Until the mid 1990s I hadn’t thought much myself about the question of how to navigate the maze of different religions. I’d been raised a Christian and had never talked much to those of different religions, so probably assumed, like many people, that most of the world’s religions were broadly similar. Then in 1997 I went along to a place in London, England, called “Speakers’ Corner”.
Known as the free speech capital of the world, on a Sunday afternoon at Speakers’ Corner anyone can stand on a ladder or a soapbox and talk about what they believe. They argue, they debate. And at Speakers’ Corner I found plenty of people of other religions—but especially Muslims—willing to attack what I believed and challenge my beliefs. And those early conversations with Muslims fascinated me so much I went on to do a PhD in Qur’anic Studies. That makes me an unusual Christian I guess.
Over the last almost 30 years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with Muslims about my faith and I’ve probably spent as much time thinking about Islam as I have about Christianity. I’ve deeply appreciated Muslim friends and academic colleagues over the years.
So given all that: why am I a Christian and not a Muslim?
I want to offer you three reasons why: first, Muhammad. Second, the Qur’an. And third—and we’ll spend most our time here—Jesus.
Those first two are the pillars that Islam stands or falls on: Muhammad and the Qur’an—but those pillars stand on nothing, they support each other. The validity of the Qur’an is based on the testimony of just one man (Muhammad), yet Muhammad’s prophethood is based on the Qur’an. And so the whole thing is viciously circular. But let’s say a bit more.
Historical Problems with Muhammad
When it comes to Muhammad, the founder of Islam, I have two main problems. First, there are the terribly poor sources we have for the life of Muhammad. Muhammad’s earliest biography, the Sirat Rassulah, was written by Ibn Ishaq (d. 767) who was writing over a century after Muhammad’s death in 632—quite a time gap, compared to the Gospels, for example. But things are even more problematic: we do not possess Ibn Ishaq’s work, only parts of it reproduced by Ibn Hisham (d. 833)—so we’re now over two centuries removed from Muhammad. Ibn Hisham edited the work in order, as he wrote, to remove “things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people; and such reports as al-Bakka’i told me he could not accept as trustworthy.”1
The problems continue when you look at the growth of the biographical tradition. Ibn Ishaq’s biography is often fairly sketchy: he’ll mention, for example, that a battle occurred, but won’t provide the exact date, the names of the participants and so forth. One generation later, another biographer, Waqidi (d.823), managed to compose a considerably larger work than Ibn Ishaq’s, despite only covering Muhammad’s time at Medina. As the historian of Islam, Patricia Crone puts it:
[Waqidi] will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend colour to the event … given that all this information was unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme.2
So there’s the huge question of how much we can even know about Muhammad, given the sources.
Muhammad’s Character
But when we look within the sources that we do have, there is the problem of Muhammad’s character. With the very greatest of respect to my Muslim friends, I find Muhammad’s character deeply troubling. We have a man who …
Had his critics assassinated. For example, Asma bint Marwan. She was a Medinan poet who wrote a poem insulting Muhammad. When Muhammad heard what Asma had said, he asked his followers: “Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?” A man volunteered and crept into her house that night. She had five children, and the youngest was sleeping at her breast. The assassin gently removed the child, drew his sword, and plunged it into her, killing her in her sleep.
Kept slaves for sexual purposes. This is mentioned in the Qur’an 33:50:
“O Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty.”
Among other slaves, he had a Christian slave girl called Mariyam, given to him by the governor of Egypt. In The History of Al-Tabari, Al-Tabari (an early Muslim historian) reports that:
“He (Muhammad) used to visit her (Mariyam) there and ordered her to veil herself, [but] he had intercourse with her by virtue of her being his property.”Used torture. For example, after Muhammad’s army conquered the Jewish town of Khaybar, one of its leaders, a Jew called Kinana, was brought to Muhammad. In the earliest biography of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rassulah, we read what happened:
Kinana al-Rabi, who had the custody of the treasure of Banu Nadir, was brought to the apostle who asked him about it. He denied that he knew where it was. A Jew came (Tabari says “was brought”), to the apostle and said that he had seen Kinana going round a certain ruin every morning early. When the apostle said to Kinana, “Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?” He said “Yes”. The apostle gave orders that the ruin was to be excavated and some of the treasure was found. When he asked him about the rest he refused to produce it, so the apostle gave orders to al-Zubayr Al-Awwam, “Torture him until you extract what he has.” So he kindled a fire with flint and steel on his chest until he was nearly dead.
… and if we had time we could list much more. The more I’ve read in the Muslim sources about Muhammad’s character, the less I’m impressed. I have many friends who are former Muslims who left Islam when they discovered this for themselves.
Problems with the Qur’an
Then there’s the other key pillar on which Islam, stands: the Qur’an. Muslims have an extraordinarily high view of the Qur’an. For example, it is considered to have come down to earth directly from heaven, with no human involved in its creation—Muhammad is considered to have received it, via the angel Gabriel, but certainly not to have created it. The idea that the earthly Qur’an is a copy of the heavenly archetype is found in Surah 85:21-22:
“This is a Glorious Qur’an, (inscribed) in a Tablet Preserved!” (Q. 85:21-22)
But I don’t think this view of the Qur’an stands up. First, there’s the fact that 25% of the Qur’an consists of retellings of biblical stories, Jewish and Christian legends, and Arabic folklore. My PhD explored this and showed how the Qur’an looks very human—it looks like a series of orally composed sermons from the seventh century that borrowed heavily from elsewhere.
But then there’s the question of how we got the Qur’an. Muslims have been taught it’s been perfectly preserved, but the evidence doesn’t support this. In the early Muslim historical sources themselves we read how In 644 AD, the third caliph to rule after Muhammad, ‘Uthmān took the throne. As the Muslim armies advanced up into Armenia and Azerbaijan, rapidly conquering territory, reports reached ‘Uthmān that Muslim soldiers on the battlefield were arguing about how the Qur’an should be recited. The Muslim general, Hudhaifa ibn al-Yaman, brought a worrying report to the Caliph:
Narrated Anas bin Malik: Hudhaifa was afraid of their differences in the recitation of the Qur’ān, so he said to ‘Uthmān, “O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book [the Qur’ān] as Jews and the Christians did before.” So ‘Uthmān sent a message to Hafsa saying, “Send us the manuscripts of the Qur’an so that we may compile the Qur’anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you.” Hafsa sent it to ‘Uthmān. ‘Uthmān then ordered Zaid bin Thabit, ‘Abdullah bin Az-Zubair, Said bin Al-As and ‘Abdur-Rahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies. ‘Uthmān said to the three Quraishi men, “In case you disagree with Zaid bin Thabit on any point in the Qur’an, then write it in the dialect of the Quraish, for the Qur’an was revealed in their tongue.” They did so, and when they had written many copies, ‘Uthmān returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa. ‘Uthmān sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur’anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.3
‘Uthmān’s destruction means we will never know what was in those other qur’anic manuscripts and how they differed from the Qur’an we have today. What we do know is that ‘Uthmān was widely criticised by other Muslims for what he did. For example, Ibn ‘Umar (son of the second Caliph) said:
“Let none of you say ‘I have learned the whole of the Qur’an’, for how does he know what the whole of it is, when much of it has disappeared? Let him rather say, ‘I have learned what is now extant of it.’”4
Whilst the tenth-century Muslim historian al-Tabari reported people saying to ‘Uthmān:
“The Qur’an was many books (kutub); you have abandoned all but one.”5
And thus this second pillar Islam stands on looks unreliable.
Jesus
So let’s now talk about Jesus. Jesus Christ is, of course, central to Christianity and to Christian faith, especially his death and resurrection. As the Bible puts it, everything stands or falls on the resurrection of Jesus:
17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied (1 Cor 15:17-19)
It’s for this reason I’m encouraged there is tremendous historical evidence for the resurrection.
But whilst Jesus stands at the centre of the Christian faith, many Christians are unaware that Jesus is also an important figure in the Qur’an, where about 90 verses talk of him and 25 verses mention him by name, using an Arabized version of his name, Isa.
This should not be a surprise: the seventh-century Arabia in which the Qur’an was composed was religiously very diverse, with Christian, Jewish and other groups present—and religious ideas and stories circulated freely. The Qur’an draws on these traditions and as we saw earlier, it’s been estimated that about 25% of the Qur’an consists of retellings of Jewish and Christian traditions.
In the fifth sura or chapter of the Qur’an, the qur’anic Jesus’s ministry is briefly summarised:
(Remember) when God said, ‘Jesus, son of Mary! Remember My blessing on you and on your mother, when I supported you with the holy spirit, (and) you spoke to the people (while you were still) in the cradle, and in adulthood. And when I taught you the Book and the wisdom, and the Torah and the Gospel. And when you created the form of a bird from clay by My permission, and you breathed into it, and it became a bird by My permission, and you healed the blind and the leper by My permission. And when you brought forth the dead by My permission, and when I restrained the Sons of Israel from (violence against) you. When you brought them the clear signs, those among them who had disbelieved said, “This is nothing but clear magic.”’ (Q. 5:110)
Elsewhere as we read the Qur’an we discover
A major emphasis on the Virgin Birth of Jesus. The Qur’an tells this story twice, in sura 3:42-48 and sura 19:16-34. Here are a couple of verses from the first of those accounts:
45 When the angels said, ‘Mary! Surely God gives you good news of a word from Him: his name is the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, eminent in this world and the Hereafter, and one of those brought near. 46 He will speak to the people (while he is still) in the cradle and in adulthood, and (he will be) one of the righteous.’ 47 She said, ‘My Lord, how shall I have a child, when no man has touched me?’ He said, ‘So (it will be)! God creates whatever He pleases. When He decrees something, He simply says to it, “Be!” and it is.’That Jesus taught and brought a book called The Gospel (or Injil).6
That he performed miracles (we saw some examples in Q. 5:110 earlier; elsewhere we read of him summoning a table of food from heaven.7)
We also discover some very, very lofty titles applied to Jesus. So, for example he is:
The Messiah
… the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary … (Q. 4:157)A Word from God
… a Word from Allah whose name is Jesus … (Q. 3:45)A Spirit from God
The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only the Messenger of God, and His Word that He committed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him (Q. 4:171)
A Polemical Jesus
The Qur’an is also concerned with asserting right belief about Jesus. Thus his place in the prophetic line is repeatedly stressed (Q. 2:136; 3:3; 4:163; 42:13). His humanity is heavily underlined, the Qur’an being especially concerned with correcting Muhammad’s perceived doctrinal excesses of the Christians (3:59; 5:72). Jesus is not Allah’s Son, but merely his servant (4:172). The Qur’an also famously denies that Jesus was crucified.
This polemical focus makes Jesus unique among qur’anic prophets. As the Muslim scholar Tarif Khalidi writes: the qur’anic Jesus is “embroiled in polemic”, indeed “[he] is in fact an argument addressed to his more wayward followers.”8 One result of this is to abstract Jesus from his first-century Jewish context—he becomes, not a first-century Jew, but a seventh-century argument.
A Jesus Who Doesn’t Fit
Yet as we move through Islamic history, interest in Jesus continues to grow. If we turn to the hadith, the collection of traditions about what Muhammad said and did that were collated and edited in the ninth century, Jesus appears all over the place, taking on in particular a role in the end-times where he will return to fight the Antichrist, al-dajjal:
It would at this very time that Allah will send Jesus, son of Mary, and he will descend at the white minaret in the eastern side of Damascus, wearing two garments lightly dyed and placing his hands on the wings of two angels. When he will lower his head, there would fall drops of water from his head, and when he will raise it up, drops like pearls would scatter from it. Every non-believer who would smell the odour of his self would die and his breath would reach as far as he would be able to see. He would then search for him (Al-Dajjal) until he would catch hold of him at the gate of Ludd [a village near Jerusalem] and will kill him. Then a people, whom Allah will have protected, will come to Jesus, son of Mary, and he will wipe their faces and inform them of their ranks in Paradise.9
And so we begin to see a problem—both with the Qur’an and the Hadith. The problem is that the Islamic version of Jesus doesn’t look very Islamic; he doesn’t fit:
There’s no Islamic reason why Jesus is born of a virgin.
His names (‘Word of God’ and ‘Spirit of God seem to suggest he doesn’t just speak God’s words, that somehow he is God’s word). This doesn’t look very Islamic.
The title ‘Messiah’, used by the Qur’an eleven times10 for Jesus, gave later Muslim scholars huge problems, as the Qur’an nowhere explains what it means (to discover what it means, you need to read the Bible). The fourteenth-century Iranian lexicographer, al-Fīrūzabādī, collected all the interpretations he could find in previous commentators, some 50 different ideas, my favourite being “flat footed”, because Jesus walked about preaching so much his feet were flat.
His miracles look Islamically rather odd—no other qur’anic prophet (certainly not Muhammad) performed these sorts of amazing feats. Why so many miracles?
His role on the Day of Judgement—hinted at in the Qur’an but vastly expanded in the hadith—also looks very odd.
The more you study this, the more apparent it increasingly becomes that the Qur’anic Jesus doesn’t look very Islamic. He doesn’t really fit the Qur’an. The Qur’an claims he is just an ordinary prophet, whose role (as is that of all qur’anic prophets) is just to pass on messages from God. But there is much more going on—he is virgin born, works miracles, bears special titles. And he turns up on Judgement Day, striking down God’s enemies, dividing good and evil, welcoming the righteous into paradise.
The Qur’an has tried to squeeze Jesus into its story but has failed miserably: it’s rather as if somebody has taken Pride and Prejudice and inserted into it Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, hoping nobody would notice.
Jesus does not belong in the Qur’an and Islam. He has been borrowed, ripped from his home habitat, and even though the Qur’an does its utmost to squeeze him into its theology, Jesus simply refuses to fit.
The Muslim Jesus doesn’t fit into Islam—he acts weirdly, says strange things, bears strange titles. He feels like an alien invader. And that’s because he is. He has been borrowed by the Qur’an and his background forgotten.
But when we turn to the Bible, Jesus suddenly makes sense. There we see a Jesus whose claims of messiahship, whose titles, miracles, and virgin birth make sense. A Jesus who was always challenging people with questions about his identity:
27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
28 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
29 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:27-29)
And the Christian answer to that question is that Jesus is more than a prophet, but God himself, stepping into space and time and history.
That, of course, is the big divider with Muslims. And the question I am asked by Muslims more than any other is why do you Christians worship Jesus? Muslims think Jesus was just a man, just a prophet, and thus Christians are guilty of blasphemy for worshipping something other than God. As the Qur’an puts it:
Allah said, “O Jesus son of Mary, didst thou say unto men, ‘Take me and my mother as gods, apart from God’?” Jesus said, “To Thee be glory! It is not mine to say what I have no right to.” (Q. 5:116)
I like to respond to Muslim friends by pointing out that Jesus is worshipped all over the New Testament—for example in Revelation 5:6-14 he is portrayed as a lamb, standing on God’s throne, receiving worship. In Philippians 2:10 we are told that every knee will bow in worship and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord . In Matthew 28, after meeting the resurrected Jesus, we are told the disciples “worshipped him”.
Elsewhere in the New Testament we read of Christians praying to Jesus, baptising in the name of Jesus, and “calling on the name of the Lord” (a phrase that in the Old Testament referred to God).
This was how the early church behaved. So now we have a choice: either Jesus was the most useless religious leader ever—he didn’t believe he was God, but utterly failed to communicate that to his closest followers, and they all messed up. Or … or … Jesus really did make claims to be God that his disciples understood.
Let me give you five brief reasons why I think Jesus did indeed claim divine identity:
His attitude to the Old Testament, sacred scripture to Jews. Jesus put his own words on a level with scripture, frequently saying things like “you have heard it said, well I say to you”. Commenting on this, the famous Jewish scholar, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, said that Jesus’s attitude to Torah wanted to make him ask: “Who do you think you are? God?”11
Jesus believed he had the authority to forgive sin—something that only God could do.
Jesus’s attitude to his own name. Rather than say “the Lord says to you” like Old Testament prophets, Jesus usually said “I say to you”. He taught his followers to pray in his name.
Jesus declares himself “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28). The Sabbath was central to Judaism and faithful Jews believed the Sabbath was sacred time, the Sabbath was something God himself had set up at the beginning of creation. Jesus thus claiming Lordship over it is tantamount to Jesus saying “I am the Lord of space and time”.
Jesus’s favourite title for himself was “Son of Man”, a title he took from Daniel 7 in the Old Testament, where “one like a Son of Man” is enthroned beside God in heaven. In his trial before the high priest, Caiaphas, Jesus quotes Daniel 7, to which Caiaphas responds “blasphemy!” and sends Jesus to the Roman governor to be executed.
If Jesus did and said all this and was merely a man, he would be a liar, a deceiver, and a blasphemer. Indeed he was crucified by the religious leaders as a blasphemer. And if he’d stayed dead, he would be a dead deceiver. But he didn’t. God raised him from the dead, proving and vindicating the claims Jesus had made about himself. That’s why Christians worship Jesus.
In Conclusion
So why am I not a Muslim? Because the twin pillars on which Islam stands, the Qur’an and Muhammad, are historically doubtful and morally questionable. Not least the Qur’an, in the way it has borrowed and mangled Jesus, is revealed to be a deeply confused and contradictory book.
But I’m also not a Muslim because I trust and believe Jesus. I believe his words, I believe his testimony about himself, I believe we have incredibly good historical evidence for his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. And if Jesus was who he claimed to be—that leaves no room for Muhammad. Not least a Muhammad who tried to rewrite Jesus’s story 600 years after the events.
And it was the historical Jesus who said on one occasion:
“Greater love has no one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends.” (John 15:13)
The greatest form of love is self-sacrifice: a person laying down her life for her friend; a parent sacrificing themselves for their child; a soldier giving his life to save his platoon during war. Now, if God is a god of love, then the love God shows must be the greatest form of love, because everything God does is the greatest. He is the greatest creator, greatest judge, greatest lover. And that means that God must be able to show self-sacrificial love, or he wouldn’t be love and he wouldn’t be God. And that’s what the God of the Bible has done, in and through Jesus:
“God demonstrates his own love for us in this—while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)
There is nothing like this in Islam. And that’s why I’m not a Muslim, and why I’m a Christian.
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See Ibn Hishām, introductory statement, in Ibn Isḥāq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allāh, trans. with introduction and notes by A. Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 691.
Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) p. 224.
Sahih Bukhari 6.61.510.
Reported in Jalal al Din ‘Abdul Rahman b. Abi Bakr al Suyuti, al-Itqan fi ‘ulum al-Qur’an, Halabi, Cairo, 1935/1354, Volume 2, p. 25. Also cited in Keith E. Small, Holy Books Have a History: Textual Histories of the New Testament and the Qur’an (USA: Avant, 2011) p. 96.
Cited in Gordon Nickel, The Gentle Answer to the Muslim Accusation of Biblical Falsification (Calgary: Bruton Gate, 2014) p.207.
Q. 3:3, 48, 65; 5:46-47, 66, 68, 110; 7:157; 9:111; 48:29; 57:27.
Q. 5:112-115.
Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) pp. 12, 16.
Sahih Bukhari Book 41, Number 7015.
11 times in 9 verses — see Q. 3:45; 4:157, 171-172; 5:17, 72, 75; 9:30-31.
Cited in N. T. Wright, ‘The Biblical Formation of a Doctrine of Christ’ in Donald Armstrong, ed., Who Do You Say That I Am? Christology and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999) 47-68, citing p. 63.
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