This past weekend I attended an Islamic exhibition at the city library in Newcastle, England. The subject of the exhibition was the Islamic perspective on Jesus. During the course of the day, I was given a copy of a new book by Muslim apologist/polemicist Abu Zakariya. The book is entitled Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah. I have now had the opportunity to read through the book, and so I thought it fitting for me to write a detailed review of some of the material and argumentation presented in the book. Although Zakariya, to his credit, pursues more depth in his discussion than most Muslim treatments of this subject (although that isn't very hard to do), the book still engages in a significant level of mangling of the Biblical text. Over the course of this and subsequent blog posts, I want to interact with some of the central claims of Abu Zakariya's book, since I thought it a good opportunity to explore some popular fallacies of thought that occur when people study the Scriptures. I will not be interacting with the book in order, but dipping into various parts of the book that I took a particular interest in. Readers will recognize that I have addressed much of the material in various blog posts and talks/interviews/debates before. Nonetheless, it is always valuable to repeat material and so I will be reiterating some material I have touched on in the past, and perhaps on occasion delving into more detail than I did previously -- but a lot of what I want to write about I have not covered before in my writings. If Abu Zakariya is interested in a public engagement regarding his book (in the form of a moderated debate), I will be only too happy to oblige.One chapter I found to be particularly interesting in the book was chapter 5, in which Zakariya makes a valiant attempt to defend the indefensible -- namely, the Qur'an's claim in Surah 4:157 that Jesus did not die by crucifixion. In this and subsequent articles, I aim to examine how well he does in this undertaking.
