Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

I sat up to consider this point. “Well, even if they’re the best, that doesn’t mean they’re any good.” “True, but these books were written shortly after Jesus’ crucifixion, in the lifetime of the disciples. That’s far better than most other biographies. For example, the main biographies about Alexander the Great were written around four hundred years after his death.40 If we are confident we know anything about Alexander, we should be exponentially more confident in what we know about Jesus.” “If we are going to learn about Jesus’ life, we must turn to the gospels because they are the most likely to be accurate.” “Yeah, but being better than other biographies doesn’t mean that the gospels are trustworthy.” “You’re not getting me. It’s not just that the gospels are temporally closer to Jesus than other biographies are to their subjects, but they are so close that eyewitnesses were still alive at the time. Given that the gospels were circulating within Christian communities, the eyewitnesses must have heard them and contributed to them.” I smiled. “That sounds like conjecture to me, David. Where’s the evidence?” “Well, early church fathers record that this is exactly what happened. According to Papias, an author writing around AD 100, the gospel of Mark is based on Peter’s eyewitness testimony.41 Papias also refers to John and Matthew as disciples.42 So it’s more than conjecture that eyewitnesses contributed to the gospels; it’s recorded history that they actually produced t...