Jesus was a Muslim

In Arabic, a muslim is one who submits. In that sense, Christians can say without hesitation that Jesus submitted to God. On the night before his death he prayed, “Abba, Father… Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will” (Mark 14:36). No one in the Christian tradition doubts that Jesus obeyed God.

In that sense, though, the word does not tell you what Jesus taught. A Jew who submits to God and a Christian who submits to God could both be called muslim in this sense, while disagreeing about almost everything else.

The other sense is a follower of the religion taught in the Qur’an and practiced by Muhammad, who lived six centuries after Jesus. Islam’s answer to that gap is that the message was always the same: what the Qur’an teaches about God and about Jesus is what Jesus himself taught. That is a historical claim, and it can be checked against the earliest records of what Jesus said and did.

Historians of every faith and none describe Jesus in much the same terms: a Jewish teacher from Galilee who kept the Torah, worshiped in synagogues, went up to Jerusalem for the festivals, and expected God to act soon to set the world right. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic scholar, describes him as a Jewish prophet who expected the end of the age (Did Jesus Exist?).

That corrects Christians and Muslims alike. Jesus did not look like a modern church member, and he did not pray in the form Muslims pray, which was set centuries later. “As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath” (Luke 4:16). He said, “I have not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets… but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). He celebrated Passover with his disciples.

Practices such as prostration and fasting were part of Jewish worship long before Islam, and Islam honors that heritage as the religion of Abraham. So when a Muslim’s prayer resembles Jesus’ prayer, the resemblance points back to the worship of Israel’s God that both inherit. It does not tell you what Jesus taught about himself.

Almost everything specific we know about Jesus’ prayer, fasting, and habits comes from the four Gospels. The Qur’an tells us that Jesus was a messenger with clear signs, but very little about his daily practice.

If the Gospels are trustworthy when they say Jesus “fell facedown and prayed,” they deserve a hearing when the same Gospels, often in the same chapter, say other things. In that same prayer he calls God “My Father.” At the meal before it he said of the bread, “this is My body,” and of the cup, “This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:22-24). Earlier he had told his disciples “that the Son of Man must suffer many things… and that He must be killed and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31).

It would be inconsistent to accept the Gospels where they agree with the Qur’an and reject them where they do not, unless there is evidence for the difference. Without such evidence, the choice is being made by the later source, not by the history.

The Qur’an and the Gospels agree on a great deal about Jesus. Both say he was born of the virgin Mary, called the Messiah, worked miracles, and taught Israel to worship the one God. Christians are glad of that common ground.

They differ at three decisive points.

• His death. The earliest records show Jesus expecting and accepting his death, and his followers proclaiming it from the start. The Qur’an says he was not crucified. The evidence is set out in Jesus was not crucified.
• His identity. In the earliest Gospel, Jesus forgives sins in his own name and is condemned for claiming God’s throne. The Qur’an calls him a messenger only. See Jesus never claimed to be God.
• The meaning of his death. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says he came “to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). His followers made his death and resurrection the heart of their message. In the Qur’an, his death has no such role.

These differences concern what Jesus taught and what his followers proclaimed, not diet or prayer posture.

The Qur’an honors Jesus’ disciples. It says they declared, “bear witness that indeed we are Muslims” (5:111), and that God would make “those who follow you… superior to those who disbelieve until the Day of Resurrection” (3:55). So it is worth asking what those disciples actually taught.

The earliest evidence comes from Paul, who in the AD 30s spent fifteen days with Peter and met James, Jesus’ brother (Galatians 1:18-19). He records that Peter, James, and John, “those reputed to be pillars,” accepted his message (Galatians 2:9), and he says of them and himself: “Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach” (1 Corinthians 15:11). What they preached was that Jesus died, was buried, and was raised (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).

You may answer that the disciples’ message was later distorted, and that view deserves a hearing; it is looked at in the Bible is corrupted. But on the evidence we have, the men the Qur’an calls Muslims are recorded, within two decades of Jesus’ death, proclaiming the crucifixion and resurrection that the Qur’an denies.