Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth, for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. In an expost on April the 14th, Tucker Carlson declared this: The people in charge don't want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus. Islam reveres him as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes he performed miracles, and states that he will return to earth to defeat the Antichrist. End quote.
Well, this is a claim often made by Muslim apologists. After all, Jesus features prominently in the Quran.
However, the Jesus described in the Quran and affirmed by Muslims is not the same Jesus who is proclaimed in the Gospels. According to Islam, Jesus was a miracle-working prophet who was the son of a virgin and whose second coming will usher in the apocalypse.
Some Muslims further claim that Jesus was a Muslim.
Now, of course, Islam came along some 600 years after Jesus did, but Muslims believe that Jesus followed the true, uncorrupted faith of Abraham, whom they herald as a patriarch of Islam. For example, Jesus prayed with his head to the ground, like Muslims do, they claim, and called God by the Semitic word for God. They also point to the fact that Jesus did not eat pork, was circumcised, washed before prayer, and kept fasts. In all of this, according to Muslims, he submitted his will to God, which is the meaning of what it is to be a Muslim.
Now, of course, the examples that supposedly show Jesus as a Muslim are a combination of biblical misunderstanding and selective reading. For example, Jesus also spoke of praying while standing up, as well as on his knees. When Jesus cried out to God using some variation of El, Eli, or Eloi, he was using a common word for God from that time and place. He did not refer to God as Allah, the Arabic word, because he spoke Aramaic along with maybe Greek. Ceremonial concerns like diet and washing.
Those were also Jewish practices and not unique to Islam. Though a few statements about Jesus in the Quran do align with what we know from the Bible, many other parts do not. For instance, it's claimed that Jesus spoke as a baby and created a living bird out of clay as a child. Other examples are far more outlandish. For example, Muslims do not believe that Jesus died on the cross, but was, and I quote, only made to appear so.
And since he did not die, he also did not rise from the dead, which of course is a central claim in all of the Gospels about who Jesus was and what he did. And most importantly, according to Islam, Jesus was not God in the flesh. As the late Christian apologist Nabeel Qureshi realized during his own journey to Christ from Islam, the so-called Jesus, loved by faithful Muslims, is not the same Jesus as the Jesus told about in the Bible. nor even the Jesus of history. Of course, remaking Jesus into our own image has a long and storied history.
Just recently, one of the hosts of the View claimed that Jesus would not call himself the Messiah. President Trump recently shared an image portraying Christ in the image of himself. Plenty of Sunday school art portrays Jesus as a European rather than a first century Jew. The Marxist Jesus often looks like Shea Guevara. The New Age Jesus looks like a hippie-smoking marijuana.
And the American Jesus, well, he's always ripped and quite handsome. In the end, all idols are, at least according to the psalmist, both sinful and also powerless. But it's also true that remaking Jesus into some other image is unnecessary. As scholars like Richard Bockham have insisted, we have eyewitness testimony about who Jesus is from Matthew and from John. We have reliable reporting in Mark and Luke, from those who actually lived and walked with Jesus.
You see, the Gospels carry far more weight than any caricature we can imagine. And it's reasonable to believe in their witness as being both genuine and accurate. The true story of the Jesus of history is not in celebrity or political endorsements, nor is it in the caricatures of other religions. It's only and truly found in the Gospels. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org. Hey, breakpoint listeners, the Colson Center is coming to Knoxville, Tennessee.
Join John Stone Street and Oz Guinness at the Knoxville Convention Center on May 27th for a Truth Rising Watch Party. Truth Rising is a groundbreaking documentary about courageous faith in this civilizational moment. It tells the stories of Christians like Chloe Cole, Seth Dillon, and Jack Phillips choosing courage over fear, making a difference where God has called them. We'll have free popcorn and soda at the watch party, and we'll enjoy a live QA with John Stone Street and Oz Guinness after the film. Register today at colsoncenter.org slash Knoxville.
That's colsoncenter.org slash Knoxville.
