James White and Farhan Qureshi, "Did Jesus Claim to be God"

The Quran, Surah 112, and the Opening Context of the Debate

I think I scared a few of my friends down front when I began quoting Surah 112 along with you while you were doing your introduction. Some of you don't know that those were Quranic texts that were being recited for you at the beginning of that presentation, and one of them was one that I had mentioned, Surah 112, that says that Allah begetteth not, nor is He begotten, was one of the subjects we were addressing.

Jesus and the Father Are One in John 10

I'd sort of like to go backwards so that what you just heard is freshest in your mind, and I'd like to direct your attention back to the text of John chapter 10, when the Jews pick up stones, stone Jesus, after he says, he and the Father are one, they are one in the salvation of God's people.

They recognize that the words he's saying could never have been spoken by a mere prophet or by a mere man, and so they pick up stones because they know that Jesus has been making himself equal with God.

He had done that in John chapter 5, he had done that in John chapter 8. Now in John chapter 10, he's doing the same thing. And Jesus' response is to quote to them Psalm 82. Psalm 82 .6 does say, you are gods, you're all sons of the most high.

But what my opponent has not looked at is Psalm 82 .7, which says, but you shall die like men and fall like any one of the princes. Psalm 82 is a psalm of judgment upon the unrighteous judges of Israel.

And by applying Psalm 82 to his accusers, Jesus is identifying them as unrighteous judges. That's why they're angry with him for so doing. He is saying, you are unrighteous judges, you are unrighteously judging me, the one the Father has sent into the world and has sealed when I say that I am the son of God.

He is not saying, well, we're just all gods and so we can all just get along. If you actually look at the Old Testament background, as the Jews would have understood it, the Psalter is their hymn book after all.

They knew these texts. They knew Psalm 82 was a psalm of condemnation upon the unrighteous judges. They were called Elohim because they stood in the place of God and judged on the basis of God's law. When they judge unrighteously, then the very foundations of society themselves are shaken.

And that is a common theme in the Old Testament text. And so there is no reference here to, well, what we need to do is we need to see if all these statements are metaphorical. The Jews did not take them as metaphorical and Jesus never said to them, oh guys, you're misunderstanding me.

I'm just speaking metaphorically. Over and over again, Jesus forces them to recognize what he's saying about himself. Now let's go back. We were told, I'm going to go backwards the notes here, that Yahweh never claimed to be the Aleph and the Waw, the Alpha and Omega in Greek.

Well, of course, the Old Testament is first written in Hebrew, translated into Greek and the Greek Septuagint around 200 years before Christ. But he did claim to be the first and the last. Isaiah 41 .4, Isaiah 44 .6 are two places where Yahweh specifically in identifying himself as the one true God over against false gods, identifies himself the very same language that is used of God in the book of Revelation.

He said that these words were not said in front of the apostles. Well, none of the words in all the Quran, except for Surah 19 when Jesus preaches from the crib, the cradle, are said in front of anyone.

So I'm not sure exactly why that would be a relevant observation to make in that particular context. He wanted to parallel Jeremiah 1 .5 and God's knowledge and choosing of Jeremiah as a prophet with John 8 .58, but that's not what Jesus said.

Jesus said, Abraham rejoiced to see his day and he saw it and was glad the Jews understood what he was saying. Who are you making yourself out to be? And Jesus' response is to use a phrase directly from the Old Testament text, not from Exodus three, but from Isaiah 43 and elsewhere in Isaiah where this phrase in the Greek Septuagint, which is what anyone reading the Greek gospel of John would be looking at.

They're not going to be reading a Hebrew Old Testament. They're going to be reading the Greek Septuagint. They would read in Isaiah where God says, Ego, I me, I am. And that is the very language that is used in Exodus 3 .14, Ego, I me, haon, in the Greek Septuagint translation of the text in Exodus chapter three.

So those texts stand. We don't have any real objection in light of the context in which they are found, especially the soldiers falling back upon the ground. And in John 13, 19, when Jesus uses this, he uses it in the same context Yahweh does in Isaiah 43, and that is the prediction of future events.

One of the key issues that Yahweh uses to prove that he's God and the false gods are not is I know the future. Challenge these idols to tell you what's going to happen in the future. In fact, God makes a challenge to make these idols tell you what happened in the past and why it happened and what's going to happen in the future.

And so in the very same context, Jesus makes this kind of statement to his disciples. There can be no question of the parallel between the Old Testament usage in Isaiah and that of Jesus in the Gospel of John.

We're told that Jesus never used the name Yahweh. Well, in the Greek translation of the new, in the Greek original, the New Testament, Yahweh's never used period. But the term kudios, which was the Greek Septuagint rendering of Yahweh is used over and over again.

And as I pointed out to you in John chapter 12, we are told there that after quoting from Isaiah six, it says, Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory, the glory of Jesus, and he spoke about him.

Well, where did Isaiah see the glory of Jesus? He just quoted Isaiah six and the year King Uzziah died. I saw the Lord lofty and lifted up sitting upon his throne. He saw Yahweh sitting upon his throne.

This is, if you're going to ask Isaiah, Isaiah, whose glory did you see? I saw Yahweh's glory. If you ask John, John, whose glory did Isaiah see? He saw Jesus's glory. So clearly that identification of Jesus with these very terms and the term kudios as well.

We also had a reference to all the differences in Christendom. Well, of course, depends on how you define Christendom. I give the Muslims the right to define what they're going to call the Islamic Ummah.

And if they're going to look at variations of their faith and say that's not truly Islam, then I have the right to say that those deny the deity of Christ, such as Jehovah's Witnesses are not a part of Christendom.

And that I would think that if we have Sunni and Shia and Ahmadi and stuff like that, you have all those divisions. Does that mean there's no way of knowing what the true Islam is? I would think that that would be the application of that type of argumentation going backwards.

When he says, well, he doesn't use the specific words, I am God. How many times does God himself in the Old Testament just simply say, I am God? He does say it, but in comparison to all the things he does that demonstrates he is God, it is but a small portion.

Is not the greatest demonstration of God's deity in the Old Testament through what he does, how he reveals himself, the names he uses for himself, his redemption of the people of Israel, his provision of prophecy, his demonstration that he is in control of the nations, his deliverance of Israel out of Egypt.

These are all things that demonstrate that he is truly God. Any idol can say, I am God. It is acting and demonstrating that demonstrates who God truly is. And so I would say to you, Jesus said things that no mere prophet could ever say.

Why did you keep stones to stone him? Because he claims, for example, in regards to the Sabbath, he claims that my father is working and I am working. The Jews understood that God broke the Sabbath because he continued to make the sunrise and the planets stay in orbit and grass to grow and so on and so forth.

They recognized that God broke the Sabbath in that way, and Jesus claimed that same prerogative for himself. And so they recognized in John chapter five that he was making himself equal with God. Could any prophet say, come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, I will give you rest?

What prophet could ever say that? What prophet could forgive sins as Jesus does in Mark chapter two? These are things Jesus does unashamedly to demonstrate his deity. He can accept the worship of people and not rebuke them.

What prophet could ever do these things? And so I would ask, why does Jesus have to say certain words that satisfy you? And even if Jesus said those words, would you believe it? Because I believe Farhan was very honest starting off and saying, look, one minute, my ultimate priority is the Quran.

And the Quran has already told us this is deception. This is blasphemy. But of course, my perspective would be that book comes 600 years later. And the real problem, I think, for Farhan is I believe that I can demonstrate that that book thinks the author thought that he was teaching in harmony with what was found in what is called today the Christian Bible.

But he didn't know what was in the Christian Bible. Now his followers know. And so what do they do? Well, they simply reject the validity of those revelations and take that later revelation as their final authority.

And so we have seen that Jesus does claim deity. As long as we do not limit ourselves to, well, it can only be in just these words. If you say words that no creature could ever say of himself, you are claiming deity.

And Jesus did. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. White. Farhan, you have 10 minutes.

The Quran’s Date, Metaphor, and the Ambiguity of Jesus’ Claims

The first of which, in fact, the last of which comments which he made in his rebuttal. He mentioned that the Quran came 600 years after Jesus. But what we cannot forget is that the Bible that you put faith in speaks of incidents that occurred thousands of years ago.

Times of Adam and Abraham and Noah. Thousands of years before their occurrence. And the time span between Moses and Jesus is 1400 years. As if to imply that 600 years between Jesus and Moses is a valid argument against what the Quran is saying, in my opinion, in all rationale, is not acceptable.

For why would you accept what Jesus is saying about Moses' law 1400 years later? Because he is a prophet of God and he has revealed himself as a prophet of God. And if there's evidence supporting him, then the issue of 600 years or 1400 years or 4000 years between Abraham and Jesus would not matter.

That comes to a different debate altogether. Can we trust the Quran which I had yesterday? Regarding Psalms chapter 82, I will, in all honesty, give Dr. White the benefit of the doubt. Had I read verse 11, that you shall die just like men, perhaps in my studies the judgment was what was being asserted.

However, the issue does not take away from the use of metaphor in the New Testament and Old Testament, for that matter, where individuals are referred to as sons of God and as being the husband and as being devils and as being Satan and so on and so forth.

These metaphors cannot be forgotten. You cannot take these things literally. And if that is the case, I again emphasize that when we are examining Scripture and when we're examining claims, what should we take as metaphorical and what should we take as literal?

For God could not be the literal, physical, begotten Son of God because the concept of God goes beyond biology. And if you cannot define Jesus as being the literal Son of God, then there's an alternative route.

Dr. White says that we find an equivalent, kurios, used in the New Testament in the claims of Jesus. But where do we find Jesus saying that I am kurios? Do we find anything of that equivalent? And my point again is, when God is able to recognize Himself thousands and thousands of times in the Old Testament as Yahweh, as the God of Israel, as the God of Moses, then why couldn't Jesus do it for us once?

I also will not deny that Paul of Tarsus believed in Jesus as the God. And I don't think any Muslim will. And the fact of the matter is that Paul and his writings are the very first writings that were written and are contained within the New Testament of the Bible.

And if I don't deny to you that he believed in the divinity of Christ and everything within the New Testament is post his ministry, then certainly you will find in the claims, in the statements of the New Testament, incidents that make it seem as if Jesus was accepting a role as some kind of God of Israel.

But that isn't the topic today, whether the New Testament and Paul believed in Jesus as God or whether the New Testament teaches that Jesus is God. The topic today is, did Jesus claim to be God? And that, my brothers and sisters in humanity, has not been shown unambiguously.

And if something as centric as your belief and definition of God does not, is ambiguous, then there's a problem in your doctrine. Dr. White says, in what Muslims define as the Muslim Ummah versus what Christians define as Christendom, what I'm saying is that an outsider can define the Muslim Ummah in this situation.

You can add the deviants, add the Ahmadis, add those who only accept the Quran, add any deviant denomination you want to the crux of what you consider the Muslim Ummah. And still, there will be no differences in opinion when it comes to Tawheed and the definition of who and what God is.

Even the deviants are united upon that there is one God and that He is one being. And that He is one being. Now, I understand the concept of Trinity says that there's one being and three persons. But we don't define God as a person.

We define Him as a single being with no persons mixed within. There is one God who is the creator of all and He's not divided into persons. But nevertheless, even the deviants agree on this nature of God.

And yet, with Christendom, that doesn't seem to be the case. And I'll give Mr. White the benefit of the doubt that he isn't amongst, well, the initial point was that within the denominations of Christendom, there is not no agreement on the very nature and definition of God.

And this is the consequence of ambiguity in the claims of Jesus. Dr. White, you have 10 minutes. Our second rebuttal.

The New Testament, the Old Testament, and the Claim that Jesus Is God

Thank you once again. Let me just briefly respond to Farhan's comments. What I was saying regards the Quran being 600 years removed from the Bible. Farhan is, of course, correct that we have commentary, for example, on what Moses did and said even in the New Testament, which is even farther removed.

But the major difference, of course, is that the writers in the New Testament possess, read, understand, believe, and teach the Old Testament. And so if you ever look in your New Testament, and if I were you, I'd get one that maybe sets the Old Testament quotations apart in bold print or italics or something.

You will see the New Testament writers are greatly dependent upon the Old Testament text. They possess it. They believe it. They are quoting it. Never does Muhammad do this. He cannot do this. He does not have the Bible in his own language.

He does not have it in the original languages. The Quran is ignorant of the Bible, even though it claims that these books have been revealed by God, and modern Muslims have come up with various ways of trying to understand this.

When I read it in its own context, try to fairly read it in its own context, it seems to me that the writer is trying to convince his followers that what he's saying is exactly what prophets from Adam onward have all said.

But he didn't know what they had said because he didn't have access to those scriptures. And so what I'm saying is, when the Quran comes along, 600 years removed from the time of Christ, and contradicts without citation the scriptures that came before it, that's where the problem is.

That's where there's not the connection that I believe Farhan made at that particular point. Farhan says, well, but there are metaphors used in New Testament. Of course there are. Jesus said, I am the door.

Jesus said, I am the vine and you are the branches. But in conflict with the Jews on the very subject of his identity, Jesus never says, gentlemen, you missed my point. I'm just speaking metaphorically.

You all could say what I say. No, were there not many times, I don't know about you, but if I found something big and heavy under the podium here and lifted up and raised it like this at Farhan and said, if you don't say something, Farhan's gonna say something.

And if Jews are standing there with rocks about to cast them at Jesus, and they've misunderstood a metaphor, he's gonna say, you misunderstood me. He never does that. In fact, he goes out of his way to press the statement upon them by saying, unless you believe that ego, I am me, you will die in your sins.

There were many times in those dialogues, Jesus could have diffused the situation. He doesn't do so. He does just the opposite. He presses the situation. Now, Farhan said there's a difference between literal biological son of God.

I'm not sure what Farhan believes about what the Quran says. There does seem to be some evidence that the author of the Quran thinks that Christians believe that Jesus is the biological son of God. In fact, in Surah 5, 117 and 118, Allah asks Jesus, did you ever instruct men to worship you and your mother as gods in derogation of Allah?

Christians have never believed in the deity of Mary. The idea that Mary is deity, maybe a young man from Mecca visiting a Christian church while on caravan, going up into Syria someplace, might've looked into a church and he sees a statue representing God, he sees a statue representing Jesus.

He wouldn't have seen a statue representing the Holy Spirit because how would the Holy Spirit be represented as a dove? But he would see statues of a woman, maybe even holding a baby. And so did he think that the Christian trinity was Allah, Jesus and Mary?

It's quite probable. If he did, that demonstrates the Quran is not a revelation from God because that's never what Christians ever believed. That's what a person from Mecca might've thought, but that doesn't make that revelation from God.

Jesus has been the son of God from eternity past. Colossians chapter one, the kingdom of his beloved son. We have been delivered to the kingdom of his beloved son. And that's referring to even a relationship that existed before the incarnation.

The father, son and spirit have borne that relationship to one another for all of eternity. It is not a relationship that started. That's where when you take human language and try to describe God, that's where you come into problems because son always comes after a father because we're time bound beings.

The relationship of father and son is not time bound. There is never a time when the son did not exist. There was never a time when that relationship did not exist. Is Jesus addressed as Kurios, the term in the Greek Old Testament for Yahweh?

Yeah. Remember John 20, 28? What is Thomas's response when he sees the resurrected Lord? My Lord and my God. Please think with me for a moment, folks. To a monotheistic Jew who got up every morning and said, Shema Yisrael.

Yahweh Eloheinu. Yahweh Echad. Hear Israel. Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one. If they said to someone, my Lord and my God, what are they saying? My prophet? My lesser being? My someone other than Yahweh?

No. My Lord and my God. We're told that Paul's writing is the earliest. Maybe James is pretty early too. But what I quoted from the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2, 5 through 11, that hymn predates Paul.

That hymn predates Paul. If the scholars are right, and I think there's every reason to think there are, I've done a lot of work on the Carmen Christi. There's even some evidence of it being a translation from an Aramaic original.

But whatever that might be, if this hymn is indeed a part of the hymnology of the early church, this is what Christians were singing when Paul was still trying to kill them. It comes before him. You can't blame him for this.

You can't say, well, Paul changed everything. He changed all the gospels. Because that would, even if you take the rather radical idea that many Muslims have, that Paul's responsible for all this, and Paul is the one who created all this, and all the gospels have been corrupted by Paul.

How in the world could he do that? I mean, remember how long it took to just travel from one part of the Mediterranean to another. You had no cell phones. You had no faxes. How in the world could he have that kind of control over the original followers of Jesus?

If the original followers of Jesus have been so cowardly that while they only believed Jesus was just a Rasul, here comes Paul, and Paul forces them all into believing in a new God. And they just all said, okay, even the Quran says the followers of Jesus were made victorious until the day of resurrection.

So I don't think that's even an option for the Muslims, though many of them have adopted that very idea. He pointed out that even if you brought in the variant groups into the Islamic ummah, that they would still agree on Tawheed.

Well, my point was that they would have fundamental differences between themselves. Prayer to Muhammad, for example, and prayer graves, all sorts of things relevant to worship. You'd get all sorts of different responses from them.

My point is, he just made my point. Tawheed, the oneness of God, becomes for him definitional of Islam. For me, the deity of Christ and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ becomes definitional of Christianity.

If he's got the right to make Tawheed the definition, why don't Christians have the right to make the Trinity the definition? I reserve that right to ourselves. Now, Farhan has admitted that he is starting with Unitarianism.

He understands even the Shema, that oneness of God, to be a oneness of person. That's what the debate is supposed to be about. How do we decide that issue? You can't just start by saying, I'm just going to start here.

It's a oneness of person. That's just all there is to it. The infinite, eternal Allah with 99 beautiful names still has to be just one person. It's impossible for there to be three divine persons. Why?

Is God's being limited in some way? If divine revelation reveals to us the existence of three divine persons, is that not what we should believe? And so my question, my question for Farhan is if the New Testament is in fact the revelation of God, if men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, would you reject that revelation simply because in your finite mind, you cannot understand how the infinite nature of God can be shared by three divine persons?

Or would you have followed the divine revelation? That's what Christians have done. Jesus did claim to be God. Those who heard him understood that and tried to stone him. His followers understood that and were willing to die for the privilege of worshiping him.