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August 20, 2018 - June 27, 2020
Perhaps the most surprising shared feature is reverence for Jesus. Both Islam and Christianity teach that Jesus was born of a virgin and that he was the most miraculous man who ever lived. Both the Bible and the Quran teach that Jesus cleansed lepers, healed the blind, and even raised the dead. Indeed, both books teach that Jesus is the Messiah, and Muslims await his return, as do Christians.
According to Islam, the way to paradise is sharia, a code of laws to follow that will please Allah and earn his favor. Sharia is literally translated “the way.”
In Clermont, France, on November 27, AD 1095, Pope Urban II issued the First Crusade. He goaded Christians into traveling from Western Europe to the Middle East, where Muslims had lived for over 450 years, in order to fight against the “infidels” and “barbarians,” “an accursed race wholly alienated from God.”
Still, I was convinced that no one should judge a religion by its followers.
In my mind, there were only two people whose behavior mattered: Muhammad and Jesus.
Just a few years before Pope Urban II called the First Crusade, the Seljuq Turks had conquered Nicaea, the same city where, 750 years prior, Constantine had convened the church’s First Ecumenical Council. The Seljuq Turks were Sunni Muslims, and they had taken Nicaea from the Byzantine emperor, a Christian. It was he, the Byzantine emperor, who asked Pope Urban II for help defending his lands at the Council of Piacenza in 1095. In other words, Muslims were actively attacking and conquering Christians, and the First Crusade was a defensive effort.
This means Muslim rulers were capturing Christian boys and turning them into slave warriors to fight against other Christians.7
By the time the Byzantine emperor asked for the pope’s help, two-thirds of the Christian world had been captured by Muslims.
Your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. For, as most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them . . . and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire.
The reality is that the Crusades were launched in defense of the Byzantine Empire after two-thirds of the Christian world had been conquered by centuries of Muslim attacks. Muslims understood this and held no grudge against crusaders until modern times, when postcolonial narratives came into vogue.
The hadith say that this is the very reason why 4.24 of the Quran was revealed, so that men would not be hesitant to have sex with female captives whose husbands were still alive.
The sword that Jesus brings is a machaira. Like a machete, a machaira is a long knife or a short sword designed as a multipurpose tool, such as cutting meat or cleaning fish. Also like a machete, a machaira can be used for fighting, but it is not its only or primary purpose. Its primary purpose is to divide, and here Jesus says his coming is as a machaira to divide families.
Now that we know what a machaira is, the answer is simple: He was telling them to be prepared for a long journey and to take along the appropriate tools. Context is helpful again:
According to the Quran, polytheists are given three options: convert to Islam, depart from the land, or be killed (e.g., Quran 9.3–11).
9.5 says, “Kill the polytheists wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them, and wait for them at every place of ambush.
to 4.34 of the Quran, which allows men to hit their disobedient wives,
I believed that Allah was loving, that Muhammad was peaceful, that the Quran was beautiful, that tawhid was the perfect doctrine, and that truly following sharia made one righteous before Allah. I did not feel any need for the gospel, and I certainly did not see it as a superior message.
Romans 10:9: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (NIV). Here we found the entire gospel message formulated as the minimum requirement for saving faith. It has three components: (1) that Jesus died, (2) that he rose from the dead, and (3) that he is God.1
if someone were to say, “I am God,” we would think them crazy; but if they were to then say, “I will prove my claim by rising from the dead,” and then they actually were to rise from the dead, we would have good reason to believe them. This is exactly what Jesus says the resurrection is for.2
When skeptics challenged Muhammad to provide evidence for his claims, the primary proof he provided was the inspiration of the Quran.4 Repeatedly, at least five times, he offered the divine origin of the Quran as the reason why people should trust Islam. By contrast, when the early Christians proclaimed the gospel, the primary proof that they pointed to was the resurrection of Jesus, not the text of the Bible.5
What Really Happened to Jesus, Lüdemann critically reexamines the life of Jesus from many angles, often dismissing the traditional Christian position outright. But in his section titled “The death of Jesus,” he spares only two sentences: “The fact of the death of Jesus as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable, despite hypotheses of a pseudo-death or a deception which are sometimes put forward. It need not be discussed further here.”2 He then moves on, as if lingering on the matter were pointless.
“The single most solid fact about Jesus’ life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion.”3
John Dominic Crossan, who says, “There is not the slightest doubt about the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.”4 As if that were not emphatic enough, he elsewhere states, “That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”5
The evidence for Jesus’ death by crucifixion is so strong that virtually every scholar who studies Jesus’ life believes it.
Zealot, Reza Aslan made it abundantly clear that Jesus “was most definitely crucified.”7 Aslan is one of the most well-known Muslim scholars in the West, and on account of the historical evidence, he also believes that Jesus died on the cross, despite what the Quran teaches. He believes so strongly in Jesus’ death by crucifixion that he uses it as the foundation for his entire theory of Jesus’ life.
By all standards of ancient history, the reports of Jesus are very early and very diverse. Starting just a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion, Christians, Jews, and Romans report that Jesus died by crucifixion. The testimony is unanimous for over one hundred years.
1 Corinthians 15 contains a creed that was formulated within five years of Jesus’ crucifixion, and it testifies that Jesus died and was buried: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried .
It is critical to understand the import of this data: Before the New Testament was even written, Christians were passing down to one another the core doctrines of their faith, and the death of Jesus was among their first concerns. Not only was the teaching present in the very earliest days of Christianity, but also it was a central component of their doctrine.
sheer presence of bias is not reason enough to discredit reports. We would have to throw out all of history, indeed all news reports and personal stories from friends, if that were the case. Second, these sources are written by people of various backgrounds, and generally speaking, they did not start their lives as Christians. Though originally non-Christians, they found the Christian message convincing enough to convert, often at great cost. Therefore, if anything, their testimony may be granted an extra measure of credibility.9
Simply put, the cross was one of the most vicious, torturous, and effective methods of execution that human depravity has ever devised. The torment of the cross was so extreme that a word was invented to describe it: excruciating, which translates from Latin to describe a pain “from the cross.”
“Can anyone be found who would prefer wasting away in pain, dying limb by limb, or letting out his life drop by drop, rather than expiring once for all? Can any man be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly tumours on chest and shoulders, and draw the breath of life amid long-drawn-out agony? I think he would have many excuses for dying even before mounting the cross!”12
Victims were at times fixed to the cross in awkward poses, at times nailed through their groins, at times forced to watch the violation of their wives, at times made to witness the slaughter of their whole families, and at times having their slain sons hung around their necks.13 Crucifixion was not just another means of execution, as there are much more efficient ways to kill. The cross was intended for brutality, and victims were not treated gently.
The ultimate end of crucifixion was execution, and it was easy to determine whether victims of the cross were alive or dead: Simply observe whether they were still moving. If they were not, they were dead, because it meant they were not breathing. On account of the way crucifixion victims were made to hang, their rib cages were fully expanded and their lungs could not generate the pressure necessary to exhale. In order to breathe out, they had to push up against the nail in their feet, and they could inhale as they sank back down. Once they had reached the limit of sheer exhaustion or blood
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“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18 NIV).
Jesus actually did die by crucifixion, and the disciples were preaching what they had to preach if they wanted to proclaim the truth.
what happened when the women went to the tomb on the third day. Mark’s gospel depicts a youth dressed in white, Matthew tells of an angel who rolled back the stone, Luke describes two men who appeared next to the women, and John says two angels were sitting where Jesus had been.