrh for Jesus
Jesus disguised as gardener to escape guards
Responding to Theistic Swoon Theory
Important to note that Quran says “and they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him” which appears to say that he wasn’t even affixed to a cross
The “subtle traces of divine design” are all said in the context of Jesus prophesying his own death
Resurrection account CAN be harmonized: there were two angels at the scene who appeared as young men.
Historically, Pilate was ruthless and did not hesitate to kill Jews if it meant preserving order and Roman rule
Josephus records Pilate’s willingness to kill innocent Samaritans as well as steal from the temple treasury and beat to death those who protested.
The Theistic Swoon Theory gives no account for the inception of the Christian church
Majority position going back to earliest commentaries in Islam: Jesus’ visage was placed on another person who was crucified in his place
Substitution Theory
Jesus’ face was placed on someone else like Simon of Cyrene or Judas Iscariot
This is a position that cannot be easily defended with historical argumentation but Muslims will point back to differing resurrection accounts in the gospels to point to the fact that the writers did not know what actually happened
Responding to the Substitution Theory
No objective observer should conclude God conducted a mircale when an obvious explanation is available.
Why would anyone argue that Jesus did not die and that God instead transposed Jesus’ image onto someone else? In this case, there is little room for doubt: the basis fo this Islamic belief is simply that the Quran asserts this
The Quran is six hundred years late and over six hundred miles removed, and it is therefore unlikely to tell us anything more accurately than the Gospels.
Quran 5.110 shows that it takes from the clay bird account in Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a second century work of fiction, and baby Jesus speaking (19.23) from the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior
Quran 4.157 seems to come from a second century Gnostic source, the Gospel according to Basilidesm which was a late, fictitious gospel propagating “secret knowledge” to support its polytheistic worldview, not providing historical information about Jesus’ life.
“He [Christ] 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 recevied the form of Simon, and standing by, laughed at them.”
Since the material world is evil in the eyes of the Gnostics, Basilides taught Jesus must not have had a material body, and therefore he could not have been crucified.
The information in these three passages makes excellent contextual sense in the fictious gospels but little or no sense in the Quran. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus blew life into clay birds as a miraculous mischief-maker, which fits the context perfectly (Jews accuse Jesus that fashioning clay birds on Sabbath is unlawful but playing with live birds is not); in the Arabic Infancy Gospel, he spoke words at birth because he was the eternal word of God; in the Gospel according to Basilidies, he was neither killed nor crucified because he was divine and did not have a material body.
Given that the Quran is a later source than all of them, we ought to conclude that the Quran’s ideas about Jesus come from these late, fictitious sources that are historically unreliable and theologically opposed to Islam.
Objective facts
No non-Muslim scholar agrees with the Islamic psoitions. There is unanimous opinion within academia that Jesus died by crucifixtion
Anti-Christian scholars like Gerd Lüdemann or Paula Fredriksen or John Dominic Crossan affirm the crucifixtion of Jesus
Keep in mind that it is almost impossible to find scholarly unanimity yet virtually all NT scholars today agree with Jesus’ death on the cross.
Muslim scholar Reza Aslan in his book Zealot says Jesus “was most definitely crucified”
This is not evidence for truth (it is an appeal to authority which is logically fallacious) but it does offer a perspective check
The foundation for any historical argument should always be the primary sources
Christians, Jews, and Romans
Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
Josephus, Jewish historian
Tacitus, Roman historian
Historically speaking, the evidence regarding Jesus’ death was categorically in favor of Christianity and against Islam
Jesus’ followers truly believed the risen Jesus had appeared to them
The proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection invites verification from eyewitnesses “he appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at the same time, of whom most remain until now, though some have fallen asleep.”
Disciples were willing to die for their belief that the risen Jesus had appeared to them. No one dies for a lie of their own making. Being willing to die for a belief does not make that belief true, but it almost always ensures sincerity.
People who were not followers of Jesus truly believed the risen Jesus had appeared to them
Saul of Tarsus
James the brother of Jesus
Before
Mark 3:21,31
John 7:3-5
After
Acts 1:14
1 Corinthians 15:7
Galatians 1:19
Hallucination theory: no mass hallucinations (especially from someone like Paul since he has no emotional attachment to Jesus)
Stolen body theory: people don’t die for their own lies
Christianity teaches that God became a man and died on the cross for our sins - doctrines that Muslims consider inconceivable and blasphemous (therefore it must have been corrupted)
When were they corrupted? The earliest church held these beliefs. Someone powerful, other than the disciples, had to infiltrate the early church and corrupt its message. Muslims point to Paul
Muslims claim that disagreements Paul had with Peter and James are evidence of a schism in early Christianity wherein the Pauline version won
Muslims point to Jesus vs. Paul on the Law
Muslims point to the fact that Paul never saw Jesus and rarely comments on the historical Jesus in his letters
Muslims on Paul
Almost no scholar today agrees with the common Muslim characterization of Paul because it depicts him as a usurping deceiver.
“Paul saw a power vacuum among the disciples after Jesus died, so he infiltrated the church and climbed the ranks to take over the reins”
This is silly because Paul was far more secure in his power as a student of Gamaliel, in the line of Hillel, than he would have been in the persecuted church. Instead he chose the meek life of a persecuted man who labored for his wages (Acts 18:3, 2 Corinthians 11:24-25)
It is true that Paul had an argument with Peter in Galatians 2:11-14 but it must be read in context Galatians 2:6,9
Peter is the one who ushered in the era of evangelizing the Gentiles (Acts 15:7-11, Acts 10:28)
Paul likely learned about the historical Jesus while with Peter for fifteen days. They definitely didn’t sit around and talk about the weather.
Letters are not meant to be comprehesnive, especially letters between close relations
Paul was definitely aware of the historical Jesus, knowing about his betrayal (1 Corinthians 11:23)
How would have the disciples been so easily overcome by Paul’s “trickery”? In fact, the Quran even says that disciples are superior to disbelievers (3.55).
Titus 2:13 “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,”
2 Peter 1:1 “Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ”
John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:18 “18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”
John 20:28-29 “28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
The claim of Muslims and skeptics like Bart Ehrman is that John’s Gospel is unreliable because it was written 60 years after Jesus’ time. Therefore, they turn to the book of Mark, the earliest of the gospels.
Mark is a very Jewish gospel, written with the OT in mind. It refers to Jewish sources over seventy times, with a strong preference for the book of Isaiah.
Mark starts with a reference to a passage in the OT: Isaiah 40:3-5. In that passage, “a voice calls out in the wilderness, ‘prepare the way for Yahweh! Make straight a highway in the desert for our God!…The Presence of Yahweh will appear.’” (Voice in wilderness = John the Baptist; Yahweh = Jesus)
Mark 14:62-64 “And Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?”
Reference to Daniel 7:13-14
Reference to Psalm 110:1
Philippians 2:5-11
Reference to Isaiah 45:22-23
Commonly cited verses that “reject” Christ’s deity
John 17:3 “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent”
Sounds just like the shahada!
John 14:28 “The Father is greater than I”
Mark 10:18 “Why do you call me good?…No one is good - except God alone”
Taken in isolation, these verses pose a challenge but that is the problem; they should not be taken in isolation. A lot of these verses need to be understood with the doctrine of the hypostatic union.
How can Jesus be God if the Father is greater than he is?
When I consider myself compared to the president of the US, I would not hesitate to say that the president is greater than I. He is in charge of the entire nation and is one of the most powerful men in the world, whereas I am a normal citizen. So the president is greater than I, far greater; but we are both equally human. In his essence, the president is just a human being, as am I, and in that sense we are equal. The difference is between “person” and “being”
One might say that this is a poor comparison. How can some be limited and unlimited at the same time? For example, God knows all things, and Jesus did not know all things (Mark 13:32). How can Jesus be God?
The answer is found in Philippians 2: God voluntarily limited the expression of his deity when he became human. He limited himself voluntarily, becoming a real man, so that as a man he could atone for the sins of man.
Why did Jesus not say “I am God”?
The answer is found in Mark 1:34 “He would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was”
Jesus had a goal to keep his identity secret for a time
When people came to learn from Jesus, they crowded around him so much that he was no longer able to go into towns (Mark 1:45)
Pharisees and Herodians began to see what Jesus was doing and claiming, they began to plot how they might kill him (Mark 3:6) but Jesus did not want to be killed until the right time (Mark 8:31)
Jesus reveals himself more and more towards the end of His ministry.
Muslims believe that Jesus is Messiah but in the Gospels, Jesus only publicaly proclaimed that he is the Messiah one time before the Sanhedrian during his trial. At this same time, Jesus also publically claimed to be God. Therefore, Muslims are in no place to demand that Jesus proclaim his deity more often or more boldly.
Islam requires Muslims to be that Jesus was so incompetent as a teacher and prophet that he was not able to instill this most simple fact in his followers’ minds: that he was merely a human. Given that Islam’s central proclamation is tawhid, this means Jesus was an abject failure. In fact, he was worse than a total failure, since he left his disciples believing the exact opposite of tawhid.
The only remaining alternative for Muslims: reject all of the historical evidence of Christian origins, regardless of how much there is, how widespread it is, and how firmly grounded it is.
Muslims’ claim: He was a champion for women and orphans, resilient proclaimer of monotheism, a great leader, and a merciful conqueror
Critically examining his character: Muhammad taugh people to feed the poor; to love others for God’s sake; to abstain from theft, fornication, and infanticide; to release slaves, to help the weak and serve those who cannot work for themselves. But one must examine the counterevidence in the Quran and the hadith of Sahih (means authentic) Bukhari and Sahih Muslim
When Muhammad received his first revelation, he became suicidal. A spiritual being named Namus grabs hold of Muhammad and squeezes him so that he cannot bear it.
Muhammad said that fighting is literally the best thing in the world (Sahih Bukhari 4.52.50)
Nothing earns a Muslim more reward than fighting in jihad, and it is better than praying without ceasing and fasting perpetually (Sahih Bukhari 4.52.44)
Dying in battle is so great that it is the only thing that would make a man want to leave heaven (Sahih Bukhari 4.52.72)
Muhammad said that he had been a victim of black magic, had delusional thoughts of things he had not done, and confused demonic inspiration with divine inspiration (Sahih Bukhari 7.71.661, 4.53.400)
Muhammad (52 y.o.) conssumated his marriage with his nine year old bride Aisha who was still playing with dolls (Sahih Muslim 3481)
Muhammad was prophesied in the Bible
Muslims’ claim: Deuteronomy 18:18-19, John 16:12-14
Deuteronomy is talking about Moses and his country men.
John is talking about the Holy Spirit.
Muhammad had God-given insight into science
Muslims’ claim: Quran 23:12-13 describes zygotic development from fertilization to differentiation. Quran 78:6-7 describes mountains as “pegs”, indicating that they have roots which go beneath the surface of the earth.
1000 years before Muhammad, Aristole published a treatise on embryology, On the Generation of Animals
500 years before Muhammad, Galen, a Greek scientist published something similar, On the Natural Faculties
Quran 23:12-13 is far from scientific. It is certainly not “miraculous scientific knowledge”
There are many scientific inaccuracies in the Quran and hadith
Muhammad teaches that flies carry diseases on one wign and antidotes on the other
That cumin heals all disease
Camel urine cures stomach aches
Most Muslims have not read the primary sources on Muhammad’s life, instead only hearing overviews
Hadith sciences and the historical method
For over two hundred years, stories about the Islamic prophet were passed orally from person to person, and among the true account proliferated many fabrications
Muslim scholars grade individual accounts of Muhammad’s life based on criteria such as how well-known an account was and who the people relaying it were. Most trustworthy = sahih/“authentic”, weakest hadith = daeef/“weak” or maudu/“fabricated”
Imans will essentially find ways to pick and choose from the ancient records which accounts were reliable and which were not, creating a Muhammad that they felt comfortable with.
The first Arabic book to have been written was the Quran, and even that was turned into a written book only after Muhammad died. There was no such thing as written Arabic literature, only oral. People were still figuring out how to write Arabic.
No one wrote a biography of Muhammad’s life until about 140 years after Muhammad died
The first biography, Sirat Rasul Allah, was written by a man named Ibn Ishaq, but the book itself has been lost. Ibn Ishaq taught a man named al-Bakkai, who made his own edition of Ibn Ishaq’s book, and al-Bakkai taught a man named Ibn Hisham, who edited al-Bakkai’s edition; it is this edition that we have today.
Ibn Hisham tells us in his introductory remarks: “Things which it is disgraceful to discuss, matters which would distress certain people, and such reports as al-Bakkai told me he could not accept as trustworthy - all these things I have omitted.” (Found in Ibn Hisham’s notes in The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaw’s Sirat Rasul Allah, 691
For this reason, selective filtration, the whole body of hadith is inherently flawed: they contain only those accounts that multiple generations of early Muslims each chose to save.
Muhammad Kalisch was a Muslim scholar goes as far as to say that Muhammad probably didn’t even exist.
Muslims are quick to discard the gospel of John because it was written fifty-five or sixty years after Jesus’ death. If they treated the accounts of Muhammad’s life the same way, they would have to throw out absolutely everything, and they would have no basis to consider him a prophet.
Muslim’s claim: The Quran is inimitable in literary quality 10.37-38
This claim is virtually impossible to assess. Purely subjective.
See Furqan al-Haqq (Psalms in Arabic) and Gerd Puin on Arabic orthography of the Quran
The Fulfilled Prophecies of the Quran
None to really test and seriously consider. The prophecies of the “predicted events” could also have been easily abrograted given the time between event and prophecy.
The Miraculous Scientific Knowledge in the Quran
Muslim’s claim: Big bang in 21.30
Actually talking about the separation between land and sea, which Genesis also talks about. Nothing new here.
The Mathematical Marvels of the Quran
Muslim’s claim: The Quran displays mathematical marvels that could only be the result of God’s authorship. The word “month” appears 12 times, the word “day” appears 365 times, the words “man” and “woman” appear an equal number of times, the word “angels” and “Satan” appear an equal number of times, the words “this world” and “the hereafter” appear an equal number of times.
See Rashaed Khalifa and his “discovery” of the number 19 in the Quran. The reality is all sorts of amazing patterns can be found in the world around us if we simply look for them.
The Perfect Preservation of the Quran
Muslim claim: Every single word, letter, stroke of the Quran remains exactly as it was revealed, from Allah to Muhammad down to our day
When Uthman produced an official, edited copy of the Quran and destroyed all the other copies, he left future historians no means to determine whether today’s Quran actually goes back to Muhammad. Uthman destroyed all the evidence and it appears he did so precisely because there were variants.
The Quran was collected from people’s memories. Sahih Bujhari: The Quran was colleced from “palmed stalks, thin white stones and also from the men who knew it by heart.”
The same hadith goes on to say “I started searching for the Quran till I found the last two verses of Surat at-Tauba with Abi Khuza’ima Al-Ansari and I could not find these verses with anybody other than him”
According to most trustworthy traditions, parts of the Quran were known by only one person, and other parts were missed, and indeed Muslims forgot verses.
Sahih Bukhari 6.61.527 “Umar said, Ubai was the best of us in the recitation (of the Qur’an) yet we leave some of what he recites.”
Given the abrogation of its text, the missing sections, the portions that had been forgotten, and the controlled destruction of all variants, an objective investigator is forced to ask, “In what way is the preservation of the Quran miraculous?”
Arabic writing was far from perfected during the time of Muhammad, which is why there was no such thing as a written Arabic book. Any reference to an Arabic Kitab, the word for “book” was actually an oral text that was handed down through poets and reciters. It was not a written book.
The Quran started as an oral text, was transformed into a written text that was not unanimously agreed upon, and has been shaped and crafted by human authority even into the twentieth century.
