In his book The Living Word of God , Ben Witherington wraps up the issue of errors in the New Testament. He has six points that are important to keep in mind when we hear complaints from critics who claim they have found errors in these documents.

First, it’s not considered an error when an author intends to give a general report or the gist of something rather than a precise report. His generalizing is not falsifying the story.

Second, it’s not considered an error if an author of ancient literature arranged, edited, or paraphrased what someone said. For example Matthew uses the term “kingdom of heaven” rather than the phrase “kingdom of God” used by Mark in the same passage. We should not impose a modern standard of precision which these ancient authors were not required to follow according to the writing customs of their day.

Third, it’s not considered an error to present events out of chronological order. For example, John 2 puts the cleansing of the temple there for theological, not chronological reasons.

Fourth, it’s not considered an error of the original author if a translator makes a mistake when rendering the original into another language.

Fifth, it’s not considered an error when a New Testament author discusses the Old Testament text and appears to misrepresent it. In fact, they are often just paraphrasing the text rather than being concerned about a precise translation.

Sixth, we need to understand what an error would look like. It would violate the principle of noncontradiction, which says that A and not-A cannot both be true at the same time in the same way. For example, it would be an error if one of the gospels said Jesus was born in Nazareth, and another said he was born in Bethlehem. They might both be wrong, but they can’t both be right.

When we hear critics talk about errors in the Bible, we should remember something that Ben Witherington said: “I have yet to find a single example of a clear violation of the principal of noncontradiction anywhere in the New Testament.”

In the last blog covering The Living Word of God by Ben Witherington, I discussed the differences between modern biographies and ancient ones so that today’s readers might be more prepared for what they read in the New Testament gospel accounts of the life of Jesus. There are big differences in length, what is covered, and the amount of editorializing done by the author. Here is some more information about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that attempts to help us understand the mindset of those who wrote about Jesus.

Ancient biographies, of which the New Testament gospels are a part, had as their main goal “an adequate and accurate unveiling of the character of the person in question,” according to Witherington. That’s why there are many stories about Jesus which may have had little historical consequence but revealed his character. For example, think of the story of the wedding feast at Cana. Even though the story involved nothing of a historical nature, it did show his abilities and his relationship to his mother. Ancient biographies, in attempting to show us the character of the person, were highly selective and were not always written according to exact chronological order. For example, early parts of Matthew show Jesus doing nothing but talking or teaching, but the author is simply grouping the teaching material in one spot. When we look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke regarding the temptation of Jesus, we see a different order to the three temptations, not because the authors couldn’t get it straight but because they had a different purpose in relating this event.

Perhaps the best way to see the gospels is to think of them as interpretive portraits rather than snapshots. When we look at a painting of an individual, we see that the artist has been selective in what is shown to us so that we may gain some sort of insight into the person being portrayed. It’s not fair to hold the gospel writers to modern standards of newspaper reporting or modern biographical and historical conventions. Our question must be if the four gospels portray a good and true likeness of the historical Jesus. I think the answer to that is a definite “yes.”

I just finished reading The Living Word of God by Ben Witherington, a professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary. In this book the author has interesting things to say about portions of the New Testament. He believes it’s important to understand the various genres that makeup the twenty-seven books found there. Since I teach the Bible as literature at Palomar College, I wanted to share some of his points here; he believes we can understand the Bible much better if we understand the type (genre) of literature we are reading.

For this blog I’m going to focus solely on the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) as ancient biographies and histories. Many of my students assume that these gospels must be like modern biographies, covering the person’s entire life, producing a chronological account, and containing precise quotations. They have questions when they discover this is not the case. They assume there must be errors in the text.

But Witherington claims these four gospels “all conform quite nicely to the conventions of ancient biographies, which were quite different in scope and character than most modern biographies.” To start with, modern authors have unlimited space to tell their stories, but ancient biographies were restricted to material that could fit on scrolls. These authors had to be selective about what they covered. That’s why, for example, we don’t learn the entire story of Jesus’ life.

In addition, ancient biographies did not spend much time about early childhood development. People in the ancient world did not believe personality developed over time. Instead, they felt you were stuck with whatever personality you were born with. Again, we can see this when we look at the life of Jesus — we know very little about him before his ministry started around the age of 30.

Another characteristic of ancient biographies was a focus on the death of the individual since this event was thought to reveal the character of the person. A shameful death was considered to be a revelation that the person did not have a good character. It’s no wonder, then, that the gospel writers spent so much time on the death of Jesus — they felt they needed to argue that this death was necessary to fulfill God’s plan.

A fourth difference between modern and ancient biographies deals with the amount of editorializing the author did. Much editorializing abounds in modern biographies; the author is often eager to share his/her comments. However, the ancients tended to portray a person indirectly, allowing the words and deeds of the person in question to speak for themselves. That is certainly true of the gospels in the New Testament. We often hear the words of Jesus and are forced to decide for ourselves what he meant.

There is much more that Witherington has to say, but I’ll save that for future blogs. I’m hoping that this information will allow us to appreciate the gospels for what they are rather than what they were never intended to be.

Here is the last part of my summary of Dr. Stephen Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell. It’s a bit daunting, but he has so much good info on recent discoveries that indicate a designer behind all life. The other three parts are available here in case you want to catch up.

Another complaint about intelligent design is that it does not qualify as a scientific theory by definition. Scientific theories, according to this complaint, must explain events or phenomena by reference to natural laws alone. Science must not assume there are any seen or unseen powers that interfere with the normal working of material objects. Meyer rejects this by saying the activity of a designing intelligence does not necessarily break or violate the laws of nature. He says it is the same style of explanation as other historical scientific theories in which events are explained primarily by reference to prior events. Those who say ID does not qualify as a scientific theory generally argue that it invokes an unobservable entity, it is not testable, it does not explain by reference to natural law, it makes no predictions, it is not falsifiable, it cites no mechanisms, and it is not tentative. But Meyer indicates that many scientific theories infer unobservable entities, causes, and events. For example, there are theories of chemical evolution and the existence of many transitional intermediate forms of life. Both of these are unobservable. Historical sciences commonly use indirect methods of testing as they weigh competing unobservable events to determine which one has the greatest explanatory power. The theory of intelligent design is subject to empirical testing and refutation. Many times scientists say that a theory must explain all phenomena by reference to purely material causes, but Meyer wonders why science should be defined that way. Scientists in the past have not always restricted themselves to naturalistic hypotheses. Today many scientific fields currently suggest intelligent causes as scientific explanations – consider archeology, anthropology, forensics, astrobiology.

Meyer spends time refuting the idea that intelligent design is religion. Religions usually involve various formal structures, practices and ritualistic observances, but these are all missing in ID. In addition, it does not offer a comprehensive system of belief about the intelligence behind the design of the universe. The theory of intelligent design does not affirm any sectarian doctrines. Of course this theory has religious and metaphysical implications, but these are not grounds for dismissing it. Intelligent design is not the only idea that has metaphysical or religious implications. Consider Darwinism – it has significant metaphysical and religious implications as well. Scientific theories should be evaluated on the evidence rather than the implications they may have. Antony Flew, a well-known atheistic philosopher who has now become a proponent of intelligent design, insists that we should “follow the evidence wherever it leads.” Meyer argues that the motivations of the people behind the theories should not invalidate them either because it is not the motivation that determines the merits of the idea; it’s the quality of the arguments and the relevance of the evidence marshaled in support of that theory.

Meyer ends his book by explaining why this issue matters. The scientific case for intelligent design poses a serious challenge to the materialistic worldview so dominant today in the West. Materialism may seem liberating, but it has proven “profoundly and literally dispiriting.” It suggests we have no purpose in life, we are all accidents, nothing lasts beyond the grave, everything will be gone as the universe spins down to heat death. On the other hand, intelligent design says that the ultimate cause of life is personal, suggesting there is something beyond this life.

I spent a long time going through Signature in the Cell because I like wrestling with interesting concepts. I was only able to scratch the surface of the book’s content in this summary, but my goal was to pass along the main points I got and to arouse your curiosity to know more about this fascinating field of study.

Here’s the third part of my summary of Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell. Check the previous two blogs for the earlier part of the book.

Meyer then presents a positive case for intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life. He begins by saying there is no other adequate explanation as to the cause. Secondly, he claims there is experimental evidence to back up intelligent design as a cause. Here he mentions experiments that try to simulate prebiotic conditions; they “invariably generate biologically irrelevant substances.” In addition he says intelligent design is the only known cause of specified information. He concludes that ID provides the “best, most causally adequate explanation of the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life on earth.” He considers other forms of specified information, such as radio signals, books, hieroglyphics, and indicates that they always arise from an intelligent source, a mind rather than a strictly material process. In addition, Meyer refers to a groundbreaking book on design detection by William Dembski – The Design Inference. This book claims that we can detect the prior activity of other minds by the effects they leave behind, namely complexity and specification. His example is Mount Rushmore – the shapes etched in the rock face demonstrate intelligence behind them because they are complex and specific to four particular American presidents. Dembski’s theory applies to the cell’s information-processing system as well as to DNA itself. Even “junk DNA” has now been found to perform many important functions.

The last part of Meyer’s book defends the theory of intelligent design against various popular objections to it. Some complain that the case for intelligent design constitutes an argument from inference. But Meyer says that is not true. We already know from experience that intelligent agents do produce systems rich in information. This is an inference to the best explanation based upon our best available knowledge rather than an argument from ignorance. Another complaint about the design inference says, “If an intelligence designed the information in DNA, then who designed the designer?” He found it odd that anyone would argue it was illegitimate to infer that an intelligence played a role in the origin of an event unless we could also give a complete explanation of the nature and origin of that intelligence. It does not negate a causal explanation of one event to point out that the cause of that event may also invite a causal explanation. For example, nobody needs to “explain who designed the builders of Stonehenge or how they otherwise came into being to infer that this complex and specified structure was clearly the work of intelligent agents.”

A third complaint about ID is that it is simply religion masquerading as science. Critics say the theory is not testable and, therefore, neither rigorous nor scientific. But Meyer says different scientists and philosophers of science cannot agree about what the scientific method is, so how do they decide what does and does not qualify as science? He rebuts the critics in several ways. First, he says the case for intelligent design is based on empirical evidence, not religious dogma – information in the cell, irreducible complexity of molecular machines, the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics. In addition, advocates of intelligent design use established scientific methods, especially the method of multiple competing hypotheses. For another thing, ID is testable by comparing its explanatory power to that of competing theories. As an example, Meyer refers to junk DNA. Neo-Darwinism says this is an accumulation of nonfunctional DNA through mutational trial and error while ID proponents claim that there must be some biological function in this so-called “junk.” It turns out that recent discoveries indicate this type of DNA performs a diversity of important biological functions. To further bolster the idea that ID is scientific, Meyer goes on to say the case for ID exemplifies historical scientific reasoning, it addresses a specific question in evolutionary biology (how did the appearance of design in living systems arise?), and it is supported by peer-reviewed scientific literature.

I am continuing a summary of the information in Dr. Stephen Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell.You can read the previous blog entry to see the first part of my report on this important book.

Meyer follows this with an examination of what scientists in the past had thought about biological origins and how they investigated these questions. He found it interesting that Watson and Crick were not doing experiments in labs, but that didn’t mean they were not doing science. Instead, they built models based on data they acquired from other sources, like scientific journals, other scientists, and other laboratories. In this way they were much like current advocates of intelligent design, who have been accused of not doing science. A brief story is revealing — when Meyer asked Fred Hoyle, a famous astronomer, about whether he thought the information stored in DNA might point to an intelligent source, his reply was, “That would certainly make life a lot easier to explain.” Meyer goes on to explain that modern science was specifically inspired by the idea that the universe is the product of a rational mind and that humans could understand it. He says historical scientists reasoned from clues back to causes, conferring unseen facts/events/causes in the past from clues or facts in the present. Based on this, he asks what causes now in operation produce digital code or specified information? Intelligent design must qualify as a possible scientific explanation for the origin of biological information because we know that intelligent agents produce specific information.

For the next 150 pages Meyer examines the competing explanations for the origin of biological information. He starts by examining the possibility that chance produced this information. Most people who advocate chance assume that life could not originate without biological information first arising in some form, which means they must explain where the DNA information came from or how proteins might have arisen directly without DNA. Many origin-of-life scientists realize how difficult it is to generate specified biological information by chance alone in the limited time earth has been around. But it’s even more difficult than this — building a living cell not only requires specified information, but it also requires a vast amount of information. For example, the simplest cell requires nearly 500 proteins and nearly 600,000 bases of DNA to assemble these proteins. One experiment in the late 1980s indicated the probability of achieving a functional sequence of amino acids in several known proteins by chance was about one chance in 10 to the 63rd power (it’s about like picking one atom out of all the atoms in the universe). Another problem with chance was the discovery of the lack of a favorable prebiotic soup on primitive earth. A biophysicist at San Francisco State University named Dean Kenyon came up with another explanation for the origin of biological information — self-organization., in which life might have arisen through a series of chemical transformations in which more complex chemical structures arose from simpler ones. However, one of his students asked him if his model could explain the origin of the information in DNA, and Kenyon realized that it could not. Probably the most popular theory now of how life began (apart from intelligent design) focuses on RNA molecules; the premise is that RNA performed both as proteins and DNA. But there are huge problems with this theory — RNA is easy to destroy, it makes a poor substitute for proteins, and it doesn’t explain the origin of genetic information. It’s no wonder that Francis Crick said, “… in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

I recently read a powerful book that argues for the existence of a creator based on the tiny world of the cell. Years ago, scientists thought of the cell as a primitive and simple thing–a glob of protoplasm. But discoveries have since changed this view. To help explain these amazing findings, Dr. Stephen Meyer, a former geophysicist and college professor who leads the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, wrote Signature in the Cell. The book looks intimidating since it has over 500 pages of information, but it is an important book that many should read. Meyer focuses on the importance of the discovery in 1953 of the information-bearing capacities of the DNA molecule, what he calls the “signature in the cell.” For the next several blogs, I’d like to walk you through the book.

His opening chapters define the scientific and philosophical issues at stake in the DNA enigma. Darwin had argued that the striking appearance of design in living organisms could be explained by natural selection working on random variations. But, thanks to Watson and Crick, scientists discovered the structure of DNA. They found that DNA stores information using a four-character chemical alphabet. This information is used to build crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive. This chemical alphabet functions like letters and a written language or symbols and a computer code. In fact, Bill Gates said, “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Of course, the key question is how the information in DNA arose. You have to have information before you can build the first living organism. In the mid-1980s a controversial book came out called The Mystery of Life’s Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen. These three scientists came to the conclusion that no theory had explained the origin of the first life. They suggested that the information in DNA might have originated from an intelligent source.

Next, Meyer describes the mystery surrounding DNA in more detail. He tells in depth the story of Watson and Crick as they set about to understand the structure of DNA. By the mid-1950s scientists soon realized that DNA could store an immense amount of information. Meyer ties this in with information about proteins — they build cellular machines and structures, they carry and deliver cellular materials, they allow chemical reactions necessary for the cell’s survival. To do all this, a typical cell uses thousands of different kinds of proteins, and each one has a distinctive shape related to its function. These proteins are made of smaller molecules called amino acids. The structure of proteins depends upon the specific arrangement of its amino acids, but the question was what determined the arrangement of the amino acids. It was Francis Crick who suggested it was the precise arrangement of the four-character chemical alphabet found in DNA that determined the arrangement of amino acids. Scientists soon found there were mechanisms in the cell to transcribe, transport, and translate the information in DNA so that amino-acid chains could be constructed at certain sites. Like a production facility at Ford, the cell uses digitally encoded information to direct the manufacture of the parts of its machines. You can see animation of this process at signatureinthecell.com or in the DVD called Unlocking the Mystery of Life. Here’s another mystery — it takes DNA to make proteins, but it also requires proteins to make DNA; so how did the whole thing get started? Which came first, the chicken (nucleic acids) or the egg (proteins)? The author says scientists must now explain the origin of three key features of life — DNA’s capacity to store digitally encoded information, the complexity of the information in DNA, and the cell’s ability to process the information.

I enjoyed reading Lee Strobel’s  book, The Case for the Real Jesus. It’s like his others—the author interviews leading experts, this time trying to better understand the truth about Jesus. Recently, many different assaults have been made on the traditional picture of Jesus, and Strobel wants to find out where the truth lies. He has five key points which he develops.

First of all, he wants to find out whether other ancient documents, rather than the four Gospels, reveal a radically different Jesus. He discovers these alternative texts were written much later than the four Gospels and, therefore, have little historical credibility. For example, liberal critics love to talk about the Gospel of Thomas, placing it on an equal footing with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. However, it was written around 200 A.D., over 100 years later than the four Gospels. Other Gnostic texts also suffer from late dating and lack any connection with the real Jesus.

Strobel then seeks to discover whether the picture of Jesus is unreliable because of changes made by scribes in the documents. He finds that the New Testament is essentially reliable, despite many claims made recently about errors. Only about one percent of manuscript variations affect the meaning; not one essential doctrine is in doubt. Because we have so many New Testament manuscripts, we can trust the way Jesus is portrayed.

A third question the author seeks to explore deals with Jesus’s resurrection. Some critics suggest alternative explanations for this crucial event. He focuses on five key facts that almost all scholars, including skeptical ones, accept as historical truths–Jesus died on a cross, his disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them, Paul (a former persecutor of Christians)converted to Christianity, James (former skeptic and half-brother of Jesus) converted, Jesus’s tomb was empty. What is the best explanation for this evidence? The resurrection appears to be far more logical than any competing hypotheses.

One question which Strobel pursued was especially intriguing to me—did Christianity steal its ideas about Jesus from earlier pagan religions? Many scholars have examined stories of Mithras, Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The truth is that there were no dying and rising gods that preceded Christianity. In fact, they appear after the time of Jesus. These myths contained no parallels to the life of Jesus. The stories occurred in the unspecified and distant past and were usually related to the seasonal life-and-death cycle of vegetation. What is frustrating is that many scholars looked at these myths decades ago and discredited them, but now, thanks to the Internet, the same challenges are back.

One other challenge comes from those who believe Jesus was an impostor who failed to fulfill messianic prophecies. Strobel interviews a Jewish scholar who does a magnificent job in going through Old Testament prophecies, showing that only Jesus managed to fulfill the prophecies that needed to come to pass before 70 A.D., when the Jewish Temple was seized and destroyed by the Romans.

Lee Strobel has produced several thought-provoking books such as The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for a Creator. His latest, The Case for the Real Jesus, does an excellent job taking on the newest critics of Christianity.

A long time ago my wife and I watched a show on PBS dealing with Galileo, the famous scientist and philosopher. It was pretty much as I expected – Galileo was persecuted by the church for his scientific beliefs and died a broken man. The show made it appear to be a war between religion and science with Galileo as the hero. However, many crucial facts had been left out which change the picture quite a bit.

Starting end of the Middle Ages, the dominant model of the universe in Europe came from Aristotle. He had written about the earth as the center of the universe. People today think that this was an egotistical attempt to make humanity think better of itself. But Aristotle placed the earth at the center because that was the lowest place in the universe, not the most important. There were concentric circles above the earth representing the moon, the stars, the planets, and heaven. These heavenly bodies were more pure than the earth, which was seen as the focus of evil in this system.

When Copernicus came along and placed the sun in the center of the universe, it changed how people saw themselves. Instead of demoting the human race, he elevated humanity. Galileo was a firm disciple of Copernicus and, therefore, argued for a sun-centered universe.

Galileo’s view put him in conflict with Aristotle’s model. This was a problem because many church leaders had bought into Aristotle’s philosophy, and they were concerned with the metaphysical, spiritual, and social consequences that would come about if this philosophy was rejected. Actually, a majority of church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo; they had no argument with Galileo’s theories as science. He got in trouble, not because the Bible conflicted with observation but because he differed with the church over what authority should be used to interpret it.

Galileo did not help himself when he turned to writing his theories. He was provocative, using caricatures of the pope to make him look silly in various debates included in the writings.

It is true that Galileo was detained and was forced to renounce the sun-centered universe theory. But he was given his own rooms and servants. He did not die a broken, lonely man in exile. Instead, he returned to his own home with his pensions from the church preserved.

This is just one more illustration that the “war” between science and Christianity often comes from poor interpretations rather than from the Bible itself. It also demonstrates how modern communicators love to perpetuate the old idea that science and faith are incompatible.

I read an interesting account by a Muslim who encountered a Christian and debated several key questions with him–has the New Testament been corrupted? did Jesus ever claim to be God? did Jesus really die on the cross?. Like all Muslims, the narrator believed the New Testament had been changed, that Jesus never claimed to be God, and that He did not die on the cross. Read his story to see the results. What would be your response to these crucial questions?

Has the Bible been corrupted?
I challenged David, stating that no reasonable person could trust the Bible. As a Muslim, I knew that the Qur’an was the uncorrupted word of God transmitted from God Himself, through the Prophet of Islam. And although the Qur’an says that the Gospels (al-Injeel) were given by God, they had been irretrievably modified and corrupted in the centuries after Jesus. Why else would there be so many versions of the Bible throughout history, with constant editions and revisions even today? I advocated the position that Christ never claimed to be God, but rather that Christians had forged all verses that would indicate such a claim. And without a divinely inspired book worth trusting, Christians have no ground to stand on. False ideas were introduced into Christianity by power-hungry followers such as Paul, a self-proclaimed “apostle,” and others like him.
Unbeknownst to me, David was not just a Bible-reading Christian, but a Christian with every intention of becoming a devoted apologist. So when he heard this argument, he wasn’t overcome by its logic (as I had assumed) but instead was shocked that I had decided to enter into such a discussion without any prodding of his own. And so began our series of informal debates about the truth of Islam versus Christianity, as well as my intellectual journey towards the throne of Christ.
David’s response to my argument ran as follows. First, while there are indeed many variations of the Bible obtained from more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts, there is such a large amount of early manuscript evidence and such a concordance between those manuscripts that we can reconstruct the Bible and be certain of about 95% of the original content. Second, no doctrine of the Bible is in jeopardy by any of the variations. Third, there are so many quotations of and references to the New Testament from the ancient world that we can reconstruct practically all of it from early quotations alone. Fourth, there are multiple fragments of manuscripts that can be dated to within a couple of centuries after Christ’s death which we have in our possession even now (the earliest dating to less than 100 years after Christ, 125 AD). Fifth, he claimed that whole copies of the Bible are available from around three centuries after Christ’s death. Finally, the previously mentioned estimate of 95% accuracy was a conservative one; in actuality it is closer to 98 or 99%.
Blown away by the overwhelmingly convincing argument he provided, I determined that he had made it all up, and I decided to investigate the issue myself. The result of my investigation was that there is no evidential reason to believe that the modern editions of the New Testament are in any way substantially different from the original autographs themselves. To challenge the scriptural integrity of the New Testament after sincere investigation is to reflect a bias against it.

Did Jesus claim to be God?
After being satisfied that the New Testament is trustworthy, I decided to take David to task on a different point. Nowhere, ever, did Christ claim that He was the literal Son of God, let alone God Himself. Christ, being the Messiah for Muslims as well as Christians, was a holy man. How dare the Christians ascribe such hubris to one of the greatest men of history, especially when He never claimed divinity in the Gospels themselves!
This discussion took more time than the first. David’s claim was that Christ did say that He was the Son of God, though He didn’t run around proclaiming it from the rooftops, as this would have gotten Him killed immediately. Here is some of the evidence David offered.
In the Old Testament, Isaiah prophesied that a child would be born who would be called “Mighty God” (Isaiah 9:6). But this isn’t the only Old Testament support for the deity of Christ. Jesus’s most common title for Himself was “Son of Man,” which referred back to a prophecy in the book of Daniel:
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. (vv. 7:14-15, NIV)
According to the New Testament, Jesus was worshiped shortly after His birth (Matthew 2:11), during His ministry (Matthew 14:33; John 9:38), and after His resurrection from the dead (Matthew 28:9, 28:17; Luke 24:52), yet He never told his worshipers to stop what they were doing. Jesus claimed to have existed before Abraham (who lived in the 18th century BC). When asked whether He was the Son of God, He answered, “I am . . . And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62). Jesus also claimed to be the final Judge of all mankind (Matthew 25-31-32).
After actually reading parts of the New Testament itself instead of merely reading Muslim books on the topic, I came to agree with David’s claim: both the New Testament in general and Christ Himself claimed that Jesus is God.

Did Jesus die on the Cross?
As a Muslim, there was one thing I had always believed that would make Christianity completely invalid, regardless of anything else. According to Qur’an, Christ did not die on the cross.
That they said “We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah.” But they killed him not, nor crucified him, … of a surety they killed him not. (Al-Qur’an 4:157-158)
If Christ did not die on the Cross, then Christianity is without question a vain belief, even according to Paul himself! Paul said that if Christ was not raised from the dead, then the faith of a Christian is worthless (1 Corinthians 15:17). Of course, His resurrection requires His death, and so Paul is stating that if Christ did not die on the cross, then the Christian faith is worthless.
Thus we are presented with a question: “Which is right—the Qur’an or the Bible?” Of course, if I were to pick the Qur’an without perusing the evidence, I would not be searching for the truth; rather, I would be robotically defending what I had prejudicially taken as the truth. After investigating the facts surrounding the crucifixion of Christ, I was amazed by how incontrovertibly clear it is that He did die on the cross, a fact which is considered by some historians to be among the best established facts of history. Based on the first century evidence (including both Christian and non-Christian sources), as well as our historical knowledge about Roman crucifixion, there turns out to be no rational way to deny the death of Jesus. Any notion that says otherwise requires an elaborate conspiracy theory of some sort, and even those fail because the conspirators would have been His apostles, the very disciples who were quite obviously convinced of the truth of the Gospel message.