Here is an excerpt from a review of my new book, Not Peace But A Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam by Jeff Miller at Patheos, April 7. You can order it here (Kindle edition here) and download a free sample chapter here.
…The biggest problem in understanding Islam as one of the Abrahamic faiths is that what we seem to have in common can be seen as completely different. We might think we are looking at the same basic story in the Old Testament, but while there might be commonalities in the Qur’an there are also vast differences. This comes about because of the way the Qur’an came about in the first place. Maybe this analogy is off-base, but it seems to me to be kind of like fan-fiction. Somebody takes a story they like and writes another story in that same universe. They also might reboot the story to be in a similar framework, but with some diferences [sic]. You can even have a case of one fan-fiction writer writing a story like the latter and then another writer taking off on that story. The Qur’an to me seems to be an awful lot like that as you have some similar biblical stories, but there are major differences such as Abraham attempting to sacrifice Ishmael instead. There are also obvious Gnostic Christian influences along with examples of other early Christian heresies.
Much is made of Jesus and Mary being in the Qur’an and yet where we think we have something in common, we really don’t. It would be like two people talking about President Lincoln where one is talking about the historic Abraham Lincoln and the other one talking about the Vampire Killer Abraham Lincoln. The Jesus in the Qur’an is really a sock puppet mainly used to deny that he is the son of God. A rebooted Jesus used to proclaim Islam. A major reboot happens where Jesus at the end of time is going to come back to break all the crosses and kill all the pigs. As annoyed by reboot story arcs found in Marvel and D.C. Comics are, they have nothing on the author or authors of the Qur’an….