On Xia Ahmad's Allegations of "Corruption" Part 1

I'd like to once again address the issue of the Islamic assertion that the Bible is corrupted. We've seen in the responses I've provided to Abdullah from London that this is a common phrase that the Bible is corrupted and what is meant by this differs from person to person.

The more serious Islamic apologists will try to use the term a little bit more consistently but on the Muslim street and in YouTube, the Islamic argumentation is considerably less accurate. One gentleman who I believe is from Pakistan, clearly English is not his first language.

His videos are filled with typographical errors and things like that but hey, he's using English as a second language and at least he's trying so I hope the English speaking viewers will try to sort of overlook the bad grammar and misspelled words.

But he likes to post videos in response to mine and since his are a little bit more representative of the Muslim street, I wanted to respond to a recent one and again demonstrate that the average Muslim truly does not understand the issue of how documents were transmitted over history nor do they understand the relationship of the transmission of the New Testament text to that of the Koran and the fact that if they're going to utilize that term corruption of the New Testament then they have to use it of the Koran as well but they refuse to do so.

Textual Variants and the Transmission of the New Testament

Let's take a look at his first allegation of corruption. Now immediately what we see is that in fact our Islamic friend here believes that any textual variation means corruption and once again I simply point out since the Koran contained textual variations not only before Uthman but after as well, that means if he's consistent then the Koran is corrupted and his conclusion that you cannot trust the Bible would also follow for the Koran as well so we just simply have to have the same standards that we apply.

To both.

Now what you're seeing on the screen right now is a copy from Codex Sinaiticus from around the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and Codex Sinaiticus is one of those that in the original hand does not have the phrase the Son of God.

If you look very carefully right above the second line you will see Son of God written.

In.

Now it looks a little different to you. See those lines over the words? These are called Nomena Sacra. What would happen in the writing of the New Testament is that the sacred names would be abbreviated and so you have Jesus Christ there and then Son of God, all of these would be Nomena Sacra and it's quite possible that in the original copying of Sinaiticus that that was just skipped because you had two Nomena Sacra in a row.

That is one of the possibilities as to where this textual variant arose but obviously the vast majority including the earliest manuscripts contain the reading the Son of God and isn't it nice that we can look at these manuscripts and see these things?

In other words if we had had a Christian Uthman who had come up with a final version then burned all this stuff we wouldn't be able to check his work would we? We wouldn't be able to do so and that's the major difference between the Christian understanding of the New Testament and the way the New Testament has been transmitted to us and that.

Of the Quran.

Synoptic Variants Are Not Corruptions

We're going to see more examples of that as we look at the rest of these allegations. Now one of the reasons I wanted to do this video was because of this example of what a Muslim thinks is a corruption because it's different than what we had in the previous.

Example.

In other words this is not a textual variation where some manuscripts have one reading and some manuscripts have another. No this is what's called a synoptic variant or a place where the synoptic Gospels do not read identically to one another.

Now of course if they read identically to one another why would we need them? No one claims they're supposed to be identical and pointing out that they're not identical is not much of an argument except with people who don't have any idea why we have four Gospels anyways.

So here for example on the screen I have a segment from BibleWorks 7 .0 where you have a synoptic window where you can put each of the synoptic Gospels and John in parallel with one another. And so we hear the assertion well what's actually going on here is that this has been changed.

How does our Muslim friend know it's been changed? Does he really think that Matthew and Luke were just sitting there and slavishly following Mark? I know there's a lot of people who think that. There's a lot of reasons not to believe that at all.

Instead for whoever does the will of my father who is in heaven or whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother, is my father in heaven and God someone different? Where's the contradiction here?

You're using different words to express the same reality. That happens a lot in the synoptics. That's not a corruption. That's just evidence that they weren't slavishly copying one another. Isn't it ironic that when they use the same terminology identically people would say well they were copying one another and it's a corruption anyway.

So you can't win for trying but this is not a quote unquote corruption. It's just simply a normal aspect of the synoptic texts. Now in this instance our friend I believe from Pakistan would do well to pick up my book called The King James Only Controversy because on page 66, 14 years ago I wrote Acts chapters 8 and 9 are also rather expanded in the TR, Textus Receptus, due to material brought over from the Latin Vulgate.

If one looks up Acts 8 .37, when Philip said if thou believest with all thine heart thou mayest and he answered and said I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, King James Version, for example in the NIV one will not find such a verse outside the textual footnote that is.

The reason is the verse is found in only a very few Greek manuscripts, none earlier than the 6th century and Erasmus inserted due to its presence in the Vulgate in the margin of one Greek manuscript in his possession.

We again note this passage is surely very orthodox and in fact is often laden with emotional attachments as well making it very easy to preach against its quote deletion end quote by modern text. But of course we must overcome our emotionalism to again ask the central question what did Luke write at this point?

While the insertion surely speaks the truth, so would inserting the Westminster Confession of Faith between Titus chapters 2 and 3, but no one is going to suggest doing that. We cannot improve upon what God has revealed end quote.

So if our Islamic friend thinks he's presenting to us things that we're not completely aware of and have taken the time to look into the history of where for example the words of Acts 8 .37 came from, from the Latin Vulgate, then our Muslim friend just is not really up to speed on the real issues in regards to textual criticism.

It's not a matter of it being an oops, it's a matter of once again textual scholars recognizing the origins of these things and again if someone had just burned all the materials before making a final copy, how would we know that they had not done the very same thing that Erasmus.

Did?

That again proves the importance of having this material. It certainly gives to people like this objector material to throw at us, but is it really a serious objection? I would submit to you that it's not.

Unfortunately I don't have enough time in 10 minutes and 59 seconds to get to the entirety of this particular video, so I'm going to have to split this up and do a shorter video after this. I apologize, but that's the time limitations of YouTube and I want to look at the last one because it does help us to illustrate something concerning the different sources that are available to us for the textual study of the Bible in comparison to that of the.

Quran.

So we'll continue this, finish it up in the next video.