The Islamic Dilemma has lately been restated in a form said to need no theology at all: anyone, believer or not, can run it. In this form it has two steps. First, the Qur’an affirms that the Torah and the Injīl held by the Jews and Christians of the seventh century are inspired, preserved and authoritative. Second, the Qur’an contradicts doctrines that stand inside those books, above all the crucifixion, the divine sonship of Jesus and the manner of his miracles. A book that affirms and contradicts the same scripture cannot, it is concluded, come from an all-knowing God. Four ways out are then offered and each is said to be unbearable for a Muslim: the Qur’an’s prophet stories are allegory; the Qur’an addresses some lost sect with its own books; the Qur’an’s author claimed to confirm what he did not confirm; or Christians of the fourth century held a salvific scripture that also taught what the Qur’an calls shirk.
A historically minded reply to this restatement has also been made, and it has been widely shared. It grants the first step outright and attacks the second with the tools of historical-critical scholarship: the Qur’an, it argues, alleges distortion of interpretation rather than lost books, and nearly every supposed contradiction dissolves once the verses are read in the discourse of their own century. Much of that reply is sound and is used below. Part of it concedes more than the Qur’an says, and that part is set aside with reasons. This page does three things: it answers the restated argument point by point; it marks where the historical reply holds and where this website departs from it; and it turns the argument’s own method back on the gospels.
The missing fifth exit
The four exits listed above share one assumption, which is the assumption the whole argument rests on: that the Injīl the Qur’an affirms is identical with the four gospels, so that affirming the one means endorsing every sentence of the other. The Qur’an does not say this, and the fifth exit, the Qur’an’s own, is the one the list leaves out. The Injīl is what God gave to Jesus, “guidance and light” (5:46). The gospels are, on their own account, books written about him by others: Luke opens by saying that “many” had already drawn up accounts and that he used what was handed down (Luke 1:1-4). The Qur’an calls itself muṣaddiq, confirming, and muhaymin, guardian, over the scripture before it (5:48), and a guardian keeps what is true and sets aside what is not. The revelation lies within the books; it is not the books. Every answer below returns to that distinction, which is set out in full on the Islamic Dilemma, answered and applied on the measure.
The first step: what the Qur’an says is “with them”
The restated argument needs the first step in a strong form: the books in seventh-century hands are affirmed as preserved and authoritative, whole. The historical reply grants it. This website grants a weaker and more exact form, because that is what the verses say.
What the Qur’an plainly holds is that the Torah and the Injīl were present with the Jews and Christians it addressed. It tells them to bring the Torah and read it (3:93). It says the Prophet is “written with them in the Torah and the Injīl” (7:157). It asks how they come to the Prophet for judgement “when they have the Torah, in which is God’s judgement” (5:43). It accuses them of concealing the truth “while they know” (2:146; 3:71), and one can only conceal what one has. On this point the historical reply is right and so are the argument’s proponents: the Qur’an does not say the earlier scripture was lost.
What the Qur’an never says is that the books in their hands were preserved whole and were authoritative in every line. It says the opposite in the same breath. Some “write the book with their own hands and then say, This is from God” (2:79). Some “alter words from their places” (4:46; 5:13), “twist their tongues with the book so that you think it is from the book, and it is not from the book” (3:78), and “forgot a portion of what they were reminded of” (5:13-14). The People of the Book are told that the Prophet “makes clear to you much of what you used to hide of the book” (5:15). A book of which “much” is hidden, and to which men have added pages of their own, is not affirmed whole. It is affirmed as the place where the revelation is to be found, among other things.
The historical reply reads 2:79 well, and the reading supports this website rather than the argument. The verse that follows quotes the people in question saying that the Fire will touch them only for a number of days (2:80), a rabbinic teaching (Mishnah ʿEduyot 2:10 gives the punishment of the wicked as twelve months). The charge is that human teaching was being passed off as the word of God, not that the scroll of the Torah had been rewritten. The Christian writer Tertullian, in the third century, made the same complaint of the heretics of his day: “one man perverts the scriptures with his hand, another their meaning by his exposition” (De praescriptione haereticorum 38). Marcion cut the text with a knife; Valentinus kept the text and changed its sense. Tertullian did not think the Bible lost; he thought it mishandled. That is exactly the Qur’an’s complaint, and it is exactly what the gospels are: the sayings of Jesus, carried in books by men who shaped, arranged and added to them. The synoptic problem shows the shaping being done, by the gospel writers themselves, within a generation.
So the first step is granted in this form only: the revelation given to Jesus was present with the Christians of the seventh century, carried in the books they read, which also carried what others had written. That is not a concession to the argument. It is the Qur’an’s own position, and it is why there is no dilemma. The argument’s force depends entirely on the strong form, and the strong form is not in the text.
The second step: the contradictions, one by one
The crucifixion
All four gospels narrate the crucifixion, and the Qur’an says “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them” (4:157). The argument counts this as a contradiction of an affirmed book. It is a contradiction of the gospel writers’ report, measured by the Qur’an, and the measure is the point: a guardian over the record may say where the record is wrong. The case for the Qur’an’s account, from the earliest Christian witnesses to a substitute onward, is on the end of his earthly mission and in section 26 of the gospel.
The historical reply here goes a step too far in the other direction. It suggests that the early commentators show “nuance” on the crucifixion, as if some early opinion allowed that the Qur’an does not deny it, and that only Ibn Ḥazm in the eleventh century hardened the denial into dogma. The record does not bear that out. What the early reports differ about is the identity of the substitute and whether Jesus tasted death before he was raised: Ibn ʿAbbās is reported to read mutawaffīka in 3:55 as “causing you to die”, Wahb ibn Munabbih gives three hours of death and Ibn Isḥāq seven, and all of them then have God raise him. No early authority reports that the Jews crucified Jesus. Ibn Ḥazm did not invent the denial; he ruled on those who denied the denial. The commentaries themselves, translated in full, are on the classical commentaries, and the reader can test this against the texts rather than against anyone’s summary.
Divine sonship, and why the Qur’an polices a word
The argument says the gospels teach that Jesus is the Son of God and the Qur’an denies it. The historical reply answers that “son of God” in the Hebrew Bible was the language of a king and his vassal, of Israel (Exodus 4:22), David (Psalm 2:7; 2 Samuel 7:14), the judges (Psalm 82:6) and the people (Hosea 11:1), and that Arabic walad means begotten offspring and nothing else, so the Qur’an refused the word because its hearers, pagan and Christian alike, took it as physical descent (6:101; 19:88-92; 43:57-58). The second half of that is overstated: Arabic can use ibn figuratively, as the Qur’an itself does of the wayfarer, ibn al-sabīl (2:177). The first half is right and is enough. The gospels keep the old usage: the peacemakers “shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9), Adam is “the son of God” (Luke 3:38), and Jesus answers the charge of blasphemy by quoting Psalm 82, “I said, you are gods” (John 10:34-36). The Qur’an denies what it names: that God “took a son” (ittakhadha waladan, 19:88-92), that He begets (112:3), that a man is to be worshipped as God (5:116-117). It does not deny that God loves, chooses and draws near His servants; it calls Abraham His friend (4:125). What it refuses is a title that, in the mouths of the Christians it addressed, had come to mean a second divine person. On this it agrees with the gospels as the measure reads them, and the reading is set out on John and the Jesus who speaks of himself.
“We are the children of God and His beloved” (5:18)
The argument treats 5:18 as a denial of a biblical doctrine, since the Torah calls Israel God’s children (Deuteronomy 14:1). The historical reply shows that the verse quotes a rabbinic saying almost word for word, “Beloved are Israel, for they are called children of God” (Mishnah Avot 3:14), and answers it with the Torah’s own conditional covenant: “they have dealt corruptly with Him; they are not His children” (Deuteronomy 32:5), “you are not My people” (Hosea 1:9). That is correct, and the gospel says the same. When his hearers claim Abraham as their father, Jesus answers that if they were Abraham’s children they would do Abraham’s works, and that if God were their Father they would love him (John 8:39-42). John the Baptist tells them God can raise up children to Abraham from stones (Matthew 3:9). The Qur’an’s question, “then why does He punish you for your sins?”, is the gospel’s own argument. There is no contradiction to find.
Miracles “by God’s permission”
The argument finds a contradiction in the Qur’an’s repeated “by My permission” over the healings and the raising of the dead (3:49; 5:110), since Mark has Jesus heal and forgive without invoking any authority, and the scribes call it blasphemy (Mark 2:5-7). But the gospels themselves supply the permission. Matthew, retelling the same scene, ends it with the crowd glorifying God “who had given such authority to men” (Matthew 9:8). Jesus looks up to heaven and sighs before he heals (Mark 7:34), thanks the Father before he calls Lazarus (John 11:41-42), says he can do nothing of himself (John 5:30) and that “the Father who dwells in me does the works” (John 14:10), and casts out devils “by the finger of God” (Luke 11:20). Peter’s first sermon calls him “a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him” (Acts 2:22), and Peter again: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; he went about doing good and healing, for God was with him” (Acts 10:38). The Qur’an’s phrase is Peter’s. The historical reply adds that the Qur’an is answering two audiences at once, the Jewish charge that the signs were sorcery (compare 5:110, “those who disbelieved among them said, This is nothing but plain magic”, and 61:6) and the Christian inference that they made him God. That is the measure at work: the signs are kept, the two false readings of them are set aside.
The “I am” sayings of John
The argument rests its weight at last on John: “I and the Father are one” (10:30), “my Lord and my God” (20:28), and the prologue’s Word that “was God”. The historical reply, following a Muslim academic, offers a Sunni reading of each: unity of will and commission rather than of essence, as the Qur’an says “whoever obeys the Messenger has obeyed God” (4:80) and “you did not throw when you threw, but God threw” (8:17); the vocative of surprise in Thomas’s cry; the Word as God’s creative and revelatory agent, as the rabbis read it. Some of this is defensible. This website does not need it, and does not take the route of reconciling every verse of John with the Qur’an, because the measure is a measure and not a harmony. John is the latest of the four and the one in which Jesus speaks of himself in a voice the other three do not know. Where John has him say what the others do not, and what the Qur’an sets aside, the measure marks it as beyond the revelation, and the reasons are given on the John page. The measure keeps a great deal of John, and the Qur’an echoes much of it: “the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (17:3), “the Father is greater than I” (14:28), “I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20:17), which the Qur’an gives back as “God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him” (3:51; 19:36; 43:64). The argument’s proponents say the author of John meant to equate Jesus with God and that no charitable reading can avoid it. If so, the author of John is one of the men whose hands the Qur’an describes, and the dilemma has no second horn.
“The Injīl commands offensive war” (9:111)
The argument says 9:111 attributes to the Torah and the Injīl a promise that those who fight and are slain in God’s way have Paradise, and that no gospel says any such thing; a human author, not knowing the canon, could make that slip. The historical reply points out that the verse speaks of a promise, not a command: God has bought the believers’ lives for Paradise, “a true promise binding upon Him in the Torah and the Injīl and the Qur’an”. The promise that the one who gives his life for God receives life is in all three. The Torah has Israel fight at God’s command with God fighting for them (Deuteronomy 20:1-4) and the psalmist say “for Your sake we are killed all the day long” (Psalm 44:22), which Paul quotes of the martyrs (Romans 8:36). The gospel has “whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35), “blessed are those persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10-12), “today you will be with me in Paradise” to the man dying beside him (Luke 23:43), and “be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10). Christians read these as the charter of martyrdom for six centuries before the Qur’an. The verse does not say the Injīl orders a campaign. It says the bargain is old, and it is.
“This is in the scrolls of Abraham and Moses” (87:19)
The argument says 87:18-19 places the Qur’an’s descriptions of the Garden and the Fire in the scripture of Moses, where they are not. But the “this” of verse 18 is what the preceding verses say: he prospers who purifies himself and remembers his Lord’s name and prays, “but you prefer the life of this world, and the Hereafter is better and more lasting” (87:14-17). That is the teaching of Deuteronomy 30:19-20, “choose life”, of Moses’ lament that his people would not “consider their latter end” (Deuteronomy 32:29), and of the one psalm the Bible ascribes to Moses, “teach us to number our days” (Psalm 90:12). The scrolls of Abraham the Bible does not contain; Jewish and Christian antiquity knew several books under his name. The verse says nothing about the furniture of Paradise.
“The Qur’an says Jesus was literate”
The restatement claims, from 3:48 and 5:110, that the Qur’an says Jesus was taught to write, and builds on it. This is a slip. The verses say God taught him “the Book and the Wisdom and the Torah and the Injīl”; al-kitāb is a noun, the scripture, not the act of writing, and the pairing of the Book with the Wisdom is the Qur’an’s fixed formula for what a prophet is taught (2:129; 62:2). The historical reply caught this and the restatement’s author accepted the correction. It is worth recording because the whole argument depends on reading Arabic terms as an English reader would, and this is a small instance of what that costs.
“The Qur’an does not know the canon”
The argument says the Qur’an shows it does not know what the Injīl contains, since it recounts the clay birds and the speech from the cradle, which are in no gospel, and speaks of “the Injīl” in the singular. Two answers. The Qur’an nowhere says that the clay birds or the cradle are in the Injīl; it recounts them as God’s favours to Jesus (5:110), and the Christians of the Near East told those very stories, which stand in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Arabic Infancy Gospel. What the Qur’an says is in the Injīl it names: guidance, light and admonition (5:46), the description of the Prophet (7:157), the likeness of the believers as a growing crop (48:29), and the promise of 9:111. The singular is the Christians’ own usage, “the Gospel according to”, one gospel in four tellings, and the gospel in widest use in Syriac was Tatian’s harmony, a single book. On this the historical reply and the argument’s proponents agree, and so does this website; the singular tells for the Qur’an’s knowledge of its audience, not against it.
The Prophet “written with them”
The argument sets a higher bar for the Qur’an than for the New Testament: the Qur’an says Jews and Christians “know him as they know their sons” (2:146; 6:20) and that he is “written with them” (7:157), so the description must be plain and the communities must have been convinced, whereas Matthew only offers typology. The verses do not say the communities were convinced; the same verse says a party of them “conceal the truth while they know” (2:146). The claim is that the learned recognised the description and that some hid it, which is a claim about knowledge, not about assent. The texts Muslims have always read this way are on the good news of Aḥmad: the prophet like Moses from among their brethren (Deuteronomy 18:18), the one who comes from Paran (Deuteronomy 33:2; Habakkuk 3:3), the servant in whom Kedar and Sela rejoice (Isaiah 42:1-11), and the Counsellor who will not speak of himself (John 16:13). Whether those texts persuade is a fair question. What is not fair is the double standard, and the next section turns to it.
Christians of the fourth century
The last exit offered is said to be the hardest: on the Qur’an’s terms Christians three centuries before the Prophet held a scripture that could save them and that also taught shirk. The Qur’an has an answer and gives it. It says of those who believed in God and the Last Day and did right among the Jews, Christians and Sabians that they have their reward (2:62; 5:69), that among the People of the Book is “an upright community who recite God’s verses in the night” (3:113-115), that God gave “those of them who believed their reward” while “many of them are transgressors” (57:27), that the followers of Jesus fell into sects (19:37; 43:65), and that God does not punish until He has sent a messenger (17:15). A Christian of the fourth century who followed the guidance in his gospel was on the path; one who built on the additions was judged by what he knew. That is not an embarrassment. It is the position of every tradition that believes God spoke before it did.
Confirming, the Book and the law
The historical reply does its best work on the verbs. Muṣaddiq, confirming, in 5:44-48 and 3:50, is used of Jesus confirming the Torah while making lawful part of what had been forbidden, which is the claim of the Sermon on the Mount, “I came not to abolish but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17), and of the Didascalia Apostolorum, a church order read across the Syriac world, which taught that Christ confirmed the law and lifted the “second legislation” laid on Israel after the calf. In 5:45 the Qur’an cites the law of retaliation from Exodus 21:23-25, insists on it against the rabbinic practice of commuting it to money (Mishnah Bava Qamma 8:1), and then opens the door that Matthew 5:38-39 opens: whoever forgoes it as charity, it is an expiation for him. The Qur’an is arbitrating between the Torah’s letter and the gospel’s mercy and binding both. Muhaymin in 5:48, guardian or arbiter, sits in a verse whose verb is “judge”, so the debate over the word changes little; a guardian who judges is an arbiter, and both readings are given on the measure. And al-kitāb, when the Qur’an says it confirms “the Book” before it, most often means the Torah, the scripture of law and history; the Injīl is paired instead with “the Wisdom” (5:110), and the jinn who hear the Qur’an say it confirms “what came after Moses” (46:30). All of this strengthens the pillar page’s second answer: to confirm is to confirm the revelation, in the first place its law and its account of God, and not to countersign every page of every book.
Where this website parts from the historical reply
- It does not grant the first step as the argument states it. The Qur’an affirms that the revelation was present with the People of the Book; it does not affirm their books whole, and it names the kinds of alteration it has in mind, of meaning (3:78; 4:46) and of text (2:79). This website uses either charge only where it can be shown from the texts, as the measure sets out.
- It does not identify the Injīl with the four gospels, or with Tatian’s harmony. The gospels carry the Injīl and carry other things. The historical reply, having said that the Qur’an “is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John” in paraphrase, has no way left to say where the Qur’an and John part company except to reinterpret John, and that is the trap the argument sets.
- It does not say the early Muslim commentators were undecided about the crucifixion. They were undecided about the substitute and about whether Jesus died before being raised. The translated commentaries are on the site for anyone to check.
- It does not rest the answer on any one school. The reply notes that literalist readers are a minority among Muslims and that Sufi and Shia traditions carry a higher prophetology able to absorb John’s language. That may be so. The measure used here needs none of it: the Qur’an as it reads, and the gospels as they read, are enough.
- It does not say that no argument can touch a scripture. The reply ends by saying that no polemic can prove a scripture false and that each side should stop. This website makes a narrower claim and stands by it: the gospels, read by their own evidence, are layered books by several hands, and the Qur’an is the measure over them. That is a claim about texts and it can be checked.
The biblical dilemma
The argument asks the Qur’an for a standard of agreement with the earlier scripture that its own proponents could not survive. If “confirm” must mean that every doctrine of the New Testament stands written in the Old, then the New Testament fails first, and by a wider margin. Isaiah 7:14, read by Matthew of the virgin birth (Matthew 1:22-23), is in its own context a sign to King Ahaz about a young woman (ʿalmāh) and a child to be born within a few years, before the Assyrian threat passed. Hosea 11:1, “out of Egypt I called My son”, which Matthew applies to the flight to Egypt (Matthew 2:15), names Israel as the son and the Exodus as the calling. The servant of Isaiah 53 is named as Israel in the surrounding chapters (Isaiah 41:8; 44:1; 49:3). Matthew says the prophets wrote “he shall be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23) and no prophet did. Matthew reads Zechariah’s one animal as two (Matthew 21:5-7) and credits Jeremiah with Zechariah’s thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 27:9). No text of the Hebrew Bible names a Messiah called Jesus. The historical reply is right to note that Gabriel Said Reynolds, no Muslim, has written that the Qur’an stands closer to the New Testament than the New Testament stands to the Hebrew Bible.
Christian apologists meet all this with typology: the earlier text foreshadows the later, and the later reveals what the earlier meant. That is a legitimate way to read scripture. It is also exactly the way the Qur’an reads the earlier scripture, retelling its stories, as the historical reply puts it, as a homily or a targum does, assuming the hearer knows why Sarah laughed (11:71) and why the priests cast lots for Mary (3:44), varying the detail (the beast that took Joseph is a wolf, 12:17) and drawing out the meaning. The Qur’an calls itself “a detailed exposition of the Book” (tafṣīl al-kitāb, 10:37). The apologist who allows typology to Matthew and forbids it to the Qur’an, who rejects every text Muslims read of Muhammad by historical context and reads Isaiah 7:14 of Jesus by faith, is using two measures. Whichever measure he keeps, he loses the argument: with the strict one the New Testament falls before the Qur’an is reached; with the generous one the Qur’an’s confirmation of the earlier scripture is no more strained than Matthew’s. And a Christian who presses the strict measure against the Qur’an in public has handed the secular critic the knife and shown him where to cut. That, and not any wish to spare the Qur’an, is why the historically minded critics of the argument call it a dilemma for the Christian.
What the restated argument gets right
Fairness requires the list. The Qur’an does engage the gospels in their sixth- and seventh-century forms, including the infancy traditions and Tatian’s harmony, because those were the forms its hearers knew; this website says so on how this gospel was composed. The Qur’an does disagree with the gospel writers on the crucifixion and with John on the person of Jesus, and no reading of the verbs makes those disagreements go away; this website does not try to make them go away, it explains them. And the question the argument asks, what the Injīl is and where it is, is the right question. The answer is the one the Qur’an gives and the gospels illustrate: a revelation given to a man, carried by other men in books that bear their marks.
Questions about the argument in this form
Can the Islamic Dilemma be argued without theology?
It can be stated without theology, and it fails without theology, because its first step misreports the Qur’an. The Qur’an says the earlier revelation is present with the People of the Book and that their books also contain what men wrote and misread (2:79; 3:78; 5:15). No faith is needed to see that the strong form of the first step is not in the text.
Does Qur’an 9:111 say the Gospel commands war?
No. It says a promise is found in the Torah, the Injīl and the Qur’an: that the one who gives his life in God’s way has Paradise. Mark 8:35, Matthew 5:10-12, Luke 23:43 and Revelation 2:10 state that promise, and Christians had read them as the charter of martyrdom for six centuries.
Does the Qur’an contradict the gospels on how Jesus worked miracles?
No. The Qur’an says he healed and raised the dead “by God’s permission” (3:49; 5:110). Matthew says the crowd glorified God “who had given such authority to men” (9:8), John has Jesus thank the Father before raising Lazarus (11:41-42), and Peter calls him “a man attested by God with wonders which God did through him” (Acts 2:22).
Does Qur’an 5:18 deny what the Torah says about Israel?
No. It quotes the rabbinic saying that Israel is beloved as God’s children (Mishnah Avot 3:14) and answers it as Deuteronomy 32:5, Hosea 1:9, Matthew 3:9 and John 8:39-42 answer it: the relationship is conditional on obedience.
Did early Muslim scholars accept that Jesus was crucified?
No. They differed about who was made to resemble him and about whether he died before being raised, and all of them held that the one crucified was another. The claim that Ibn Ḥazm invented the denial reverses the record. The commentaries are translated in full on the classical commentaries.
Does the Qur’an say Jesus was taught to write?
No. It says God taught him “the Book and the Wisdom” (3:48; 5:110), the fixed phrase for a prophet’s instruction in scripture (2:129; 62:2). The claim that this means literacy is a misreading that the argument’s own interlocutors have corrected.
Sources
- Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 38; Mishnah Avot 3:14, ʿEduyot 2:10, Bava Qamma 8:1; the Didascalia Apostolorum, chapter 26, on the second legislation.
- Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge, 2010), and “On the Qurʾānic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (taḥrīf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 130 (2010); “The Muslim Jesus: Dead or Alive?”, Bulletin of SOAS 72 (2009).
- Nicolai Sinai, Key Terms of the Qur’an: A Critical Dictionary (Princeton, 2023), entries on ṣaddaqa, haymana and kitāb.
- Holger Zellentin, The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of Departure (Mohr Siebeck, 2013).
- Mohsen Goudarzi, “The Second Coming of the Book: Rethinking Qur’anic Scripturology and Prophetology” (PhD dissertation, Harvard, 2018).
- Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic (Princeton, 2013), on the Diatessaron and the absence of an early Arabic Bible.
- Todd Lawson, The Crucifixion and the Qur’an (Oneworld, 2009), a survey of the commentaries on 4:157.
- Michael Meerson and Peter Schäfer (eds), Toledot Yeshu: The Life Story of Jesus (Mohr Siebeck, 2014).
- Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted (HarperOne, 2009), and Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (updated edn, Yale, 1993), on Matthew’s use of the prophets.
- Ibn Ḥazm, al-Fiṣal fī al-milal wa-l-ahwāʾ wa-l-niḥal, on the Torah, the gospels and the crucifixion.
Read next: The Islamic Dilemma, answered · The measure · The end of his earthly mission · Responses to named articles