Dr. Anthony Buzzard is one of the foremost Biblical Scholars on the Trinitarian dogma. Last year he published a book called, “Jesus was not a Trinitarian”. A Brother notified me that it was available for free download via Amazon.com. My advice would be to get this book while it’s available for free. You can read it via the Free Amazon Kindle App for PC.
It is important to fully understand any topic, before we enter into the arguments against it. The purpose of this reader is to introduce the Muslim and the Christian alike into the proto-orthodox (present day Christian theology) teaching of the Trinity. By doing this, we enable ourselves to think rationally and logically instead of polemically. This is important, for if we truly want to engage in discussion with each other, there must be a foundation from which we can operate.
What is the Trinity?
I have found the following definition communicates what needs to be said with the greatest clarity: Within the one
Being that is God, there exist eternally three coequal and coeternal Persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. – [1]
While reading Mortimer Adler’s, “How to Read a Book”, I came across a paragraph that struck me as nothing short of pure brilliance.
The one person who immediately came to my mind was James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. In as much as he tries to appear to be well read, his ignorance of Islamic theology, scripture and study is quite apparent to the most basically of educated Muslims. It’s ironic because in his videos he stands in front of what appears to be a library of books. The same can be said for the AI and AM teams. What I’ve taken from this book and especially this quote is despite people owning books and having read them, it does not make this person educated and surely in the cases of the men and groups I’ve mentioned previously, this is surely the reality of their situation(s).
James White concedes that Paul had no idea that his words would eventually become to be seen and believed to be scripture. He says and I quote, “No, I don’t think Paul had to, be able to go when he was done writing Romans and he goes ooh, I definitely felt that one, it’s going into the canon“. Therefore according to James White, he merely repeats what Islamic scholarship has been saying for centuries, if Paul did not consider his own work to be scripture, why should we? Check out the video as assembled by Br. Muslim By Choice that takes James White to task over his contradicting position:
Br. Muslim by Choice has released a hilarious 10 clip countdown of the best Muslim vs Christian debates. Some familiar faces include Dr. Shabbir Ali, Br. Sami Zataari and Ustadh Ali Ataie, alongside infamous Islamophobes, James White, Jay Smith and arsonist Anis Shorrosh. Entertaining and educational, it’s quite the video to watch:
Persecution of non-Christians residing in Christian majority nations has reached a high point this week. Once more, we have to fight for our rights that Christians themselves enjoy. Yet, it’s not Muslims being discriminated, we’re also being joined by every other non-Christian faith! As it turns out, in Canadian prisons, all non-Christian Chaplains are being fired from their positions of counselling prisoners. It should be noted that a significant majority of Canada’s prison population is majority Christian, here are the percentages from CBC Canada:
There are nearly 15,000 inmates in federal custody and a large majority of them identify themselves as Christian:
37.5% are Catholic.
19.5% are Protestant.
4.5% are Muslim.
4% First Nations spirituality
2% are Buddhist.
less than 1% are Jewish.
less than 1% are Sikh.
The article goes on to mention just how discriminatory the move is:
Figures obtained by CBC News show that before the contract cancellations — which will take effect by the end of March 2013 — there were about 80 full-time chaplains across the country and all but one are Christian. There are about 100 part-time chaplains, 20 of them non-Christian. The total cost of the chaplain program is about $6.4 million a year and it’s not clear what amount will be saved by the cancellations.
This is most likely a move to convert non-Christians to Christianity, there can be no other motive. When you have men who stare at 4 walls all day long and live day to day not knowing if another inmate can murder them, it’s significantly depressing. These men are emotionally and mentally fragile, perfect fruit for Christian Chaplain-Missionaries to, ‘spread the message’ of their human-worship centric faith.
We hope that God allows the non-Christian prisoners to be guided through their own faiths and that they are not forced into having Christianity shoved down their throats, as many of us have experienced this in the past (myself included). Please see this CBC News link for a video interview and comments by Rabbis and Imams from Canada on this depressing issue.
I was taken aback by some of James White’s arguments in yesterday’s debate with Br. Adnan Rashid, however I was pleased with the simplicity of his presentation. The topic being debated was, “Was the Qur’an or the Bible Reliably Transmitted? ” and what a show it was. James’ presentation was rather straight forward, to the point and predictable. Admittedly, he’s a seasoned orator which would impress the lay Christian, but as a person who studies the Christian scriptures and their textual history, I felt nothing but shame for James White. His arguments were borderline facetious, if not absurd and really demonstrated a lack of honesty on his part. I’m not sure if he would be willing to defend his statements, but many of his comments were dishonest to say the least. Let’s examine his main point:
An Uncontrolled Text is Superior to a Controlled Text.
James’ reasoning, revolved around the idea that if multiple people, at multiple places, at multiple times wrote a documents which ‘largely agreed’ with one another, the autograph would be more preserved and thus rendering the text, ‘reliably transmitted’. This view is largely held by neo-inerrantist Christian scholars such as Maurice Robinson, William Pierpont, Zane Hodges and Aruthur Farstad. There view can be summed up in this excerpt:
“from a transmissional standpoint, a single Textform would be expected to predominate among the vast majority of manuscripts in the absence of radical and well-documented upheavals in the manuscript tradition.” – Maurice Robinson, “The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the Byzantine/Majority Textform”, Preface to the 2nd Ed.
It must be understood however, that this understanding is not due to the science of textual criticism, but based on faith that God preserved the Bible, see Dr. B. Metzger and B. Ehrman, ‘The Text of the NT: It’s Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, 4th Ed, pg 219, Citation #29. Therefore James’ position is not based on sound research and study, which he alluded to, but based upon dogmas. It is with this in mind that I’d like to contest his view of preservation through ‘uncontrolled copying‘, by providing a simple example:
Scribe writes epistle.
Some time passes.
Later scribe copies epistle (emendations/ interpolations occur).
Some time passes.
Another scribe copies the mistakes of the previous scribe and adds mistakes of his own.
At this point the original epistle is lost and the autographs of the two later scribes are preserved.
The question we’d have to ask James, is which manuscript autograph would he give precedence to? Would his criteria be based upon dating or level of variance after comparison with his current New Testament codex? If it’s a combination of both, then what would be common to both manuscripts would be the errors of the first copyist and the recopied errors by the second copyist, thus leaving us with something vastly variant to the original:
In some cases the evidence will be found to be so evenly divided that it is extremely difficult to decide between two variant readings. – Dr. B. Metzger and B. Ehrman, ‘The Text of the NT: It’s Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, 4th Ed, Preface XV.
Occasionally, none of the variant readings will commend itself as original, and one will be compelled either to choose the reading that is judged to be the least unsatisfactory or to indulge in conjectural emendation. – Dr. B. Metzger and B. Ehrman, ‘The Text of the NT: It’s Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, 4th Ed, pg 343.
However, let’s say that we oppose James’ view and we examine a controlled text.
A Controlled Text is Superior to an Uncontrolled Text.
What if the original scribe oversaw the copying of his manuscript, and left instructions that any copy henceforth would have to be double checked with his manuscript. That’s a level of control that at the minimum preserves the text by one generation. If this method is continued, essentially all generations of copyists would be able to preserve the original scribe’s works. This is essentially what the Ijaza is in Islam. A person is given the authority to transmit knowledge/ data, because they have achieved a level of approval according to the one who has received authority from one with authority to transmit the knowledge/ data. We know that later Christianity adopted controlled textual transmission, because it better preserved the texts:
It is a striking feature of our textual record that the earliest copies we have of the various books that became the New Testament vary from one another far more widely than do the later copies, which were made under more controlled circumstances in the Middle Ages. – Dr. B. Metzger and B. Ehrman, ‘The Text of the NT: It’s Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, 4th Ed, pg 275.
The vast majority of Christian texts which have survived are from the Middle Ages:
Furthermore, the work of many ancient authors has been preserved only in manuscripts that date from the Middle Ages (sometimes the late Middle Ages), far removed from the time at which they lived and wrote. – Dr. B. Metzger and B. Ehrman, ‘The Text of the NT: It’s Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, 4th Ed, pg 275.
The end of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in the Byzantine text type among those who believe that the original text is best preserved in the vast majority of witnesses produced in the Middle Ages.’ – Dr. B. Metzger and B. Ehrman, ‘The Text of the NT: It’s Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, 4th Ed, pg 218.
Therefore the correlation being that texts which are controlled, have been vastly more preserved as opposed to the earlier uncontrolled texts of which are sparse and often vastly variant with one another:
Complaints about the adulteration of texts are fairly frequent in early Christian literature. Christian texts, scriptural and nonscriptural, were no more immune than others from vicissitudes of unregulated transmission in handwritten copies. In some respects they were more vulnerable than ordinary texts, and not merely because Christian communities could not always command the most competent scribes. Although Christian writings generally aimed to express not individual viewpoints but the shared convictions and values of a group, members of the group who acted as editors and copyists must often have revised texts in accordance with their own perceptions. This temptation was stronger in connection with religious or philosophical texts than with others simply because more was at stake. A great deal of early Christian literature was composed for the purpose of advancing a particular viewpoint amid the conflicts of ideas and practices that repeatedly arose within and between Christian communities, and even documents that were not polemically conceived might nevertheless be polemically used. Any text was liable to emendation in the interest of making it more pointedly serviceable in a situation of theological controversy. – H. Y. Gamble, Books And Readers In The Early Church: A History Of Early Christian Texts, 1995, Yale University Press: New Haven & London, pp. 123-124.
It is with the above being said, I must thereby conclude that James White’s position in his debate with Br. Adnan Rashid is unscholarly, deceptive, displays a significant level of ignorance of the history and the science of textual criticism and is nothing short but a disgrace to the field of academia. I pray that God guides James White to admitting his erroneous position and that he corrects himself, sooner rather than later.
Br. Zakir did a wonderful job, this was his first debate in such a capacity and performed really well. Entertaining, informative and important to both religions. A bit disappointed with James and his mistakes, expected better from a so called, ‘seasoned veteran’, nonetheless, it’s worth the watch.
Well, that didn’t take long! The day after James White’s debate with Br. Zakir Hussain (details here, audio stream here, or right click ‘save as’ to download here), James released an article conceding to his clear ineptitude, inability to respond to well founded research and lack of basic comprehension skills. By basic I mean not being able to find a word and correctly identify its meaning, even after having used a computer to search for it (even though he’s a self claimed expert on the Greek language). I really must question not only his basic comprehension skills, but his lazy and hypocritical attitude as well. Yet, before I do so, let’s examine his statements:
First, having quoted John 1:1 in Greek a few thousand times in my life, I think I ended up trying out for a spot on the TBN team at one point last night, but without an interpreter. My apologies.
Ask a 3 year old Muslim to recite 7 ayat from Surah Fatihah and they would be able to do so with perfect pronunciation (tajweed), which I can demonstrate as being possible here and here, ask James White to repeat something he’s done several thousand times and he can’t. What’s worse is that James White even released a video condemning Shaykh Ahmad Deedat for not pronouncing the Greek of John 1:1 correctly, but James himself could not do so. In the video, he says:
Ahmad Deedat’s comments on John 1:1 were inaccurate and incorrect, you will remember that I documented that he didn’t even have the proper Greek terms…..he was actually unable to handle the Greek language, he claimed to be able to do so…..I’m not sure how you are able to properly understand his (Deedat’s arguments) upon not being able to read the language…..in the process he demonstrates that he (the person in the video, not Deedat) cannot read Greek…..he doesn’t known the difference between a v and a nu , he regularly mispronounces the words and he (the person in the video, not Deedat) just does not know the language.
Unfortunately for James, it seems as if his hypocrisy has shown through his facade of using the Greek language. If he can produce a 9 minute video condemning Shaykh Ahmad Deedat (who never formally studied Greek), as opposed to James claiming to have studied Greek and using one verse’s Greek ‘a few thousand times‘, that either means James has to produce a video condemning himself while retracting the video about Shaykh Ahmad Deedat, or James has to concede that he is largely uneducated in this field. This isn’t a situation of ‘either or’, but a situation of ‘and’. Mr. White’s pretentious use of the Greek language was also exposed by myself earlier in this earlier post. What’s worse is that he can’t read Greek by himself, as James has stated that he needs an interpreter as he wrote himself (as seen above).
Anyway, Zakir was talking at the speed of sound in the rebuttal period (as my notes show) and it was next to impossible to keep up with the references as they flew by.
James was unable to keep up with the vast amounts of information that Br. Zakir used in his presentation, not only was James unable to match his level of research, or keep up with Br. Zakir’s arguments, James later concedes that he intentionally refused (much like a petulant child) to respond to several of the brother’s arguments. Let’s examine James’ inability to properly search for a word, he writes and I quote:
At one point he raised the issue of the Matthean reference to the prophecy (2:23) about the Nazarene. I did a quick search on my computer looking for the right reference and…got the wrong one in my haste.
As opposed to this baby who can actually use an iPhone to search for a song (you can see the baby scrolling through a list and then selecting what it wants; something which James seems unable to do!):
It’s really embarrassing to note that this man is supposed to be, keyword: ‘supposed’ to be, an intellectual of the Christian religion, a representative of their faith and he’s unable to do something for which he condemns others for. Reminds me very much of Matthew 7:1-5:
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Sad to say this James, but this is one time you’re going to have to face the music. James then goes on to say this:
I did a quick search on my computer looking for the right reference and…got the wrong one in my haste. Oh, I got “branch” alright, but I wrote down the reference below what I wanted in the search list, Isaiah 14:19. My apologies. I didn’t have time to read but a single line, saw “rejected branch,” and scribbled it down.
At this point, you must be questioning James’ rationale. James searches for a word, turns out to be the wrong one, he sees a word/ phrase that looks similar to what he wanted to use and decides to give up on academic standards and just ‘wings it’, his reasoning can be seen as the equivalent to another popular right wing nut, Bill O Reilly! See his rant here:
James then ends that portion of the article with this statement:
I will set up a donation fund for some prescription mid-range reading glasses.
James, I think you need more than glasses. There are many vocational schools that can help you with your comprehension problem, but as for your integrity and dignity, I can offer you nothing but a broom to sweep the fragments of them off of the floor (I’m sort of cheap, get the scoop yourself).
James then decided to use the age old tactic of anti-intellectual argumentation, by generalizing his opponent’s argument and then belittling his generalization:
Finally, I did not get into the issue of the wavy hair and light skin because, as anyone can see, that kind of description could have been applied to any number of the Muslims attending the debate that night, and even some of the Christians.
This is a problem, as James betrays his own methodology of searching for prophecies of Jesus the Christ in the Jewish Tanach. For example, to witness James’ double standards, in this debate with Br. Shabbir Ali, James refers to the physical description of Christ as a ‘key prophecy’, which allegedly foretold of his ‘coming’. However, apparently when a Muslim uses the same methodology of referring to a ‘physical description’, it’s belittled by James. Why can’t the argument James sources from Deuteronomy also be applied to any of the other Jewish Messiahs? Why his God? Is that not confirmation bias? James has once again betrayed any form of dignity. He continues:
the only real issue is whether the term machamad is actually the name of Muhammad. I obviously argue that such a connection is absurd.
On the same note, David is not Dawud, Echad is not Ahad, Abraham is not Ibrahim, Moses is not Musa, Iyov is not Ayub, Ketuvim is not Kutub, Miriam is not Maryam, of course, such relations are just ‘absurd’, and have nothing to do with two Semitic languages mirroring each other! He continues (to his own peril):
Utilizing verbal roots in this fashion can be used to prove anything, as I have noted already by finding both Shabir Ally and Zakir Hussain in the Old Testament using the same methodology.
Apparently James find such a method quite silly, yet ask him what Shemot (Exodus 3:14) is supposed to mean (note: it’s a series of verbs: ‘ehyeh asher ehyeh’ – I will be who I will be – future perfect tense) and that’s supposed to mean Ego Emi (a present tense statement), referring to Christ’s deity. As opposed to an actual name being used, as is clearly demonstrated above. James then concedes to making more mistakes, it just doesn’t get any better for him:
But I did want to note two things for the sake of accuracy once again. First, at least two people have mentioned to me that I was in error on an ABN show regarding the root H M D in either Arabic or Hebrew, and I may have been, I haven’t taken the time to go back and try to find the comments.
After being corrected by two persons, and after making grievous mistakes and spreading misinformation on live TV, James still did not review his statements, nor did he try to find what was wrong with his presentation, yet he admits to using the same incorrect information during his debate:
I do recall doing a program on a particular video on YouTube (well, we quoted material from it anyway)
In ending, James’ article is nothing short of a direct result of being baptised by Br. Zakir. The term ‘baptised’ simply means to be ‘whelmed’ that is, ‘overwhelmed’ (see Strong’s Greek Lexicon: G907, ‘βαπτίζω‘). James White, was baptised into conceding that he was misinformed, deceitful and that he demonstrated clear cut pseudo-intellectualism. Br. Zakir most certainly did excellent to evoke such emotions from James White. Please do check out his debate, you will not be disappointed.
Calling Christians 
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