Do Muslims Love Jesus?

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In an X post on April 14, Tucker Carlson declared:

The people in charge don’t want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus. Islam reveres Him as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes He performed miracles, and states that He will return to Earth to defeat the Antichrist.

This claim is often made by Muslim apologists. After all, Jesus features prominently in the Koran. However, the Jesus described in the Koran and affirmed by Muslims is not the same Jesus who is proclaimed in the Gospels.

According to Islam, Jesus was a miracle-working prophet, who was the son of a virgin and whose “Second Coming” will usher in the Apocalypse. Some further claim that Jesus, or Isa as they call Him, was a Muslim. Of course, Islam came some 600 years after Christ, but Muslims believe that Jesus followed the true, uncorrupted faith of Abraham, whom they herald as a patriarch of Islam. For example, Jesus prayed with His head to the ground, as Muslims do, and called God by the Semitic word for God. They also point to the fact that Jesus did not eat pork, was circumcised, washed before prayer, and kept fasts. In all of this, He submitted His will to God, the meaning of what it is to be Muslim.

Of course, the examples that supposedly show Jesus as a Muslim are a combination of Biblical misunderstanding and selective reading. For example, Jesus also spoke of praying while standing up, as well as on His knees.

When Jesus cried out to God using some variation of El, Eli, or Eloi, He was using a common word for God from that time and place. He did not refer to God as “Allah,” the Arabic word, because He spoke Aramaic, along with maybe Greek. Ceremonial concerns like diet and washing were also Jewish practices and not unique to Islam.

Though a few statements about Jesus in the Koran align with what we know from the Bible, other parts do not. For instance, it’s claimed that Jesus spoke as a baby and created a living bird out of clay. Other examples are more outlandish. For example, Muslims do not believe that Jesus died on the cross, but “was only made to appear so.” And since He did not die, He also did not rise from the dead. Most importantly, according to Islam, Jesus was not God in the flesh. As the late Christian apologist Nabeel Qureshi realized on his own journey to Christ from Islam, the “Jesus” loved by faithful Muslims is not the Jesus of the Bible, nor even the Jesus of history.

Of course, remaking Jesus into our own image has a long and storied history. Just recently, one of the hosts of The View claimed that Jesus would not call himself the Messiah, and President Trump shared an image portraying Christ in the image of himself. Plenty of Sunday School “art” portrays Jesus as a European rather than a first-century Jew. The Marxist Jesus looks like Che Guevara, the New Age Jesus looks like a hippie, and the American Jesus is ripped and handsome.

All are fictional projections, and many are blasphemous. All idols are, according to the Psalmist, both sinful and powerless, but remaking Jesus is also unnecessary. As scholars like Richard Bauckham insist, we have eyewitness testimony about Jesus from Matthew and John, and the reliable reporting of Mark and Luke of those who lived with Jesus. The Gospels carry far more weight than any caricature, and it is reasonable to believe their witness as genuine and accurate.

The true Story of the Jesus of history is not in celebrity or political endorsements or the caricatures from other religions. It is found in the Gospels.

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Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Israel Brum

John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.