The Religion Of Paul In Malaysia And Southeast Asia

The case against Paul is a case about the first century. Its consequences are felt in the twenty-first, and nowhere more plainly than in Southeast Asia, where the religion of Paul arrived with the colonial powers and stayed after them. This article sets out what that religion does when it meets a Muslim society, with Malaysia as the documented instance.

A region under mission

The roofless stone ruins of St Paul's Church on St Paul's Hill in Malacca — The ruins of St Paul’s Church on St Paul’s Hill, Malacca, built as a chapel by the Portuguese in 1521 above their fortress, A Famosa, and renamed for Paul by the Dutch. Image: Natalie.Thoo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Southeast Asia is home to the largest Muslim populations on earth. It is also the region where Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British and American colonial administrations planted the church beside the fort, from Malacca in 1511 to Manila and the Moluccas. The pattern described in The verdict, missionaries arriving with the colonizers, was the region’s own history before it was anyone’s theory.

The religion that arrived was Paul’s. Its central claims, that ʿĪsā ibn Maryam (ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him) is God, that his death redeems sin, and that the law is finished, are the claims examined across this site. The missionary movement carried them, and its heirs, the evangelical churches of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, carry them still.

Christian Zionism arrives

In the modern period the missionary current has fused with Christian Zionism, the evangelical doctrine that reads the founding of the illegal state of Israel and control of the Temple Mount as the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Its theology of blood sacrifice, the red heifer and the Third Temple is described in the final part of Count·VI; its politics reach into the foreign policy of the United States.

Iain Buchanan’s study of dominionism and Christian Zionism in Malaysia documents how that current reached Southeast Asia. He describes an eschatological narrative rooted in the Pauline interpretation of sacrifice and purification, exported through evangelical networks, and used to justify political and religious dominance in the name of prophecy.¹ The book’s title joins the founder of Singapore’s legend to the emblem of the tribe of Judah: the region’s own past, rewritten as a chapter of someone else’s prophecy.

Penang as laboratory

Buchanan’s findings reached the Malaysian Parliament. In a debate of the Dewan Negara on 19 April 2017, Tan Sri Dato’ Seri Dr. Ibrahim Shah bin Abu Shah set out the study’s conclusion: that the Christian Zionist movement has made Malaysia, and Penang in particular, a “laboratory of religious and political transformation” for Southeast Asia.²

The methods he listed are the ones the movement uses elsewhere: infiltration of political parties, a doctrine of dominionism drawn from an extreme reading of Bible prophecy, and covert dakyah (Christian proselytism) wrapped in the rhetoric of humanitarian aid.³ What distinguished the Malaysian case was that a national legislature had named the pattern and entered it in the record.

The claims as heard here

The missionary claims answered on this site are the claims heard in Malaysia. That Paul was an apostle of Jesus; that Muslim scholars accepted him; that five hundred saw the risen Christ; that Jesus set aside the law. Each is answered in the Answers, and each answer links to the count that carries the evidence.

The claims travel because the medium has changed. Where the colonial mission worked through schools and hospitals, the evangelical movement now works through social media, information technology and postmodern narrative, and it addresses Muslims directly in their own languages.

In March 2025 a complaint was filed with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission concerning dakyah content published by the YouTube channel Impact Evangelism, run by a right-wing evangelical preacher based in the United States, Johnny P. MacAllister, whose material openly insults Islam in pursuit of an agenda of apostasy.⁴ The preacher is American, the platform is global, and the target is a Malay-speaking audience: the modern mission in one sentence.

A literature of reply

Muslim scholars in the region have answered, and have done so in Malay for readers the English-language literature does not reach. The studies range from comparative surveys of Christian doctrine to field studies of missionary activity in Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya, from the Selangor Islamic Religious Council’s exposure of the missionary agenda to a Catholic glossary of Christian terms in Malay, which shows the mission working on the language itself.⁵

The book on which this site is built belongs to that literature. Paulus: Perosak Risalah Al-Masih was written in Malay, for that readership, and published in Selangor in 2025. This site carries its argument into English so that the case can be read outside the region where it was made.

What the region shows

Southeast Asia is where the abstract history of this site becomes contemporary fact. The religion of Paul is a system that arrived by conquest, stayed by institution, and now spreads by broadcast; its content is the content Paul gave it.

The scholars who named him the corrupter of the religion of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, from Khushaysh ibn Aṣram in the ninth century to Isma’il R. al Faruqi in the twentieth, were describing the same religion that a Malaysian senator described in 2017. The verdict of the region, mutatis mutandis, is the verdict of the tradition.