A Dialogue with Muslims

Islam, especially militant Islam known also as “Islamism”, is very much in focus these days and we can expect to see public dialogue with Muslims multiplying in the months to come.  Such dialogue is already present, of course, especially on university campuses where Muslims challenge Christians with questions and try to turn them from Christianity to Islam.  Here, in a similar friendly spirit of dialogue, I would like to answer a few of those questions and respond with some questions of my own.

       One question often asked of us by Muslims regards our Lord’s favourite self-designation as “the Son of Man”.  Does that not prove, they ask, that He did not claim to be God but was rather a mere man?  For He did not publicly refer to Himself as “Son of God” but as “Son of Man”. 

       In reply we must dig a little into what the title “Son of Man” meant to our Lord’s audience of Second Temple Jews.  We learn from the Book of Enoch (a composite work dating to about that time) that the title referred to the transcendent Messiah.  Thus, for example, in we read in the Book of Enoch chapter 45 and following this: “On that day My Chosen One shall sit on the throne of glory and try their works… this Son of Man whom you have seen shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats and shall break the teeth of the sinners… at that hour  that Son of Man was named in the presence of the Lord of spirits and His name before the Head of Days. Yes, before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of the heaven were made, His name was named before the Lord of spirits. All who dwell on earth shall fall down and worship before Him… All the kings and the mighty and the exalted and those who rule the earth shall fall down before Him on their faces and worship and set their hope upon that Son of Man and petition Him and supplicate for mercy at His hands…”

       There is more, but you get the idea.  The Son of Man in the Book of Enoch (and therefore in the understanding of our Lord’s hearers) signified a transcendent and heavenly Messiah, one exalted by God the Head of Days, one whom all the world would worship.

       The Book of Enoch did not make up this title.  They got it from reading the Book of Daniel.  In Daniel 7:13-14 we read the following:

“I kept looking in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven one like a Son of Man was coming, and He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations and men of every language might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away; and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed.”

       There is more to this also; for a deeper dive into the text please see my commentary on Daniel available here.  For now it is enough to point out that Christ chose the title to indicate that although He was a lowly carpenter, He was the Messiah, God’s Chosen One, the One whom all the world would one day serve.   

Indeed, He quoted this verse of from the Book of Daniel at His trial.  When asked with an oath whether or not He was the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One, He replied, “I am [Greek ego eimi] and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven”— references to Psalm 110:1 and Daniel 7:13.  (In Luke’s version, the phrase “the Son of the Blessed” was explained as meaning “the Son of God”.)

We see therefore that Christ’s self-designation “Son of Man” was not an implicit denial of His divinity but a claim to future universal worship.  Note too that the assertion used in Daniel 7:14 to describe Christ’s dominion (i.e. “His dominion is an everlasting dominion”) was previously used in Daniel 4:34 to describe God’s dominion.

Next, Muslims often focus on the fact that Jesus referred to God as His God, concluding from this that He was merely a man like other men, a part of God’s creation and was not divine.  They point to such texts as John 20:17, a part of which reads, “Go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.’”  “See?” they say, “this proves that Jesus did not consider himself to be divine but worshipped Allah just like everyone else did.” 

The odd thing about this objection is that the Church agrees that Jesus considered the Father to be His God and that He was a man like other men (sin excepted).  The Church calls this “the Incarnation”.

That is, the Church teaches that Jesus is 100% human as well as being 100% divine.  You can find this in many places in the New Testament, not the least of which is in the beginning of John’s Gospel which opens with the ringing declaration, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and which reaches its narrative climax with the confession of Thomas.  Thomas, having finally seen for himself the risen Christ, addresses Christ by saying, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).  Christ does not correct him, but merely gently chides him for his slowness of belief.  

John also declares that “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).  In other words, without ceasing to be God, the Word took flesh from the Virgin Mary and became a man like us.  As a man, of course He regarded the Father as His God.  The Church regards denial of this as a heresy— possibly the heresy of Docetism or perhaps Apollinaniarism (a kind of “Docetism-lite”).  The Church confesses the Lord Christ in two natures, as both God and Man.  Or do Muslims deny that God has the power to do this, uniting human nature to Himself?  Christians confess not only that God has the power to do this but that He actually did it.

Muslims often ask another question, this one to prove their contention that Christ was never crucified.  (Yes, in defiance of all sound history, they really teach that; see Qur’an 4:157-158 part of which reads, “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him”.) In support of this they cite Hebrews 5:7 which reads, “In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety.”  “There!” they say, “See? Jesus asked God to save Him from dying and God answered his prayer”.

It is (forgive me) an extraordinarily stupid argument given that the rest of the Letter to the Hebrews makes Christ’s death on the cross central to its message and to our salvation.  A cursory look at the Gospel record to which Hebrews 5:7 refers would’ve helped.  The passage in Hebrews refers to Christ’s prayer in the garden of Gethsemane when He prayed “Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will.”

Note the last part of the prayer:  “Yet not what I will, but what You will”.  That is, Christ did not pray that He would not have to die but that God’s will would be done; if that meant dying, He embraced the Father’s will.

Now I have a few questions of my own.  It is tempting to ask how contemporary Islam can justify the death penalty for Muslims who leave their religion and embrace Christianity.  It is also tempting to ask how it can justify Muhammad marrying Aisha when she was six years old and “consummating” the marriage when she was nine or ten years old (this according to Islamic sources the Sahih al-Bukhari collection of hadith traditions and Ibn Hisham’s ninth century biography of Muhammad respectively).  But never mind.  Since their questions related to our New Testament, I will direct mine to their Qur’an.

In Q. 28:38 we find a narrative in which Pharaoh says the following: “Counsellors, you have no other god that I know of except me. Haman, light me a fire to bake clay bricks, then build me a tall building so that I may climb up to Moses’ God:  I am convinced that he is lying.”  We find this pairing of Pharaoh with Haman earlier in the chapter in v. 8, which reads, “Pharaoh, Haman, and their armies were wrongdoers”.   

Here Pharaoh speaks to Haman as one of his chiefs, and he tells him to make burnt bricks from the kiln and use them to build a lofty palace so that he may mount up to heaven to see the god of Moses, an obvious conflation of the story of the Tower of Babel with that of Exodus.

More to the point, the pairing of Pharaoh (the villain from the Book of Exodus) with Haman (the villain from the Book of Esther) is an historical impossibility. The title “Pharaoh” is of course Egyptian, whereas the name “Haman” is Persian. Persia was separated from Egypt by many miles, and the stories of the Exodus predated that of Haman by almost a thousand years.   It seems clear that what happened is that Muhammad had heard that the Jews regarded both Pharaoh and Haman as villains and gratuitously assumed they were contemporaries. Attempts to find an Egyptian equivalent for the Persian name “Haman” (such as connected with the Egyptian god “Amun”) have no scholarly merit and are acts of exegetical desperation.  The picture of Pharoah talking to Haman is an error in the text— and an egregious one at that.

Similarly egregious is the Qur’an’s confusion of Miriam the sister of Moses with Miriam (i.e. Mary) the mother of Jesus.

   In Q. 3:33-37 we read the following: “God chose Adam, Noah, Abraham’s family, and the family of ‘Imran, over all other people… Imran’s wife said, ‘Lord, I have dedicated what is growing in my womb entirely to You; so accept this from me. You are the One who hears and knows all,’ but when she gave birth, she said, ‘My Lord! I have given birth to a girl…I name her Mary’.  Her Lord graciously accepted her and made her grow in goodness and entrusted her to the charge of Zachariah. Whenever Zachariah went in to see her in her sanctuary [i.e. in sanctuary of the Temple], he found her supplied with provisions. He said, ‘Mary, how is it you have these provisions?’ and she said, ‘They are from God:  God provides limitlessly for whoever He will.’”

Here we pause to note several things. The “Mary” referred to here is the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus. This is clear from the reference to Zachariah (the father of John the Baptist) and the reference to Mary being “supplied with provisions” while she was living in the “sanctuary”.  This last detail is a reference to the apocryphal story of the young child Mary dwelling in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem and being miraculously fed by angels, as recounted in the second century Proto-evangelium of James. But, we ask, who is this “‘Imran” identified in the Qur’an as the father of Mary?

This “‘Imran” is the Arabic version of the Hebrew “Amram”, identified in Exodus 6:20 and 15:20 as the father of Moses, Aaron and Miriam. That is, the Qur’an identifies the father of the Virgin Mary with the father of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, conflating Miriam the sister of Aaron and Moses with Mary the Mother of Jesus.  That is why Q. 19:28 calls Mary the Mother of Jesus “the sister of Aaron”— the term is not an honourific or a way of saying that she belonged to the same tribe as Aaron for Q. 3:33f makes it plain that the Virgin Mary’s father was also the father of Aaron.  The author of Qur’an is plainly (and badly) confused.

It’s clear enough what happened: Muhammad had evidently heard stories about Mary the Mother of Jesus and conflated them with stories about Mary the sister of Aaron and Moses.  It was hardly the first of his errors; for some of his other errors of history see my Exploring Islam (image inset).

One final look at the Qur’an for another of its historical howlers.  In Q. 20:85 we read that Allah addresses Moses as follows: “We tested your people [i.e. Israel] in your absence: the Samaritans have led them astray”.  

The Samaritans [Arabic Samiri] were, as any first-year student of the Bible knows, the people who inhabited the northern kingdom of Israel after their deportation by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.  They were a mixed people, the result of marriages between the new Assyrian settlers and the remnant of the Israelite northern kingdom remaining in the land.  As such they did not exist at the time of Moses many hundreds of years before and could hardly have led Israel astray after the Exodus as the Qur’an says.  But then Muhammad had never read the Hebrew Bible and was ignorant of any such history. He only knew that the Jews did not like the Samaritans of their day.

       As Islam becomes more aggressive in the West, it is more and more important to shine the light of history and truth upon erroneous Islamic claims and to meet them with the truth of the Gospel and the words of life. God has brought the mission field to our front door.  We must take the opportunities we have to share the Good News with those living as our neighbours and standing before us.  For God loves everyone and wants them to be saved.