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, but that the revelation no longer exists 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 theological rejection, on historical review, comparison of narratives and epistemological principle, all of which affirm that Paul’s teaching is not in line with the message of the prophets as recognized in the Qurʾān and the Sunnah.6
Reza Aslan
One important modern figure on this question is Reza Aslan, the Iranian-born Muslim writer and professor of religious studies in the United States. He stresses that Paul created a theological system Jesus himself would not have recognized, so radical and so far outside the norms of Jewish thought that it could not have been accepted except by claiming it came directly from Jesus:
What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality. Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’ dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making: Christ.7
The view agrees with the critical arguments in Islam, and it confirms that the transformation of the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam into a Trinitarian religion of salvation was the invention of an individual in conflict with true revelation.
Al-Attas
The deviation is also criticized firmly by Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, who rejects the notion that the tawḥīd of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam was diverted by ʿĪsā ibn Maryam himself. The deviation began with particular figures after him, above all Paul. He writes:
It was some other disciples and the apostles including chiefly Paul who departed from the original revelation and true teachings based on it, and who began preaching a new religion and set about establishing the foundations for a new religion which later came to be called Christianity.8
Isma’il R. al Faruqi
That view agrees with the sharp assessment of the late Isma’il R. al Faruqi, the Muslim analyst par excellence of Christian dogma, who showed how post-Pauline theology eroded the purity of the concept of God and replaced it with the influence of myth and the mystery religions. Al Faruqi asserts:
Evidently, Christian thought has not yet outgrown its linkage to the mystery religions. What it digested of Judaism is a historical figurization, a context, as historians of religions would say. What it digested of Hellenism is a cosmetic superstructure which gives it pomp and circumstance. In its rock-bottom essence, the core of its religious content, it remains true to the mystery religions with their immanent god dispensing his man of holiness and salvation through the catharsis which participation in the sacrament brings. Here, transcendence is a decorative notion, inexpressed and inexpressible except when it assumes the modality of the concrete.9
Of Paul himself, al Faruqi states:
What Jesus did not furnish, Paul was ready to offer to Christianity. For, according to Paul, Jesus Christ is God, incarnate, crucified, and resurrected that man may be saved from the predicament of sin. But if there is to be any redemption at all, there must be something from which it may take place. This “something” he contributed to Christian dogma.10
Shabbir Akhtar
As Shabbir Akhtar, a contemporary Muslim philosopher, puts it:
Granted that Paul was the last of the apostles of Christ, an apostle with honour in his native land, he was also a prophet manqué, the lost prophet who missed the mark, so to speak. But he was not simply a man of unfulfilled potential or misdirected energy. Where there are pretenders, there are even more pretences. But Paul was no false pretender. If he did pretend, he pretended, in the noblest sense, to the greatest things of the spirit. He broods in his theology as he attempts to make sense of his confused and unsettling experience of Jesus. Was he self-deceived? To outsiders, it must appear so. The comparison then is not to be with Jesus, a true prophet. Nor is the real analogy here with Muhammad – as if he were also in the wrong profession! Rather, it is with literary figures such as Charles Dickens who was not a novelist at heart but rather a novelist in the dramatic tradition of the master Shakespeare – but without knowing this truth. Like Milton, many men do not know which party they belong to until after they have reached the further side of experience. If Muhammad was the last prophet, Paul was the lost prophet. That is the most charitable Islamic verdict on the man Muslims see as the founder of Christianity.11
The criticism of these Muslim scholars confirms that the doctrine of divinity in Christianity, as inherited through Paul, is the product of theological manipulation with roots in a paganism opposed to the principle of tawḥīd.
Can anyone of sound mind fail to see it? Only the jeweler knows the gem.
- William Montgomery Watt, Muslim-Christian Encounters: Perceptions and Misconceptions (Routledge, 1991), p. 66. ↩
- 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. ↩
- 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. ↩
- ibid. ↩
- 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). ↩
- 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). ↩
- Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 118. ↩
- Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1993), p. 28. ↩
- Isma’il R. al Faruqi, Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (Kuala Lumpur: ABIM, 1983), p. 21. ↩
- Isma’il R. al Faruqi, Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), p. 203; see also Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi, “Isma’il al Faruqi’s Appraisal of Paul of Tarsus,” https://bit.ly/3ZtSSAu. ↩
- Shabbir Akhtar, The New Testament in Muslim Eyes: Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 269. ↩