It really bothers Muslims that they can’t prove that Christ, his disciples, or his blessed mother were Muslims. Of course they claim that they were but there is no proof. There also isn’t proof of an early Islamic Christian community in the first century. While we know of many heretical groups in existence in the first couple centuries of the Church, there is no community that is Islamic.
Recently, American Muslim Daniel Haqiqatjou shared an article on social media from his website. It’s not written by him but by someone named Burhan Karacay. The article is called Disciples of Jesus and the Forgotten Letter. Here is the link:
I won’t get too deep into it but the writer realizes that it isn’t Islamic so he accuses it of interpolation on things like the Trinitarian baptismal formula. He writes:
Here we see the notorious Trinitarian formula clumsily inserted into the text. This expression of trinity came into use many centuries after the Didache first began to circulate, and is considered to be a corruption of the original text by the consensus of Western scholars. The original Teaching was likely to baptize in the name of God (Alaha in Aramaic).
The “consensus of Western scholars” eh? He doesn’t quote any scholars, let alone any manuscript evidence. But naturally that’s what he believes. I retweeted Haqiqatjou’s tweet which links to the article. I said:
So the MO is to dismiss anything you disagree with as a Pauline, Trinitarian or Greek interpolation. Sorry but I can’t say I’m impressed by this lazy methodology.
A couple days later, Haqiqatjou posted some of Karacay’s responses. I was surprised to find myself among them!
Karacay wrote:
> So the MO is to dismiss anything you disagree with as a Pauline, Trinitarian, or Greek interpolation.
Yes. But, to be precise, our Modus Operandi is to analyze the notoriously fragmentary source-materials of early Christianity through the use of abductive logic. We Muslims utilize the well-documented records of a 7th century Ishmaelite Prophet as baseline criteria to determine which surviving Greco-Roman legends of Jesus (pubh) can be regarded as authentic material. Other researchers may start with different hypotheses and see where their assumptions take them.
I’ve got to give Karacay credit. This is probably the most honest thing I’ve heard a Muslim apologist say. I take it that he’s knew to the apologetics game. Basically, Muhammad tells the Muslim what to find so any evidence to the contrary is discarded. I should point out that Muhammad never said anything about the Didache, only the Injeel and that’s a stretch as well. Try again Karacay.
Luis Dizon goes in depth on this: