World’s Most Famous Muslim Debater Converts To Christianity – “I Was Wrong For 25 Years”
The Quranic position that Jesus was not crucified, that what appeared to happen on the cross was an illusion, that the central claim of Christian theology rests on an event that did not occur.
I’d made this argument hundreds of times.
I began to quote the relevant verse.
I got four words in and then the lights changed.
I need to be precise about this because I’ve been asked about it many times and I want to be accurate.
The studio lighting did not malfunction.
The overhead lights did not flicker or surge.
What changed was something that the cameras did not capture and that nobody else in the room appeared to notice.
A quality of brightness that entered the space from no identifiable source and settled specifically in the area behind my opponent to my left.
As I faced the cameras, I looked toward it before I understood why I was looking.
He was standing there.
I am a man who has spent 25 years analyzing, categorizing, debating, and dismissing claims about Jesus.
I have read every serious scholarly work on the historical Jesus.
I have studied the gospel accounts in their original Greek.
I have examined the theological development of the doctrine of the incarnation across 2,000 years of Christian thought.
I know the arguments for and against every major claim Christianity makes about who Jesus was.
None of that prepared me for seeing him because seeing him was not an argument.
Arguments I knew how to handle.
Arguments I had a quarter century of training and experience to evaluate and respond to.
What was standing in the light behind my opponent was not an argument.
It was a person present in my studio with the full weight of actual presence.
The way any real person is present in a room occupying space displacing air existing with the undeniable particularity of someone who is actually there.
He was not performing for me.
He was not presenting a case.
He was simply standing there in brilliant white looking at me with an expression that I can only describe by saying it contained my entire life.
He did not speak audibly.
The studio microphones would have captured audible speech and the footage from that night which has been reviewed many times records nothing unusual in the audio.
What happened was not audible.
It was direct.
A communication that bypassed the channel of sound entirely and arrived in the center of me with the precision of something that knew exactly where it was going.
He said, “And I am giving you these words as faithfully as I am able.”
That I had spent 25 years fighting against him.
That I had led millions away from truth while presenting myself as a seeker of truth.
That I had twisted his words and denied his sacrifice and used my considerable intellectual gifts to harden hearts against him.
That I knew the arguments against Christianity as well as any person alive and had never once genuinely sought to know him.
He said, “And this is the part that broke something in me that has not been repaired and does not need to be repaired.”
He said that he was standing in front of me, that I could see him, that I knew he was real.
And he asked me one question.