Ibn Ḥazm and al-Thaʿlabī

In exposing the falsehood of Paul’s message, one of the most important figures in the tradition of Islamic-Christian polemic is Ibn Ḥazm al-Andalusī (994–1064), who systematically rejected the authority of the gospels and the letters of Paul as valid sources of revelation. He held that ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him received from God a revelation on a par with the Qurʾān, and that the revelation has not survived in its original form.

The books now regarded as “gospels” are historical records composed by human hands, full of contradictions, and carrying no divine authority. In the summary of William Montgomery Watt:

Ibn Hazm uses all his knowledge, however, to produce what he regards as devastating arguments against the Christians. He starts from the position or assumption that Jesus had received from God a Qur’an-like scripture, and then proceeds to show that little of this has been preserved in the actual gospels. These are historical works composed by their writers, whose sources, such as the apostle Peter, he tries to identify, in order to discover whether they could have preserved the genuine scripture revealed to Jesus. In this he is trying to show that the gospels have no chains of transmitters comparable to those for the Islamic Hadith. With regard to the Pauline epistles he notes the short time Paul was in contact with Peter, suggesting that he could only have an imperfect knowledge of what Peter could bear witness to. He also notes that for three hundred years until the conversion of Constantine the Christians were persecuted and had no secure place for their documents. Later he moves on to mention contradictions or alleged contradictions between the four gospels, and to argue that this proves they are completely untrustworthy. The conclusion is that, while Muslims are required to honour the revelation received by Jesus, they cannot be certain that any part of the gospels is a true recording of this revelation. In other words the Christian scriptures are completely corrupt.¹

Ibn Ḥazm’s argument against Paul is significant: Paul’s contact with Peter was too brief to qualify him as a valid transmitter of the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam. If the gospels, with named authors, fail the test of isnād, a fortiori the letters of a man who spent a fortnight with Peter fail it. The whole content of the New Testament, Paul’s letters included, is a reconstruction without the value of revelation.

Al-Thaʿlabī

One more of the earliest narratives in Islamic exegesis that connects Paul directly with the diversion of tawḥīd (توحيد, “the oneness of God”) is found in the work of Abū Isḥāq al-Thaʿlabī (d. 1035), in his commentary on Sūrah al-Tawbah, verse 31. In it the Christians are said at first to have followed a teaching in line with Islam, praying toward the qiblah and fasting in Ramaḍān, for 81 years after ʿĪsā ibn Maryam was raised.

Then a man named Yūnus (in other manuscripts Būlus, Paul) appeared, a Jew who harbored the fear that the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam might be true. Fear that his own people would be cast into Hell led him to plan a great deception.²

Yūnus, or Paul, feigned repentance by killing his horse, putting earth on his head and shutting himself in a church for a year. Having won the trust of the Christians, he claimed to have received revelation that his repentance was accepted. He then taught three chief individuals, Nasṭūr, Yaʿqūb and Malkān, different doctrines about the nature of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam.

To Nasṭūr he taught that God is three: ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, his mother and Allāh. To Yaʿqūb he said that ʿĪsā ibn Maryam was only the appearance of a man, and to Malkān that ʿĪsā ibn Maryam is God. He raised each of the three separately as his successor, then killed himself as a “sacrifice” before the people.

Each of the three pupils then spread his own doctrine and founded a different sect within Christianity, and so began the doctrinal splits that continue to this day. The commentary positions Paul as a schemer who plotted to drag the Christians into Hell by corrupting their belief from within.

The story bears a marked resemblance to a Jewish polemical text, the Toldoth Jeshu, believed to have been compiled between the sixth and eleventh centuries. In that Jewish narrative a figure named Simon Kepha (Peter) is said to have used miracles to trick the Christians into replacing the Jewish festivals, permitting forbidden food and abandoning circumcision, to separate them from the legitimate Jewish community.³

The motivation differs. In the Toldoth Jeshu the deception is done to protect the purity of Judaism from Christian influence.

In al-Thaʿlabī’s commentary Paul is a true liar who wants to mislead the Christians because he fears his own religion is wrong, and wants them to perish with him. That shows al-Thaʿlabī’s commentary was shaped by external texts such as the Toldoth Jeshu, and also stands on the polemical frame of Islamic theologians who stressed the threat to tawḥīd and Paul’s chief role in bringing shirk (شرك, “associating partners with God”) into the religion of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam.⁴

In this context, Paul’s shift from Jewish teaching to a new doctrine he attached to ʿĪsā ibn Maryam was more than a change of personal belief. It was a systematic effort to form a new religion opposed to the original message.

His claim to apostleship and the arguments built on his personal interpretation of the gospel and his own letters show a doctrinal diversion.⁵ The Islamic assessment of Paul therefore rests on two grounds, theological and historical, and both find his teaching out of line with the message of the prophets as the Qurʾān and the Sunnah recognize it.⁶

1. William Montgomery Watt, Muslim-Christian Encounters: Perceptions and Misconceptions (Routledge, 1991), p. 66. ↩
2. Abū Isḥāq al-Thaʿlabī, al-Kashf wa al-Bayān ʿan Tafsīr al-Qurʾān, vol. 5 (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 2002), p. 33; cf. Michael F. Kuhn, “Early Islamic Perspectives of the Apostle Paul as a Narrative Framework for Taḥrīf,” in Mark Beaumont (ed.), Arab Christians and the Qurʾan: From the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period, History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 35 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 150ff. ↩
3. G. Foote and J. M. Wheeler, Jewish Life of Christ: Being the Sepher Toldoth Jeshu (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1885); cf. S. Stern, “ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Account of How Christ’s Religion Was Falsified by the Adoption of Roman Customs,” Journal of Theological Studies 18 (1968), pp. 179ff. ↩
4. ibid. ↩
5. See ʿAlāʾ Abū Bakr, al-Masīḥiyyah al-Ḥaqqah kamā Jāʾa bihā al-Masīḥ bayna al-Iltizām wa al-Taḥrīf wa Daʿwat al-Islām (Cairo: Maktabah Wahbah, 1997). ↩
6. See also a contemporary treatment of Paul’s standing from the Islamic viewpoint in Bilal Muhammad, “Muslim Perspectives on St. Paul,” published 9 February 2020, https://bit.ly/45rGuVt (accessed 24 May 2025). ↩