October 11, 2005

Asking around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is

The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

James White. Good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line on this

Tuesday morning. Looks like a number of folks are having connection problems. Looks like everyone is having connection problems, but we hope to return.

It worked fine for 30 minutes, you know, and that's electronic equipment.

That's how it works. I used to run a sound at a big, huge Southern Baptist Church and you could check the sound, you could check the sound, and you could check the sound, and it would always work up until the time the deacons walked in and the service started.

And then something would happen. That's just, that's just electronic equipment. That's all there is.

So anyways, we press on because obviously we record all of this, make it available on archive.

And for that matter, today we are going to begin a series where we're going to be reviewing, listening to and reviewing a debate that took place in 2000 between Sam Shamoon, Sam's a good friend of the ministry.

He was on one of our cruises, the one after the Stafford debate was very helpful, an expert on Islam.

He truly is. He knows his stuff. He's one of the main folks who contributes to answeringislam .org.

And he debated Shabbir Ali. Now Shabbir is an up -and -comer.

He is one of the most prolific of the Islamic apologists today. I have been downloading for quite some time now, various of his debates, online resources.

And I must admit, listening to those debates made me very upset simply because the people that he would debate would not come after him.

They simply would not debate him the way that his statements demanded he be debated.

He makes very strong statements, even if he makes them in a somewhat gentle manner.

The statements that he makes are exceptionally strong and exceptionally subject to refutation by someone who basically has the guts to stand up and say, no, that's wrong and here's why.

And one thing I certainly learned from listening to those, theological liberals have no reason to debate and really shouldn't be debating anyways.

And so it's been frustrating to listen to these debates knowing that very strong answers could be provided.

Shabbir Ali, as we will hear, relies very heavily upon liberal Christian theologians.

His favorite person to quote is Raymond Brown. But at many other times, he is quoting from the

Jesus Seminar and John Dominic Crossan and so on and so forth. And so having debated

John Dominic Crossan and those things, it was actually somewhat difficult for me to listen to some of these debates.

And then I listened as our good friend Sam Shamoon debated and it was being done the way that it needs to be done and I was exceptionally happy about that.

So we are going to share with you the debate. Now the first section is

Sam's presentation, the first 20 minutes or so. So I'm not going to be interrupting that. I'm going to let that go in its full course.

And then once Ali begins, Shabbir Ali begins, then I will be doing with his presentation what we do when we review anything on the dividing line.

We review sermons and we review Catholic answers materials and Mormon materials, whatever it might be, we start and stop.

When someone makes a statement, then we stop, we comment on it and move on. And of course, obviously, in a context of a debate, many of these things,

I'm sure Sam would have liked to have responded to at that point in time. But as he understands having engaged in this debate, when the other guy had 20 minutes and you have 10 minutes, it takes more time to respond to an error than it does to enunciate an error, and hence when you have half that amount of time, you have to pick and choose.

You have to look at what has been said and you have to look at your audience and you have to look at what you're trying to accomplish and go, all right, these are the most important things were said.

And you know in the back of your mind someone's going to say, well, you didn't respond to this and you didn't respond to that, well, you can't. Especially when someone starts using a scattergun approach, you simply cannot respond to everything there is to respond to.

It is simply not a possibility. And so at least in this format,

I will have the opportunity to respond to each of the things that Shabir Ali says, and then of course we'll be listening to Sam as well and it's encouraging to listen to Sam's response.

And it sounds like it would have been a fascinating thing to observe because it sounds like the audience is really up close and personal.

And so it must have been quite the interesting experience to be able to have been there and to have experienced that, so I wish there had been maybe a video recording.

Maybe there is, I haven't even asked. Maybe there is a video recording, I don't know. But be that as it may, let's go ahead and begin listening to this opening statement.

Now, you might want to be taking some notes. Sam throws a lot of stuff out here. He takes an interesting approach here.

This is on the subject of the Bible and the Koran. And he's basically, and this is an important point to raise, this is an issue that I've run into with some

Islamic apologists as well, and that is their constant assertion that the Bible has been corrupted, the

Bible has been changed. And Sam has some real challenges and I think you really need to listen carefully here because the fact that once you get into the cross -examination period and the rebuttal periods,

I don't hear any meaningful response to most of what Sam said in this portion by Shabir Ali.

He really, in my opinion, utilizes the let's throw out a bunch of other stuff that is going to help my followers to get excited and hopefully not recognize that I'm not responding to what this man said.

He seemed to have been really taken aback by that. So, let's start off here and listen as Sam Shamoon opens the debate.

And there we go. And so you have the opening presentation from Sam Shamoon on the subject of the

Bible and the Koran, and like I said, it certainly sounds to me like the audience is,

I don't think there is a whole lot of room between the front row and the debaters there, at least that's how it sounds.

There was a microphone in the audience or something like that. So now, Shabir Ali takes up the challenge and we will be stopping and starting as statements are made, responding to things, obviously.

At the beginning, probably not stopping as often as we will later on, of course, but here is

Shabir Ali. Now, we're going to have to keep the microphone up.

Let's stop right there. Sometimes a little bit difficult to hear.

There's a lot of house sound. The recording quality isn't very good, of course. What is being discussed here is a changing of the

Torah and the Gospel. And as Shabir Ali has already said, you need to understand what those terms are referring to.

If we are talking about a Gospel, are we talking about Mark? Are we talking about Matthew?

Later he's going to bring up the textual variant, for example, in Mark chapter 16. Are we talking about the

Gospel message itself? There's a difference between those types of terms. And so, there's going to be some confusion,

I think, and there's certainly a lack of clarity on Shabir Ali's part as to what he's addressing and certainly a lack of clarity in his understanding of textual critical issues and the uses of such terms as corruption, change, etc.,

etc. And so, what was just said was Christians know that the

Gospel and the Torah have been changed. If what he means by that is that there is textual variation in handwritten manuscripts, that's a given.

It's also a given in regards to the pre -Othmanian Quranic manuscripts themselves. So, that's not even an issue.

But what most people hear, of course, is when you're talking about changing

Gospels, the term change normally carries with it the idea of a purposeful change.

That's not differentiating between purposeful emendations made, for example, by Uthman and scribal errors,

Homo Etelyatan, for example, similar endings. If you've seen the series we've been doing in response to Saifullin Azmi's commentary, quoting from Bentley on the

Sinaiticus, we've talked about what Homo Etelyatan is and various and sundry scribal errors that can be made that are not at all purposeful.

Those things have to be differentiated if, in any way, shape, or form, you're going to have a meaningful discussion about the textual accuracy and transmission of any text that is transmitted.

And do you all notice something? I don't know about you, but as I was listening to the discussion of, well, the

Koran says things favorably about the Torah and things like that, but that doesn't necessarily mean this. I could not help but think of another group that has their own book of scripture that speaks very much in the same way.

That's the Mormons. That may not have struck you, but it struck me when you listen, especially to Mormon apologists today, as they speak about the text of the scriptures and what

Mormonism has said over the history of its existence. In regards to the

Book of Mormon, the Bible, the superiority of the Book of Mormon, its transmission, its prophetic nature, etc.,

etc., etc. So it was interesting to me to catch that. So we continue now with Shabir Ali. If, for example, you're reading the

New International Version of the Bible, you will notice in the footnoting of the Bible that it always points out, or often points out, that there's a change here or there.

So you will find... Now, what he said there is, if you're looking at the

NIV, it has textual footnotes. Well, okay, that means there's textual variation. So what?

If we had the pre -Uthmanian collections of the Quran, we would have the same thing.

We would have the exact same phenomena taking place there. And one of the things that...

One of the greatest weaknesses in Shabir Ali's apologetic attack upon the Christian faith...

And it is an attack upon the Christian faith. Let's try to be honest here.

Shabir Ali attacks the Christian faith. He may be nice about it. He may smile while he's doing it.

That doesn't change the fact. It is an attack upon the Christian faith, an attack upon the Christian scriptures. And to be fair, you're going to have to use the same standards that you use for your own scriptures to apply them to the

Bible. And the fact of the matter is, the Muslim struggles at that point because of what's called the

Uthmanian revision, the gathering up of the written manuscripts that had come into existence at that early period of time by Uthman, the revision that takes place, the destruction of those others.

We know that there are some he missed, which is an important issue. The Sa 'ana Quranic manuscripts, for example, which do demonstrate variations.

And from the Christian perspective, what you do is you want all that information. As you do more and more study, more and more of that information only verifies and clarifies for you the text of the

New Testament itself. That's not how Muslims approach the subject of the

Quran. That's not how they view the subject of the textual examination of the Quran. And in fact, if you were to go over to most

Islamic nations today and say, I'm looking for pre -Uthmanian manuscripts of the Quran because I want to do a study of the changes in the text of the

Quran, there are many places you would not get out of alive. That is a major difference in the viewpoint between Christianity and Islam in regards to the historical transmission of our scriptures.

Remember, the Quran is much younger by more than a factor of one quarter, much younger than the

New Testament text, let alone the text of the Old Testament. So there is a major difference at that particular point in time.

So looking at NIV footnotes and saying, well, there's a textual variant here, and saying, oh, well, see, the

Bible has been changed. Not quite saying the same things. That's not an overly impressive approach already.

Original, I see some very leery eyes here. Let's look, for example, at Mark chapter 16.

And so where do we immediately go? You go to the largest textual variation in the entire

New Testament, the longer, medium, and shorter endings of Mark chapter 16. An issue that we've addressed many times.

The King James only controversy has an entire section on the subject of this. So all we're doing right now is not proving anything relevant at all.

What I mean by that is that Sam has already pointed out what the Quran's testimony is here.

This certainly isn't relevant to the Torah in any way, shape, or form. But he's already pointed out what the

Quran says. And so now all we're proving is what everybody knows, and that is there's textual variation.

And that we have this massive manuscript tradition that allows us to examine the textual variants as they exist.

And to understand what is behind those textual variations.

Which again, the Muslim does not have for his own book, which is even younger. We're proving something that isn't even at the point here.

Unless you can then go beyond that to prove, well, and the purposes here. And remember,

Shabir Ali is going to be using very much a perspective that embraces redaction criticism in regards to the

New Testament. He, I don't believe, would do that in regards to the Quran in any way, shape, or form. Again, one of those inconsistencies in the utilization of sources and not using the same standards.

But he's going to do that, and he's going to try to tie these together. Textual variation and redaction criticism are two very different things.

There are some people, even amongst Christians, who try to tie them together. But in reality, at least with the one, you have manuscripts you can deal with.

You have factual data that you can examine over against the redaction theory.

Where you say, well, you've got Mark, and he's being used by Matthew and Luke. And so if there's differences here, then there's changes here.

And when you try to put all that together, which Ali does, you create tremendous confusion. Which is simply, in any way, shape, or form, dishonest to the facts themselves.

And does not actually promote to truth in any way, shape, or form. Look for verses 9 to 12.

You'll see that that whole section that Mark talks about is a later addition into the widely -spoken original part of Mark's Gospel.

Now what happens to the original text? Now notice the sources here.

Interpreter is one volume commentary. If you've not heard of it, it is well to the left of center.

He's going to be quoting from people like Raymond Brown. I haven't heard him, at least in this debate, specifically citing someone like a

John Dominick Crossan. But the terminology he uses is identical at times. And so I'm sure he's very, very familiar with everything.

So here you see, folks, the self -destructive nature of theological liberalism.

And the fact that this has become so much of a prevalent perspective in so many theological seminaries today.

That's why I've said many, many times, I view it as a part of the very judgment of God upon a nation.

And upon a church that has been discontent with Christ's truth. Here you see it being used by those that we would be clearly recognizing as the enemies of the faith.

By a completely different religion. We're not even talking about cults here in the sense of Mormonism trying to carve out its niche.

Here we have Islam itself. And we have the utilization of this material.

And that's one of the problems with some of the people that Shabir Ali has debated.

They're already compromised in that they have accepted the conclusions of the quote -unquote academy.

They're no longer defending things like the doctrine of inerrancy. They've bought into what the academy has to say.

And quite honestly, the academy cannot provide a meaningful apologetic for anything but the least common denominator viewpoint of Christianity.

Which isn't what Islam is concerned about. Islam doesn't have to worry about liberal

Christianity. Because liberal Christianity can't do anything about Islam. It can't do anything about Islamic expansion. And it doesn't have a message that's going to change the heart of a

Muslim. When they don't have the gospel anymore, it doesn't matter. And so that's why these issues are important.

They are all connected together. Sometimes you might look at the blog, you might see what Alpha Omega Ministries does. And you see it's talking about Mormonism over here and the

Jehovah's Witnesses over here. And textual criticism over here and the Jesus Seminar over there. And it looks very scattered. But in reality, what ties all that together is a general biblical apologetic to the

Christian faith. And as I've said many times before, I mean this direct connection here, for example, to the

Da Vinci Code coming out. Very direct connection itself. Very same kind of argumentation.

Not nearly as erudite. But very same kind of argumentation that is being utilized.

And we're going to have to respond to that. Christians no longer have the option to be ignorant of issues like textual criticism.

I'm sorry, you can't do it anymore. When U .S. News and World Report is putting on its front cover the conclusions of people like the

Jesus Seminar, you cannot any longer basically stick your head in the sand and ignore these things.

You have to do the work. You have to take the time to learn these things and be ready to give an answer.

So that's where we are. ...offers a few suggestions. Among them is the suggestion that what was there was not palatable to the early

Christians, and somebody deliberately tore it up. And then in his plea, other writers wrote some a short ending, some a long ending, and some copied both endings into the one volume.

So what he's suggesting is the interpreter's one -volume commentary suggests that, without evidence, by the way, that what was in the final ending of Mark, which has been completely lost, that's why it's so easy to speculate about such things because you can't come up with such things, was somehow offensive to somebody in the early church, and so it would have to have been in the very first generation, the very first period of time where the existence of Mark's Gospel, right as it was first written.

Which obviously casts a tremendous amount of doubt upon such a wild -eyed suggestion that someone who would have access to, in essence, the original manuscript of Mark would find

Mark's conclusion to be offensive to the Christian faith. It's really easy to sit back and say, well, there was someone in the early church.

Could we have some names, please? Could we have some evidence of the existence of this unknown ending that has simply disappeared?

But it's real easy when what you want to do is to inculcate doubt and to increase people's doubt to throw stuff like this out without even wanting to provide a...

I mean, what if Sam Shmoomer were to get back up and say, well, you know what? I found a book written by a liberal

Muslim that theorizes without evidence that there was stuff in the

Quran prior to Uthman that was offensive. Now, actually, you don't have to theorize about some of that, but let's just say in Surah 5 there were verses here that said such and so.

Would it be fair, from Shabir Ali's point, for Sam to throw something like that out? Or for me to throw something like that out?

No. Why? Because I can't prove it. First of all, he would undoubtedly not appreciate the utilization of liberal

Muslims who would not actually believe in the inspiration authority of the Quran, though he will use liberal

Christians who do not believe in the inspiration authority of the Bible all the time. And secondly, to throw something like that out there that is a mere myth, a speculation, without the ability to substantiate it,

I'm sure he would take tremendous... he would object to that, and rightfully so, and yet here he is doing it himself in reverse.

If you find that part out, don't be surprised if we claim that the Bible has changed over time.

Now, if you're wondering, in Jill, the Quranic term for the Gospel, and he's discussing there, are we talking about the

Gospels as a whole, the Message Gospel, so on and so forth, you'll hear that term in Jill used a number of times.

Just put that in your palm pilot and remember that one. Now, you need to hear that because that's an important assertion that is being made right there.

That the meaning of the term under discussion, which Sam himself mentioned, he's saying that it is one that in reality corrects the previous scriptures.

That it provides for a means of understanding what these previous scriptures should have said, and what he's going to try to say, in essence, is that that kind of material provides a means for correction.

He's going to go through a number of different... I forget how much time he spends here, we'll see, and we're actually running out of time on our program today, but he's going to spend a lot of time going through various issues where the

Quran has a different element of the biblical story than the Bible does, and of course he says the

Quran is right here, even when it's very, very clear. Remember, the Quran comes 600 years after the time of Christ, at least 550, 540 from the writing of the various books of the

New Testament, and so you're talking half a millennium, and it is painfully clear to anyone who is willing to look at it that Muhammad was very ignorant of many of the things that are found in scripture.

Even the Christians that he encountered, very obvious. Even Islamic writers talk about the fact that many of those they talked to were themselves not considered orthodox in their perspectives and their viewpoints, and so this view of the

Quran, very important to understand exactly what is being asserted here, is being a corrector, in essence.

Not one that substantiates those previous scriptures, but one that, in essence, corrects, adds to, amends them, is going to be the way that he ends up presenting it.

A couple things.

Let me read Surah 548 so you know what that text was, if you don't happen to have a

Quran handy. Interestingly enough, since I am sort of tied to a microphone here, the only

Quran I had handy to me is on my Palm Pilot, which probably would have been one I would have grabbed anyways, even though I probably could have gotten there a little bit faster if I had used the printed one back on the shelf.

Anyways, Surah 548. To you we sent the scripture in truth, confirming the scripture that came before it, and guarding it in safety.

It doesn't seem to me that the natural meaning of those words is correcting the alleged corruptions and things like that.

So, judge between them by what Allah has revealed, and do not follow their vain desires diverging from the truth that has come to you.

I don't see anything there about, and then correct all the untruths that have come to you in the form of the text of the

Bible. I don't see that as being a proper reading of that particular text whatsoever.

So, then we have the assertion that was just made. Let me let him fill that out just a little bit here.

Okay, now we have two examples.

This will give us enough to at least make a little bit of a comment here in the last few minutes of the program. How does the

Quran function to correct and to safeguard in the sense of correcting misapprehensions in scripture?

The first one that he mentioned was that God was refreshed, and what he takes that, he assumes a certain meaning for that.

And this is what happens with Muslim apologists all the time. They assume a certain meaning. It is almost always not the meaning that is common amongst conservative

Christians as they read the same text or historical reading of the text. They assume a certain meaning.

That is, they assume that what that means is the Bible is saying that God was exhausted, he was tired, and he needed rest.

It's sort of like when you encounter the Hebrew term nakham, when it repented

God that he had made man nakham, that inward sighing. Well, of course, the

Bible says God doesn't repent, so therefore there's contradiction, etc., etc. So instead of allowing those texts to speak for themselves, you assume a meaning that, well, that just doesn't fit our view of God, or it couldn't mean this or the other thing, and therefore when the

Quran comes along and gives maybe a briefer version, doesn't use that term, that's how the Quran is correcting it.

Here, for example, when it speaks of the Son of God. Obviously for the Muslim, any type of association of any divine being with God is the sin of shirk.

And they view the idea that Jesus is the Son of God as a great error, and Ali's position is going to be, repeatedly, that the utilization of the term

Son of God of the Lord Jesus Christ is a later addition, it was not a part of the original teaching, and that the

Quran then corrects this, see, and allows us to understand what the original intention of the

Christian scriptures were to be. And to come up with that kind of perspective, of course, he has to adopt the

Jesus Seminar style view of the Christian scriptures, which I see no evidence, I'm sorry,

I see no evidence whatsoever, that that is how, certainly, I mean, think about it for a second.

Was there anybody in Muhammad's day who thought like the Jesus Seminar does? Clearly that was not his view of the origination of the

Christian scriptures, that was not the view of the original Muslims in regards to the origination of the Christian scriptures.

I don't think you're in any way misrepresenting the Quran to say, I don't see any evidence that it sees the scriptures the way the

Jesus Seminar did. And so if you're having to borrow that kind of modernistic, naturalistic, materialistic worldview to defend your scriptures, you're not going to apply that stuff to your scriptures.

No, no, no, no, no. We're not going to allow the Jesus Seminar type viewpoint to be applied to the

Quran. But we're going to apply that to the Bible so as to validate the Quran. That's complete, that demonstrates some real issues, some real problems there.

So, it is a statement of disbelief, and this is, as far as this is concerned, this clearly is the

Quran's teaching, that it is a statement of disbelief to speak of, actually the word is threeness, it is the

Quran's way of referring to the Trinity, even though at that point whether Muhammad even understood the Trinity is somewhat debatable, and it seems that he did not.

It seems he viewed the Trinity as Allah, Jesus, and Mary in the Quran anyways.

And when it refers to the Son of God, that this is a statement of disbelievers, and the fact that that is part of the earliest tradition, that is

New Testament -wide, you cannot remove, huyastu'theyu, from anything in the scripture, the

Son of God from anything in Mark or Matthew or whatever, and still have the same message, still have the same gospel, still have the same writings.

You just can't do it. It's not possible to cut it up in that fashion. But his assertion is going to be this concept of Son of God is most definitely not a part of the original revelation from God, and therefore what the assertion is being made, sort of in a backhanded fashion, is that, well, that was not a part of what was originally written, that had to have been changed over time, etc.

So the Quran is making itself clean. Not only is it confirming the previous scriptures, but it's also correcting it, supervising it.

So there's a clear assertion that what that passage is actually saying is not those scriptures.

Now, of course, as Sam had said, if that's what that means, if that's what the

Quran is saying there, how is it that Allah then says, judge on the basis of these things?

If they've already been corrupted. And remember, this is being spoken 600 years after the time of Christ.

So if what they had then had already been corrupted, and certainly we do know what the

Bible looked like in 630, we have plenty of manuscript evidence to be able to determine that, and the

Bible in the days of Muhammad clearly taught that Jesus was the Son of God. There's no question about any of that.

And so how are you supposed to judge, and judge rightly, on the basis of a corrupted text?

This was a challenge that Sam makes to Shabir Ali, and I don't believe Shabir Ali ever gives a meaningful response to the challenge that has been made to him.

So you have a contradiction between the Quran and the Bible. The earliest scriptures clearly say that at the end of his life,

Solomon engaged in idol worship, that his heart was drawn aside by his many wives, and by the possession of many things, he disbelieved.

In that sense. And since the Quran says, well he didn't become a disbeliever, well that then, you take the later scriptures, written hundreds of years later, and correct that which had been written literally a thousand years, almost, well, what, about 1 ,300 years, prior to the time of the

Quran, and allegedly correct it on the basis of that. Well, just getting started, it's going to take quite some time to work through this, but I think it is well worth everyone's effort.

It does take a little effort to listen to the debate. It takes a little effort to bring in some of the terms in the

Quran, and some of the Islamic concepts there. But you can see that what we're talking about here is directly relevant to a wide area of apologetics.

So we will continue on Thursday on The Dividing Line. Thanks. Be listening then. God bless. Brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602, or write us at P .O.

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