Abdullah of the UK on Textual Claims Part 5

The Comma Johanneum and the Greek Manuscript Tradition

Now, let's talk a little bit about the Kama Yohaniam. Since Abdullah brought it up and identified this as being an example of how the whole New Testament is dealt with, the Kama Yohaniam is a text that comes to us primarily from the Latin manuscripts, from the Latin textual tradition.

It is not a meaningful part of the Greek textual tradition. It is found in a very small number of extremely late manuscripts. And if we allow the Greek manuscript tradition to define what the Greek New Testament should be, then it would have no place.

I've often said that those who promote the Kama Yohaniam, and there are those who do so, if they were to be consistent in their textual critical methodology, they would be forced to adopt a radically different New Testament.

Because if an entire text, which could be taken as a very theologically rich text, could simply disappear from the entire witness for century after century after century after century, and exist only in a parallel translation, a translation to another language, then there are all sorts of texts you'd have to insert into the New Testament.

The result would be a wholesale revamping of the New Testament, which would make absolutely positively no sense whatsoever. And so it is not even a serious textual variant in the sense of serious textual variants where there is early witness for more than one reading in a particular text, those few texts where we have to do serious textual critical study in comparison to the massive number of pages of the New Testament where you simply do not have to do that.

So to make it representative of anything, because it's so unusual, demonstrates, again, a massive misrepresentation on the part of Abdullah. Now, the Textus Receptus has a number of texts in it that Erasmus inserted from the Latin Vulgate.

Erasmus, the Textus Receptus, and the Trinity

And again, the very fact that you recognize he had to insert it, are you not aware that he had already done two editions? This shows there is no single, quote unquote, Textus Receptus, because Erasmus' first and second editions did not have it.

It's inserted in the third. Then it's in the fourth and the fifth. So there's much more complexity to this issue than your comments and your conclusions would indicate or warrant. But to say he was forced to put it in, as if Christians need the Kamiohanium to define or defend the Trinity, again, for someone who has written on the Trinity and taught on the Trinity for years, Abdullah, you're just simply in error.

I have never had to use 1 John 5 -7 as the foundation for the doctrine of the Trinity in any way, shape, or form. The testimony is clear through so many texts of scripture that to say that 1 ,500 years after the time of Christ, people forced Erasmus to put it in there to save the Trinity or to teach the Trinity or something, no.

Erasmus was an irascible fellow, and he had enemies. And it was very common in that day that if you wanted to basically get someone in trouble, question their orthodoxy. And the easiest way to question their orthodoxy would be to question their orthodoxy and the doctrine of the Trinity.

And that's what certain people were doing to Erasmus. And so it really had nothing to do with the idea of Christians loving their doctrines and forcing somebody to rewrite the Bible or something to put it in there.

Again, to the person who actually has studied these issues and studied the background and the context doesn't follow and would indicate that your grasp of these particular things is not very good. And beyond that, it would be very much like someone pointing to the palimpsest manuscripts of the Quran that have Ibn Masud readings in them and demonstrating thereby that you have multiple streams in those earliest manuscripts and saying, ah, see, since there's that one variant here, then I'm going to make it the standards for everything else, so all the rest of the Quran is correct.

Textual Variants, the Quran, and Consistency

And how would you respond to that? Again, consistently. Because what you're about to say to Jay Smith is, face it, Jay, the Bible is corrupt. And as I said in my first video, if what you mean by corrupt is the Bible contains textual variants, then yes, the Bible is corrupt, and so is the Quran.

If you're going to be consistent. If you're going to throw your hands up in the air and say, I'm not going to be consistent, then the debate's over, because without consistency you can't define truth and you can't claim to hold the truth.

So you've got one or two choices. You either need to say, yes, the Quran is corrupt, because there are textual variants in the earliest manuscripts, or no, the Quran is not corrupt, but I'm still going to say the Bible's corrupt and demonstrate upon what basis you're going to make that assertion.

Or you just have to admit, OK, I admit that the term corruption there, as I was using it, was an inappropriate term. However you want to do it, but the facts are the facts. And so to use the Kami Ohanian in this way, when it is a text it is so clearly and easily dealt with given the rich New Testament textual tradition coming from all sorts of different parts of the Roman Empire, different time periods, so on and so forth, since we can deal with it so easily that way.

Honestly, I'm tempted at this point to comment on the supremacy, the superiority of the New Testament to the Quran at this point, because this is exactly where it can be illustrated. That is, if you accept the Uthmanic revision, if you accept the idea, and actually I do need to address this, because you go into the subject of burning gospels, and again it is in reference to Uthman's destruction of the materials used to collate the original Mus 'haf, the first Mus 'haf, that Zayd bin Thabit Abu Bakr, you put this material together and then you get rid of the preceding material that was used to create the one ecclesiastical text that is now protected by governmental authority.

There is no parallel to that. In a Galatian decree that comes 500 years after the time of Christ, the New Testament has already been circulating for hundreds of years.

At that point in time.

No parallel whatsoever. Very bad argumentation on a scholarly level at that point. But my point is this. You can only go back to the Uthmanic revision if Uthman was successful. And the question is, was he?

But if Uthman was successful in the destruction of those sources, then you can only go back to that point. That becomes your initial text, the earliest discoverable text through the means of textual criticism.

And since that then is controlled by, yes, the caliphate, but a political caliphate,.

Even at the time of Uthman.

Just look at the Sunni-Shia split. There's already a whole lot of politics involved here. It's still controlled by people who have, shall we say, vested interests in it containing particular theological concepts.

And so the question is always there. Is it possible that there are entire sections of the Quran that are post-Muhammadan and that were inserted into a controlled text so as to establish certain later theological developments?

That can't happen with the New Testament. You can't say, oh, we insert the deity of Christ later on. That is not possible because of the fact that when the New Testament comes into historical expression, it doesn't come in just one form controlled by one group.

It's coming from all sorts of different places. It's coming from multiple sources at multiple times, multiple geographical locations. There was no one organization to control it. The Christian church was a persecuted, illegal religion.

The Romans are trying to kill Christians. They could not control their text, collate their text or anything like that. Like Uthman could do. And so this is an issue that I want to develop much further in the future at some point.

But I would argue very strongly that the very thing that you like to point to as the evidence of the corruption of the New Testament is, in fact, the very means by which the superiority of the New Testament to the Quran can be demonstrated.