What surprises people on both sides of the question is how much the Quran and the Gospels share when it comes to Jesus. He is honoured in both. Mary, his mother, is the only woman named anywhere in the Quran, which affirms the virgin birth in language a Christian would recognise at once. A Muslim does not approach Jesus from contempt; he approaches from reverence. That shared ground is what makes the disagreements, when they finally arrive, so sharp and so interesting, because they appear precisely where two traditions that agree on a great deal suddenly cannot both be right.
Where the two accounts agree
The Quran calls Jesus Isa al-Masih, the Messiah. It affirms that he was born of the Virgin Mary, that he worked miracles by God's permission, healing the blind and raising the dead, that he was righteous, and that he was a word and a sign from God. He stands among the most exalted figures in the entire book, and Mary is honoured with a chapter of her own. This is no small overlap, and it is part of why a dream of the man in the white robe is taken so seriously by the person who has it, a point we develop in our piece on true dreams in Islam. A Muslim drawn to investigate Jesus is not betraying his reverence for him; he is following it to its question.
Where they part company
Two divergences matter above all the rest, and on both of them the accounts simply cannot be reconciled.
The cross
The Gospels make the crucifixion of Jesus their centre of gravity, the event toward which every narrative drives and from which the whole Christian claim hangs. The Quran, in a single much-discussed verse (Surah an-Nisa 4:157), appears to deny that Jesus was crucified and killed at all, saying instead that it was only made to appear so. Yet the crucifixion of Jesus is among the best-established facts of ancient history, granted even by scholars with no Christian commitment, precisely because it is so widely attested and so unlikely a thing to have been invented. We set out why historians are so confident in the article on the resurrection.
His identity
The Quran presents Jesus as a prophet and a servant of God, and firmly denies that he is divine or the Son of God in the sense it understands, rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity. The Gospels present something the Quran cannot allow: a man who forgives sins in his own name, accepts worship rather than refusing it, applies divine titles to himself, and tells his followers, "I and the Father are one." The dreams press on this exact nerve, because the man in white so often speaks not as a prophet pointing away toward God, but in the first person: Follow me. I am the way.
Why the two cannot simply be blended
It is tempting to say the two portraits can be folded together, each kept as a partial view of one figure. On these two points they cannot. Either Jesus was crucified or he was not. Either he is solely a prophet or he is what the Gospels report him claiming to be. And the high regard the Quran shows him does not soften the question so much as force it: if Jesus is to be honoured at all, then what he said about himself has to be reckoned with rather than quietly set aside. That is the doorway in which many seekers find themselves standing, and it is why so many of them, after a dream, go looking for the Gospels in order to hear his own words. If you are standing in that doorway now, you may want the page written for dreamers, or our wider survey of why these dreams keep coming.