Christian missionaries in Malaysia and elsewhere make the same handful of claims about Paul again and again. Each answer below is short, and each links to the article that sets out the full evidence.
Was Paul an apostle of Jesus?
Paul never met ʿĪsā ibn Maryam (ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him) during his life. His claim rests on a vision near Damascus, which the only narrative source tells three times with contradictory details.1 The men who had walked with ʿĪsā ibn Maryam never granted him the standing he claimed for himself.
Full evidence: The Damascus road: one vision, three stories
Did Muslim scholars accept Paul as a disciple?
The claim rests on a few histories that list Paul’s name among early Christian figures. The scholars who examined his teaching judged him the corrupter of the religion of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, from Khushaysh ibn Aṣram in the ninth century to ʿAbd al-Jabbār in the tenth and Isma’il R. al Faruqi in the twentieth.
Full evidence: Paul in the Islamic tradition
Did more than five hundred people see the risen Jesus?
Only Paul says so, and he was not there. The claim is prima facie weighty and, on inspection, unwitnessed.2 No Gospel records the event, and Paul names none of the five hundred.
Full evidence: Revelation or borrowing?
Did Paul and the disciples teach the same gospel?
Paul’s own letter records him opposing Peter to his face at Antioch.3 In Islamicjerusalem, James had to instruct him to prove in the Temple that he still kept the law he told his converts was finished.4
Full evidence: Paul against the disciples
Did Jesus set aside the law of Mūsā?
ʿĪsā ibn Maryam said he came to fulfill the law, and that not a stroke of it would pass away.5 Paul called the law a curse and declared Christ its end.6
Full evidence: The law as a curse
Does the New Testament speak with one voice?
Paul’s letters contradict one another on the law, and more sharply still on the place of women. Scholars accept only seven of the thirteen letters that carry his name as his own work.
Full evidence: How Paul came to own the New Testament
Did Jesus claim to be God?
In the Gospels he refuses even to be called good, since none is good but God, and he calls the Father the only true God.7 In the Qurʾān he describes himself as the servant of God.8 The divine Christ of Christian belief begins with Paul.
Full evidence: Two portraits of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam
Did Jesus found Christianity?
His followers in Jerusalem kept the law and prayed in the Temple. The name “Christian” first appears at Antioch, the base of Paul’s missions to the Gentiles, and the religion that grew from there carries Paul’s theology.9
Full evidence: Paul, the father of a new religion