Search Results for: Is Allah a man

If Allah is so powerful, why can’t He become a man?

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At first glance, this seems like a pretty strong argument. God in both Christianity and Islam is defined to be all powerful. So if God is all powerful, why does Christianity say He can become a man and Islam say He cannot? The Christian’s argument does not include a deep study on the nature of God and due to this, it is very simple to debunk this argument.

Defining God

Both Muslims and Christians believe that God is an all powerful being.

God’s Nature is Absolute

Both Muslims and Christians believe that God’s nature does not change, He was all powerful, is all powerful and will always be all powerful.

Man’s Nature Differs 

Both Muslims and Christians believe that mankind is not all powerful.

Muslim Response

If God is all powerful and man is not all powerful, can God’s nature of being all powerful, change to becoming not all powerful? How can an all powerful God become less powerful?

Conclusion

  • God is all powerful.
  • If God gains power, then by definition He was not all powerful before and thus cannot be considered a God.
  • If God loses power, then by definition He is not all powerful and thus cannot be considered a God.

Since a Christian believes that a God can become a man, and a man is not all powerful, how can God remain all powerful yet be unable to defend himself (Christ was allegedly subject to Roman torture) and unable to eat (so hungry he cursed a fig tree)? If God is all powerful, no being should be able to overcome him, since Christ was overcome, then he clearly was not a God. So the simple answer is: Whereas God is always all powerful, man is not.

A Christian apologist may argue Jesus ‘chose’ to take all of these things unto himself, that would still not change the fact that he chose to take on an attribute of weakness by becoming a man, thus meaning he cannot be God because God is always all powerful, and does not change. So by no longer being all powerful, he is no longer God, and the very fact he changed and took on a new nature, when God does not change and always is, also again means he can’t be God.

and Allaah knows best.

New Podcast Episode with Dr. Bart Ehrman

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A new podcast headed by an awesome brother from the Mad Mamluks podcast has finally publicly released an episode I’ve been excited for since the moment it was recorded. Please click this link or the image below to access it:

Facebook Post of Episode

Debates, some elements of historiography, and general information about New Testament Textual Criticism are discussed.

and Allah knows best.

Corrections in Early Qurʾān Manuscripts: Twenty Examples – Dan Brubaker

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cc-2019-db-correctionbookcover

A recent publication by Dan Brubaker has received quite serious praise from a crowd of individuals who do not seem to have read it and those that have read it cannot seem to articulate what about it was meant to be praiseworthy in the first place. Having read it myself roughly a week or two ago, I forgot about its existence as I was thoroughly nonplussed about its contents, I proceeded with my Ramadan (and subsequently my Eid) until today when I thought to myself that perhaps I can do a very brief review of the work in an effort to put to some use the time I invested in having read the very short book.

To begin with, I have had several interactions with missionaries who seem to consider this book to be one of the greatest literary pieces ever published, yet I cannot seem to find anyone who is able to explain to me why this is the case. Most of my conversations about this work have followed generally the same line of reasoning:

This book proves that the Qur’an is corrupt and has not been preserved!
Can anyone reference the page on which this claim is made?
No.

This book is groundbreaking because it shows that the Qur’an has changes to it!
Changes in the sense that someone somewhere inserted a word or verse or chapter into one of these manuscripts which eventually came to be seen as part of the Qur’an today? No.

Changes that show the early Muslims had a different Qur’an!
A different Qur’an in what sense?

That it contained different words that they had to correct!
Do you mean the words which were omitted by the initial scribe, noticed and then corrected by the same scribe (or in some cases, later ones)?
Yes.
That doesn’t make it a different Qur’an then, all that makes it is someone writing, making an error while writing and then correcting that error.

But it is an intentional change!
Well yes, I would imagine that if someone wrote something and realised they made an error that they would have intentionally chose to correct it.

He says that some of the corrections were later!
Not exactly, he only comes to this conclusion because the nib (writing tip of the writing instrument – think of a lead pencil’s point) was different, the same scribe could have had more than one nib, especially if they were untrained and prone to error, as some of the manuscripts clearly demonstrate some scribes were untrained. It is also possible that there was an initial scribe with one writing instrument (think of a pen, or a pencil), what scholars call the initial scribe or the prima manus and then there was a corrector or secunda manus reviewing the work of the first scribe who used a different nib or the same nib (but due to difference in writing ability their corrections were more noticeable). Therefore a difference in the nib (writing instrument) or in the stroke of the hand of the scribe (or corrector) would appear different but would not necessitate it being centuries later (that conclusion is a matter of interpretation and not one of a factual or immutable nature).

These are how most of my conversations have gone, indeed one specific conversation comes to mind where a missionary could not believe I had read the book so quickly because it took years of research to write. He could not grasp that a man can take 100 years to write a book, but that it does not mean it takes 100 years to read it. I have tried to understand what missionaries find so impressive about the book, it has been difficult to find one that has actually read it. I was able to find one and some of his reasons were as follows:

It is impressive because he shows that corrections were made.
Is he the first person in the world to recognize that authors (scribes) can make mistakes and then correct their mistakes?
No.

Is he the first person in the world to study Qur’anic manuscripts?
No.

Doesn’t he thank Islamic Universities, libraries and institutions for help with his manuscript studies?
Yes.

Didn’t he claim to have consulted Islamic scholarly works on understanding some corrections?
Yes.

So what exactly was impressive if he was not the first to notice any of these things and especially that he received help from pre-existing Islamic literature and Arab-Islamic institutions on this topic?

On the other hand however, what I have managed to notice is that from those who have actually read the very brief book, there is a trend they have all noticed. There are four things to note:

  1. These corrections were allegedly made in different cities.
  2. At different times.
  3. By different scribes.
  4. Towards the accepted Qira’at of the Qur’an.

If the argument was that the Qur’an which is read today was a recent invention (though this is not the argument he himself makes), then how is it possible for all of these different people, in different places, in different times to invent the exact same Qira’at of the Qur’an as we have it today? The only reasonable and sensible conclusion is because they had the same Qur’an, they could not all make the same corrections towards the text of the Qur’an as we have it today, if they did not know what the correct Qira’at of the Qur’an was in the first place. In other words his short book is not a proof of anything negative about the Qur’an, rather it is a proof that scribal errors made by unknown scribes (and in many cases, clearly untrained in Arabic nahw) were seen as such and did not enter into the authentic and well-known transmissions Qira’at of the Qur’an.

The fact that Muslims read these individual copies and went to the effort to ensure they were properly written, demonstrates their careful concern for the accurate transmission of the Qur’an, if they had left the errors without correction then that would have been a cause for concern. In many cases, Dan’s inability to understand Arabic nahw allowed him to choose examples which didn’t make much sense, especially in the cases where:

  1. The scribe omitted or repeated a word due to confusing it with another verse (homoeoteleuton or homoeoarcton).
  2. The scribe omitted or repeated a word due to copying the letters as shapes (unable to understand what they are writing, they are able to identify shapes but don’t know words or what the words mean).
  3. The owner preferring another Qira’ah and requesting it be changed to that reading.

What is perhaps the most intriguing is that these errors before being corrected were exclusively done to singular manuscripts which when compared to manuscripts from the same time period, it can easily be seen that contemporaneous manuscripts do have the correct reading and do not have the same error, thus certifying that these were not legitimate readings that were long forgotten, but that they were genuine errors that were supposed to be corrected.

All in all, nothing about the book is novel, nothing about it is ground-breaking and nothing about it affects any beliefs that Muslims have about the Qur’an, to the contrary it serves as a good evidence for the preservation of the Qur’an that after almost a decade of research for the sake of advancing Christianity, and with a team of volunteers behind him, he could find only 20 examples of corrections stemming from largely untrained scribes. On the other hand, that we have early manuscripts of the New Testament from professional publication houses (scriptoria) with text-clusters (multiple manuscript traditions from the same time period) showing significant and meaningful changes, and additions, demonstrates to us why the missionaries need to inflate meaningless corrections to obfuscate from the faith-crisis they are experiencing.

and Allah knows best.

Between Ehrman and Error

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Recently on Blogging Theology I posted a video on the tenacity of the proposed ausgangstext which filled the lacuna of John 20:28. The vast majority of Muslims (expectedly) were enthusiastic about discussing the tenacity of Doubting Thomas’ alleged statement. The vast majority of Christians were not, which was also understandable. Then there were those caught in-between, educated enough to know that there had to be, or that there was more evidence behind what I had published, and there were others who were incredulous as to what that evidence could have been. Upon release of my second response video, I took a little more time, some 20 minutes and expanded on the rationale leading to the conclusions I mentioned in my first video on the topic.

Everyone knows about Dr. Ehrman’s famous statement, “copies of copies of copies of copies”. Yet the only two arguments I received in return were quite amusing. The first of which was that some people were curious as to whether Dr. Ehrman had commented on this passage or not. For some reason I have yet to discover, some Muslims’ hold on simple textual criticism of the New Testament is limited to only what Dr. Ehrman says, yet at the same time they are fully willing to simultaneously argue against his famous aforementioned quote. I duly provided a list of scholarship that not only knew of the work I gained the reference from John 20:28 on, I also provided the name of a seminary which uses the work itself, while also foregoing to mention that the scholar in question has been cited by Dr. Ehrman himself – one of the Muslims who opposed me in those comments had perhaps not yet read Dr. Ehrman’s references to this scholar (and his conclusions).

Nonetheless, the second argument I received was that no other variant of John 20:28 existed post p66, although I did point out that this was the case in Codex Bezae, as minor of a variant as it is, the challenge that not one variant exists has thoroughly been debunked (for those unread, the manuscript was eventually edited by a scribe).

bezae1

Following from this ignorant argument, was the case that since we know what every text post p66 said, then we must know what p66 itself said. This again, coming from those who agree with Dr. Ehrman’s aforementioned statement. We are therefore left with the following problem. Hence the title, Between Ehrman and Error. We have the following from the gracious Dr. Ehrman (emphasis mine own):

My point has always been (for example, in Misquoting Jesus) that we can’t know with absolute complete certainty what was said in each and every passage of the NT. That point – which I think cannot be refuted – is principally directed against fundamentalists who want to claim that every word of the Bible is inspired by God. How can we say the words were inspired if we don’t know in a lot of cases what the words were??? – Source.

I don’t think there’s an easy answer to these questions.  But they shouldn’t be ignored, as they ALWAYS are (in my experience) by people who want to assure us that we “know the original text in 99% of all cases.”   Really?   Which original?

If it were just up to me, I would say that the “original” is the first form of the text that was placed in circulation.  But since that in fact is not the oldest form of the text, maybe we shouldn’t call it the original. – Source.

One very interesting piece of evidence for this view involves a fact that is not widely known outside the ranks of the professional textual critics.  It is this:  new papyri manuscripts – relatively very old ones – do show up all the time (several in the past few years).  Whenever a new papyrus turns up, it almost NEVER contains a textual variant that is completely new.  The variants are almost always variants that we know about from our later manuscripts.  This shows, the argument goes, that variants were not created later.  Our later manuscripts preserved variants, they didn’t create them.  And this shows, it is argued, that all of the earlier variants are to be found even in the later manuscripts.

This is a terrific argument, and very interesting.  On the surface, it seems pretty convincing.  But in fact, in my view, it does not actually show that we have the original reading or that we can know that we do.  I will explain why in the next post. – Source.

I don’t think our New Testaments are likely ever to change much.  And I don’t think we know in a lot of places what the originals said.  Where’s the contradiction?  I’m not saying that we *know* that we have the original text in 99.9% of the passages of the NT.  I’m saying we *don’t* know – for a wide variety of reasons that I haven’t gotten into very much here.   But I’m emphasizing the word “know.”  We simply don’t know.

Do I *suspect* that most of the time we are pretty close or even there?  Yes, that would be my guess.  But it’s just a guess based on scholarly assumption and suspicion. – Source.

During those 300 years, Mark was being copied, and recopied, and recopied, by scribes.  Until we get our first full copy.  Can we know that this copy from 300 years later was 99% like the version that came directly from the pen of the author?  Of course we can’t know.  How would we know? – Source.

Between Ehrman and Error. It’s really as simple as that. Dr. Ehrman used the word “guess”, I used the word “guesswork”. Dr. Ehrman used the word “suspicion”, I used the word “speculation”. Dr. Ehrman repeatedly points out that we cannot know what the original text said. He repeatedly points out that most variant units are decided on guesses and suspicion. So the question begs itself, how far are the conclusions in my video, different from that of Dr. Ehrman’s himself?

The problem presents itself, as he described regarding Mark, we don’t know what version of what copy we received. Given that basic, common sense principle, extend that to John 20:28, given that p66 is our earliest and we have no intermediate text (that is, the text between what the original author(s) wrote and the text of p66 itself), and that it has a lacuna or gap for the famous, “and my God” – then there is no way of certainty of knowing what p66 itself said or what the intermediate text(s) said, what the archetypal text said, or what the autographic text said. To require that we must need a variant before being able to dispute what a missing text says, is essentially self-refuting, the gap itself presents us with a problem, we don’t know what it said and we don’t know if any of the intermediate texts said something variable. We simply cannot know, just as Dr. Ehrman says.

So between Ehrman and Error, I agree with him, we cannot know, it involves guessing and suspicion. Those who disagree, disagree with the very goodly Dr. they appealed to in the first place and are as such, in error.

and Allah knows best.

Jonathan McLatchie Begs For Do-Over Debate with Mansoor

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After a disappointing and embarrassing encounter with Br. Mansoor, Jonathan McLatchie has challenged Br. Mansoor for a re-do. The following video in its entirety really demonstrated Jonathan’s inability to dialogue and debate under pressure:

This video has cleaned up audio and subtitles to hear the mistakes that Jonathan made:

In this video, both Dr. James White and Jonathan’s friend, Sam Shamoun correct and refute Jonathan’s mistakes about core Christian doctrines:

Unfortunately Jonathan claimed that fellow Christians were in agreement with him, and that he did not make heretical claims about the Trinity, which is contradicted in this conversation I had with his friend, Rudolph Bushoff:

After suffering such a humiliating debate defeat against Br. Mansoor, Jonathan is begging and pleading for another turn, this is Br. Mansoor’s response to him:

It appears that Jonathan Mclatchie had an unpleasant experience at Speakers’ Corner speaking with us (Hamid, me and Paul). He wishes for a second chance. He has challenged me openly for a debate. Needless to say that I am not interested in public/ formal debates and will have to let this one pass. Perhaps what he should instead do is to answer some of the points already made in our brief exchange at Speakers’ Corner to the wider Christian audience who might be reflecting on burning him on the stakes for his unorthodox belief if that were to happen in classical times.

Alternatively, if he is really desperate, I am found visiting most Sundays at Speakers’ Corner where we can continue our friendly discussion there informally, (sitting comfortably on the grass with the Sun shining over us) as the exchanges there can be more fruitful for mutual understanding of each others faith than from a formal debate setting where often it’s all about scoring points, in my opinion.

I can understand that whenever an intellectual exchange takes place on the Christian doctrine of Trinity at Speakers’ Corner, there often seems to be a realisation of a need for a second chance in a different debate setting as appreciated by external audience by the virtue of internet, as if that debate setting will provide somehow a comfort zone where the same points made in the exchange will wash away. As for Jonathan, I did want to continue our discussion at the park a little bit later from the initial exchange, but he was not that keen at all and had instead jumped on the ladder with Jay’s students only to be heckled down badly by the regular hecklers.

Anyways, apologetic Christians should rethink about throwing open challenges to lay Muslims like myself instead of engaging with our scholarly community. Or may be abandon the idea of formally debating our Islamic scholars, especially when even the Muslim laity seems to rock the foundation of the faith of your scholarly community?

and Allah knows best.

Br. Mansoor Stumps McLatchie

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Br. Sarwar of Hyde Park has released one of the most entertaining videos of the year, Br. Mansoor running laps around McLatchie in discussing monotheism in the Bible and the Qur’an. McLatchie’s main line of argumentation was, “…in my debate with Dr. Shabir”. The brothers at Hyde Park were unsure whether McLatchie thought all brown people were the same (given his previous comments about Muslims) and Br. Mansoor had to clarify that he indeed was not Dr. Shabir, several times! Surprise guests include my friends Br. Hamid and Br. Paul of Blogging Theology.

The ending of the video is quite a pleasant one, Jonny becomes increasingly frustrated and angry with being asked to explain his reasoning and beliefs. After seemingly being unable to joust with Br. Mansoor, Jonny decided to storm off mid-discussion. Hilariously enough, after several days, Jonny messaged one of the Muslims in the above video saying he enjoyed the “banter”. He enjoyed it so much, he had to storm off. The Muslims at Hyde Park would like to thank Jonny for coming down and helping them in their da’wah efforts.

and Allah knows best.

Should Christians Appeal to Jesus’s Human Nature to Explain God’s Ignorance or Fallibility?

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Question:

When discussing whether Christ was God or a man with Christians, they often explain his “defects” as being due to his human nature. For example, they say if he was hungry, it was due to his human nature, or cursing the fig tree and praying to God, was due to his human nature. What would be your response to this?

Answer:

Assuming that this question refers to interactions with Trinitarian Christians, it is actually a heresy to explain Jesus’s actions exclusively in light of his human nature. In Trinitarianism, Jesus is considered to be both God and man, with his divine nature and his human nature being eternally united, otherwise known as the hypostatic union. In the centuries when the Trinitarian creed was being developed, a popular heresy which existed at that time was to separate these two natures. This was known as Nestorianism. Thus, the Nestorians believed that there were two natures, a divine and human but that they were not joined together in a union.

Trinitarians describe this union as Jesus being one person with two unified natures, sometimes referred to as “fully God and fully man”. Meaning, at all times, he – Christ, was both fully God and fully man. Let’s take the example of Jesus’s crucifixion. If we ask, did the all powerful God suffer, a Christian would say no, as a divine being cannot suffer. Only the human nature suffered. This is the heresy of Nestorianism. They are disuniting the natures, and isolating the human nature from the divine nature. We must remind these Trinitarians of their beliefs, if the human nature suffered, then the divine nature must also have suffered as these natures are eternally united. Modern Trinitarians often use the heresy of Nestorianism when defending the Trinity, without realising it.

Another popular example is Jesus praying. Many Trinitarians would claim that the human nature was praying. This is incorrect, both the divine and the human natures were praying to God, the human nature is eternally united with the divine, at no point can one nature be disunited from the other. When Jesus was hungry, the human nature hungered. This is what Trinitarians claim when we inquire of Jesus’s cursing of the fig tree. Yet, they are once again isolating one of the two natures. We must remind them, both the divine and the human nature hungered, these natures cannot be separated under any circumstances unless one is willing to declare themselves apostates from Trinitarianism and believers in the heresy of Nestorianism. As Dr. James White says in his book, The Forgotten Trinity:

“Instead, the doctrine is misunderstood as well as ignored. It is so misunderstood that a majority of Christians, when asked, give incorrect and at times downright heretical definitions of the Trinity.” – White, James R. (1998-11-01). Forgotten Trinity, The (p. 16). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Interestingly, despite this book claiming to be a defense of the Trinitarian doctrine, Dr. White himself also appeals to the heresy of Nestorianism. In seeking to explain the dual nature of Christ, he says:

“Crucifixion is only meaningful with reference to his human nature (you cannot crucify the divine nature). When Paul speaks of the crucifixion of the Lord of glory, he is speaking of Christ as one person with two natures.” – White, James R. (1998-11-01). Forgotten Trinity, The (p. 160). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In the space of two sentences, a person writing on the very topic of understanding the Trinity, appeals to and accepts Nestorianism. He begins by saying that the crucifixion can only be meaningful in regard to the human nature, yet in the next sentence he states that Paul teaches that the crucifixion is of the person of Christ, the person with two natures. Such a level of confusion and contradiction is rampant throughout Trinitarian teachings. I have previously written about another Trinitarian book that sought to explain the Trinity, which you can read here.

It is interesting that John 14:26 claims that the Spirit would come to explain all things necessary for salvation and to make these things easy to understand, yet all Trinitarians would gladly proclaim that the Trinity is a divine mystery which cannot be understood and that the communication between the two natures (communicatio idiomatum) is a divine mystery. Surely then, the Trinity is not a doctrine of God, and it is something that both Christian scholars and laymen alike, find extreme difficulty in accepting and believing, and it is unfortunate that while they condemn Nestorianism as a heresy, they openly appeal to it in trying to explain Trinitarianism.

and Allah knows best.

If the Command was Given to Burn the Manuscripts, Why Do So Many Survive?

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Question:

If the command was given to burn unauthorized copies of the Qur’an, why do so many early manuscripts exist?

Answer:

This narration must firstly be taken into its historical context. There were generally two types of writing material being used at that time. Papyrus and Vellum (Parchment). Papyrus is a plant based material, which is very delicate. In other words, it can be difficult to preserve and it is damaged somewhat easily. However, it was cheap to produce and attain. This type of material could not be washed or rubbed so that the writing on it could be changed. To the contrary, parchment (vellum) which is animal skin is very robust and it can be washed over or rubbed to have the writing changed. It is also very expensive and at that time, some may say difficult to procure (acquire). In this context, the command to burn, would have meant to burn what could not be changed, which is why we find a number of manuscripts (made with animal skin) with changes, and why papyrus based manuscripts are extremely rare. Therefore, in terms of the historical context of the writing material of that time period, it would make sense that you burn the cheap, mass produced material which could not be changed and you do not burn the expensive, difficult to acquire writing material which could be changed.

Similarly, we have to take into consideration the fact that this narration presupposes that the command be carried out by those who knew how to read. If the command was absolute, then any person who possessed any type of writing in their household, handed down through family tradition or given in trade, would have to destroy all the writing they possessed. However, this would not make sense. Only a person who knew how to read, and in this case, could read the writing of the Qur’an, would know what to burn. Most people at that time would not be able to read, and so we cannot expect that the command meant that every person, whether literate or illiterate, burn their entire libraries when they did not understand what they were burning in the first place. In this way, many manuscripts would have survived. It is not simply a case of burning everything and anything. These narrations do exist within a historical period and we must understand these narrations in light of their historicity.

If we take for an example, the command of a general on a battlefield who says, “kill everyone!” Does he mean to say that his own soldiers should kill each other and himself? Or, if you’re at a restaurant and order something from the menu, that it means you have ordered for everyone? Statements have to be taken into context and we must be careful about taking them absolutely literally, especially when we do not understand the customs and practises of the time period in which they are said to have taken place within.

and Allah knows best.

The Role of Scriptural Manuscripts in Islam and Christianity – A Primer

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Introduction

Given all the buzz about manuscripts regarding both the scriptures of the Muslims and Christians, I thought it’d be best to write something simple to explain the differences in approach that the Islamic and Christian faiths use when understanding their scriptures. This isn’t meant to be a highly technical article, but by the end of this post you’ll understand why manuscripts are important and to whom they are important.

The main difference in understanding manuscripts in both these faiths can be summed up in one term, “textus receptus vs textus criticus”. Textus receptus refers to the passing of scripture from generation to generation, until present day. Hence the term, “received text”. Textus criticus refers to a reconstructed version of scripture, based on the best manuscript witnesses that are extant (still surviving to our times). Hence the term, “critical text”.

Textus Receptus or Textus Criticus?

Christians today no longer depend on their textus receptus, they opt for textus criticus. In essence, they believe that their scriptural tradition internationally, that their Churches internationally, that for over 2000 years, their collective world of Christendom was unable to accurately preserve the New Testament. We can assign the shift in thinking from textus receptus to textus criticus sometime during the 16th century, when we had Erasmus’s, Cisneros’s and Stephanus’s critical Greek editions of the New Testament. This movement agreed on the principle that the Latin Vulgate, despite being the primary New Testament for centuries, did not accurately represent the “original” readings that the earlier Greek manuscripts contained. Therefore, Christians had to “recover” and “reconstruct” their scripture from the earlier Greek manuscripts, as opposed to relying on the traditional view of depending on the Latin Vulgate which was a translation of some of the Greek, the primary language of the New Testament.

There are however Christians who do disagree with this view that the entire world of Christendom failed to preserve the New Testament, and that the Church tradition did preserve their scripture. This is a minor group known as KJV-Onlyists. It has taken over 500 years for Christendom to propagate the shift from textus receptus to textus criticus. Thus, to modern Christians, manuscripts are extremely important to reconstructing the original words of the New Testament. The problem here is that we have no original manuscripts (autographs) and at best, the critical text of the New Testament today is an approximated “prototype” (vorlage) of the manuscripts, that may have been written in between 200 – 500 CE. In other words, the critical text of the New Testament does not go back to the original manuscripts (autographs) but they can be traced back to a “prototype” from which they may have been copied from at a later date, usually known as an “archetypal text”.

This view of textus criticus is not accepted in Islam. We believe that our scholastic tradition has preserved the Qur’an in its entirety. This is because in Islam, we did not translate the Qur’an from Arabic to English and then only used the English for 1400 years, while forgetting the Arabic and failing to preserve the Arabic Qur’an. We have kept the primary language of the Qur’an alive as well (fusha Arabic), and we’ve kept two separate traditions alive for over 1400 years: Hifz al Qur’an (memorization of the Qur’an) and ‘Ilm al Rasm al Mushaf (the science of the writing of the Qur’an). In essence, Muslims have kept reciting the Qur’an, memorizing it in its entirety, specializing in learning its language, specialized in learning its recital for over 1400 years, to this very day. We’ve also kept the tradition of writing the Qur’an and writing it with the most advanced Arabic styles of calligraphy. These two traditions mean that the Muslims in China are reciting the same Qur’an, in the same way, as the Muslims in the Caribbean, and that they have been doing so for centuries. The fact that Muslims have an entire month each year dedicated to the reciting of the Qur’an, and that we must recite it at a minimum 5 times a day, ensures that the Qur’an is being preserved everyday, all day. The same cannot be said for the New Testament.

This means, that while Christians have great reasons to doubt the preservation of their scripture and have to rely on reconstructing it, us Muslims do not share this problem. We have no reason to doubt our traditions of preservation as we have means to authenticating them. The Christians do not. As mentioned in other articles, we know who our reciters are and where they came from, what their characters were like and what their beliefs were. They are not unknown and we do not take knowledge from unknown persons. Today one would find many Christian scholars trying to search for a “Jesus oral tradition”. They’re trying to find some oral tradition that can link the manuscripts to credible persons who are historically viable to give their manuscripts authority, so that they could validate their reconstructed text. Muslims do not need to find an oral tradition to do so, as ours still exists to this day through our sanad of reciters (Qurra) and memorizers (Huffaz), which must authorize (provide an ijaza) students before they can teach the Qur’an to others. These mechanisms are inherent to the Islamic scriptural tradition, but they are alien to the Christian scriptural tradition.

The Need for Manuscripts

What Christians are doing today, like Jay Smith, Keith Small, Andy Bannister, Samuel Green and Spencer, is trying to get Muslims to reject textus receptus and to create a textus criticus. In essence, they need Muslims to have the same level of doubt about the Qur’an as they do, with the New Testament. Yet, as mentioned previously, our faith’s mechanisms in regard to preserving, teaching and sharing scripture are far more advanced that those of Christianity’s. Thus, when Christians point out that manuscripts have some variants or some differences, they are trying to force Muslims to reject our scriptural tradition. However, we are not in the same position as Christianity. We have no need to reject our scriptural tradition, but Christians do, since their collective world of Christianity was unable to preserve their scriptural tradition as Muslims have. The problem with using manuscripts from unknown authors, from unknown sources is quite obvious. What would happen if Christians found a manuscript of John 1 from the 1st century CE that excluded the Johannine Prologue? By their standards, they would have to give this manuscript authority and remove the prologue from their modern Bibles.

However, Christians are not consistent. They will instead claim that Church tradition has mentioned the prologue as being scripture and thus they will find some excuse to remove authority from that manuscript, despite rejecting their scriptural tradition for the critical method. In other words, Christians seriously doubt the preservation of their scripture and demand that Muslims use their critical methods on the Qur’an, when they themselves do not apply these critical methods consistently. Consider then, the example of the Shepherd of Hermas which is included in our earliest collection of the New Testament from the 4th century CE, Codex Sinaiticus. An entire book is excluded from the modern critical texts because Church tradition did not consider it scripture, yet the critical texts are not supposed to be based on tradition, but on the critical method. If Christians were consistent, they’d have to place the Shepherd of Hermas in their modern day critical edition. Yet, when missionaries see that some obscure manuscript, found in some obscure place may or may not have a different spelling of a word in the Qur’an, they demand that we accept that the Qur’an has changed.

That is strange reasoning. Who wrote this manuscript? We don’t know. What was their level of education? We don’t know. Why did they write it? We don’t know. So, on what basis do we accept an unknowable. unverifiable text, over 1400 years of verifiable, known tradition from chains of historic transmission? There are a hundred and one reasons why a manuscript can contain a variation. The person writing may have been using regional orthography (representation of letters and words) than a standardized style of writing. The scribe may have been using the manuscript to practise writing. The scribe could have been writing while someone was reciting (usually known as an amanuensis) and made an error in haste. The scribe could have been copying the shapes of the letters without knowing what the letters on the manuscript meant, thus if they made an error they would not have known that they changed a word. These are all common reasons that Christian textual critics point out for rejecting the variants found in many New Testament manuscripts.

In other words, Christians themselves reject the notion that all manuscripts are authoritative and for them manuscripts need to be authoritative because their scriptural tradition internationally was unable to preserve their scripture from its earliest days to the present day. This problem is not present in Islam and so we have no need to depend on, unverifiable manuscripts. We don’t need to authorize texts that are historically without authority. Christians have that need, it’s a necessity because their scriptural tradition was insufficient, Islam does not have this problem. So when Christians point out a variant that a scribe may or may not have made in writing the Qur’an, that means nothing to do the Muslim as it is a lone witness, versus a living tradition of witnesses in continuous verification over 1400+ years through daily, monthly and yearly memorization and recitation. However, if there is a variant in a New Testament manuscript, this is a problem for Christianity as not only do they accept that their scriptural tradition needs to be abandoned, they now need to reconstruct what their scripture may or may not have looked like and so they try to attack the Qur’an out of jealousy. While Muslims can be certain about the Qur’an, a Christian simply cannot be certain about anything in the New Testament.

Conclusion

One of the divine signs of Islam is the promise in Qur’an 15:9, which reads:

“Indeed, it is We who sent down the Qur’an and indeed, We will be its guardian.”

From the very start of Islam, the Qur’an was commanded to be recited. It was memorized, taught, recited daily. If God wanted a scripture to be preserved, then the best way to preserve it among humans would have been through continuous and daily recitation. In Islam, we find this with the 5 daily prayers in which the Qur’an must be recited. God included an entire month of the year dedicated to reciting the Qur’an in mass congregation, Ramadhan. God made it compulsory for each community to have a hafiz (memorizer) who needed to know the Qur’an by memory. God made it compulsory for each Muslim to individually carry the responsibility of knowing several chapters (Surahs) of the Qur’an. The God of Islam, it would seem through divine wisdom, knew what was needed for the Qur’an to be preserved among its followers. The same cannot be said about the New Testament or the Graeco-Roman Post-Hasmonaean Jewish Syncretic deity that Christians worship. This deity did not make the New Testament central to the lives of the early Christians. There was no need to memorize what Jesus said and taught, there was no need to recite what God revealed daily, monthly or even yearly. There was no command to preserve the language in which the scripture was given.

There was no need to preserve the New Testament. One must wonder, if there is a God and He wanted us to know Him, wouldn’t He have raised a community of people devoted to the preservation of His scripture? This is what we find in the religion of Islam, but it is not something we can find in the religion of Christianity. Interestingly, this rejection of textus receptus for textus criticus raises a very disturbing problem. If the collective world of Christendom, could not preserve their scripture for over 2000 years and they needed to reconstruct their scripture, what else has their religious tradition failed to preserve? What if their traditional teachings about the Trinity are wrong and need to be recovered. What if their traditional beliefs about Jesus dying for their sins are wrong and need to be recovered? What if…? Islam does not carry with it, such uncertainty, only Christianity can and does. For me, that’s a problem.

and Allah knows best.

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