I LOOKED DOWN AT THE BOOK David slid across the table toward me. The lunchtime din of the student union forced me to focus extra carefully, taken aback as I was by the book’s title and compact size. Furrowing my brow, I rifled through its pages before sending it back across the table. “I already know Jesus is more than a carpenter.”
David was in an exceptionally playful mood. Fridays had a way of doing that. “Yeah, but he’s way more than a carpenter. He actually creates carpenters.”
I smiled. “I know that’s what you say, but that’s not what the Bible says.”
“Yes it does. The Bible says that all carpenters were made through Jesus.”
“Come on, David, I’m serious.” I faked a frown for emphasis.
David’s smile grew. “So am I. What do you think it means when the Bible says, ‘All things came into being through Jesus’?”
“It says that?” The frown wasn’t fake anymore.
“Yup.”
“Not in the gospels, though. I need to see it in the gospels.”
“Last I checked, the . . .” he inserted an egregiously fake cough before loudly exclaiming, “GOSPEL OF JOHN,” he coughed again, “is a gospel.”
“Yup.” He smiled, feigning innocence.
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. Come to think of it, had anyone other than David told me this, I would not have believed him, assuming instead that he was fabricating things. But I knew David well, and he would not go that route with me. Maybe David was distorting something? I did not know, but I was intrigued.
David saw my gears turning and slid the book back toward me, but this time, dramatically, in slow motion. When I reached out to take it, he quickly pulled it back. “But you already know Jesus is more than a carpenter,” he said, still smiling.
I leaned forward and snatched the book away from David. “Quit gloating.”
Later that weekend, I flopped onto the ground in Abba’s study, examining the book more carefully. More Than a Carpenter was very compact, the size of my hand and only about one hundred pages.53 The author’s name was Josh McDowell, and I had seen his name before. Abba owned a book called The Islam Debate, a transcript of a 1981 dialogue between McDowell and celebrated Muslim apologist Ahmed Deedat. I had not yet read it because it was a full-size monograph and seemingly dealt with defending Islam. I was more concerned with defeating Christianity.
But here was a book on Christianity by Josh McDowell, a booklet really, so small it was begging me to read it. I 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 devoured McDowell’s book in a matter of hours. Most of it encouraged people to take Jesus and their faith seriously, but I already did that. The chapter that affected me most was chapter 2, “What Makes Jesus So Different?” Here, McDowell defended the claim that the New Testament presents Jesus as God. When I finished the book, I decided to revisit that chapter with a more critical eye.
I found many of McDowell’s arguments insufficient. There were alternate explanations he was not considering. For example, he quoted Matthew 16:16, where Peter exclaims that Jesus is “the Son of the living God,” in order to show that Jesus is divine. But I had been taught a counterargument early in childhood: many people are called sons of God in the Bible, such as Adam, Solomon, even unnamed strangers.54 The Bible actually teaches that we can become sons of God, even going so far as to say that humans are gods.55
Elsewhere, McDowell quoted Matthew and Luke to argue that Jesus had characteristics of God, like omnipotence, but none of his references were convincing for me.56 They all showed Jesus doing miracles, to be sure, but the Muslim explanation for Jesus’ miracles was simple: they were all done by God’s permission, not by any power intrinsic to Jesus. This is what the Quran said,57 and I had long before memorized Bible verses that showed Jesus’ works were actually from the Father and that he could do nothing without God.58 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. For example, Jesus said, “all will honor the Son just as they honor the Father.”59 In addition, a disciple addressed Jesus as “God,” only to be praised by Jesus.60 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. I paced across the study, wondering, “How does it all fit together? I know there are verses in the Quran that apparently contradict one another, but Abba or an imam can usually resolve them. Is there anyone in the jamaat who knows the Bible as they know the Quran?”
A thought that had been simmering in my mind since I started reading McDowell’s book suddenly came to a whistling boil. Like a man finally stepping back for the first time after inspecting a mosaic piece by piece, I 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 side by side in the Quran, often with no obvious connection. 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 historical commentaries, hadith called asbab-an-nuzul.
I realized I had missed the big picture. The Bible and the Quran were nothing alike.
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.
But as I read through the Bible in conjunction with McDowell’s book, 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.
Asbab-an-nuzul: A body of Islamic literature purporting to detail the circumstances of specific Quranic revelations
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.
Armed with this new perspective, I decided to read the gospel of John from the beginning before trying to interpret it. I sat back down on the ground and opened Abba’s Bible to John 1.
What I found did not sit well with me.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”61
There it was. Full stop. I pored over these verses, reading them and rereading them. There was no other explanation. The verses were saying that God created the world by means of the Word, that the Word was coeternal with God, and that it was God Himself, yet in some sense separate from Him.
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.
Incredulous, I put the Bible down and began pacing the room once more, assembling the pieces in my mind. This was John’s first chapter, his prologue. Like an introduction in modern books, it gives us the lens through which to read the rest of the book. It was as if John were saying, “As you read this gospel, keep in mind that Jesus is coeternal with the Father, His partner in creating the world.”
Here was the context I needed to resolve the tension in other parts of the gospel. Whatever difficulty I might have while reconciling verses, I had to keep John’s prologue in mind: Jesus is God.
If Jesus truly did claim to be God, then the Quran is wrong and Islam is a false religion.
As the inevitability grew in my mind, I stopped pacing and stared at the Bible, still open to John 1. 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 is a false religion.
There must be some other explanation. I did not yet know what that explanation was, but it had to be there. I had faith that it was there, and I did not doubt that Allah would show it to me.
I immediately went to our living room, where we offered our congregational prayers. I approached the prayer rug, raised my hands to my ears, recited “Allah-hu-akbar,” and offered Allah two rakaats of nafl prayer.
Nafl: Optional prayers designed to invoke the help of Allah or draw the worshiper closer to Him
I was ready to recommit myself to this battle, and I was invoking the help of Allah.