So why do we not see Paul talking more about Jesus’ life in his letters? In fact, he does talk about the historical Jesus, most notably in the book of 1 Corinthians where he paraphrases Jesus’ words or discusses Jesus’ life a total of six times.13 In addition, some of the accounts Paul relays about Jesus’ life indicate that he knew much more that he did not say in his letters, such as the words “on the night he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23 NIV). One could hardly imagine that Paul would say these words without knowing what actually did happen on the night Jesus was betrayed. Yet Paul never actually talks about the details in his letters.
Which leads to the second, more important point: Letters are not meant to be comprehensive, especially letters between close relations. I have written fewer than a dozen letters to my wife, and if people were to read those letters assuming they contained everything I ever wanted to tell her, they would be sorely disappointed. I have a strong relationship with my wife, and we talk with each other for hours every day. What has been said in person will go unsaid in written communication, and usually only emergent matters are stated in letters, while the most established matters have already been stated in person. In the same way, Paul personally knew those to whom he wrote his letters, and he spent weeks, at times years, in their company. To expect something different of Paul’s letters is to burden them with unrealistic expectations.14
So we can conclude Paul was very much interested in the actual life of Jesus, not just the theological Jesus. The question of whether Paul turned Jesus into the Son of God, or perhaps even God himself, will be explored more fully in the next chapter.
Summarizing Paul
There is little reason to doubt Paul’s sincerity. He received his teaching from Peter, and he submitted to Peter’s authority. He followed Peter in teaching that the Gentiles did not need to follow the law, a corollary of Jesus’ teaching implicit in Matthew 5:17. Even though Paul did not know Jesus during Jesus’ ministry, we can be confident that Paul learned about the historical Jesus from Peter and knew much that he did not mention in his letters. The common Muslim assertion that Paul hijacked Christianity, imposed his own teachings, and corrupted the true religion not only goes against the biblical records but also is unwarranted from a historical point of view and enjoys very little scholarly support.
But beyond this, there is a theological problem for Muslims who would argue that Paul corrupted Christianity.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE ISLAMIC VIEW OF PAUL
The common Muslim view of Paul has significant problems even when considered from an Islamic perspective. First, what happened to the disciples? How were they so easily overcome by Paul that either they were convinced by his trickery and followed him, or their voices were completely drowned out and there is no record of their dissent? Was this outsider that much more powerful than Jesus that he was able to undo all of Jesus’ work and teachings? As a Muslim, I never provided a model as to how this might have occurred, and I have never heard one after leaving Islam.
The problem becomes sharper when we revisit one of the Quranic verses that makes a promise to Jesus: “Indeed, I will cleanse you (Jesus) from those who disbelieve, and I will make those who follow you superior to those who disbelieve, until the day of resurrection” (3.55).15 Allah promises to make the disciples superior to disbelievers, and Jesus would be made free from such disbelievers. The Muslim view of Paul, that he overcame the disciples and hijacked Jesus’ message, seems to ignore the Quran’s promise to the disciples.
It would be helpful if the Quran had something to say about Paul, but it says absolutely nothing, never so much as mentioning his name. Given the pivotal role Muslims often think Paul had in corrupting Christianity, the silence is deafening. Why does the Quran not mention him? Is it on account of the Quran’s omission that Muslims in the early and classical periods of Islam, such as Tabari and Qurtubi, saw Paul as a follower of Jesus?16
In US criminal law, as in other places around the world, three aspects of a crime must be established before a suspect can be found guilty: a means, a motive, and an opportunity. The Islamic view that Paul hijacked Christianity fails to secure any of these three. Paul could not have had the means because Allah promised to make the disciples insuperable; there is no viable motive for Paul to deceive the church as his efforts earned him only persecution and a death sentence; and there is no model suggested that clarifies how Paul might have had an opportunity to overcome all the disciples and hijack the church. Of course, not only should Paul be considered innocent until proven guilty, but as far as this investigation is concerned, there simply is no evidence to convict him. Case closed.
RECENTERING ON THE RESURRECTION
Finally, let us return to the original question: Did Jesus rise from the dead? The truth is, even if we disregard Paul entirely, we still have good reason to think Jesus rose from the dead. The disciples preached Jesus’ resurrection many times in the book of Acts, and their conviction that Jesus rose from the dead is the best explanation for their transformation from fearful followers in the garden of Gethsemane to bold martyrs at the hands of the Romans and others. They no longer feared death because Jesus had defeated death. The same is true for James, Jesus’ unbelieving brother, who was willing to pay the ultimate price after seeing the risen Jesus. These records are found in the Gospels, the book of Acts, the Johannine epistles, 1 Peter, Hebrews, 1 Clement, Josephus, and elsewhere. In order to effectively argue against the resurrection from an Islamic perspective, one would have to do more than just discredit the Pauline accounts.
Jesus’ resurrection encompassed the disciples. It was their initial catalyst, their core message, their driving conviction, and their ultimate hope. To deny this through an Islamic perspective, one which respects Jesus and the disciples as men of God, is to overlook everything we know about the inception of the church.
CHAPTER 28
CONCLUSION
JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD
At the end of the debate, my friend David and I discussed what we thought of the Christian defense of the resurrection and the Islamic critique. We ended up sitting in his car for a few hours in the parking lot, processing thoughts and mulling over the arguments. There was no question in my mind that Shabir Ally was the more polished speaker and the better debater, and that he did an excellent job of winning over the crowd.
But when I considered the arguments carefully, even as a Muslim, I had to conclude that Mike’s Minimal Facts Approach was more compelling than Shabir’s critique. History certainly seemed to testify that Jesus died by crucifixion, that his followers then honestly believed they had seen him risen, and that even some who were not his followers honestly believed they had seen him risen. Mike suggested that the best explanation for these historical facts was that Jesus rose from the dead.
Shabir did not suggest a better alternative. Rather, Shabir tried to discard data that did not fit the Islamic perspective: Jesus’ death and Paul’s reliability. When we consider the arguments that Muslims commonly use to discredit Paul’s testimony, we find that they are very problematic. There is no reason to think that Paul was insincere; the evidence indicates that he submitted to the authority of the disciples, that Peter was the one who suggested new Christians not be bound to the Law; and it was indeed Peter, James, and John who extended their hand to Paul in his ministry to the Gentiles. The common Islamic characterization of Paul as the one who hijacked Christianity not only ignores Allah’s promises in the Quran but also fails to provide a motive or a means for Paul’s corruption of the church, and it requires a wholesale disregard for the records of the early church’s history.
So when answering the question I had set out for myself, “Would an objective observer conclude that Jesus rose from the dead?” I had to admit that Jesus’ resurrection was indeed the best explanation of the historical facts. Mike’s explanation of the evidence was much more convincing than Shabir’s selective rejection of the evidence.
But just as when I had investigated Jesus’ death, my
conclusion did not compel me to leave Islam. I believed that my Islamic faith would be vindicated by other means, and that the Christian faith still had at least one fatal flaw: Jesus never claimed to be God.
This, for me, was the critical point. As far as I was concerned, Jesus’ death and resurrection were important matters to investigate, but whether Jesus claimed to be God was the real game changer. I was ready to pull out all the stops to defend my faith and prove that he did not.
PART 8
DID JESUS CLAIM TO BE GOD?
CHAPTER 29
THE POSITIVE CASE
JESUS WAS ALWAYS GOD
At no point is the schism between Christian and Islamic theologies broader than on the person of Jesus. For Muslims, the doctrine of a divine Christ is anathema, and the Quran teaches that he who subscribes to it will make his home in the flames of hell (5:72). For the Christian, belief in the lordship of Christ is necessary for salvation (Rom. 10:9). What wider divergence could there be?
As a Muslim in the West, I very proudly saw myself as a real monotheist who respected Jesus appropriately. By contrast the Christians around me were, whether wittingly or unwittingly, blaspheming the one true God and insulting Jesus by deifying him. All other differences between Muslims and Christians were secondary to me, far less important than this most significant matter. In fact, I even boldly told Christians that Islam was superior to Christianity simply on account of this issue. “Islam is the true monotheism,” was the motto we heard at mosques.
The Quran informs Muslims that Jesus never claimed to be divine. Rather, people began to believe this after Jesus left the earth (5.116–117). So we believed that later Christians were responsible for corrupting the true Christianity. Learned men at our mosque told me that Roman paganism influenced Christian thought, as Roman gods often had sons who were demigods. Other Muslims argued that the Council of Nicaea was responsible for Jesus’ apotheosis, while yet others accused Paul of this blasphemy. Regardless of the exact model, most of us believed that the Bible did not even depict Jesus as God, and certainly Jesus never claimed to be God himself.
But did he? If we put aside our Islamic beliefs and ask the question as objective observers, will we conclude that Jesus claimed to be God? Based on my own experience, the answer is an arresting, revolutionizing yes. More than anything else, investigating this question has changed my life forever.
My greatest opponent in discovering the answer was my own will. I did not want to see Jesus’ claim to deity in the pages of history, so I kept retreating and altering my position to avoid what was becoming more and more obvious. While I cannot trace all the points of this internal fencing competition, I will provide the conclusion of each major bout.
DOES THE NEW TESTAMENT TEACH THAT JESUS IS GOD?
At the outset, I was unsure whether the New Testament said anywhere that Jesus is God. I remember watching a Muslim speaker, Hamza Abdul Malik, challenge Christians by saying the teaching is not found anywhere in the Bible. But then I watched a debate between him and the Christian debater James White, and the matter was thoroughly settled: Apart from anything that could potentially be obscured, 2 Peter 1:1 (NIV) calls Jesus “God and Savior,” as does Titus 2:13.1
DO THE GOSPELS TEACH THAT JESUS IS GOD?—JOHN’S GOSPEL
Of course, Muslims owe no allegiance to the Bible as a whole, nor even the New Testament. The Quran says that the Injil was revealed as the Word of God, the gospel. I quickly staked my claim that, regardless of what the other books of the Bible said, Jesus is not God in the Gospels. It was then that my friend David pointed me to the gospel of John.
There can be no doubt that Jesus is presented as divine in this Gospel. From the outset, John emphatically declares that Jesus is God, that he has always existed, and that he is the very means of all creation (1:1–3). Thus the first three verses of John’s gospel introduce Jesus as “God, the Eternal One through whom the universe was created.” John’s prologue concludes by calling Jesus “the only begotten God” (1:18).
As John’s gospel progresses, the Christology is unpacked and elaborated. Jesus is worthy of the honor due to God (5:23); he asks people to have faith in him as they have faith in God (14:1); he claims to be the enabler of salvation (5:21) and the earthly manifestation of God (14:8); he is the king of another world (18:36–37); he assumes dominion over all things (3:35); and he claims to be able to do whatever people ask in his name after he is gone, more or less implying that he has omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence (14:13). In addition, he admonishes his opponents that his identity is central to salvation (8:24) and that he perpetually preexists Abraham (8:58), in both of these cases using the divine name of Yahweh from the Old Testament, the “I Am.”2 In what some consider the climax of the gospel, a disciple realizes who he is and exclaims in affirmation, “My Lord and my God!”3 to which Jesus responds, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (20:28–29 NIV). The height of John’s gospel is a disciple proclaiming that Jesus is God, and Jesus’ commending his affirmation. From the first to the last, John’s gospel identifies Jesus as divine.4
This discovery was a jolt to my Islamic confidence. If Jesus actually claimed to be God, then the Quran was wrong about Jesus, which in turn meant that Islam was false. I could not concede this point, so I had to find a way out.
DO THE GOSPELS TEACH THAT JESUS IS GOD?—THE BEGINNING OF MARK’S GOSPEL
After some research, I found that there was a famous scholar, Bart Ehrman, who was critical of Christianity and argued that John’s gospel was unreliable. “Jesus, beyond doubt in John’s gospel, is portrayed as divine,”5 remarks Ehrman; but because John was written sixty years after Jesus, it need not be accurate.6 The belief that Jesus was God was invented after his death, in the decades between Jesus and the writing of John’s gospel. That is why it is not found in the other gospels. If Jesus himself had claimed to be God, why do we have to wait until the fourth gospel to hear about it?
That Jesus was deified after his death was what we believed as Muslims, and I found Islamic websites quoting Ehrman regularly. I decided to adopt his approach, arguing that, had Jesus actually claimed to be God, we would have found his deity taught in the first of the four gospels, Mark.7 So I set out to show David that Mark presented Jesus as just a man, not God, and I immersed myself in Mark’s gospel.
The more I learned about Mark, the more I realized that it was a very Jewish gospel, written with the Old Testament in mind. It refers to Jewish sources over seventy times, with a strong preference for the book of Isaiah, and never once does it explicitly refer to a Graeco-Roman source.8 When I read Mark through that lens, the lens of Hebrew Scripture, I realized that Ehrman was terribly mistaken. Not only does Mark present Jesus as divine, but the very point of Mark’s gospel is that Jesus is Yahweh.
Mark starts with a reference to a passage in the Old Testament: 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.’ ” So Isaiah prophesies that Yahweh, the God of Israel, will appear, and a voice in the wilderness will proclaim his arrival. Mark tells us in 1:4 that John the Baptist is that voice in the wilderness, and the one whose arrival John proclaimed was Jesus. In other words, Mark equates Yahweh with Jesus, saying: We have been waiting for a man to proclaim the arrival of Yahweh, our God. John the Baptist is that man, and he has proclaimed the arrival of Jesus.
In fact, Mark combines his reference to Isaiah 40:3–5 with Malachi 3:1, where the text says explicitly that the messenger (again, John the Baptist) will appear before the Lord himself comes to his temple.9 As in the Isaiah reference, this equates the Lord with Jesus. For added emphasis, the book of Malachi ends a few verses later by saying that if the Israelites do not accept the messenger, God himself will come.10
Thus, at the very beginning of his gospel, Mark equates Yahweh with Jesus, using multiple Old Te
stament references. For the attentive Jewish reader, Mark’s prologue functions very much like John: It proclaims that Jesus is God himself.
Mark continues in 2:3–10, telling us that Jesus forgave a paralyzed man his sins. The Scribes at the scene thought to themselves, “He’s blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (NIV). For the Jews, to blaspheme against God is an accusation that someone is not giving God his due respect, most commonly by saying the name Yahweh or by claiming divine status for oneself.11 Clearly, Jesus neither insulted God here nor uttered the divine name. Their charge of blasphemy can mean only that Jesus thought himself to be God by claiming the divine prerogative of forgiving sins.12
In response, far from denying that he claimed to be God, Jesus showed them his authority to forgive sins by healing the paralytic. Not only did this demonstrate his spiritual authority, but also it reminded the Scribes, who knew well the Hebrew Scriptures, of Psalm 103:2–3, which says, “O my soul, bless Yahweh and do not forget all his deeds! He is the one forgiving all your sins and healing all your diseases.”13 When Scribes charge Jesus with claiming to be God, instead of denying it, he goes even further by healing a paralytic, thereby doing what only Yahweh does in the Psalms.
No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity Page 19
