Q represents a major challenge for contemporary Christianity, not least because it strongly suggests that Islam's picture of Jesus (pbuh) is historically correct. The fact that Q essentially confirms Islam’s image of Jesus (pbuh) as a distinctly human Prophet has not, I think, been widely noticed by today's Christians. And it must be. Because a careful review of the scriptures demonstrates that Jesus (pbuh) is in fact calling his people to Islam.

JESUS (PBUH) BROUGHT ME TO ISLAM!

I came to Islam, alhamdulillah, after three decades of restless dissatisfaction with conventionial Christianity. Although I've read a lot of conversion stories since I embraced Islam in March of 2003, I haven't found many that cited the Gospels as a point of entry to the Holy Qur'an. This is how it was for me.

I was drawn to the Gospels at a young age -- eleven -- and I read them compulsively on my own, despite the fact that I did not live in a Christian household. I soon learned to keep religious matters to myself. 
 
EARLY QUESTIONS

For most of my adolescence I studied the Christian scriptures on my own. I still have the red King James Bible I bought as a child; my own handwritten note on the front page proclaims June 26, 1974, as the date I accepted Jesus (pbuh) as my personal savior.
 
When I say I read the scriptures compulsively, I mean that I was drawn to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John like a magnet. There are plenty of notes and highlightings in that old Bible of mine in Psalms, in Ecclesiastes, in Proverbs -- but most of the notes and underlinings are in the Gospels. But I sensed, even at an early age, that there were some internal problems with the texts I loved so dearly. 
  
WHO TAMPERED WITH THE GOSPELS?
 
I can clearly remember reading the account in the 22nd chapter of Luke where Jesus (pbuh) withdrew from the disciples, prayed, and returned to find them fast asleep. Who, I wondered, could have possibly observed him praying ... and then related the incident so that it eventually could be included in the Gospel of Luke? There's another passage in the Gospels where Jesus (pbuh) supposedly includes the words "let him who reads understand" in one of his spoken discourses, which seemed odd to me. And there was yet another spot where the New Testament author assured first-century Christians that their generation would see the second coming of the Messiah -- a passage I found difficult to square with modern Christian doctrine. These and other queries about the New Testament arose while I was still quite young, certainly before I was fifteen. Had someone manipulated the Gospels? If so, who? And why? 

I "filed" my questions for later, and decided that the real problem was that I was not part of a vigorous Christian faith community.

CATHOLIC 

At eighteen, I headed East for college and entered the Roman Catholic Church. In college, I met a beautiful and compassionate Catholic girl who was to become the great love and support of my life; she was not particularly religious, but she appreciated how important these matters were to me, and so she supported me in my beliefs. I do a great injustice to her seemingly limitless resources of strength, support, and love by compressing the beginning of our relationship into a few sentences here.
 
AN ENCOUNTER WITH A PRIEST

I asked the campus priest -- a sweet and pious man -- about some of the Gospel material that had given me trouble, but he became uncomfortable and changed the subject. On another occasion, I remember telling him that I was focusing closely on the Gospel of John because that Gospel was (as I thought then) a first-person account of the events in question.

Again, he stammered and changed the subject and did not want to discuss the merits of one Gospel over another; he simply insisted that all four were important and that I should study all of them. This was a telling conversation, and a fateful one, as it turned out.

CHRISTIANITY? OR PAULISM? 

Now, this is not my life story, but rather my reversion account, so I'm going to fast-forward over a lot of important events. That sweet campus priest eventually married my girlfriend and me, and we settled in suburban Massachusetts. We each moved ahead professionally and became grownups. We had three beautiful children. And I kept reading and rereading the Bible. I was drawn, as ever, to the sayings about the lamp and the eye, the Prodigal Son, the Beatitudes, the importance of prayer, and so many others -- but I had steadily more serious intellectual problems with the surrounding "architecture" of the New Testament, particularly with the Apostle Paul. The fact that Paul never seemed to build a theological argument around anything that Jesus (pbuh) actually said was a big, big problem for me.
 
In the mid-1990s, my wife and I both became deeply disenchanted with the Catholic Church, in part because of a truly terrible priest who gave very little attention to the spiritual needs of his community. We later learned that he had been covering up for a child abuser! 
 
PROTESTANT
 
I found it necessary to immerse myself in a faith community. I joined, and became active in, the local Protestant denomination, a Congregational Church.
 
So I led Sunday School classes for children, and briefly taught a Gospel class on the Parables for the adults. In the Sunday School classes for the kids I stayed right with the curriculum I had been given; but in the adult class, I tried to challenge the participants to confront certain parables directly, without filtering everything through the Apostle Paul. We had interesting discussions, but I sensed some resistance, and I didn't try to teach an adult class again. My wife eventually joined my church. (She is a member there today.)
 
By this point, I had become deeply affected by the apparent intersection of the Christian mystic tradition and that of the Sufis and the Zen Buddhists. And I had even written on such matters. But there seemed to be no one at my church who shared my zeal for these issues. 
 
 
FOCUSING ON THE GOSPEL SAYINGS
 
In particular, I was interested in the research being done that indicated that the oldest strata of the Gospels reflected an extremely early oral source known as Q, and that each of the individual sayings of Jesus (pbuh) needed to be evaluated on its own merits, and not as part of the narrative material that surrounded it.

This is because that narrrative material was added many years later.

In Q, Jesus (pbuh) endorses, in no uncertain terms, a rigorous monotheism.

"Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, 'Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.' (Luke 4:8)

Compare:

"Children of Adam, did We not command you not to worship Satan? He was your sworn enemy. Did We not command you to worship Me, and tell you that this is the straight path?" (Holy Qur'an 36:60-61)