Jesus and Muhammad: examining the differences
Jesus and Muhammad do not teach the same thing about marriage, Jesus’s identity, or his death. For Christians, these differences are reasons to reject the claim that Muhammad simply continued Jesus’s message. The comparison below concerns religious claims and recorded conduct—not the character or dignity of Muslims.
Marriage and the pattern Jesus restores
Asked about divorce, Jesus appeals to creation: a man and his wife become one flesh, and people must not separate what God has joined. He distinguishes this original pattern from a later concession made because of human hardness of heart. Christians therefore understand his teaching as restoring an exclusive marital union, not merely regulating how an existing marriage ends. The immediate subject is divorce; the monogamous conclusion follows from Jesus’s argument, rather than an explicit sentence naming polygamy. Matthew 19:3–9 ↗
The Qur’an, by contrast, permits a man to marry up to four wives, conditional on just treatment, and directs him to one if he fears injustice. Muhammad himself had multiple wives: the Sunni collection Sahih al-Bukhari reports nine. These are permissions and practices, not accusations invented by Christian critics. Qur’an 4:3 ↗, Sahih al-Bukhari 5068 ↗
A Muslim reply: Earlier biblical figures had multiple wives, and God can give different communities different laws. The Qur’an itself speaks of different legal paths. Qur’an 5:48 ↗
The Christian response: Jesus’s argument reaches behind earlier concessions to God’s intention in creation. Appealing to what earlier people practised does not answer that argument. Islamic permission for plural wives differs from the marriage pattern Christians understand Jesus to restore. Calling that permission a new divine law explains the Muslim position; it does not make it the same teaching.
The honour Jesus claims for himself
In John’s Gospel, Jesus says that he gives life, exercises judgment, and must receive honour corresponding to the Father’s honour. His identity is therefore part of his teaching—not an incidental detail Christians can discard while retaining his message. John 5:19–23 ↗
The Qur’an proclaimed by Muhammad identifies Jesus as God’s messenger, rejects divine sonship, and condemns identifying the Messiah as God. That conflicts with the Christian reading of Jesus’s claims. Qur’an 4:171 ↗, Qur’an 5:72 ↗
A Muslim reply: Jesus prays to God and calls the Father the only true God. Honouring a messenger need not mean worshipping him. John 17:1–3 ↗
The Christian response: Christians affirm that Jesus truly became human and is distinct from the Father; divine sonship does not mean biological reproduction or a second, rival god. But the same prayer describes Jesus sharing glory with the Father before the world existed. Later, Thomas addresses Jesus as “My Lord and my God,” and Jesus responds by affirming his belief. These passages cannot fairly be reduced to ordinary respect for a prophet. The Christian reading must account for Jesus’s humanity and his divine identity together. John 1:1–14 ↗, John 17:5 ↗, John 20:28–29 ↗
The death Jesus says he came to undergo
Jesus predicts that he will be killed and rise again. He then explains his mission as giving his life to ransom others. At the Last Supper, he describes his blood as establishing a covenant for many. His death is not merely something other people later say happened to him: the Gospels present it as something he teaches his disciples to understand. Mark 10:32–45 ↗, Mark 14:22–25 ↗
Qur’an 4:157 denies that Jesus’s opponents killed or crucified him, and the next verse says God raised him to himself. On the standard Muslim reading, Jesus was rescued from crucifixion rather than dying on the cross. That removes the event Jesus presents as central to his mission. Qur’an 4:157–158 ↗
A Muslim reply: God vindicated his messenger by rescuing him; the Christian account does not preserve what actually happened.
The Christian response: In the Gospel account, the cross is not the failure of Jesus’s mission but its fulfilment, followed by resurrection. Rescuing Jesus from death and vindicating him through resurrection after death are different claims. A change in religious law cannot make both descriptions of the same event true.
What if the Gospel account was changed?
This is the strongest underlying Muslim objection: the Qur’an corrects earlier religious error rather than contradicting the real Jesus. Its claimed authority over earlier scripture is explicit. Qur’an 5:48 ↗
But that authority is precisely what needs establishing. Disagreement with the Qur’an is not, by itself, evidence that a Gospel passage was corrupted. Nor is the New Testament a modern reconstruction: Codex Sinaiticus preserves a complete New Testament from the fourth century. That does not settle every historical question, but it places the Christian account well before Islam. Codex Sinaiticus project ↗
The Christian conclusion is clear: we cannot follow Jesus as the divine Son who gives his life for us while accepting a later message that rejects that identity and saving death. Read the passages in context, compare the explanations, and ask which account gives the better reason to trust its portrayal of Jesus.