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Nabeel Qureshi (1983 – 2017): The Man­u­fac­tured Mar­tyr of Chris­t­ian Apologetics

When Muham­mad came into a posi­tion of polit­i­cal pow­er after decades of per­se­cu­tion, his first act was to for­give those who had per­se­cut­ed him. His heart of mer­cy is also illus­trat­ed by this hadith : A dying child was once brought to the Prophet Muham­mad (peace be upon him). When, on see­ing the child’s last breaths, the Prophet began to shed tears, one of his com­pan­ions asked why he was cry­ing. He replied : It is a mer­cy that God has put in the hearts of God’s ser­vants, and God is mer­ci­ful only to those of God’s ser­vants who are mer­ci­ful to oth­ers’”. I hope that, in the midst of pub­lic debate between Mus­lims and non-Mus­lims, we all can be mer­ci­ful to one another.

Out­side of the World Wide Web, Nabeel Qureshi was (and still is) an unknown enti­ty to the Mus­lim world and nev­er had any real influ­en­tial pres­ence. Eli­jah Reynolds in an online piece co-writ­ten with a Chris­t­ian grad­u­ate stu­dent crit­i­cized Nabeel Qureshi by stating :

For Qureshi, the Qur’an is a bloody and vio­lent text — a fact which learned inter­preters of Islam today ignore, he implies, but some­how the unlearned Jihadists get right. Qureshi claims that as a young man, he was shield­ed from read­ing Qur’an and hadith on his own, and instead was taught a mes­sage of Islam­ic peace and love. This read­ing was sub­se­quent­ly shat­tered by his own inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion of the texts, bypass­ing cen­turies of the tra­di­tion and schol­ar­ly interpretations.

Qureshi claims to speak more author­i­ta­tive­ly on Islam than the imams whose inter­pre­ta­tion he explic­it­ly ignores. He remem­bers as a child, if I want­ed to know about the tra­di­tions of Muham­mad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tra­di­tion of Islam.” It was not until he bypassed cen­turies of tra­di­tion and their imams’ inter­pre­ta­tions” that he dis­cov­ered real Islam — appar­ent­ly on the inter­net, where young poten­tial ISIS recruits eas­i­ly find real Islam too.

Qureshi’s rejec­tion of the learned schol­ars of his com­mu­ni­ty in favor of the internet.…is com­pa­ra­ble to an athe­ist learn­ing every­thing she knows about Chris­tian­i­ty from Richard Dawkins.

The vast and copi­ous mate­r­i­al that he had pro­duced from the time of his con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty until a week before his death are most­ly rehash­es of Ori­en­tal­ists and Chris­t­ian polemi­cists in the likes of Alphonse Min­gana, Samuel Zwe­mer, Robert Spencer, David Wood and many oth­ers. There was noth­ing new or any­thing worth men­tion­ing that he had intro­duced in his debates with the Mus­lims, apart from him con­sis­tent­ly attempt­ing to cre­ate a dichoto­my” between Allah and Jesus” (as made appar­ent in his book titles and online speeches).

Even that hon­our” has been tak­en away by the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies Robert Morey and Sam Shamoun, the for­mer being known for his Allah is a moon-god” the­o­ry and the lat­ter for his vir­u­lent, Islam­o­pho­bic straw­man against the con­cep­tion of God in Islam. The image that was care­ful­ly planned and craft­ed of him hav­ing ques­tioned his Mus­lim faith” and being called off the minaret”. It is inter­est­ing to note that he made no men­tion that his fam­i­ly were from the Ahmadiyya, and por­trayed his fam­i­ly back­ground as being main­stream Islam. how­ev­er, has made it a promi­nent fea­ture among a gullible West­ern audi­ence primed with Islam­o­pho­bia and always will­ing to parade some­one from the ene­my” as one of their own.

In spite of the mea­gre achieve­ments of Nabeel Qureshi in the Mus­lim world, this had not stopped the West­ern Chris­t­ian pub­lic – delud­ed by the myth­i­cal influ­ence of their fall­en hero — to donate mon­ey to his cause, even in death. Nabeel’s GoFundMe page reached up to USD700,000.00 after the news of his death was known to the pub­lic sphere, and the month­ly amount he receives from Patre­on had not wavered either. His wid­ow, Michelle Qureshi, ful­ly exploit­ed the death of her late hus­band by announc­ing pub­licly that she will con­tin­ue his min­istry”. It seems obvi­ous to us that those man­ag­ing the crowd­fund­ing pages (most espe­cial­ly his wid­ow!) of their fall­en com­rade are mak­ing a huge prof­it out of this sen­sa­tion­al­ism for per­son­al gain.

Why God Did Not Heal Nabeel Qureshi ?

This was the ques­tion posed by the Chris­t­ian polemi­cists, guised in the form of an op-ed by Frank Turek and anoth­er in a blog post. This must have been the ques­tion that had been play­ing in their minds when Nabeel Qureshi first announced that he had Stage IV can­cer on August 312016.

We find the state­ment made by Frank Turek in ref­er­ence to Mus­lims extreme­ly polem­i­cal and total­ly below the belt, as he wrote that :

Is it because the Mus­lim God is the true God, and He pun­ished Nabeel for leav­ing Him ? No, there’s excel­lent evi­dence for the Chris­t­ian view of God (see Nabeel’s book No God but One). More­over, Mus­lims who sug­gest this should be asked, Why did your God wait until Nabeel had writ­ten three best-sell­ing books, made hun­dreds of hours of videos, and helped bring hun­dreds of Mus­lims to Christ ? Is his tim­ing off?” Not only that, Nabeel’s work will con­tin­ue to bring peo­ple to Christ, prob­a­bly in an accel­er­at­ed man­ner after his passing.

We would like to address sev­er­al things for this mis­sion­ary to digest.

First of all, Mr Turek, there has nev­er been a Mus­lim God” or a Chris­t­ian God” or any oth­er god that the Mus­lims wor­ship which is dis­tinct from the God of Abra­ham, Moses and Jesus, peace be upon them all. It is very insult­ing to even sug­gest that the God of Islam is dis­tinct from the God of Chris­tian­i­ty because, in real­i­ty, they are not dis­tinct — Mus­lims and Chris­tians do wor­ship the same God.

Regard­ing the sec­ond part of Turek’s rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, one may not have to look far to see why this may be the case. It has been report­ed by sev­er­al Chris­t­ian news por­tals that Nabeel him­self prayed for God to kill him after con­vert­ing to Christianity”.

This may or may not have been true as we would like to keep an open mind on this, but we leave the inter­est­ed read­er to fol­low the trail and check out the evi­dence for them­selves as to whether God may have indeed killed” Nabeel Qureshi because He did answer what Nabeel had prayed for…and it has noth­ing to do with the Muslims.

Con­clu­sions

Based on what we have dis­cussed on Nabeel Qureshi, the his­to­ry behind it and his polem­i­cal exploits which includes his Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus book, we can thus infer from these cir­cum­stances and form our own con­clu­sions about him, from a Mus­lim per­spec­tive, which are as follows :

Nabeel Qureshi Nev­er Was A Muslim

Nabeel Qureshi was a Qadi­ani, or oth­er­wise known as the Ahmadiyya, a deviant sect that only began in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. The Qadi­a­n­is have been con­sis­tent­ly denounced by main­stream Islam as het­ero­dox for their belief that Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad was a Prophet and the promised Messiah.

Hence, it is cor­rect to say that Nabeel Qureshi was nev­er a Mus­lim, to begin with. This is akin to stat­ing that a for­mer Mor­mon who revert­ed to Islam was a Chris­t­ian”, even though Mor­monism is reject­ed by main­stream Chris­tian­i­ty because Mor­mons believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

The par­al­lels between Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad and Joseph Smith are so sim­i­lar to one anoth­er that we won­der how was it pos­si­ble for West­ern Chris­tians to fall for this con.

Nabeel Qureshi’s For­mer Mus­lim” Title

It is very inter­est­ing to note that despite his claims of Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus (as is the title of his book), Nabeel Qureshi had nev­er once addressed the issue of Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad while talk­ing about his past — whether in his books ; most espe­cial­ly his pop­u­lar Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus book, his online cours­es or in his speech­es — because he knew very well that to do so will lend lit­tle cre­dence to his claims of being a for­mer Mus­lim” and total­ly remove any ves­tige of his cred­i­bil­i­ty. He unabashed­ly cap­i­talised on that label to the point of mak­ing a huge for­tune from his var­i­ous evan­gel­i­cal ven­tures, with the full back­ing of the Chris­t­ian establishment.

He did attempt to wig­gle his way out of this issue by insist­ing that the Qadi­a­n­is are Mus­lims while gloss­ing over the sta­tus of Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad in Qadi­ani theology.

It is worth men­tion­ing that this was the same tac­tic employed by a Chris­t­ian polemi­cist and Islam­o­phobe extra­or­di­naire by the name of Ergun Caner — a self-pro­fessed for­mer devout ex-Mus­lim” who nev­er did prac­tice any of the basic tenets of Islam dur­ing his ear­ly life and was in fact weaned into Chris­tian­i­ty even before the age of puberty.

Ergun Caner exploit­ed his shenani­gans to the hilt as a mon­ey-mak­ing enter­prise until he was exposed as a fraud by Moham­mad Khan, a British Mus­lim, for pass­ing off gib­ber­ish as Ara­bic phras­es and Qur’an­ic verses.

Manip­u­lat­ed By Michelle Qureshi and Others

In turn, the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies them­selves have used Nabeel Qureshi as a ham­mer against the Mus­lims — and as their ide­o­log­i­cal weapon — to pro­mote an agen­da of extin­guish­ing IslamWe are remind­ed of the fol­low­ing verse : They want to extin­guish the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah will per­fect His light, although the dis­be­liev­ers dis­like it.” (Qur’an 61:8), which still remains the fastest-grow­ing reli­gion in the world.

Nabeel Qureshi Google Trends
Google Trends search for Nabeel Qureshi” around the time of his death

Sad­ly, even his wid­ow, Michelle Qureshi – instead of tak­ing the time off to mourn for the loss of her late hus­band — has decid­ed to jump on the polem­i­cal band­wag­on by tak­ing up the man­tle of bash­ing Islam.

Nabeel Qureshi Widow
Screen cap­ture of Nabeel Qureshi’s wid­ow tak­ing advan­tage of her hus­band’s death.

His Final Fate

While we reserve our judge­ment on the final fate of Nabeel Qureshi, who had clear­ly erred in the sight of Islam (as we do believe mat­ters of his affairs have now come between him and God Almighty), we do find that the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ary attempts at the hero-wor­ship of Nabeel Qureshi in death and (mis)using it — to the point of mak­ing thin­ly-veiled attacks on Islam and the Mus­lims — shame­ful and dis­gust­ing, to say the least.

In the end, Mus­lims are remind­ed of the words of God Almighty in the Final Tes­ta­ment, the Qur’an, which says :

And they say, None will enter Par­adise except one who is a Jew or a Chris­t­ian.” That is [mere­ly] their wish­ful think­ing, Say, Pro­duce your proof, if you should be truth­ful.” (Qur’an 2:111)

And ver­i­ly, only God knows best ! Nabeel Qureshi (1983–2017): The Manufactured Martyr of Christian Apologetics 1

Appen­dix : You Can­not See God And Live

In an event enti­tled What is God Real­ly Like : Tawhid or Trin­i­ty ? that the late Nabeel Qureshi debate Dr Shabir Ally, a per­son asked in the Q&A Ses­sion how he would rec­on­cile the appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion between say­ing that Abra­ham actu­al­ly laid eyes on God and yet Exo­dus 33:20 has God telling Moses that see­ing His face is an impos­si­bil­i­ty as see­ing Him would cause the human being to die.

In answer­ing this ques­tion, Nabeel Qureshi debate that it was Jesus that Abra­ham saw and not the Father. It is the Father, accord­ing to Nabeel Qureshi and many oth­er Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists, that human being can­not lay eyes on and live, but if it was the Son, that is, Jesus then it would be total­ly all right for the human eyes to see.

First­ly, the verse in Exo­dus 33:20 does not cat­e­gorise God into the Father and the Son and there­by argue, as Nabeel Qureshi did, that only the Son can be seen but not the Father. The plain text sim­ply shows God as One Being and One per­son explic­it­ly declar­ing that nobody can see Him and live.

Sec­ond­ly, if indeed it was God that Abra­ham saw and his life was pre­served despite Exo­dus 33:20 because — as Nabeel and co. rea­soned — it was Jesus, but if it had been the Father then he would have been utter­ly destroyed, then the nec­es­sary impli­ca­tion of that claim is that the Father and Jesus are not co-equal as the Trini­tar­i­ans claim. If they were, in fact, equal in pow­er and glo­ry, then see­ing both would result in the same cat­a­stroph­ic end, i.e., death. But appar­ent­ly, the Father has far greater glo­ry than the Son, that see­ing Him and not the Son would have the view­er for­feit his life.

In con­clu­sion, in an attempt to rec­on­cile Gen­e­sis 18 with Exo­dus 33:20, this Nabeel Qureshi debate inad­ver­tent­ly refutes the Trin­i­ty as he glo­ri­fies the Father and makes the Son inferior.

Still, read­ers should recall that it was orig­i­nal­ly a Mus­lim apol­o­gist who exposed incon­sis­ten­cies in Ergun Caner’s Islam­ic back­ground sto­ry. While the incon­sis­ten­cies in the dream sto­ries cit­ed above are slight, they are rel­e­vant giv­en the vast evan­gel­i­cal fas­ci­na­tion with sto­ries of Mus­lim dreams and visions of Jesus. Fur­ther­more, Qureshi’s very Islam­ic cre­den­tials are in ques­tion. Qureshi is a for­mer Ahma­di. Accord­ing to Snow, the Ahma­di sect is not con­sid­ered Mus­lim by Mus­lims in the same way Mor­mons are not con­sid­ered Christians.

In oth­er words, Nabeel Qureshi’s so-called Mus­lim upbring­ing” was a con­ve­nient ham­mer” against the Mus­lims which the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies utilised to the fullest.

How Influ­en­tial Was Nabeel Qureshi, Really ?

No son did Allah beget, nor is there any god along with Him : (if there were many gods), behold, each god would have tak­en away what he had cre­at­ed, and some would have lord­ed it over oth­ers ! Glo­ry to Allah ! (He is free) from the (sort of) things they attribute to Him ! (Qur’an, 23:91)

At the onset of his reimag­ing as a Chris­t­ian apol­o­gist in 2014, Nabeel wrote the fol­low­ing tweet :

Nabeel Qureshi left Islam
Screen­shot tak­en from archive​.org. The orig­i­nal tweet has been delet­ed as at Decem­ber 2022

As any Mus­lim who sin­cere­ly under­stands and believes in the mes­sage of Islam would know, that state­ment on why Nabeel Qureshi left Islam is total­ly untrue and with­out any real basis what­so­ev­er. As it is, Islam does not sole­ly hinge on the life of the Prophet Muham­mad(P) to uphold the divine truth of the Qur’an as the direct Rev­e­la­tion from God Almighty.

Hence, when the news of Nabeel’s death became known, the Mus­lim ini­tial reac­tion was — on the whole — mut­ed and dig­ni­fied on the social media and blogs. It was only the Chris­t­ian news media and Chris­t­ian blogs that went with inflam­ma­to­ry head­lines in order to drum up pub­lic sen­ti­ment about Nabeel’s death and sen­sa­tion­alise it for their tar­get audience.

This brings us to the next ques­tion : how far did Nabeel’s suc­cess­es real­ly go ?

We find it odd that at the time of writ­ing this arti­cle, no Chris­t­ian had open­ly ques­tioned the so-called achieve­ments” of Nabeel Qureshi in his attempts to bring Mus­lims to the wor­ship of Christ ; more so its effec­tive­ness. Where are those so-called hun­dreds of Mus­lims” that were inspired by Nabeel’s mes­sage of him leav­ing Islam and con­vert­ed ? What are their names and which part of Nabeel’s mes­sage reached them to the point that they feel com­pelled to con­vert to Christianity ?

There has been no such data pro­duced and we believe that there will be no such data any time soon, sim­ply because it does not exist. Nabeel Qureshi’s tired polemics on the issue of Allah (God), the per­son­al­i­ty of the Prophet Muham­mad(P), the con­cept of jihad and any­thing else apart from this will not change the minds of Mus­lims to con­sid­er Chris­tian­i­ty as a valid option.

The Chris­t­ian schol­ar and thinker Hans Kung said as fol­lows regard­ing Muhammad : 

What­ev­er we Chris­tians do with this fact, we must affirm that he act­ed as a prophet and that he was a prophet. I do not see how we can avoid the con­clu­sion that on their way of sal­va­tion, Mus­lims fol­low a prophet who is deci­sive for them.

Cer­tain­ly, the cre­den­tials of Hans Kung is much more impec­ca­ble than the high­ly polem­i­cal and dis­put­ed author­i­ty that Nabeel Qureshi represents !

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, how­ev­er, there were no polem­i­cal inquiry from Nabeel Qureshi on Islam that had not already been analysed, debat­ed, answered and refut­ed already by the many Mus­lim apol­o­gists and the online Islam­ic da’wah move­ment in gen­er­al. Indeed, the gen­er­al opin­ion among Mus­lims regard­ing the Prophet(P) is one of being mer­ci­ful, the total oppo­site of what Nabeel Qureshi represents :

When Muham­mad came into a posi­tion of polit­i­cal pow­er after decades of per­se­cu­tion, his first act was to for­give those who had per­se­cut­ed him. His heart of mer­cy is also illus­trat­ed by this hadith : A dying child was once brought to the Prophet Muham­mad (peace be upon him). When, on see­ing the child’s last breaths, the Prophet began to shed tears, one of his com­pan­ions asked why he was cry­ing. He replied : It is a mer­cy that God has put in the hearts of God’s ser­vants, and God is mer­ci­ful only to those of God’s ser­vants who are mer­ci­ful to oth­ers’”. I hope that, in the midst of pub­lic debate between Mus­lims and non-Mus­lims, we all can be mer­ci­ful to one another.

Out­side of the World Wide Web, Nabeel Qureshi was (and still is) an unknown enti­ty to the Mus­lim world and nev­er had any real influ­en­tial pres­ence. Eli­jah Reynolds in an online piece co-writ­ten with a Chris­t­ian grad­u­ate stu­dent crit­i­cized Nabeel Qureshi by stating :

For Qureshi, the Qur’an is a bloody and vio­lent text — a fact which learned inter­preters of Islam today ignore, he implies, but some­how the unlearned Jihadists get right. Qureshi claims that as a young man, he was shield­ed from read­ing Qur’an and hadith on his own, and instead was taught a mes­sage of Islam­ic peace and love. This read­ing was sub­se­quent­ly shat­tered by his own inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion of the texts, bypass­ing cen­turies of the tra­di­tion and schol­ar­ly interpretations.

Qureshi claims to speak more author­i­ta­tive­ly on Islam than the imams whose inter­pre­ta­tion he explic­it­ly ignores. He remem­bers as a child, if I want­ed to know about the tra­di­tions of Muham­mad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tra­di­tion of Islam.” It was not until he bypassed cen­turies of tra­di­tion and their imams’ inter­pre­ta­tions” that he dis­cov­ered real Islam — appar­ent­ly on the inter­net, where young poten­tial ISIS recruits eas­i­ly find real Islam too.

Qureshi’s rejec­tion of the learned schol­ars of his com­mu­ni­ty in favor of the internet.…is com­pa­ra­ble to an athe­ist learn­ing every­thing she knows about Chris­tian­i­ty from Richard Dawkins.

The vast and copi­ous mate­r­i­al that he had pro­duced from the time of his con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty until a week before his death are most­ly rehash­es of Ori­en­tal­ists and Chris­t­ian polemi­cists in the likes of Alphonse Min­gana, Samuel Zwe­mer, Robert Spencer, David Wood and many oth­ers. There was noth­ing new or any­thing worth men­tion­ing that he had intro­duced in his debates with the Mus­lims, apart from him con­sis­tent­ly attempt­ing to cre­ate a dichoto­my” between Allah and Jesus” (as made appar­ent in his book titles and online speeches).

Even that hon­our” has been tak­en away by the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies Robert Morey and Sam Shamoun, the for­mer being known for his Allah is a moon-god” the­o­ry and the lat­ter for his vir­u­lent, Islam­o­pho­bic straw­man against the con­cep­tion of God in Islam. The image that was care­ful­ly planned and craft­ed of him hav­ing ques­tioned his Mus­lim faith” and being called off the minaret”. It is inter­est­ing to note that he made no men­tion that his fam­i­ly were from the Ahmadiyya, and por­trayed his fam­i­ly back­ground as being main­stream Islam. how­ev­er, has made it a promi­nent fea­ture among a gullible West­ern audi­ence primed with Islam­o­pho­bia and always will­ing to parade some­one from the ene­my” as one of their own.

In spite of the mea­gre achieve­ments of Nabeel Qureshi in the Mus­lim world, this had not stopped the West­ern Chris­t­ian pub­lic – delud­ed by the myth­i­cal influ­ence of their fall­en hero — to donate mon­ey to his cause, even in death. Nabeel’s GoFundMe page reached up to USD700,000.00 after the news of his death was known to the pub­lic sphere, and the month­ly amount he receives from Patre­on had not wavered either. His wid­ow, Michelle Qureshi, ful­ly exploit­ed the death of her late hus­band by announc­ing pub­licly that she will con­tin­ue his min­istry”. It seems obvi­ous to us that those man­ag­ing the crowd­fund­ing pages (most espe­cial­ly his wid­ow!) of their fall­en com­rade are mak­ing a huge prof­it out of this sen­sa­tion­al­ism for per­son­al gain.

Why God Did Not Heal Nabeel Qureshi ?

This was the ques­tion posed by the Chris­t­ian polemi­cists, guised in the form of an op-ed by Frank Turek and anoth­er in a blog post. This must have been the ques­tion that had been play­ing in their minds when Nabeel Qureshi first announced that he had Stage IV can­cer on August 312016.

We find the state­ment made by Frank Turek in ref­er­ence to Mus­lims extreme­ly polem­i­cal and total­ly below the belt, as he wrote that :

Is it because the Mus­lim God is the true God, and He pun­ished Nabeel for leav­ing Him ? No, there’s excel­lent evi­dence for the Chris­t­ian view of God (see Nabeel’s book No God but One). More­over, Mus­lims who sug­gest this should be asked, Why did your God wait until Nabeel had writ­ten three best-sell­ing books, made hun­dreds of hours of videos, and helped bring hun­dreds of Mus­lims to Christ ? Is his tim­ing off?” Not only that, Nabeel’s work will con­tin­ue to bring peo­ple to Christ, prob­a­bly in an accel­er­at­ed man­ner after his passing.

We would like to address sev­er­al things for this mis­sion­ary to digest.

First of all, Mr Turek, there has nev­er been a Mus­lim God” or a Chris­t­ian God” or any oth­er god that the Mus­lims wor­ship which is dis­tinct from the God of Abra­ham, Moses and Jesus, peace be upon them all. It is very insult­ing to even sug­gest that the God of Islam is dis­tinct from the God of Chris­tian­i­ty because, in real­i­ty, they are not dis­tinct — Mus­lims and Chris­tians do wor­ship the same God.

Regard­ing the sec­ond part of Turek’s rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, one may not have to look far to see why this may be the case. It has been report­ed by sev­er­al Chris­t­ian news por­tals that Nabeel him­self prayed for God to kill him after con­vert­ing to Christianity”.

This may or may not have been true as we would like to keep an open mind on this, but we leave the inter­est­ed read­er to fol­low the trail and check out the evi­dence for them­selves as to whether God may have indeed killed” Nabeel Qureshi because He did answer what Nabeel had prayed for…and it has noth­ing to do with the Muslims.

Con­clu­sions

Based on what we have dis­cussed on Nabeel Qureshi, the his­to­ry behind it and his polem­i­cal exploits which includes his Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus book, we can thus infer from these cir­cum­stances and form our own con­clu­sions about him, from a Mus­lim per­spec­tive, which are as follows :

Nabeel Qureshi Nev­er Was A Muslim

Nabeel Qureshi was a Qadi­ani, or oth­er­wise known as the Ahmadiyya, a deviant sect that only began in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. The Qadi­a­n­is have been con­sis­tent­ly denounced by main­stream Islam as het­ero­dox for their belief that Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad was a Prophet and the promised Messiah.

Hence, it is cor­rect to say that Nabeel Qureshi was nev­er a Mus­lim, to begin with. This is akin to stat­ing that a for­mer Mor­mon who revert­ed to Islam was a Chris­t­ian”, even though Mor­monism is reject­ed by main­stream Chris­tian­i­ty because Mor­mons believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

The par­al­lels between Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad and Joseph Smith are so sim­i­lar to one anoth­er that we won­der how was it pos­si­ble for West­ern Chris­tians to fall for this con.

Nabeel Qureshi’s For­mer Mus­lim” Title

It is very inter­est­ing to note that despite his claims of Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus (as is the title of his book), Nabeel Qureshi had nev­er once addressed the issue of Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad while talk­ing about his past — whether in his books ; most espe­cial­ly his pop­u­lar Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus book, his online cours­es or in his speech­es — because he knew very well that to do so will lend lit­tle cre­dence to his claims of being a for­mer Mus­lim” and total­ly remove any ves­tige of his cred­i­bil­i­ty. He unabashed­ly cap­i­talised on that label to the point of mak­ing a huge for­tune from his var­i­ous evan­gel­i­cal ven­tures, with the full back­ing of the Chris­t­ian establishment.

He did attempt to wig­gle his way out of this issue by insist­ing that the Qadi­a­n­is are Mus­lims while gloss­ing over the sta­tus of Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad in Qadi­ani theology.

It is worth men­tion­ing that this was the same tac­tic employed by a Chris­t­ian polemi­cist and Islam­o­phobe extra­or­di­naire by the name of Ergun Caner — a self-pro­fessed for­mer devout ex-Mus­lim” who nev­er did prac­tice any of the basic tenets of Islam dur­ing his ear­ly life and was in fact weaned into Chris­tian­i­ty even before the age of puberty.

Ergun Caner exploit­ed his shenani­gans to the hilt as a mon­ey-mak­ing enter­prise until he was exposed as a fraud by Moham­mad Khan, a British Mus­lim, for pass­ing off gib­ber­ish as Ara­bic phras­es and Qur’an­ic verses.

Manip­u­lat­ed By Michelle Qureshi and Others

In turn, the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies them­selves have used Nabeel Qureshi as a ham­mer against the Mus­lims — and as their ide­o­log­i­cal weapon — to pro­mote an agen­da of extin­guish­ing IslamWe are remind­ed of the fol­low­ing verse : They want to extin­guish the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah will per­fect His light, although the dis­be­liev­ers dis­like it.” (Qur’an 61:8), which still remains the fastest-grow­ing reli­gion in the world.

Nabeel Qureshi Google Trends
Google Trends search for Nabeel Qureshi” around the time of his death

Sad­ly, even his wid­ow, Michelle Qureshi – instead of tak­ing the time off to mourn for the loss of her late hus­band — has decid­ed to jump on the polem­i­cal band­wag­on by tak­ing up the man­tle of bash­ing Islam.

Nabeel Qureshi Widow
Screen cap­ture of Nabeel Qureshi’s wid­ow tak­ing advan­tage of her hus­band’s death.

His Final Fate

While we reserve our judge­ment on the final fate of Nabeel Qureshi, who had clear­ly erred in the sight of Islam (as we do believe mat­ters of his affairs have now come between him and God Almighty), we do find that the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ary attempts at the hero-wor­ship of Nabeel Qureshi in death and (mis)using it — to the point of mak­ing thin­ly-veiled attacks on Islam and the Mus­lims — shame­ful and dis­gust­ing, to say the least.

In the end, Mus­lims are remind­ed of the words of God Almighty in the Final Tes­ta­ment, the Qur’an, which says :

And they say, None will enter Par­adise except one who is a Jew or a Chris­t­ian.” That is [mere­ly] their wish­ful think­ing, Say, Pro­duce your proof, if you should be truth­ful.” (Qur’an 2:111)

And ver­i­ly, only God knows best ! Nabeel Qureshi (1983–2017): The Manufactured Martyr of Christian Apologetics 1

Appen­dix : You Can­not See God And Live

In an event enti­tled What is God Real­ly Like : Tawhid or Trin­i­ty ? that the late Nabeel Qureshi debate Dr Shabir Ally, a per­son asked in the Q&A Ses­sion how he would rec­on­cile the appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion between say­ing that Abra­ham actu­al­ly laid eyes on God and yet Exo­dus 33:20 has God telling Moses that see­ing His face is an impos­si­bil­i­ty as see­ing Him would cause the human being to die.

In answer­ing this ques­tion, Nabeel Qureshi debate that it was Jesus that Abra­ham saw and not the Father. It is the Father, accord­ing to Nabeel Qureshi and many oth­er Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists, that human being can­not lay eyes on and live, but if it was the Son, that is, Jesus then it would be total­ly all right for the human eyes to see.

First­ly, the verse in Exo­dus 33:20 does not cat­e­gorise God into the Father and the Son and there­by argue, as Nabeel Qureshi did, that only the Son can be seen but not the Father. The plain text sim­ply shows God as One Being and One per­son explic­it­ly declar­ing that nobody can see Him and live.

Sec­ond­ly, if indeed it was God that Abra­ham saw and his life was pre­served despite Exo­dus 33:20 because — as Nabeel and co. rea­soned — it was Jesus, but if it had been the Father then he would have been utter­ly destroyed, then the nec­es­sary impli­ca­tion of that claim is that the Father and Jesus are not co-equal as the Trini­tar­i­ans claim. If they were, in fact, equal in pow­er and glo­ry, then see­ing both would result in the same cat­a­stroph­ic end, i.e., death. But appar­ent­ly, the Father has far greater glo­ry than the Son, that see­ing Him and not the Son would have the view­er for­feit his life.

In con­clu­sion, in an attempt to rec­on­cile Gen­e­sis 18 with Exo­dus 33:20, this Nabeel Qureshi debate inad­ver­tent­ly refutes the Trin­i­ty as he glo­ri­fies the Father and makes the Son inferior.

Nabeel Qureshi died at the age of 34 years old from a rare and dead­ly form of stom­ach can­cer” on 16th Sep­tem­ber 2017. The online com­mu­ni­ties of Mus­lims and Chris­tians, espe­cial­ly those who were involved in apolo­get­ics on the World Wide Web, came to receive the news of Nabeel Qureshis death with mixed reac­tions, as his funer­al was streamed live on YouTube. 

It is, after all, well-known to Mus­lims involved in apolo­get­ics that, hav­ing brand­ed him­self as an ex-Mus­lim” with a strong appeal to fam­i­ly emo­tion­al­ism, Nabeel had gone on to become the author of three polem­i­cal books diss­ing Islam and its tenets, devel­oped an online mon­ey-mak­ing polem­i­cal video course aimed at an evan­gel­i­cal tar­get audi­ence, and allied him­self with Ravi Zacharias Inter­na­tion­al Min­istries (RZIM) to go on var­i­ous road­shows and sem­i­nars with the sole inten­tion of vil­i­fy­ing Islam openly.

This arti­cle aims to pro­vide con­text to Nabeel Qureshi’s polem­i­cal life, his for­ays into Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ary attacks against Islam and his hid­den motives in doing so, insha’Allah.

Who Was Nabeel Qureshi ?

To begin, we must, of course, ask the obvi­ous ques­tion : who is Nabeel Qureshi and how was he able to sell him­self” as an ex-Mus­lim with the cre­den­tials to talk about Islam ?

The sto­ry, accord­ing to his first polem­i­cal and infa­mous book Seek­ing Allah, Find­ing Jesus : A For­mer Mus­lim Shares the Evi­dence That Led Him from Islam to Chris­tian­i­ty” (Zon­der­van, 2014), tells us that he was room­mates in col­lege with infa­mous YouTu­ber and anti-Islam big­ot, David Wood. After hav­ing dis­cus­sions about reli­gion with Wood, Nabeel Qureshi appar­ent­ly decid­ed to con­vert” to Chris­tian­i­ty after meet­ing Jesus[!] in con­tra­dic­to­ry dream sequences.

From this point on, he was involved in the activ­i­ties of Acts 17 Apolo­get­ics, a mil­i­tant mis­sion­ary group start­ed by Wood, which great­est achieve­ment was to gate-crash” on an Arab-Mus­lim fes­ti­val that is held annu­al­ly in Dear­born, Michigan.

Not long after, he was tak­en notice of by Ravi Zacharias from the Ravi Zacharias Inter­na­tion­al Min­istry (RZIM). Even­tu­al­ly, it was Ravi Zacharias him­self who took him in as his pro­tégé and under the RZIM ban­ner, sup­port­ed Nabeel Qureshi’s evan­ge­lis­tic and mis­sion­ary out­reach to the Muslims.

Through the books and video cours­es that Nabeel Qureshi pro­duced on Islam while being affil­i­at­ed with RZIM, his image was slow­ly build up by RZIM through their online and offline media pro­mo­tions. This reached the point that many Chris­tians regard Nabeel Qureshi as an author­i­ty” on Islam and took his words on any­thing about Islam as indisputable.

Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus ?

The con­sis­tent nar­ra­tive that was repeat­ed inces­sant­ly by Nabeel Qureshi was that he was raised in a devout Mus­lim fam­i­ly”. It should be men­tioned right from the onset how­ev­er that Nabeel Qureshi was was a Qadi­ani. He con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty, under the influ­ence of David Wood, from a het­ero­dox sect which calls itself the Ahmadiyya, a move­ment that has nev­er been recog­nised by main­stream Islam as Mus­lims”.

The Ahmadiyya believe that their founder, Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad, was a prophet of God and the promised Mes­si­ah in the like­ness of Jesus(P). These two fun­da­men­tal claims run con­trary to main­stream ortho­dox Islam, which clear­ly says that there can be no Prophet of God after the pass­ing of Muham­mad(P) (Qur’an, 33:40) and that the Mes­si­ah was no oth­er than Christ Jesus(P), the son of Mary (Qur’an, 3:45 ; cf. 4:171).

In 1974, the Nation­al Assem­bly of Pak­istan con­vened in a spe­cial assem­bly called the Nation­al Assem­bly of Pak­istan Pro­ceed­ings on Qadi­ani Issue, the out­come of which had result­ed in the pas­sage of an amend­ment to the then fresh­ly mint­ed con­sti­tu­tion of Pak­istan and declared the Qadi­a­n­is to be non-Muslims.

Qadiani Proceedings 1974 In Pakistan
Qadiani Law 1974 In Pakistan

Yet the Chris­t­ian media, in the wake of Nabeel’s death, con­ve­nient­ly gloss over this small, incon­ve­nient fact and con­sis­tent­ly potrayed Nabeel Qureshi in their rabid, polem­i­cal fren­zy as an ex-Mus­lim” or as a for­mer Muslim”.

It is inter­est­ing to note that some Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists did ques­tion Nabeel Qureshi’s Islam­ic upbring­ing”. One of them was Seth Dunn, in which he says (while com­ment­ing on Nabeel’s con­tra­dic­to­ry sto­ry on hav­ing been con­vert­ed through a dream”):

Still, read­ers should recall that it was orig­i­nal­ly a Mus­lim apol­o­gist who exposed incon­sis­ten­cies in Ergun Caner’s Islam­ic back­ground sto­ry. While the incon­sis­ten­cies in the dream sto­ries cit­ed above are slight, they are rel­e­vant giv­en the vast evan­gel­i­cal fas­ci­na­tion with sto­ries of Mus­lim dreams and visions of Jesus. Fur­ther­more, Qureshi’s very Islam­ic cre­den­tials are in ques­tion. Qureshi is a for­mer Ahma­di. Accord­ing to Snow, the Ahma­di sect is not con­sid­ered Mus­lim by Mus­lims in the same way Mor­mons are not con­sid­ered Christians.

In oth­er words, Nabeel Qureshi’s so-called Mus­lim upbring­ing” was a con­ve­nient ham­mer” against the Mus­lims which the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies utilised to the fullest.

How Influ­en­tial Was Nabeel Qureshi, Really ?

No son did Allah beget, nor is there any god along with Him : (if there were many gods), behold, each god would have tak­en away what he had cre­at­ed, and some would have lord­ed it over oth­ers ! Glo­ry to Allah ! (He is free) from the (sort of) things they attribute to Him ! (Qur’an, 23:91)

At the onset of his reimag­ing as a Chris­t­ian apol­o­gist in 2014, Nabeel wrote the fol­low­ing tweet :

Nabeel Qureshi left Islam
Screen­shot tak­en from archive​.org. The orig­i­nal tweet has been delet­ed as at Decem­ber 2022

As any Mus­lim who sin­cere­ly under­stands and believes in the mes­sage of Islam would know, that state­ment on why Nabeel Qureshi left Islam is total­ly untrue and with­out any real basis what­so­ev­er. As it is, Islam does not sole­ly hinge on the life of the Prophet Muham­mad(P) to uphold the divine truth of the Qur’an as the direct Rev­e­la­tion from God Almighty.

Hence, when the news of Nabeel’s death became known, the Mus­lim ini­tial reac­tion was — on the whole — mut­ed and dig­ni­fied on the social media and blogs. It was only the Chris­t­ian news media and Chris­t­ian blogs that went with inflam­ma­to­ry head­lines in order to drum up pub­lic sen­ti­ment about Nabeel’s death and sen­sa­tion­alise it for their tar­get audience.

This brings us to the next ques­tion : how far did Nabeel’s suc­cess­es real­ly go ?

We find it odd that at the time of writ­ing this arti­cle, no Chris­t­ian had open­ly ques­tioned the so-called achieve­ments” of Nabeel Qureshi in his attempts to bring Mus­lims to the wor­ship of Christ ; more so its effec­tive­ness. Where are those so-called hun­dreds of Mus­lims” that were inspired by Nabeel’s mes­sage of him leav­ing Islam and con­vert­ed ? What are their names and which part of Nabeel’s mes­sage reached them to the point that they feel com­pelled to con­vert to Christianity ?

There has been no such data pro­duced and we believe that there will be no such data any time soon, sim­ply because it does not exist. Nabeel Qureshi’s tired polemics on the issue of Allah (God), the per­son­al­i­ty of the Prophet Muham­mad(P), the con­cept of jihad and any­thing else apart from this will not change the minds of Mus­lims to con­sid­er Chris­tian­i­ty as a valid option.

The Chris­t­ian schol­ar and thinker Hans Kung said as fol­lows regard­ing Muhammad : 

What­ev­er we Chris­tians do with this fact, we must affirm that he act­ed as a prophet and that he was a prophet. I do not see how we can avoid the con­clu­sion that on their way of sal­va­tion, Mus­lims fol­low a prophet who is deci­sive for them.

Cer­tain­ly, the cre­den­tials of Hans Kung is much more impec­ca­ble than the high­ly polem­i­cal and dis­put­ed author­i­ty that Nabeel Qureshi represents !

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, how­ev­er, there were no polem­i­cal inquiry from Nabeel Qureshi on Islam that had not already been analysed, debat­ed, answered and refut­ed already by the many Mus­lim apol­o­gists and the online Islam­ic da’wah move­ment in gen­er­al. Indeed, the gen­er­al opin­ion among Mus­lims regard­ing the Prophet(P) is one of being mer­ci­ful, the total oppo­site of what Nabeel Qureshi represents :

When Muham­mad came into a posi­tion of polit­i­cal pow­er after decades of per­se­cu­tion, his first act was to for­give those who had per­se­cut­ed him. His heart of mer­cy is also illus­trat­ed by this hadith : A dying child was once brought to the Prophet Muham­mad (peace be upon him). When, on see­ing the child’s last breaths, the Prophet began to shed tears, one of his com­pan­ions asked why he was cry­ing. He replied : It is a mer­cy that God has put in the hearts of God’s ser­vants, and God is mer­ci­ful only to those of God’s ser­vants who are mer­ci­ful to oth­ers’”. I hope that, in the midst of pub­lic debate between Mus­lims and non-Mus­lims, we all can be mer­ci­ful to one another.

Out­side of the World Wide Web, Nabeel Qureshi was (and still is) an unknown enti­ty to the Mus­lim world and nev­er had any real influ­en­tial pres­ence. Eli­jah Reynolds in an online piece co-writ­ten with a Chris­t­ian grad­u­ate stu­dent crit­i­cized Nabeel Qureshi by stating :

For Qureshi, the Qur’an is a bloody and vio­lent text — a fact which learned inter­preters of Islam today ignore, he implies, but some­how the unlearned Jihadists get right. Qureshi claims that as a young man, he was shield­ed from read­ing Qur’an and hadith on his own, and instead was taught a mes­sage of Islam­ic peace and love. This read­ing was sub­se­quent­ly shat­tered by his own inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion of the texts, bypass­ing cen­turies of the tra­di­tion and schol­ar­ly interpretations.

Qureshi claims to speak more author­i­ta­tive­ly on Islam than the imams whose inter­pre­ta­tion he explic­it­ly ignores. He remem­bers as a child, if I want­ed to know about the tra­di­tions of Muham­mad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tra­di­tion of Islam.” It was not until he bypassed cen­turies of tra­di­tion and their imams’ inter­pre­ta­tions” that he dis­cov­ered real Islam — appar­ent­ly on the inter­net, where young poten­tial ISIS recruits eas­i­ly find real Islam too.

Qureshi’s rejec­tion of the learned schol­ars of his com­mu­ni­ty in favor of the internet.…is com­pa­ra­ble to an athe­ist learn­ing every­thing she knows about Chris­tian­i­ty from Richard Dawkins.

The vast and copi­ous mate­r­i­al that he had pro­duced from the time of his con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty until a week before his death are most­ly rehash­es of Ori­en­tal­ists and Chris­t­ian polemi­cists in the likes of Alphonse Min­gana, Samuel Zwe­mer, Robert Spencer, David Wood and many oth­ers. There was noth­ing new or any­thing worth men­tion­ing that he had intro­duced in his debates with the Mus­lims, apart from him con­sis­tent­ly attempt­ing to cre­ate a dichoto­my” between Allah and Jesus” (as made appar­ent in his book titles and online speeches).

Even that hon­our” has been tak­en away by the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies Robert Morey and Sam Shamoun, the for­mer being known for his Allah is a moon-god” the­o­ry and the lat­ter for his vir­u­lent, Islam­o­pho­bic straw­man against the con­cep­tion of God in Islam. The image that was care­ful­ly planned and craft­ed of him hav­ing ques­tioned his Mus­lim faith” and being called off the minaret”. It is inter­est­ing to note that he made no men­tion that his fam­i­ly were from the Ahmadiyya, and por­trayed his fam­i­ly back­ground as being main­stream Islam. how­ev­er, has made it a promi­nent fea­ture among a gullible West­ern audi­ence primed with Islam­o­pho­bia and always will­ing to parade some­one from the ene­my” as one of their own.

In spite of the mea­gre achieve­ments of Nabeel Qureshi in the Mus­lim world, this had not stopped the West­ern Chris­t­ian pub­lic – delud­ed by the myth­i­cal influ­ence of their fall­en hero — to donate mon­ey to his cause, even in death. Nabeel’s GoFundMe page reached up to USD700,000.00 after the news of his death was known to the pub­lic sphere, and the month­ly amount he receives from Patre­on had not wavered either. His wid­ow, Michelle Qureshi, ful­ly exploit­ed the death of her late hus­band by announc­ing pub­licly that she will con­tin­ue his min­istry”. It seems obvi­ous to us that those man­ag­ing the crowd­fund­ing pages (most espe­cial­ly his wid­ow!) of their fall­en com­rade are mak­ing a huge prof­it out of this sen­sa­tion­al­ism for per­son­al gain.

Why God Did Not Heal Nabeel Qureshi ?

This was the ques­tion posed by the Chris­t­ian polemi­cists, guised in the form of an op-ed by Frank Turek and anoth­er in a blog post. This must have been the ques­tion that had been play­ing in their minds when Nabeel Qureshi first announced that he had Stage IV can­cer on August 312016.

We find the state­ment made by Frank Turek in ref­er­ence to Mus­lims extreme­ly polem­i­cal and total­ly below the belt, as he wrote that :

Is it because the Mus­lim God is the true God, and He pun­ished Nabeel for leav­ing Him ? No, there’s excel­lent evi­dence for the Chris­t­ian view of God (see Nabeel’s book No God but One). More­over, Mus­lims who sug­gest this should be asked, Why did your God wait until Nabeel had writ­ten three best-sell­ing books, made hun­dreds of hours of videos, and helped bring hun­dreds of Mus­lims to Christ ? Is his tim­ing off?” Not only that, Nabeel’s work will con­tin­ue to bring peo­ple to Christ, prob­a­bly in an accel­er­at­ed man­ner after his passing.

We would like to address sev­er­al things for this mis­sion­ary to digest.

First of all, Mr Turek, there has nev­er been a Mus­lim God” or a Chris­t­ian God” or any oth­er god that the Mus­lims wor­ship which is dis­tinct from the God of Abra­ham, Moses and Jesus, peace be upon them all. It is very insult­ing to even sug­gest that the God of Islam is dis­tinct from the God of Chris­tian­i­ty because, in real­i­ty, they are not dis­tinct — Mus­lims and Chris­tians do wor­ship the same God.

Regard­ing the sec­ond part of Turek’s rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, one may not have to look far to see why this may be the case. It has been report­ed by sev­er­al Chris­t­ian news por­tals that Nabeel him­self prayed for God to kill him after con­vert­ing to Christianity”.

This may or may not have been true as we would like to keep an open mind on this, but we leave the inter­est­ed read­er to fol­low the trail and check out the evi­dence for them­selves as to whether God may have indeed killed” Nabeel Qureshi because He did answer what Nabeel had prayed for…and it has noth­ing to do with the Muslims.

Con­clu­sions

Based on what we have dis­cussed on Nabeel Qureshi, the his­to­ry behind it and his polem­i­cal exploits which includes his Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus book, we can thus infer from these cir­cum­stances and form our own con­clu­sions about him, from a Mus­lim per­spec­tive, which are as follows :

Nabeel Qureshi Nev­er Was A Muslim

Nabeel Qureshi was a Qadi­ani, or oth­er­wise known as the Ahmadiyya, a deviant sect that only began in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. The Qadi­a­n­is have been con­sis­tent­ly denounced by main­stream Islam as het­ero­dox for their belief that Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad was a Prophet and the promised Messiah.

Hence, it is cor­rect to say that Nabeel Qureshi was nev­er a Mus­lim, to begin with. This is akin to stat­ing that a for­mer Mor­mon who revert­ed to Islam was a Chris­t­ian”, even though Mor­monism is reject­ed by main­stream Chris­tian­i­ty because Mor­mons believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

The par­al­lels between Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad and Joseph Smith are so sim­i­lar to one anoth­er that we won­der how was it pos­si­ble for West­ern Chris­tians to fall for this con.

Nabeel Qureshi’s For­mer Mus­lim” Title

It is very inter­est­ing to note that despite his claims of Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus (as is the title of his book), Nabeel Qureshi had nev­er once addressed the issue of Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad while talk­ing about his past — whether in his books ; most espe­cial­ly his pop­u­lar Seek­ing Allah Find­ing Jesus book, his online cours­es or in his speech­es — because he knew very well that to do so will lend lit­tle cre­dence to his claims of being a for­mer Mus­lim” and total­ly remove any ves­tige of his cred­i­bil­i­ty. He unabashed­ly cap­i­talised on that label to the point of mak­ing a huge for­tune from his var­i­ous evan­gel­i­cal ven­tures, with the full back­ing of the Chris­t­ian establishment.

He did attempt to wig­gle his way out of this issue by insist­ing that the Qadi­a­n­is are Mus­lims while gloss­ing over the sta­tus of Mirza Ghu­lam Ahmad in Qadi­ani theology.

It is worth men­tion­ing that this was the same tac­tic employed by a Chris­t­ian polemi­cist and Islam­o­phobe extra­or­di­naire by the name of Ergun Caner — a self-pro­fessed for­mer devout ex-Mus­lim” who nev­er did prac­tice any of the basic tenets of Islam dur­ing his ear­ly life and was in fact weaned into Chris­tian­i­ty even before the age of puberty.

Ergun Caner exploit­ed his shenani­gans to the hilt as a mon­ey-mak­ing enter­prise until he was exposed as a fraud by Moham­mad Khan, a British Mus­lim, for pass­ing off gib­ber­ish as Ara­bic phras­es and Qur’an­ic verses.

Manip­u­lat­ed By Michelle Qureshi and Others

In turn, the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies them­selves have used Nabeel Qureshi as a ham­mer against the Mus­lims — and as their ide­o­log­i­cal weapon — to pro­mote an agen­da of extin­guish­ing IslamWe are remind­ed of the fol­low­ing verse : They want to extin­guish the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah will per­fect His light, although the dis­be­liev­ers dis­like it.” (Qur’an 61:8), which still remains the fastest-grow­ing reli­gion in the world.

Nabeel Qureshi Google Trends
Google Trends search for Nabeel Qureshi” around the time of his death

Sad­ly, even his wid­ow, Michelle Qureshi – instead of tak­ing the time off to mourn for the loss of her late hus­band — has decid­ed to jump on the polem­i­cal band­wag­on by tak­ing up the man­tle of bash­ing Islam.

Nabeel Qureshi Widow
Screen cap­ture of Nabeel Qureshi’s wid­ow tak­ing advan­tage of her hus­band’s death.

His Final Fate

While we reserve our judge­ment on the final fate of Nabeel Qureshi, who had clear­ly erred in the sight of Islam (as we do believe mat­ters of his affairs have now come between him and God Almighty), we do find that the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ary attempts at the hero-wor­ship of Nabeel Qureshi in death and (mis)using it — to the point of mak­ing thin­ly-veiled attacks on Islam and the Mus­lims — shame­ful and dis­gust­ing, to say the least.

In the end, Mus­lims are remind­ed of the words of God Almighty in the Final Tes­ta­ment, the Qur’an, which says :

And they say, None will enter Par­adise except one who is a Jew or a Chris­t­ian.” That is [mere­ly] their wish­ful think­ing, Say, Pro­duce your proof, if you should be truth­ful.” (Qur’an 2:111)

And ver­i­ly, only God knows best ! Nabeel Qureshi (1983–2017): The Manufactured Martyr of Christian Apologetics 1

Appen­dix : You Can­not See God And Live

In an event enti­tled What is God Real­ly Like : Tawhid or Trin­i­ty ? that the late Nabeel Qureshi debate Dr Shabir Ally, a per­son asked in the Q&A Ses­sion how he would rec­on­cile the appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion between say­ing that Abra­ham actu­al­ly laid eyes on God and yet Exo­dus 33:20 has God telling Moses that see­ing His face is an impos­si­bil­i­ty as see­ing Him would cause the human being to die.

In answer­ing this ques­tion, Nabeel Qureshi debate that it was Jesus that Abra­ham saw and not the Father. It is the Father, accord­ing to Nabeel Qureshi and many oth­er Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists, that human being can­not lay eyes on and live, but if it was the Son, that is, Jesus then it would be total­ly all right for the human eyes to see.

First­ly, the verse in Exo­dus 33:20 does not cat­e­gorise God into the Father and the Son and there­by argue, as Nabeel Qureshi did, that only the Son can be seen but not the Father. The plain text sim­ply shows God as One Being and One per­son explic­it­ly declar­ing that nobody can see Him and live.

Sec­ond­ly, if indeed it was God that Abra­ham saw and his life was pre­served despite Exo­dus 33:20 because — as Nabeel and co. rea­soned — it was Jesus, but if it had been the Father then he would have been utter­ly destroyed, then the nec­es­sary impli­ca­tion of that claim is that the Father and Jesus are not co-equal as the Trini­tar­i­ans claim. If they were, in fact, equal in pow­er and glo­ry, then see­ing both would result in the same cat­a­stroph­ic end, i.e., death. But appar­ent­ly, the Father has far greater glo­ry than the Son, that see­ing Him and not the Son would have the view­er for­feit his life.

In con­clu­sion, in an attempt to rec­on­cile Gen­e­sis 18 with Exo­dus 33:20, this Nabeel Qureshi debate inad­ver­tent­ly refutes the Trin­i­ty as he glo­ri­fies the Father and makes the Son inferior.

Paul Says That Mark Is Futile : No Res­ur­rec­tion In Mark’s Gospel

The whole of Chris­tian­i­ty rests on the ques­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion as its founder, Paul of Tar­sus writes : And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is use­less and you are still guilty of your sins.” (1 Corinthi­ans 15:17, NLT) But the first of the four gospels, i.e., the Gospel accord­ing to Mark, appar­ent­ly did not receive Paul’s memo.

There is no res­ur­rec­tion in Mark’s gospel. And this is a very impor­tant point as we keep in mind that each of the gospels was ini­tial­ly divorced from each oth­er and were writ­ten in dif­fer­ent local­i­ties for dif­fer­ent audi­ences. There was no canon of the New Tes­ta­ment as we know it today in the first 70 years of Chris­tian­i­ty in the first century.

No Res­ur­rec­tion In Mark ?

The first per­son to canon­ise scrip­ture was the heretic Mar­cion and this was, accord­ing to most bib­li­cal crit­ics, the impe­tus behind the ortho­dox canon­i­sa­tion process.Perhaps it is also per­ti­nent to note that a gospel that pre­dates Mark, the so-called Say­ings Gospel or Q (quelle, which means source” in Ger­man), which has been recon­struct­ed by schol­ars through the Syn­op­tic Prob­lem, has absolute­ly no cru­ci­fix­ion or res­ur­rec­tion nar­ra­tives in it. Pro­fes­sor James Robin­son writes : “…the Say­ings Gospel has no pas­sion nar­ra­tive or res­ur­rec­tion sto­ries…” (Robin­son, J. M. (n.d.). The Real Jesus of the Say­ings Q” Gospel. Retrieved from http://​www​.reli​gion​-online​.org/​s​h​o​w​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​.​a​s​p​?​t​i​t​l​e​=​542). Pro­fes­sor Bart Ehrman writes : Most strik­ing was the cir­cum­stance that in none of the Q mate­ri­als (that is, in none of the pas­sages found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark) is there an account of Jesus’ death and res­ur­rec­tion.” (Ehrman, B. D. (2003), Lost Chris­tian­i­ties (New York : Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press) p. 57)

The Gospel of Mark seems to sup­port the Islam­ic world­view as it stark­ly keeps silent or omits any men­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion. The gospel ends in verse eight with the women, in utter con­fu­sion, flee­ing the scene of the tomb, which was empty :

Trem­bling and bewil­dered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said noth­ing to any­one because they were afraid.” 

Mark 16:8NIV

The late Catholic Jesuit schol­ar John McKen­zie writes :

…for Mark real­ly has no res­ur­rec­tion and no appari­tions, just the emp­ty tomb.”

McKen­zie, J. L. (2009), The New Tes­ta­ment With­out Illu­sion (Eugene, Ore­gon : Wipf & Stock), p. 198

Light­foot Pro­fes­sor of Divin­i­ty and New Tes­ta­ment schol­ar, James Dunn writes :

… the ear­li­est Gospel (Mark) ends with­out any record of a res­ur­rec­tion appearance’,…”

Dunn, J. D. G. (1985), The Evi­dence for Jesus (Louisville, Ken­tucky : The West­min­ster Press), p. 66

Dean at the Insti­tute of Pas­toral Stud­ies at Loy­ola Uni­ver­si­ty, Dr Bri­an Shmisek writes :

For our pur­pos­es, let us note that the ear­li­est gospel has no appear­ance nar­ra­tive and leaves many ques­tions unanswered.”

Schmisek, B. (2013), Res­ur­rec­tion of the Flesh or Res­ur­rec­tion from the Dead : Impli­ca­tions for The­ol­o­gy (Col­legeville, Min­neso­ta : Litur­gi­cal Press), p. 61

Chair of the Depart­ment and Cen­tre for the Study of Reli­gion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, Prof. John S. Klop­pen­borg writes :

Mark, famous­ly, has no res­ur­rec­tion appear­ance sto­ries, only the dis­cov­ery of an emp­ty tomb.”

Klop­pen­borg, J. S. (2008). Q, the Ear­li­est Gospel : An Intro­duc­tion to the Orig­i­nal Sto­ries and Say­ings of Jesus (Louisville, Ken­tucky : West­min­ster John Knox Press), p. 84

Mark’s Faith Is Futile”?

no resurrection in mark

Essen­tial­ly, the gospel accord­ing to Mark has zero res­ur­rec­tion nar­ra­tive and so those — the ini­tial recip­i­ents — that read this gospel soon after it was writ­ten and put into cir­cu­la­tion, would not have had much belief in the res­ur­rec­tion as they were not made aware of it by the gospel that they were rely­ing upon.

The gospels accord­ing to Matthew and Luke, which would even­tu­al­ly sup­ply such infor­ma­tion would only come years later.

This would have been utter­ly anti­thet­i­cal to the gospel preached by Paul, which spec­i­fies the fun­da­men­tal impor­tance of the res­ur­rec­tion ; accord­ing to the words of Paul, the gospel accord­ing to Mark, with­out the res­ur­rec­tion, is in fact use­less”.

Con­clu­sions

The orig­i­nal end­ing of Mark proved very dis­turb­ing to the ear­ly scribes of the Bible and it real­ly did not sit too well with them. So per­turbed was their the­o­log­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties, that they sought to smoothen the end­ing with their own ver­sion of an end­ing by append­ing to verse 8 the longer end­ing of Mark that extends from verse 9 to 20 and that cur­rent­ly remains part of the main text in the New King James Ver­sion. In fact, more cre­ative scribes added two oth­er ver­sions of the end­ing, i.e., the Freer Logion and the Short­er Ending.

North Amer­i­ca’s most emi­nent tex­tu­al crit­ic — the pro­tégé of Bruce Met­zger — Pro­fes­sor Bart Ehrman, writes :

Obvi­ous­ly, scribes thought the end­ing was too abrupt. The women told no one ? Then, did the dis­ci­ples nev­er learn of the res­ur­rec­tion ? And did­n’t Jesus him­self ever appear to them ? How could that be the end­ing ! To resolve the prob­lem, scribes added an ending.

Ehrman, B. D. (2006). Whose Word is it?: The Sto­ry Behind Who Changed the New Tes­ta­ment and Why (Lon­don : The Con­tin­uüm Inter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ing Group), p. 67

And that was how easy it was to mint the so-called words of God” in Christianity.

In short, the gospel accord­ing to Mark — accord­ing to the gospel of Paul — is noth­ing but a use­less gospel, because with­out the res­ur­rec­tion the faith of Chris­tian­i­ty is use­less and the res­ur­rec­tion sim­ply does not exist in Mark’s gospel. Paul Says That Mark Is Futile: No Resurrection In Mark's Gospel 4

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The Gospels’ Accounts Regard­ing the Call of the First Disciples

Ibn Hazm (994CE-1064CE) was a Mus­lim schol­ar of great repute from Cor­do­ba, dur­ing the Mus­lim Spain era. He is wide­ly regard­ed as the Father of Com­par­a­tive Reli­gion”. In his cel­e­brat­ed mag­num opus enti­tled Kitab al-Fasl fi al- Milal wa al-Ahwa’ wa al-Nihal, he pre­dat­ed mod­ern Bib­li­cal tex­tu­al crit­i­cism by sev­er­al cen­turies and as Krentz admits, Ibn Hazm’s crit­i­cisms gen­er­al­ly rep­re­sents the first, albeit rudi­men­ta­ry, sys­tem­at­ic his­toric crit­i­cism of the BibleEdgar Krentz, The His­tor­i­cal Crit­i­cal Method (Fortress Press, 1975), p. 4. He had demon­strat­ed his prowess in Bib­li­cal tex­tu­al crit­i­cism by giv­ing many exam­ples of inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions in the Bible.

The fol­low­ing Bible con­tra­dic­tion regard­ing the call of the first dis­ci­ples was extract­ed from an unpub­lished the­sis enti­tled Ibn Hazm On The Doc­trine of Tahrif which cites Kitab al-Fasl fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa’ wa al-NihalAbdul Rashied Omar, Ibn Hazm On The Doc­trine of Tahrif (unpub­lished the­sis, 1992), p. 34 and insha’allah this will be part of an ongo­ing series to repro­duce extracts of Ibn Hazm’s crit­i­cisms of the Bible and Chris­tian­i­ty, as well as fur­ther elab­o­ra­tion on our part to refine his argu­ments in order to solid­i­fy the charges against the Bible.

So which is the cor­rect Gospel account con­cern­ing the call of Jesus’ first dis­ci­ples ? Ibn Hazm quotes Matthew 4, 12 – 22Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he depart­ed into Galilee ; And leav­ing Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Caper­naum, which is upon the sea coast, in the bor­ders of Zab­u­lon and Neph­thal­im : That it might be ful­filled which was spo­ken by Esa­ias the prophet, saying,The land of Zab­u­lon, and the land of Neph­thal­im, by the way of the sea, beyond Jor­dan, Galilee of the Gen­tiles ; The peo­ple which sat in dark­ness saw great light ; and to them which sat in the region and shad­ow of death light is sprung up. From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent : for the king­dom of heav­en is at hand. And Jesus, walk­ing by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his broth­er, cast­ing a net into the sea : for they were fish­ers. And he saith unto them, Fol­low me, and I will make you fish­ers of men. And they straight­way left their nets, and fol­lowed him. And going on from thence, he saw oth­er two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his broth­er, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mend­ing their nets ; and he called them. And they imme­di­ate­ly left the ship and their father, and fol­lowed him.” (Mt. 4 : 12 – 22); Mark 1, 14 – 20Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preach­ing the gospel of the king­dom of God, And say­ing, The time is ful­filled, and the king­dom of God is at hand : repent ye, and believe the gospel. Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his broth­er cast­ing a net into the sea : for they were fish­ers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fish­ers of men. And straight­way they for­sook their nets, and fol­lowed him. And when he had gone a lit­tle fur­ther thence, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his broth­er, who also were in the ship mend­ing their nets. And straight­way he called them : and they left their father Zebedee in the ship with the hired ser­vants, and went after him.” (Mk. 1 : 14 – 20); Luke 5, 1 – 11And it came to pass, that, as the peo­ple pressed upon him to hear the word of God, he stood by the lake of Gen­nesaret, And saw two ships stand­ing by the lake : but the fish­er­men were gone out of them, and were wash­ing their nets. And he entered into one of the ships, which was Simon’s, and prayed him that he would thrust out a lit­tle from the land. And he sat down, and taught the peo­ple out of the ship. Now when he had left speak­ing, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. And Simon answer­ing said unto him, Mas­ter, we have toiled all the night, and have tak­en noth­ing : nev­er­the­less, at thy word I will let down the net. And when they had this done, they inclosed a great mul­ti­tude of fish­es : and their net brake.And they beck­oned unto their part­ners, which were in the oth­er ship, that they should come and help them. And they came, and filled both the ships, so that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, say­ing, Depart from me ; for I am a sin­ful man, O Lord. For he was aston­ished, and all that were with him, at the draught of the fish­es which they had tak­en : And so was also James, and John, the sons of Zebedee, which were part­ners with Simon. And Jesus said unto Simon, Fear not ; from hence­forth thou shalt catch men. And when they had brought their ships to land, they for­sook all, and fol­lowed him.” (Lk. 5 : 1 – 11) and John 1, 35 – 42Again the next day after John stood, and two of his dis­ci­ples ; And look­ing upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God ! And the two dis­ci­ples heard him speak, and they fol­lowed Jesus. Then Jesus turned, and saw them fol­low­ing, and saith unto them, What seek ye ? They said unto him, Rab­bi, (which is to say, being inter­pret­ed, Mas­ter,) where dwellest thou ? He saith unto them, Come and see. They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day : for it was about the tenth hour. One of the two which heard John speak, and fol­lowed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s broth­er. He first find­eth his own broth­er Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Mes­sias, which is, being inter­pret­ed, the Christ. And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona : thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by inter­pre­ta­tion, A stone.” (Jn. 1 : 35 – 42) and con­cludes that there are four basic con­tra­dic­tions con­tained in the Gospel accounts of the first apos­tles. They relate to :

    (1) The time the first apos­tle­ship of Andrew and his broth­er Simon Peter com­menced. Was it before the impris­on­ment of John the Bap­tist as Math­ew and Mark records, or was it after the impris­on­ment of John as he him­self claims ?
    (2) The place where the first apos­tle­ship took place. Was it at the place where the Mes­si­ah found Peter and Andrew enter­ing their nets into the sea as they were about to fish as Matthew and Mark relates, or was it at the place where Andrew was stand­ing with John when he heard him remark when the Mes­si­ah walked past say­ing Behold the Lamb of God!”, as John records ?
    (3) The sequence of the first com­pan­ion­ship. Did Simon, Peter and his broth­er Andrew joint­ly become the Mes­si­ah’s first apos­tles at the same point in time, or was it Andrew who became the Mes­si­ah’s first apos­tle and sub­se­quent­ly recruit­ed his broth­er Simon ?
    (4) The con­di­tions in which the Mes­si­ah found his first two apos­tles. Was it as they were enter­ing their nets into the sea or was it as they were get­ting out of their boat in order to wash their nets after they had spent the entire night with­out catch­ing any fish ?

Accord­ing to Ibn Hazm, one of these four con­fus­ing sto­ries on the call of the first dis­ci­ples of Jesus must be untrue. Such untruths, how­ev­er, can­not be attrib­uted to God, nor a Prophet, nei­ther of any truth­ful person. 

Ibn Hazm also points out that Saint John had trans­lat­ed the Gospel of Matthew from Hebrew to Greek and there­fore he must have come across the dif­fer­ences in the two accounts. These clear con­tra­dic­tions are suf­fi­cient proof, Ibn Hazm claims, that the Gospels are the works of accursed liars (min amal kad­hib­in mal’unin).“As cit­ed from Abdul Rashied Omar, Ibn Hazm On The Doc­trine of Tahrif (unpub­lished the­sis, 1992), p. 34 The Gospels' Accounts Regarding the Call of the First Disciples 5

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On The Reli­a­bil­i­ty Of Luke As A Historian

Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists and mis­sion­ar­ies believe that Luke was inspired” and inerrant,” even though Luke him­self does not make such a claim in his books (Gospel accord­ing to Luke and Acts). luke as a historian One of the most pop­u­lar argu­ments often pro­posed by the mis­sion­ar­ies as evi­dence” that Luke was inspired”, or at least some­one who we can blind­ly trust with­out sec­ond thoughts, is as fol­lows : he was an excel­lent his­to­ri­an who con­duct­ed a care­ful inves­ti­ga­tion dur­ing the course of com­pos­ing his books. 

It is claimed that Luke accu­rate­ly named many coun­tries, cities, that he accu­rate­ly described cer­tain events of his time, cor­rect­ly named var­i­ous offi­cials with their prop­er titles and referred to places which have only recent­ly been dis­cov­ered. There­fore, this some­how proves”, accord­ing to the apol­o­gists, that Luke’s sto­ry can be trust­ed in its entire­ty and that there is no room for doubts regard­ing his claims whatsoever.

We refer to the author as Luke” sim­ply for the sake of con­ve­nience and not because we believe that Luke authored the third Gospel and the Book of Acts. We might as well call the author Max”, but because the third gospel is com­mon­ly known as the Gospel accord­ing to Luke,” the name Luke” is retained. 

Did Luke Author The Third Gospel and Acts ?

Accord­ing to crit­i­cal schol­ars, the third gospel, like all the gospels, is anony­mous­ly authored. That is to say, we real­ly do not know who authored it. Nonethe­less, even if we accept the tra­di­tion­al author­ship claim, it remains that Luke was a non-eye­wit­ness — he did not wit­ness any of the alleged events from the life of Jesus first hand. Luke was a fol­low­er of Paul. 

Accord­ing to the late Ray­mond Brown, it is pos­si­ble that Luke, a minor fig­ure who trav­elled with Paul for some time, wrote the third gospel and the book of Acts decades after Paul’s death. 

Brown writes :

We have no way of being cer­tain that he was Luke, as affirmed by 2nd-cen­tu­ry tra­di­tion ; but there is no seri­ous rea­son to pro­pose a dif­fer­ent can­di­date.Ray­mond E. Brown, S.S, An Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment (The Anchor Bible Ref­er­ence Library), 1997, Dou­ble­day, p. 326

Sim­i­lar­ly, Lee Mar­tin McDon­ald and Stan­ley Porter accept tra­di­tion­al Lucan author­ship but not whole­heart­ed­ly. They write (p. 295): We are inclined to accept Lucan author­ship, but not with­out some reser­va­tion …“See Lee Mar­tin McDon­ald, Stan­ley E. Porter, Ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty And Its Sacred Lit­er­a­ture, 2000, Hen­drick­son Pub­lish­ers. For a more crit­i­cal assess­ment, see Gerd Theis­sen and Annette Merz, who dis­miss the tra­di­tion­al author­ship claims about the gospels in their The His­tor­i­cal Jesus : A Com­pre­hen­sive Guide, 1998, SCM Press Ltd. See also W. G. Küm­mel, Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment, 1975, Revised Edi­tion, SCM Press Ltd. Hel­mut Koester also dis­cuss­es gospel author­ships in his Ancient Chris­t­ian Gospels : Their His­to­ry and Devel­op­ment, 1990, Trin­i­ty Press Inter­na­tion­al. Also Vin­cent P. Bran­ick, Under­stand­ing the New Tes­ta­ment and its Mes­sage : An Intro­duc­tion, 1998, Paulist Press

Bart Ehrman, sum­ming up the stance of crit­i­cal schol­ars, writes :

Pro­to-ortho­dox Chris­tians of the sec­ond cen­tu­ry, some decades after most of the New Tes­ta­ment books had been writ­ten, claimed that their favourite Gospels had been penned by two of Jesus’ dis­ci­ples — Matthew, the tax col­lec­tor, and John, the beloved dis­ci­ple — and by two friends of the apos­tles — Mark, the sec­re­tary of Peter, and Luke, the trav­el­ling com­pan­ion of Paul. Schol­ars today, how­ev­er, find it dif­fi­cult to accept this tra­di­tion for sev­er­al reasons.

…none of these Gospels makes any such claim about itself. All four authors chose to keep their iden­ti­ties anony­mous.Bart D. Ehrman, The New Tes­ta­ment : A His­tor­i­cal Intro­duc­tion to the Ear­ly Chris­t­ian Writ­ings, 2000, Sec­ond Edi­tion, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, p. 52. For a defense of tra­di­tion­al author­ship claims, see the fol­low­ing books by evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars : Don­ald Guthrie, New Tes­ta­ment Intro­duc­tion (Mas­ter Ref­er­ence Col­lec­tion), Revised Edi­tion, 1990, Inter­Var­si­ty Press ; D. A. Car­son, Dou­glas J. Moo, Dr. Leon Mor­ris, An Intro­duc­tion to the New Tes­ta­ment, 1992, Zon­der­van Pub­lish­ing House.

As for the dat­ing of Luke and Acts, most schol­ars place it in the 80 — 100 AD peri­od. For instance, Paula Fredrik­sen places Luke between c. 90 — 100.See Paula Fredrik­sen, From Jesus To Christ : The Ori­gins of the New Tes­ta­ment Images of Christ, Sec­ond Edi­tion, 2000, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, New Haven and Lon­don, pp. 3 – 4, 19. E. P. Sanders dates the final form of the gospels between the years 70 and 90.See E. P. Sanders, The His­tor­i­cal Fig­ure Of Jesus, 1993, Pen­guin Books, p. 60. Theis­sen and Merz place Luke any­where between 70 C.E to 140150 C.E — more in the first half of this peri­odGerd Theis­sen, Annette Merz, The His­tor­i­cal Jesus : A Com­pre­hen­sive Guide , 1998, SCM Press Ltd. p. 32 The late Catholic schol­ar and priest, Ray­mond Brown, placed Luke in the year 85 — give or take five to ten yearsRay­mond E. Brown, S.S, An Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment (The Anchor Bible Ref­er­ence Library), 1997, Dou­ble­day, p. 247. Sim­i­lar dates are also pro­posed in the fol­low­ing sources : Gerd Lude­mann, Jesus After Two Thou­sand Years : What He Real­ly Said and Did, 2001, Prometheus Books ; Gra­ham N. Stan­ton, The Gospels and Jesus, Sec­ond Edi­tion, 2002, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press ; James L. Mays (Gen­er­al Edi­tor), The Harper­Collins Bible Com­men­tary, 2000, Harper­San­Fran­cis­co ; Don­ald Senior, Jesus : A Gospel Por­trait, New and Revised Edi­tion, 1992, Paulist Press ; W. G. Küm­mel, Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment, 17th Revised edi­tion, 1975, SCM Press Ltd ; Vin­cent P. Bran­ick, Under­stand­ing the New Tes­ta­ment and Its Mes­sage : An Intro­duc­tion, 1998, Paulist Press ; John P. Meier, A Mar­gin­al Jew : Rethink­ing the His­tor­i­cal Jesus : The Roots of the Prob­lem and the Per­son, Vol. 1, 1991, 1st edi­tion, The Anchor Bible Ref­er­ence Library, Dou­ble­day ; Also Geza Ver­mes, The Authen­tic Gospel Of Jesus, 2004, Pen­guin Books. These types of dates are accept­ed by the vast major­i­ty of New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars and the ref­er­ences pro­vid­ed above are only a few exam­ples. For much ear­li­er dates, see the afore­men­tioned intro­duc­tions by Don­ald Guthrie and Car­son. See also John A. T. Robin­son, Redat­ing the New Tes­ta­ment, 2000, Wipf & Stock Publishers.

Nev­er Claimed To Be Inspired

It should be not­ed that the author of the third gospel and Acts nowhere claims to have been inspired” by a high­er source to write his accounts. Such argu­ments are list­ed by one mis­sion­ary as follows :

    Inde­pen­dent archae­o­log­i­cal research has solid­i­fied the authen­tic­i­ty and the his­tor­i­cal reli­a­bil­i­ty of the New Tes­ta­ment. Some of the dis­cov­er­ies include :
  • Luke refers to Lysa­nias as being the tetrar­ch of Abi­lene at the begin­ning of John the Bap­tist’s min­istry, cir­ca 27 A. D. (Luke 3:1) His­to­ri­ans accused Luke of being in error, not­ing that the only Lysa­nias known was the one killed in 36 B. C. Now, how­ev­er, an inscrip­tion found near Dam­as­cus refers to Freed­man of Lysa­nias the tetrar­ch” and is dat­ed from 14 and 29 A. D.
  • Paul, writ­ing to the Romans, speaks of the city trea­sur­er Eras­tus (Romans 16:23). A 1929 exca­va­tion in Corinth unearthed a pave­ment inscribed with these words : ERASTVS PRO:AED:P:STRAVIT : (“Eras­tus cura­tor of pub­lic build­ings, laid this pave­ment at his own expense.”)
  • Luke men­tions a riot in the city of Eph­esus which took place in a the­atre (Acts 19:23 – 41). The the­atre has now been exca­vat­ed and has a seat­ing capac­i­ty of 25,000.
  • Acts 21 records an inci­dent which broke out between Paul and cer­tain Jews from Asia. These Jews accused Paul of defil­ing the Tem­ple by allow­ing Trophimus, a Gen­tile, to enter it. In 1871, Greek inscrip­tions were found, now housed in Istan­bul which read :

    NO FOREIGNER MAY ENTER WITHIN THE BARRICADE WHICH SURROUNDS THE TEMPLE AND ENCLOSURE. ANYONE WHO IS CAUGHT DOING SO WILL HAVE HIMSELF TO THANK FOR HIS ENSUING DEATH.

  • Luke address­es Gal­lio with the title Pro­con­sul (Acts 18:12). A Del­phi inscrip­tion ver­i­fies this when it states, As Lucius Junius Gal­lio, my friend, and the Pro­con­sul of Achaia …”
  • Luke calls Pub­li­cus, the chief man of Mal­ta, First man of the Island.” (Acts 28:7) Inscrip­tions now found do con­firm Pub­li­cus as the First man”. (Josh McDow­ell, The Best of Josh Mcdow­ell : A Ready Defense, pp. 110 – 111)

He goes on to present more sim­i­lar cita­tions and arguments :

    The sig­nif­i­cance of such extra-Bib­li­cal evi­dence is of such mag­ni­tude that hon­est scep­tics are now forced to agree that the Bible is his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate and reli­able. One such per­son was Sir William Ram­sey, con­sid­ered one of the world’s great­est archae­ol­o­gists. He believed that the New Tes­ta­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly the books of Luke and Acts, were sec­ond-cen­tu­ry forg­eries. He spent thir­ty years in Asia Minor, seek­ing to dig up enough evi­dence to prove that Luke-Acts was noth­ing more than a lie. At the con­clu­sion of his long jour­ney, how­ev­er, he was com­pelled to admit that the New Tes­ta­ment was a first-cen­tu­ry com­pi­la­tion and that the Bible is his­tor­i­cal­ly reli­able. This fact led to his con­ver­sion and embrac­ing of the very faith he once believed to be a hoax.

    Dr Ram­sey stated :

      Luke is a his­to­ri­an of the first rank ; not mere­ly are his state­ments of fact trust­wor­thy … this author should be placed along with the very great­est of historians.”

    Ram­sey fur­ther said : Luke is unsur­passed in respects of its trust­wor­thi­ness.” (Josh McDow­ell, The Best of Josh Mcdow­ell : A Ready Defense, pp. 108 – 109)

First­ly, we should note that there is noth­ing in the above which would indi­cate that Luke was inspired“or inerrant” and that every­thing with­in his books can be trust­ed blind­ly. There is noth­ing here which would show that Luke was some­how spe­cial”. Far from being remark­able, the above are very ordi­nary exam­ples of Luke’s alleged accu­ra­cies. There is no rea­son to sup­pose that unless a per­son is inerrant or inspired, he or she can­not get such basic ele­men­tary facts straight. Such type of ordi­nary accu­ra­cies relat­ing to cer­tain fac­tu­al mat­ters is also to be observed in fic­tion­al books, which name, for instance, cities cor­rect­ly, etc.

So what if Luke was able to name the var­i­ous cities in exis­tence in his time, accu­rate­ly name offi­cials of his time with their cor­rect titles, name cer­tain coun­tries of his time, men­tion a the­atre he knew about which has recent­ly been dis­cov­ered and accu­rate­ly men­tion cer­tain reli­gious rites and prac­tices of the time ? There is noth­ing extra­or­di­nary“about this. This only shows that Luke was a per­son who had a basic edu­ca­tion and was famil­iar with his surroundings. 

If I am not con­sid­ered inspired and inerrant — despite accu­rate­ly nam­ing fifty coun­tries in exis­tence today, accu­rate­ly nam­ing var­i­ous world cities, accu­rate­ly nam­ing heads of state and var­i­ous oth­er offi­cials togeth­er with their cor­rect titles and ranks, accu­rate­ly nam­ing a few the­atres around Lon­don togeth­er with a few addi­tion­al tourist attrac­tion sites and accu­rate­ly describ­ing the work­ings and prac­tices of the local mosques and church­es — then why must Luke be con­sid­ered inerrant and inspired ? These are utter­ly ordi­nary mat­ters and such type of accu­ra­cies do not in any­way sug­gest that the per­son or book is extra­or­di­nary”, spe­cial”, or in any way heav­en­ly inspired”.

Sec­ond­ly, besides the above list­ed so-called won­der­ful accu­ra­cies”, there are also grave inac­cu­ra­cies with­in Luke’s gospel. The fol­low­ing are some inac­cu­ra­cies and dis­crep­an­cies with­in Luke’s Gospel and Acts over which there is wide­spread agree­ment among schol­ars, includ­ing devout Chris­t­ian scholars :

  • Luke forged a geneal­o­gy for Jesus(P) even though he(P) had no father. The geneal­o­gy has no his­tor­i­cal stand­ing. Worse, his geneal­o­gy con­tra­dicts the one forged by Matthew.
  • Luke pro­vides an infan­cy nar­ra­tive which is irrec­on­cil­able with the infan­cy nar­ra­tive pro­vid­ed by Matthew.
  • Luke men­tions a cen­sus under Quirnius dur­ing the birth of Jesus(P) which is almost uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­nized as a major his­tor­i­cal blun­der on Luke’s part.

In addi­tion to the dif­fi­cul­ties raised by a detailed com­par­i­son of the two birth nar­ra­tives found in the New Tes­ta­ment, seri­ous his­tor­i­cal prob­lems are raised by the famil­iar sto­ries found in Luke alone.Bart D. Ehrman, The New Tes­ta­ment : A His­tor­i­cal Intro­duc­tion to the Ear­ly Chris­t­ian Writ­ings, 2000, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, p. 109 In Acts, Luke has Gamaliel refer­ring to a revolt by Theudas which in fact took place years lat­er after his speech. Again, there is wide­spread agree­ment among Chris­t­ian schol­ars that Luke was in error on this occasion.

There is also gen­er­al agree­ment among New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars that the speech­es found in Acts are either the cre­ations or adap­tions of Luke.Mar­shall believes that most of the speech­es in Acts are based on tra­di­tion­al mate­r­i­al, but he adds that they were nev­er meant to be ver­ba­tim reports and that Luke has pro­vid­ed us with noth­ing more than brief sum­maries. Hence he leaves room for at least some Lucan cre­ativ­i­ty [I. Howard Mar­shall, Acts (The Tyn­dale New Tes­ta­ment Com­men­taries), 1980, Inter-Var­si­ty Press, WM. B. Eerd­mans Pub­lish­ing Co, p. 41]. More­over, he acknowl­edges that Luke could not have known what Fes­tus and Agrip­pa said to each oth­er in their pri­vate apart­ments (25:13 – 22 ; 26:30 – 32) nor could the Chris­tians have learnt what exact­ly was said by the mem­bers of the San­hedrin in closed ses­sions (4:15 – 17 ; 5:34 – 40). Nonethe­less, he spec­u­lates that per­haps Luke could have expressed the things that the pub­lic behav­iour of rulers indi­cat­ed that they had prob­a­bly said in pri­vate (so some inven­tion of speech by Luke did take place?) and that it is pos­si­ble that some sym­pa­thiz­er from the San­hedrin may have giv­en Chris­tians the gist of the con­ver­sa­tion (ibid.).

Fur­ther­more, Luke’s sto­ry in Acts con­tra­dicts at a num­ber of points with the infor­ma­tion with­in the authen­tic Pauline epis­tles, some­thing also gen­er­al­ly acknowl­edged by schol­ars. Luke was thus an errant writer who made mis­takes and inac­cu­ra­cies in his writ­ings.Mar­shall admits that there are points of ten­sion between Luke’s por­trait of Paul and his own writ­ing, but insists that they are not so sub­stan­tial so as to make Acts entire­ly unhis­tor­i­cal (ibid.)

How Luke Copied From Mark

Mov­ing on, inspired“Luke lift­ed 50% of his gospel from Mark — a sec­ondary source authored by a non-eye­wit­ness. Why would Luke do this if we are to sup­pose that he was accu­rate­ly research­ing the issues and shift­ing through reli­able first-hand sources ? We know from Luke’s open­ing words that he did not have high regard for the pre­vi­ous nar­ra­tives. Evan­gel­i­cal schol­ar Don­ald Guthrie writes :

Luke’s pref­ace is illu­mi­nat­ing in regard to his own approach to his task. He claims to have made a com­pre­hen­sive and accu­rate sur­vey over a con­sid­er­able peri­od, which throws a good deal of light on his seri­ous­ness of pur­pose. More­over, Luke admits that oth­ers had pre­vi­ous­ly attempt­ed the same task, but his words imply that he found them unsat­is­fac­to­ry…Don­ald Guthrie, B.D., M. Th., New Tes­ta­ment Intro­duc­tion. The Gospels and Acts, 1966, Inter-Var­si­ty Press, p. 87

W.G. Küm­mel, in his clas­si­cal intro­duc­tion to the New Tes­ta­ment writes :

With his his­tor­i­cal work Lk joins their ranks [ranks of his pre­de­ces­sors who com­posed gospel nar­ra­tives], though he was not him­self a wit­ness from the begin­ning, because he feels the works of his pre­de­ces­sors to be in some way inad­e­quate.W. G. Küm­mel, Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment, 17th Revised edi­tion, 1975, SCM Press Ltd, p. 129

Ray­mond Brown, on the oth­er hand, says :

…nei­ther evan­ge­list [Matthew and Luke] liked Mark­s’s redun­dan­cies, awk­ward Greek expres­sions, uncom­pli­men­ta­ry pre­sen­ta­tion of the dis­ci­ples and Mary, and embar­rass­ing state­ments about Jesus. When using Mark, both expand­ed the Markan accounts in the light of post-res­ur­rec­tion­al faith.Ray­mond E. Brown, S.S, An Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment, 1997, (The Anchor Bible Ref­er­ence Library, Dou­ble­day, p. 115

Yet Luke, our so-called reli­able” his­to­ri­an, copies no less than 50% of his book from Mark, regard­ed as an unsat­is­fac­to­ry source ! 

Ray­mond Brown men­tions some of the ways on how Luke had used Mark :

  • Luke improves on Mark’s Greek, bet­ter­ing the gram­mar, syn­tax, and vocab­u­lary, e.g., in 4:1, 31, 38 and pas­sim by omit­ting Mark’s overused imme­di­ate­ly”; in 20:22 by chang­ing a Latin­ism like ken­sos (=cen­sus) from Mark 12:14 ; in 20:23 by sub­sti­tut­ing the more exact crafti­ness, treach­ery” for the hypocrisy” of Mark 12:15.
  • Luke states at the begin­ning his inten­tion to write care­ful­ly and in an order­ly man­ner (1:3); accord­ing­ly he rearranges Mar­can sequence to accom­plish that goal, e.g., Jesus’ rejec­tion at Nazareth is put at the open­ing of the Galilean min­istry rather than after some time had elapsed (Luke 4:16 – 30 vs. Mark 6:1 – 6) in order to explain why his Galilean min­istry was cen­tred at Caper­naum ; the heal­ing of Simon’s moth­er-in-law is placed before the call of Simon and com­pan­ions (4:38 – 5:11 vs. Mark 1:16 – 31) in order to make more log­i­cal Simon’s will­ing­ness to fol­low Jesus ; Peter’s denials of Jesus are put before the San­hedrin tri­al in pref­er­ence to Mark’s com­pli­cat­ed inter­weav­ing of the two. At times Luke’s order­li­ness is reflect­ed in avoid­ing Mar­can dou­blets (Luke does not report the sec­ond mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of loaves) where­as Matt likes to dou­ble fea­tures and per­sons. Yet Luke has a dou­ble send­ing out of the apostles/​disciples (9:1 – 2 ; 10:1).
  • Because of changes made in mate­r­i­al received from Mark, Luke occa­sion­al­ly cre­ates incon­sis­ten­cies, e.g., although in Luke 5:30 the part­ners in the con­ver­sa­tion are the Phar­isees and their scribes,” 5:33 speaks of the dis­ci­ples of the Phar­isees,” as if the Phar­isees were not present ; although in 18:32 – 33 Luke takes over from Mark the pre­dic­tion that Jesus will be mocked, scourged, and spit on by the Gen­tiles, Luke (unlike Mark 15:16 – 20) nev­er ful­fills that pre­dic­tion ; Luke has changed the Mar­can order of the denials of Peter and the Jew­ish mock­ery of Jesus but for­got­ten to insert the prop­er name of Jesus in the new sequence, so that at first blush Luke 22:63, in hav­ing him” mocked and beat­en, seems to refer to Peter, not Jesus. See also n. 67 above.
  • Luke, even more than Matt, elim­i­nates or changes pas­sages in Mark unfa­vor­able to those whose sub­se­quent career makes them wor­thy of respect, e.g., Luke omits Mark 3:21,33,34 and (in 4:24) changes Mark 6:4 in order to avoid ref­er­ences detri­men­tal to Jesus’ fam­i­ly ; Luke omits Mark 8:22 – 26 which dra­ma­tizes the slow­ness of the dis­ci­ples to see, and Mark 8:33 where Jesus calls Peter Satan”; in the pas­sion Luke omits the pre­dict­ed fail­ure of the dis­ci­ples, Jesus’ find­ing them asleep three times, and their flight as report­ed in Mark 14:27,40 – 41,51 – 52.
  • Reflect­ing Chris­to­log­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties, Luke is more rev­er­en­tial about Jesus and avoids pas­sages that might make him seem emo­tion­al, harsh, or weak, e.g., Luke elim­i­nates : Mark 1:41,43 where Jesus is moved with pity or is stern ; Mark 4:39 where Jesus speaks direct­ly to the sea ; Mark 10:14a where Jesus is indig­nant ; Mark 11:15b where Jesus over­turns the tables of the mon­ey chang­ers ; Mark 11:20 – 25 where Jesus curs­es a fig tree ; Mark 13:32 where Jesus says that the Son does not know the day or the hour ; Mark 14:33 – 34 where Jesus is trou­bled and his soul is sor­row­ful unto death ; Mark 15:34 where Jesus speaks of God for­sak­ing him.
  • Luke stress­es detach­ment from pos­ses­sions, not only in his spe­cial mate­r­i­al (L), as we shall see below, but also in changes he makes in Mark, e.g., fol­low­ers of the Lucan Jesus leave every­thing (5:11,28), and the Twelve are for­bid­den to take even a staff (9:3).
  • Luke elim­i­nates Mark’s tran­scribed Ara­ma­ic names and words (even some that Matt includes) pre­sum­ably because they were not mean­ing­ful to the intend­ed audi­ence, e.g., an omis­sion of Boan­erges, Geth­se­mane, Gol­go­tha, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.
  • Luke may make Mar­can infor­ma­tion more pre­cise, pre­sum­ably for bet­ter sto­ry flow, greater effect, or clar­i­ty, e.g., Luke 6:6 spec­i­fies that the next scene (Mark 3:1 : again”) took place on anoth­er Sab­bath”; Luke 6:6 spec­i­fies the right hand” and 22:50 the right ear”; Luke 21:20 clar­i­fies or sub­sti­tutes for Mark’s abom­i­na­tion of des­o­la­tion”.Ray­mond E. Brown, S.S, An Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment, 1997, The Anchor Bible Ref­er­ence Library, Dou­ble­day, pp. 263 – 265

The impor­tant point to note here is that Luke has used Mark and made a num­ber of changes to its con­tents. New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars com­pare Luke and Mark to see how Luke is using his source (Mark) and adapt­ing it. Mark is obvi­ous­ly not the only source employed by Luke, but since we know that he has altered the Markan sto­ries in a vari­ety of ways, it is only log­i­cal and rea­son­able to con­clude that Luke must have done the same with the oth­er sources at his dis­pos­al — he must have altered them as well to suit his agen­da and pre­sup­po­si­tions. The fact that Luke accu­rate­ly men­tions cer­tain ordi­nary details, such as nam­ing cities cor­rect­ly etc., does not fol­low that his sto­ry in its entire­ty can be trust­ed blindly. 

Thus, the state­ment that hon­est scep­tics are now forced to agree that the Bible is his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate and reli­able” is noth­ing more than non­sense. Crit­i­cal schol­ars cer­tain­ly do not regard Luke, or any book of the Bible, in its entire­ty to be his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate and reli­able” just because cer­tain ordi­nary details are record­ed accu­rate­ly with­in them.

Luke As A His­to­ri­an : Final Observations

Although we have not gone into detail regard­ing the above-men­tioned issues, the aim was to sim­ply high­light here some of the major prob­lems with­in Luke’s writ­ings over which we have a schol­ar­ly con­sen­sus. Con­trary to Ram­sey’s con­clu­sion (and bear in mind that he was an apol­o­gist and not a bal­anced his­to­ri­an) is the fact is that there is noth­ing super”, extra­or­di­nary” or spe­cial” about Luke’s writ­ings, even if we buy all of Ram­sey’s claims regard­ing Luke’s alleged accu­ra­cy on cer­tain issues. 

More­over, Luke also makes mis­takes, some exam­ples pro­vid­ed above. Of course, apol­o­gists will chal­lenge all of them but note that these are accept­ed as such and acknowl­edged by main­stream scholarship.

Instead, we come across a fair­ly ordi­nary writer who utilis­es sources at his dis­pos­al, mak­ing a vari­ety of changes to them to suit his the­o­log­i­cal agen­da and one who makes errors at times and also gets cer­tain facts right. None of the exam­ples pre­sent­ed by these apol­o­gists sug­gests that the Bible” (which is a col­lec­tion of many indi­vid­ual books and let­ters by authors of vary­ing degrees of edu­ca­tion and lit­er­a­cy) is his­tor­i­cal­ly reli­able” as a whole.

Mod­ern New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars do not entire­ly endorse Ram­sey’s claims per­tain­ing to Luke’ abil­i­ties as a his­to­ri­an and con­sid­er him to have exag­ger­at­ed his case. To be more pre­cise, the stud­ies by Ram­sey and oth­ers did at least estab­lish that Acts was not a com­plete fic­tion authored in the mid-late sec­ond cen­tu­ry peri­od. The author is like­ly to be one writ­ing some­time in the late first cen­tu­ry, some­one who was edu­cat­ed and well-trav­elled, and was using some tra­di­tions and sources at his dis­pos­al. There is no doubt that he does present accu­rate details, yet it is also a fact that his account is selec­tive, roman­ti­cised at times and the­o­log­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed. We know that the author was not just relat­ing bare inci­dents and events with­out changes but was adapt­ing them to suit his purposes. 

Hence his work (the gospel and Acts) needs to be used care­ful­ly and crit­i­cal­ly by the historians.

The late Ray­mond Brown made a remark that Luke would have been a fit­ting can­di­date for mem­ber­ship in the broth­er­hood of Hel­lenis­tic his­to­ri­ans, but he would nev­er be made the pres­i­dent of the soci­ety.Ray­mond E. Brown, S.S, An Intro­duc­tion To The New Tes­ta­ment, 1997, The Anchor Bible Ref­er­ence Library, Dou­ble­day, p. 322. Howard Mar­shall, on the oth­er hand, a major con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal schol­ar of our times who is quite char­i­ta­ble towards Acts, admits that :

…he [Ram­sey] was capa­ble of mak­ing asser­tions about Luke’s his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy which went beyond what could be shown by the avail­able evi­dence.“I. Howard Mar­shall, Acts (The Tyn­dale New Tes­ta­ment Com­men­taries), 1980, Inter-Var­si­ty Press, WM. B. Eerd­mans Pub­lish­ing Co, p. 34

Mar­shall talks about the essen­tial” reli­a­bil­i­ty of Acts regard­ing his­tor­i­cal mat­ters and not its com­plete reli­a­bil­i­ty. Sher­win-White, for instance, believes that Luke makes mis­takes, but the main thrust of his book is to demon­strate that for the most part, Luke por­trays the first-cen­tu­ry Roman scene accu­rate­ly.“I. Howard Mar­shall, Acts (The Tyn­dale New Tes­ta­ment Com­men­taries), 1980, Inter-Var­si­ty Press, WM. B. Eerd­mans Pub­lish­ing Co, pp. 36 – 37

Do note that this does not mean that we can accept all of Luke’ sto­ries blind­ly. So, while many mod­ern schol­ars do not out­right dis­miss Acts and con­sid­er it to be more accu­rate than was pre­vi­ous­ly thought, it is nonethe­less rec­og­nized that its author is not with­out mis­takes and does colour sources at his dis­pos­al for the­o­log­i­cal and apolo­getic rea­sons. This means that not every­thing with­in his books is his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate, as alleged by Chris­t­ian missionaries. On The Reliability Of Luke As A Historian 6

[cite]

Ali Sina’s Under­stand­ing Muham­mad : A Psychobiography”

Ali Sina Understanding Muhammad

For those who are famil­iar with the extrem­ist Islam­o­pho­bic web­site called Faith­free­dom Inter­na­tion­al”, the name of its founder Ali Sina (a pseu­do­nym) is syn­ony­mous with the big­otry and vile rhetoric often dis­played against Mus­lims and Islam. This was a per­son who open­ly advo­cat­ed for the atom­ic bomb to be used on Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions and have many times declared that he will wipe out” Islam with­in 30 years. 

King Abdul­lah I : As the Arabs See The Jews

Edi­tor’s Note : This fas­ci­nat­ing essay, writ­ten by King Hus­sein’s grand­fa­ther King Abdul­lah, appeared in the Unit­ed States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. King Abdullah I: As the Arabs See The Jews 7 In the arti­cle, King Abdul­lah dis­putes the mis­tak­en view that Arab oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism (and lat­er the state of Israel) is because of long­stand­ing reli­gious or eth­nic hatred. He notes that Jews and Mus­lims enjoyed a long his­to­ry of peace­ful coex­is­tence in the Mid­dle East, and that Jews have his­tor­i­cal­ly suf­fered far more at the hands of Chris­t­ian Europe. Point­ing to the tragedy of the holo­caust that Jews suf­fered dur­ing World War II, the monarch asks why Amer­i­ca and Europe are refus­ing to accept more than a token hand­ful of Jew­ish immi­grants and refugees. It is unfair, he argues, to make Pales­tine, which is inno­cent of anti-Semi­tism, pay for the crimes of Europe. King Abdul­lah also asks how Jews can claim a his­toric right to Pales­tine, when Arabs have been the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty there for near­ly 1300 unin­ter­rupt­ed years ? The essay ends on an omi­nous note, warn­ing of dire con­se­quences if a peace­ful solu­tion can­not be found to pro­tect the rights of the indige­nous Arabs of Palestine.

The Tran­script

I am espe­cial­ly delight­ed to address an Amer­i­can audi­ence, for the trag­ic prob­lem of Pales­tine will nev­er be solved with­out Amer­i­can under­stand­ing, Amer­i­can sym­pa­thy, Amer­i­can support.

So many bil­lions of words have been writ­ten about Pales­tine — per­haps more than on any oth­er sub­ject in his­to­ry — that I hes­i­tate to add to them. Yet I am com­pelled to do so, for I am reluc­tant­ly con­vinced that the world in gen­er­al, and Amer­i­ca in par­tic­u­lar, knows almost noth­ing of the true case for the Arabs. 

We Arabs fol­low, per­haps far more than you think, the press of Amer­i­ca. We are frankly dis­turbed to find that for every word print­ed on the Arab side, a thou­sand are print­ed on the Zion­ist side.

There are many rea­sons for this. You have many mil­lions of Jew­ish cit­i­zens inter­est­ed in this ques­tion. They are high­ly vocal and wise in the ways of pub­lic­i­ty. There are few Arab cit­i­zens in Amer­i­ca, and we are as yet unskilled in the tech­nique of mod­ern propaganda.

The results have been alarm­ing for us. In your press we see a hor­ri­ble car­i­ca­ture and are told it is our true por­trait. In all jus­tice, we can­not let this pass by default.

Our case is quite sim­ple : For near­ly 2,000 years Pales­tine has been almost 100 per cent Arab. It is still pre­pon­der­ant­ly Arab today, in spite of enor­mous Jew­ish immi­gra­tion. But if this immi­gra­tion con­tin­ues we shall soon be out­num­bered — a minor­i­ty in our home.

Pales­tine is a small and very poor coun­try, about the size of your state of Ver­mont. Its Arab pop­u­la­tion is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zion­ist Jews. We are threat­ened with many hun­dreds of thou­sands more.

Our posi­tion is so sim­ple and nat­ur­al that we are amazed it should even be ques­tioned. It is exact­ly the same posi­tion you in Amer­i­ca take in regard to the unhap­py Euro­pean Jews. You are sor­ry for them, but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are for­eign­ers. We would not want hun­dreds of thou­sands of for­eign­ers in our coun­try, be they Eng­lish­men or Nor­we­gians or Brazil­ians or whatever.

Think for a moment : In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire pop­u­la­tion forced upon us. In Amer­i­ca that would be the equiv­a­lent of 45,000,000 com­plete strangers admit­ted to your coun­try, over your vio­lent protest, since 1921. How would you have react­ed to that ?

Because of our per­fect­ly nat­ur­al dis­like of being over­whelmed in our own home­land, we are called blind nation­al­ists and heart­less anti-Semi­tes. This charge would be ludi­crous were it not so dangerous.

No peo­ple on earth have been less anti-Semit­ic” than the Arabs. The per­se­cu­tion of the Jews has been con­fined almost entire­ly to the Chris­t­ian nations of the West. Jews, them­selves, will admit that nev­er since the Great Dis­per­sion did Jews devel­op so freely and reach such impor­tance as in Spain when it was an Arab pos­ses­sion. With very minor excep­tions, Jews have lived for many cen­turies in the Mid­dle East, in com­plete peace and friend­li­ness with their Arab neighbours.

Dam­as­cus, Bagh­dad, Beirut and oth­er Arab cen­tres have always con­tained large and pros­per­ous Jew­ish colonies. Until the Zion­ist inva­sion of Pales­tine began, these Jews received the most gen­er­ous treat­ment — far, far bet­ter than in Chris­t­ian Europe. Now, unhap­pi­ly, for the first time in his­to­ry, these Jews are begin­ning to feel the effects of Arab resis­tance to the Zion­ist assault. Most of them are as anx­ious as Arabs to stop it. Most of these Jews who have found hap­py homes among us resent, as we do, the com­ing of these strangers.

I was puz­zled for a long time about the odd belief which appar­ent­ly per­sists in Amer­i­ca that Pales­tine has some­how always been a Jew­ish land.” Recent­ly an Amer­i­can I talked to cleared up this mys­tery. He point­ed out that the only things most Amer­i­cans know about Pales­tine are what they read in the Bible. It was a Jew­ish land in those days, they rea­son, and they assume it has always remained so.

Noth­ing could be far­ther from the truth. It is absurd to reach so far back into the mists of his­to­ry to argue about who should have Pales­tine today, and I apol­o­gise for it. Yet the Jews do this, and I must reply to their his­toric claim.” I won­der if the world has ever seen a stranger sight than a group of peo­ple seri­ous­ly pre­tend­ing to claim a land because their ances­tors lived there some 2,000 years ago !

If you sug­gest that I am biased, I invite you to read any sound his­to­ry of the peri­od and ver­i­fy the facts.

Such frag­men­tary records as we have indi­cate that the Jews were wan­der­ing nomads from Iraq who moved to south­ern Turkey, came south to Pales­tine, stayed there a short time, and then passed to Egypt, where they remained about 400 years. About 1300 BC (accord­ing to your cal­en­dar) they left Egypt and grad­u­al­ly con­quered most — but not all — of the inhab­i­tants of Palestine.

It is sig­nif­i­cant that the Philistines — not the Jews — gave their name to the coun­try : Pales­tine” is mere­ly the Greek form of Philis­tia.”

Only once, dur­ing the empire of David and Solomon, did the Jews ever con­trol near­ly — but not all — the land which is today Pales­tine. This empire last­ed only 70 years, end­ing in 926 BC. Only 250 years lat­er the King­dom of Judah had shrunk to a small province around Jerusalem, bare­ly a quar­ter of mod­ern Palestine.

In 63 BC the Jews were con­quered by Roman Pom­pey, and nev­er again had even the ves­tige of inde­pen­dence. The Roman Emper­or Hadri­an final­ly wiped them out about 135 AD. He utter­ly destroyed Jerusalem, rebuilt under anoth­er name, and for hun­dreds of years no Jew was per­mit­ted to enter it. A hand­ful of Jews remained in Pales­tine but the vast major­i­ty were killed or scat­tered to oth­er coun­tries, in the Dias­po­ra, or the Great Dis­per­sion. From that time Pales­tine ceased to be a Jew­ish coun­try, in any con­ceiv­able sense.

This was 1,815 years ago, and yet the Jews solemn­ly pre­tend they still own Pales­tine ! If such fan­ta­sy were allowed, how the map of the world would dance about !

Ital­ians might claim Eng­land, which the Romans held so long. Eng­land might claim France, home­land” of the con­quer­ing Nor­mans. And the French Nor­mans might claim Nor­way, where their ances­tors orig­i­nat­ed. And inci­den­tal­ly, we Arabs might claim Spain, which we held for 700 years.

Many Mex­i­cans might claim Spain, home­land” of their fore­fa­thers. They might even claim Texas, which was Mex­i­can until 100 years ago. And sup­pose the Amer­i­can Indi­ans claimed the home­land” of which they were the sole, native, and ancient occu­pants until only some 450 years ago !

I am not being face­tious. All these claims are just as valid — or just as fan­tas­tic — as the Jew­ish his­toric con­nec­tion” with Pales­tine. Most are more valid.

In any event, the great Moslem expan­sion about 650 AD final­ly set­tled things. It dom­i­nat­ed Pales­tine com­plete­ly. From that day on, Pales­tine was solid­ly Ara­bic in pop­u­la­tion, lan­guage, and reli­gion. When British armies entered the coun­try dur­ing the last war, they found 500,000 Arabs and only 65,000 Jews.

If sol­id, unin­ter­rupt­ed Arab occu­pa­tion for near­ly 1,300 years does not make a coun­try Arab”, what does ?

The Jews say, and right­ly, that Pales­tine is the home of their reli­gion. It is like­wise the birth­place of Chris­tian­i­ty, but would any Chris­t­ian nation claim it on that account ? In pass­ing, let me say that the Chris­t­ian Arabs — and there are many hun­dreds of thou­sands of them in the Arab World — are in absolute agree­ment with all oth­er Arabs in oppos­ing the Zion­ist inva­sion of Palestine.

May I also point out that Jerusalem is, after Mec­ca and Med­i­na, the holi­est place in Islam. In fact, in the ear­ly days of our reli­gion, Moslems prayed toward Jerusalem instead of Mecca.

The Jew­ish reli­gious claim” to Pales­tine is as absurd as the his­toric claim.” The Holy Places, sacred to three great reli­gions, must be open to all, the monop­oly of none. Let us not con­fuse reli­gion and politics.

We are told that we are inhu­mane and heart­less because do not accept with open arms the per­haps 200,000 Jews in Europe who suf­fered so fright­ful­ly under Nazi cru­el­ty, and who even now — almost three years after war’s end — still lan­guish in cold, depress­ing camps.

Let me under­line sev­er­al facts. The unimag­in­able per­se­cu­tion of the Jews was not done by the Arabs : it was done by a Chris­t­ian nation in the West. The war which ruined Europe and made it almost impos­si­ble for these Jews to reha­bil­i­tate them­selves was fought by the Chris­t­ian nations of the West. The rich and emp­ty por­tions of the earth belong, not to the Arabs, but to the Chris­t­ian nations of the West.

And yet, to ease their con­sciences, these Chris­t­ian nations of the West are ask­ing Pales­tine — a poor and tiny Moslem coun­try of the East — to accept the entire bur­den. We have hurt these peo­ple ter­ri­bly,” cries the West to the East. Won’t you please take care of them for us?”

We find nei­ther log­ic nor jus­tice in this. Are we there­fore cru­el and heart­less nationalists”?

We are a gen­er­ous peo­ple : we are proud that Arab hos­pi­tal­i­ty” is a phrase famous through­out the world. We are a humane peo­ple : no one was shocked more than we by the Hit­lerite ter­ror. No one pities the present plight of the des­per­ate Euro­pean Jews more than we.

But we say that Pales­tine has already shel­tered 600,000 refugees. We believe that is enough to expect of us — even too much. We believe it is now the turn of the rest of the world to accept some of them.

I will be entire­ly frank with you. There is one thing the Arab world sim­ply can­not under­stand. Of all the nations of the earth, Amer­i­ca is most insis­tent that some­thing be done for these suf­fer­ing Jews of Europe. This feel­ing does cred­it to the human­i­ty for which Amer­i­ca is famous, and to that glo­ri­ous inscrip­tion on your Stat­ue of Liberty.

And yet this same Amer­i­ca — the rich­est, great­est, most pow­er­ful nation the world has ever known — refus­es to accept more than a token hand­ful of these same Jews herself !

I hope you will not think I am being bit­ter about this. I have tried hard to under­stand that mys­te­ri­ous para­dox, and I con­fess I can­not. Nor can any oth­er Arab.

Per­haps you have been informed that the Jews in Europe want to go to no oth­er place except Palestine.”

This myth is one of the great­est pro­pa­gan­da tri­umphs of the Jew­ish Agency for Pales­tine, the organ­i­sa­tion which pro­motes with fanat­ic zeal the emi­gra­tion to Pales­tine. It is a sub­tle half-truth, thus dou­bly dangerous.

The astound­ing truth is that nobody on earth real­ly knows where these unfor­tu­nate Jews real­ly want to go !

You would think that in so grave a prob­lem, the Amer­i­can, British, and oth­er author­i­ties respon­si­ble for the Euro­pean Jews would have made a very care­ful sur­vey, prob­a­bly by vote, to find out where each Jew actu­al­ly wants to go. Amaz­ing­ly enough this has nev­er been done ! The Jew­ish Agency has pre­vent­ed it.

Some time ago the Amer­i­can Mil­i­tary Gov­er­nor in Ger­many was asked at a press con­fer­ence how he was so cer­tain that all Jews there want­ed to go to Pales­tine. His answer was sim­ple : My Jew­ish advi­sors tell me so.” He admit­ted no poll had ever been made. Prepa­ra­tions were indeed begun for one, but the Jew­ish Agency stepped in to stop it.

The truth is that the Jews in Ger­man camps are now sub­ject­ed to a Zion­ist pres­sure cam­paign which learned much from the Nazi ter­ror. It is dan­ger­ous for a Jew to say that he would rather go to some oth­er coun­try, not Pales­tine. Such dis­senters have been severe­ly beat­en, and worse.

Not long ago, in Pales­tine, near­ly 1,000 Aus­tri­an Jews informed the inter­na­tion­al refugee organ­i­sa­tion that they would like to go back to Aus­tria, and plans were made to repa­tri­ate them.

The Jew­ish Agency heard of this, and exert­ed enough polit­i­cal pres­sure to stop it. It would be bad pro­pa­gan­da for Zion­ism if Jews began leav­ing Pales­tine. The near­ly 1,000 Aus­tri­an are still there, against their will.

The fact is that most of the Euro­pean Jews are West­ern in cul­ture and out­look, entire­ly urban in expe­ri­ence and habits. They can­not real­ly have their hearts set on becom­ing pio­neers in the bar­ren, arid, cramped land which is Palestine.

One thing, how­ev­er, is undoubt­ed­ly true. As mat­ters stand now, most refugee Jews in Europe would, indeed, vote for Pales­tine, sim­ply because they know no oth­er coun­try will have them.

If you or I were giv­en a choice between a near-prison camp for the rest of our lives — or Pales­tine — we would both choose Pales­tine, too.

But open up any oth­er alter­na­tive to them — give them any oth­er choice, and see what happens !

No poll, how­ev­er, will be worth any­thing unless the nations of the earth are will­ing to open their doors — just a lit­tle — to the Jews. In oth­er words, if in such a poll a Jew says he wants to go to Swe­den, Swe­den must be will­ing to accept him. If he votes for Amer­i­ca, you must let him come in.

Any oth­er kind of poll would be a farce. For the des­per­ate Jew, this is no idle test­ing of opin­ion : this is a grave mat­ter of life or death. Unless he is absolute­ly sure that his vote means some­thing, he will always vote for Pales­tine, so as not to risk his bird in the hand for one in the bush.

In any event, Pales­tine can accept no more. The 65,000 Jews in Pales­tine in 1918 have jumped to 600,000 today. We Arabs have increased, too, but not by immi­gra­tion. The Jews were then a mere 11 per cent of our pop­u­la­tion. Today they are one third of it.

The rate of increase has been ter­ri­fy­ing. In a few more years — unless stopped now — it will over­whelm us, and we shall be an impor­tant minor­i­ty in our own home.

Sure­ly the rest of the wide world is rich enough and gen­er­ous enough to find a place for 200,000 Jews — about one third the num­ber that tiny, poor Pales­tine has already shel­tered. For the rest of the world, it is hard­ly a drop in the buck­et. For us it means nation­al suicide.

We are some­times told that since the Jews came to Pales­tine, the Arab stan­dard of liv­ing has improved. This is a most com­pli­cat­ed ques­tion. But let us even assume, for the argu­ment, that it is true. We would rather be a bit poor­er, and mas­ters of our own home. Is this unnatural ?

The sor­ry sto­ry of the so-called Bal­four Dec­la­ra­tion,” which start­ed Zion­ist immi­gra­tion into Pales­tine, is too com­pli­cat­ed to repeat here in detail. It is ground­ed in bro­ken promis­es to the Arabs — promis­es made in cold print which admit no denying.

We utter­ly deny its valid­i­ty. We utter­ly deny the right of Great Britain to give away Arab land for a nation­al home” for an entire­ly for­eign people.

Even the League of Nations sanc­tion does not alter this. At the time, not a sin­gle Arab state was a mem­ber of the League. We were not allowed to say a word in our own defense.

I must point out, again in friend­ly frank­ness, that Amer­i­ca was near­ly as respon­si­ble as Britain for this Bal­four Dec­la­ra­tion. Pres­i­dent Wil­son approved it before it was issued, and the Amer­i­can Con­gress adopt­ed it word for word in a joint res­o­lu­tion on 30th June, 1922.

In the 1920s, Arabs were annoyed and insult­ed by Zion­ist immi­gra­tion, but not alarmed by it. It was steady, but fair­ly small, as even the Zion­ist founders thought it would remain. Indeed for some years, more Jews left Pales­tine than entered it — in 1927 almost twice as many.

But two new fac­tors, entire­ly unfore­seen by Britain or the League or Amer­i­ca or the most fer­vent Zion­ist, arose in the ear­ly thir­ties to raise the immi­gra­tion to undreamed heights. One was the World Depres­sion ; the sec­ond the rise of Hitler.

In 1932, the year before Hitler came to pow­er, only 9,500 Jews came to Pales­tine. We did not wel­come them, but we were not afraid that, at that rate, our sol­id Arab major­i­ty would ever be in danger.

But the next year — the year of Hitler — it jumped to 30,000 ! In 1934 it was 42,000 ! In 1935 it reached 61,000 !

It was no longer the order­ly arrival of ide­al­ist Zion­ists. Rather, all Europe was pour­ing its fright­ened Jews upon us. Then, at last, we, too, became fright­ened. We knew that unless this enor­mous influx stopped, we were, as Arabs, doomed in our Pales­tine home­land. And we have not changed our minds.

I have the impres­sion that many Amer­i­cans believe the trou­ble in Pales­tine is very remote from them, that Amer­i­ca had lit­tle to do with it, and that your only inter­est now is that of a humane bystander.

I believe that you do not realise how direct­ly you are, as a nation, respon­si­ble in gen­er­al for the whole Zion­ist move and specif­i­cal­ly for the present ter­ror­ism. I call this to your atten­tion because I am cer­tain that if you realise your respon­si­bil­i­ty you will act fair­ly to admit it and assume it.

Quite aside from offi­cial Amer­i­can sup­port for the Nation­al Home” of the Bal­four Dec­la­ra­tion, the Zion­ist set­tle­ments in Pales­tine would have been almost impos­si­ble, on any­thing like the cur­rent scale, with­out Amer­i­can mon­ey. This was con­tributed by Amer­i­can Jew­ry in an ide­al­is­tic effort to help their fellows.

The motive was wor­thy : the result were dis­as­trous. The con­tri­bu­tions were by pri­vate indi­vid­u­als, but they were almost entire­ly Amer­i­cans, and, as a nation, only Amer­i­ca can answer for it.

The present cat­a­stro­phe may be laid almost entire­ly at your door. Your gov­ern­ment, almost alone in the world, is insist­ing on the imme­di­ate admis­sion of 100,000 more Jews into Pales­tine — to be fol­lowed by count­less addi­tion­al ones. This will have the most fright­ful con­se­quences in bloody chaos beyond any­thing ever hint­ed at in Pales­tine before.

It is your press and polit­i­cal lead­er­ship, almost alone in the world, who press this demand. It is almost entire­ly Amer­i­can mon­ey which hires or buys the refugee ships” that steam ille­gal­ly toward Pales­tine : Amer­i­can mon­ey which pays their crews. The ille­gal immi­gra­tion from Europe is arranged by the Jew­ish Agency, sup­port­ed almost entire­ly by Amer­i­can funds. It is Amer­i­can dol­lars which sup­port the ter­ror­ists, which buy the bul­lets and pis­tols that kill British sol­diers — your allies — and Arab cit­i­zens — your friends.

We in the Arab world were stunned to hear that you per­mit open adver­tise­ments in news­pa­pers ask­ing for mon­ey to finance these ter­ror­ists, to arm them open­ly and delib­er­ate­ly for mur­der. We could not believe this could real­ly hap­pen in the mod­ern world. Now we must believe it : we have seen the adver­tise­ments with our own eyes.

I point out these things because noth­ing less than com­plete frank­ness will be of use. The cri­sis is too stark for mere polite vague­ness which means nothing.

I have the most com­plete con­fi­dence in the fair-mind­ed­ness and gen­eros­i­ty of the Amer­i­can pub­lic. We Arabs ask no favours. We ask only that you know the full truth, not half of it. We ask only that when you judge the Pales­tine ques­tion, you put your­selves in our place.

What would your answer be if some out­side agency told you that you must accept in Amer­i­ca many mil­lions of utter strangers in your midst — enough to dom­i­nate your coun­try — mere­ly because they insist­ed on going to Amer­i­ca, and because their fore­fa­thers had once lived there some 2,000 years ago ?

Our answer is the same.

And what would be your action if, in spite of your refusal, this out­side agency began forc­ing them on you ?

Ours will be the same. King Abdullah I: As the Arabs See The Jews 8

Abdul­lah I was the first King of Jor­dan. This arti­cle was pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Mag­a­zine, Novem­ber, 1947

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