Question 1

Did Jesus die on the cross?

Accepted Answer

Written six centuries after the fact and six hundred miles away, the Quran denies what eyewitnesses, all four Gospels, the earliest creed (1 Cor 15), and even hostile Roman and Jewish sources (Tacitus, Josephus) affirm: Jesus was crucified and died. To explain the denial, the classical commentators taught a substitution — Allah making someone else look like Jesus; Ibn Kathir relays it from Ibn ‘Abbas — but no first-century source, friend or foe, knows anything of it. A prophecy written a thousand years before (Psalm 22) describes the piercing the Quran says never happened.

Question 2

Can anyone bear your sins?

Accepted Answer

In Islam no soul can carry another’s load: each stands alone on the scales with its own record, hoping in Allah’s mercy. But Isaiah 53 — written seven centuries before Christ — declares that the LORD laid our iniquity on the suffering Servant. Substitutionary atonement is not an afterthought of Christianity; it is the spine of the whole Bible, from the Passover lamb to the cross. Mercy with no sin-bearer leaves justice unanswered; at the cross God is shown "just and the justifier" at once (Romans 3:26).

Question 3

Is Jesus God?

Accepted Answer

The Quran says whoever confesses that Jesus is God is doomed — yet Thomas calls Jesus "my Lord and my God," and Jesus does not correct the confession; he receives it as faith: "Because you have seen me, you have believed." Jesus takes the divine name "I AM" (Exodus 3:14) for himself and the crowd reaches for stones, understanding exactly what he claimed. The Quran asks Christians to abandon the testimony of the men who walked with Jesus in favor of a revelation that began in a cave near Mecca six hundred years later.

Question 4

Why "Son of God" never meant what the Quran thinks

Accepted Answer

"How can He have a child, when there is for Him no consort…?" — the Quran’s objection assumes sonship requires a wife. No Christian creed ever taught that. The Son is eternally begotten, not made; Luke is explicit that the virgin conception was by the overshadowing power of the Most High, not by union. Muslims answer that the Quran denies any begetting at all — "He begetteth not nor was begotten" (112:3) — but a denial is not a refutation: the argument the Quran actually makes, from the lack of a consort, answers a pagan idea Christians also reject, and leaves the eternal Son untouched.

Question 5

Was Jesus only a messenger?

Accepted Answer

"The Messiah, son of Mary, was no other than a messenger…" Yet Jesus accepted worship, forgave sins, claimed authority over the Sabbath, and said all judgment was given to Him. Messengers refuse worship (Acts 14:14-15); Jesus received it. Either He is who Peter confessed — "the Christ, the Son of the living God" — or He is no mere prophet at all.

Question 6

The sinless Christ vs. the forgiven prophet

Accepted Answer

Muhammad is told to "ask forgiveness for thy sin" (47:19) — Muslim scholars read this as minor lapses or humble devotion, holding the prophets protected from sin — and by his own testimony he asked it more than seventy times a day. Jesus asked his fiercest enemies "Which of you convicts me of sin?" and they could answer only with an insult, not a sin. Even the Quran concedes Jesus’ purity — "a faultless son" (19:19) — while recording Muhammad’s need of pardon. One of these two is qualified to stand in for sinners; the other stood in need himself.

Question 7

Clay birds: borrowed from 2nd-century legend

Accepted Answer

Jesus animating clay birds appears nowhere in the first-century Gospels — it comes from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a Greek legend written more than a century after Christ and rejected by the church as fiction. John records that Jesus’ first sign was at Cana. When the Quran retells a known late fable as fact, it reveals its sources: not revelation, but the folklore circulating in 7th-century Arabia.

Question 8

The Quran gets the Trinity wrong

Accepted Answer

"Didst thou say unto mankind: Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah?" The Trinity has never been Father, Son, and Mary — it is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, defined centuries before Muhammad at Nicaea and Constantinople. Muslims answer that the verse rebukes the worship of Mary, not the creed — yet the Quran never once names the Holy Spirit as the third person it rejects, and its great commentators read it just as its critics do: Ibn Kathir charges the Christians with "making a rival, wife and son for Allah." An all-knowing God does not misstate the doctrine He is refuting. A 7th-century Arabian author, hearing garbled reports of Christian devotion to Mary, easily could.

Question 9

“Say not ‘Three’” — but the apostles did

Accepted Answer

Jesus commanded baptism "in the name" — singular — "of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." One name, three persons. The earliest Christians worshipped accordingly, centuries before Islam. The Quran’s "say not ‘Three’" asks the church to un-say what its Founder said.

Question 10

Weighed scales vs. amazing grace

Accepted Answer

In Islam your eternity hangs on whether your good deeds outweigh your bad — and you will not know the verdict until the Day. Muslims rightly add that deeds alone save no one: Muhammad taught that "one's good deeds will not make him enter Paradise" — not even his own, "unless and until Allah bestows His pardon and Mercy on me." But that mercy is hoped for, never promised. Isaiah says even our righteousness is like a polluted garment; scales loaded with soiled garments on both sides save no one. The Gospel is different in kind, not degree: salvation is "not of works," it is the gift of God through the finished work of Christ. One system says "do"; the other says "done."

Question 11

Can a Muslim know he is saved?

Accepted Answer

"I am no new thing among the messengers (of Allah), nor know I what will be done with me or with you." Over a faithful companion’s body Muhammad said the same: "I do not know what Allah will do with me." Muslim commentators answer that later verses promised him forgiveness (48:2) and the believing men and women Gardens (48:5) — Ibn Kathir reports that some held this verse abrogated. Yet that promise is to believers as a class; whether any one Muslim will be among them waits on the weighing of the Day. Contrast John: "These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life…" Assurance is not arrogance — it is confidence in the One who promised.

Question 12

Two exclusive claims — only one with a Savior

Accepted Answer

The Quran says whoever seeks a religion other than Islam will be a loser in the Hereafter. Jesus says "No one comes to the Father, except through me." Both claims cannot be true, and neither can be dismissed as intolerant without dismissing the other. The question is which exclusive claim is backed by evidence — a risen Savior with eyewitnesses, or a private revelation with none.

Question 13

The Quran affirms the Bible it now rejects

Accepted Answer

Here is the dilemma the Quran sets for itself: it commands the people of the Gospel to judge by what Allah revealed in it (5:47) and tells doubting Muhammad to ask "those who read the Scripture (that was) before thee" (10:94). You cannot judge by a corrupted book or settle doubts from a forged one. Muslim apologists answer that the Quran meant the original Torah and Gospel, not the books Christians held — but the command is addressed to the Christians of Muhammad’s own day, to judge by what they had. Either the Bible in the 7th century was trustworthy — and we possess manuscripts centuries older than Muhammad showing today’s Bible matches it — or the Quran commanded people to follow corruption. Both roads break the corruption claim.

Question 14

“There is none who can change His words”

Accepted Answer

"Perfected is the Word of thy Lord… There is naught that can change His words." If the Torah and Gospel are Allah’s words — and the Quran says He revealed them (3:3) — then by the Quran’s own axiom no one could corrupt them. Muslim scholars answer that "His words" here are His decrees — Ibn Kathir: "none can avert Allah's judgment" — and point to verses accusing some of the People of the Book of changing words "from their context" (4:46). But twisting words from their context is twisting what is read, not rewriting the book; the Quran never says the Scriptures in Christian hands were lost, and it tells their readers to judge by them (5:47). The Bible agrees with the axiom: "Yahweh, your word is settled in heaven forever."

Question 15

The Quran’s own preservation problem

Accepted Answer

"Lo! We, even We, reveal the Reminder, and lo! We verily are its Guardian." Yet Sahih al-Bukhari records Uthman, alarmed at the provinces’ "differences in the recitation of the Qur'an," fixing one text and ordering every other Quranic manuscript burned. Muslims answer that he only unified the reading — but you do not burn the variants of a text that has none. Sahih Muslim records the companion Abu Musa recalling a surah "which resembled in length and severity to (Surah) Bara'at" that he had forgotten but for a line; Muslim scholars class such passages as abrogated, which concedes they were once recited. These are not Christian polemics; they are Islam’s gold-standard sources testifying against the perfect-preservation narrative used to attack the Bible.

Question 16

Abrogation: when revelation replaces itself

Accepted Answer

"Nothing of our revelation (even a single verse) do we abrogate or cause be forgotten, but we bring (in place) one better or the like thereof." Islamic scholars catalogued verses cancelled by later ones — estimates run from fewer than ten to more than five hundred — all within a single generation, from one prophet. Ibn Kathir defends it as Allah’s sovereign right and points to earlier laws God also changed. But in the Bible the covenants move from promise to fulfilment — Jesus "didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill" — not by cancelling a prophet’s own recited words within his lifetime, some of them made to be forgotten. "For I, Yahweh, don’t change" stands in another world entirely. A revelation that needs in-flight corrections testifies against its own source.

Question 17

The vanished verse of stoning

Accepted Answer

The caliph Umar declared from the pulpit that the "Verse of the Rajam" (stoning) was revealed, recited, and practiced — "we did recite this Verse and understood and memorized it" — yet it appears nowhere in the Quran you can buy today. Sunan Ibn Majah adds Aisha’s report that the page bearing it lay under her pillow, and after Muhammad’s death "a tame sheep came in and ate it." Muslim scholars answer that the verse was "abrogated in recitation but not ruling" — but that is the point: by Islam’s own canonical sources, the "perfectly preserved" Quran lacks a verse its first community recited and still enforced.

Question 18

“The best of schemers”

Accepted Answer

The Arabic "khayru-l-makirin" — rendered by Pickthall "the best of schemers" — ascribes scheming to Allah as a virtue. Muslim scholars answer that Allah’s makr is only ever a just counter-plan against the wicked; yet Ibn Kathir’s own gloss on 3:54 is the substitution at the cross: "Allah deceived these people." Scripture stakes everything on the opposite: it is "impossible for God to lie," and hope is anchored precisely there. A god whose answer to the cross is a deception leaves even his own worshippers unsure what is real — which is exactly the assurance problem Islam exhibits.

Question 19

Does God love sinners?

Accepted Answer

Over twenty times the Quran lists those Allah "loveth not" — disbelievers, aggressors, the proud. It does call Allah "the Loving" (85:14), and it says He loves the penitent and the doers of good — but in every case the love follows the turning. The Gospel inverts the order: "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." God’s love is not a reward for the righteous but a rescue for the lost. No verse in the Quran says of Allah what John 3:16 says of God: that he "so loved the world, that he gave his only born Son."

Question 20

The God who refuses to be Father

Accepted Answer

When Jews and Christians called themselves children of God, the Quran’s answer was a rebuke: "Why then doth He chastise you for your sins?" In Islam Allah has 99 names; "Father" is not one of them. Yet the deepest cry of the Gospel is adoption — "Abba, Father." Islam counts it the highest honour to be Allah’s servant; the Gospel offers more: "you are no longer a bondservant, but a son." A god who is only Master makes slaves. The God who is Father makes sons.

Question 21

Which son did Abraham offer?

Accepted Answer

Genesis is explicit: "Now take your son, your only son, Isaac…" The Quran’s sacrifice narrative names no son at all, and Islam’s own commentators long disagreed. Ibn Kathir, who argues for Ishmael and accuses the People of the Book of inserting Isaac’s name, concedes in the full text of his tafsir that a group of scholars — reported from some of the earliest generations, even some Companions — held the son was Isaac. Later opinion settled on Ishmael, reading the order of the chapter, where Isaac’s birth is announced after the sacrifice. But Genesis names the son outright, and Hebrews confirms it: Abraham "offered up Isaac." A detail this central, left unnamed in the Quran and long disputed by its own interpreters, is not the mark of better information.

Question 22

Mary, "sister of Aaron"?

Accepted Answer

Mary is addressed as "sister of Aaron" (19:28) and called the daughter of Imran (66:12) — but Miriam, Aaron’s sister and Amram’s daughter, died fourteen centuries before Christ. The two share a name (Maryam), and the Quran fuses them. Sahih Muslim preserves the controversy: the Christians of Najran challenged this very verse, and Muhammad answered that people "used to give names (to their persons) after the names of Apostles and pious persons who had gone before them." Commentators add that "sister of Aaron" can mean one of Aaron’s line, as Luke calls Elizabeth one "of the daughters of Aaron." An idiom might explain one title; it cannot explain why Mary is both Aaron’s sister and the daughter of Imran — exactly as Miriam was.

Question 23

A Samaritan at Mount Sinai

Accepted Answer

In the Quran, the golden calf is made by "As-Samiri" — the Samaritan, as the Arabist A. J. Arberry translates it: "The Samaritan has misled them into error" (20:85). But Samaritans originate from the resettlement of Samaria after its fall in 722 BC (2 Kings 17), roughly seven hundred years after the Exodus — and the city itself did not exist until King Omri bought its hill from Shemer and named it Samaria (1 Kings 16:24). Muslim commentators offer other origins for the name — Ibn Kathir records that he came from Bajarma, or Kirman, or a village called Samarra — but three guesses are not an answer, and the word itself means "the Samaritan." It is an anachronism on the order of placing a Frenchman at the fall of Troy, and it sits in what claims to be a dictated, eternal text.

Question 24

The sun sets in a muddy spring

Accepted Answer

Dhul-Qarnayn travels until "he reached the setting-place of the sun" and "found it setting in a muddy spring." Ibn Kathir reads that as appearance — "he saw the sun as if it were setting in the ocean" — and the verse alone could bear it, since the Bible too speaks of sunrise and sunset. But the hadith go further. Asked where the sun sets, Muhammad answers, "It sets in a spring of warm water (Hamiyah)" (Abu Dawud 4002); and in Sahih al-Bukhari the setting sun "goes (i.e. travels) till it prostrates Itself underneath the Throne" and asks permission to rise again (Bukhari 3199). That is cosmology, not appearance. The Bible — centuries earlier — speaks of God who "hangs the earth on nothing" and "sits above the circle of the earth." The hadith read like 7th-century cosmology; these lines do not.

Question 25

Haman in the wrong empire

Accepted Answer

In the Bible, Haman is the vizier of the Persian king Ahasuerus (5th century BC). The Quran makes "Haman" Pharaoh’s master-builder in Moses’ Egypt, nearly a millennium earlier — and has Pharaoh order mud baked for "a lofty tower," an image straight out of Babel, where men said, "let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly," to build "a tower whose top reaches to the sky." Some Muslim writers propose an Egyptian official of a similar name; the identification is disputed. Two biblical stories, separated by a thousand years, blended into one.

Question 26

Born under a palm tree?

Accepted Answer

Micah named the town seven centuries in advance: Bethlehem. Luke, a careful historian, records the census that brought Joseph and Mary there. The Quran instead shows Mary alone under a palm tree, in a scene paralleling the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew’s palm-and-stream episode — legend again standing in for history, and the fulfilled prophecy of Bethlehem missing from the retelling.

Question 27

The satanic verses

Accepted Answer

Quran 22:52 concedes the principle: of every messenger before, "Satan proposed (opposition) in respect of that which he recited thereof." Early Islamic historians (al-Tabari, Ibn Sa’d) and tafsir traditions tie it to the day Muhammad briefly endorsed the pagan goddesses of 53:19-20 — the "cranes" whose intercession was hoped for — before retracting the lines as satanic. Many later scholars, Ibn Kathir among them, reject the story, judging its chains broken; yet Sahih al-Bukhari itself records the strange scene it explains: when Muhammad finished reciting Surat an-Najm, "all the Muslims and pagans and Jinns and human beings prostrated along with him" (Bukhari 4862). Paul’s standard is absolute: even an angel preaching another gospel is accursed. A prophet who cannot tell Gabriel from Satan, even once, fails the Bible’s test of a prophet.

Question 28

Even Islam’s Jesus returns as Judge

Accepted Answer

In Sahih al-Bukhari, it is Jesus son of Mary who descends at the end, judges justly, and breaks the Cross. Muhammad stays in his grave; Jesus returns. Islam could not write Jesus out of the end of the story — it could only change his job description. The Bible’s account stands: "This Jesus, who was received up from you into the sky, will come back in the same way as you saw him going into the sky."

Question 29

The bewitched prophet

Accepted Answer

The Quran indignantly quotes unbelievers calling Muhammad "a man bewitched" — yet Bukhari reports that a spell cast by one Labid bin al-A'sam left Muhammad "imagining that he had done a thing that he had not really done." Muslim scholars answer that it touched only ordinary matters, never the revelation; but Islam’s most trusted collection still concedes the very thing the Quran calls slander. No such cloud ever touches Jesus. When some said he had a demon, others answered from what they had seen: "It isn’t possible for a demon to open the eyes of the blind, is it?"

Question 30

The tafsir that bless the Bible

Accepted Answer

The Quran says Allah revealed the Torah and the Gospel "for a guidance to mankind" (3:3-4), and Ibn Kathir affirms these were "divinely revealed Books" and that "the Qur'an also testifies to the truth these Books contained." He also held that the People of the Book later altered them. But the manuscripts Christians held in the 7th century — Codex Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and hundreds more — still exist, and they are, in substance, the Bible we print today. If the Quran confirmed the books in Christian hands, it confirmed ours; if those books were already corrupt, the Quran confirmed a corruption. What the Quran endorsed is what we still read.

Question 31

Was Jesus a Muslim?

Accepted Answer

It turns on a word with two meanings. “Muslim” can mean anyone who submits to God — the loose sense in which the Quran calls even Abraham one who “surrendered” — or a follower of the religion Muhammad delivered six centuries later. In the first sense, yes: Jesus submitted to God. But notice whom he submitted to — he prayed “Abba, Father,” and taught his followers to pray the same. Islam refuses God that name: “He begetteth not nor was begotten,” and “say not ‘Three’… Far is it removed from His Transcendent Majesty that He should have a son.” The prayer offered as proof that Jesus was a Muslim is one no Muslim could pray. The headline trades on the second sense anyway, and by Islam’s own definition that is impossible — Muhammad defined Islam as testifying “that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Jesus lived six centuries before Muhammad and kept the feasts at the Temple in Jerusalem; Mecca had no place in his faith. And the things he claimed are the very things Islam exists to deny: he took the divine name “I AM,” called God his own Father, forgave sins as only God can, and his disciples preached his death and resurrection. Those are not the words of a Muslim — they are the reason a new religion had to recast him.

Question 32

Is Muhammad foretold in the Bible?

Accepted Answer

Read in full, the texts point the other way. The prophet “like Moses” is raised up “from among their brothers” — from Israel — and the New Testament names him: Peter, preaching in the Temple, says that prophet is Jesus (Acts 3:22-26). Deuteronomy itself closes by noting that no prophet like Moses had yet arisen in Israel; the whole expectation looked inside Israel, not toward Arabia. And the Comforter is no man arriving six centuries later — Jesus says plainly it is “the Holy Spirit,” whom the Father would send in his name, whom the disciples already knew, and who would be in them forever (John 14:16-17, 26); he came at Pentecost, days after the ascension (Acts 1:5; 2:4). A human prophet cannot indwell millions of believers at once. The “Ahmad” reading depends on swapping the Greek paraklētos (“comforter”) for periklytos (“praised”) — a pun no Greek manuscript supports.

Question 33

Are there scientific miracles in the Quran?

Accepted Answer

Its showcase, the embryo, is not seventh-century foreknowledge but the embryology of the ancient world. The Quran’s sequence — a drop, then a clot, then a “little lump,” then bones, then “clothed the bones with flesh” — is the staged growth Greek medicine had taught for centuries: Aristotle had the male seed set the mother’s blood “in the same way as rennet acts upon milk” (Generation of Animals II.4), and Galen of Pergamon (d. c. 216) traced the embryo through stages from seed to full form. The clot gives it away. The classical commentators took ‘alaqa as exactly that — Ibn Kathir: “a red clot”; ‘Ikrimah: “This is blood” — yet a human embryo is never a clot of blood, which is why newer translations turn Yusuf Ali’s “a (mere) clot of congealed blood” (96:2) into “a clinging substance” (Sahih International). The other “miracles” are read backwards into the lines. “We have built the heaven with might, and We it is Who make the vast extent (thereof)” is praise of God’s power, not Hubble’s expanding cosmos; and the “iron from space” claim rests on the verb anzala, which Pickthall himself renders simply “He revealed iron” — the same ordinary word the Quran uses for sending down rain, scripture, and provision. Every one of these readings appeared only after modern science did, which is the reverse of prophecy. The Bible never pitched itself this way: it offers to reveal God and the way of salvation, not to anticipate the textbook.

Question 34

Was the real gospel the Gospel of Barnabas?

Accepted Answer

The Gospel of Barnabas is a forgery more than a thousand years too late. No ancient writer quotes it; a sixth-century list of rejected books, the Gelasian Decree, names a “Gospel in the name of Barnabas” (Evangelium nomine Barnabae), but nothing of that lost text survives to tie it to this one. The earliest copy is an Italian manuscript from the late sixteenth century (a Spanish text survives only in an eighteenth-century copy), and the text betrays itself on nearly every page. It has Jesus sail to Nazareth — an inland town with no harbour — speaks of wine kept in wooden casks, where Jesus’ world used jars, and, fatally, has Jesus speak of a jubilee coming “every hundred years,” the very calendar Pope Boniface VIII decreed in AD 1300. It even borrows Dante’s catchphrase “dei falsi e bugiardi” — false and lying gods. It is not the lost testimony of the apostle Barnabas but a late European composition retrofitted to Islam — and the Quran itself told the Christians of Muhammad’s day to “judge by” the Gospel they already had. The genuinely early record — the four Gospels and the creed Paul received within a few years of the cross — says Jesus died and rose.

Question 35

Is Allah the God of the Bible?

Accepted Answer

The name was never the issue — Arabic-speaking Christians have always called God “Allah,” and the Bible proclaimed the one Creator long before Arabia. The question is the nature, and there the two portraits part at the centre. The God of the Bible is a Father who has an eternal Son and gives his Spirit — the Quran calls that the unforgivable error: “say not ‘Three’… Far is it removed from His Transcendent Majesty that He should have a son.” The God of the Bible so loved the world that he gave his Son and proved his love “while we were yet sinners”; the Quran’s Allah “loveth not the disbelievers (in His guidance)” and is named “the best of schemers.” The God of the Bible draws near and is crucified for his enemies; the Quran’s Allah, though “nearer to him than his jugular vein” (50:16), would never take flesh, still less die for his enemies. Both call him Creator — but the character each describes cannot both be true, and only one of them has a cross.

Question 36

Jesus never said “I am God — worship me”

Accepted Answer

He revealed who he was the way the Gospels actually work — by claim, by action, and by the reaction he provoked. He took the divine name “I AM” (“before Abraham came into existence, I AM”) and the crowd reached for stones. He said “I and the Father are one,” and they tried to stone him “because you, being a man, make yourself God” — they understood the claim exactly. He forgave sins as only God can (Mark 2), accepted worship without ever refusing it, and received Thomas’s “My Lord and my God” as faith, not blasphemy. Demanding that exact slogan is like saying a king is no king unless he recites “I am the king” — while the whole room kneels. The Quran’s own objection (5:72) only confirms that everyone knew what was being claimed; the question is not whether Jesus said one sentence, but whether the claim his enemies executed him for was true.

Question 37

Muslims love Jesus too — isn’t it the same Jesus?

Accepted Answer

Two figures share a name and very little else. The Quran’s ‘Isa is a created prophet who is made to deny his own deity — “Didst thou say… Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah?… It was not mine to utter that…” (5:116-117) — who was not crucified (4:157), is not the Son, and foretells Muhammad. The Jesus of the only first-century records, the Gospels, is worshipped as “My Lord and my God,” forgives sins, is crucified under Pontius Pilate (reported even by Roman and Jewish sources — see The Historical Jesus), and rises. These are not two emphases on one person; they are mutually exclusive claims, and whoever denies the Son “doesn’t have the Father” either. To admire ‘Isa while denying the cross and the deity is to honour a different figure who happens to carry the name. The real question is not whether we like Jesus, but which Jesus actually lived, died, and rose — and that one is attested by history, not asserted six centuries later.

Question 38

Does Muhammad pass the Bible’s test of a prophet?

Accepted Answer

The test has two prongs, and he does not clear them. Accuracy first: the Quran’s flagship prediction — that the defeated Romans would soon defeat Persia (30:2-4) — turns on a verb the early unvowelled script lets be read either way, and the Muslim sources remember it as a wager Abu Bakr lost on his first term (see “Did the Qur’an miraculously predict the future?”) — a bet on the next round of a known war, not a sealed prophecy. And when Bedouins asked him when the Hour would come, he pointed to the youngest and said that if this one lived till he was very old, "your Hour" would come — a reply the narrator Hisham had to explain as "their death" (Bukhari 6511). But the deeper prong is Deuteronomy 13: even a prophet whose sign comes true is false if he turns you to a god you have not known. The prophet like Moses speaks for the LORD who has a Son (see “Muhammad foretold”); the apostle’s rule is that any spirit denying Jesus is come in the flesh "is not of God." It was never about a lucky forecast. It is about which God he preached.

Question 39

Did Muhammad perform miracles?

Accepted Answer

The Quran itself takes them away. Again and again, when challenged for a sign, Muhammad is told to answer that he has none but the book: “Why are not portents sent down upon him from his Lord? Say: Portents are with Allah only, and I am but a plain warner” (29:50; cf. 13:7; 6:37; 17:59). The one verse Muslims cite — “The hour drew nigh and the moon was rent in twain” (54:1) — speaks of the Hour; the story of the moon split on request, like the flowing fingers and the moaning palm-trunk, comes from hadith gathered one to two centuries after his death, exactly the stretch in which a movement tends to grow its founder’s legend. Contrast the Gospels, set down within living memory by and from eyewitnesses (Luke 1), whose central miracle — the resurrection — was public, checkable, and died for by the very men who claimed to have seen it. Islam’s earliest source answers the demand for miracles with the book alone; its later sources supply them. That is the opposite of how true history behaves.

Question 40

Is Muhammad the final “Seal of the Prophets”?

Accepted Answer

Two problems. First, the title: “Muhammad is not the father of any man among you, but… the Seal of the Prophets” (33:40). Khatam means a seal or signet; mainstream Islam, backed by hadith — “There will be no prophet after me” — reads it as “last,” and only minorities such as the Ahmadiyya read it otherwise. Grant the mainstream reading, and the deeper problem remains: the Bible already closed prophecy — not with a later prophet, but with the Son. “God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son…” (Hebrews 1). The Spirit, not a future messenger, was given to lead the church into all truth, and the apostle pronounces a curse on any later “gospel,” even one brought by an angel (Galatians 1:8). Christianity has no empty seat after Jesus waiting to be filled six hundred years on; it has “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” A seal pressed in long after the document is finished doesn’t close it — it adds to it.

Question 41

Is the Qur’an’s eloquence a miracle no one can match?

Accepted Answer

This is a proof most of the people asked to accept it can never check. Eloquence lies in the ear of the hearer; well over a billion Muslims who do not read classical Arabic take the claim on trust, and non-Muslim Arabic scholars simply do not grant it. The challenge is also unfalsifiable — every attempt is ruled “not like it” by the very people judging. And beauty is no test of truth: forgers and poets are eloquent; the question is not whether a text sings but whether it is so. Scripture stakes its claim on something checkable instead — prophecy written centuries early and fulfilled in history, and a resurrection with named witnesses who “didn’t follow cunningly devised fables.” God’s own challenge in Isaiah is not “is it lovely?” but “Declare the things that are to come hereafter” — predict the future and be vindicated by events. A book can be beautiful and false. The question Scripture invites is whether it happened.

Question 42

Is the Qur’an in flawless “pure Arabic”?

Accepted Answer

The Quran does claim to be pure, clear Arabic (16:103; 12:2; 41:44) — yet it is studded with words carried in from other tongues. Some classical Muslim scholars conceded it, and the scholar Arthur Jeffery catalogued scores: terms from Syriac/Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Greek, and Ethiopic — among them load-bearing words like injil (from Greek euangelion), firdaus, and masjid, with many scholars tracing even the word qur’an to Syriac qeryānā, “a reading” or lectionary. Muslim scholars answer that a borrowed word, once naturalized, is Arabic — fair enough, but loanwords are normal in every human language, which is exactly the point: the Quran reads like the natural speech of a 7th-century trading culture at the crossroads of empires, not a tongue let down pure from heaven. The Bible never claimed linguistic purity; it was carried deliberately into every language from Pentecost on, where each man heard the wonders of God “in our own native language,” and ends with a redeemed crowd “out of every nation and of all tribes, peoples, and languages.” The gospel’s glory is that it translates. The claim that breaks here is the claim of flawless native purity.

Question 43

Did the Qur’an miraculously predict the future?

Accepted Answer

This is the showcase, and it is fragile. The verse promises that the defeated Romans “will be victorious” within a few years. But the early script carried no vowel marks, and Ibn ‘Abbas himself is recorded giving the opening verb both ways — “Ghulibat wa Ghalabat” (Tirmidhi 3193) — and on the second reading it is the victorious Romans who will be defeated. Muslims rightly point out that when the verse came, Persia had crushed Rome; yet the Muslim sources themselves remember it as a wager: Abu Bakr bet the pagans of Quraysh on it, and lost when six years passed without a Roman victory, which came in the seventh (Tirmidhi 3194) — a bet on the next turn of a long war between two empires, not a sealed prophecy. Set beside the Bible’s kind of prediction it nearly vanishes: Cyrus named as Israel’s liberator a century and more before his birth (Isaiah 44:28); the Messiah’s town named in Micah; pierced hands described in Psalm 22 a thousand years early. Guessing which of two superpowers wins the next campaign is the sort of thing a shrewd observer might call. Naming a king long before he was born is not.

Question 44

Has the Qur’an really never changed a letter?

Accepted Answer

The claim outruns the evidence — and Islam’s own sources say so. The early reports show companions’ codices differing — Bukhari records that Ibn Mas‘ud held the last two surahs were not part of the Qur’an (Bukhari 4977) — until the caliph Uthman, a generation in, fixed one version and burned the rest; and you do not burn copies of a text that never varied. The early script carried no dots or vowels, which is why Islam has the qira’at, the seven and then ten canonical “readings” that still differ in the printed Qur’ans of today; Muslims hold that these readings were themselves revealed, but then “one unchanging text” is not what the evidence shows. The Sana‘a palimpsest, uncovered in Yemen in 1972, preserves one Quranic text scraped away and overwritten by another. None of this is borrowed from Christian polemics; it is in the hadith and the manuscripts. The irony is that the Bible’s “messier” transmission — thousands of early manuscripts laid open and compared in public — is the better-evidenced and more honest of the two (see “Can We Trust the Text?”). “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” is a claim the open record can actually bear.

Question 45

Is there a miraculous “Code 19” in the Qur’an?

Accepted Answer

The “Code 19” was the project of Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian biochemist who in the 1970s announced that the Quran’s letters are bound to multiples of nineteen — and then used the “discovery” to declare himself God’s messenger, throw out the entire hadith, and delete two verses (9:128-129) that spoiled his count. Mainstream Muslims rejected his claims, and he was murdered in his Tucson mosque in 1990. The arithmetic only “works” after selective counting, disputed spellings, and the very textual edits he made to force it. It is a cautionary tale, not a miracle: number-patterns can be mined out of any long text, and this one cost its author the orthodoxy he began in, and two verses of the very book he claimed it proved. Scripture warns against precisely this — chasing a sign in hidden codes instead of the plain word and the risen Christ: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign,” and “Jews ask for signs… but we preach Christ crucified.”

Question 46

Does the Qur’an contradict itself?

Accepted Answer

The Quran sets its own test in 4:82 — no discrepancies if it is from God — and then supplies some. Count the days of creation: 7:54 and many verses say six, but 41:9-12 reads two days for the earth, then four for its provisions, then two for the heavens — eight, unless you let the four quietly absorb the two. Pharaoh drowns, yet is told “We save thee in thy body that thou mayst be a portent for those after thee” (10:92). Who takes a soul at death — the one angel of death, “Our messengers” in the plural, or Allah himself? Were humans formed from a clot, from water, from clay, from dust? Defenders harmonize each case — exactly as Christians do with the Bible’s hard places — and that is the whole point: the Quran offered a book with no discrepancies as its proof of God, then turned out to read like every other ancient text that needs harmonizing. The honest claim is not that there is nothing to reconcile, but that “the word of our God stands forever” — which the Bible says of itself without staking its deity on a puzzle with no seams.

Question 47

Did the Qur’an borrow from earlier legends?

Accepted Answer

The trouble is that these stories trace not to anything older or truer than the Bible, but to Jewish and Christian lore that grew up around it. The raven that shows Cain how to bury Abel (5:31) has its counterpart in Jewish tradition: in the Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer a raven teaches Adam the same lesson. And the very next verse — “For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel” that whoever kills one person, “it shall be as if he had killed all mankind” (5:32) — is the Mishnah’s teaching, set beside the story of Cain and written down about AD 200 (Sanhedrin 4:5). The boy Jesus shaping clay birds comes from the second-century Infancy Gospel of Thomas (see “Clay birds”); Mary under the palm tree parallels the apocryphal Pseudo-Matthew (see “Born under a palm tree?”); the Sleepers of the Cave (18:25) retells a Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. None of these is early or eyewitness; they are exactly the tales a 7th-century Arabian preacher could have heard from his Jewish and Christian neighbours. A book that claims to correct the Scriptures instead absorbs the lore that grew up around them — which is why the apostles insisted they “didn’t follow cunningly devised fables,” and warned the church not to let anyone “rob you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men.”

Question 48

Aisha’s age — does it matter?

Accepted Answer

The facts are not in dispute, because they come from Islam’s own most trusted books. Sahih al-Bukhari states plainly that the Prophet married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine — and Sahih Muslim says the same. The fairest defense is that child betrothal occurred in the ancient world and a man is shaped by his age; that is honestly granted. But it is also where the claim breaks. Muhammad is not offered as an ordinary 7th-century man — he is held up as the “good example,” the uswa hasana (33:21), the timeless moral pattern every Muslim in every century is to imitate. A standard chained to one culture’s worst practice cannot be the universal standard for all. The question is not whether we can excuse a man of his time, but whether the conduct of the one held up as the final model for all time is conduct we would protect a nine-year-old from today. The Jesus of the Gospels took children in his arms and blessed them, and warned that whoever causes one of “these little ones” to stumble would be better off sunk in the depths of the sea. The contrast is the argument.

Question 49

Muhammad’s marriages and the convenient revelations

Accepted Answer

Several of the marriages were plausibly diplomatic or merciful. Two facts, though, sit hard against the prophetic claim. First, Zaynab: she was the wife of Zayd, the man Muhammad had adopted as a son — and after Zayd divorced her, a revelation arrived authorizing the marriage and declaring adopted sons are not real sons, “so that (henceforth) there may be no sin for believers in respect of wives of their adopted sons” (33:37). A revelation that conveniently sanctions the prophet’s own desired marriage is exactly what a skeptic predicts and a holy God would not require. Second, the privilege: while other men were limited to four wives (4:3), a revelation exempted Muhammad alone from that limit, adding any believing woman who would “give herself unto the Prophet” — “a privilege for thee only, not for the (rest of) believers” (33:50) — until 33:52 closed the list: “It is not allowed thee to take (other) women henceforth.” The pattern is the point: revelations that loosen the rules for the one delivering them. When 33:51 left him free to “defer whom thou wilt of them and receive unto thee whom thou wilt,” Aisha herself said, as Sahih al-Bukhari records, “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.” The gospel runs the opposite way — its Lord gave himself up rather than take, and its leaders must be “the husband of one wife.”

Question 50

The sword — was the spread of Islam peaceful?

Accepted Answer

The Quran does say “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) — but it is the earlier verse, and the later verses of Surah 9 — which many classical scholars held to abrogate it, or to limit it to Jews and Christians who pay the tribute (Ibn Kathir records both views; see “Abrogation”) — command offensive war. “Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them” (9:5, the Verse of the Sword). “Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not… until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low” (9:29) — fight Jews and Christians until they submit and pay. The Quran itself recalls the aftermath of the siege of Medina, when the men of the Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza were brought down from their strongholds: “Some ye slew, and ye made captive some” (33:26) — the histories number the executed in the hundreds. One may argue each context; what cannot be argued away is the contrast with the One Muhammad claimed to stand in line with. Jesus told Peter to put up his sword — “all those who take the sword will die by the sword” — said “My Kingdom is not of this world,” and commanded “love your enemies.” He conquered not by killing but by being killed. Two founders, two swords: one drawn, one turned into a cross.

Question 51

Is there freedom to leave Islam?

Accepted Answer

“There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) stands in the Quran — and is undone by the practice the Prophet himself laid down. Sahih al-Bukhari records his ruling without qualification: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.” The classical schools of Islamic law agreed in prescribing death for the apostate, and a number of Muslim-majority states keep the penalty on the books today. Some modern Muslim thinkers argue the ruling concerned treason in wartime, not belief — but the hadith’s words are about changing one’s religion, and the classical law read them that way. The door the Quran opens in one verse, the Prophet’s own example bars in another: free to enter, not free to leave. Set this beside the gospel. When the rich young ruler turned and walked away, Jesus let him go grieving and did not call him back by force. When crowds deserted him he asked the twelve, “You don’t also want to go away, do you?” — an invitation, not a threat. Christianity spread for three centuries with no sword but the willingness of its own people to die — never to kill — for what they believed. A faith confident in its truth does not need to threaten those who would leave it.

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