Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

“What if Jesus did not die on the cross?” That was the Ahmadi position, and Mike and Gary had refuted all those arguments.

when Shabir began his opening statement, it was clear he was going to argue that position.

As the debate proceeded, though, it became clear that Shabir had to deny and ignore far more than an objective investigator would.

He denied

he d...

he ignored

on and on, he denied and ignored very important bits of data to make his case.

focusing on his arguments led to two conclusions: his skepticism of the data was unwarranted, and he applied nowhere near the same level of skepticism to his own position.

This inconsistency had to be the result of his bias, one that I could see even as a Muslim who wanted to agree with him.

After pausing for dramatic effect, which seemed lost on David, I continued.

“God begets not, nor is He begotten,”52

My battle against the lordship of Jesus was an organic outgrowth of everything that defined me. It was here I would make my stand, and I was not backing down without a fight.

we bickered our way through the hour, neither studying genetics nor arguing theology. It was all for the best, though. My Islamic identity was so strongly forged as a reaction against the deity of Jesus that a discussion at this point invariably would have been counterproductive and divisive.

What was needed first was a small inroad, a route past the Islamic knee-jerk reaction against Jesus’ deity. The book David planned to give me would get me asking the right questions and start me on that path. It proved to offer significant headway, especially considering how small it was.

This ran counter to everything Muslim teachers taught about Jesus in the Bible. Was it possible that a gospel actually said Jesus was the Creator? Why hadn’t I heard this before? None of the Christians I had spoken with mentioned this, and I had challenged so many.

dived in, checking all McDowell’s Bible references for accuracy. It is hard to believe, but despite having dozens of Bible verses memorized for the sake of refuting Christianity, this was my first time actually opening a Bible. All the Bible verses I had read before were in Muslim books.

I found many of McDowell’s arguments insufficient.

There were alternate explanations he was not considering.

As a Muslim trained to counter Christianity, I found nothing new in most of McDowell’s statements, and I had long been adept at turning these arguments back at Christians.

But McDowell did succeed in convincing me that even if there were verses in John’s gospel that I could use to refute the deity of Jesus, there were others that painted Jesus in an undeniably divine light.

I had not heard these quotations before, and they did not fit into my mindset. They could not. There was no way Jesus would say or allow these things, at least not the Jesus I knew.

I began processing these new verses, struggling to harmonize them with the contrasting verses I had memorized as a child.

A thought that had been simmering in my mind since I started reading McDowell’s book suddenly came to a whistling boil.

realized I had missed the big picture:

The Bible and the Quran were nothing alike. Not in the slightest. Why was I trying to interpret them in the same way?

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. Verses that had been dictated years or decades apart are frequently found...

The result is that Muslims place relatively little weight on surrounding passages when trying to interpret sections of the Quran. For context, they turn instead to histori...

So fractured are narratives in the Quran that only one story has a clear beginning, middle, and end: the story of Joseph. All the other stories pick up in the middle, or else they are never carried to their conclusions. It was no wonder I had to turn to my teachers in order to understand the Quran.

I realized that the gospels were coherent narratives, each serving as its own context. There was no need for any commentary in order to understand the gospels. Anyone can understand the Bible.

Conversely, I could not just focus on individual verses to make a point about a gospel, as we often did with the Quran. I needed to read the whole gospel, understand the author’s intent and themes, and let the book speak for itself.

the Quran calls Jesus the “Word of God.”

I could not believe it. It simply could not be true. Jesus could not be God. There must be some other explanation, or else I was deceived.

There must be some other explanation, or else my family and everyone I loved was caught in a lie.

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

I had spent the weekend studying John’s gospel on the internet and praying avidly.

“A new search engine I found, ‘Google.’ ”

Founded September 1998 So this gives a timeline Accept it wasn't all that new because This takes place after 9-11 2001

Bart Ehrman.”64

LOL I think it's Greg Kokul who mentions Bart in his book Street smarts or perhaps tactics, 1 or the other.

The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and though this book was also written by McDowell, it was in an entirely different class. It was eight hundred pages of lecture notes that McDowell had collected over his years researching Christian origins.

I was undaunted. My recent victory over David’s argument from the gospel of John had given me a newfound confidence. I was more certain than ever that Allah was on my side, that no arguments against Him would prevail, and that the deity of Jesus was an innovation relegated to later Christianity.

If Jesus truly claimed to be God, we could expect his claim to be found in the earliest gospel, not just the last one. I needed to see Jesus’ claim to deity found in the gospel of Mark. Without hesitation, I opene...

As if McDowell had presciently read my mind, the very first piece of evidence that he offered was “Jesus’ own legal testimony concerning himself” in Mark’s gospel. When the high priest asked if he was the Christ, the Son of God, Jesus testified to the Sanhedrin: “I am; and you shall see the Son of M...

one thing was clear. The priests of the Sanhedrin thought he made a statement about his identity that they considered blasphemous, warranting execution.

There was only one identity claim that deserved such a harsh penalty: claiming to be God.

Claiming to be the Messiah was...

Craig Blomberg, who explained,

‘Son of man’ means far more than a simple human being.

This claim to be far more than a mere mortal is probably what elicited the verdict of blasphemy from the Jewish high court.”

Could it be that the term “Son of Man” actually meant something more?

took my search online and began looking up as much information as I could

I fervently searched the internet for a way out, but there was none.