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August 20, 2018 - June 27, 2020
For example, it casts Pilate in a God-fearing light, willing to collude with Jews to save an innocent man. Historically speaking, the opposite appears to be true. Pilate was ruthless and did not hesitate to kill Jews if it meant preserving order and Roman rule.
Pilate being ruthless
And it is true in the Gospels as well, for even though he did not consider Jesus guilty, he ordered him crucified when faced with the threat of treason.
He ordered Jesus to be killed
What was it that drove the early Christians to preach Jesus crucified and resurrected if they had themselves colluded in saving him? Were they liars, or must we discard additional reams of evidence and argue that they did not preach a crucified and resurrected Messiah?
Why go out and preach about Him.
we have to conclude that it is testimony six hundred years late and over six hundred miles removed, and it is therefore unlikely to tell us anything more accurately than the Gospels, whose accounts come from the lifetime of Jesus’ eyewitnesses and from the vicinity of his very community.
600 years ago and 600 miles away
This late, fictitious gospel is propagating “secret knowledge” to support its polytheistic worldview, not providing historical information about Jesus’ life.
Not a good source
But as before, I needed to frequently remind myself that I was investigating as an objective observer and could not conclude this without assuming the Quran was inspired.
If an investigator will be objective.
But in the Quran, why does Jesus give life to clay birds? No reason or context is provided; the Quran simply refers to a well-known account.
What is the reason?
My belief that Jesus did not die on the cross was based on faith in Islam, not facts of history.
History is more reliable that a set of beliefs.
The record of Jesus’ death appears at lightning speed, it is asserted dozens of times within a hundred years, and the chorus of reports is composed of Christian, Jewish, and Roman voices. No one had ever survived a full Roman crucifixion, and had Jesus done so, that would have been a much more appealing message for the early church to proclaim than was the stumbling block of a crucified Savior.
All agress about Christ' death.
In addition, as a historical source about Jesus’ life, there is very little reason to trust the Quran because it was composed six hundred years after Jesus and more than six hundred miles away from where he lived.
Date and location
There are historical facts surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion that virtually all historians agree upon, and by far the best explanation of those facts is that Jesus rose from the dead.
The teachings that the very first Christians chose to formulate into creeds and pass on to one another included a list of people to whom the risen Jesus appeared. Not only is Peter first in this list, essentially hanging the proclamation on his authority, but also the list says that Jesus appeared to five hundred people at once.
500 people saw Jesus alive.
Acts 2:32, to which we have already referred: “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it” (NIV). To Paul, Peter, and Luke, we can add John’s emphasis of being a witness to the risen Jesus as recorded in John 21:24.
Paul, Peter, Luke and John werr first hand witnesses
Third, the disciples were willing to die for their belief that the risen Jesus had appeared to them. Of
The disciples died for their belief.
People do not often give up their lives for what they know is wrong. In this case, the disciples were willing to die for something that they claimed to have personally seen: the risen Jesus.
Fact 3: People who were not Jesus’ followers truly believed the risen Jesus appeared to them.
Even non believers followed him.
men who were not following Jesus during his lifetime—gave their lives on account of having seen the risen Jesus.10
Non followers also died for Him
The self-described “liberal, modern, secularized”11 scholar E. P. Sanders says, “That Jesus’ followers, and later Paul, had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact.”12 David Catchpole, emeritus professor at the University of Exeter, adds, “The appearance to James was . . . not one that could work from an already existing sympathy or commitment. In that respect it was not dissimilar to what happened later to Paul.”13 To this, scholars Shanks and Witherington add, “It appears that James, like Paul, was a convert to the Jesus movement because at some juncture he saw the risen Jesus,
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Scholars support it to be a fact.
Even if there were an unprecedented five hundred people who had bereavement hallucinations, it seems unlikely that every one of them would be convinced they saw Jesus himself instead of a passing dream.
Lots of people saw Him.
Paul does not fit the psychological profile of one who would hallucinate the return of Jesus. He had no emotional attachment to Jesus and no hopes vested in him, and Paul had everything to lose. Why would Paul have hallucinated the risen Jesus? It simply does not fit.
Paul encountered Jesus
It is not likely that Peter and James and Stephen and others would have died for a known lie, and certainly not so willingly.
They willingly died for the Lord.
“An objective observer should not conclude that a miracle has occurred unless there is no other probable explanation, and even then only in special circumstances.
Ask the reason why.
According to 3.52, the disciples answered Jesus’ call to righteously follow Allah, and in 3.55, Allah promises to exalt Jesus’ followers, making them superior to others until the Day of Resurrection.1
Be a follower if Jesus
Muslims today recognize that Christian teachings are diametrically opposed to Islamic doctrine. Christianity teaches that God became a man and died on the cross for our sins—doctrines that Muslims consider inconceivable and blasphemous. So, from our perspective as a Muslim community, Christian teachings had been corrupted.
Corrupted teachings because of Paul
The record of his martyrdom comes within a few years of his beheading, and scholars do not doubt it.4
Paul also died a martyr
Paul was lashed five times, beaten with rods three times, and even stoned until assumed dead before he was ultimately executed (2 Cor. 11:24–25). If he were simply deceiving people, he had ten opportunities to repent before receiving life-threatening punishments. Would he not have given up the charade? What was there to gain by deceiving everyone if he was about to lose his life? In truth, Paul gave up power, prestige, personal safety, and even his life. He did not receive any material gain by following Jesus.
Paul did not received any material gain by following Jesus.
The first thing to note is Jesus says he has come to “fulfill” the Law and the Prophets. Not “follow” but “fulfill.”
He came to fulfil the law.
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.
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.
Investigate Jesus
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.
They dont want to see it.
2 Peter 1:1 (NIV) calls Jesus “God and Savior,” as does Titus 2:13.1
Jesus is God and savior
The Quran says that the Injil was revealed as the Word of God, the gospel.
Injii is the word of God.
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
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Jesus is divine
The more I learned about Mark, the more I realized that it was a very Jewish gospel, written with the Old Testament in mind.
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.
Jesus is Yahweh
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?”
Forgiving sins
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.”
Forgave and healed people
do, Mark shows Jesus doing. Having discussed the highlights of Mark 1–6, we see Mark’s endeavor is clear: He portrays Jesus as Yahweh.
Daniel 7. He is Yahweh.
When Jesus claimed to be the Son of Man from Daniel 7 and the Lord of David from Psalm 110, “Both claims imply divine status, authority and power.”18
Jesus' divine status
Romans 9:5, Paul says Jesus is “God over all, blessed into eternity.”
am God, and there is no other . . . to me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear” (Isa. 45:22–23).
Muslims are not encouraged to know either of them in any detail, so instead of reading the Bible on its own terms we read it through the lens of the Quran and Islamic teaching.
Considering the context of the verses and taking a closer look at the doctrine of Jesus’ deity resolves most of the Muslim challenge.
How could I use verses from John’s gospel to deny the deity of Jesus when that Gospel as a whole
That would be disingenuous, extracting verses out of their context to suit my purposes rather than seeing what they actually say.
account for all these verses, not just some. The way to account for them, the
Jesus could have known all things while on this earth, but he chose not to because he “did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil. 2:6–7 NIV).
He limited himself voluntarily, becoming a real man, so that as a man he could atone for the sins of man.
So he could atone us.
This is not “God praying to himself,” as some allege, because the Son is not the Father. There are two persons here, two selves.
