#865 An Ex-Muslim Asks, “What Makes Jesus Special?”
December 10, 2023Hello, Dr Craig,
I lost my muslim faith since a little more than a decade ago when I was 20 - now I'm 31 - because of historical and especially philosophical reasons: basically I concluded that claiming to be a messenger of God is an extraordinary claim in intself and that one who claims such a thing for himself the probability is significantly higher that that person is either deluded, insane or a fraud, and that there are no sufficient good reasons to believe Islam has divine origins. However, during the last years I have increasingly found my unbelief to by dry and nihilistic in terms of being able to offer a meaning of life: as british journalist Peter Hitchens likes to remark when he often asks atheists why would they want to believe that the Universe is a purposless caos in which there is no justice, et cetera?
That feeling made me be more open to considering faith in God and Christianity. I am saying Christianity because if there is one system of faith for me that is true, that can only be Christianity, because of the caracter of Jesus of Nazareth and the arguments put forward for the resurrection. As Antony Flew remarked in a conversation with Gary Habermas when he said that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is better and different in quality and quantity compared to miracles in other religions. And my question is related to this:
As I have mentioned above, for me claiming to be e prophet of God or God incarnated himself is a big claim that requires evidence at least closely proportional to that claim. My question is, what makes Jesus special compared to self proclaimed prophets of his time like Jesus son of Ananias, the so called the Egyptian, or later centuries claimaints like Baal Shem Tov who even had direct eyewitnesses who claimed that he performed miracles? I am ready to accept to accept that our Jesus was more special compared to other claimants in the sense that he was more carismatic and his teachings deeper, just like a person can be more carismatic than another. But what makes him radically different, what sets him radically apart that the most parsimonial explanation would be that he really was the Son of God?
Kastriot
Kosovo
Dr. craig’s response
A
It seems to be an increasingly common experience of Muslims to leave Islam for atheism (or agnosticism) but then to become disillusioned with the latter and so to look again at Christian faith. I’m so glad you’re doing so, Kastriot.
Your question is really two questions, it seems to me, one fairly easy to answer and the other more difficult.
The easy question is, “what makes Jesus special compared to [other] self-proclaimed prophets?” The answer, apart from his unparalleled life and teachings, whereby he put himself in God’s place, is, of course, his resurrection from the dead. If God really did raise Jesus from the dead, then God has dramatically and publicly vindicated those allegedly blasphemous claims for which he was crucified. Jesus’ resurrection sets him apart from every other self-proclaimed prophet like Mohammed or Baal Shem Tov.
The more difficult question is “what makes the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection special compared to that for other self-proclaimed prophets?” I suspect that this is your real question. To answer that question, you need to dig into the evidence and weigh it for yourself. If you’ll read my discussion in Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Crossway, 2008), I think you’ll be surprised how good the evidence is for the fundamental facts undergirding the inference to Jesus’ resurrection as the best explanation of those facts. It differs sharply from the case of the claimants you refer to, in that, to mention but one point, the miracles attributed to such claimants were wrought in a climate of expectation on the part of his followers, whereas Jesus’ resurrection was completely unexpected and even antithetical to Jewish beliefs.
So take a look and see for yourself whether the evidence supports the belief that Jesus was someone very special, indeed, just as he claimed.
- William Lane Craig