Did the Earliest Followers of Jesus Believe in His Deity?

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The following presentation is a production of Alpha and Omega Ministries, Inc. and is protected by copyright laws of the

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is prohibited. Then we can get to the debate.

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Again, my apologies for giving you guys unnecessary exercise from the auditorium to the

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IT building, but let's just blame it on the university. Then I'm not to blame.

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Guys, a debate such as tonight, just allow me one or two preliminary remarks until we get this sorted out and get the banners up, etc.

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A debate like this, a lot of people would say polarizes the two groups. Polarizes, just makes a division between Christians and Muslims.

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That's much bigger. And I must say, that sort of criticism can be fair at times. I've been to debates, and if you come to the debate with an expectation to pick a fight, then you're definitely at the wrong venue.

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In fact, if you want to pick a fight, the are you the toy is still available for you. A lot of detractors would say that this is not helpful, especially in a complex society such as South Africa, where racial division and religious division has been here for centuries.

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Now, can I just ask the Muslims quickly, how many of you are annoyed when you encounter a

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Christian, a very ignorant Christian, I might add, who is so excited to speak to you and tell you that you are an idiot for believing in Islam because you guys are responsible for terrorism and Al -Shabaab and Jihad?

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Who are annoyed with that sort of criticism? Okay, there's two that's annoyed with that sort of criticism.

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If I was a Muslim, I would have been annoyed with that because that's a very ignorant way of thinking.

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And you are not even willing to wait for an answer from the other perspective. In the same way, a

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Christian, I'm not going to embarrass myself by asking you guys to raise your hands again, but in the same way,

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Christians will be very annoyed if a Muslim is very much ready with his arguments that saying the

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Trinity is silly because God seems to be schizophrenic and he himself is Jesus but he is not, he sends his son, so he's actually committing suicide.

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In the same way that we try to ridicule one another, we are not taking this conversation forward because we're not even willing to wait for an answer.

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We're like a big man walking around with a hammer and with a man walking around with a hammer, everything looks like nails and he just wants to bash in nails.

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So please, come to this debate willing to learn something, willing to be challenged, and then this debate will be very, very meaningful.

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I also want to say that it is okay in a place like South Africa where tolerance is the big word and we don't want to offend everybody and we must just hold hands and sing

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Kumbaya and not disagree about big things. I can tell you that these guys are two examples of people who can disagree with one another but in a civil manner and the basis for that disagreement or the basis for it happening in a civil manner is not relativism, it's not the lack of truth, but it's mutual respect and love and I think we can learn something from that sort of discussion methodology.

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I also want to thank the Muslims for last night. I'm just going to put on my Christian hat for a moment and just thank the hospitality that we had there last night.

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The debate did start at an ungodly hour, which is ironic because it's a religious debate, but I can tell you that as a

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Christian I felt very welcomed there and I want to thank you guys so much and the snacks outside was amazing.

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In fact, the cheesecake I had alongside Hashim Amla is probably the best argument for Islam in my opinion.

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So again, I just want to say thank you so much for the hospitality and inviting us into the mosque and it was a historic occasion.

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So you can give yourself a hand for what it's worth. Thank you so much for that. All right, just quickly

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I want to thank the sponsors for tonight, Campus Crusade for Christ. They helped us. All these cables over here are their responsibility and if you trip, you can sue them.

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IPCI, they were here a couple of minutes ago, but IPCI, the

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Islamic Propaganda Center for Islam, Mohammed Khan, Yusuf, you guys, thank you so much for all your trouble. And then of course

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Antwerp, which should not be confused with the band. So that's very important.

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Okay, guys, again, I'm just quickly going to introduce these speakers to you. And you know a speaker has arrived on the

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World Platform. If he has a Wikipedia page, that is my, I think I can die if I realize

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I've got a Wikipedia page, if you want to do something like that. Now I'm going to read Shabir Ali when

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I got from Wikipedia. I'm going to read his very, very short CV. If I had to read his whole

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CV, it's longer than the Old Testament. So I'm just quickly going to give you a brief idea.

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Shabir holds a BA in Religious Studies from, now these are Canadian names, and luckily you're

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South Africans, you're not going to judge me for my accent, Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, it's in Canada, with a specialization in Biblical Literature.

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He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Toronto with a specialization in Quranic Exegesis.

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He is the President of the Islamic Information and Dawa Center International in Toronto where he functions as Imam.

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He travels internationally to South Africa to represent Islam in public lectures and interfaith dialogues.

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He explains Islam on a weekly television program called Let the Quran Speak. And again, if I can just put my neutral hat on again, by the way

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I'm the moderator, I don't think there's an intelligent voice out there in Islam, no offense to anybody who thinks he's an intelligent

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Muslim, but I don't think they'll give him a warm South African round of applause. In fact

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I've spoken to numerous Christian apologists who have debated him in college, an

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MA from Fuller Theological Seminary, and then a bunch of things that, I don't know what it means but it sounds very academic, a

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THM, a THD, and a Dmin from Columbia Evangelical Seminary.

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He served as Professor of Greek, Hebrew, Systematic Theology, and various, John Salbespong, all guys that you won't find in the church any time soon.

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And probably he's, and this is your seventh debate, am I right? Yeah, this is their seventh debate.

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All right. All right guys, Nadim, just very quickly. Well I'm going to try to give my opening statement.

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If the microphone will allow me to do so and not to provide a rhythm section during the entirety of my presentation.

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I'm not sure what that is, but hopefully it will go away, or maybe it won't.

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Maybe we'll just learn to ignore it. Our topic this evening is a very, very important topic.

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It's going to require you to focus in upon what both sides are saying. We are asking the question, did the earliest followers of Jesus view him as God?

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The question is not, did the earliest followers of Jesus view him as a prophet? Because they did. Did they view him as a man?

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Because they did. Did they view him as King of Israel? Because they did. Did they view him as Messiah?

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Because they did. The issue is, when we look at the earliest material, the earliest material that can give us any meaningful and documented understanding of what the earliest

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Christians believed, is there evidence there that they believed in the deity of Christ? We are not debating wild, esoteric, scholarly theories tonight where there is no evidence.

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What I'm going to give you is documentary evidence. I'm not going to be talking about Jimmy Dunn and his theories and all these people that have to get published and so they have to try to read between the lines and can't allow the text to speak for itself.

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I'm going to go straight to you and show you the evidence, and then you can answer the question for yourself.

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Did the earliest followers of Jesus view him as God? To view

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Jesus as God would be to attribute to him words, actions, names, offices, and functions that would be blasphemous if the person of Jesus was not truly divine.

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Normally, especially if you're a Christian and you've grown up reading the New Testament, you skip over so many of the evidences of the deity of Christ because you're so accustomed to hearing it.

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You're just so accustomed to hearing Jesus speak in a certain way. I'm going to be challenging you to think a little bit more closely as to the original context of the words of Jesus this evening.

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The earliest disciples, of course, are represented by the earliest sources. What are the earliest sources that I'm going to be looking at?

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I will present my case this evening from the following sources. First of all, from James 2, verse 1, and the phraseology that James uses there of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.

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Then we're going to look at the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2, 5 -11. We're going to look at 1 Corinthians 8, verse 6.

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We're going to look at the Gospel of Mark in toto, which means it's going to be a really fast run through of the Gospel of Mark since I only have now about 23 and a half minutes or 22 and a half minutes.

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It goes by very, very quickly unless you're waiting to get your turn to speak. Then it goes by very slowly.

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Anyways, let's look at James 2, verse 1, which says, My brothers, do not hold the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ in a spirit of favoritism.

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Tradition tells us, and it seems that James is the half -brother of Jesus obviously because of the virgin birth.

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What would it take to force a person who had grown up with someone, someone who was, in fact, obviously, according to the biblical testimony, an unbeliever, at least in John chapter 7, he'd be an unbeliever in Jesus' ministry.

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What would it take to cause a person to refer to Jesus by the phrase, to kurio teis doxas, the glorious Lord?

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In fact, when you think about that phrase, think about that phrase also as it appears in 1 Corinthians 2, 8, which says,

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None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

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Ton kurion teis doxas, the Lord of glory. Compare that with Isaiah's temple vision, Isaiah 6, 1, where he saw the glory of the

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Lord, and that Lord was Yahweh. These are high and exalted words. How could any mere prophet be described as the glorious Lord?

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That is not terminology that any Muslim would use today of Jesus, and yet Jesus' own half -brother utilizes that description of him there in James chapter 2.

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Now, in Philippians chapter 2, we have something that most scholars believe goes well before Paul.

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Obviously, there were Christians before the Apostle Paul. He learned from those individuals. He talks about receiving tradition from them and things like that.

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And Philippians chapter 2 is called the Carmen Christi because it's the hymn to Christ as to God. And most people believe that this section of scripture is from the early

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Jerusalem hymn book. I would like to see the rest of the hymn book. It seems to be better than most that we have. But it's a hymn to Christ that predates the

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Apostle Paul. It's something that he himself would be familiar with, but that his audience would be familiar with.

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He's basically using a sermon illustration like if I, for you who are Christians, if I said, amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

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I don't have to even finish that out because most Christians know the hymn, amazing grace. In the same way,

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Paul is using this. And listen to the words of what is found in this very early tradition, even prior to Paul's own writings, because it's something that's the common possession of himself and the

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Corinthian church. You must have the same mindset among yourselves. It was in Christ Jesus who, although he eternally existed in the very form of God, that's

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Morphe to Thayu, the very form of God, no mere apostle could eternally exist in the

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Morphe to Thayu, did not consider that equality had with God the Father something to be held on to at all costs.

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But instead he made himself nothing by taking on the very form of a slave, by being made in human likeness.

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And so the humiliation of Jesus is not his ceasing to be God. The humiliation of Jesus is his taking on a true human nature.

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He actually makes himself nothing by entering into his own creation by taking on the very form of a slave, by being made in human likeness.

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And again, this is in the very first decades. This isn't the Council of Nicaea. This isn't the second century.

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This is in the very first decades of the Christian experience you have these words being said of Jesus.

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And the hymn goes on to say, and having entered into human existence, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death one dies on a cross.

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I simply say to all my Muslim friends, you will find nothing in history to substantiate Surah 4, verse 157, and everything to not substantiate it.

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It is a very important point. He goes on to say, having said that Jesus dies on the cross, because of this,

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God the Father exalted him to the highest place and bestowed on him the name which is above every name. So at the mention of the exalted name of Jesus, everyone who is in heaven, on earth, and under the earth bows the knee, and every tongue confesses

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Jesus Christ is Lord, all to the glory of God the Father. Now, to someone who is familiar with the

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Old Testament text, those words sound very, very familiar. Because, for example, God had said in Isaiah chapter 48 that he gives his glory to no one.

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In Isaiah 45, 23, it was said that it is to Yahweh that every knee will bow.

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How does this early hymn of the church understand that? That to Jesus, every knee will bow.

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This is not later development. This is not some kind of evolution over time. This is from the very earliest decades of the

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Christian experience there in the Carmen Christi in Philippians chapter 2.

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Now, I'd like to show you the Christian shema. Christian shema. If you know anything about Judaism, you know that the faithful conservative

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Jew gets up in the morning and he says, the Orthodox Jew says, shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad.

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Here, Yisrael, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. Well, the early Christians were monotheists.

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They came out of the Jewish faith. So, how did they understand that important statement of faith?

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Well, you see it here as it's found in Deuteronomy 6, 4. And please notice at the bottom, the

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Greek here. Akure Israel, kurias hafeas That's the

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Greek Septuagint. Now, why does that matter to us? Well, the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament was the Bible of the early church.

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When Paul's writing to the Corinthians, for example, what Bible would they be reading? They wouldn't be reading the Hebrew text. They couldn't read Hebrew. So, what would they be reading?

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They would be reading the Greek Septuagint translation. And so, it's very important to keep that in mind because this would have been what they were familiar with in regards to the form of the shema.

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And so, notice the words that are found here. Here, the word kurias is the translation of the

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Hebrew Yahweh. God is the translation of Eloheinu here. And then the word one comes from echad.

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All right, that's going to become important because now let's look at what Paul said to the Corinthians in regards to our knowledge of the fact there's only one true

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God over against the peoples around them who believe that there were many gods and many lords.

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Notice what he says. But for us, there is one God, and then notice how he defines the term

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God. He does so in two phrases. The Father, from whom are all things, and we for him.

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And one Lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things, and we through him.

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Now, the words should look familiar to you. Here they are in the Greek language. You have hais theos, hapater, one

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God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we unto him. And hais kurias, one

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Lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things, and we through him. Now, let's put the words in color so we can see them.

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Remember the words that were important. We had God, theos, hais is one, and kurias was the word for Yahweh.

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Now, let's compare these two together. Over on this side, you have the shema, and here's

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Paul's words here. And you can see he's using the very same words, hais, theos, kurias, but he has filled them out.

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Why? Because Paul is a bad man trying to come up with a new religion? No, that is absolutely absurd.

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Because Paul is having to deal with the reality of what God has done in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. This one has come in fulfillment of the prophetic scriptures.

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He is the El Gabor, the mighty God of Isaiah 9. He is the Emmanuel of Isaiah 7 through 11.

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He has come. He has demonstrated his messiahship. He has demonstrated he was a prophet.

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He has risen from the dead. He has ascended into heaven. He sent the Holy Spirit from the

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Father, who's now indwelling Paul and the other believers. And so, it is that incarnation and then that outpouring of the

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Spirit that the early church has to deal with. And yet, they still believe in the shema, but they understand now what the shema is telling them.

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And they see that one Lord, that name of Yahweh, that Lord becomes applied to the person of Jesus Christ.

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And so, you have the Father, you have the Son. Why? Because of the incarnation. And this is not a denial of monotheism, but it is a demonstration that, again, in the earliest decades of the

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Christian experience, it was their understanding that Jesus was not a mere prophet.

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He was a man. He truly was a man. That's what the incarnation is all about. He was a prophet. He was messiah.

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But he was more than all of that. And here you have evidence from that source. Now, most of the time, in the debates

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I hear with Muslims, they like to get into speculations as to which gospels are written first.

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And again, no documentary evidence on this can ever answer the question. It's all theoretical.

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But a lot of them will present the idea that, well, Mark has this low view of Jesus and John has this high view of Jesus.

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And I just wonder, have you read the book of Mark? Let's run through. It's literally, because I only have 14 minutes left, or even less than that.

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No, 13 minutes. I have 13 minutes left to go through the entire gospel of Mark. So it's going to be fast. So you're going to have to be awake and have to have a deep seat in the saddle, because I just want to present to you some of the evidence from the gospel of Mark, where once again, ask yourself a question.

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Can the Muslim view of Jesus be fit into the words and actions and descriptions of Jesus found even in the shortest gospel, the gospel of Mark?

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And I submit to you, the answer is no, they cannot. They cannot. So if you're going to say, well,

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Mark shows a later development, then show me documentary evidence before Mark. You can't do it, but that's the challenge

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I'm going to be making. So let's take a look at it. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The phrase, the

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Son of God, is a textual variant. However, it is found in Sinaiticus. It's found in Vaticanus. It's found in a number of the other early manuscripts, and there is really no reason to why it would have been taken out if it was not the original reading.

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He is called the Son of God. In the very next phrase says, in chapter one, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, describing

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John the Baptist, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. If you go back to Isaiah, the quotation is actually saying, prepare the way of Yahweh, in Isaiah 40, verse three.

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The way of Yahweh, described as the way for whom? That John was preparing for Jesus, here in fulfillment of Isaiah 40, verse three.

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In chapter one, verses nine through 11, in those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John of the

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Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open, and the spirit descending on him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven, you are my beloved

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Son, with you I am well pleased. Now here, once again, we have language that could never be used of a mere prophet.

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You are my beloved Son. If you've heard anyone say God has sons by the tons, they never understood the

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New Testament. Never understood the uniqueness of the Sonship of Christ. The fact that when

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Jesus uses this terminology of himself, the Jews are offended because they recognize what it means. And here it's, you are my beloved

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Son. At the end of the gospel, you're going to see that the high priest is going to ask him, are you the Son of the

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Blessed One? And when Jesus says I am, then the high priest recognizes he has committed blasphemy.

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Anyone who says when Jesus says he's the Son of God, I'm just a godly man, has totally missed the intention of Mark, the intention of Luke, the intention of Matthew, and the intention of John in their utilization of this language.

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Chapter two, verse five, and immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, what have you to do with us,

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Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.

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That's actually chapter one, verses 23 through 24. The unclean spirits recognize that Jesus is not just a mere prophet.

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He's not just a rasul. He is the Holy One of God who has power over them to destroy them.

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And even before Jesus says anything to them, they react and recognize who he is.

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In chapter two, verse five, when men brought a sick man to Jesus, lowering him down through the roof. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, son, your sins are forgiven.

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He didn't simply proclaim a way of forgiveness. He actually forgave men's sins.

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And the Jews that were sitting around saw this as blasphemy. Then in chapter two, verses 27 through 28, and he said to them, the

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Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the son of man is Lord, even of the

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Sabbath. Jesus identified himself as the son of man, as we're going to see in his trial. He quotes from the book of Daniel, chapter seven, of this heavenly son of man.

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And he makes application to himself. Jesus as the son of man is Lord, even of the

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Sabbath. Who established the Sabbath? God established the Sabbath. It's part of his law.

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And Jesus claimed to be Lord of the Sabbath. What mere prophet could ever make a statement like that?

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Chapter three, verse 11, and whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, you are the son of God.

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You're the son of God. There is no question that the earliest material we have of the

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Christian faith identifies Jesus, not as a son of God, like anyone else can be just a godly person, but the demons themselves say, you are the son of God.

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You are unique. They recognized him in a way that, unfortunately, even the scribes and Pharisees could not recognize who he was,

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Mark chapter three, verse 11. Mark chapter five, verses six through seven, here's another demon -possessed man.

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This is the one who is Legion. His name was Legion. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him and crying out with a loud voice, he said, what have you to do with me,

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Jesus, son of the most high God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.

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So once again, this one who will be healed recognizes who Jesus is and recognizes his authority and recognizes his power over even the unclean spirits in Mark chapter five.

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In Mark chapter seven, and he said to them, then are you also without understanding?

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Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart, but his stomach and is expelled?

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Thus he declared all foods clean. Now it took the Jews along, the

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Jewish believers a long time to figure that out. In fact, for poor Peter, God had to drop a sheet down from heaven three times.

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He was sort of like smack, smack, smack, get to get Peter to figure this out because of their tradition. But the reality is that even at this early point in time,

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Mark recognizes that Jesus by his teaching can actually change the dispensation and application of God's law to God's people.

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Who can do that? No mere result, no mere prophet, no mere man. It is one who has an authority that is far beyond that level.

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In chapter eight, verses 31 to 34, you read, and calling the crowd to him with his disciples, Jesus calls the crowd to him.

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And he said to them, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

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For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses life for my sake and the gospels will save it.

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For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels.

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So here in calling men to be followers of him, to take up their cross, which in that day meant to join the death march.

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Anyone who took up the cross, there was only one place you were going, that was to die. That was to die. That is the call of Jesus for each one of us is to die to self and live only to him.

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That's why Paul can say, I have been crucified with Christ. But here the assertion is you must not be ashamed of me, not of God.

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And if you're ashamed of him, then the son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father, who can bear the glory of the father and also with the holy angels.

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These again are words that do not fit into the mouth of Amir Razul. In Mark chapter 10, verses 17 through 18, as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked, good teacher, what must

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I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. This passage is so misunderstood by my

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Muslim friends. They've completely missed it. It's like a veil is over their eyes. Don't you see what Jesus is saying?

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He's not saying I'm a bad guy. Jesus is not saying I'm not good. In fact, we have evidence. Jesus said, which one of you convicts me of sin?

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This young man didn't know who he was asking. He thought he was just asking another religious teacher. He didn't know who he was approaching.

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And Jesus is trying to get him to think about what he's actually saying. And it's not going to work because what happens with this young man?

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He loved his things so well. He thought he had kept all the commandments. He hadn't. He actually was an idolater and he didn't recognize the very giver of the law who was standing right before him.

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This is why Jesus asks him what he asks him. Mark chapter 13, verses 26 to 27. Here is the mount of transfiguration and a cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud.

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This is my beloved son. Listen to him. And then they will see the son of man. I'm sorry, it's chapter 9, verse 7.

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So here again, God speaking refers to Jesus and says, this is my beloved son.

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Not just one son amongst many sons, not just one son amongst many tons of sons, but this is my beloved son.

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Listen to him. And then in chapter 13, verses 26 to 27, and then they will see the son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

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And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth and from the ends of the heaven.

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Do you hear what Jesus says? The elect people of God are whose? Well, they're God's, right?

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Jesus says they're mine. I will gather my people. They are my elect.

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I will send the angels. Who sends the angels? Who has power over the angels? Isn't that God? Of course,

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Jesus says he has that power and he gathers his elect people to himself.

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Same chapter, verses 31, 32. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

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That's the promise of the word of God in the Old Testament. But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows that I am the angels of heaven or the son, but only the father.

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All this text is always used. See, he can't be God because he doesn't know. Well, that means he can't be God because he didn't glow all the time and God's glorious.

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He laid aside the exercise of certain divine prerogatives so that he might fulfill his mission as Messiah to die and provide salvation.

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But notice, no Muslim actually believes Jesus could ever have said these words, because notice where Jesus puts himself. He says, no one knows, no man knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the father.

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He puts himself above men and angels in his relationship with the father. Can Amir Razool do that?

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Can Amir Razool do that? And if you've ever had a Muslim reading this text, actually bring that fact out,

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I bet you you have not. Look at the end here. At the trial of Jesus, but he remained silent and made no answer.

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Again, the high priest asked him, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed? And Jesus said, I am, and you will see the son of man sit at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.

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And the high priest tore his garments and said, what further witnesses do we need? You have heard that his blasphemy. What is your decision?

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And they all condemned him as deserving death. Why did they condemn him for death, for claim to be the son of man?

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Because he was quoting from first Psalm 110, but he also quotes from Daniel chapter seven. I kept looking the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven, one, like a son of man was coming and he came up to the ancient of days and was presented before him.

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And to him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that all the peoples, nations, and men of every tongue might serve.

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Latruo, the highest form of worship, him, the son of man is worshiped by all of humanity, not just the

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Jews. And that's why when Jesus quoted it, the Jews recognized it's blasphemy.

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It could never be applied to Amir Azul. And therefore they convicted him of blasphemy.

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Were they wrong? Of course they were wrong, but that is why they did it. Now you need to keep a sharp eye tonight.

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You need to keep a sharp eye and do not be distracted. Saying the earliest disciples testified of Jesus divinity does not mean they did not testify of his humanity saying he was a prophet, a man, or a teacher, et cetera.

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They did because Jesus is all that. Christians accept all that they said about Jesus.

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We don't cut the text up into little pieces and only accept little parts of it. Theories require facts.

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Theorizing about Q sources, redactions, Jimmy Dunn, or anybody else requires a little something called proof.

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Give us documents. I've just given you the documents. And if there's a question about any one of those particular texts,

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I'll be happy to show you the textual basis for any one of them in the earliest manuscripts. I have all that information with me.

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If you're going to say those texts are wrong, then give me documentation, not theories of someone sitting in a faraway classroom who wants to get published.

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We have examined the earliest sources we possess, and they clearly present a Jesus who is more than a mere prophet.

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And so tonight we have to consider this and ask ourselves the question, did those early followers of Jesus know something that maybe some of us don't, or has

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God preserved that message all the way down to this very day? Thank you for your attention. Okay, I begin by praising our creator and fashioner as asking to send peace and blessings upon all of his prophets and messengers and upon all of his righteous servants from the beginning of time to the end of time and to all of us here.

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I greet you with the greetings of peace. And I thank the organizers, the

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IPCI, first of all, for bringing me into this country, making it possible for me to be here tonight.

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I want to thank Johann and all of the organizers who have put together this program here tonight.

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And I thank you for coming out. Well, the topic before us tonight is about the original disciples of Jesus and whether or not they considered

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Jesus to be God. My answer obviously would be no, they did not consider Jesus to be

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God. Let me look at some preliminary points, and then I will summarize my argument in five points.

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So first point, the Gospels in their present form were not written by disciples of Jesus.

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Let me explain that further. The Gospels do not name their writers. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are names that have been tacked onto these

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Gospels by Christian tradition over time, mostly in the second century of Christianity.

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What we find is that the Gospel, according to Luke, in fact, could not have been written by a disciple, even according to Christian tradition, because Luke, it is said, was a disciple of Paul.

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He was a companion of Paul and not a disciple of Jesus, or a direct disciple is what I mean.

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What about Mark's Gospel? It is generally agreed that Mark's Gospel was not written by a disciple of Jesus.

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It is said, in fact, that Mark was a disciple of Peter, and so he was second generation, one removed from Jesus.

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So we're asking tonight, did the original disciples of Jesus consider him God? And we want to find what the original disciples said.

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Well, the Gospel, according to Matthew, has been said by Christian tradition to be written by one

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Matthew, a disciple of Jesus. However, now it is widely recognized that Matthew did not write this

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Gospel, because Matthew copied Mark. And since Mark was not a disciple, it is unlikely that Matthew wrote this, because it is unlikely that a disciple would learn about the

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Master from a non -disciple. Then we go to the Gospel, according to John, the last of the four now.

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And the Gospel, according to John, according to modern studies, had gone through stages of editing.

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Some say five stages of editing, according to Raymond Brown, but I'll narrow this down to three for simplicity and for shortness of time.

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The first stage, we have an original disciple of Jesus, said to be John, son of Zebedee, who preached what he remembered about Jesus.

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But the decades will pass, and there comes, in stage two, a disciple of the disciple who himself took what

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John, the son of Zebedee, preached, and he preached that further. Now, you know how it is in church sermons or mosque khutbas.

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When somebody quotes a text of Scripture and then expounds upon it, sometimes you can get lost between where the

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Scripture stops and the explanation continues. Everything gets mixed into each other.

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If you know the text ahead of time, you will know that much is the text, and now he's adding his commentary.

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But if you didn't know the text ahead of time, you'll be lost between what is the text he's quoting and what is the commentary he's adding.

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Now, when the material about Jesus was being preached by early Christians, like, for example, this preacher, the text and commentary became fused together.

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And this is why when you read John's gospel, you cannot tell, for example, where the red letter actually should stop of Jesus' sayings and where the black letter of the writer's sayings should begin.

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John 3 .16 is an example, a case in point, where one cannot be sure was this really said by Jesus or by the writer of the gospel.

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The two are fused together. Now, in stage two, this disciple of the disciple wrote the results of his preaching, which means that we have together what were to be the original words of Jesus mixed together with the preachings of John, son of Zebedee, and the preachings of this other disciple.

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But it didn't end there. Stage three, a later editor came and worked on this gospel and added parts to it, inserted here and there, and also, it is believed, added the 21st chapter to this gospel.

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So, where does that take us? Conclusion, we've looked at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and we've seen that none of them can commend themselves to us in their present form as having been written by a disciple of Jesus.

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So, when we want to know, did the original disciples consider Jesus to be God, we would like to have, yes, James was right, let's get the documentary evidence.

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Let's put our hands on what the original disciples actually wrote, and let's find out what they actually said.

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But we do not have that in the gospels. Now, the four gospels, let's look at them in some more detail.

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The order as they appear in the Bible today is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as you all know. But scholars now believe that between Matthew and Mark, the order should have been the other way around, in that Mark is written first, and then

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Matthew and Luke, and finally John. So, the order should look like something like this, the actual order in which these gospels first appeared in history,

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Mark first, and John last. Now, this is an important finding, and this finding leads to certain conclusions which conservative

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Christians will not be happy with. And because they're not happy with the conclusions, they denounce the scholars who arrive at this principle of working with the gospels, this recognition that Mark is first.

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But the recognition that Mark is first is so firmly based on a careful study of the gospels that even some of the most conservative

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Christians finally accept that Mark is the first of the four gospels.

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For example, F. F. Bruce, and in last night's debate, James did recommend

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F. F. Bruce for everyone to hear. So, he's not a way -out -there scholar waiting to get published and trying to publish anything true, false, or ugly.

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He is a careful scholar, he's conservative, he's trying to preserve the tradition, believe in what

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Christians have always believed in, but certain points strike a person so clearly that even the conservative scholars accept that point, such as that Mark is the first of the four gospels.

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Let's see where that leads us. Well, there are three gospels that are called synoptic gospels, meaning that they can be seen together because they're so similar in their outline and also in specific wordings.

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And there is one gospel that is known as the different gospel that is a gospel according to John. When these gospels are compared, if we compare

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Mark, for example, and the synoptic tradition altogether, Matthew, Mark, and Luke together, with John on the other hand, you will see that John has actually improved the image of Jesus over time.

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So, you can see the earlier gospels present Jesus as having some limitations. He's a human being.

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Yes, he has some great power, but not the way he appears in John. Remember how James was emphasizing that Jesus is the

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Son of God? Yeah, the only one. Well, that emphasis does not actually come from the gospel according to Mark as he was presenting it.

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That emphasis comes from the gospel according to John. It is only John who says that Jesus was the only begotten son,

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John 3 .16. The term monogenous, and James will correct me on the pronunciation because I don't know

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Greek, he knows it. But the term monogenous is used with reference to Jesus, only begotten, only in the gospel according to John, and a letter of John, but not in the other gospels.

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Now, you imagine this situation. Jesus came and he preached and he left. Somebody's going to tell us the most important things about Jesus.

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They're not going to tell us everything. So, Mark wrote a gospel telling us the most important things. Matthew wrote,

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Luke wrote. Why didn't they tell us that Jesus is the monogenous son of God, the only begotten son of God?

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That would have been a very important thing for them to mention, do you not think? But they presented Jesus as the son of God to be sure, but a son like many other sons.

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And yes, there are sons by the tons in the Bible, and it is only John of the four gospels that presents him as the monogenous, the only begotten son.

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What else does John do with the tradition? John is the only one of the four gospels that has somebody addressing

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Jesus as God. That's in John chapter 20, verse 28, when Thomas says, my Lord and my

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God. John is the only one who has sayings like, I and the Father are one. Whoever has seen me has seen the

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Father. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me. Whoever has seen me has seen the

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Father. Now, if these were actual sayings of Jesus, why would the other three gospels miss them?

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Yes, James has picked on Jimmy Dunn twice in his presentation, but Jimmy Dunn is one of the most careful scholars

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I have studied. He is very religious in his orientation. You can see that, as opposed to some skeptical scholars who could not care less for belief in God, or belief in Jesus, or belief in Christianity.

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The man is obviously a Christian. He writes with care and with respect for the

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Christian tradition, and at the same time, he says, call it scholarly skepticism if you like. But if these statements were made by Jesus, it's difficult to explain why the first three gospels would have missed them, and only

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John would have picked them up. The best explanation for this phenomenon is to say that John has actually improved the image of Jesus through those stages of editing, through the decades that have passed over time.

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But is John the only one who has done this with Jesus? Now, our thinking has to be historical.

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We want to go back to the origins of things. We want to find out, did the original disciples really consider him God? So we want to go back to the original disciples as close as we possibly can.

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So this is why we're peeling back the pages. My main criticism of what

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James has presented is that there is nothing in what he presented that shows a historical thinking.

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He's not trying to get to what the original disciples said. The closest he has done to that is to cite

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James, but James, as many will know, is not an authentic letter of James, in that many scholars think that this is a pseudonymous writing.

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It was written by someone else using James's name. He also made strides when he tried to look at Mark's gospel, because Mark's gospel has come up in our discussions again and again.

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A similar type of discussion has come up in which the Muslim side, myself usually, says that, look,

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Mark is the earliest gospel, John is the last. Prove your case from Mark. So that shows some improvement that James is looking at Mark.

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However, he has not looked close enough, because our topic is, did the original disciples believe that Jesus was

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God? Did the original disciples consider Jesus God? It's not that Mark considered

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Jesus God. It's not that Mark presents Jesus as God through the stories that he narrates. Well, let's look at what the other gospel writers have done with the stories of Jesus.

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As scholars have tried to find a literary relationship between Mark and the other two synoptic gospels, what they have come up with is that Matthew and Luke have based their writings on the gospel according to Mark.

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Again, this conclusion is so firm that even a conservative scholar like Robert Gundry, in his commentary on Matthew's gospel, he has adopted this as the working principle to explain

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Matthew's gospel. Matthew's gospel, he says, can be easily explained by seeing that Matthew has started with Mark and he has taken the episodes from Mark one after another, but he didn't just simply represent the episodes as they were in Mark.

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He has changed the situation. He has changed the story and the words as he has gone.

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What effect has this had on the developing tradition? Well, we can see episode for episode that Matthew and Luke generally change the story such that if there is the limitation that is mentioned about Jesus in Mark, that limitation is removed or covered up or somehow smoothed over in Matthew and Luke.

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So we see that Jesus is on his way to becoming God through these literary products, not in fact that he was

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God, but he started out with some limitations. For example, he has limitations in his knowledge, and James cited the verse from Mark, chapter 13, verse 32.

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If there is one thing he doesn't know, well, then he's not the almighty God. He's not the omniscient God.

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James says, well, this is because he emptied himself and became flesh so that he can do what he had to do, to die for the sins of the world.

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Well, then, if he so emptied himself and to all appearances, he didn't have full knowledge and he didn't have full power, well, how did anyone take him to be

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God? No one would have taken him to be God. Mark's gospel shows that on occasion,

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Jesus has a limitation. For example, when he tried twice to heal the blind man, after the first time, the man said,

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I see people like trees walking, and obviously that means the cure was not totally effective.

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Jesus did it one more time, and the man was cured. This sort of limitation that is shown in the gospel according to Mark is covered up or eliminated totally in the remaining two synoptic gospels.

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So we see then that as we trace the development, we see that Jesus is going from somebody who is just like a human being, a prophet, yes, you can say that he is greater than Muslims will agree.

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And yes, that's true for Mark's gospel indeed, but that doesn't mean that he's God. What exactly is

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God? What is your definition of God? St. Anselm of Canterbury said that God is that beyond which nothing greater can be thought of.

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Now, among monotheists, I think we should have no difficulty agreeing on that definition. If you can think of God, and now think of one who is greater than the one you're thinking of in the first place, well, the one who is greater than, that's the one who really deserves to be thought of as God.

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Until you arrive at one beyond whom nothing greater can be thought about, that one is God. So God is not by definition son of God or a great angel, even the archangel.

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God is greater than all of these. So I believe James's presentation is flawed in that he spent a lot of time showing, oh,

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Jesus is the son of God there. Oh, Jesus is greater than a prophet there. So greater than a prophet does not mean

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God. It means greater than a prophet. That's a far cry from being God. Now, let's continue then.

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Let's date the gospels. Now, Mark generally is considered to be written around the year 70, but I've given an earlier date because I want to be softer on James, and I know he's going to complain later the date, okay?

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So 65, according to F .F. Bruce, Mark is written in the mid -60s.

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And he said that John is written, well, he said the gospels are written from the 60s to 100, and that would mean that he thinks

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John is written about 100, but I've given a more conservative date of 90 here. That means that there are so many decades that pass between the ascension of Jesus and the writing of the gospels, as we will see now.

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Ascension of Jesus around 30 CE, the death of Paul around 64, and then 65,

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Mark is written, and the remaining gospels. What this means is tremendous, and we'll see this in my conclusion as we proceed.

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It means, in a nutshell, that all of the gospels are written after Paul, and they are somehow influenced by Paul.

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We will see to what extent. I only have 10 minutes remaining. Now, Paul was not an original disciple of Jesus, and I think that James must have forgotten what our topic was about, because when he wrote to me, he said that,

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Shabir, we should discuss this topic, because Muslims are always saying it's Paul who invented the divinity of Jesus, and it's not the original disciples of Jesus.

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Muslims would tend to believe in the original disciples of Jesus and be suspicious of Paul, so the whole point of tonight's debate was to prove that the original disciples, in contradistinction to Paul, held to the divinity of Jesus.

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In what James presented, I think he's actually missed the point, but he'll have a rebuttal, and we'll hear how he does then.

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Now, Paul was not an original disciple. As everyone knows, he became a disciple later on, after he claimed that Jesus appeared to him from heaven, after Jesus had ascended.

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Now, what about Paul's influence on later Christianity? We see he was influential in writing much of the

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Scripture, in insisting that Jesus died for our sins—that's a very important Paulian doctrine and very central to Christianity—and he raised

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Jesus to an intermediary status between man and God. For Paul, as James quoted, there was only one

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God and one Lord, Jesus Christ. Paul has now suddenly changed the Shema from one

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Lord God to one Lord and one God. And then he also canceled the law for Gentile Christians.

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Well, let's see what else Paul has done. In the Christian Bible, we know that there are two parts, the

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Old Testament and the New Testament. The New Testament comprises 27 books. Out of the 27, 13 are attributed to Paul, and that shows about half the number of the documents attributed to Paul, which means that the people who collected this,

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Christians, considered Paul to be a very important teacher. But, our question is, the original disciples, did they consider

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Jesus to be God? Let's see what are my five reasons for thinking that they did not.

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First reason is that the disciples were Jewish monotheists, and James actually mentioned this.

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And therefore, we should conclude that without any evidence to the contrary, that they believed that there was only one

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God whose name is Jehovah or Yahweh. And anyone who disputes this should show that the disciples of Jesus actually believe something else.

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And yes, show us the documentary evidence. It is generally considered that Jesus is not

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Jehovah himself, but the son of Jehovah. And since Jehovah or Yahweh is the only

51:11

God, then considering Jesus to be the son of Jehovah does not mean that somebody considers

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Jesus to be God. The son of a man is not the man himself. The son of God is not necessarily

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God himself. One has to prove that in a further step. My second reason is that the speeches of the original disciples which are recorded in Acts of the

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Apostles are not entirely reliable. One can go to the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible and see that Peter, for example, would say that God has made this one you crucified both

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Lord and Christ. And one might say, well, Muslims wouldn't accept this title for Jesus, Lord and Christ like this.

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Christ, yes, but Lord? Well, it is generally considered now by many modern scholars.

51:55

For example, this is mentioned in the Harper's Bible Dictionary. It is mentioned in the preface to Luke's Gospel in the New Jerusalem Bible.

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This is widely stated, that the speeches of the disciples cannot be taken to be original.

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These are Luke's own composition. And how accurate were these? This is a matter of debate among scholars.

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So you cannot say, then, that we have this kind of documentary evidence. Third reason, no writing survives from the original disciples of Jesus.

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I've already mentioned that James is a pseudonymous work. Of course, James was not one of the 12 listed as the disciples of Jesus, but many believe him to be an important early disciple.

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But among the 12, we have two writings which are credited to Peter, one of the 12.

52:37

But second Peter in the Bible is largely regarded, again, as a pseudonymous work, which means that somebody wrote it, falsely using the name of Peter as the author of this letter.

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And this, too, has been a conclusion which is so firm that many conservative scholars accept this.

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For example, William Barclay in the Daily Bible Commentary, and also Richard Baucom in his commentary on second

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Peter. What about first Peter? First Peter is disputed.

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Some scholars think he wrote it. Some scholars think he did not write it. And many important scholars, of course, do say that Peter did not write that one as well.

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Because this is disputed, I would submit tonight that we cannot use this as firm documentary evidence, and we need to look for other evidence that would show that Peter and the other disciples of Jesus actually considered

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Jesus to be God, or that he was divine. My fourth reason is that Paul was in conflict with the original disciples of Jesus on questions of law and monotheism.

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We talked about law last night. I'll talk about monotheism tonight. Remember that Paul, in his second letter to the

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Corinthians, in chapter 11, verse number 4, he was railing against people who were coming into his territory, into his churches, and preaching another

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Jesus. Now, who were these other people? As James Dunn has shown in his book,

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Jesus the Evidence, these other people are actually the other disciples and close followers of the disciples of Jesus.

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They're people like Peter, James, and John. And on one occasion, Paul actually mentions their names.

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And he says that, I don't care what they are, pillars of the church, it doesn't matter. God doesn't show any partiality.

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Well, that sounds like a nice statement. God doesn't show any partiality, but at the same time, Peter, James, and John, and other disciples of Jesus have credentials to their name.

54:34

It is mentioned in Matthew's gospel that Peter was going to be the rock on which God will build the church, or Jesus will build the church, however you like it.

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This may not be an authentic saying of Jesus, but nevertheless, it is there in the gospels. And it is recognized that Peter was one of the leaders of the

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Jerusalem church, the mother church. So when Peter clashed with Paul, and Paul represents himself as the winner, and the church follows

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Paul, then we have to ask, are we getting it straight from the disciples of Jesus? Are we getting a history that is written by the winners who were not the original disciples of Jesus?

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My fifth reason for thinking that the original disciples did not consider

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Jesus to be God is that Jesus himself taught that he was not God. Remember the passage that James quoted where Jesus says, why do you ask me, why do you call me good?

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No one is good but God alone. James says, all Muslims didn't get it, but actually his reasoning is circular, because he is assuming that Jesus is claiming to be

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God. You can't assume the very thing that you set out to prove. James has to prove that Jesus claimed to be

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God, and that the disciples then took this claim, and made it their own, and believed that Jesus was God.

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You cannot assume the very thing which you are setting out to prove. This is called circular reasoning. So I've found that James is not historical in his thinking, in that he didn't try to reach back to the earliest historical records about the disciples.

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Second, that he's using circular reasoning. And third, that he's not precise in his thinking, in that his presentation showed no clarity about what the original disciples of Jesus actually believed.

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I have two minutes left, but my presentation is done. I could use the two minutes to start rebutting some of the points that James raised.

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But I'll leave that for later on, and I'll come back and do that afterwards. Thank you very much. So much to say, and so little time in which to say it.

57:05

It was just said that I don't think historically. Well, obviously we define how you do history very, very differently.

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I believe you do history as a Christian. I believe you do it consistent with your worldview. I don't believe you just abandon the existence of God, and then start embracing naturalistic materialism.

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And the individuals that Shabiris depend upon don't do that. For example, Jimmy Dunn starts off with allowing for cutting up the

57:29

New Testament to pieces, accusing Paul of deception, Luke of error. He starts with the conclusion that what he's dealing with is not inspired

57:36

Scripture, and then shockingly comes the conclusion that it's not inspired Scripture. How did that ever happen?

57:43

Shabir will say, listen to him. Scholars have concluded. Scholars have concluded. I dispute every single one of them.

57:50

Scholars can conclude anything. There's a scholar in Germany that has concluded, he's a Muslim scholar, that Muhammad didn't exist.

57:56

Any Muslims ready to convert? Oh, why not? Shabir says scholars say, and you just accept it.

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Well, I don't accept it, because scholars say anything. Scholars say that the original language of the

58:07

Quran was not Arabic. Scholars say all sorts of things. I don't believe that it is meaningful argumentation to stand before you and say, well, my scholars say this, his scholars say that.

58:17

Now you decide. You see, my presentation took you directly to the sources, because we have to demythologize this scholars says stuff, because too much of education today is you quote your scholars,

58:28

I quote my scholars. I've got great scholars, and my scholars, I think, are better for one simple reason. They're consistent.

58:34

They have a worldview that's consistent with the worldview of the authors of the Scriptures, unlike the scholars that Shabir is presenting to you this evening.

58:42

So be very careful in here. Scholars have concluded. For example, scholars have concluded that James didn't write James. Which ones, and how'd they do it?

58:49

Show it from the evidence. Show us the evidence of this. Well, scholars have concluded. They've written it in books. Again, every single thing that you

58:57

Muslims believe about Jesus, scholars have disputed. Every single one of them. Most of these scholars don't believe in the virgin birth.

59:02

Do you? Of course you do. Most of these scholars don't believe that Jesus committed miracles and did miracles, supernatural things.

59:09

You believe he did? The Quran tells you as such. So what are you going to believe? Who's going to be consistent here?

59:15

That's the question this evening. It's interesting. He wants to start saying, well, F .F. Bruce believes in Mark in priority.

59:21

I realize there are conservatives that do, but they realize it is a theory. And what

59:26

Shabir does with it is he starts off with a theory and then uses it later as a fact. For example, notice he got rid of Matthew.

59:33

Well, Matthew can't have been written a disciple because he's quoting from Mark. And, oh, well, theoretically he's quoting from Mark.

59:38

And you see how something became a theory initially, now becomes a fact upon which you then build conclusions that, by the way,

59:45

F .F. Bruce never came to. The conclusions that Shabir comes to are radical in comparison to the sources that he's actually utilizing.

59:54

For example, he said the emphasis on sonship is found only in the Gospel of John. Well, the term monogamist may appear there, and he certainly utilizes the term unique, but I showed you in my presentation that Jesus' use of the term

01:00:07

Son of God resulted in the Jews accusing him of blasphemy. That clearly means that the sons by the tons thing is a gross misapprehension of what's happening in the

01:00:18

Gospel of Mark. No answer was given to that, just simply a reassertion. Well, yeah, sure, that's what it means in Mark.

01:00:24

Then why is there the reaction to this statement, I'm the Son of God, in the Gospel of Mark? Why do demons come running up to him?

01:00:31

Why don't demons run up to everybody who is godly and say, you're the Son of God? They don't do that, do they? No, they don't.

01:00:37

So clearly, the Markan intention is what is important here. Shabir has missed that completely.

01:00:42

Why did the other Gospels not include the sayings of Jesus that John does? He's writing at a later time, it does certainly seem that at least

01:00:50

John is after Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and what is he giving? Is he giving, is he doing what Matthew's doing, writing to the

01:00:56

Jews? No. Is he doing what Mark's doing, writing to the Romans? No. Is he doing what Luke is doing, focusing upon history and writing to the Gentiles as a whole?

01:01:01

No. What's he doing? He's giving the inside, personal, disciple information of what their experience was, and maybe the reason that only he did so is because he was the last one, and that since the other ones were around, he did not feel it was proper time to reveal those sayings, especially because remember what's going on during this period of time.

01:01:22

The church is under persecution. You have to be careful what you put in print about other people, especially because they might end up lying food in a

01:01:30

Roman context. You have to keep those things in mind. You see, the possibilities that, for example,

01:01:36

Matthew and Mark are drawing from an oral tradition in the presence of eyewitnesses, not that Matthew is slavishly copying

01:01:47

Mark, and somehow we can get into Matthew's mind and figure out why he's changing Mark. The very possibility which answers far more questions than the position

01:01:56

Shabir has taken is not even allowed for in most liberal seminaries today. Most people who graduate given that kind of information don't even have a clue that there's a possibility there might be another way of looking at it.

01:02:08

Liberals do not listen to conservatives. Conservatives study liberals and respond to them, but it's a one -way street.

01:02:15

It's a one -way street. So when we heard Shabir actually saying, none of my presentation was historical, what does that mean?

01:02:26

What I said was, we want to go back to the earliest information we have about the followers of Jesus.

01:02:32

Shabir gave us nothing about those early. He did quote from the Gospel of Mark once, after actually faulting me for doing that, but he did quote the

01:02:39

Gospel of Mark once in regards to Jesus actually saying, why do you call me good?

01:02:45

But of course, the question then has to be asked, why do you trust Mark at that point and not at the points where I showed you that he presents the deity of Christ?

01:02:53

Why is that? That's a good question. But what's more than this, when you say I wasn't being historical, could we hold on just one second?

01:03:01

I'm going to stop my clock here. If we could stop the Adnan, someone. Who's got the

01:03:10

Adnan going? Let's stop it. Come on, you know who you are. Thank you. All right. Okay.

01:03:18

It's sort of hard to keep people's attention when the call to prayer is going on. Okay. All right. Let's continue on.

01:03:24

All right. When he says I'm not doing this historically, I'm not doing it in an inconsistent way of history that he's been taught that is against Christian worldview and against the

01:03:34

Muslim worldview. I was being very historical. For example, he said, why did you go to Paul? I wasn't going to Paul.

01:03:40

Did you listen to me carefully? I pointed out to you that both the Carmine Christi and then the statement that he makes in regards to Shema predate

01:03:47

Paul. He's drawing from something that's common to the Corinthian church and himself.

01:03:53

It has to be something they already knew about. He wasn't coming up with this. So I'm going into pre -Pauline.

01:03:59

Did he give you anything that was pre -Pauline? Did he even make reference to even how we could know something was pre -Pauline?

01:04:04

Didn't touch it. Didn't touch it. Can't because there isn't anything earlier than that.

01:04:10

The Carmine Christi, which he did not address, but of course his time of rebuttal is coming up. The Carmine Christi, make sure that he does.

01:04:17

If it is truly is a hymn, it predates Paul's utilization of it because he's using it as a sermon illustration.

01:04:25

They have to know what it is for it to be a sermon illustration. So it comes from an earlier period. Explain how that kind of language can be found in that time period.

01:04:34

That is what is so vitally important at that point in time. And even looking at Mark 13 .32, he did respond to what

01:04:42

I said about that. So I'll go ahead and respond to that. Do you hear what Jesus said? I pointed out that he says, no one, no man, nor the angels, nor the son, but only the father.

01:04:55

He didn't even touch that. He said, it's obvious that's not what Jesus is saying. Why isn't it?

01:05:00

In his own words, he puts himself above men and angels and puts himself into a relationship with God, the father that no

01:05:09

Muslim in this room actually believes he has. You've got to explain that. You've got to deal with that.

01:05:15

And that is from the most primitive material that we have. I mean, it's amazing.

01:05:20

He wants to promote Mark in priority, which is a theory. I even operated on that, said Mark's our earliest gospel.

01:05:26

It's the earliest source we have for the words of Jesus. And then he says, well, you're not operating historically. That's an amazing, amazing statement to make.

01:05:34

And then he says, one of the main reasons that these cannot present the deity of Christ is why? Because these were

01:05:39

Jewish monotheists. What did I say to you? These were Jewish monotheists. And that is why in recognizing what happened in the incarnation and in the outpouring of the

01:05:49

Holy Spirit, they had to fit that into their Jewish monotheism. I am a monotheist.

01:05:54

I can say the Shema and believe it. But the reality is the New Testament writers identified Jesus as Yahweh.

01:06:01

And the presupposition of the Islamic approach to the New Testament is that's impossible. My friends, that's backwards.

01:06:08

You cannot start with your assumption and then read it back into my text. You can't start with your text from 600 years after mine and force its conclusions into mine, especially when

01:06:18

I have yet to find anyone to give me any evidence that the author of the Quran actually knew anything about the contents of the

01:06:24

New Testament at all. At all. Show me where the author of the Quran shows accurate knowledge of what

01:06:30

Christians believed. Show me where he had accurate knowledge of what is contained in the New Testament. In fact, even though he speaks the

01:06:36

Injil, he does not know what is contained in that document. And so you cannot simply turn it around and anachronistically force its conclusions in the

01:06:45

New Testament. That simply isn't going to work. So what have we seen? Who has presented you with documentary evidence on the subject this evening?

01:06:53

I have. Who has given you the theories of higher critical scholars without any documentation in the historical sources?

01:07:01

Shabir has. There you go. There you go. So keep your eye on the ball, what's really going on here.

01:07:10

Watch for someone saying, scholars say, scholars say, and see if actual evidence is given. That's the key to the debate this evening.

01:07:16

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, now listening to James has been very interesting.

01:08:02

How did James respond to my presentation of the five points regarding the conclusion that the original disciples did not consider

01:08:15

Jesus God? The disciples were Jewish monotheists. Well, we know that for a fact.

01:08:21

Everybody agrees on that. We don't have to prove that now to everybody who agrees on it. What does that imply?

01:08:27

It implies that if you do not have any evidence to the contrary, you should not assume that they took anyone other than Yahweh or Jehovah for God.

01:08:35

He says we don't have any documentary evidence, and I didn't present any. What about the Old Testament? The Old Testament is there before Christianity, and this proves conclusively that there is no other

01:08:46

God but Yahweh. There are great creatures. There is the son of man of Daniel, but that son of man is not

01:08:52

God. Actually, it's not the son of man. It is one like a son of man. You get your terminology accurate there,

01:08:59

James. So that one like a son of man, some people have taken it and made it into Jesus and pretended that that means that Jesus is

01:09:08

God. But in the book of Daniel, the one like a son of man is a great angelic being.

01:09:13

True, but that is not God. The Ancient of Days is the one who is

01:09:18

God, and this one like a son of man approaches the Ancient of Days, comes up to his throne, and that shows that there are two separate different beings.

01:09:28

The Speeches and Acts of the Apostles. Well, since we do not have dependable speeches from the disciples, and we have a document in the

01:09:36

New Testament, Acts of the Apostles, which is said to be written by one of the traveling companions of Paul, and that document presents the disciples as in some way teaching

01:09:45

Paulian doctrine, that becomes suspect. Three, I said that there are no writings of the original disciples.

01:09:53

I mentioned 2 Peter, so if we stick with the original 12 disciples, we know that Judas Iscariot, one of them betrayed

01:10:01

Jesus, so he is out, that leaves 11, and then Matthias is added to make 12.

01:10:07

Okay, of these 12 disciples, do you have any original writings from them? No. We have two letters which are said to be from Peter, and I have quoted scholars who have said that these are not

01:10:18

Peter's letters. So then, what do we have? We have a situation where scholars are studying, in this university, in every university in the world, scholars are studying things in detail, and in modern studies, we take a detached perspective, a disinterested approach to what we're studying.

01:10:38

We don't want to force our conclusion onto what we're studying, we just study things and let the conclusion speak for themselves to us.

01:10:46

Of course, everyone has a bias, and one has to be aware of his own bias and try to overcome it as much as possible.

01:10:52

But this is what peer review is about. Somebody comes up with a theory because he wants to get published, and then he gets scathing critical reviews from his peers, and then he's sorry that he actually said something like that.

01:11:03

But what happens eventually is that as a result of this peer review process, eventually the better ideas stick around and the not -so -good ideas get shoved away into the wayside.

01:11:15

Nobody wants to hold on to those ideas. It becomes embarrassing in scholarly circles because further studies are being done from the same disinterested perspective.

01:11:25

When scholars then come up with these conclusions, we cannot just brush the scholars away. But James wants to brush all of these scholars away because James wants to hold on to certain traditional

01:11:35

Christian beliefs which become questionable in the light of modern studies and discoveries. And he's saying, well,

01:11:40

Shabir, you know, you should be afraid of the boogeyman scholar as well because watch out, they're going to come to the

01:11:47

Quran now, and they're going to say things about the Quran. So be afraid of those scholars. Don't quote them. Run away from them.

01:11:53

And I say, why should we be afraid of scholarship? Why should we be afraid of reasoning, of discovery, of study, of examination?

01:12:01

Why should we be afraid of truth? If somebody comes up with the truth, let's know what it is and let's follow it.

01:12:06

He says that somebody said Muhammad does not exist. People have claimed that, but that did not become scholarly consensus.

01:12:14

Even among non -Muslim scholars, in fact, they think that this is a wild idea to say that Muhammad did not exist.

01:12:20

In fact, a certain scholar, Patricia Crone, together with Michael Cook, had written a book in which they had tried to prove such things.

01:12:28

But later on, they themselves abandoned their own ideas. So the idea does not actually hold, although some people who want to somehow disprove

01:12:36

Islam, whether by hook or crook, will still try to champion those ideas. I know James doesn't do that, but all

01:12:42

James is telling me is, Shabir, be afraid of the boogeyman scholar. And I'm saying, well, I'm not afraid.

01:12:48

Let the scholars come. Let us talk to them and debate with them. And let's find out what they have discovered.

01:12:53

And if their discoveries are good, it's based on reason, evidence, and proof, we'll follow that. If we need to adjust or modify our faith in some way to deal with the facts, well, we'll do that.

01:13:01

But so far, you cannot just imagine that the scholars will come up and tell us something that we will not agree with.

01:13:07

He says, well, the same scholars I'm citing reject the virgin birth of Jesus, and they reject the miracles of Jesus, things that Muslims will accept.

01:13:17

Well, how would we respond to that? Scholars have a number of presuppositions and a number of approaches that they're using.

01:13:26

As a Muslim, I will not take all of what the scholars are saying. I will take those things which are proven with evidence and conclusive proof, things which commend themselves to me as a believer in faith.

01:13:39

I can take two approaches. One is a purely historical approach, assuming I know nothing about the religion of Islam.

01:13:46

And then as a second stage, I can ask, okay, having taken that historical approach and seen what the scholars are saying, how does that affect my faith?

01:13:54

Do I need to adjust something in my faith? Or is there something in the scholarship that is not quite right that I need to go down deeper into and discover?

01:14:04

And when I do that... Shabir, this is not on.

01:14:10

This is a debate. You listen here. And seriously, we will just judge you away if that happens again.

01:14:17

Sorry if I said anything the wrong way. I don't mean to provoke anyone or anything like this. So what

01:14:22

I'm saying is that I will pay attention to the scholarship. And then as a second stage,

01:14:27

I will ask, how does that scholarship affect my faith? Do I need to adjust something? Or do I need to go back to that scholarship and see if it's really based on sound evidence and proof that it first appeared to be?

01:14:38

Now, after doing this kind of homework, I am satisfied with my faith as a

01:14:44

Muslim. I don't feel that there's any scholarship out there that has actually disproved the key things that Muslims believe in.

01:14:50

And I have no reason to fear the scholar as a boogeyman. And I can still continue to believe in the

01:14:56

Quran as the word of God. And many of the scholars that we are referring to who are scholars of the

01:15:02

Christian Bible, I'm referring to them as scholars in their own field. They're not scholars of the Quran. So I would refer to scholars of the

01:15:09

Quran for Quranic matters and scholars of the New Testament for New Testament matters, scholars of the

01:15:14

Old Testament for Old Testament matters, every scholar in his field. And a scholar who speaks outside of his field of expertise is just like another lay person.

01:15:23

We might take his opinion and leave it, and it's not worth anything more than the opinion of a lay person.

01:15:28

So in short, James has not given us any reason for ignoring modern scholarship except that the modern scholarship threatens what he believes.

01:15:39

And he's warning Muslims that if you adopt the modern scholarship, then you will also be threatened in your faith.

01:15:45

I don't believe that to be a true threat. I showed that Paul is in conflict with the original disciples of Jesus.

01:15:54

It is clear that Paul would found a church, he would write letters to them, and then he would have to write letters to them again, warning them about the false apostles, who are the false apostles.

01:16:05

It turns out that Paul was teaching one thing and the original disciples of Jesus another thing. For example, when it came to the practice of the law,

01:16:13

Paul was challenged in Jerusalem, in the Jerusalem Council in Acts chapter 15, and then Paul was made to go out and proclaim the food laws, which from his own writings we know he wouldn't have proclaimed.

01:16:26

Romans chapter 14, verse 20, says that all foods are clean. And then in chapter 21 of Acts, he was challenged again to perform the sacrifices in the

01:16:36

Jerusalem Temple. And as all Christians know, Jesus died as a sacrifice once and for all.

01:16:41

There are no more sacrifices for Christians to make. But we see now in Acts of the Apostles that the disciples were making sacrifices, and now they made

01:16:49

Paul also perform animal sacrifices, which we know from his letters he shouldn't have done.

01:16:56

And this shows that there was a deep -seated rift between Paul and the original disciples of Jesus.

01:17:02

And key for our study tonight is that some of these original disciples were going around preaching, according to Paul, another

01:17:09

Jesus. So if we have the one Jesus that is known from Paul's writings, and there is another

01:17:14

Jesus that we know little about, we can only speculate because we don't have original documents from the original disciples of Jesus.

01:17:21

I'm asking you now, who was that original Jesus? And I'm saying that when we look at the Gospels, we can see that there is an original

01:17:27

Jesus who appears in Mark. And yes, not everything in Mark is authentic, as John Bowdoin said, just as the later

01:17:34

Gospels improved the status of Jesus, Mark would have done the same thing as well. And we would only be able to prove this conclusively when we find a prior document to Mark.

01:17:43

But the fact that we cannot prove it conclusively does not allow us to omit the trend and see that it went this way and Jesus was down there from the beginning.

01:17:52

Thank you very much. Okay, we're going to have a cross -examination now.

01:18:07

Just a couple of things. Let's call it a square and say both sides have misbehaved.

01:18:14

We had Muslim prayers, we had Christian shouting. So guys, this is a civil debate.

01:18:22

You wouldn't believe it, but these guys are actually good friends. And it's actually sad that we have a Canadian and American showing us here how to disagree.

01:18:30

This is a good exercise. And if you are getting too emotional and you want to shout something, guys, the audio toy is available for you to go and do that.

01:18:40

This is not a place for it. So please, put your cell phones off, put your prayers off, and close your mouths.

01:18:47

That's what I'm going to ask you now. Guys, we're going to go into the cross -examination section now.

01:18:53

So Shabir is going to have five questions that he can put to James, and James will have two minutes to respond.

01:19:04

So Shabir, take it away. Now, does he have one of these on too?

01:19:23

Does he have one of these on? Hold on, he needs to put something on you. I was hearing that we've got a debate between Islam and Christianity, but the thing that I didn't know is actually, who's winning the basic race competition?

01:19:43

Not even a competition. Shabir wishes he could wear bow ties, but you wouldn't see him under his beard anyway.

01:19:55

I thought about giving him one once. It would be the thing that was never seen. So why bother?

01:20:05

Okay, James, my first question for you is about the passages that you've quoted, showing that the

01:20:14

Jews took Jesus' saying here or there to imply that Jesus is

01:20:20

God. You are aware that Jesus said that you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God, according to John chapter 8.

01:20:30

Now, if these people are determined to kill him, and they're trying to bring up false charges and trumped up evidence against him, do you still want to rely on their testimony that Jesus said something, and therefore he is claiming something that means he's blaspheming?

01:20:46

Are you giving that credence to the Jewish opponents of Jesus? Well, the only two places that I presented, first of all, was in Mark chapter 2, where they considered

01:20:56

Jesus' statement that he could forgive sins to be blasphemy. And that's a fact. They did, because they believe only

01:21:02

God can forgive sins. And then the other was, of course, Mark chapter 14, verses 61 and following, where the high priest tears his garment, which is the sign of great emotional distress, when

01:21:14

Jesus quotes the Son of Man text from Daniel, where the Son of Man appears before the

01:21:19

Ancient of Days in a heavenly context, and is given kingdom, power, dominion, so that all the people worship him.

01:21:27

So monotheists, if you're worshipped, somehow that Son of Man is a divine figure, not a mere creation, just as you have in Revelation chapter 5, where all created order worships

01:21:37

Jesus. So, if your question is, do those texts indicate that they found

01:21:43

Jesus' claims to be blasphemous? Of course. If you're asking, well, then why would they seek to kill him?

01:21:50

And then you just quoted from John chapter 8, well, they tried to kill him in John chapter 8, because he used the I Am statements of himself in 24 and 858, but that very same gospel in chapter 11 has

01:22:01

Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and the first thing that the

01:22:06

Jews do when they see the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead is they gather together. This isn't all Jews, obviously.

01:22:12

These are the people who Jesus accuses of having committed the unpardonable sin. They are so twisted in their religiosity that they are now identifying the

01:22:22

Spirit of God as Satan. The first thing they do when they see Lazarus come out from the dead is do what? They gather together and say, how can we destroy him?

01:22:30

Now, that's the biblical testimony of what was going on there. There's a consistent way of understanding all of that.

01:22:36

So, yes, it's very clear to me that in Mark chapter 14, the high priest understands

01:22:41

Jesus' words to be a statement of blasphemy, and they convict him on the basis of that. Now, my second question is related to that one.

01:22:49

Okay, can I just ask for clarification? Are we just doing these five and then we're doing audience, so there's not gonna be any give and take between us?

01:23:01

I'm just questioning. I just didn't have it in front of me, so I just want to know what the game plan is. Okay, all right, that's cool. Yeah, so my second question is related to the first one.

01:23:11

As much as I'm asking you, should we really believe the Jewish opponents of Jesus? Now I'm going to ask you about all these passages in which you quoted this evil spirit or that unclean spirit or a legion of unclean spirits declaring that Jesus is the son of God.

01:23:25

Now, of course, that doesn't prove that Jesus is God. It's only proving that some evil spirit claimed that Jesus is the son of God.

01:23:31

But are you saying that we should believe the evil spirits? I am saying that Mark obviously includes these to demonstrate

01:23:39

Jesus' power in the spiritual realm and to demonstrate that the spirits had better discernment of who

01:23:44

Jesus was than the devil. They recognized, since they're not limited in the same way we are by what they can see, they recognized

01:23:56

Jesus' true nature. It's not that, oh, believe whatever demons say. Demons are deceptive. But there is a unanimous fear on their part of Jesus' authority over them which no other apostle or man ever had.

01:24:09

And so it was not just them, it's not just their testimony, but it's the fact that, you know, you just said, well, you're gonna believe what the

01:24:17

Jewish opponents of Jesus said. Again, it is very clear that the intention of Mark, the intention of John, the intention of Luke, the intention of Matthew, is to present this information to communicate to us that Jesus is more than a mere rasul.

01:24:31

He is something very special and when you allow all of what they say to speak, and this is what the sources that you rely upon,

01:24:38

I've never used the term boogeyman, you introduced that. I have introduced this standard of using a double standard, of using uneven weights.

01:24:47

And what I'm saying is sound scholarship, which is much more exegetical and in the text, sound scholarship that also happens to have the same worldview as the authors of the text you're dealing with, that sound scholarship recognizes that it was the intention of these authors to present

01:25:05

Jesus in this way. And since they do go, this is the earliest material we have, it does take us back to that primitive period and demonstrates that the idea that this alleged exaltation of Jesus takes place decades later and doesn't come to its final conclusion until Nicaea or whatever else it might be, simply can't stand up to allowing the text to speak for itself.

01:25:26

Now, you cited the Carmen Christi from Philippians chapter 2, where Paul is obviously referring to the book of Isaiah chapter 45.

01:25:37

Now, are you aware that Paul has actually taken a reference to Yahweh and then made that a reference to Jesus, and so he has in fact here modified the original belief in one

01:25:53

God, Yahweh, and now he has made Jesus this Yahweh. And if Jesus is this

01:25:59

Yahweh, then how could Yahweh be Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?

01:26:04

Because in that case, Jesus is not part of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. You have Yahweh who's

01:26:10

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and then you have Jesus. Explain that. This is the essence of what you're going to have to come to understand in our book,

01:26:18

Shabir. This is what we've got to talk about, because this is what, my friend, you do not understand what we believe here. You do not understand it.

01:26:25

With all the love in my heart, I pray for you, but you don't understand what we believe here. Yahweh refers to the being of God.

01:26:35

There are three persons that share that one being, therefore they are identified with that name Yahweh. You are assuming

01:26:42

Unitarianism with the name Yahweh, that Yahweh can only apply to one person. That is the fundamental erroneous assumption of Islam that I just cannot get my

01:26:51

Muslim friends to recognize. You've got to get past it and realize what we're really saying. You are exactly right that what

01:26:58

I don't think Paul did, because you didn't hear my statement on this, I don't think it's Paul that made this up. He's recording it for us, but the only way this could be a sermon illustration to Philippians is if they already know this fragment of a hymn.

01:27:10

So what the early church before Paul was already confessing was that the language used of Yahweh in the

01:27:16

Old Testament is appropriately applied to Jesus of Nazareth. I know, Shabir, that that's an amazing assertion, but that's the whole assertion of Christianity.

01:27:25

That's the only thing that makes sense. You see, you're telling us this text of mine is filled with contradictions right and left.

01:27:31

Why? Because you demand to enforce this view of God upon it. When you don't make that demand and allow the writers of the

01:27:40

New Testament to define their own categories and their own position, all those contradictions all of a sudden disappear.

01:27:46

And that's exactly what you request for the Quran. That's what we have to have for the New Testament. So how do I explain it?

01:27:52

You're exactly right. To me, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess. To what? All to the glory of God the

01:27:57

Father. Who is this one God for Paul? We saw it in Le Shema verse

01:28:03

Corinthians 8. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all identified by the one name Yahweh has become flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

01:28:10

That is the whole primitive message, and you just demonstrated it right there. My next question.

01:28:16

Is that three or that? This is number four coming up. I can't even keep track of that.

01:28:23

All right, now Bruce Chilton has written an article and published in Bible Review entitled,

01:28:30

The Son of Man, Who Was He? And he has shown that Jesus, in using the title Son of Man, could in some cases be referring to himself as an ordinary human being, and he could be referring to that angelic being that is described in Daniel, and he could be describing a future figure, a messianic figure, who is not himself.

01:28:53

Now in the passages you quoted from Mark's Gospel, is there any one of these passages in which Jesus says,

01:28:58

I am the Son of Man? Oh yes, definitely. Not only the one before the high priest, but the one that was exactly preceding that.

01:29:07

I'd have to bring it up, but it was in chapter 13 where you see the Son of Man descending. There's at least two right there.

01:29:14

Chilton's article has been thoroughly examined. In fact, have you seen the entire book edited by Hurtado and Masser?

01:29:21

I'm sorry, I would recommend to you the book edited by Hurtado and Masser that go in depth in response to Chilton at that particular point in time.

01:29:33

I just read it about two months ago. And again, I have to dispute, Shabir, with your assertion, where he said,

01:29:40

Chilton has shown. The appropriate way of saying is, Chilton has argued. But as you know, the proper scholarship would be to say, okay, you made your argument, but if an entire book has been published refuting your conclusions, that would mean he has not shown.

01:29:55

He has simply asserted. And so when you say Chilton has shown that Jesus did this, I would argue that the people in this room are capable, more than capable, of listening, going back to every one of the references that I gave where Jesus uses

01:30:09

Son of Man language of himself, and determining for themselves whether Jesus is simply saying,

01:30:16

I'm just a regular dude, which is why everybody goes insane when he says it. Or is it in the context of exercising spiritual power?

01:30:25

Is it in the context of being something other than merely a man? I think everyone in this room, and I like to demythologize scholarship.

01:30:33

That means I think everybody in here is capable of examining these conclusions. They may not have all the background information, but they can understand what the conclusions are.

01:30:41

And I think when you look at what's actually found in Mark, you will see that that's exactly how he's functioning. That's exactly how he's using the phrase.

01:30:50

So my last question. Paul, in his letters, is railing against the super apostles, the false apostles, the pillars of the church, and he says that they added nothing to my gospel.

01:31:01

And, of course, he says that even when I had my disciple Titus with me, they could not force him to be circumcised.

01:31:09

And then when he went to Jerusalem, according to Acts chapter 15, he circumcised Timothy. Now, I'm wondering then, who are the false apostles that he's railing against?

01:31:22

Are they the original disciples of Jesus, or followers of the original disciples of Jesus? Well, since we keep bringing up F .F.

01:31:28

Bruce, I would direct you to his discussion of it because he will repudiate and refute the idea that this has anything to do with Peter, James, and John.

01:31:36

These are the ones that are troubling him in Corinth, primarily. They're associated with having some kind of a special capacity or ability to speak that make them better than the apostle

01:31:46

Paul. The reason that Timothy is circumcised is because Timothy is going to be dealing with Jewish people and going into a

01:31:52

Jewish context. Titus is not, therefore he is not. Therefore, it's a matter of making yourself all things to all people.

01:31:58

I would point to John Murray and Douglas Moo and all of these tremendous, in -depth, consistent scholarly commentaries in the

01:32:07

Pauline epistles that give an in -depth analysis that demonstrates that the idea that you have to turn this into this radical theory that Paul was in conflict with Peter.

01:32:18

Fundamentally, what you're having to say is Paul's a liar and Luke's a liar because according to Acts and according to Paul's epistles, that's not the case.

01:32:28

Fundamentally, you have to start off and have to say, these men are dishonest. I'm going to start with the assumption that they're guilty until proven innocent.

01:32:35

Then you come to the conclusion that they're guilty. What a shocking thing that is too. You were just saying that I was reasoning in a circle.

01:32:41

This popular theory that you're promoting is a vicious circle that most people just don't even seem to recognize.

01:32:49

Again, go to the solid materials found in people like Moo and Murray and others for a sound demonstration that, again, the best and most consistent way to interpret these things has nothing to do with starting off by calling

01:33:02

Paul and Luke liars, which is what you have to do. Okay, I just want to say, which is quite remarkable, that all of your time, you were supposed to have two minutes, and it was between 1 .50

01:33:14

and 1 .60 that he stopped. It's called a stopwatch.

01:33:22

It's a cool invention. In fact,

01:33:31

I have told myself a thousand times, I am going to buy Shabir one of those really cool egg timers so you can stop using your watch.

01:33:39

I mean, how many debates have you done, and you're still using your watch?

01:33:45

This way I don't lose my stopwatch. You don't lose your, yeah, okay, all right. So, Jay, how was your first question?

01:33:55

Nothing like having an unbiased moderator. Okay, so same rules, five questions, two minutes.

01:34:06

You've got that. Yes, wonderful, yeah, exactly. Okay, and guys, by the way, you guys are going to ask questions in a short while.

01:34:15

These are good examples of how questions work. You've got that little squiggly thing at the end, you know, the dot underneath it.

01:34:21

It's really cool. All right, question one. All right, thank you. Shabir, I simply have to ask you, why is it impossible that Matthew was a disciple of Jesus, an eyewitness, and that he, in writing his gospel, was drawing on the same oral tradition that Mark was drawing on, and hence that Matthew is an eyewitness account, and that his source is simply the same oral tradition that Mark was using?

01:34:51

Why is that an impossibility from your perspective? Well, in historical reconstructions, we do not speak of impossibilities like this, but we speak of what is more probable and plausible.

01:35:02

When Mark is compared with Matthew, it is clear that Matthew has improved the tradition by using the words of Mark, but he has modified them somewhat.

01:35:13

So, for example, James Dunn has shown this in his book, Jesus the Evidence, where he shows that, for example, where the man comes up to Jesus and says, good teacher, what must

01:35:22

I do to have eternal life? And Jesus replies, why do you call me good?

01:35:27

No one is good but God alone. So in Mark's gospel, Jesus repudiates that he is good, but in Matthew's gospel, we have similar wording.

01:35:35

Instead of the person asking Jesus by addressing him as good teacher, he says, teacher, what good deed must

01:35:44

I do? We have all kinds of sound effects in this room. Very interesting ones, yeah. So what

01:35:51

Dunn has shown is that Matthew has taken the word good from good teacher, and he has put it with good thing.

01:35:59

So it's no longer good teacher, it's teacher, what good thing must I do? And this, to me, is what the

01:36:06

Quran teaches, that the people have changed the gospels. They have changed the words from the right places.

01:36:13

It's not only here, but you see, consistently, both Matthew and Luke have improved the tradition. You have said in your book that Mark's gospel ends at chapter 16, verse 8.

01:36:23

Now, it ends with the women saying nothing to anyone because they were afraid. Problem, how did anyone learn about this?

01:36:29

Matthew improves it by saying they ran away with fear and great joy and rushed to tell the disciples.

01:36:35

And Luke changes it in a different way, saying, returning from the tomb, they told this to the disciples and all of the rest.

01:36:42

So we can see that, very simply, Mark is in the middle with some problem, and Matthew and Luke improves it to remove the problem.

01:36:51

Okay, I'm going to burn my second question by simply following up and saying, you didn't hear the question.

01:36:58

Let me try it again. Your answer demonstrated that you have not even considered the perspective that I and many other scholars would present, that Matthew is drawing from the same oral tradition as Mark.

01:37:15

You assumed the relationship of Matthew slavishly following Mark and editing him, but you didn't answer the question that I asked.

01:37:24

Let me try it again. Going to Jimmy Dunn is not going to allow you to do this because he doesn't deal with this either. Why is it impossible?

01:37:33

Why do you not even bring into the realm of possibility the idea that Matthew is drawing from the same oral tradition that Mark is without editing

01:37:45

Mark? For example, to use your Mark 10 and the

01:37:51

Rich Young Ruler. Why can't it be that the oral tradition that Matthew receives records it in that way and Mark records it in his way?

01:38:01

Why is that not, why can that not even enter into your consideration as it did in your response?

01:38:07

So I heard your question and I answered it by saying that, I'm not saying that this is impossible, but I'm saying that the scholarly work which has gone into the careful examination of the differences between Mark and Matthew leads to the very clear conclusion that Matthew is using the precise wording of Mark.

01:38:24

So there's a literary relationship between the two and it's not to be explained by an oral tradition.

01:38:30

Let me give another example which Robert Stein has given. You have a parenthetical remark in Mark's report of an event and then the same parenthetical remark is given in Matthew's account where Jesus speaks about the end times and he says, well, he wouldn't have said, but that's inserted in Mark's account, let the reader understand.

01:38:51

Now, the same parenthetical remark is in Matthew's gospel, let the reader understand at the very same point.

01:38:58

Same thing with the healing of the paralytic that you mentioned in your presentation. Jesus is healing the paralytic and then he turns to the crowd at the particular moment and the same parenthetical turning to the crowd is there in Matthew's gospel.

01:39:12

What we see is that Matthew is using the written source Mark. It's not that Mark and Matthew are using oral traditions.

01:39:20

Now, you ask me why don't I consider that? I don't have to do this work because this work, we started with that.

01:39:26

The Christian history started by thinking that Matthew, Mark, and Luke just simply recorded oral tradition.

01:39:33

Mark got it from Peter, oral tradition. Matthew wrote what he knew from Jesus. He was a disciple of Jesus.

01:39:40

That for many centuries was the prevailing opinion and then scholars from about the mid -1800s started to study this more carefully and they came up with this firm conclusion that it's not that the three gospels are borrowing all from the common pool of oral tradition but that Matthew and Luke are using

01:39:59

Mark as a literary source and they are also using another document which might be referred to conveniently as Q.

01:40:09

In regards to Daniel chapter 7, where I believe you said that the

01:40:16

Son of Man is not deity in Daniel chapter 7, could you please explain how it is that the

01:40:23

Son of Man receives service in Hebrew but in the Greek Septuagint from which the quotations are taken in the

01:40:32

New Testament. The term is Latruo. Now there's two primary terms for worship, Latruo and Proskuneo.

01:40:38

Latruo is the highest form of worship Jesus receives both but here it's

01:40:43

Latruo, such as in the temple. In light of your interpretation of Daniel 7, could you tell us what does it mean for the

01:40:52

Son of Man to receive Latruo and how could that not be directly the reason why the high priest tore his garment and said, you've heard the blasphemy?

01:41:04

What's going on in Mark 14? The Septuagint obviously is not a final proof for what is the truth in God's scripture because since the original is

01:41:15

Hebrew, we need to know what is in the Hebrew. If somebody writing in Greek has taken the

01:41:20

Greek version and made that a source or basis of their argument, they have misconstrued what the

01:41:26

Word of God was about. It was originally in Hebrew. We can't take an English translation and make that the basis of the

01:41:33

Quranic argument. We have to go to the Arabic. Similar here, we have to go to the Hebrew. In Mark 14, the high priest is trying to find any argument to disqualify

01:41:43

Jesus and try to put him to death. So Jesus says something which does not qualify as blasphemy and then the high priest tears his garment and says, the guy has committed blasphemy.

01:41:52

What else do we need? Notice that in Mark 14, I think you got it wrong, James. Jesus was not saying there,

01:42:00

I am the son of man. He was asked, are you the son of the blessed? And he said, I am. And you will see the son of man coming.

01:42:07

But he didn't say, I am that son of man. Similarly, in Mark 13, he didn't say,

01:42:13

I am that son of man. So you need to read that again. In short, Jesus said nothing in this trial before the high priest that would mean that he's committing blasphemy.

01:42:26

It is true that he says things which Muslims would not agree with. But we don't agree with everything that is represented in the gospel according to Mark.

01:42:33

John Bowdoin said that if we could find the source that existed before Mark, we would see that Mark has improved the image of Jesus just as the later gospels have improved it as well.

01:42:43

Mark is a theological document. As in the book, the history of apologetics, it is mentioned that normally apologists today are taking the gospels as the basis and the fact that they need to present to the world.

01:42:59

But the gospels themselves are apologetic material to start with. They have already done the apologetic work.

01:43:07

Now, given that our debate was on what the earliest sources, do these earliest sources indicate that the followers of Jesus viewed him as God?

01:43:16

I gave you the Carmen Christi. And in your question, you seem to have admitted that what we have in the

01:43:25

Carmen Christi is a view of Jesus as deity, not just in the utilization of a passage about Yahweh, but also in the assertion,

01:43:38

I would assume, that he eternally existed in the form of God, so on and so forth. If in point of fact, that is the

01:43:45

Carmen Christi, hymn to Christ as to God, that predates Paul's utilization of it, does that not establish?

01:43:53

Let me put it this way. Can you show me anything earlier than that data that would demonstrate that it somehow is not showing that the earliest

01:44:05

Christians believe in the deity of Christ and hence fulfilling my burden in this debate? Earlier than this, as I mentioned, is the

01:44:12

Old Testament. We do not have any earlier New Testament writings than the writings of Paul, and Paul has represented

01:44:19

New Testament Christianity as the winner, writing after a conflict.

01:44:25

If you want to know the other side of that conflict, we have to start with the realization that the original disciples of Jesus were

01:44:31

Jewish monotheists. They would have gotten their theology from the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament, there is only one

01:44:37

God, and this is the central teaching of the Old Testament. The most important teaching is the first and second commandment of the 10.

01:44:46

Paul is representing this Carmen Christi as a hymn that he somehow stumbled upon or received, okay?

01:44:54

But from whom? Some unknown source. We cannot, based on some unknown source, construct our theology, even if he did.

01:45:02

That's up to him. Now, in Paul using this hymn and representing

01:45:08

Jesus in this way, we can see that he has actually departed from the Old Testament because he has taken an

01:45:14

Old Testament passage that referred to Yahweh, and he has made that refer to Jesus. He is now departing from that original commandment which says that you should have no other

01:45:24

God but Yahweh. Clearly, Jesus was a human being. In the book of Numbers, chapter 23, verse 19, it says

01:45:30

God is not a man and not the son of man. So if Jesus is a man to all appearances, well then, you cannot take him to be

01:45:38

God. He cannot be Yahweh. He is not Yahweh. And by taking him to be somehow Yahweh, as Paul is now doing in his letter, even in a tantalizing way,

01:45:48

Paul is actually departing from the Old Testament scripture. Moreover, Paul has said in his letters that he did not get his teachings from any man.

01:45:57

He got it as a revelation from the Christ. So in that case, we cannot claim that Paul is getting this from the original disciples of Jesus.

01:46:04

In other words, this is pure invention on the part of Paul, and there is no reason why Muslims, or Christians, or Jews should believe in him.

01:46:12

You have one second. Okay, so I have one more, don't

01:46:19

I? Yeah. This is it. I'll make this five seconds shorter. Shabir, I think you just gave the debate to me.

01:46:26

Tell me why I'm wrong. The thesis of the debate was the earliest sources, which represent the earliest disciples of Jesus, believe in the deity of Christ, and you just confirmed that the

01:46:40

Carmen Christi does that. And when I asked what earlier sources you have, you went to the

01:46:45

Old Testament, which was finished being written 400 years before the Christian church began.

01:46:51

So why can't I now say that really your whole argument is that I simply won't accept what the early

01:46:59

Christians believed, because I interpret the Old Testament differently than they did, but the fact is the earliest

01:47:06

Christians did believe this. I just say that they were wrong. I did not hand the debate to you.

01:47:16

I've argued that when we know for a fact that they were Jewish monotheists, and this is not disputed by anyone, we should not assume that they held to anyone being

01:47:27

God other than Yahweh without documentary evidence. As you rightly have said, let's look at the documentary evidence.

01:47:34

So what do we have before the disciples? It's the Old Testament. What does the Old Testament teach? All Jews, including the early disciples of Jesus, that they should have no other

01:47:43

God but Yahweh. Moreover, I've argued that Jesus himself taught that he was not

01:47:48

God. And this is clear in the gospels where Jesus, for example, says, why do you call me good?

01:47:53

No one is good but God alone. When Jesus said something that seems to indicate that he doesn't know when the last day will occur, well, that would mean that he is not the omniscient

01:48:03

God. When it is clear that Jesus had limitations in his power when he tried to heal the blind man twice, for example.

01:48:10

In all of these instances, it is clear that Jesus is a man and not God. Moreover, in Acts of the

01:48:15

Apostles, even though the story has been rewritten to present the disciples of Jesus as though they were towing to some extent the

01:48:23

Pauline line, still we see that the disciples of Jesus were simply preaching that Jesus is the

01:48:28

Messiah. That is how Acts chapter five ends, that they went around everywhere teaching that Jesus is the

01:48:33

Messiah. And it is Paul in chapter nine, verse 20, of Acts of the Apostles who went into the synagogue and straightaway began preaching that Jesus is the

01:48:41

Son of God. Even Acts of the Apostles recognizes that there is a kind of evolution in the presentation of Jesus.

01:48:47

Earlier disciples presenting him as a man, a human being, the Messiah of God. Later on,

01:48:52

Paul raising him to the status of Lord and Son of God. And we see this in Paul's writings when we see that the four gospels, when lined up, show a clear distinction between Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

01:49:05

And then on the other hand, we see John's gospel saying that Jesus is the monogenous Son. It is clear that there is an evolution.

01:49:15

Let's give him a hand. I was going to work now, is let's see after this.

01:49:30

Remember, 50 seconds, and I'm coming in as well. Good evening to you.

01:49:36

The New Testament teaches consistently that Jesus is the giver of eternal life.

01:49:44

And in the story of the rich young ruler, he comes to Jesus inquiring to inherit eternal life.

01:49:52

The answer that Jesus gives him at the end is come and follow me. So the eternal life is like the

01:50:00

God kind of life. Does that not indicate that Jesus alone is the one giver of life, is divine?

01:50:12

And the passage, of course, the passage by itself does not show that Jesus gives eternal life, but rather that passage shows that by following Jesus, you have eternal life.

01:50:23

And more than this, Jesus said, if you will enter into life, keep the commandments. And the man asked, how do you read them?

01:50:29

And Jesus repeated the Shema Israel. Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.

01:50:35

And it is interesting for our study tonight that in Matthew's reproduction of this story, he omits the

01:50:41

Shema Israel, which is an emphasis on the belief in one God. And that demonstrates my theory that there is an evolution in the presentation of Jesus.

01:50:52

And the later gospels are making Jesus into somehow God and diminishing that emphasis on the one

01:50:58

God that we know from the Old Testament. There is a departure there from the pristine monotheism into what would later on become

01:51:05

Trinitarian Christianity. So when Jesus says to the man, if you must enter into life, keep the commandments, well, that's what

01:51:12

Muslims are trying to do. That's what Jews are trying to do. But it was Paul who said, you don't have to keep the commandments.

01:51:21

Commandments have been nailed to the cross in the writing up to the Ephesians in chapter two, verse 15 and 16.

01:51:27

It says that Jesus abolished the law. And we know that Matthew reacted to that by saying in Matthew chapter five, verse 17, that you must keep all of the law even to the last jot and tittle.

01:51:39

Paul wrote in Romans and Galatians that the law is abolished and you're not saved by works.

01:51:47

And James responds to that. Well, whoever wrote the letter to James, the letter named

01:51:52

James, in chapter two responds to Romans chapter three and Galatians chapter two, rather Galatians chapter three,

01:52:04

Romans chapter four. So we see that it does not teach that Jesus is God in that passage.

01:52:10

It really shows that God is someone else. It breaks my heart. It honestly really does, that my friend

01:52:16

Shabir does not understand the apostle Paul and has become so biased against him.

01:52:22

What he just said about what Paul was teaching is nowhere near what the apostle Paul actually taught. And if you would just allow the apostle to speak for himself, you would see that that is the case.

01:52:34

He does not simply say the law has been done away with. That is not an honest reading of Paul. You've got to realize these sources, these scholars, they cut

01:52:43

Paul into parts and say, well, he didn't write this, he didn't write that. And so they can get rid of Paul's own words that would correct them and hence misrepresent him.

01:52:51

But notice you just start with the assumption of Paul's guilt. You start with the assumption, the accusation that Matthew somehow knew,

01:52:59

Matthew was responding to this, James was responding to Paul. There is no historical evidence. I've written a huge chapter on this very issue.

01:53:07

You do not have to read James as being contradictory to Paul in any way, shape or form. That's not even the natural way to do it. Yeah. Well, of course, it is absolutely without merit and utterly absurd to say that any

01:54:14

Christian is defending the idea of Greek mythological gods. And if anyone asserts that the incarnation of Jesus has anything to do with Greek mythology, they don't know anything about Greek mythology.

01:54:24

They don't anything know about what Christians believe either. So the fundamental answer to the question is, the question is invalid.

01:54:31

To answer it more fully in regards, and I forgot to start this, and so you just kept letting me know here, I apologize. But to answer the question, the prophecies of the one that was going to come were fulfilled and the writers of the

01:54:43

New Testament recognized that. They saw in Isaiah 9, El Gabor, Avi -Ad. These are

01:54:48

Hebrew terms that are fulfilled in Jesus. He is Emmanuel. You have all of these prophetic things that are fulfilled in Jesus.

01:54:55

They look beyond what they could even begin to understand. And in the incarnation, you have monotheism.

01:55:02

There is no tritheism. There's no Greek mythology. And any type of even suggestion that there is a parallel there, again, demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of not only what

01:55:11

Greek mythology was about, but what about Christian theology is about what the New Testament teaches. So there's just no basis to the question.

01:55:20

For my response, I'd like to emphasize the first part of the question without reference to this part about Greek mythology.

01:55:26

Just from the Old Testament, Numbers 23, verse 19 says that God is not a man nor the son of man.

01:55:32

And then Malachi 3, verse 12 says, I am Yahweh, I do not change. So if Yahweh is not a man and not the son of man, and he does not change, and that is the teaching to the

01:55:42

Jewish people, then God now comes down after giving this teaching to the Jewish people, and he comes down as a man.

01:55:48

What does he do? He makes it necessary for them to think that he's committing blasphemy by claiming now to be a

01:55:53

God because he couldn't have been according to his own teachings. And then they crucify him. And then that turns out to be great because that was

01:56:00

God's plan to die for the sins of the world. And meanwhile, he had given them a law that says, follow this law and you will be forgiven and do all of these sacrifices and you'll be forgiven.

01:56:11

So nothing really makes sense. How does it make sense to do this? It would have God contradicting himself all over the place.

01:56:18

That's not the proper theology. What's that?

01:56:24

That's a question for Jeremy. When we get to heaven and look upon God, we expect to see a

01:56:32

God -man or God -spirit. If you say God -spirit, in the book of Jeremiah, we are told that Jehovah is seated on the throne, but possesses the livers of a man.

01:56:44

If you say spirit, we are told in the Torah that he was created in the likeness on the livers of God.

01:56:53

There are certain mysteries that we do not understand. How exactly is God? How to conceive of God? But that does not mean that we should pick upon any sort of conception and make that our

01:57:02

God. One of the previous questioners spoke about Greek mythology in which people have all kinds of gods.

01:57:07

And in some religions to this day, people imagine gods and goddesses and they get married, they have children and the child is a

01:57:15

God as well. Well, in the Old Testament, it is very clear that there is only one God and that God is not a man nor the son of man.

01:57:23

Numbers chapter 23, verse 19. So there's no way that we should interpret any passage of the

01:57:28

Old Testament to make it contradict unless we're trying to be like those scholars that James doesn't like who are trying to find contradictions in the

01:57:37

Old Testament. But if we read the Old Testament as a consistent document, there may be puzzles, there may be creatures of God who are great and they look like a human being and maybe they're sitting on a throne.

01:57:47

There are images and visions that people conceive of like Ezekiel and Jeremiah and other visionaries.

01:57:55

That does not mean that you should let this detract from the main original teaching. There are 10 commandments which

01:58:00

God took pains to write on tablets and gave to Moses. And now Charlton Heston stars as Moses.

01:58:09

The 10 commandments of the first two are about oneness of God and not having anything that resembles

01:58:16

God. The first commandment God says, write it on your doorposts, band it to your wrists, tie it to your foreheads so you don't forget this.

01:58:24

Hero Israel, Jehovah your God, Yahweh your God is one God. So then we have

01:58:31

Numbers 23, 19. God is not a man nor the son of man. How much more do we have to emphasize this?

01:58:36

Don't make God into a man. Malachi chapter 3, verse 12 says God does not change.

01:58:42

He never was a man. He never will be a man. From everlasting to everlasting, according to Psalm 83,

01:58:48

He is God. Well, we need to correct this utter misapprehension of Numbers 23, 19 because when you use verses that I use to defend my view of God as if you think you're arguing against me, you don't know what

01:59:00

I believe. God is not a man. He is God. That does not mean He cannot enter into His own creation.

01:59:06

Jesus was not eternally a man. The word became flesh at a point in time. The incarnation took place at a point in time.

01:59:12

It is not something that's been eternal. So when you say God is not man nor the son of man, He should lie is actually what it's about.

01:59:18

That has nothing to do with what we are saying that God has the ability to enter into His own creation and He did in the person of Jesus Christ.

01:59:25

Numbers 23, 19 is not opposed in any way, shape, or form to what we are saying because the only way it's being interpreted is, well, and what this means is and He cannot enter into.

01:59:36

But you see, that would mean He'd have to cease being God. We don't say that He ceased being God. We believe there's one God who at a particular point in time became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

01:59:45

We're not saying anything different than that. Numbers 23, 19 doesn't contradict it. They reconciled that through what's called the hypostatic union, the relationship of the divine human and Jesus.

02:00:25

There is nothing in the Christian assertion that says the being of God changes. So, I am God, I change not, has nothing to do with, we're not saying

02:00:31

God's being changed. And if you could say, well, but His experience changed, well, Allah's experience changed when

02:00:37

He created, so you can't go that direction either. So, you have the divine nature of the sun does not cease being the divine nature.

02:00:44

He does not cease being, you know, God does not cease being infinite. And the human aspect of Jesus, there's a intimate connection, but there's no intermingling.

02:00:53

So, you don't end up with like a 50 % God, 50 % man. You don't have some sort of a demigod type thing, which is why the

02:00:59

Greek mythology stuff is so silly. What you do have is a true human nature. And so,

02:01:04

God does not cease being eternal. And it's interesting, the question you're really dealing with is what lies behind the striking language that's found in 1

02:01:14

Corinthians, when Paul says, if the rulers of this age had understood, they would not have crucified the

02:01:21

Lord of glory. Now, how do you crucify the Lord of glory?

02:01:26

You have an attribution of a physical reality to one who has eternally been non -physical.

02:01:34

And so, clearly the incarnation is in His mind, but the reality is that Jesus is one person with two natures.

02:01:41

And so, to answer your question, there is no limitation of the infinite. The infinite does not cease being infinite.

02:01:47

There is no infinitizing of the finite because there's no mixture of the natures.

02:01:53

But the relationship is you have one person with two natures, whereas we are one person with only one nature.

02:01:59

And so, that was the way philosophically that the later church especially dealt with the biblical data that spoke to the nature of the person of Christ.

02:02:11

For my response to that, I would say that what actually happened is that over time, people began to take

02:02:16

Jesus to be God. First, they thought he's the son of God. And then they thought literally the son of God. And then they thought, well, the only son of God.

02:02:23

And then they thought, well, he must be like God. Well, he must be God as well. So, through this evolution of thinking, eventually they took a man and made him

02:02:30

God. And the idea that he was a man is so clear that they could not refuse that. And now they have a man whom they made

02:02:36

God. And now they're wondering, how can we reconcile the fact that he's a man, which is known to everybody? And now they believe that he is

02:02:43

God. It is an irreconcilable belief, but people pretend that it's reconcilable.

02:02:49

But the questioner is right. It is a contradiction. To say that the man is God is like saying that you saw a square circle.

02:02:57

Either it's a square in which it's got four sides, or it's a circle in which it's got no sides or no corners.

02:03:03

You cannot have a square circle. You cannot have a God -man, perfect and imperfect at the same time.

02:03:09

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid you don't have time for questions. That's the only time for questions that we're gonna have, since we are lifting off.

02:03:18

No, we are gonna have a chance now for the political battles. And Shapiro's gonna have an opportunity to do that.

02:03:24

So you guys can take your seats. And thank you for behaving yourself. You can give him a hand. Shabir, Shabir.

02:03:39

Shut up. I think the one that is on you, it has to go on the microphone. The other microphone.

02:04:06

Now, folks, for this third rebuttal,

02:04:12

I would like to say that I presented five reasons for thinking that the original disciples of Jesus did not consider

02:04:19

Jesus to be God. My first reason is that the disciples were Jewish, monotheists.

02:04:25

And it is very clear to Jewish monotheists that Yahweh is the only God, and that that God is not a human being.

02:04:32

In John chapter six, we have Jesus speaking to the Jews, and he says...

02:04:37

Just wait a second. Did anybody just... Did you relax? That seems relaxed to you.

02:04:45

Okay. And Jesus refers to his father as the one whom the

02:04:51

Jews say is their God. Well, that simply means that Jehovah, the

02:04:56

God of the Jews, is his father. And since Jehovah or Yahweh is his father, that means

02:05:01

Jesus is not Jehovah. And James says that Jehovah is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And if Jehovah is

02:05:07

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and Jesus is not Jehovah, then Jesus is neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost.

02:05:13

To me, it is very simple. Though James will come back and try to make them one by saying that Yahweh is the name of the being, and the being is in three persons, and the name can apply to each of the three persons.

02:05:26

Well, this is making anything mean anything you want it to mean, and not sticking to your original definitions.

02:05:32

Define your God and stick to your definition, and then we'll be clear. Define Jesus and stick to your definition.

02:05:38

The disciples of Jesus would have been clear about this. It is clear that the speeches and acts of the apostles actually show that the disciples of Jesus maintained monotheism, and they maintained the belief that Jesus was a human being who acted on behalf of God, and who did miracles through God's help and power, in Acts chapter two, for example.

02:06:01

But all of these speeches of Peter and others and acts of the apostles cannot be dependable. Many scholars, for example, the

02:06:09

Interpreter's Bible Dictionary, and many other scholars show that you cannot rely on these as actual sayings of the disciples.

02:06:18

They are compositions of the author of Acts. Acts is writing the kinds of things which he thought the disciples must have said.

02:06:26

But then we do not have any dependable information then, other than to rely on the presumption that these were monotheists, and they would not have taken

02:06:33

Jesus to be God. Third, there are writings in the New Testament which claim to be from some of the disciples of Jesus, but these are now acknowledged to be pseudonymous works, falsely named.

02:06:44

For example, 2 Peter. And I've cited a conservative Christian scholar, Richard Balcombe, who admits that this letter is not from Peter, in which case somebody wrote it saying that Peter wrote it, and that is a false attribution.

02:06:58

What we have then is that the New Testament is composed largely of the writings of Paul, and we have followers of Paul writing letters like 2

02:07:09

Peter, trying to show that Peter was in league with Paul, because that's what the second letter of Peter does.

02:07:17

We are really getting the history presented by the winners, and it is made to seem that this is the universal history.

02:07:25

It is not. It is a one -sided history from people who went a different way than the teachings of the original disciples of Jesus.

02:07:34

Four, I've shown that Paul was in conflict with the original disciples of Jesus. He names them as Peter, James, and John.

02:07:41

Elsewhere, he does not name them, he calls them pillars of the church, and he says what they were means nothing to me.

02:07:47

James quotes the Carmen Christi, but Paul says I did not get this from any human being. I got my teachings from a revelation from Jesus.

02:07:55

So that means we cannot say that what Paul was teaching was what the original disciples were teaching, and it is clear that Paul was teaching a

02:08:05

Jesus that is different from what these other teachers were teaching. He calls their

02:08:10

Jesus another Jesus, but as Bruce Chilton points out in his introduction to the

02:08:16

New Testament, we do not have Peter's reply to Paul's claims in the

02:08:21

New Testament, and if we had their reply, as James Dunn says, they would say that it is

02:08:27

Paul's Jesus who is the different Jesus. It is Paul's gospel which is the different gospel and the false gospel, but Paul is saying their gospel is false, their

02:08:37

Jesus is false, and we only have it from Paul. Five, I have shown that Jesus taught that he was not

02:08:47

God, and that teaching is so clear that even though the gospels were rewritten and they wrote the story in such a way as to present

02:08:57

Jesus as God, we still see echoes of the belief that Jesus is a human being and not

02:09:03

God, because James will say, yeah, human being and God, but importantly, human being and not

02:09:11

God. For example, when in John chapter 17, verse three, Jesus looks up into heaven and he prays, and he says that they may know you as the only true

02:09:21

God, and that they may know Jesus, your messenger, as Christ. So one

02:09:26

God and Christ. That's what Muslims believe. Of course, Muslims do not believe everything that is said there in John's gospel or even in this passage, but it is important to notice in this passage that Jesus is teaching that he is not

02:09:40

God. Our subject tonight is, did the original disciples consider him

02:09:46

God? It is not, did they consider him something that Muslims will not accept? If that was the topic, yeah,

02:09:53

James can come and say, look, Shabir, the gospels say this, and you don't accept it, so you lost the debate.

02:09:59

But the question is, did they consider him God? It's not that they consider him an archangel.

02:10:06

Did they consider him the son of man? Did they consider him even the son of God? Did they consider him to be the

02:10:12

Messiah? No, that's not the debate. Did they consider him to be God?

02:10:18

There is only one God, and for monotheists, God is that beyond which nothing greater can be conceived.

02:10:24

In John chapter 14, verse 28, Jesus speaks of the Father as being greater than he is.

02:10:30

The teaching that Jesus is not God is so strong that even Paul, who elevated Jesus as a creature between man and God, and as the agent of God's creation, even

02:10:41

Paul does not call Jesus God in any clear passage in his writings.

02:10:47

In fact, Paul continues to differentiate between Jesus and his God. Even the

02:10:54

Deuteropoly letters, like 1 Timothy, speaks of God as being someone else other than Jesus.

02:11:02

John's gospel takes the same view as Paul, saying that God created the universe through Jesus, but even in John's gospel, we have it that Jesus is subordinate to the

02:11:15

Father. So it is very clear that Jesus himself taught that he's not

02:11:20

God, and since that is his teaching, that is what his disciples could be presumed to have followed, and since Paul was not one of the disciples of Jesus during the time that Jesus walked the earth, well, anything might be expected of Paul.

02:11:34

Well, when Paul came to the disciples, according to Acts of the

02:11:39

Apostles, the disciples were afraid of him, but Acts is not telling the whole story, because why would the disciples be afraid of Paul if the disciples have the

02:11:48

Holy Spirit and Paul has the Holy Spirit? Why would those having the Holy Spirit be afraid of the other one who has the

02:11:54

Holy Spirit? There's more to the story than this. There is a deep rift between Paul and the original disciples of Jesus, and that is because Paul was teaching something else about the law and about Jesus.

02:12:05

I do not believe that anything that James said here tonight has proven that the original disciples of Jesus considered him to be

02:12:12

God. He proved that Paul considered Jesus to be God, and he's presuming that Paul must have got that from the original disciples, false presumption.

02:12:19

He says that Mark considered Jesus to be God, but as I've shown, Mark was not one of the original disciples, so what does that prove?

02:12:27

It doesn't prove that the original disciples believe Jesus to be God. It only proves that Mark is trying to show us that Jesus was somehow more than a human being, and Mark, in order to do that, says that the unclean spirits were calling

02:12:41

Jesus God. Well, Mark is just telling us that the original disciples didn't know that Jesus was God.

02:12:46

It is only the demons that knew it, but of course, we shouldn't believe the demons. They might just be trying to mislead us.

02:12:53

Likewise, we shouldn't believe the opponents of Jesus who tried by hook or crook to crucify him, and they accuse him of blasphemy.

02:13:01

Jesus didn't say anything that amounted to blasphemy, and when I asked James, did

02:13:08

Jesus say in these sayings that you cited from Mark, I am the Son of Man?

02:13:14

James said yes, and you all heard him, but I invite you to read Mark 13 and Mark 14, and you will see that Jesus did not say this, and I would invite

02:13:24

James to come up and tell us that actually, I am right about this, and he was wrong, not for my own glory or any reason like that, but for our understanding.

02:13:34

We need to know, did Jesus really claim the kinds of things that Christians have later said that he claimed?

02:13:41

I've got one minute to go, but I'll leave it at that since I've used up an extra second earlier. Thank you all very much.

02:14:22

Well, thank you very much for sticking it out here this evening and being here to the bitter end, as they say.

02:14:30

I'd like to start off, it has been my tradition to give a little something to my opponents.

02:14:36

I started with Shabir. I have an excellent example of the scholarship that, again,

02:14:41

Shabir, I like you a lot, but you don't interact with this kind of scholarship at all, so I'm hoping you will really, really dig into this.

02:14:51

This is by Dr. Michael J. Kruger, one of the leading lights in Christian scholarship today.

02:14:58

It is called Canon Revisited. Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books. I think you will be very challenged by this, but I highly recommend it to you.

02:15:06

Dr. Kruger is the president of Reform Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and so I'd like to have you to have this. Thank you.

02:15:18

Now, with all due respect to Shabir Ali, and I hope you can tell that, as sharp as our disagreement has been, that we do like each other.

02:15:28

We have to, we're writing a book together. We sign papers, so we have to be nice to each other.

02:15:34

No, this is our seventh debate together. We are at least demonstrating, despite the fact that we are light years away from one another in our ways of thought and our conclusions, that we can respectfully disagree even while pointedly going at each other's positions.

02:15:52

That is why I only slightly hesitate to say that Shabir handed the debate to me this evening, and I'll explain to you why.

02:16:01

When Shabir made the statement in our Carmen Chrissie discussion when

02:16:07

I was talking about Philippians chapter two, well, of course Paul is teaching the deity of Christ. He's making

02:16:13

Jesus Yahweh. Of course he did. What I pointed out to you already was that that material came from before the apostle

02:16:23

Paul. And when I asked him the question, and I hope you all caught this, because this is where the debate concluded logically and on any meaningful level,

02:16:32

I said, what evidence do you have? What is your evidence that's before the

02:16:38

Carmen Chrissie that would demonstrate the original followers of Jesus did not believe the deity of Christ?

02:16:43

And what was his response? The Old Testament. That's an abandonment of the thesis, because what he means is not the

02:16:51

Old Testament. I read the Old Testament, and I do not believe he's reading it correctly to miss its prophetic statements in any way, shape, or form.

02:17:01

But what he's saying is, well, I interpret the Old Testament in such a way that there can be no evidence to substantiate your position.

02:17:09

That's circular argumentation. And when you have to say, well, I don't have any earlier evidence than the

02:17:14

Carmen Chrissie. I can't point to anything that comes from that first generation of Christians. I've got to go to my interpretation of the

02:17:22

Old Testament, and may I assert it's my interpretation as he is forced to interpret it by a book written 600 years after Jesus, by someone who did not know the content of either the

02:17:36

Old or especially the New Testament. That is his ultimate authority. That is the interpretive grid that he places upon the

02:17:44

Quran. And that's why Shabir's conclusions are always different than even Jimmy Dunn's are, because he has another authority even above what they utilize that is extra biblical.

02:17:54

And so I would suggest to you that when I ask the question, what evidence can you give me before I gave you the most primitive evidence there is?

02:18:04

He's dismissed Mark. Well, Mark wasn't one of the original disciples. And what's his basis for saying that?

02:18:10

Well, because Matthew was writing to him and all the rest of that kind of stuff. All right, yet the very scholarship that he cites recognizes that Mark contains primitive tradition regarding Jesus.

02:18:23

And if it doesn't, we don't know anything about Jesus at all, anything at all. So I gave you the widest spectrum of the earliest information that we can have about the followers of Jesus.

02:18:35

And what was the consistent element of all of it? A belief that Jesus said and did those things that could not be attributed to a mere result.

02:18:46

And then Shabir closed the door on his own position with his evolution argument. Did you hear it? He said, well, you see, they started off and they started thinking

02:18:54

Jesus was a little bit special. And then he was a son of God, then he was the son of God, then became

02:18:59

God and all the rest of this stuff. But then he turns around and says, these people were

02:19:06

Jewish monotheists. Do Jewish monotheists engage in that kind of evolutionary argument?

02:19:13

Do they believe that there are demigods? Do they believe that there are divine sons of God that aren't truly

02:19:19

God? You can't put those two statements together. Either they were

02:19:25

Jewish monotheists and hence would have resisted any exaltation of a mere prophet. Or if there was this evolution, there had to be a reason for it.

02:19:33

But it can't be both. And so I submit to you on any logical, rational grounds,

02:19:40

Shabir has conceded the debate with his answers because they demonstrate beyond all question that his position is not a consistent position.

02:19:49

And he cannot give us any earlier information than what I've presented to you. And so from my perspective,

02:19:56

I would say at that point, the debate has in fact been concluded. And I would say that given what

02:20:04

Shabir has said, I could not present any kind of information to him to substantiate the thesis because he presuppositionally rejects the conclusion.

02:20:15

That's not how you do debates. Presuppositionally, God cannot become a man.

02:20:20

Therefore, any evidence that he did must be rejected. And that's what we've seen him doing with every single text that's been presented.

02:20:26

And that's what he'll continue to do. Why? Because he takes as the ultimate authority a book written by one man 600 years later in a different language who didn't know anything about what was in the

02:20:35

Old and New Testaments. And that's why we have these debates. Do I want the man sitting behind me to hear me tonight for maybe the first time?

02:20:46

It's my prayer. Can I make him hear me? I can't. I can't. Can I make any of the

02:20:52

Muslims in the audience hear me? I can't. I am dependent upon the spirit of God, but that's why I do what I do. That's why

02:20:58

I do what I do. I want to hear the Christians. I want the Christians here to hear what I'm saying and be able to explain it to others.

02:21:05

But once you see, and that's what I appreciate about tonight, we've gotten down to the presuppositional issue.

02:21:11

The foundational issue is that from Shabir's perspective, God can't become man. Therefore, there's no evidence that he did.

02:21:17

And he'll accept any worldview and any conclusion from a worldview that will substantiate that.

02:21:25

And I simply turn around and I say, when I respond to the Quran, I try to interpret it within a supernatural worldview that its own author had.

02:21:34

I do not allow myself to use double standards because I follow him who didn't just point to the truth, but who was the truth.

02:21:44

And so I suggest to you this evening that the debate was decided during the cross -examination.

02:21:52

And I leave it to you to decide whether that was the case or not. Now, I have just enough time to answer a few other questions.

02:22:00

This is the rebuttal period. I'll have some closing remarks in a moment. Why is it that Shabir is so emphatic about saying that Peter's writings are not from Peter?

02:22:11

Well, first and second Peter have very different styles to them. There's no question about them. I've translated both of them. And it's very clear to me, the same person did not write those letters.

02:22:20

But I still think Peter wrote both of them. You know why? Because it specifically says in second Peter, in first Peter, I'm sorry, that Peter was writing through Silvanus.

02:22:31

Peter dictated the letter. He probably, no one can disprove it, but probably dictated it in Aramaic and Silvanus wrote it in Greek, which is why it's so different than the

02:22:40

Greek of second Peter. But why is it that he has to emphasize that can't be Peter?

02:22:45

Because he wants to say that Paul and Peter were fighting with each other and they were going against each other because he's assumed that Paul would lie and that Luke would lie and things like that because they present a completely different picture.

02:22:54

But you know what the real reason is? Because second Peter 1 .1 says, speaking of the faith that people have in our great

02:23:03

God and Savior, Jesus Christ. You see, Peter identified

02:23:09

Jesus as God in his own letter. And so he has to presupposition.

02:23:15

Peter couldn't have done that, so it couldn't have been written by Peter. And James couldn't have written

02:23:20

James because James talks about Jesus is the Lord of glory. Do you see how the presupposition's working here? You take a book written 700, 600 years later, its conclusions, and you force them back upon the material.

02:23:33

That is not what the scholars that he's citing are supportive of.

02:23:38

None of them come to conclusions that Shabir does. None of them are coming to conclusions, well, that means that the Quran must be true and think that, no, they don't go there.

02:23:46

That's why this information has to be brought to your attention because if you allow the

02:23:51

New Testament to actually speak for the New Testament the way that Shabir wants the Quran to be able to speak for the Quran, that's his TV show.

02:23:58

The New Testament teaches the very things the Quran says it can't. And that's the issue. Thank you.

02:24:04

So if you are as excited as I am to hear

02:24:18

Shabir's response to that, give your man five minutes to take that. Okay. Folks, for my final five minutes tonight,

02:24:30

I have to say that I've never seen a man having lost a debate so badly and at the same time claiming again and again that he's actually won it.

02:24:48

James said I lost the debate when I said that Paul took the Old Testament about Jehovah and made that refer to Jesus.

02:24:57

And he's saying that, well, perhaps other monotheists might have done the same thing as well. But we don't know that Paul was a strict monotheist except by his own testimony.

02:25:08

And if we don't know Paul to be one of the original disciples of Jesus, what reason do Muslims have?

02:25:14

And in fact, what reason did the original disciples of Jesus have for taking Paul as a true teacher?

02:25:19

This is the reason why they were not afraid of him, but they did not welcome him initially until they saw that he was doing some good work and they thought, well, why not?

02:25:30

But then they continued to test him and made him prove the opposite of what he was writing in his letters.

02:25:36

And James says, well, Paul did that to be all things to all men. But then how can we trust a man like that?

02:25:44

James is saying that by taking the

02:25:51

Old Testament Jehovah and making that refer to Yahweh, well, others might have done that too.

02:25:58

And that when I said that you see this evolution, they made Jesus son of God and then made him literally

02:26:03

God and then made him God, he's saying, you see, the original Jewish monotheists are doing that to Shabir contradicted himself, saying that the original

02:26:10

Jewish monotheists did what they couldn't have done. But I'm not saying that the original

02:26:16

Jewish monotheists did that. Remember what I said, the original disciples were Jewish monotheists.

02:26:22

The writers of the gospels were not the original disciples. Some of them were disciples of disciples.

02:26:29

Some of them were not even Jewish. So the later writers made

02:26:36

Jesus into God in a way that a Jewish monotheist should not have done. And if anyone did that, they departed from the true teachings.

02:26:44

And I don't believe that the original disciples did that. Why do I reject the authorship of 2 Peter? Not because it says that Jesus is

02:26:52

God. That would have been a good reason enough. But Christian scholars who believe that Jesus is

02:26:59

God, like Richard Baucom and several other Christian scholars say that 2 Peter is not written by Peter and they excuse that it was written by Silvanus and that helps it, that doesn't help it because 2

02:27:11

Peter speaks about a persecution that only visited the Christians from the year 82 onwards under Domitian.

02:27:19

And Peter was long dead by then. So Peter did not come back from the dead to write this letter. It was written by somebody else in his name.

02:27:27

This is a widely held conclusion by conservative Christian scholars. Peter, James asked me, tell me who does not accept that James wrote

02:27:36

James? Well, the interpreters, one volume commentary on the Bible does not accept that James wrote

02:27:41

James. So we have another synonymous letter here. That means people are writing in the names of other people and passing that off as original word of God.

02:27:50

This is not fair. James said that the author of the Quran did not know the

02:27:56

New Testament. Well, I beg to differ. From a Muslim point of view, the author of the Quran is God himself and he knows all things.

02:28:03

But even if you take the author of the Quran to be the Prophet Muhammad as a human being, it is interesting that we find in the

02:28:11

Quran details which show a very intimate knowledge of the New Testament. For example, when the

02:28:17

Quran denies that Jesus died on the cross, this is referring to the fact that in the earliest gospel,

02:28:25

Mark's gospel, there was some doubt as to whether Jesus actually died on the cross because crucifixion usually took a couple of days to kill a person.

02:28:33

Jesus was on the cross only for a few hours and Pilate marveled that he could have died so soon.

02:28:38

There was doubt as to whether Jesus had actually died on the cross in Mark's gospel. Finally, we look at Mark's gospel and we don't take everything in it to be the original truth, even though Mark is early.

02:28:50

And James has not shown the historical sense to try and peel back to what was there before Mark. Yes, if Jesus is shown to be like this in Mark, like this in Matthew and Luke, and then going through the roof in John, we can see where it all started with a human being that was there before Mark.

02:29:06

That is the human being that we should believe in as a servant and messenger, the Messiah of God, but not

02:29:12

God. Thank you. Well, I will leave it to you to answer the question as to whether Shabir actually recovered from the documentation

02:29:30

I gave of the conundrum he fell into. I don't believe he even attempted to do so. First of all, where is the data?

02:29:39

Where is the evidence that Shabir has given us from these early monotheists? Where were their writings? Do they remember what he gave us? Nothing.

02:29:45

He's assuming that they were there, but why didn't they write anything? Where are these original disciples of Jesus who did not believe in the deity of Christ?

02:29:51

Everyone that we've looked at did believe in it. So doesn't that sort of answer the issue of the debate this evening?

02:29:58

Did Shabir give us any evidence? No, he did not. By the way, why do you assume that the persecution mentioned by Peter is the

02:30:04

Domitian? Why couldn't it be the Neronian, which is the period of time where Peter lived? See, it's all theories. I've actually read the books in the original languages, and I don't come to these texts with some kind of bias against what they originally said and what they've originally understood.

02:30:20

I did not say give me a reference of somebody who doesn't believe James wrote James. Every liberal on the planet does that.

02:30:26

I said, I want some evidence. Where's the evidence that he did? What's internal? What's the manuscript evidence?

02:30:31

We've been given no evidence whatsoever that James did not write James or that Peter did not write Peter. What is the evidence in the

02:30:37

Quran? We were just told, well, there's doubt about the crucifixion of Mark. There is not a shred of doubt about the crucifixion of Mark, none.

02:30:45

No one can allow the text to stand for itself. You have to cut the text into pieces. Read it for yourself.

02:30:51

A centurion who knows how people die, he'd killed enough of them. A centurion verified that Jesus was dead, for crying out loud.

02:31:00

To say that there's a doubt about the crucifixion in Mark is to say there's a doubt in the Quran about the prophet of Muhammad.

02:31:07

It is absolutely impossible to come to that conclusion. And so what do we have in the New Testament, my friends? We've been told that even

02:31:13

Jesus taught against his deity. And these people, let me just ask you a question. How can it be that John 1, 1 will say, in the beginning was the word and words with God and the word was as to his nature deity.

02:31:22

How can Jesus say in John 8, 24 that he is the I am unless you believe he's the I am, you'll die in your sin. How can in John 8, 58 says before Abraham was,

02:31:30

I am and the Jews pick up stones to stone him. How is it that he and John 17, 5 can say that he shared the glory of the father in his presence before he turned he was.

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How can he accept the worship of Thomas when Thomas said, my Lord and my God, both words addressed to him alone. How is it that James can call him the

02:31:45

Lord of glory? How is it that Peter can identify him as our God and savior, Jesus Christ? How can the book of Revelation say that every created thing in heaven and earth will worship

02:31:52

Jesus Christ? And then you put that together and you discover Paul teaches the same thing and this whole myth of this great controversy falls flat on its face when you simply allow the text to speak for itself because then

02:32:07

Paul can come along and we need to understand that when he says that Jesus Christ is our great God and savior in Titus 2, 13, when he says that he's the creator of all things whether in heaven and earth, visible or invisible, principalities, powers, dominions or authorities, all things created by him and for him.

02:32:22

He is before all things. In him, all things consist or hold together that that is what the early Christians believed.

02:32:27

They didn't rebel against that. So when he wrote the, when he relayed the Karmic Christi to the people in Philippi, they knew what he was talking about.

02:32:33

They believed he'd eternally exist in the very form of God. That is indeed the testimony of the

02:32:39

New Testament and that is the material that the writer of the Quran did not know. You can say it was Allah if you want to.

02:32:46

I simply have to ask you the question. If your Quran is denying my faith, why does it never once define my faith accurately?

02:32:53

The one time it even tries, it says the Trinity is God the father, Allah, Mary and Jesus.

02:33:00

Nobody believes that and have never believed that. That's Surah 5, 116. Why is that?

02:33:08

If Allah is the author, then even if the Trinity was wrong, didn't God know what it was in 632

02:33:13

AD? Then why is there no meaningful refutation of it? Why does Shabir Ali give stronger arguments against my belief than the

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Quran does? That's a question you've got to answer. You've got to think about this, my friends.

02:33:26

Don't walk out of this room. I hate when we talk about this being entertaining. I'm not here to entertain you.

02:33:32

I'm not here to entertain anybody. I'm here to talk about truth. And if you walk out of this room tonight and you have not thought about these things, if you did not take, if you're a

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Christian, you didn't listen to Shabir, shame on you. But if you're a Muslim, you're not listening to me. Shame on you. We need to listen to what each other says.

02:33:50

That's the only way we're gonna make advancement. That's the only way that we are going to really grow in understanding. So may

02:33:56

I thank all of you for being here this evening, for sticking it out to the end and listening. But once these tapes are available, once IPCI makes them available, once Alpha and Omega Ministries makes them available, go back, slow them down.

02:34:09

Take notes, listen to them more than once and find out who has been consistent in their argumentation this evening.

02:34:16

Thank you for being here this evening. Okay, guys.

02:34:35

Thank you. Thank you so much. We're gonna start, close the thing off. I'm gonna give it 50 minutes, my take on the debates.

02:34:44

And you guys are welcome. Welcome to stay. This is where this stuff starts. Um, when

02:34:50

I used to play rugby, we would, after a game, stand in the huddle and one of the teams would win.

02:34:56

But then some guy would always say, you know what, rugby was the winner at the end of the day. So I want to say debate was the winner at the end of the day.

02:35:06

So that was my five minutes. From, you guys can go.

02:35:14

I'm just gonna talk. On behalf of all of South Africa, on behalf of this room, on behalf of the