Mohamed,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I refer others to read Mohamed comments which he posted in Dr. Daughrity's article.
There were many things mentioned. If I may summarize the essense of your comments into two issues: 1) Tahrif of Judeo-Christian scriptures. 2) Nature of Christ--that Christians have committed 'shirk.'
Broadly Muslim theologians have responded in two ways. A) A corruption of the meaning of the text without tampering with the text itself. (Nazir-Ali, Michael. Frontiers in Muslim-Christian Encounter. Oxford:Regnum Books, 1987). Most Muslims hold this view. B) The biblical Torah was apparently not similar with the pure tawart (law of Moses)given as a revelation to Moses. There are differences of opinion as to the extent of corruption in the scriptures. ( Waardenburg,"World Religions as Seen in the light of Islam"). In addition, forgery and change of textual divine revelation, doctrinal mistakes like trinity of Godhead, incarnation of Christ.
Not only are Christians and Jews (kafar) unbelievers but worst (shirk). No not Shreik the Movie :> Kidding. Shirk are Christians committing the unforgivable sin of believing that Christ is Divine. Quran 5:75 " They do blaspheme who say God is Christ the son of Mary.. Whoever Joins other gods with God -- God will forbid him The Garden, and the Fire Will be his abode."
How valid are the Muslim theologians accusations?
First, I believe we need to understand who the accuser and their sources and the accused and their sources.
Quran-- not written down until at least 600 years after Christ's death, hundreds of miles from where he lived.
Christ sources can be dated back nearly 20 years after the crucifixion of Christ. The first century historians Thallus and Phlegon (52AD). They not only confirm the Gospel by debating the cause of darkness in the middle of the day and the terrible earthquake which occurred at Christ's crucifixion. How about Lucian from early second century who mention Christ as a man who was crucified because he introduced a new cult. Or Tacitus certainly nonchristian who confirm basic life and death of Christ. We have literally solid historical evidences both non-Christian Jews, Roman historians, and Christians. We have complete manuscripts of NT fromthird century after Christ including Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus (4th and 5th c. AD). In addition there are 86,000 quotes from NT from Church Fathers. 36,000 of which date from BEFORE Council of Nicea in 325 DA, which when placed chronologically, reproduce the entire NT except for 11 verses. Show me from any religion or secular literature that have this kind of documentary evidence !!! The reason I took time to show this will be apparent later.
The big Q is . Is the scripture Tahrif or corrupted? One need then to ask:
1) When is it corrupted in relation to the Qur'an? Is it AFTER or BEFORE
It cannot be AFTER the Qur'an because as shown above we have numerous manuscripts pre-dating Qur'an
It cannot be BEFORE the Qur'an otherwise the Qur'an would have certainly mentioned it. Please note, the Qur'an does not say that the Bible has been changed at any point. On the contrary the Qur'an encourages its readers when they have questions to compare its own teaching with the BIBLE!! (suras 10:64,94 21:7) This actually is odd when there are many contradictions between Bible and Qur'an concerning the person of Christ. However, when one understand that the Bible was not translated into Arabic until after the Qur'an was written ( late 8th centruy so the writers of Wur'an were not privy to the content of the Gospel account so could not have known there were contradictions between the two. This would explain why Qur'sn referss a number of times to the Bible for guidance. (sura5:43,46; 6:34). It is important also to understand that early Muslim scholars Al-Razi agree that Bible could not be changed since it was God's Word and Qur'an states God does not change his word. (Suras 6:34) Fact of the matter is centuries passed before Muslims formally claimed that it has been changed.
Ibn Hasm 1056 AD is regarded as the first Muslim scholar documented to have tampered with this topic. So yes, Quran affirms the New Testament as the depository of what we know about our Lord and Saviour.
Stay tune for SHIRK
Blessings
Eric
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
Post a Comment