A letter to our Muslim friends.

This is written in love, to all who guard the oneness of God. You love God. You guard His oneness with a zeal that puts many who call themselves Christians to shame, and that zeal is not lost on us — it is honoured. So let me be plain about how I want to speak to you: I will quote your own Book, the Qur'an, and treat it fairly. I will not use the word the later councils invented — the word that has caused so much of the misunderstanding between us. And I will keep the whole letter on one question, the question everything turns on: who is Jesus, the Messiah, the son of Mary?

We share more than is usually admitted. We both believe there is one God, the Creator of all, beside Whom there is no other. We both honour a line of prophets — Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David. We both abhor idolatry, the dividing of God, the worship of created things. And we both hold the Messiah in the highest honour. If we begin where we agree and walk slowly from there, I think you will find that the road leads somewhere you were taught it could not. This study has a close companion in The Godhead, where the doctrine of the one true God and His only-begotten Son is laid out in full from the Scriptures.

We do not worship three gods

Let me clear away first the thing that rightly horrifies you. The Qur'an pictures a day when God asks the Messiah whether He told people to take Him and His mother as two gods beside God (Qur'an 5:116). Hear me carefully: we have never believed that, and we reject it as firmly as you do. To worship Mary as a deity is an abomination; to imagine God as one of three equal beings is not the faith of the Bible. What the Scriptures actually teach is this: there is one God, the Father, the only true God and the source of all; there is His Son, Whom He sent into the world; and there is the Spirit of God, His own living presence. One God, not three. The Son Himself prays to the Father as “the only true God” and calls Himself the One sent:

Notice that Jesus does not put Himself in the place of God; He points past Himself to the Father as the only true God, and names Himself the sent One. That is not the speech of a man claiming to be a second deity. It is the speech of a Son.

The Son you were taught to deny

Your own Book gives the Messiah honours it gives no one else. It teaches that He was born of a virgin, by the word of God, without a human father. It calls Him sinless. It says God raised Him to Himself. No other prophet in the Qur'an is spoken of this way. And yet there is one thing it recoils from with horror — the idea that “the Most Merciful has taken a son” (Sura 19:88-92), calling it a monstrous thing, as if the very heavens might split at the blasphemy.

I understand that recoil, and I honour what is behind it. The world into which Islam came was full of pagan gods who took wives and fathered children — Zeus and his offspring, the gods of Arabia with their daughters. If “son of God” means that — God taking a partner and producing a child by physical generation — then I reject it too, and so does the Bible. But that is not what the Scriptures mean, and it is worth letting them say what they do mean before the door is shut.

What “begotten” does and does not mean

When the Bible calls Jesus the only-begotten Son, it does not mean God took a wife. It does not mean a moment when a man named Jesus was manufactured out of nothing like the rest of creation. It means something higher and stranger: that the Son was brought forth from the Father's own being, before there was a world — not made, but begotten; not a creature, but truly from God. Wisdom, which the New Testament identifies with Christ, says it of itself:

Think of how light comes from a fire. The light is not the fire, yet it is not a separate, lesser thing made by the fire from the outside — it comes out of the fire, of the same nature, and the fire is never for an instant without its light. So the Son comes forth from the Father, of the Father's own nature, fully divine because He is from God — and yet the oneness of God is not broken, because He is not a second source standing beside the Father. He is from the one Source, the Father. There is still one God. That is why we can confess the full divinity of the Son and the absolute oneness of God in the same breath, without contradiction.

The Word and the Spirit from God

Here is something your own Book says that no other prophet is ever given. The Qur'an calls Jesus the Word of God and a spirit from Him (Sura 4:171). Stop and weigh that. Moses is not called the Word of God. Abraham is not called a spirit from God. Only the Messiah. Where do those titles lead? Open the Gospel and read how it begins:

The very name your Book reserves for Jesus alone — the Word of God — is the name the Gospel uses to explain Who He is and where He came from: the Word that was with God in the beginning, by Whom all things were made, made flesh and dwelling among us. The thread is already in your hands. It leads to the Son.

The God who shows His face

You hold, rightly, that God is high above His creation — beyond picturing, beyond containing. We hold that too. But consider the longing God Himself put in the human heart. We do not only want to be commanded by God; we want to know Him. A servant can obey a master he has never seen. A child wants the father's face. And the wonder of the gospel is that the unseen God, without ever ceasing to be high and holy, drew near enough to be known — in His Son:

When Jesus said, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9), He did not mean that He was the Father — He had just been praying to the Father. He meant that the Father's own character, mercy, and heart were perfectly shown in Him, as the light shows the fire. This is the difference at the centre of everything: a master demands; a Father gives. Islam gives you a God to obey, and that is no small thing. The gospel offers you, on top of it, a God you may know — Who has shown you His face in His Son.

Why the Son had to die

I know your Book denies that the Messiah was crucified — that it appeared so, but that God took Him up instead (Sura 4:157). Let me say two things gently. First, on the plain ground of history: the death of Jesus by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is one of the best-attested events of the ancient world, recorded not only by His followers but by hostile Roman and Jewish sources within the century. To deny it is to deny the historical record itself. But the deeper question is why — why would God allow His sinless One to die?

Because of the one problem every honest soul runs into: God is just, and God is merciful, and our sin sets those two against each other. A judge who simply waved away every crime would not be good; he would be corrupt. Yet we need mercy, or we are lost. At the cross both are kept whole. The sinless Son takes into Himself the penalty we earned, so that God can forgive the guilty without ceasing to be just. And He did it freely — no one forced Him:

And then — what your own Book half-remembers — He rose. This is the hinge of everything, and it is where a prophet and a Saviour part ways. A dead prophet leaves you his words. A risen Saviour gives you His life. Islam can hand you a law to keep. The risen Christ offers to come and live in you and keep it with you.

The story remembered in pieces

The Qur'an honours the same prophets the Bible does, but it tells them as separate stories, each a messenger sent to warn. The Bible binds them into a single thread, every one of them leaning forward toward the same coming Redeemer. Watch it in the story you already know — Abraham, asked to give up his only son:

God stopped Abraham's hand and provided a ram in the son's place. Why put a father through such a thing? Because it was a rehearsal — a picture, planted two thousand years early, of a Father who would one day give His own only Son, and not be stopped. The whole of the older Scriptures works this way: Joseph betrayed and raised to save his brothers; the Passover lamb whose blood turns death aside; the priests and the daily sacrifices — all of them shadows cast backward by the cross that was coming. And mark one thing the Bible does that no mere human book would dare: it does not hide the sins of its heroes. Abraham lies; Moses kills; David commits adultery and murder. The Book tells it all, because the point is not how great the prophets were. The point is that every man needs a Saviour — and only one Man ever walked the earth Who did not.

A Father, not only a Master

Here is perhaps the deepest difference, and I say it without insult. In Islam, God is Master and you are His slave — 'abd, the servant — and that relationship is real and reverent. But the Bible dares to let God be called something more: Father. Consider even how the two Books treat God's own word. The Qur'an teaches that a verse may be abrogated — set aside for a better one (Sura 2:106). The God of the Bible says of Himself, “I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6), and instead of merely issuing decrees, He reasons with His people:

A master does not say let us reason together. A father does. And the single verse that has carried more weight than any other in all the world says the same thing in one line — that God did not merely command from a distance, but gave:

The Book you call corrupt — and trust

You may have been taught that the Jews and Christians corrupted their Scriptures, and that this is why the Bible differs from the Qur'an. But notice the difficulty your own Book creates here. The Qur'an tells the doubter to “ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you” (Sura 10:94), and calls the Torah and the Gospel “a guidance and a light” (Sura 5:46). But you cannot have it both ways. If the earlier Scriptures were trustworthy in the Prophet's own day — trustworthy enough to send a doubter to them — then they were not corrupt. And if they were corrupt, why send anyone to them at all? Either way, the charge of corruption collapses.

And the manuscripts agree. We hold copies of these Scriptures from long before Muhammad — the Dead Sea Scrolls carry the Hebrew prophets a thousand years older than we once had them, and the Greek Gospels survive in thousands of early copies — and they say the same things our Bibles say today. The text was not changed. So I ask you for one thing only: read it for yourself. Not as an enemy hunting for errors, but as a seeker who already loves God and wants the truth about His Messiah.