For 1,400 years, Christians have wrestled with how to defend their faith to Muslims. While Islam accepts Jesus as a prophet, it denies his divinity. And as for his sacrifice for sin on the cross, the Quran denies the crucifixion and by extension the resurrection, claiming instead that God took him directly to heaven.
Christian responses have often been polemical, seeking to invalidate the message and morality of Muhammad. They have also been apologetic, sometimes employing legal arguments that Muslims view as manmade and changeable—thus lacking authority to adjudicate matters of eternal significance.
Baptist pastor Suheil Madanat seeks instead to ground the authenticity of the gospel account within Islam itself. In Evidence for the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ Examined through Islamic Law, the former president of the Jordan Baptist Convention (2016–2022) consults expert sharia compendiums and relevant scholarly works to learn sharia’s criteria for validating relevant evidence—including eyewitness testimony, confession, expert opinion, and circumstantial evidence—and examines the New Testament accounts against it.
Endorsed by scholars at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary in Amman, the book is a new resource for Muslim apologetics and comparative religion. CT interviewed Madanat about liberal source criticism, the divergence in resurrection accounts, and his ultimate hope for Muslims who read his book.
How does traditional Islam look at the Bible?
In principle, they accept both the Old and New Testaments as the word of God, but they believe that they have been largely corrupted. Though they accept that some accounts read today still have some truth, they do not accept the Bible as authentic. This is especially the case for the parts that contradict Islam—mainly the divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus.
How do Arab Christians tend to address these objections?
Most of what I read in Arabic is a polemical approach rather than apologetic. They are more concerned about attacking the ethics of Muhammad and the teaching of the Quran rather than defending the Scripture. I have not seen much done to vindicate the authenticity of the Bible, though some is done in academic circles.
But I must add that Muslim scholars do not provide solid testable evidence that can be argued against. They say the Bible is corrupt, but what is the alternative? The Quran speaks about preserving the divine text, but where then is the authentic text? How did God allow this? When did the corruption happen exactly? To be sure, they do tell a story of the alleged corruption, but it contradicts plain historical facts.
They do not give objective answers to these questions, inviting the polemical reply.
Is this why you wanted to defend the Bible through an Islamic framework?
My task here is not to defend the whole Bible but the reliability of the accounts of crucifixion and resurrection, the backbone of our Christian faith. The libraries of the West are full of conservative responses to liberal source criticism and other critiques, but they do not mean much to most Muslims. Since the Quran says that the Bible is corrupt, they ask: Why should we care about an intra-Christian dispute?
But when I say I want to examine evidence for Chistian claims through the filters of divine Islamic law—it immediately catches their attention.
What is your method?
Islamic law has established strict criteria to examine eyewitness testimonies, but those who experienced the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ are long deceased. Their evidence exists only in documentary form—the Gospels. These must be first authenticated, so they can be equivalent to live eyewitness accounts, and then examined. The problem is that…
This article was originally published at Christianity Today, on December 22, 2023. Please click here to read the full text.
Jayson Casper 