The question sounds provocative at first — but for anyone who pauses to examine it honestly, the answer unlocks something profound about the nature of faith itself. Was Jesus, peace be upon him, a Muslim? To the average Western ear, this may seem like an extraordinary claim. Yet Dr. Jerald Dirks — a Harvard Divinity School graduate, former ordained United Methodist minister, and prolific scholar who embraced Islam in 1993 — makes the case not from provocation, but from precision: once you understand what the words Islam and Muslim actually mean, the answer becomes almost self-evident. This is not a debate about competing labels or cultural ownership. It is an invitation to look past centuries of theological drift and ask what Jesus, peace be upon him, actually believed, practised, and taught — and whether the religion named after him was ever truly his.
The Meaning Hidden in Plain Sight: Submission, Surrender, and the Name of God
“Islam means surrender — and in any religious context, it means surrender or submission to God. Muslim is simply a variant on the word Islam. It means one who submits or surrenders to God.”
— Dr. Jerald Dirks
Dr. Dirks draws attention to something deceptively simple: the word Christian derives from Christ, which traces back through the Greek Christos to the Hebrew Mashiach — meaning anointed. Christianity as a named religion, according to the New Testament’s own Book of Acts, first emerged among followers in Antioch — years after Jesus’s earthly ministry had ended. Jesus never called his followers “Christians,” and the theological structure of Christianity as we know it was shaped far more decisively by Paul of Tarsus than by Jesus’s own teachings. Islam, by contrast, is not named after a person or a tribe. It describes an action and a state of being: the willing surrender of one’s will to the One God. A Muslim, by definition, is anyone who lives in that state of submission. If any life in human history embodied complete submission to the will of God Almighty, it was the life of Jesus, peace be upon him. Crucially, the name of God is not confined to one tongue: the Hebrew El and Elohim, the Aramaic word Jesus himself would have used, and the Arabic Allah share the same Semitic root — all pointing to the same One God worshipped by Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, peace be upon them all. The line Islam draws is not one of language, but of theology: the Creator must never be confused with His creation.
- Islam means submission or surrender to God — a universal concept, not a culturally exclusive label tied to any one people or era
- Muslim means one who submits to God — making Jesus, Moses, and Abraham “Muslims” in the truest, most literal sense of the word
- Christianity as a named religion emerged in Antioch after Jesus’s ministry — Jesus himself identified with none of its later formulations
- Paul of Tarsus, not Jesus, is widely credited by scholars as the primary architect of Christianity as a distinct theological system
- Judaism as practised today traces primarily to Ezra and the Great Assembly around 400 BCE — long after Moses, who was himself a submitter to God
- Allah, Elohim, Yahweh, Theos, Deus — all refer to the same One Creator across languages; what matters is not the word, but the concept: one God, without partner or equal
A Scholar Who Followed the Evidence — Wherever It Led
Dr. Dirks’s journey to Islam was not a rejection of faith — it was its most rigorous expression. Beginning as a committed born-again Evangelical Christian, he progressed through Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College (Billy Graham’s own alma mater), Harvard Divinity School, and doctoral studies in New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he served as an ordained deacon and later as a Baptist pastor. It was this depth of immersion in scripture — not ignorance of it — that began to surface serious questions: inconsistencies in the biblical text, the historical development of Trinitarian doctrine, and the lack of any evidence that Jesus himself taught what later became “Christianity.” His conversion to Islam in 1993 was the culmination of years of intellectual courage and spiritual honesty. He is not an isolated case. He represents a growing number of deeply credentialed Western scholars — men and women who approached the Abrahamic faiths without prejudice and found in Islam not a foreign import, but the original and universal message carried by every prophet: there is One God, and the path to Him is submission, in whatever language you may speak it.
One Message Across All the Prophets
“Coming to the truth requires two things: it requires deep thinking — but it also requires another step, and that’s courage. If you have the truth but you don’t have courage, you won’t stand up for the truth. And that’s as good as standing up for falsehood.”
— Dr. Jerald Dirks
The Quran — the last and final Revelation, sent by God Almighty to clarify what had become distorted over time — confirms what sincere study of the scriptures already points toward: every prophet from Adam to Muhammad, peace be upon them all, carried the same essential message. Worship the One God alone, and surrender your will to His. Abraham did Islam. Moses did Islam. Jesus did Islam. The word shifts with the tongue and the century; the truth it names does not. For those who approach the Biblical text with an open mind and a sincere heart — whether from a Jewish, Christian, or secular background — that thread is there to find. God is One. He is without beginning and without end. He is unlike anything in His creation, and we are entirely dependent upon Him — yet He is a deeply personal God who offers love, mercy, and forgiveness to those who return to Him in repentance. This is not a new or rival religion. It is the oldest covenant between the human soul and its Creator, renewed through every prophet and completed, in its final and preserved form, in Islam. The question “Was Jesus a Muslim?” is ultimately not a challenge — it is an invitation to reflect honestly, to trace the family of prophets across the centuries, and to ask, with the same intellectual courage Dr. Dirks embodied in his own life, where that evidence leads you.
