Does the word of God in the
Noble Qur'an contain contradictions?
By
Mishaal ibn Abdullah
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Terms the reader needs to know before reading this
article:
Allah: The supreme God of all creation. He is known as "God the Father" to the Christians, and as "El" or "Yahweh" to the Jews. It is important to distinguish that the one referred to in Islam as "Allah" is not the "Trinity" which the Church refers to as "God." The Muslim "Allah" is only the Christian's "God the Father."
Muhammad: The last messenger of God to all mankind. He was the seal of the prophets of God, who included prophets Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jesus, and many others.
Islam: The last message of God to all mankind. It was sent down upon prophet Muhammad (pbuh), recorded in broad outlines in the Qur'an, and described in detail in the Sunnah. Islam is an Arabic word which means "Submission to God".
Qur'an: The holy book of the Muslims. It consists of 100% the word of God and no words of the prophet Muhammad (pbuh), his companions, or any human being.
Sunnah/Hadeeth:The title given to the collection of recorded words and actions of the prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Most of what he said or did throughout his lifetime is recorded in the Sunnah.
pbuh: Means "Peace Be Upon Him". Used most often in reference to prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and also in reference to the many other prophets of Allah, such as Noah, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, etc.
pbut: Means "Peace Be Upon Them". Same as above, but used in reference to more than one.
s.a.w./s.a.s.: Same as "pbuh". It is an abbreviation of the original Arabic words "Salla Allahu alaihi Wa Sallam", which are translated as "peace be upon him" in English.
OT: Old Testament. The portion of the Bible transmitted by the Jews.
NT: New Testament. The portion of the Bible specific to the Christian faith.
People of the Book: This is the term used by God in the noble
Qur'an to refer to the Jews and Christians. It is also sometimes translated as
"People of the Scripture"
Introduction:
"Say: 'O People of the Scripture! come to common terms as between us and you: That we worship none but Allah(God); that we associate no partners with Him; that we erect not, from among ourselves, Lords other than Allah.' But if they turn away, say: 'Bear you witness that we have surrendered unto Allah (We are Muslims).'"
The noble Qur'an, A'al-Umran(3):64
"The lies which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only"
Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, Thomas
Carlyle, p. 57
"The use of false evidence to attack Islam was all but universal…"
Islam and the West, Norman Daniel, p. 267
"I have read in Moslem (sic) writings such deep and tender expressions of respect and reverence for Jesus that for the time I almost forgot, I was not reading the words of a Christian writer. How different, it is sad to say, has been the way in which Christians have spoken and written of Muhammad Let us put it down to its true cause, ignorance"
Reverend R. Maxwell King
The author of the "Answering Islam" webpage has chosen to provide us on his page with a list of what he deems to be contradictions in the word of God, the noble Qur'an. He has legitimate concerns and I shall, by the will of Allah(God), provide him in this article with the answers he has asked for regarding what he perceives to be contradictions. His conclusions, as we shall see, are understandable and not to be held against him since they are not based upon knowledge he has gained from Muslim scholars or from Muslim references, rather, they are a result of a personal attempt by him to, in the most part, simply scan the text of the noble Qur'an with the help of some of his sympathizers and try and piece together any narrations which he can claim to be contradictory. This is understandable since over the last couple of years he has made a number of public as well as private requests of Muslims, myself included, that they provide him with proof that the Bible does not contain 100% the original message of Jesus (pbuh) or that it has been tampered with by the Church (as affirmed by God in the Qur'an). In response to his many requests he has been presented over these last few years with quotation after quotation from highly respected trinitarian references and clergymen who all readily admit that the Bible has been the object of continuous tampering by the Church during the "Dark Ages." This has enraged him. Not so much against the Trinitarian Christians who have admitted this basic fact and are quoted to him, rather his rage has been directed against the Muslims who he has asked to prove this fact and have quoted these clergymen and Christian scholars. All of these admissions go to support that what God said in the noble Qur'an regarding this same Church tampering, is true. As a result of this he has felt it necessary to seek retribution against Muslims by attempting to prove that if this is the case with regard to the Bible then the same must be true in the case of God's words in the Qur'an. However, since he can not find any highly respected Muslim scholars and references of the same caliber as those presented with regard to the Bible, and who support his desire of contradiction in the Qur'an, therefore, the only recourse left was for him and some of his sympathizers, all of whom are not Muslims, to attempt to personally scan the text of the Qur'an and discover what no Muslim has managed to find in 1400 years, slowly trying to piece together a list of "contradictions." As I said, this is human nature and quite understandable, so it shall not be taken personally.
It was originally hoped that in simply quoting Christian clergymen and trinitarian references with regard to the Church's tampering with the text of the Bible, and refraining from quoting Muslim scholars in this regard, that it might be possible to try and remain objective in this matter and avoid the accusation that this is simply Muslim propaganda as well as avoiding the resultant ill will and desire for retribution. However, this sadly does not seem to be the case. In any case, the point-by-point response to his claims shall be presented at the end of this article
The alegations found in the following list were a result of a joint effort of a number of men including our current author. One of the major references referred to in this attempt appears to be the book "Answering Islam" which is a joint effort by Mr. Norman Geisler and a man who goes by the pseudonym of "Abdulsaleeb" ("slave of the cross")(1). This was not a random occurrence since he has in the past sought the assistance of Mr. "Abdulsaleeb" in other similar situations. Therefore, it is understandable that he should do so again now.
"Did Jesus (pbuh) ever explicitly of implicitly say 'I am a god' or 'I am 'God' or 'worship me' any other words to that effect?. Further, did anyone at all, anywhere in the Bible, from cover to cover, ever say that God is triune, a trinity, three, or three-in-one?"
To this day, every time anyone ever asks me to discuss this matter the discussion starts with "Yes! Of course! Jesus said all of this clearly!" The claim then moves on to "No, he did not say it in so many words, however, he implied it in many places." Then finally we arrive at "Well, he does not need to say any of it. It is clear to anyone who has faith. You just do not have any faith."
In all cases I would respond to all quoted verses from the Bible itself or from the words of highly respected Biblical dictionaries, Catholic encyclopedias, or members of the Church. I can appreciate that this is a touchy subject and I can appreciate that it is human nature for the first knee-jerk reaction to be "kill the messenger." However, I am indeed only a messenger and my words are not to be accepted simply because I say so, rather because the Church and Christian scholars do. I shall be providing a small taste in the following quotations and all those who would like to read the details can then get a copy of the book "What Did Jesus Really Say?". I wish that if someone were going to demand that I debate them on any topic that they would then indeed answer my question and not a question I never asked. However, it looks like this is simply not going to happen.
In my original question I drew attention to the fact that Jesus (pbuh)
said in many places in the Bible that it is his words which the faithful
must follow in order to receive salvation. For example, we read:
John 14:23: "Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him."
Luke 6:46: "And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the
things which I say?"
I made this issue as clear as I possibly could, over and over again, every time I asked this question. I repeated it to the point that I hoped that it would be next to impossible to misunderstand what I had asked for. I just have only one simple rule which I ask all those who challenge me to debate to abide by: To place Jesus' (pbuh) words FIRST and then place the words of everyone else in second place AFTER his words, not the other way around. Is this such an evil request? Is this what makes me so totally faithless, perverse, and unable to love Jesus (peace be upon him)? Strangely, in each case, it is everyone BUT Jesus (pbuh) himself who is quoted. Why? Was my question not clear? Have I still not placed enough emphasis on WHO is to be quoted first? How do I make it any clearer than this? And despite all of this, we still can not find these claims anywhere in the Bible.
Why is it important to start with the words of Jesus (pbuh) first and then place everyone else's words in second place? Well, let us have a look at a simple example:
If my father's name is Frank, and Joe comes to me and says "your father, Frank, wants you to give me all your money and the deed to your house," would it then be unreasonable for me to ask for proof? In a matter of such profound importance, if I asked him to produce a signed document, a cassette tape, or a video tape proving this statement and verifying that it indeed came from my father, would this be such an unreasonable request?
If I ask Joe for such proof directly from Frank himself, would it be acceptable for him to reply "Yes, well, Jim says so" or "Henry says so" or "Roger says so"? Am I to understand from Joe that my father considered the handing over of my house and all of my money such a trivial matter that there would be no need for him to hand over to Joe any kind of verification of this command? Is it acceptable for Joe to tell me: "well, your father may not have said it in so many words, but he 'hinted' at it, and I 'gathered' that I should now come and take over your house and bank account"? If in addition to all of the above, if I then find that the words of Jim, Henry and Roger were further such "hints" which were all taken out of context, should this increase my faith in this claim?
This man is asking that I hand my whole life savings and my very home over to him and claims that my father wants me to do this yet he wants me to understand that it is not necessary for him to produce any proof directly from my father himself, rather it is only necessary for him to make the claim and then claim that my father "hinted" that I should do this, or that he "gathered" that my father wanted me to do this. Would anyone in their right mind accept such a statement? Why then when we now are dealing with our ultimate salvation, a commodity which is more valuable than any conceivable wealth or property, is it no longer necessary for Jesus (peace be upon him) himself to teach any of the fundamental doctrines, rather it is entirely appropriate to claim that he spent his life "hinting" at these doctrines not willing to openly commit himself to them in clear words and statements and that the only time he was clear and direct was when he was endorsing what the Qur'an told us he said?
Why is it that when God tells us in the Qur'an that Jesus (pbuh) never made a given claim, like endorsing the 'trinity' or claiming to be a god (or God, or part of God, or one of three forms or faces of God), why only now do we suddenly need to understand that he only 'hints' at it in the Bible and then leaves it up to us to "gather" that he wanted us to adopt such beliefs? Why do so many highly respected Christian scholars and Biblical references confirm the words of God in the Qur'an by admitting that the "trinity" doctrine can not be found anywhere in the Bible?
Everybody and his uncle can claim to be able to receive direct inspiration from Jesus and be able to tell us what Jesus "wants," however, does this mean that every single one of these people really do have a direct hotline to him and are daily receiving direct inspiration from him? Just because someone says he said something should I simply have faith and not bother to read his actual words? Trinitarian Christians claim that Jesus is God. Unitarian Christians say that he is not. Muslims say that he was a very pious and elect messenger of God. In the first three centuries CE Christians were even further split on exactly who he was, who his mother was, who God is, what their relationship to one-another is, how many gods there are, were all three of them gods?, was only two or one of them a god?, etc. (see quotations below). So who is telling the truth? Are all of these people receiving "inspiration" from Jesus? This is indeed why I asked that Jesus (pbuh) himself be quoted, just as he asked us to do in so many places in the Bible. If he makes a given statement just once then it shall be acceptable for others to repeat it a thousand times. However, it has to start with him.
No sooner do I ask this very simple and direct question than what do I get? Everyone once again reverts to quoting everyone but Jesus (pbuh) himself. A catch 22. An unending loop. And still they can not find it in the Bible. We are only told that everyone implied it. Everyone says that Jesus (pbuh) said it, yet no one appears to be able to show us where. Others are alleged to have implied it, so obviously Jesus "must have" said it. Yet they can not show us where. If someone wants to challenge me to a debate then I would appreciate it if they would simply answer this one question clearly and directly while keeping an open mind and heart. Otherwise please do not demand that I debate you.
In the end the only alternative for them is to tell us that Jesus (pbuh) does not need to say it, but he "implied" it in many places. When we study the verses where he is claimed to have "implied" it we find that they are all cases of false and unfaithful translation by the Church where the words are conveniently made to say in English what they do not really say in Greek, while when others in the Bible use the exact same words Jesus is just quoted to have used, now the very same words wherein Jesus is claimed to be "implying" to be God, these very same words are now translated completely differently when they come out of the mouths of others. The Church has not told us to worship these other people so they "translate" these very same words differently when others say them so that we will not get "the wrong impression" from their words. In a similar manner, when a given word is used to describe Jesus (pbuh) in the Bible it is translated completely differently than when that exact same word is used to describe everyone else. This is how Jesus (pbuh) is made to "imply" divinity. And the loop continues. In order to exhibit that these claims are not my own but are well known to the Church, I quoted the Bible and Christian clergymen in all cases so that I would not be accused of perverting the meanings of the verses or forcing my own beliefs upon the words of the Bible.
Strangely, after all of this, the impression is once again made that any and all refutations are all an outcome of ignorance and faithlessness of hateful Muslims. They completely disregard the fact that the whole refutation was based upon what Christian Bishops, ministers, priests, Doctors of Divinity, scholars, and Trinitarian Biblical references admit in this regard. Sadly, it is all just depicted as ignorant Muslim propaganda. Very highly respected and revered men of the Church who were so well acquainted with the Bible, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac and Latin including many other disciplines that they slowly rose through its ranks to finally be appointed Christian Roman Catholic Bishops, such people are simply depicted after their demise as very ignorant people who did not know what they were talking about and their level of understanding of Greek, Hebrew, etc. did not rise to the level of the current speaker. What a truly sad way to treat one's own scholars and clergymen. They are only revered and esteemed so long as they say what they are supposed to. Once they find the truth after many many years of study, service to the Church, missionary work and propagation of the faith, and then convert to Islam, now they are beneath contempt.
Another popular trend is to distance oneself from any Christian scholars or Bishops, etc. who recognize the evidence of Church tampering with the Bible. The interesting response to the increasing number of Christian scholars and clergymen who are accepting this matter as basic fact is that those who defend the trinity, such as Mr. Abdulsaleeb, simply claim that Muslims are unable to appreciate the higher levels of Biblical criticism that the truly believing apologists have reached? Look, if your policy is that if someone being Muslim automatically makes them genetically ignorant then that is your choice. I prefer not to continue down this path. However I am hoping that it does not take an IQ of 1000 to understand the implication when Trinitarian Christian clergymen and scholars officially declare that the Bible contains such severe errors that it is literally riddled with, by the most conservative estimates, 2000 errors. Am I to understand that because I am a Muslim, that my Muslim mind is too ignorant to recognize that this is simply a developed sense of perfect faith and belief which hopefully we can, a few centuries from now, crawl out our caves, recognize as true enlightenment and be saved? These people are indeed to be commended for standing up for the truth, however, I would like to hope that my inferior Muslim mind, limited as it may be, is capable of grasping the implication of their findings.
These gentlemen go on to object to our using these Trinitarian Church references and Bishops as references and inform us that these people in addition to recognizing the falseness of the trinity doctrine, also do not believe in issues that Muslims consider to be historical fact and which God confirmed in the noble Qur'an, such as the virgin birth of Jesus (pbuh) and his miracles. In other words, Muslims should not point to these Bishops increasing discovery of Church tampering and their own attempt to try and recover the truth since these Bishops have not yet become Muslims and embraced 100% of the religion of Islam. If they have only come part way towards Islam and have themselves admitted that the Church had made very severe and deliberate changes to the Bible, and they are trying to strip away these changes in order to uncover the original message of Jesus (pbuh), then these men should simply be regarded as an embarrassment to Muslims and Christians alike and should not be given the time of day. Well, although they may not have found the whole truth, at least they are trying. At least they are willing to admit that the Church has intentionally tampered with the Bible and they shall not sit still and remain quiet even if it does mean that this shall infuriate those who have not studied their evidence, nor do they have any interest in doing so.
The final attempt of such men is to then simply apply to all Muslims such words as: "Muslims are very fond of quoting critical scholars conclusions (only those that agree with Islam) without the slightest realization of the presuppositions of such scholars that led them to these conclusions in the first place." Such men completely side-step all of the quoted official Church encyclopedias, Biblical dictionaries, official Church proclamations, and even public admissions of very highly respected Trinitarian scholars (such as Tischendorf who could himself not understand how the Church could make so many thousands of changes to the Bible and "allow themselves to bring in here and there changes, which were not simple verbal ones, but materially affected the meaning" or why they "did not shrink from cutting out a passage or inserting one.") These quotations are forgotten, the references brushed aside, and a generic catch-all answer of "Muslim backwardness and ignorance" is applied to all cases.
Are we now to understand that, as Muslims, our mental capacity is so severely limited that we are not able to realize that these officially sponsored Church encyclopedias and Biblical references as well as all of these very highly respected Trinitarian scholars and clergymen all based their "presuppositions" on corrupt foundations (see some quotations below)? Who then is left who is not corrupt or has based his opinions on corrupt foundations?. If we can not even accept Trinitarian scholars, Bishops, ministers, Catholic encyclopedias, and Biblical commentaries, then who can we accept? Are the "presuppositions" of all of these people questionable?
Mr. "Abdulsaleeb" would like to refer to me as a "king of language" in an attempt to make it seem like these are my own conclusions. I thank you Mr. Abdulsaleeb for your exhalation, however, I can in no way claim credit for what your own Trinitarian scholars have written and what I am simply reproducing. If you do not like what they are saying then that is regrettable, and I am sorry you feel that way. However, this in no way makes the words my own. This is indeed the very mindset of the Church in the Dark Ages which drove them to withhold the Bible from the masses and make it the exclusive property of the Church. The great unwashed masses were far to "ignorant" and "backward" to have any dealings with God's holy word. It was reserved for higher Biblical criticism and neo-Platonic philosophy, and all those "enlightened" minds which were receiving direct inspiration from Jesus to "clarify" the Bible and "fix" it. They couldn't have all of these "common people" running around touching the scriptures, reading them and defiling them with their unwashed hands. They were too "holy." They could never "comprehend" them. They needed the Church to "explain" them. Right?
Another problem with such lines of logic is that in many cases the refutation of a given author's evidence is simply based upon slander and character assassination. They don't say, for example, let us take their evidence and study it, reproducing every one of their arguments word-for-word and then refuting them point-by-point and leaving no question unanswered and no allegation unrefuted, rather, they simply tell everyone that the author simply does not have enough faith or the higher degrees of enlightened thought which they themselves have achieved and wish to bestow upon the masses so that they too will be able to achieve the perfection of belief which allows them to simply disregard the vast majority of the contradictions and variations of text in the Bible, to soar high above such "petty" concerns in elevated levels of spiritual ecstasy unfettered by such stone age issues as whether or not the Church tampered with the Bible and whether or not the Bible they have in their hands has any relationship whatsoever to anything the apostles of Jesus (pbuh) actually wrote. For them these are all trivial issues. They love Jesus (pbuh) too much to worry themselves about what he actually said or whether or not the Church has warped his message. Such matters have no bearing on their all-encompassing love for Jesus.
Well guess what? Muslims love Jesus (pbuh) too. We regard him as one of the highest examples of human excellence and service to the Almighty that a Muslim can ever find or follow. This is a fundamental pillar of our belief, without which we would not be Muslims. However, Muslims feel that it is the obligation of those who love Jesus to not allow those who would injure him or warp his words to go unchallenged. Muslims recognize that there is no such thing as "insignificant" tampering with the words of Jesus or "unimportant" changes to his preaching.
If I tell you: "I would like to cut a few small pieces from your body. Not a lot. Just about thirty or forty pieces." Would you then say: "Fine, as long as they are not 'big' pieces, or 'important' pieces"? Sadly, when the Church tampers with the words of Jesus, making many 'thousands' (see below) of changes, now it is entirely ok for them to cut away with abandon. Get out the chain-saws and crank them up, what do we care?. We love Jesus too much to worry ourselves about their surgery on him. We are flying around on enlightened spiritual planes and can't be bothered with such petty stone-age issues, right?
For example, many such authors mention names of books. But names of books can do us no good if we can not put the information found therein to good use in providing physical and tangible evidence. I too could quote reams and reams of books. All authored by Christians. Christians who would not sit still for the Church tampering nor allow themselves to simply look on with delight as the Church cut away and tampered with the message of Jesus. For example, I have yet to see any of the apologists attempt to challenge the evidence of David Friedrich Strauss in his 800 page book "The Life of Jesus Critically Examined." A book which was written in the early eighteen hundreds and which to this day has yet to find an apologist capable of facing it head on, point by point, toe-to-toe, rather than the conventional method of "He has no faith, his foundations are not good, forget his evidence. Have faith and don't read his book."
But now we return to the present and the current author's claims
regarding God's words in the noble Qur'an. He has spent a long time searching the text of
the Qur'an looking for contradictions and has done his utmost to build a counter case of
contradictory verses against the noble Qur'an in retribution against what these Christian
scholars have said regarding the Bible. His list which shall be studied a
little further down is a collection of all of the examples he has been able to put
together over the last couple of years and the strongest case he has been able to build
against the word of God, the noble Qur'an. It shall be dealt with shortly, by the will of
Allah, and we shall have a look at what his efforts have produced for us. Please note in
all that follows that when Muslims point to contradictory verses in the Bible they produce
their evidence from the writings of Christian Bishops, Reverends, priests,
Biblical encyclopedias, Biblical dictionaries, Doctors of Divinity and the like, all of
whom readily admit that the Bible was exposed to continuous tampering from the Church
during the "Dark Ages" when it completely withheld the Bible from the masses and
prevented anyone from reading it. We will see that he, however, when attempting to do the
same with regard to God's words in the Qur'an also points to either his own
personal conclusions or to those of other Christians. Let us start with a couple of
examples of the former case. Let us read for example:
A couple quick quotations:
So, is Peake's commentary written by "critical scholars" who
based their conclusions upon corrupt foundations? Do ignorant Muslims not understand the
"presuppositions" which the authors of Peake's commentary based their
conclusions upon? What about some other quotations:
"Yet, as a matter of fact, every book of the New Testament with
the exception of the four great Epistles of St. Paul is at present more or less the
subject of controversy, and interpolations (inserted verses) are asserted even in
these." Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 12th Ed. Vol. 3, p. 643
After listing many examples of contradictory statements in the Bible, Dr. Frederic Kenyon says:
"Besides the larger discrepancies, such as these, there is
scarcely a verse in which there is not some variation of phrase in some copies [of the
ancient manuscripts from which the Bible has been collected]. No one can say that these
additions or omissions or alterations are matters of mere indifference" Our
Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, Dr. Frederic Kenyon, Eyre and Spottiswoode, p. 3
Is the trinitarian apologist, Mr. Kenyon, basing his comments on corrupt
foundations? Do ignorant Muslims simply not comprehend the complex nuances of his elevated
Biblical criticism?
"In any event, none of [the original manuscripts of the books of the Bible] now
survive. What do survive are copies made over the course of centuries, or more accurately,
copies of the copies of the copies, some 5,366 of them in the Greek language alone, that
date from the second century down to the sixteenth. Strikingly, with the exception of the
smallest fragments, no two of these copies are exactly alike in their particulars. No one
knows how many differences, or variant readings, occur among the surviving witnesses, but
they must number in the hundreds of thousands." The
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Bart Ehrman, pp. 27
"It is highly probable that not one of the Synoptic Gospels
(Matthew, Mark, and Luke) was in existence in the form which we have it, prior to the
death of Paul. And were the documents to be taken in strict order of chronology, the
Pauline Epistles would come before the synoptic Gospels." History of Christianity in the Light of Modern Knowledge, Rev. Charles Anderson
Scott, p.338
In the latter part of the second century, Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth says:
"As the brethren desired me to write epistles(letters), I did
so, and these the apostles of the devil have filled with tares (changes), exchanging some
things and adding others, for whom there is a woe reserved. It is not therefore, a matter
of wonder if some have also attempted to adulterate the sacred writings of the Lord, since
they have attempted the same in other works that are not to be compared with these."
Toland observes:
"We know already to what degree imposture and credulity went
hand in hand in the primitive times of the Christian Church, the last being as ready to
receive as the first was to forge books, this evil grew afterwards not only greater when
the Monks were the sole transcribers and the sole keepers of all books good or bad, but in
process of time it became almost absolutely impossible to distinguish history from fable,
or truth from error as to the beginning and original monuments of Christianity. How
immediate successors of the Apostles could so grossly confound the genuine teaching of
their masters with such as were falsely attributed to them? Or since they were in the dark
about these matters so early how came such as followed them by a better light? And
observing that such Apocryphal books were often put upon the same footing with the
canonical books by the Fathers, and the first cited as Divine Scriptures no less than the
last, or sometimes, when such as we reckon divine were disallowed by them. I propose these
two other questions: Why all the books cited genuine by Clement of Alexander. Origen.
Tertullian and the rest of such writers should not be accounted equally authentic? And
what stress should he laid on the testimony of those Fathers who not only contradict one
another but are also often inconsistent with themselves in their relations of the very
same facts?"(emphasis added). The Nazarenes, John Toland, pp. 73 (From:
Jesus Prophet of Islam).
One quick example of Church tampering with the text of the Bible:
Due to a lack of time and space, let us have a quick look at just one specific example. Those who wish to read more can refer to the book "What Did Jesus Really Say?" For example, let us study the twelve verses of Mark 16:9-20:
"Nonetheless, there are some kinds of textual changes for which
it is difficult to account apart from the deliberate activity of a transcriber. When a
scribe appended an additional twelve verses to the end of the Gospel of Mark, this can
scarcely be attributed to mere oversight" The
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Bart Ehrman, pp. 27-28
Peake's Commentary on the Bible records;
"It is now generally agreed that 9-20 are not an original part
of Mk. They are not found in the oldest MSS, and indeed were apparently not in the copies
used by Mt. and Lk. A 10th-cent. Armenian MS ascribes the passage to Aristion, the
presbyter mentioned by Papias (ap.Eus.HE III, xxxix, 15)."
"Indeed an Armenian translation of St. Mark has quite recently
been discovered, in which the last twelve verses of St. Mark are ascribed to Ariston, who
is otherwise known as one of the earliest of the Christian Fathers; and it is quite
possible that this tradition is correct" Our Bible and the Ancient
Manuscripts, F. Kenyon, Eyre and Spottiswoode, pp. 7-8
Notice how this is by far not a new trend with the Church. Indeed, as we
can see, the very first Church Fathers themselves freely allowed themselves to insert
whole passages made up of no less than twelve verses when they felt like it, allowing the
reader to believe that their words were the words of the apostles of Jesus. In the light
of such Church policies, would it be so hard to imagine them making smaller
"corrections" here and there to the text?
Well, did all of this Church tampering end with the demise of the first
Church Fathers or did their students learn these techniques from them? As it happens,
Victor Tununensis, a sixth century African Bishop related in his Chronicle (566 AD) that
when Messala was consul at Costantinople (506 AD), he "censored and
corrected" the Gentile Gospels written by persons considered illiterate by the
Emperor Anastasius. The implication was that they were altered to conform to sixth century
Christianity which differed from the Christianity of previous centuries (The Dead Sea
Scrolls, the Gospel of Barnabas, and the New Testament, by M. A. Yusseff, p. 81)
Sir Higgins confirms that this practice did not even end in the sixth century, rather it continued on into the eleventh and twelfth:
"It is impossible to deny that the Bendictine Monks of St. Maur,
as far as Latin and Greek language went, were very learned and talented, as well as
numerous body of men. In Cleland's 'Life of Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury', is the
following passage: 'Lanfranc, a Benedictine Monk, Archbishop of Canterbury, having found
the Scriptures much corrupted by copyists, applied himself to correct them, as also
the writings of the fathers, agreeably to the orthodox faith, secundum fidem
orthodoxam." History of Christianity in the light of
Modern knowledge, Higgins p.318
In other words, the Bible was re-written in order to conform to the doctrines of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and even the writings of the early church fathers were "corrected" so that the changes would not be discovered. Sir Higgins goes on to say:
"The same Protestant divine has this remarkable passage:
'Impartiality exacts from me the confession, that the orthodox have in some places altered
the Gospels."
Well, how seriously was the text of the Bible affected by so many centuries of such practices? Is it true that all of the changes made by the Church are all "unimportant" and that all Christians should simply "disregard" them all as having no effect on the message of Jesus (pbuh) or his apostles? Well, once again, in order that it not be said that this is simply Muslim propaganda, therefore let us hear from Dr. Lobegott Friedrich Konstantin Von Tischendorf, one of history's most adamant conservative Christians and the man who single-handedly discovered one of the two most ancient copies of the NT available today. He himself was driven to admit after his study of these most ancient copies of the Bible available today that:
"[the New Testament had] in many passages undergone such serious
modification of meaning as to leave us in painful uncertainty as to what the Apostles had
actually written" Secrets of Mount Sinai, James
Bentley, p. 117
In all, Tischendorf uncovered over 14,800 "corrections" to just one ancient manuscript of the Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus (one of the two most ancient copies of the Bible available to Christianity today), by nine (some say ten) separate "correctors," which had been applied to this one manuscript over a period from 400AD to about 1200AD. Tischendorf strove in his dealings with his holy texts themselves to be as honest and sincere as humanly possible. For this reason he could not understand how the scribes could have so continuously and so callously,
"allow themselves to bring in here and there changes, which were not simple verbal ones, but materially affected the meaning"
or why they "did not shrink from cutting out a passage or
inserting one."
In the introduction of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible by Oxford press we read:
"Occasionally it is evident that the text has suffered in the
transmission and that none of the versions provides a satisfactory restoration.
Here we can only follow the best judgment of competent scholars as to the most
probable reconstruction of the original text" (emphasis added)
Are the authors of the RSV Bible "critical scholars" whose
"presuppositions" are above Muslim understanding? Please note that not a single
one of the above quotes came from a Muslim. Are the words of God in the Qur'an, which
these Christian scholars are slowly confirming, are they really just an outgrowth
of Muslim propaganda and unsubstantiated lies by Muslims? Why then are the most
knowledgeable among Christian scholars yearly confirming more and more of the words of God
found in the Qur'an? Why? Are Muslim minds simply genetically inferior? When a Christian
missionary, priest or Bishop converts to Islam do they automatically lose all ability to
reason? Come on, let us be reasonable.
Even Anglican Bishops confirm this basic truth of the Qur'an. In the British newspaper the "Daily News" 25/6/84 under the heading "Shock survey of Anglican Bishops" We read
"More than half of England's Anglican Bishops say that
Christians are not obliged to believe that Jesus Christ was God, according to a survey
published today. The pole of 31 of England's 39 bishops shows that many of them think that
Christ's miracles, the virgin birth and the resurrection might not have happened exactly
as described in the Bible. Only 11 of the bishops insisted that Christians must regard
Christ as both God and man, while 19 said it was sufficient to regard Jesus as 'God's
supreme agent'"
It is further interesting to note that even the most adamant defenders
of the Trinity do not refute the fact that the Bible contains many thousands of
contradictions or discrepancies between its verses and versions, which they refer to
as "variant readings," as a result of their Church's attempts to insert verses
validating their doctrines into the Bible (such as the very famous case of 1 John 5:7 among many others and which continues to cause them
unending embarrassment and has been removed from all modern Bibles such as the RSV, the
NIV, the ASV, etc.), rather, the most they ever do is to try and "trivialize"
these errors and sweep them under the rug. For example,
"...the rare parts about which there is still uncertainty do not
affect in any way any doctrine" Bible Translations, R.L. Sumner
In the book "The Story of the Manuscripts" by Rev. George E. Merrill, the good Reverend quotes Prof. Arnold as stating:
As we can see, they do not challenge the fact that the Bible contains
many thousands of errors (a result of Church tampering during the Dark Ages), rather they
only try to reduce them in number, trivialize them and disregard them. Thus, we have
returned to the "how many 'small' pieces will you allow me to cut from your
body?" question.
"O people of the Scripture! commit no excesses in your religion: nor say of Allah aught but the truth. Christ Jesus the son of Mary was (no more than) a Messenger of Allah, and his Word, which he bestowed upon Mary, and a spirit preceding from him so believe in Allah and his messengers. Say not "Three" desist It will be better for you for Allah is one God Glory be to him Far exalted is he above having a son. To him belong all things in the heavens and the earth. And enough is Allah as a disposer of affairs."
The noble Qur'an, Al-Nissa(4):171
One of the doctrines which has been exposed to not be contained in the
Bible but which the Church has attempted to insert into the Bible during the Dark Ages is
the doctrine of the "TRINITY." This simple fact which was exposed
by God in the Qur'an fully 1400 years ago is now beginning to be recognized even in
official Trinitarian references. For example, let us read the following quotations:
In "The New Catholic Encyclopedia" (Bearing the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur, indicating official Church approval) we get a glimpse of how the concept of the Trinity was not introduced into Christianity until close to four hundred years after Jesus (pbuh):
".......It is difficult in the second half of the 20th century
to offer a clear, objective and straightforward account of the revelation, doctrinal
evolution, and theological elaboration of the Mystery of the trinity. Trinitarian
discussion, Roman Catholic as well as other, present a somewhat unsteady silhouette. Two
things have happened. There is the recognition on the part of exegetes and Biblical
theologians, including a constantly growing number of Roman Catholics, that one
should not speak of Trinitarianism in the New Testament without serious qualification.
There is also the closely parallel recognition on the part of historians of dogma and
systematic theologians that when one does speak of an unqualified Trinitarianism, one has
moved from the period of Christian origins to, say, the last quadrant of the 4th
century. It was only then that what might be called the definitive Trinitarian dogma 'One
God in three Persons' became thoroughly assimilated into Christian life and thought
... it was the product of 3 centuries of doctrinal development" (emphasis
added). The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIV, p. 295.
They admit it!. Jesus' twelve apostles lived and died never having heard of any "Trinity" ! So did their children! So did their children's children! They are slowly facing the facts and accepting the truth of God found in the Qur'an. The only problem is that they are dragging their feet and insist on finding it all out by themselves and independent of God. They do not imagine that perhaps God may have relieved them of this task and may have fixed the tampering Himself by sending a new messenger.
If the "Trinity" is the true nature of God, then why did Jesus
(pbuh) leave his closest and dearest followers so completely and utterly baffled and lost
that they never even realized the "true" nature of God? Why did he leave them
steeped in such black darkness that neither they nor their children, nor yet their
children's children would ever come to recognize the "true" nature of the One
they are to worship? Do we really want to allege that Jesus was so thoroughly incompetent
in the discharge of his duties that he left his followers in such utter chaos that it
would take them fully three centuries after his departure to finally piece together the
nature of the One whom they are to worship? Why did Jesus never, even once, just say "God,
the Holy Ghost and I are three Persons in one Trinity. It is a mystery. Worship all of us
as one and have blind faith"? Couldn't it possibly be that he didn't say it
nor did he teach it BECAUSE IT ISN'T TRUE ?!
Some people try and make the case that Jesus (pbuh) taught the disciples
the concept of the "trinity" in secret and that these "secret"
teachings were then made public knowledge many years later. However, in advancing this
unsubstantiated claim these people forget Jesus' explicit refutal of this claim. He
publicly announced:
"Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught
in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I
said nothing." John 18:20
If Jesus (pbuh) had only chosen to make just one such explicit
statement to them he could have relieved Christianity of centuries of bitter disputes,
division, and animosity, and the later "official" Church would not have needed
to make so many thousands of "corrections" and "clarifications" to the
text of the Bible over so many centuries until this doctrine finally became
"clear" to the reader, nor would it have needed to hold tens upon tens of
councils, spanning many centuries, to define, redefine, and constantly fine-tune their
definitions of the nature of God in their "official creeds." A job which they
found to be of the utmost importance, yet Jesus (pbuh) himself found no need to do
himself. Perhaps Jesus (pbuh) did not have the required levels of "Biblical
criticism" and neo-Greek philosophy needed to do the job "right."? Perhaps
he did not have the necessary understanding to realize the importance of this issue, a
matter which the Church "councils" would later find to be of such dire and
crucial importance that they needed to spend literally many centuries debating, defining,
quarreling over, and condemning other Christian sects and killing them because they did
not convert to these new "official" definitions of the nature of God.
As Muslims, we do not subscribe to the belief that Jesus (pbuh) was
incompetent in his duties nor that he would neglect to teach his followers the most major issue of his religion, the issue of "Who is
God," preferring to leave that up to the Church councils and their notorious
inquisitions. If we do not know who God is then we know nothing. This is the
hand-down most important issue of any religion. If it was true that God is a trinity then
Jesus (pbuh) would have said so clearly, just as he did so when he clearly told us that
God is ONE (i.e. Mark 12:29-32, etc.) How many millions of Christians and non-Christians
died in these Inquisitions and Crusades? Just one single clear statement from Jesus
clearly confirming that God is a trinity, and that he is
"part of" God, could have prevented all of this spilt blood.
"The horrors of the Crusades and the notorious Inquisitions are
all but a small part of this tragic tale." For Christ's Sake, Tom Harpur.
If God is a trinity then God Himself would have told us so clearly,
directly, and without beating around the bush, just as He clearly tells us that He is One
in so many places in the Bible, for example:
"Ye [are] my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I [am] he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, [even] I, [am] the LORD; and beside me [there is] no savior." Isaiah 43:10-11
"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God [is] one LORD:" Deuteronomy 6:4
etc.
Tom Harpur, a former minister and the religion editor of the Toronto Star, writes in his book "For Christ's Sake":
"What is most embarrassing for the church is the difficulty of
proving any of these statements of dogma from the new Testament documents. You simply
cannot find the doctrine of the Trinity set out anywhere in the Bible. St. Paul has the
highest view of Jesus' role and person, but nowhere does he call him God. Nor does Jesus
himself anywhere explicitly claim to be the second person in the Trinity, wholly equal to
his heavenly Father. As a pious Jew, he would have been shocked and offended by such an
Idea....(this is) in itself bad enough. But there is worse to come. This research has lead
me to believe that the great majority of regular churchgoers are, for all practical
purposes, tritheists. That is, they profess to believe in one God, but in reality they
worship three.."
In "The Dictionary of the Bible," bearing the Nihil Obstat, Imprimatur, and Imprimi Potest (official Church seals of approval), we read:
"the trinity of God is defined by the Church as the belief that in God are three persons who subsist in one nature. That belief as so defined was reached only in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and hence is not explicitly and formally a biblical belief."
The Dictionary of the Bible, John L. McKenzie, S.J., p. 899
In spite of all of this, the apologists insist on making it all out to be a result of Muslim ignorance and misunderstanding. Further, in spite of this, I continue to find many people who insist on telling everyone that any claims that the doctrine of the trinity was not arrived at until at least 400 years after Jesus (pbuh) is all simply Muslim propaganda and a result of Muslim ignorance and slander. Even after they are quoted such statements as these they then turn around and go back to telling all those who did not read these statements that it is all untrue and simply Muslim distortion of the facts. Is this how we are to search for the truth of God? Is this how we open our minds and hearts to His truth?
"And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is,
Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and
with all thy strength: this is the first commandment." Mark 12:29-30.
"According to orthodox Christian doctrine, God is one nature in
three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No one of them precedes or created the others
or stands above them in power or dignity. In precise theological terms, they are one in
substance (or essence), coeternal, and coequal. The doctrine so stated does not appear in
Scripture, ... The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was hammered out gradually over a
period of three centuries or more...Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the coeternity and coequality
of the divine persons remained a matter of theological dispute, and so are frequently
discussed in the context of heresy... In 381 the bishops convened again at Constantinople
and set forth the orthodox doctrine in its final form" A
Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, David Lyle Jeffrey, p. 785
"In the Old Testament, the Unity of God was clearly affirmed.
The Jewish creed, repeated in every synagogue today, was 'Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God
is one Lord (Deut. 6:4). This was the faith of the first Christians, so Paul writes,
'There is one God and Father of all, Who is above all and through all and in you all"
(Eph. 4:6). But gradually some addition or modification of this creed was found necessary.
Christians were fully persuaded of the Deity of Jesus Christ and later of the Deity of the
Holy Spirit, and they were compelled to relate these convictions with their belief in the
Unity of God. During many years, the problem was discussed and many explanations were
attempted. One advanced by Sabellius, that became fairly popular was that Christ and the
Holy Spirit were successive manifestations of the Supreme Being, but finally, the belief
prevailed that the words Father, Son, Spirit, declared eternal distinctions in the
Godhead. That is, that the Trinity of Manifestation revealed a Tri-unity of Being. In
other words,' that Christ and the Holy Spirit were coeternal with the Father. With the
exceptions of the Unitarians, this is the belief of Christendom today" Christadelphianism,
F. J. Wilkin, M.A., D.D, The Australian Baptist, Victoria.
Amazing! In spite of his belief in the doctrine of the "trinity," Mr. Wilkin has just himself admitted that the doctrine should not be sought after in the Bible, nor did the disciples of Jesus preach it, and that those who accepted it did not get it from the Bible, rather they started out with their own preconceived concepts and then did their best to make the Bible endorse their preconceptions, and finally, that it was only "adopted" by the Church after many years of contention and experimentation, because members were "fully persuaded of the Deity of Jesus Christ, and later of the Deity of the Holy Spirit." When Jesus was on earth, Judaism was the only purely monotheistic religion in the region, having become surrounded by endless waves of "trinities" from the surrounding nations of the Romans, Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians (see chapter 3 of "What Did Jesus Really Say"). So, why did Jesus (pbuh) choose to allow the very first generations after him to remain steeped in ignorance and division, to live and die never having heard of any "trinity," and only choose to bring enlightenment to the creed-writers and neo-platonic philosophers of the fourth century CE?
Why was it that only after the Romans, who themselves worshipped pagan
trinities, celebrated the 25th of December as the birthday of their supreme god
of the sun, celebrated Easter as the festival of the return of power to the earth, used
the "cross of light" as their official symbol, and believed in the death and
resurrection of their gods in atonement for their sins, why was it only after these pagan
Romans officially "sponsored and protected" the church that the Trinitarians
finally gained the upper hand over all of the other Christian sects and suddenly everyone
"recognized" the "true" nature of God as being a trinity similar to
that of the surrounding pagan nations and "recognized" that all of these other
Christian sects needed to be converted or killed and their gospels destroyed?
"The reign of Constantine marks the epoch of the transformation
of Christianity from a religion into a political system; and though, in one sense, that
system was degraded into idolatry, in another it had risen into a development of the old
Greek mythology. The maxim holds good in the social as well as in the mechanical world,
that, when two bodies strike, the form of both is changed. Paganism was modified by
Christianity; Christianity by Paganism. In the Trinitarian controversy, which first broke
out in Egypt - Egypt, the land of the Trinities - the chief point in discussion was to
define the position of 'the Son.'" History of the Conflict between Religion and
Science, Prof. John Draper, pp. 52-53
The great luminary of the Church, Saint Augustine (354-430 C.E.), is
quoted to have said "The same thing which is now called CHRISTIAN RELIGION existed
among the ancients. They have begun to call Christian the true religion which existed
before."
"Our love for what is old, our reverence for what our fathers
used, makes us keep still in the church, and on the very altar cloths, symbols which would
excite the smile of an Oriental, and lead him to wonder why we send missionaries to his
land, while cherishing his faith in ours" James Bonwick
The Encyclopedia Britannica states under the heading "Trinity":
"in Christian doctrine, the unity of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit as three persons in one Godhead Neither the word Trinity nor the explicit doctrine
appears in the New Testament,... The Council of Nicaea in 325 stated the crucial formula
for that doctrine in its confession that the Son is 'of the same substance [homoousios] as
the Father,' even though it said very little about the Holy Spirit. Over the next half
century, Athanasius defended and refined the Nicene formula, and, by the end of the 4th
century, under the leadership of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of
Nazianzus (the Cappadocian Fathers), the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the
form it has maintained ever since."
The Church forces the "Trinity" into the Bible:
"Then woe to those who write the Scripture with their own hands and then say: 'This is from Allah', to traffic with it for a miserable price. Woe to them for what their hands do write and for the gain they make thereby"
The noble Qur'an Al-Bakarah(2):79
"Do you covet that they will believe in you when [in fact] a party of them used to hear the Word of Allah then they would distort it knowingly after they had understood it?"
The noble Qur'an Al-Bakarah(2):75
Indeed, the very fact that the "trinity" is not to be found
anywhere throughout the Bible except as a direct result of deliberate mistranslation of
the verses (see chapter
one of "What Did Jesus
Really Say") finally resulted in the Church finding it necessary to
"fix" the Bible by inserting fabricated verses which would make this doctrine
"clear," such as the famous case of the verse of 1 John 5:7
which has now been universally recognized by the majority of Christian scholars as a false
insertion of the Church and is no longer found in any modern Bible except for the King
James Bible. For the longest time this verse was considered the main text which everyone
referred to in defense of the trinity. It was on everyone's lips. It was so
"clear." It was so "obvious." How could anyone not see a trinity in
this verse? Then they found out why it was so clear. It was because the
verse was a fabrication which the Church had inserted into the Bible in the 4th
century in order to make their doctrine "clear" to future generations so that
they could simply demand "blind faith" from them. No ancient manuscript of the
Bible from before that century contains this verse. It took fully four hundred years after
the departure of Jesus (pbuh) for this verse to "magically" appear in the text
of the "Word of God." For many centuries before that, tens upon tens of
Christian sects were at one-another's throats accusing each-other of blasphemy, heresy,
tampering and corruption. Each one had their own concept of "who" God was and
"how many" gods there were. Many raging debates were convened to debate this
issue and defend their various beliefs from the holy texts themselves. Since the
Trinitarian doctrine could not be found anywhere in the Bible, therefore, there was no way
for the Trinitarians to defend their "triune god" theory or substantiate their
claims of "heresy" against the Unitarian Christians who remained upon the
original teachings of Jesus (pbuh). Once this verse magically showed up in the 4th
century in the text of their Bible, and the Roman empire put its considerable might behind
the trinitarian sect, then they finally had the "big stick" they needed in order
to bash all of these other "heretical sects" over their head and show them how
their "heresy" is so expressly condemned in the Bible…..finally God Himself
said so very clearly …right "here."
"The text about the three heavenly witnesses (I John 5:7 KJV) is
not an authentic part of the NT" The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Vol.
4, p.711, Abingdon Press.
"1 John 5:7 in the KJV reads: 'There are three that bear record
in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one' but this is
an interpolation of which there is no trace before the late fourth century." The
Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 4, p. 871, Abingdon Press.
"1 John 5:7 in the Textus Receptus (represented in the KJV)
makes it appear that John had arrived at the doctrine of the trinity in explicit form
('the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost'), but this text is clearly an interpolation
since no genuine Greek manuscript contains it" The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary,
Edited by Allen C. Myers, p. 1020
The great luminary of Western literature, Mr. Edward Gibbon, explains the reason for the discardal of this verse from the pages of the Bible with the following words:
"Of all the manuscripts now extant, above fourscore in number,
some of which are more than 1200 years old, the orthodox copies of the Vatican, of the
Complutensian editors, of Robert Stephens are becoming invisible; and the two manuscripts
of Dublin and Berlin are unworthy to form an exception...In the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, the Bibles were corrected by LanFrank, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by
Nicholas, a cardinal and librarian of the Roman church, secundum Ortodoxam fidem.
Notwithstanding these corrections, the passage is still wanting in twenty-five Latin
manuscripts, the oldest and fairest; two qualities seldom united, except in
manuscripts....The three witnesses have been established in our Greek Testaments by the
prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors; the typographical
fraud, or error, of Robert Stephens in the placing of a crotchet and the deliberate
falsehood, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza." "Decline and fall
of the Roman Empire," IV, Gibbon, p. 418.
Peake's Commentary on the Bible says:
"The famous interpolation after 'three witnesses' is not printed
even in RSVn, and rightly. It cites the heavenly testimony of the Father, the logos, and
the Holy Spirit, but is never used in the early Trinitarian controversies. No respectable
Greek MS contains it. Appearing first in a late 4th-cent. Latin text, it entered the
Vulgate and finally the NT of Erasmus."
It was only the horrors of the infamous Church inquisitions which held back Sir Isaac Newton from openly revealing these facts to all:
"In all the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the
Trinity in Jeromes time and both before and long enough after it, the text of the 'three
in heaven' was never once thought of. It is now in everybody's mouth and accounted the
main text for the business and would assuredly have been so too with them, had it been in
their books… Let them make good sense of it who are able. For my part I can make
none. If it be said that we are not to determine what is scripture and what not by our
private judgments, I confess it in places not controverted, but in disputed places I love
to take up with what I can best understand. It is the temper of the hot and superstitious
part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason
to like best what they understand least. Such men may use the Apostle John as they please,
but I have that honor for him as to believe that he wrote good sense and therefore take
that to be his which is the best" Jesus, Prophet of Islam, Muhammad Ata'
Ur-Rahim, p. 156
In spite of this universal realization, the Church insists on keeping
the wool pulled over the eyes of the masses of Christendom by refusing to remove it from
the last holdout, their famous "King James" Bible, and this is how they force
words into the mouths of Jesus (pbuh) and his disciples so that it may become
"clear" to us that Jesus is God and God is a "trinity." Once this
contradictory and illogical doctrine becomes "clear" in the Bible then they will
no longer have to defend it or explain it. They can simply demand "blind faith"
in it and insist that God wants us to believe it without understanding it. This is why
they can't get rid of it even though it has been exposed as a fabrication of the 4th
century Trinitarian Church. You see logic dictates that if a verse is a fabrication then
you must remove it from the "word of God." You must remove it, that is, if your
goal is indeed to spread the word of God and you do not have another agenda. Many a
gullible soul did indeed predict the imminent removal of this verse once it became so
widely recognized to be the fabrication that it is. Sadly, this would not prove to be the
case.
For example, Mr. Edward Gibbon was one of the first men to recognize
this fabrication and to heroically and selflessly expose it in front of all. Today, as we
have seen, it has become too widely recognized as the fabrication that it is, and removed
from too many reputable Bibles, for anyone to say otherwise if he wishes to retain any
shred of his credibility. During his time, Mr. Gibbon was defended in his findings by his
contemporary, the brilliant British scholar Richard Porson who also proceeded to publish
devastatingly conclusive proof that the verse of 1 John 5:7 was only first inserted by the
Church into the Bible in the end of the 4th century. (Secrets of Mount Sinai,
James Bentley, pp. 30-33). Regarding Porson's most devastating proof, Mr. Gibbon later
said
"His structures are founded in argument, enriched with learning,
and enlivened with wit, and his adversary neither deserves nor finds any quarter at his
hands. The evidence of the three heavenly witnesses would now be rejected in any court of
justice; but prejudice is blind, authority is deaf, and our vulgar Bibles will ever be
polluted by this spurious text."
You see Mr. Gibbon was a man ahead of his time. He recognized the
underlying motives and interests of his contemporaries. These motives and interests had
been cultivated and nurtured for too many centuries to simply admit the truth, accept
defeat, seek God's forgiveness and remove the interpolation. Not everyone, however, had
Mr. Gibbon's foresight. For example, in commenting on the above statement, Mr. Bentley
responds:
"In fact, they are not. No modern Bible now contains the
interpolation."
Mr. Bentley, however, was mistaken. Indeed, just as Mr. Gibbon had
predicted, the simple fact that the most learned scholars of Christianity now unanimously
recognize this verse to be a later interpolation of the Church has not prevented the
preservation of this fabricated text in our modern Bibles. To this day, the Bible in the
hands of the majority of Christians, the "King James" Bible, still unhesitantly
includes this verse as the "inspired" word of God without so much as a footnote
to inform the reader that all scholars of Christianity of note unanimously recognize it as
a later fabrication.
Prejudices die hard. Religious prejudices die the hardest.
What does God Almighty have to say to these people and their tampering
fingers? Well we can read His condemnation of their actions in the noble Qur'an. He says:
"Then woe to those who write the Scripture with their own hands
and then say: 'This is from Allah', to traffic with it for a miserable price. Woe to them
for what their hands do write and for the gain they make thereby" The noble
Qur'an Al-Bakarah(2):79
"O People of the Scripture! Why do you reject the Signs of God,
when you [yourselves] bear witness [to their truth] ?. O People of the Scripture! Why do
you clothe Truth with falsehood, and conceal the Truth, while you have knowledge?" The
noble Qur'an, A'al-Umran(3):70-71
"Say: 'O People of the Scripture! Why do you reject the Signs of
God, when God is Himself witness to all you do?' Say: 'O People of the Book! Why do you
obstruct those who believe from the path of God, Seeking to make it crooked, while you
were yourselves witnesses? But God is not unaware of what you do'" The noble
Qur'an, A'al-Umran(3):98-99
"[And remember] When Allah(God) took a covenant from those who
were given the Scripture: You shall make it known and clear to mankind, and you shall not
hide it; but they flung it behind their backs, and purchased with it a miserable gain! How
evil was that which they purchased!" The noble
Qur'an, A'al-Umran(3):187
"Say: 'O people of the Scripture! exceed not in your religion
the bounds [of what is proper], trespassing beyond the truth, nor follow the vain desires
of people who went astray in times gone by, who misled many, and strayed [themselves] from
the straight path.'" The noble Qur'an, Al-Maida(5):77
"And when Allah said: O Jesus, son of Mary! Did you say unto
mankind: Take me and my mother(2) for two gods beside Allah?
he said: Be You glorified. It was not mine to utter that to which I had no right. If I
used to say it, then You knew it. You know what is in my [innermost] self but I know not
what is in Yours. Truly! You, only You are the Knower of things hidden. I spoke unto them
only that which You commanded me, (saying): Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord, and I
was a witness over them while I dwelt among them, and when You took me You were the
Watcher over them, and You are Witness over all things." The noble Qur'an, Al-Maidah(5):116-118
"And from those who said: "We are Christians," We took
their covenant, but they forgot a good part of the message which was sent to them.
Therefore We have stirred up enmity and hatred among them till the Day of Resurrection,
and Allah will inform them of what they used to do. O people of the Scripture! Now has Our
messenger (Muhammad) come to you, explaining to you much of that which you used to hide in
the Scripture, and forgiving much. Indeed, there has come to you a light from Allah and a
plain Scripture. Wherewith Allah guides him who seeks His good pleasure unto paths of
peace. He brings them out of darkness by His will into light, and guides them to a
straight path. They indeed have disbelieved who say: Lo! Allah is the Messiah, son of
Mary. Say : Who then has the least power against Allah, if He had willed to destroy the
Messiah son of Mary, and his mother and everyone on earth? And to Allah belongs the
dominion of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them. He creates what He
will. And Allah is Able to do all things. The Jews and Christians say: We are sons of
Allah and His loved ones. Say; Why then does He punish you for your sins? No, you are but
mortals of His creating. He forgives whom He will, and punishes whom He will. And to Allah
belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them, and unto
Him is the return (of all). O people of the Scripture! Now has Our messenger (Muhammad)
come unto you to make things plain after a break in (the series of) the messengers, lest
you should say: There came not unto us a messenger of cheer nor any Warner. Now has a
messenger of cheer and a Warner come unto you. And Allah is Able to do all
things." The noble Qur'an, Al-Maidah(5):14-19
"The similitude of Jesus before Allah is as that of Adam, he
created him from dust, then said to him: 'Be' and he was" The noble Qur'an,
A'al-Umran(3):59.
"They say: Allah has taken a son. Glorified be He! He has no
needs! His is all that is in the heavens and that is in the earth. You have no warrant for
this, do you say regarding Allah that which you know not?" The noble Qur'an,
Yunus(10):68
"The Messiah, son of Mary, was only a messenger, messengers (the
like of whom) had passed away before him. And his mother was a saintly woman. They both
used to eat (earthly) food. See how we make the signs clear for them, then see how they
are deluded!" The noble Qur'an, Al-Maidah (5):75.
Indeed, Jesus (pbuh) is quoted in the Bible as having confirmed all of the above:
"And this is life eternal, that they might know you
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." John
17:3.
Notice that Jesus (pbuh) did not say "Us the only true
God"
He did not say "Me the only true God"
He only said what Allah Almighty confirmed in the Qur'an that he said, namely, "YOU the ONLY true God"
Notice the word "ONLY." If he did not use this word then we
could imply that he had left the door open for someone else to be God or "part of
God" in addition to God Himself. However, Jesus (pbuh) made sure to close that door
and lock it tight. He did so by using the explicit word "ONLY." How could he
possibly make it any more clear than that? How much more evidence do we need to accept his
words, recognize the truth, and follow the truth of Allah?
Also:
"Jesus saith unto her, ...I ascend unto my Father, and your
Father; and to my God, and your God." John 20:17
Once again remember the confirmation of Jesus' words as confirmed by God
in the noble Qur'an: "…I (Jesus) spoke unto them only that which You
commanded me, (saying): Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord, and I was a witness over
them while I dwelt among them, and when You took me You were the Watcher over them, and
You are Witness over all things…" The noble
Qur'an, Al-Maidah(5):118
"Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the
LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us?
Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay: for
shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of
him that framed it, He had no understanding?" Isaiah
29:15-16
Now, if our current authors object to all of this evidence showing the Bible to have been the object of continuous and unrelenting tampering by the Church in its attempts to make such doctrines as the trinity "clear" to mankind, and if they continue to maintain that this is all simply Muslim propaganda, if this is still the case, and they would like to prove their case quite conclusively while also collecting an easy $2000 in the process, then they are invited to take the "Easter challenge" found close to the end of this article.
As just observed, when the author of this list tries to find
contradictions in God's words in the noble Qur'an he either uses personal opinions or else
Christian references to do so. It is interesting that the contradictions in the Bible
are recognized by its own foremost scholars but not seen by him, while the claimed
contradictions in the noble Qur'an appear very clear to him while he can not produce a
single well known or respected Muslim scholar who endorses his claimed contradictory
verses. The most that he might be able to say in this regard is that some
"Shiite" Imams of Iran think that there might be more books to the Qur'an,
however, whenever you openly ask any Shiite if he can produce these missing books he very
strenuously stresses that they do not believe that the Qur'an is missing a single verse,
that the claim that they say this is false and a fabrication, and that anyone who claims
that they say this is a liar
There is a very big difference between:
a) one group who's own scholars and most respected clergymen say that they have in their hands thousands of officially recognized physical and tangible ancient manuscripts of their holy scripture containing discrepancies between one-another "numbering in the hundreds of thousands," and between,
b) another group who are claimed by others to believe that there are
some missing verses in their holy scripture, but which they themselves claim they never
said but are all propaganda, lies and fabrications against them. (The Shia have also
written some books defending themselves against this claim, such as "Adam Tahreef
Al-Quran.")
Perhaps this is why we find so many learned teachers of Christianity converting to Islam such as Bishops priests and ministers (i.e. Bishop David Benjamin Keldani, Bishop John Jacob, Anselm Turmeda, Rev. Prof. Abraham Phillips, or father Marino, etc.), to say nothing of more contemporary Christian scholars such as Gary Miller (who now goes by the name Abdulahad Omar), or father Norman, the 19th century Christian priest who went to Turkey to preach Christianity to the 'heathens' and came back to America in order to convert the Christians to Islam. On the other hand any claims of conversion from Islam to Christianity can not point to a single famous or reputable Muslim teacher who was sought after by Muslims during his lifetime to teach them Islam and who spent many years of his life strongly espousing Islam and teaching others to uphold it. This is to say nothing about Christian kings who converted to Islam, such as the Anglo-Saxon king Offa (757-796 CE) who converted from Christianity to Islam, or Russell Webb the American Consul in Manila Philippines who converted to Islam, resigned his job, went to India to learn more about Islam and came back to the US to teach it, in addition to many others from Lord Headley to Schoun, since in spite of their being kings, Lords, high officials and diplomats, in all fairness, some of them can not be considered to have previously been missionary scholars of Christianity and teachers of the Bible. This is also why world famous athletes, musicians, or celebrities who convert to Islam too are not emphasized here (i.e. Mike Tyson, Cat Stevens, Jemima Goldsmith etc.)
In our one small mosque in Central New York, we have close to three thousand Muslims. Of these three thousand I would estimate that perhaps one thousand were previously Christians. Of this number quite a few were very active and energetic members of their local Churches and denominations and openly abusive of Islam and all Muslims before they themselves willingly embraced Islam. They studied the Bible, read many Christian publications, prayed daily, attended the Church daily, and were even quite active in missionary and evangelical work. Some were even considered the most active members of their Churches before their conversion. A recent U.S. pole on this very issue informs us that there are 120,000 converts to Islam within the USA every year. Most of them profess to have been previously Christian (to hear from some of them go to http://web.syr.edu/~msa/comparative_religion.html or http://tblr.ed.asu.edu/abdrahman/islam.htm). A sizable number of these were very active and devoted Christians strongly involved in very diligent missionary work. This is to say nothing about converts to Islam in other countries. The reason why these people, their numbers and activities are usually not quoted by Muslims is not because they are regarded as small in number or unimportant in their persons, neither is it because many of them did not have extensive schooling in Christian theology (since many of them did), rather it is because it is felt that in order to try and remain as objective and unbiased as humanly possible it is important to restrain ourselves only to those Christians who combined knowledge, high authority and respect within their community, in addition to very active preaching and missionary work in support of Christianity (or even abuse of Islam) before their conversion to Islam.
Perhaps this is also why ever so slowly but surely, the most knowledgeable scholars of Christianity are year by year slowly finding evidence of Church tampering and as they slowly strip away the changes they are discovering the exact message God told them, in the noble Qur'an, that they would find. Specifically, that Jesus was not God, that God is not a Trinity, that Muhammad (pbuh) was expected by both the Jews and Christians as the last prophet, and that there is no such thing as an "original sin," an "atonement," or "belief without faith." Rather, every single human being is responsible for himself alone and can never be held accountable in any way, shape or form for what anyone else did or did not do. Further, Islam emphasizes that God is a very merciful God who can forgive any sin no matter how tremendous very trivially simply by willing it. Indeed, Allah delights in forgiving human transgressions and in expiating the sins of all those who turn to Him in sincere repentance, however, He first requires faith to be supplemented by works and that either one by itself shall never suffice.
As we have seen, it is only those who are extremely unfamiliar with their Bible who claim that it contains no contradictions, "variant readings," or evidence of deliberate Church tampering. The scholars of Christianity including Trinitarian Bishops, ministers, priests, Doctors of Divinity, and official Trinitarian Biblical references all agree that the evidence of tampering is far too extensive to ignore or to attribute to mere "slips of the pen," etc. These Christians only differ on how many thousands of errors are contained in the Bible and how serious they are, with some of them claiming that there are only about two thousand errors and that they are all "not very important," while others insist that they are over one hundred thousand in number and that a large portion of them are extremely serious, intentional, and malicious.
Again, although some apologists would like to depict such statements as
being an outgrowth of despicable Muslim propaganda since they all hate Jesus (peace be
upon him) so very much and are faithless, still, the truth is far different from their
claims. Every single Christian who has converted to Islam whom I have spoken to has
informed me that he or she only converted because of their faith and love of Jesus (pbuh)
and not in spite of it. Indeed it is usually the most knowledgeable of Christian scholars
who are the most likely to openly admit these facts. For example, in 1881, the scholars of
Christianity got together to study the King James Bible (based upon the Greek
Textus Receptus), the version of the Bible which the Church has been pushing upon the
masses for roughly four centuries, the version of the Bible which the Church depicted as
being so utterly perfect and faultless as to literally consider it to be direct from 'the
mouth of God,' the version of the Bible which the Church considered it a heresy to
consider anything less than 100% perfect and the undying unfailing word of God, these same
thirty two Trinitarian scholars and fifty cooperating Christian denominations got together
to expose the Church's "King James Bible," their ultimate achievement, and
declare the following:
"...Yet the King James Version has GRAVE
DEFECTS.." (From the preface of the RSV 1971)
They go on to caution us that:
"...That these defects are SO MANY AND SO SERIOUS as to call for
revision"
The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible by Oxford Press has the following to say in its preface:
"Yet the King James Version has serious defects. By the middle
of the nineteenth century, the development of biblical studies and the discovery of many
biblical manuscripts more ancient than those on which the King James Version was based
made it apparent that these defects were so many as to call for revision."
Who says so? Who are these people who claim that the Bible in the hands of the majority of today's Christians contains "many" "grave defects" which are so "serious" as to require a complete overhaul of the text? Are they, as our current authors would have us believe, all people of questionable 'preconceptions' which backwards Muslims gleefully quote out of ignorance? Well, we can find the answer in the very same RSV Bible. In it, the publishers themselves (Collins) mention on page 10 of their notes:
"This Bible (RSV) is the product of thirty two scholars assisted
by an advisory committee representing fifty cooperating denominations"
Let us see what is the opinion of Christendom with regard to these scholars and their work in the revision of the Bible (revised by them in 1952 and then again in 1971):
"The finest version which has been produced in the present century" - (Church of England newspaper)
"A completely fresh translation by scholars of the highest eminence" - (Times literary supplement)
"The well loved characteristics of the authorized version combined with a new accuracy of translation" - (Life and Work)
"The most accurate and close rendering of the original" -
(The Times)
In the beginning, when the Gutenburg printing press was first invented and the masses finally succeeded in forcing the Bible out of the hands of the Church and out into the open, those who studied it and found numerous problems in it simply attempted to 'fix' the errors and tampering in the KJV (of 1611 C.E.) as they were slowly exposed by the discovery of more and more ancient copies of the Bible. However, it was not long before the errors which they discovered became so many and so serious that any amount of 'fixing' would no longer do. The text needed a complete overhaul. The whole KJV needed to be tossed out, the ancient manuscripts needed to be reassessed, and a completely new version needed to be compiled. This is how such Bibles as the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the American Standard Version, etc. (based upon the Westcott-Hort) were born. However, even this effort was found to be seriously lacking in total honesty of translation and reproduction of the original and in unbiased objectivity. For more on this issue please download the second edition of the book "What Did Jesus Really Say?". and read chapter 2.1 The information contained therein is too extensive to reproduce here.
On the other hand Muslims remain resolute that God's words in the noble Qur'an, which He sent down in order to rectify mankind's tampering with the previous Scriptures, this final Book of God does not contain "only a 1500-2000 errors." It does not contain "only errors which do not affect in any way any doctrine." Rather, the Qur'an contains exactly ZERO errors and exactly ZERO contradictions. God has not left it up to mankind to preserve the scripture this time. This time He has preserved it Himself.
In what follows I shall be reproducing the original author's arguments
verbatim without removal of a single word, or correcting a single spelling error, in order
to ensure that the reader can indeed read both party's points of view completely and
faithfully. Simply removing all of my comments from this article will result in a complete
and faithful reconstruction of his original article. I shall further only be placing
emphasis on responding to all questions which he has marked as "unanswered."
Although I have not yet read the complete texts of the questions marked by him as
"answered," still, I am assuming that they have been dealt with sufficiently so
I shall only deal with them in brief. However I shall try to find the time in the near
future to scan through the provided answers and verify this assumption. If my assumption
proves to be incorrect then I shall, by the will of Allah, answer those questions in more
detail, updating this file as needed. So let us see what he has to say:
Some readers have asked for a condensed overview on the contradictions to be displayed on one page instead of distributing it over so many pages. Each contradiction will be described in a minimum of words and has a link to the page where the issue is discussed in more detail.
Do they not ponder on the Qur'an?
Had it been from other than Allah,
they would surely have found therein much discrepancy.
-- The Qur'an, Sura 4:82
A second example is, that when a man leaves only his other, his wife and two sisters, then they receive 1/3 [mother, 4:11], 1/4 [wife, 4:12] and 2/3 [the two sisters, 4:176], which again adds up to 15/12 of the available property.
These verses were revealed by God to Muhammad at a time when the people of Arabia (and even many of the surrounding nations, such as the Romans, the Hindus, the Persians, etc.) gave very little heed to the rights of women. Many of them, such as the Christian Romans, would continue for many more centuries debating whether or not women even had souls. It was not until very recently that Western women actually achieved the right to inherit at all. A right which was established for them by God in the Qur'an 1400 years ago. Even such "modern" rights as pre-nuptial agreements were firmly established in Islam 1400 years before they showed up in the West. During that age, women in many of these surrounding nations were simply property of the men to be inherited with his other material belongings by his male heirs. In the Arabian peninsula, this very same attitude was held and the common law was that the male children receive the inheritance and the father receives inheritance conditional upon explicit verbal bequeathal. All others got nothing. When Islam came, God commanded Muhammad (pbuh) to return to women their fair share of the inheritance and to further establish the rights of the other relatives in the family of the deceased to receive their just share according to their relationships.
The verses dealing with inheritance are not as our current author may imagine only these couple of verses. There are many other verses in different locations throughout the Qur'an dealing with this issue. They range over the chapters of Al-Baqarah(2), Al-Nissa(4), Al-Maidah(5), Al-Anfal(8), etc. This is to say nothing about the many multiples of that in the Sunnah (Sayings of the prophet, pbuh). Out of these many verses and sayings of the prophet has been developed the science of "Al-Fara'id" which is a very vast issue and which can not be collected in a single paragraph. Suffice it to say that the question appears to display a complete unawareness of any aspects of the discipline of Al-Fara'id, its basis, its subdivisions, its special cases, the rules of "Awl" and "Usbah," the laws of "Usool" of the Fara'id, the laws of "Hajb wa Hirman," and many other issues relating to this matter. This particular example falls under the laws of "Awl" which regulate the cases when the inheritor's shares exceed or "overshoot" the sum of the total inheritance, and in which case the inheritance is recalculated according to the laws of Awl and redistributed. In the above two cases, the distribution would be "Parents: 4/27 each, wife:1/9, daughters:16/27" and for the second case, "Mother:4/15, Wife:3/15, Sisters:8/15." The books of Fiq contain specific examples of Awl, such as the Awl of Umar ibn al-Khattab, however, the interested reader can study this issue further by referring to any number of references on Islamic Fiq.
There are yet other cases when the number of inheritors and their shares do not sum to a whole 100%, in which case the laws of "Usbah" come into play in order to distribute the unclaimed shares which have no corresponding people to receive them. Then there are the laws of "Hajb wa Hirman," which encompass still other special cases of inheritance and block normally deserving relatives from inheriting in special extraordinary cases.
Our current author objects to Islamic law and wishes it to conform to his tastes. Christians officially have only one reference; the Bible. This is why he and some of his friends at times try to force this same system on Muslims. They insist that Islamic law come only from the Qur'an, thus effectively blotting out roughly one half of Islamic law.
Islamic law is based upon two references, the Qur'an (sayings of God) and the Sunnah (sayings and actions of the prophet). These two are then narrated and interpreted by the Companions through their consensus and their narrations of when and how a given verse or Hadeeth was revealed (it's context) and how the Prophet (pbuh) taught these issues to them or how he interpreted a given verse or applied it. All of this information is vital to the interpretation of a given Islamic law and none of it can be taken in a vacuum of the rest, based upon personal whims. At times the Qur'an contains a given law, at others the law is found in the Hadeeth, and in still other cases the broad outlines of a given law are presented in the Qur'an and the details are explained in the Hadeeth. For example, the Qur'an only commands Muslims to "pray." The details of how to pray are found in the Hadeeths of the prophet (pbuh) and described by the companions who saw him teach it and were themselves taught by him directly. If a non-Muslim does not like this system and rejects it then this in no way makes it any less the law of Islam or the command of God. Indeed this system itself is taught by God in the Qur'an. Examples of God commanding Muslims to obey the prophet and abide by the laws of the Sunnah and Hadeeth in interpreting the Qur'an are:
"He who obeys the messenger has indeed obeyed Allah ..." Al-Nissa(4):80
"And We (God) have sent down unto you (Muhammad) the Reminder (Qur'an), that you might make clear to mankind that which was sent down unto them and perchance they might reflect." Al-Nahil(16):44
"And We (God) have not sent down unto you (Muhammad) the Book (the Qur'an) except that you might make clear to them that in which they differ, and [as] a guidance and a mercy for a folk who believe" Al-Nahil(16):64
"And whatsoever the Messenger gives you take it, and whatsoever he forbids you, abstain [from it]. And guard yourselves from Allah, verily Allah is severe in punishment" Al-Hashr(59):7
"... And if you should differ in anything among yourselves then refer it to Allah and His messenger if you believe in Allah and in the Last Day. That is better for you and best in interpretation" Al-Nissa(4):59
etc.
A messenger of God is not simply a tape recorder that records
everything that is spoken into it an then regurgitates it without explanation. Far from
it. A messenger of God is a teacher whose job it is to not only pass out the textbook but
to also explain the text itself, teach it, answer the student's questions regarding it,
and clarify all passages wherein they find difficulty.
Similarly, the command to interpret the Qur'an and the Hadeeth only as expressly understood by the Companions due to their companionship of the prophet and their discipleship directly under his command and watchful eye can be found in quite a number of hadeeth, such as the hadeeths of "La tajtami ummati ala dhalal" and "Alaikum bi sunnati wa sunnat al-Khulafa..." among countless others.
What the "Islam bashers" do is that they take a Biblical
yardstick and attempt to force it upon the Qur'an. For Christians there is only one divine
reference; the Bible. In Islam there are two; the Qur'an and the Sunnah (or Hadeeth). The
Qur'an can not be interpreted by Muslims based upon their personal desires. It has to be
done in the light of how the prophet (pbuh) taught it. This is indeed the system which
Allah commands us to follow in the above verses. Authors of such lists as this, however,
prefer to take the short route of simply reading the Qur'an and then applying to it the
meaning they chose, in spite of what the Prophet (pbuh) had to say in this regard and in
spite of what the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh) had to say regarding the contexts of
the verses, the times of their revelation, and the situations associated with each one,
and the intended meanings or interpretations.
Actually, the author's unfamiliarity with the Arabic language, its grammar and usage, is one of the main reasons for his objection. Indeed, one of the major problems with the Bible as it stands today as so graciously demonstrated by him for us in this example, is that our current Bibles force us to study ancient Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures through Greek and Latin glasses as seen by people who are neither Jews, Greeks, nor Romans. Such practices (as demonstrated in the book "What Did Jesus Really Say?"), have seriously handicapped any attempts to faithfully translate the original author's intended meanings. This problem, all thanks be to the Almighty, has been completely avoided in the Qur'an, since it has remained from the time of its inspiration to the present day in the same language it was originally revealed in, the language has remained a living language from that day to this, and the book itself has always been in the hands of the people and not "the elite."
The foremost miracle of the Qur'an is in its text. The text of the Arabic language. You can not translate a miracle no matter how you may try. The Arabic language can not be compared to any other language in its intricate complexity, diversity of form, richness of meaning, brevity of parlance, beauty of construct and power of delivery. To give an example of this let us look at the most basic of measures, that of dictionaries:
A fairly comprehensive and authoritative reference on the English language would be the "Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary" tenth edition, in 1500 pages. On the other hand, a common Arabic dictionary is "Lisan Al-Arab" in 18 volumes, each averaging about 650 pages, or about 11700 pages in all. In other words, even if we were to disregard all of the other aspects of the Arabic language, such as its grammar, we would still be faced with a language which is about eight times as complex as the English language. It is not at all uncommon in the Arabic language to find over one hundred words that refer to the same entity, each one of them giving a slightly different detailed description than all of the others. This has resulted in a language which can translate complete English sentences into only one Arabic word.
But the Arabic language is not simply a list of words. Far from it, it is a very complex collection of literary sciences which have been developed, refined, and fine-tuned for generations and millennia beyond counting. The end result of this is a group of literary sciences which literally have no parallel whatsoever in the English language, such as the science of "Sarf" or the multifarious sciences of "Balaghah," among others. Even when the English language can lay claim to a parallel science to that of the Arabic language, such as for example the science of "grammar," even in this case anyone who has the slightest understanding of the Arabic language finds that even these equivalent sciences fade nearly into oblivion when faced with the tremendous complexities and inestimable attention to the minutest detail in Arabic grammar which can literally reverse the meanings of a sentence simply by changing a single squiggle (diacritic) above the last letter of only one word in that sentence (Imagine being able to reverse the meaning of an English sentence by removing the dot over one "i" in that sentence).
William Shakespeare was considered to be one of the leading masters of English literature known to date. However, he never had to deal with the Arabic language. Now, taking into consideration that the Arab nation was one obsessed with literary perfection and refinement of prose, it becomes apparent that what we had here was a nation of literally hundreds of "William Shakespeares." Indeed an individual's mastery of the Arabic language was considered one of the primary distinguishing criteria in selecting tribal leaders. Just as in the wild west people used to have public shoot-outs at high noon, so too did the ancient Arabs have public face-downs in literary composition. These public confrontations could at times be so scathing and destructive as to totally destroy a given individual or tribe and cause them to disband in shame and humiliation, erased from the pages of history (such as happened with the tribe of "Numair"). The greatest of these literary masters had their compositions transcribed and hung up on the walls of the noble Kaaba as a badge of honor and an example for future generations. These compositions which were regarded the "best of the best" where given the name of "Al-Muallaqat" (the hanging poems). These were the people whom God sent Muhammad (pbuh) to, and these are the people whom prophet Muhammad (pbuh) repeatedly challenged, over 23 years, to produce a work similar to the Qur'an, standing alone with no tribe to support him and no ally to defend him but God Almighty. In other words he was challenging them in a field which they were the world's foremost authorities in and the source of their greatest strength and pride. Indeed all of God's prophets throughout history have been sent with miracles in the very fields which that prophet's people excelled in so that they might fully comprehend the magnitude of that miracle and have no excuse in ignorance.
These people whom prophet Muhammad (pbuh) stood alone against and challenged to face the Qur'an were no timid sheep. They were men of great pride, misdirected as it may have been, who would rather go to war and die a slow and torturous death rather than allow the slightest indignity to be attached to their names or the most trivial challenge go unanswered. These were people who would go to war at the drop of a hat or the slightest disrespectful word. In spite of all that, when prophet Muhammad (pbuh) brought them the word of God in the noble Qur'an they suddenly fell silent and refused to face its challenge. God continued to reduce the challenge to them, from challenging them to produce a book like the Qur'an, to challenging them to produce a single surah (chapter) like it, to finally challenging them to produce even a few verses like it. And still, no one was able to face the challenge. On the contrary, those who were the best versed in these issues were among the first to convert to Islam and accept God's message. Some of them even went so far as to completely give up altogether on their previous literary work and to publicly declare that faced with the utter perfection and completion of this book that there was nothing left to say and nothing left to compose. Perfection had already been achieved (3).
Why did I get into all of this?. Well it is in order to make it easier to understand some of the reason why the noble words of God in the Qur'an can never be faithfully translated into English and why the first thing most converts to Islam do is to learn Arabic.
For example, as seen in chapter 14 of the
book "What Did Jesus Really
Say?," we find that many people when reading the Qur'an mistakenly understand
the plural references to God through the use of the words "We" and
"Us" to mean that God is "many" or "triune" etc. As seen in
that book, this has indeed been the very reason why some people of little knowledge of
ancient Hebrew even go so far as to claim that the OT Bible's use of such constructs
implies a similar "plurality" of God in a "Trinity." Our current
author himself at one time defended this belief. However, as seen in that book, this is
far from the true meaning. Informed Christian scholars and dictionaries readily recognize
the plurals used there as being plurals of respect reverence and exaltation, not plurals
of multiplicity. For example, one of the quotes presented in that book is quoted from the
Eerdmans Bible Dictionary where we read the following explanation of the word
"Elohiym" (God):
"As a name or designation of the God of Israel, the term is understood as a plural of majesty or an intensive plural, indicating the fullness of the supreme (or only) God ... the canonical intent is clearly monotheistic, even where the accompanying verbs or adjectives are grammatically plural (e.g. Gen. 20:13, Exod. 22:9 [Mt 8])"
Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, edited by Allen C. Myers, William B.
Eerdmans Publishers, p. 331
This is why to this day we find the Queen of England, French dignitaries, and most Arab leaders referring to themselves, or referred to by others in the plural sense. When the Queen of England refers to herself in her official speeches as "we" does this mean that she too is "a Trinity"? Sadly, even to this day we still can find people of little experience in these issues continuing to insist on their personal forced interpretations of these matters in spite of what they truly mean and in spite of what those who speak the language, or their own scholars, say they mean.
A similar case to the above is the one presented by our current author. The first three verses (Aal-Umran(3):42-45) do indeed use the word "angels." However, this plural form of the word is used to describe only one angel, specifically, angel Gabriel. Such constructs are used in the Arabic language as a symbol of dignity and respect for that person. This is a popular Arabic grammatical construct called "al-majaz al-mursal" which falls under the subheading of Arabic grammar titled "Balaghah" and which we can not get into here since it requires a basic knowledge of the Arabic language and its grammar. Suffice it to say that there are at least two quick clues to this matter which even non-Arabic speaking people can appreciate. The first one is that in the first set of verses, verses 46-48 say: "The angels said... Mary said... HE replied" meaning that we are speaking about an angel designated as "he" and not "they," in the same very verses themselves.
Secondly, a similar construct can be found elsewhere in the Qur'an which can hopefully clarify this construct to non-Arabic speakers. For example, in Al-Nahi(16):120 we read: "Verily Abraham was a nation obedient to Allah and he was not of the polytheists."
We notice here that prophet Abraham (pbuh) is described as a "nation." Does this mean that he is literally a few hundred thousand people? No. This is an Qur'anic term of exaltation and elevation for Abraham above all humans such that he is higher in regard and reward with God than an entire nation of mortals. In the same manner, the status of the angel Gabriel with God is of a similar stature among the angels. There are many other similar constructs in the Arabic language, many of which are applied to angel Gabriel in more than one location in the Qur'an to set him apart from all other angels. These examples include special grammatical constructs as well as special titles (such as the title of "Holy Spirit"