Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

“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.”

“Luke has given us the most historical data, which means he gives people more opportunities to question him. But the more we find archaeologically, the more he is proven accurate.

As far as we know, no one in history ever survived a full Roman crucifixion.43 The Romans designed it to be a humiliating, torturous, surefire method of execution. Are you familiar with the flogging process and the rest of the crucifixion?”

“They used what’s called a flagrum, a whip that was designed to rip skin off the body and cause excessive bleeding. After just a few lashes, the victim’s skin began to come off in ribbons and their muscles tore. After a few more lashes, the muscles became like pulp. Arteries and veins were laid bare. Sometimes the flagrum would reach around the abdomen and the abdominal wall would give way, causing the victim’s intestines to spill out. Obviously, many people died during the flogging alone.”44

Abba was not through. “Jesus prayed for the bitter cup to be taken away from him in the garden of Gethsemane. Clearly, he did not want to die! Would God not honor that?” Mike answered, “Yes, but he also said to God, ‘Let Your will be done, not mine.’

“You see, the disciples went from being afraid of associating with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane to being willing to die for proclaiming him the Risen Lord. If Jesus had just barely survived the crucifixion, he would have come to them broken and on the verge of dying. That is not the kind of appearance that would inspire a total transformation and a disregard for death. That boldness was the ethos of the early Christian movement, and without it, there would be no Christianity.”

In fact, the opposite is true: most scholars agree that they can be more assured of Jesus’ death by crucifixion than of anything else in his life.”

“Fact number two: The empty tomb. An impressive 75 percent of scholars who study the subject acknowledge the empty tomb.”

if Jesus’ body had still been in the tomb, the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem could have easily ended Christianity by parading Jesus’ body throughout the city. That they didn’t do it lends weight to the position that the tomb was empty.

The final reason has to do with the position of the Jewish leadership. When asked about Jesus, they said that the disciples had stolen his body, implicitly agreeing that the tomb was empty.

Muhammad dictated the contents of the Quran to his scribes over a period of twenty-three years. Only after his death was the Quran collected into a book.

It was obvious that “the Word” was Jesus, not just because John’s gospel was ostensibly about Jesus but also because the Quran calls Jesus the “Word of God.”62 Besides, verse 14 left little doubt: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.” It had to be Jesus.

If Jesus truly did claim to be God, then the Quran is wrong and Islam is a false religion.

Jesus called himself the Son of Man more than eighty times in the four gospels; that he really used the term was undeniable.

What reason do you have to say Paul is a pathological liar?” “I told you, he wanted power.” David was now beside himself. “Power?! If all he wanted was power, he could have stayed just where he was. He was the top student of the top rabbi of his time; power was coming his way. He went the total opposite direction, choosing a life of meekness and poverty. The early Christians had Paul and his sacrifices to thank for their survival!”

“A better analogy would be a son who has stolen from his father’s business. If after wasting the goods, the son returns to the father and sincerely seeks forgiveness, it is within the father’s right to forgive him. But not all would be settled yet; the accounts haven’t been balanced. Someone has to take the hit for the stolen goods. If the father wants, he has every right to pay for his son’s debt from his own account. That’s fair.”

“We are the son, and God is the father. We have incurred a debt against God, and we can’t pay Him back. So in His mercy, He pays our sins for us. The wages of our sin is death, and He died on our behalf, balancing the accounts.”

“There isn’t really a case for Buddhism. It’s a path you can choose to follow. I follow it because of the meditation, but I wouldn’t tell anyone else that they should follow it or that it’s true in some sense. Christianity is really unique like that. With Christianity, either Jesus died and rose from the grave or he didn’t. That’s something you can build a case for.”

So, in truth, the scholars were not arguing that the Quran had remained unchanged. They were arguing that Allah intended all the many changes that came to it.

Did he know that God loved him from the foundations of the earth? With a power far exceeding the immensity of the cosmos, He turned all His attention to creating that man and declared, “You are My child. I love you.”

Did he know that God made him exactly how He wanted, knowing each hair on his head and each second of his life? God knew full well that the hands He gave to this man would be used to sin against Him, that the feet He gave to this man would be used to walk away from Him. Yet, instead of withholding these gifts, He gave him the most precious gift of all: His own Son. Did he know that God entered into this world for him, to suffer in his stead? Received with slaps and fists by the very people He came to save, He was scourged until His skin fell off in ribbons, only to be pierced through both arms and feet, nailed naked on wood for all to ridicule. He scraped His skinless back on splintered wood with each rasping breath, His last breath finishing the task of rescuing us, of securing our eternity with Him. Did he know?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, many Christians ask me why devout Muslims are not immediately convinced by my arguments for Christianity. I have to remind them that the lens through which many such Muslims see the world simply does not allow it. Their prevailing understanding is that “Islam is obviously true; Christianity is obviously false,” and any input they receive is filtered accordingly. The difference between an Islamic perspective and a Christian perspective is tremendous, and switching between the two requires massive mental tectonic shifts. A single conversation is not going to move all the pieces into place. For these reasons, the imams simply could not believe my answers and at times could not even understand what I was saying.