Blasphemy.

(Christian Post) — Highly respected evangelical pastor John Piper made a startling yet insightful comment Tuesday when he compared the burning of the Islamic holy book to crucifying Christ.

To help explain Muslims’ violent rage over the Koran burning, Piper cited the writing of U.K. scholar Andrew Walls, founder of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, in his book The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History.

In the book, Walls highlighted that a difference between Islam and Christianity is that one is readily translatable while the other resists translation.

“Islamic absolutes are fixed in a particular language, and in the conditions of a particular period of human history. The divine Word is the Koran, fixed in heaven forever in Arabic, the language of original revelation,” wrote Walls. “For Christians, however, the divine Word is translatable, infinitely translatable.”

“Much misunderstanding between Christians and Muslims has arisen from the assumption that the Quran is for Muslims what the Bible is for Christians,” wrote Walls, who was one of the first scholars to study the global church shift away from the West. “It would be truer to say that the Koran is for Muslims what Christ is for Christians.”

Piper caught this last line and concluded that the parallel between Christianity and Islam is not of Christ to Muslim prophet Muhammad and the Koran to the Bible. Rather, the Koran parallels Christ.

“The giving of the Koran is in Islam what the incarnation of Christ is to Christianity,” asserted Piper in a blog posting on the Desiring God website. “If this is so, then Koran-burning is parallel to Christ-crucifying.”