Forthcoming 2027 · i2 Ministries Press

The Jesus of the Qur'an has a paper trail.

Name: The Borrowed Christ
Author: Joshua B. Lingel

The Borrowed Christ — book jacket, by Joshua B. Lingel

Twenty-five biblical prophets appear in the Qur'an. Joshua Lingel follows their stories — the clay birds, the speaking cradle, the palm tree that bends to Mary — back to the Syriac-Aramaic legends of the second through seventh centuries, and sets them beside the Christ of the first-century eyewitnesses.

Foreword by Darrell L. Bock · Endorsed by Gary R. Habermas, J. P. Moreland, David B. Capes and Gerd-R. Puin

Early praise

By comparing the earliest available sources concerning Jesus with much later traditions, The Borrowed Christ challenges readers to consider carefully what the historical evidence can actually support.

Dr. Gary R. HabermasDistinguished Research Professor, Liberty University

Lingel's collection of sources and his both empathetic and clear argumentation are an indispensable theological companion through the difficult field of Islam's emergence.

Dr. Gerd-R. PuinScholar of Early Qur'ānic Manuscripts and the Ṣan'ā' Manuscripts, Germany

My test when writing about Islam has always been, Would I share this with a Muslim? This book passes that test with flying colors.

Dr. David GarrisonAuthor, A Wind in the House of Islam

The question

Which Jesus is grounded in the earliest evidence?

Two billion people have been taught a Jesus who was never crucified, never called the Son of God, and never rose from the dead. Most of the Christians around them have never been shown where that portrait came from.

The Borrowed Christ is a historical investigation, not a polemic. It works from dates, manuscripts and the ordinary tools of source criticism — and it grades its own evidence, lowering its confidence where the manuscripts require it.

"The Jesus of the Qur'ān is borrowed and His Christology is cut out, drawn not from the first-century witnesses to Jesus of Nazareth, but from the Syriac-Aramaic apocryphal traditions of the second through seventh centuries."
The thesis, p. 15

A Syriac Christian codex beside an early Ḥijāzī-script Qur'anic fragment — Illustration: a Syriac Christian codex beside an early Ḥijāzī-script fragment.

27 Chapters in five parts

49 Side-by-side comparative tables

14 Appendices of primary evidence

25 Prophets traced to their sources

Some ninety verses across fifteen sūrahs concern ʿĪsā — the largest dossier of any prophet in the Qur'an. Every one is examined.

Inside the book

Five parts, twenty-seven chapters.

From Chapter 6 · Tables 2–4 The clay birds

The Qur’ān, Q 3:49 · 7th century AD

أَنِّي أَخْلُقُ لَكُم مِّنَ الطِّينِ كَهَيْئَةِ الطَّيْرِ فَأَنفُخُ فِيهِ فَيَكُونُ طَيْرًا بِإِذْنِ اللَّهِ

“That I fashion for you out of clay the likeness of a bird, and I breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by God's leave.”

Infancy Gospel of Thomas 2 · 2nd century AD

λαβὼν πηλὸν ἁπαλὸν ἔπλασεν ἐξ αὐτοῦ στρουθία δώδεκα

“Taking soft clay, he fashioned from it twelve sparrows ... he clapped his hands and cried to the sparrows and said to them: Off with you.”

Clay. Bird-form. A child. Animation by command. Same elements, same order. The storybook is the elder by four to five centuries.

A Different Jesus

How the Qur'an's portrait of Jesus was assembled from stories told by ear along the caravan roads — and how a borrowing is proved.

Chapters

The Animator's Hand
Two Footprints
How It Travelled
How a Borrowing Is Proved
The Catalogue
The Three Borrowed Miracles
Maryam
Where the Commonalities Came From
Finishing the Character
The Gospel of Barnabas
The Other Twenty-Four

A Different Gospel

What the Qur'an denies — the cross, the Sonship, the Trinity, the Word made flesh — and why each denial removes something load-bearing from the gospel.

Chapters

The Cross and the Atonement
The Sonship Denied
The Trinity Denied
The Word Became Flesh
The Claims Made for the Text

A rock-cut tomb entrance in the Judean hills at dawn, its stone rolled away

III

The Case for Christ

How early, how fast and how well-attested the highest claims about Jesus actually are — from the YHWH texts to the empty tomb.

Chapters

The Explosion
Divine Identity and the YHWH Texts
Jesus on Jesus
The Eyewitnesses
The Gospel in the Gospels
The Resurrection

A Different Spirit

The Spirit of the Qur'an is an angel, not the third Person of the Trinity — and the verdict of the whole investigation.

Chapters

The Spirit Who Is an Angel
The Verdict

Global church leaders gathered around a table in discussion

The Bride Prepared

From argument to mission: the gospel stated plainly, and a strategy for 5.5 million churches to reach their Muslim neighbours.

Chapters

The Bride and the Bridegroom
Come to Christ
The Great Commission and the Global Harvest

Plus 14 appendices — from a comparative chronology to non-Christian attestation of Jesus's death — a glossary, select bibliography and index.

Look inside

Begin on the road to Bethlehem.

The Introduction opens on a road outside Bethlehem around the year 450, and follows one story from a pilgrim church into the text of the Qur'an. Read the opening now. The full Introduction is yours free when you join the list.

Introduction: The Investigation

Begin here, because everything that follows runs through this place.

Three miles south of Jerusalem, on the road to Bethlehem, there stands an octagonal church built around a rock. Pilgrims call it the Kathisma — the Seat — because tradition says Mary rested on that stone when the journey became too much for her. On her feast day the church fills. Lamps are lit. A deacon reads, and then a cantor sings the story the pilgrims came to hear: how the mother of God, exhausted and in pain, was refreshed when a palm tree bent its branches down to her, and how water broke from the ground at its roots.

Nobody in that building thinks they are hearing Scripture. The story is not in Matthew. It is not in Luke. It is a beloved embellishment, four centuries young, and the bishops who permit it know precisely what it is.

The pilgrims go home. Some of them go a long way home — down the incense roads, through Ghassānid country, into the tent camps and market towns of Arabia, where the story is told again in Syriac, and then in Arabic, to people who have never seen a Gospel in their own language and never will.

Two hundred years later a voice recites, in an Arabic that no one has yet written a grammar for: And the pangs of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree ... your Lord has placed a rivulet beneath you. And shake toward yourself the trunk of the palm tree; it will drop upon you ripe dates.

And it is no longer an embellishment. It is the word of God, and to doubt it is unbelief.

Written for the Church that will answer the question.

Pastors & church leaders

Confidence to answer your people — and the Muslim families who live within five miles of your church.

Missionaries & mission leaders

A source-by-source case you can carry into conversation with conviction and respect.

Professors & seminary students

Forty-nine comparative tables, fourteen appendices and a select bibliography — built for the classroom.

Apologists & scholars

Qur'anic narratives read against the Greek, Syriac and Aramaic literature of Late Antiquity.

Written with "an abundance of love for Muslims." — Dr. David Cook, Rice University

The Founding Reader list

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What scholars and church leaders are saying

"This book shows how that portrait of Jesus is a distortion, a myth developed after the fact, that hides the real Jesus and why he matters."

Dr. Darrell L. Bock, from the ForewordSenior Research Professor of New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary

Scholars

Hard-hitting, carefully argued, and distinctive in its approach, this is a one-of-a-kind contribution to Christian engagement with Islam.

Dr. J. P. MorelandDistinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University

Joshua brings more than three decades of advanced study of both the Bible and Islam to the task. I know of no one alive better equipped to have written it. If the identity of Jesus is the question of ultimate consequence, and it is, then this is one of the most important books available to us today.

Dr. Daniel A. BrubakerPublisher and President, Think and Tell, LLC; Quranic Manuscript Scholar

Readers will find here a serious argument, a clear love for Christ, and a desire to help Christians engage their Muslim neighbors with conviction and respect.

David B. CapesDirector, Lanier Theological Library

With an abundance of love for Muslims, yet a burning need to further the gospel message to all the world in accord with the Jesus of reality this will inform, convince and goad all who read. No one can remain apathetic in the face of such evidence.

Dr. David CookProfessor of Religion, Rice University

Read all endorsements

This book is essential reading for both students and pastors alike who seek to engage and evangelize Muslims. I highly recommend it.

Dr. Tony CostaInstructor, University of Toronto; Pastor, Park Lawn Baptist Church

Joshua is not against Islam. He is for truth. He loves Muslims and is truly giving his life so that they might know the only One who can satisfy their deepest spiritual appetites and save them from the sins which burden them.

Dr. David TalleyChair, Biblical Studies Department, Biola University and Talbot School of Theology

Lingel's honest quest offers rich material for both Christians and Muslims to better understand Jesus and each other.

Dr. Todd M. JohnsonEva B. and Paul E. Toms Distinguished Professor of Mission and Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

Global church leaders

This message is particularly important for Africa. ... May this book strengthen the Church's confidence in the biblical Christ and help mobilize a new generation to take the Gospel to Muslims everywhere.

Archbishop Dr. Barnabas MtokambaliAssemblies of God, Tanzania; Continental Leadership, Assemblies of God Africa

Africa stands at one of the most important frontiers of Christian mission in the world, and the Church must be prepared to proclaim Jesus Christ clearly and confidently to our Muslim neighbours, who number around five hundred million.

Apostle Dr. Eric NyamekyeChairman, The Church of Pentecost, Ghana

Its publication in Spanish will provide pastors, leaders, missionaries, and churches throughout Latin America with a valuable resource for understanding Islam, strengthening confidence in the biblical Jesus, and communicating the Gospel faithfully to our Muslim neighbours.

Pr. Ricardo CastilloContinental Superintendent, Latin America, Assembly of God, Costa Rica

As the book demonstrates, the question is ultimately not merely about comparing religions, but about answering the most important question: Who is Jesus Christ?

Apostle Yohannes GirmaFormer Vice President, Ethiopian Council of Gospel Believers' Churches

Read all endorsements

Over 40 years ago I prayed that the Lord would bring apologetics training available to the Global Church and i2 Ministries and Dr. Joshua Lingel has been an answer to us and the MENA region for that prayer.

Pr. Dr. Sameh MauriceSenior Pastor, Kasr El Dobara Evangelical Church, Cairo, Egypt

The Borrowed Christ is exactly the kind of material that makes MMWU different. As a radical Muslim I studied the Islamic traditions deeply. MMWU matches that same rigour in English, with hard-hitting material from the best apologists and theologians alive today.

Tomas SamuelDirector, MENA Training Programme, Mission Muslim World University, i2 Ministries

It gives pastors and mission leaders something rare: a rigorous, historically grounded case for why the Jesus of the Qur'an cannot be the Jesus of the Gospels, built not on rhetoric but on the earliest sources themselves.

Ricardo LunaGlobal Servant, Transform World

About the author

Joshua B. Lingel

Joshua Lingel is the founder and president of i2 Ministries and dean of Mission Muslim World University, which trains more than 1,700 students across seventy nations. For three decades he has studied the Qur'an and its origins — in 2005 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and alongside scholars of the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts — and has given his life to equipping the Church to reach Muslims with the gospel.

"Joshua is not against Islam. He is for truth. He loves Muslims and is truly giving his life so that they might know the only One who can satisfy their deepest spiritual appetites." — Dr. David Talley, Biola University

More about Dr. Lingel

Questions

Frequently asked questions

When will The Borrowed Christ be released?

It is forthcoming from i2 Ministries Press in 2027. Founding Readers hear first — before the public announcement.

What will it cost, and in what formats?

Pricing and formats will be announced at release. Join the list and we'll send the details the day they're final.

Is the book respectful toward Muslims?

Yes. It addresses Muslim readers directly and warmly, and its argument concerns texts, dates and sources — never people. Dr. David Garrison's test was "Would I share this with a Muslim?" He says it passes "with flying colors."

Is it written for scholars or for pastors?

Both. The argument is fully documented — 49 tables, 14 appendices, a select bibliography — but it is written to equip pastors, missionaries and church members for real conversations.

Can my church, ministry or seminary order in bulk?

Yes. Tick "I may order copies" when you join, or write to info@i2ministries.org, and we'll follow up personally with bulk pricing.

Will it be translated?

A Spanish edition is planned, with other languages to follow. Tell us your role when you join and we'll alert you.

The tomb is empty. The case is documented.

Be the first to read The Borrowed Christ — and get the Introduction free today.

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