According to the Qur’an, Jesus was a prophet of Islam, his followers were Muslims, and
the Gospel is the inspired, preserved, authoritative Word of Allah.
But when we go to our earliest records, we find Jesus claiming to be the divine Son of
God who would die on the cross for sins and rise from the dead.
Jesus’ followers proclaimed him as their risen Lord.
The Gospel that Christians have been reading for nearly two thousand years tells us that
anyone who claims to be a prophet but rejects Jesus’ death, resurrection, and deity is
a false prophet and an antichrist.
So if the Qur’an is right about Jesus, why does all of the available evidence tell us
that the Qur’an is wrong about Jesus?
Well, our Muslim friends have an answer.
The reason our earliest evidence so thoroughly contradicts Islam, they insist, is that our
earliest evidence was corrupted.
But who corrupted it?
Notice that their options here are quite limited.
Muslims can’t blame Jesus for corrupting the evidence, since Jesus was a Muslim prophet,
according to the Qur’an.
Nor can they blame Jesus’ original disciples for corrupting the evidence, since Jesus’
original disciples were devout Muslims, according to the Qur’an.
So they need a villain who wasn’t Jesus or one of his original disciples, but who
was still powerful enough to corrupt Christianity in the first century.
Who had that kind of power in the first century?
The only name that Muslims have been able to come up with here is Paul.
So if you’ve ever wondered why Muslims spend so much time attacking Paul, it’s not because
Paul is somehow especially untrustworthy or controversial; it’s because they have no
one else to blame for Muhammad’s abundant historical blunders.
But there’s a problem here.
It only makes sense to blame Paul for all of the evidence that contradicts Muhammad’s
claims if Muhammad is significantly more reliable than Paul.
If Muhammad is less reliable than Paul, it makes no sense to point a finger at Paul whenever
Muhammad gets something wrong.
In other words, if I catch Person A making numerous false statements, and I ask him how
I can trust him when he’s making so many false statements, and he says, “It’s Person B's fault;
he corrupted all of the evidence and made my statements seem false,”
but Person B turns out to be far more trustworthy than Person A, it becomes impossible to take
Person A seriously.
So the question we should be asking is this: Whose claims about Jesus are more reliable,
Paul’s or Muhammad’s?
In this series, I’m going to offer a few reasons to trust what Paul says about Jesus
over what Muhammad says about Jesus.
And when I say a “few” reasons, I mean twenty-five of them.
Some of these reasons, taken individually, wouldn’t be enough to reject what Muhammad says.
But when we consider all of the reasons together, it’s pretty clear that Muhammad’s claims
about Jesus are about as reliable as a CNN special on the origins of Islamic terrorism.
Hi everyone.
Thanks for watching.
In case you stumbled upon this video while browsing or searching, I wanted to let you
know that it’s part of a series comparing Paul and Muhammad.
So if you’d like to see the full series, be sure to click on the playlist.
If you’re already in the playlist, you’re about to see that we have much earlier records
for Paul’s life than for Muhammad’s life.