Scripture, Apologetics and Islam Part 3

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Good afternoon everybody. Let's finish this up. You're tired,
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I'm tired, but we're not done yet. And some of you traveled a long ways, so you need to get your money's worth.
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We've been here so long, the sun's coming through the other windows now, so that gives you an idea how long we've been at it.
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So I will try to be respectful of your time, and yet we want to finish up what we were looking at.
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Make sure you've got everything you need to have, and it's been a great afternoon.
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I appreciate Jeff's presentation. I will admit that's a subject
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I could never begin to address. Jeff and I's backgrounds and histories, very, very, very different, and yet in God's providence, we have been thrust together in that field with issues in my own family, and it's been very great to have
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Jeff and his expertise in that area, so I appreciate very much what he had to say.
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The only thing that really disappointed me was he didn't mention what one of the first books he ever read as a
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Christian was. Why was that, Jeff? I'm a little hurt that you didn't tell everybody what one of the first books you read as a
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Christian. The King James Only Controversy. That explains a lot of things about Jeff, because I would not really suggest that as one of the first books.
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It sort of warps the mind a little bit, and yeah, yeah, there you go. So anyways, it's been a great day, a great afternoon, morning, afternoon, whatever time it is.
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My clock is a little bit off, but it's not too bad. I'm about to go to Wellington, and I did want to thank – when
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I was in Brisbane, speaking there, some good, kind Christian brothers gave me an
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All Blacks jersey, and so some good brothers here just decided to try to retake the ground, and so there you go, there you go.
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I almost – if it wouldn't have clashed so badly with gray dress slacks,
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I think that would have looked extremely corny. I would have put it on, and we would have done our last session wearing the jersey there, but who knows?
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Maybe I'll have to dig that out while I'm in New Zealand and see what the response there is. Christian apologist missing after his last scene running into the bush, wherever we are.
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Okay, now, let's get you back to where we were. I was talking about the standard understanding of the
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Muslim to whom you're speaking concerning the history of their own text, which is very similar to, let's be honest, what most
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Christians don't know about the history of their own. Most Christians just assume that the
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Bible's always been the way it is today, that it sort of floated down from heaven, leather -bound and everything else, and so a knowledge of the history of our own text is unusual for many people, and the same thing is true for Muslims, but this translates into a fundamental distrust on their part of our scriptures, and on the screen are just some of the textual variants.
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Here is another example. This is from Surah 222, and what you're seeing here,
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I'm going to have to define a term for you that I'm sure you're all going to be discussing over dinner this evening. You're just going to fascinate people,
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I'm sure, with this discussion, but you will see this. It says, Ibn Masud, Surah 222,
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The Fog's Palimpsest Manuscript and Sa 'ana. Now, what in the world is all that?
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A palimpsest manuscript is, remember, the better manuscripts in the ancient world were made out of parchment, which is animal skin, extremely thinly sliced animal skin, and hence, it could be washed.
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It's a little bit like your money here. It can go through the washer and still survive. Don't try that with a $20 bill in the
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United States. It's gone after that. And so you could wash it, and then you could take the ink off and write something new on it.
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But, since it's an animal skin, and you used a stylus to write initially, there's a scarring on the surface that, through the use of ultraviolet or infrared, whatever that particular surface reacts best to, you can actually read what is under what was then written over the top.
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So you can actually see what the manuscript originally said through the use of special technology.
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And we have found some manuscripts of the Qur 'an. I think there are more manuscripts of the
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Qur 'an like this out there, but some of them have simply disappeared. I remember a few years ago, one came up for auction at Sotheby's in London.
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Nobody knows who bought it, and no one's ever seen it since. It was a palimpsest manuscript of the Qur 'an, and it's, as far as we know, it's gone.
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And will it ever appear? Will we ever know what was written on it? Don't know.
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That's a concerning thing. But you can read the underlayer, and in the 1970s, they were rebuilding a mosque in Sa 'ana, the capital of Yemen.
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And they broke through a wall and found a cache of ancient
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Qur 'anic manuscripts. And some people believe that these are the earliest manuscripts that we possess, and that some of them are actually older than the third caliph,
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Uthman. I'm going to read you the story of Uthman here in a few moments. Anyway, the point is that these palimpsest manuscripts have revealed to us textual variants.
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And you can see in the graphic there, along the top is the standardized text that Muslims would have today.
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And then down below, you can see that the variations are not variations of spelling or something like that.
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They are fundamental edits, because they involve the changing of grammatical endings and things like that.
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In other words, these weren't mistakes. This was purposeful editing in a previous version of the
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Qur 'an. 99 .99 % of Muslims in the world have never heard of a palimpsest manuscript and never heard of the
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Sa 'ana manuscripts. And so they're just not aware of these things. Only some of their leading scholars are aware of these specific issues, but they're there.
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Then, here's another example. Notice in the middle of, you see how, you can just barely see how something, the
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Arabic letters right in the middle, see how the angle is different in the two in the middle than all the other angles of the letters?
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And you can tell there was something behind it. This is where a correction has been made in this manuscript.
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And without going into a lot of detail, here is a larger version of it. And you can, this is the fourth, one, two, three, fourth line from the bottom over toward the right is what
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I had blown up before. This is manuscript 328A.
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I have a museum -quality facsimile of this particular Qur 'an in my library.
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In fact, these are pictures from my version of it. And without going into a lot of the details, what's fascinating here is in this particular manuscript, this variant here has to do with the issue of the succession in the leadership of the
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Muslim people. And if you know anything about the history of Islam, the fundamental thing that caused the
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Sunni -Shia split, which still results in bloodshed to this day, was who was going to be the caliph, the head of the caliphate.
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And you know that the Shiites believe it was supposed to be a familial descent through Ali and his descendants.
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The Sunnis believe in the rightly guided caliphs, and hence it went to Abu Bakr, and then eventually to Uthman, who was the third,
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Umar, and then to Uthman, who was the third caliph. And then you had civil war and things like that, and you've really had civil war ever since then, to be perfectly honest with you, in the relationship of the two.
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Well, later on in the manuscript, we find this. And it's hard to see, but there is a stub between folios 19b and 20a in BNF 328a.
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That is a torn out page. Now, why would you tear a page out like that? Well, if you think about how ancient manuscripts were made, you'd take a longer sheet of paper and you'd fold it through.
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So if you tear it all the way out to the spine, the other sheet on the other side is going to fall out.
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So you have to leave enough in the gutter to hold the other sheet in. So what has happened is this is the sheet that was then put into place.
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And notice, you can see it yourself without being able to read almost any Arabic at all, but notice at the top how tight the lines are and how much smaller it is in comparison to down at the bottom.
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What clearly has happened here is someone is replacing a sheet and there has been an insertion made, and now they've got to make this sheet fit with what was already written before.
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So they know where they've got to get to, but they've got to get it onto a smaller space.
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And so you're writing smaller and smaller, and then as you get toward the bottom, oh, it looks like I'm going to make it. Oh, okay, I made it.
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And you can see the spacing. Clearly, what you have going on here is not accidental errors like Homo Etelyuton or something like that.
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This is specific editing of the text taking place in one of the earliest
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Qurans that we possess. And so you go, well, okay, but, you know, someone inserted the
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Prick -a -Pay adultery, the woman taken in adultery. Well, that had nothing to do with the key political issue of the day, which was succession in the caliphate.
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This did. And then you don't have the background that the
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Muslim sources themselves give to you as to what happened with the
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Quran. Listen, there are, the Sunni have six authoritative collections of hadith.
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Hadith are the sayings, actions of Muhammad and his immediate followers in that, the first generations of Islam.
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And the collections of hadith become the very source of Sharia law and are the lens through which the
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Quran is read. And so all of the different groups, the arguments that you'll hear between Wahhabis and Salafis and all the other groups all goes back to your view of the hadith.
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Orthodox Sunnis believe the hadith are authoritative. They're not inspired like the Quran is, but they're close.
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And then the more liberal the Sunnis become, the less emphasis is placed upon the role of the hadith.
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And almost everyone calling for reformation in Islam today recognized the only way that could ever happen is for there to be a fundamental reorientation of the view of the hadith.
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The two most important collections are Sahih al -Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. And I've read both of these.
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There's eight volumes and nine volumes, English, Arabic, respectively. I listened to all of them while riding a bike.
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That's how I listened to the hadith. I turned them all into MP3 recordings and listened to them while riding a bike, which is an interesting way of doing things.
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And here in Bukhari, which is really considered the best and most authoritative collection, we have the story of what happened in the collection of the
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Quran. This is from Islamic sources, so listen to what it says. Narrated Zayd bin Thabit, Abu Bakr Asidic, Abu Bakr was the second caliph, sent for me when the people of Yamama had been killed, i .e.
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a number of the prophet's companions who fought against Musalima. Musalima was a, well, they would consider him to be a false prophet, but he was a prophet who arose after Muhammad.
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Abu Bakr then said to me, Umar has come to me and said casualties were heavy among the Qur 'an of the
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Qur 'an, i .e. those who knew the Qur 'an by heart, on the day of the battle of Yamama, and I am afraid that more heavy casualties may take place among the
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Qur 'an on other battlefields, whereby a large part of the Qur 'an may be lost.
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Now I stop right there. Our Arabic readers in the audience can read what is there, and you can see the term
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Qathir. Qathir means a large part, a major portion, and so there was a concern expressed within the
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Islamic sources after the death of Muhammad, this was very shortly after the death of Muhammad, but within a couple of years after the death of Muhammad, that the
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Qur 'an existed only in the memories of men, and that if more of those who had memorized the
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Qur 'an died, then a large portion of the Qur 'an might be lost. So in other words there was no codification, there was no writing down of the entirety of the
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Qur 'an during Muhammad's life. Many Muslims will tell you today, oh no, no, no, no, he checked everything himself, and blah, blah, blah, blah, but the sources just simply do not substantiate that kind of a concept at all, and you have that being said right here.
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Therefore I suggest you, Abu Bakr, or the Qur 'an, be collected. I said to Umar, how can you do something which
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Allah's Apostle did not do? Umar said, by Allah, that is a good project. Umar kept on urging me to accept his proposal to Allah, opened my chest for it, and I began to realize the good in the idea which
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Umar had realized. So I started looking for the Qur 'an and collecting it from what was written on palmed stocks, thin white stones, and also from the men who knew it by heart.
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So in other words, this is all very fragmentary. You're not talking about manuscripts or anything like that. You're talking about fragmentary recollections.
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Till I found the last verse of Surah Al -Tawbah, Surah of Repentance, which is Surah 9, by the way, with Abi Qusaymi al -Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him.
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So here is one verse that Zayd bin Thabit finds with one man, in one man's memory.
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Only he had it memorized, no one else had it memorized, and that's where it came from.
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Now just think for a second, what about all those people who died in the Battle of Yamama? How many of them may have had a verse that no one else knew?
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That raises the issue, do we have everything that Muhammad even dictated to his followers, even from Islamic sources?
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This is an Islamic source that I'm reading here. That is a question. And that verse is, Verily there has come unto you an
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Apostle Muhammad from amongst yourselves, agrees him that you should receive any injury or difficulty until the end of Surah Al -Tawbah.
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So, then the complete manuscripts or copy of the Quran remained with Abu Bakr till he died, then with Umar till the end of his life, and then with Hafsa, the daughter of Umar.
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So we have one manuscript collected under Abu Bakr shortly after Muhammad's death, even after the
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Battle of Yamama, okay? So, then we go on from there, Hudayfa bin
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Al -Yaman came to Uthman. Now Uthman is the third caliph, this is about 20 years later, this is around 650. So about 20 years later,
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Hudayfa was afraid of there, the people of Sham and Iraq's differences in the recitation of the
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Quran. Now listen to this, so he said to Uthman, O chief of the believers, save this nation before they differ about the book, the
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Quran, listen, as Jews and Christians did before. So there was a concern that there would be a divisions amongst the
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Muslims about the interpretation of the text as Jews and Christians did before them.
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So Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, send us the manuscripts of the Quran so we may compile the
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Quranic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you. Now notice it says manuscripts, but then what does it say?
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Hafsa sent what? It, to Uthman. There's a bit of a contradiction there when you think about it.
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Uthman then ordered Zayd bin Thabit, Abdullah bin Az -Zaber, Zayd bin Al -As, and Abdur -Rahman bin
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Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies. You try to say that three times fast, okay?
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To rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies, Uthman said to the three, now these were men of the Quraishi tribe, he said to the three
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Quraishi men, in case you disagree with Zayd bin Thabit on any point of the Quran, then write it in the dialect of the
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Quraish. The Quran was revealed in their, and it should say language, but obviously it got lost when
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I upgraded this particular version. Anyways, the Quran was revealed in their tongue or their language, their dialect.
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They did so, now listen to this, they did so and when they had written many copies,
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Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa. Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied and ordered that all other
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Quranic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.
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So this is the very definition of what? Controlled transmission.
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This is a government and the leader of a religion producing and official version and sending it to the major Islamic cities and saying, this is what you will use and anything else that you have, burn it.
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Go with this. Now this doesn't work for you, but for an American this would be like being forced to use the
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Obama translation of the Bible. I can assure you, I ain't doing that.
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I ain't giving up my Greek manuscripts or my New American Standard for the Obama version of the Bible or the coming
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Clinton version of the Bible, which will be published from prison. But anyway, do you think if we drafted the
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Queen she'd accept us? I really, I like her.
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She is classy people and I, anyway. I just ruined everyone's train of thought, didn't
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I? You were all so trained in and now you're thinking about Donald Trump and that is pretty much not what I wanted you to do at all.
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But notice, it goes on to say, Zayd bin Thabit added, a verse from Surah Az -Zaab was missed by me when we copied the
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Quran and I used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it, so we searched for it and found it with Kuzaymi bin
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Thabit al -Ansari. The verse was, among the believers are men who have been true in their covenant with Allah, which is
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Surah 33, 23. In other words, when they first collected the Quran, 20 years passed and someone said, oh wait a minute, what about that other one?
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And so this verse was not added in for 20 years into the final collection that was made, the official version that was then distributed to people.
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Now this is called the Uthmanic revision and it's a part of the Islamic sources themselves.
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And I tend to think that it has a solid basis in reality because it's an embarrassing story.
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You're talking about stuff that was missing, you're talking about memorizers who had died, you're talking about finding verses with only one person.
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There's a lot of stuff here that doesn't sound like something that would be made up down the road.
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What's made up down the road is, oh actually Muhammad oversaw the collection of all the things in the
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Quran. There were 30 ,000 people that memorized it and they all said the exact same thing. That's the later stuff that you would expect.
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This is not the kind of stuff that you would expect. And what's very interesting is you have that in the
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Islamic sources. And so you have a recension. Now Uthman is murdered and it is right out, the forces that will eventually lead to the
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Sunni -Shia split and literally civil war are already active at that time.
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We saw what happened in BNF 328a and the changing of the page and the relevant materials there.
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And so this is all happening at the same time. So you're making a recension of the
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Quran right at the time there is a brewing theological argument going on.
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That's highly significant. Highly significant. So that's the Muslim witness.
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Now there were Christians who began responding to Islam very early on. And one of the most fascinating of those responses is from a fellow by the name of al -Kindi.
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Now there is a famous al -Kindi amongst the Muslims who is a philosopher. This is a different al -Kindi. This is a
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Christian who flourished during a time of one of the caliphates that was very open and more accepting and allowing of different viewpoints before that changed.
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And listen to what al -Kindi wrote. Now this is a Christian writing. I want everybody to understand.
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We read Bukhari. That's the Muslim perspective. Listen to the parallels in what this Christian writes right around the same time.
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Because Bukhari, the hadith are being collected 250, 300 years after the time of Muhammad.
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That's a long time. That's a very lengthy period of time. So here's what al -Kindi says.
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The result was that in the caliphate of Uthman it was discovered that there was no consent as to the true text.
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One man then read one version of the Quran, his neighbor another, and differed. One man said to his neighbor, my text is better than yours while his neighbor defended his own.
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So additions and losses came about and falsifications of the text. Uthman was told that various versions were in use, that the text was being tampered with and that strife with all the mischief of party spirit was being engendered.
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They said, we do not believe that matters can continue as they are. It is an affair of urgency. They are slaying one another.
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The sacred book is corrupted. A second apostasy is imminent. Ubai, the son of Kab, Ubai ibn
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Kab, was dead before it was made while ibn Masud, remember that name, refused to give up his copy of the
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Quran so they drove him from his post in Kufa and appointed Abu Musa as governor in his place. Let me just stop for a moment.
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Abdullah ibn Masud, fascinating fellow. Fascinating fellow. Muhammad in the hadith pointed to him as one of the four men to learn the
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Quran from. But Uthman was not and Abdullah ibn Masud did not get along.
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Primarily because Uthman did not choose Abdullah to be one of those that collated the Quran. And so when
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Uthman promulgated his version, ibn Masud said, don't use that.
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Hide your Qurans. And numerous of the, what's called tafsir literature, tafsir means commentary on the
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Quran. There are numerous references in the tafsir literature to the differences that existed in the manuscripts that were traceable to Abdullah ibn
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Masud over against those that were traceable to Uthman. And we're not only, we're not talking just about differences in pronunciation.
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We're talking about differences in the actual continental text between Masud's readings and those that Uthman promulgated as the final authority.
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And so according to this source, now it's interesting, the sources are contradictory as to what happened to ibn
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Masud. The Shiite sources say that he was beaten and eventually died of his beating because he would not give up his
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Quran. The Sunni sources say that he and Uthman died in, that when ibn
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Masud died, he and Uthman embraced and they were friends and buds. I don't know about you,
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I've read enough about ibn Masud. He wasn't buds with Uthman, ever. He just seems like one of those guys.
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So in that instance it seems to me the Shiite sources are a little bit more truthful at that point.
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Anyway, when the revision had been completed according to the various manuscripts, four copies were made.
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Now check this out. Four copies were made in large text, one of which was sent to Mecca, a second remained in Medina, a third was sent to Syria and is today in Malatia.
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So Kendi had access to information as to exactly where the manuscripts had actually even been sent.
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Next Uthman gave directions that the leaves and sheets of the Quran should be gathered in from the provinces.
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He ordered his agents to collect all that they could lay their hands on and destroy them till it should be certain that not a sheet remained in the possession of any private individual.
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You want controlled transmission? This is controlled transmission to the nth degree. Heavy penalties were threatened against the disobedient.
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All the leaves they could secure were shredded and boiled in vinegar till they were sodden.
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Nothing remained, not even the smallest fragment that could be deciphered.
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You know what happened between Ali, Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman. This is the eventual Sunni -Shia split.
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How they hate each other and quarreled and corrupted the text, how each one tried to oppose his neighbor and to refute what he had said.
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Pray, how are we to know which is the true text and how shall we distinguish it from the false one? Now this is ancient
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Christian apologetic against Islam and notice what it's focusing upon. The same story clearly that is the basis for the discussion that we saw in Bukhari.
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Now there are obviously differences between the two but they're obviously clearly drawing from the same historical reality and the things that came from that.
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Fascinating and again, sadly when I debated Adnan Rashid on this subject, this was before Adnan and I had, it's fascinating,
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I should mention this in passing. Adnan and I debated at Kensington Temple in London back in May and then we had debated at Trinity College in New York and Trinity College in Dublin in,
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I think it was 2014. Right around that time I finally had the opportunity of sitting down with Adnan over lunch and expressing to him why
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I do what I do, why I care for the Muslim people and why I'm involved in apologetics like this.
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Every debate since then has been wonderful. Not wonderful in the sense of oh we won, wonderful in the sense that he's still an irascible, aggressive fella.
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He's a big Pakistani guy and that's just the way Adnan is but you see it's amazing because Adnan knows
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I love him and Adnan knows I pray for him and it's changed every debate since then. I wish that had happened before the debate we did about the transmission of the
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Quran, the Bible because I think it might have gone differently but in that particular debate,
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Adnan's only response to my question and my citation of Al -Kindi was, well he's a Christian, he's a Christian and there were these young radicals right on the front pew and they were doing the
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Allahu Akbar thing all the time and they thought I'd be intimidated by that and so when
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I got up I made a really good point and I looked at them and said why don't I get an Allahu Akbar for that and they were sort of looking at me like, so one of them goes
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Allahu Akbar. So they don't know what to do with a
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Christian who will look at them and will say I love you,
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I respect you, I've done everything I can to understand what you believe, to represent it accurately but you simply have to understand
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Jesus is not merely a prophet, he is the one who made you, you must deal with him as Lord and they just, they respect you.
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They respect the proclamation of a Jesus who's the real Jesus. I'm afraid and this is a sermon that has nothing to do with what
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I'm talking about but you get it anyways. I'm afraid that many times
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Christians present only a part of Jesus to the
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Muslim people. They present the love of Jesus and they need to know about the love of Jesus but the
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Bible teaches us about a Jesus who is loving and compassionate and merciful but he's also the
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King of Kings and the Lord of Lords and he rules the nations with a rod of iron and someday, remember what it says in the book of Revelation, one of the most amazing phrases that has ever been written under the inspiration of the
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Holy Spirit of God. When people cry out for the mountains to hide them, what are they crying out to be hidden from?
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Remember the phrase, the wrath of the Lamb, the wrath of the
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Lamb because you see the Lamb gave his life but then the
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Lamb will someday have wrath for those that are not in him and so I like to proclaim to the
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Muslim people, you need to understand Jesus Christ made you. Every breath of your mouth, every beat of your heart comes from his hand and you cannot be neutral about him and if he is your creator, if he is your maker, then you must deal with him.
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You cannot dismiss him as a mere prophet and you can get some pretty interesting looks when you preach that to a bunch of young bearded radicals on the front pew.
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They're not really sure what to do with that, especially when it comes from someone who's tried his best to accurately represent them.
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And so here you have the real question. Here's the real question.
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Which methodology gives us the most certainty as to the real question, do we possess the original words of the authors we believe to have been inspired of God?
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The free transmission of the New Testament text precludes editing and revision and the manuscript tradition shows us tenacity.
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We know that the original readings still exist but the controlled transmission of the
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Quran together with the ethmonic revision, the possible later work of Abd al -Malik,
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I didn't go into that but there are some people who see evidence of a further revision in around 705
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A .D., according to our calendar, under Abd al -Malik. And the evidence of the differing traditions of Ibn Masud, Uba 'i
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Ibn Ka 'b, and possibly others seen in the Su 'ana manuscripts raises serious questions as to the originality of the ethmonic tradition.
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Now I don't think there's much question that the Arabic Quran carried by a
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Muslim today is pretty much what Uthman produced. I don't see much evidence that there is much difference.
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There are some people who theorize, as I said, the Abd al -Malik revision later on but I haven't seen much documentary or manuscript evidence that would suggest anything major in a way of interrupting the ethmonic transmission from that time period.
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But the point is this, once you have a major effort at recension, which includes the destruction of pre -existing manuscripts, and we have two sources,
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Muslim and Christian, testifying to the same reality along those lines. Once you have revision, then the more successful that revision is, the less possibility you have of ever obtaining the original wording of that document to begin with.
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And what was amazing was Adnan's response to that in London when we first debated this was, well hey, if we can at least get back to Uthman, that's good enough for me.
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And I was like, how can that be? Uthman wasn't a prophet. Muhammad did the very essence of Islamic belief.
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Why do the Muslims, why do Sunni and Shiite Muslims reject the Ahmadi, the
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Ahmadi Muslims? Because Ahmadi Muslims believe there is a prophet after Muhammad. And so if you can't get back to what
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Muhammad himself actually gave, what good is anything else? And yet his response was, well as long as we can get back to Uthman, that's good enough.
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No, it is not. And certainly it's not good enough for us, from our perspective, in the
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New Testament. Well, we can at least get back to the Council of Nicaea. So? That's not good enough for us.
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It certainly should not be good enough for the Muslim either. Islamic scholars and apologists must recognize that merely asserting the perfection of the
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Uthmanic tradition proves nothing. The realities of the variant traditions must be embraced and examined before the
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Quran can be proven to have been accurately transmitted. And so why do
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I present this to you? Well, first of all, hopefully you now see why
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I spent so much time making little manuscripts move across a map of the ancient world and talk about multifocality and the free transmission of the text.
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And if you grasp that, and if you could accurately contrast for a
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Muslim the difference between how the New Testament was transmitted to us and how the
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Quran was transmitted to us, you know what that means? That means you're amongst a very, very small number of Christian believers in the world today.
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A microscopic number. And yet that's one of the things they need to understand.
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Because what did I say to you were the three barriers? What are the three barriers? Shirk, denial of the cross, and then the near universal belief on the part of Muslims that the
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Bible has been corrupted. And the only way that they can embrace that argumentation of corruption is to ignore the history of their own text.
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They love folks like Bart Ehrman, but if you applied Bart Ehrman's methodology to the Quran, it would not only disprove the inspiration of the
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Quran, it would do so even to a greater extent, because Ehrman's methodology would focus upon the recensional characteristic of Uthman's work and the editing of the text.
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It would have to, to be consistent. Now, Ehrman won't touch it with a ten -foot pole.
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He will not even comment on the Quran, because he knows how politically incorrect it would be, and I'll just be perfectly honest with you, he's a coward.
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He makes money off of his books, and he will not do what he needs to do to say the same thing and be truthful and make the same application to any other ancient work.
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He's only concerned about substantiating his own apostasy from Christianity. He doesn't need to have any problems in anything else.
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But if you were to consistently apply the very same methodology that he employed in probably his single most famous scholarly work, the
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Orthodox Scripture and Scripture, to the Quran, absolutely devastating to the
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Quranic text in light of the revisions that have been made in it, even according to the Muslim sources. So, that helps, hopefully, for you and I to recognize, because you see, for a lot of Christians, you hear about the variations, and it's like, well, why did
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God do it that way? What God did in the way that he wrote the
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New Testament, and having it distributed the way that it was, is that's how he protected the text.
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Did Shirley MacLaine ever get down here to Australia? Ever heard of who Shirley MacLaine is? Anyone heard of her?
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An actress, and she went off into the New Age in the 1980s, and she put out a movie called
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Out on a Limb, and she got into all this weird New Age stuff where she gets a guru and a, you know, trans -channeling and a spirit guide and all that wild and strange stuff.
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Do you have, like, a city in Australia where all the weird New Agers sort of congregate? Where is it?
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Okay, okay, Byron Bay, all right. So she'd fit in real well in Byron Bay, okay?
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We have a bunch of, we have way more of them than you do, unfortunately. We have one within bike riding distance of Phoenix called
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Sedona. It's a beautiful, anybody ever been to Sedona? Sedona is the Grand Canyon upside down.
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So, in other words, you go into the bottom, and the red rocks, oh, it's a beautiful, beautiful place, but it's been ruined by all the weird people sitting on the rocks going, and stuff like that.
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It's just, oh, it's just, I don't even like going there anymore because of all the weird people.
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But she got into all that stuff, and so in her movie, for example, she's walking along the seashore, and her guru's teaching her to say,
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I am God, I am God, I am God, and we're all sitting in our home going, no, you're not, no, you're not.
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And she used to tell people that the Bible taught reincarnation, but they took it out at the
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Council of Constantinople. Now, how do you respond to that?
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I'm sorry? You just laugh. Oh, you turn it off, okay.
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How many of us know what actually happened? How many of you, without Googling, put your phones down now.
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How many of you know when the Council of Constantinople was? This same group over here is very strange.
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It's sort of worrying me. This one little section, a bunch of theology students, right?
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Mm -hmm, yeah. Yeah, this would be the section where I would show the people taking the
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Shahada, and I'd be talking about how it's different in Islam. You have to do it in Arabic and stuff like that. And then
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I'd say, for example, how many of you made your profession of faith in either Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek?
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And something tells me somebody right around there. And you probably actually believe it, which would be the scary part.
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But anyways, few people know when the Council of Constantinople was, but not very many people either know when it was or what it dealt with.
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And the idea that the Council of Constantinople in 381 could actually change the text of Scripture, most of us are left going, well,
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I don't even know how to respond to that. I don't think that's true, but I've never heard any discussion of it.
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Hopefully, even after today, you know why that's impossible. We have manuscripts that predate the
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Council of Constantinople. And so, if there had been some kind of major change where reincarnation was taken out of the
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Bible in 381, and now we have manuscripts that predate 381, guess what? When they were discovered, we'd go, wow, look at all this stuff about reincarnation.
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But that, of course, isn't what's found in there, is it? So all that kind of New Age silliness and the
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Dan Barker -Da Vinci Code foolishness. I love Tom Hanks, but that was just a disaster.
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And all that kind of stuff just simply does not fly in the face of history.
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But there are lots and lots of folks that think that that's the way things are. And our Muslim friends think, well, you know, there was a corruption and the deity of Christ was put in, and his testimony to the oneness of God and the coming.
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You know, they believe that the New Testament prophesies the coming of Muhammad, right? You all knew that, right? The Quran itself in two different places says that our scriptures prophesy the coming of Muhammad.
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And so I even have a tie. I normally show this as part of my presentation. I didn't bring it with me because I'm in Australia.
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I'm not even sure you're allowed to bring ties to Australia. So the first time I showed up here, the first night
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I spoke in a bow tie, did I feel like an alien? And I don't mean an alien from another country.
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I mean from another planet. I really did. And part of it was jet lag, though. But I have a tie that I've made from Codex Alexandrinus.
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And right in the middle in Greek is the term parakletos, parakletos.
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Now parakletos is found in John chapters 14 and 16. You've heard it transliterated as paraclete, the helper.
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That is who we believe to be the Holy Spirit of God. And in Islamic circles, now some
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Muslims, some well -read westernized Muslims will go, well, you know, the Quran doesn't say where. And so they'll sort of back off of identifying any particular place.
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But Muslims as a whole will say that the helper in John 14 and 16 is not the Holy Spirit.
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It's Muhammad. And so I had this tie made because this is one of the arguments is, well, parakletos, but you see periklutos in Greek means exalted one, which would be like Ahmed, which would be a variant of Muhammad.
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So there it is. Thinking that Greek is like Arabic, where you have consonants and the vowels are signs underneath it.
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Where in point of fact, vowels are just a part of the actual written Greek language, and you can't just take the vowels out and play around with them.
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They're right there. They're written right there. So I actually have a tie where I can just pull it up and say, well, actually, this is parakletos, and this was written approximately 300 years before your prophet came along.
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And so it actually doesn't say exalted one. And then they look at you and go, you wear a tie with that on it? That's very strange.
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You're very, very odd man. And they would be right about that, but it proves the point. So it's very strange to debate someone like Shabir Ali that will affirm that John 14 and 16 is about Muhammad.
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Well, at the same time, every other debate, he's talking about how we can't trust John for anything.
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So if you can't trust John for his testimony to the deity of Christ, then how can you trust
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John 14 and 16 for a prophecy of Muhammad? The double standards that are absolutely required of the
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Muslim are what I keep pushing on and keep saying to my Muslim friends, why can't you use the same standards?
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Because, you see, they're made in the image of God. So they're going to hear what I'm going to say. Now, they may close their ears to it, but they're made in the image of God.
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And so they're going to hear my saying, we need to have equal scales. You can't be using one set of arguments for me and another set of arguments for you.
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And when you start using the same arguments for you to use against me, you're going to be left with atheism, and you're not going to be a
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Muslim any longer. And so when we look at things like that, we have that kind of a background, you are going to be able if you've listened carefully today, to be able to explain things to people that otherwise almost nobody else would ever be able to explain to them.
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And that would be a great thing for them, to be able to hear a Christian who goes, no, actually, we can have confidence that we know what the original text of the
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New Testament said. And actually, the way that God preserved his word providentially in the distribution of the manuscripts throughout the known world is a wonderful act of his providence, that it was a tremendous way of doing so, that the idea that he would have had to have waited until 1949, because that's what
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Bart Ehrman's theory is. Bart Ehrman's theory is, is if the Bible was inspired from God, God would never allow there to be textual variance.
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If it's inspired of God, there can't be textual variance. Well, so much for the Quran or anything else in the ancient world, because what that means is
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God could not have inspired the Bible until 1949. I also wonder how that would work. Let's say
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God inspires the Bible, and so a scribe is copying an early New Testament manuscript, and he's just about to make a mistake.
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His mind has wandered, you know, they lost their Australian rules football game the day before, and so they're really upset.
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And so he's thinking about how he missed that one important kick or whatever, what it was.
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So his mind's wandering, and he's about to make an error in his copying. And right as the quill is going toward the manuscript, what does
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God do? Does he take him over like an automatic writer? And all of a sudden he wakes up, oh wow,
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I didn't even remember writing that. Does he just vanish in flames? You know, I can't even begin to understand the process that Ehrman thinks
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God would undertake to keep any type of textual variation from taking place.
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The reality is that textual variation is the necessary result of the mechanism of providence, which was that immediate distribution of the
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New Testament text far and wide. That's why we can say with absolute confidence, no, the deity of Christ was not stuck into the
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New Testament by some later generation. Reincarnation wasn't taken out by some later generation.
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Because of that multifocality and the fact you have multiple lines of transmission, if there had ever been anything like that, there would still be evidence of it, and there isn't.
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And so the appearance of textual variation is simply the necessary byproduct of that, and since we have the best attested document of antiquity, believe me, people who study
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Homer and Plato and the others on a textual critical level look at us and go, you people are complaining, because we have such a wealth of material.
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They have sometimes less than six manuscripts to work with that average five to nine hundred years after the thing was written.
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They wish they had what we had, but they don't. We have. In fact, I… Hold on a second here.
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Let me see if I can pull this up real quick, because I want to show you one thing and then we'll wrap up. Let's see if it's in this one.
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Is this still on here? Uh -oh, where'd it go?
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Come on, Bart, where are you? I have a clip with… Okay, it's not in that one. All right, let's try…
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New Testament. Let's try that one, because I know Bart's in here someplace, and I have a really cool quote.
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I just loaded this computer, so it's the first time I've used it for anything like this, and I'm trying to…
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I'm having trouble finding some of my files. If you can imagine rebuilding an entire computer after years and years of…
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Okay, I know you can't convert that. Stop. Go away. Let's see. Are you down here? Come on,
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Bart. I hate going, oh, let me show you something, and then it's like, uh…
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I'll look for one more, and if it doesn't happen, then
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I'll just have to do my best Bart Ehrman impersonation. Which will not have any
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G'day mates or anything like that in it either. I mean, I can show you a different Bart Ehrman clip, but this is from our debate in 2009, and I asked him a number of questions that a lot of people wondered why
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I asked him some of the things that I did. This one looks promising. Ah, there it is.
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By the way, let me show you this one real quick. David's not here anymore. Oh, but this was…
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If y 'all ever want to go over there, this is P91, which is over at Macquarie State University.
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A little fragment there. There's me examining it, and David arranged that for me, holding it there.
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That was instead of going to, you know, see the opera house or something. I wanted to go see manuscripts. I am fairly odd, and so it's over there.
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And then I made a P52 tie. Yeah, I made a tie out of P52.
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Not the original, obviously. But here I am.
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Notice my tie is both sides of P52. In my debate with Bart Ehrman, there's Bart, and there I am giving him his own
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P52 tie. And that was about the only time he smiled, pretty much the whole evening, really. I'm not sure what he ever did with it.
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I think he probably wears it, like, once a year, just to mock fundamentalists or something. I don't know. Maybe he burned it. I don't know.
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But there's my P52 tie. But here is the quote, and I'm going to hold this over my computer, so the quality won't be the greatest.
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But I asked Bart Ehrman a question. I want you to listen to his answer. And here we go.
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On the Unbelievable Radio Program in London, you discuss the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the
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Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You describe this time period as enormous.
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That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?
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Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. I mean, ginormous doesn't cover it.
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The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book of antiquity. Did you hear that?
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For the New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book of antiquity.
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And that is the leading English -speaking critic of the New Testament today.
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And he would also have to admit we have more attestation as far as just bulk material.
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So we have the earliest, we have the most, and that is not a disputable fact.
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Those are the realities. The New Testament is the most reliably transmitted document of antiquity.
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There's no question about it. There's no question about it. So I want to show that to you.
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Now, I know there is so much more, and I've thrown a lot of material at you. I hope it has been at least a beginning for you.
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My full presentation on the whole subject is available online if you want to look at it.
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And both the debates with Yusuf Ismail and Adnan Rashid, one from Northwest University in Patrasum, South Africa, the other from London, are available on YouTube as well.
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And so if you want to, you know, sort of go a little bit, dig a little bit deeper, you'll be able to obtain that material there as well.
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I thank you very, very much for your attention. I know it's not easy material, but I hope it has been helpful to you.
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Let's close our time with a word of prayer. Our Heavenly Father, once again, we do thank you for this day, for the fellowship that has been ours in your truth.
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We thank you for the gospel that makes us brothers and sisters in Christ. I thank you especially for those who have traveled so far.
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I thank you for the many words of sincere encouragement that I have heard, how much they have meant to me.
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I ask that you would bless this time, that these individuals would be used of you to spread the light of the gospel here in Australia and New Zealand and even beyond that as these recordings are made available.
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Lord, we know that we live in a day where your judgment is upon the earth. You've called us to be salt and light.
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May we know what that means. May we do so. Be salt and light to your honor and to your glory.