James White vs. Nadir Ahmed, March 21, 2008 Part I

The Debate Over the New Testament’s Reliability

I provide here the video of the debate between myself and Mahbar Ahmed that took place at Old Dominion University, March 21st, 2008. I only use the term debate because that's what it was officially called.

I really would not consider this much of a debate. A number of the Muslims commented, both here and during the audience questions, as you'll see, and then afterwards that they were pretty embarrassed by the way that Mr. Ahmed debated and how he behaved.

And my hope, of course, is that other than having answered the questions that were asked of me clearly and forcefully, that the debate itself and this video will encourage other Muslims to avoid allowing Mr. Ahmed to represent them, because I really don't believe that anything positive can be accomplished with someone who just simply lacks any capacity to meaningfully engage these subjects.

At least the audience questions here will be interesting. Normally I would take time. There was actually two cameras. One camera doesn't have sound. It would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to bring that video into this, to sync it up with the sound and things like that.

I just don't see any reason to do that. Normally I'd put my PowerPoint presentation that I used, even though I used it only briefly, in here. I just don't see any reason to do this. There are much better debates on this subject than this.

So I do provide it. Nader Ahmed has challenged me to provide it on YouTube, and so that's what we're going to do. But I truly hope that people will see that there is no reason to be engaging Mr. Ahmed any further, because he simply does not know how to debate and to engage in these subjects.

So here's a video of the debate between myself and Nader Ahmed, generally on the subject of the New Testament.

The Challenge to Trust the New Testament

With that said, please give Nader your undivided attention as he argues that we can't trust what the New Testament tells us about Jesus and the Gospel. Nader, you have 20 minutes. All right. I'd like to thank everybody for coming tonight.

Now, I just want the Christians to relax. I am not an executioner here tonight, okay? I'm not going to viciously attack the Bible. There you go. I'm just going to ask some very basic, fundamental questions.

So usually inside these types of discussions, the issues which are most frequently talked about is how the text of the Bible, how the scribes deliberately changed it from generation to generation, and thus it can't be relied upon.

Now, I believe James, you're going to be having this debate with Dr. Bart Ehrman, and so since he's already got that department, and by the way, he's a New Testament scholar, and since he's already got that department taken care of, so I'm going to go ahead and take a different approach to things.

And just to show you how reasonable I'm going to be, okay, and how sympathetic I'm going to be to the Christian point of view, okay, I am going to debate from the premise that the Bible which we have in our hands today has never been changed.

It is an accurate duplicate of the original documents. Now you are not going to get a better deal than this, okay? So I don't think a lot of Christians have debated from that premise. So anyways, let me start off by saying that the New Testament which we have today in our hands, this book was assembled by the early Pauline church over a couple of centuries.

The New Testament’s Three Claims to Reliability

And in the present New Testament, it makes three radical claims which it bases its reliability on. Number one, it claims to have been written by the disciples of Jesus. Number two, the prophethood of Paul.

The New Testament actually claims that there was this man who claimed to be a prophet named Paul. He saw some revelations of God and thus he was appointed to now deliver the true message of God. And number three, the New Testament also makes a claim that the apostles worked with Paul and they, you know, I guess what I'm saying is the disciples of Jesus verified Paul.

That's what the New Testament claims. Therefore when you ask a Christian, why is Paul true, they'll just go to the Bible and tell you because the disciples worked with him. Now these are the three radical claims which the New Testament bases its reliability on.

And for each and every one of these claims, there is absolutely no evidence for it. These are baseless claims and the only reason why Christians believe it is because the Bible teaches it. Now I also want to make it clear tonight that, you know, what it means by blind faith.

Blind faith means three things. Number one, there's absolutely no evidence for it. Number two, there's absolutely no facts which could at least hint or suggest that maybe the disciples of Jesus actually wrote these things or that Paul was a true apostle.

And number three, there is not a single good reason why anyone should even entertain the thought that these things are written by the disciples or that Paul was a true prophet or apostle, whichever word you want to use.

Now does that mean that James White is just going to come up over here and stare at the wall for twenty minutes? No. He's going to present to you lots of fascinating facts and figures as to why he believes that the New Testament is true.

And also he's going to present to you lots of reasons why he thinks that the New Testament is reliable and based on these three truth claims. But for each and every one of these truth claims, what we're going to find out, his reasons aren't going to make a whole lot of sense.

Blind Faith Versus Historical Evidence

So I also want people to understand that the New Testament, which we have in our hands today, it's really not different from most religions in the world today. Most religions actually do base their religion on blind faith.

For example, if you were to ask a Hindu, you're asking, why do you believe that your religion is true? He would say it's based upon blind faith. In fact, if you were to even bring up issues of proofs and evidences, that's considered something very offensive.

Now, some Christians, and I think a lot of Christians will agree with me, I think a lot of Christians will agree that we don't really have any evidence for the New Testament. This is something which is mostly based on blind faith, and they see this as kind of a source of pride.

So anyways, now some Christians may retort, but we have the writings of the early church fathers. And the early church fathers, they were the students of the disciples. But now here's a problem with that.

Here's a problem with that. The early church that we're talking about is the Pauline church. And the Pauline church is the one with basically all the church fathers accepted him as a true prophet of God.

Now, the problem is there were other churches. There was the Ebionite church. The Ebionite church basically believed that Jesus to be God, Jesus was not God, and they also believed that Paul was a false apostle.

And most likely they also had their own version of the New Testament, and they called it the Gospel of the Ebionites. And also, now let's look at another church. There was also the church which is the Gnostic church, and they had the Gospel of Thomas.

Okay, in fact, let me bring a book here real quick. In fact, all of this information, I forgot my little book over here, all of this information is documented inside Bart Ehrman's book, Lost Christianities.

So basically, so all I'm going to ask, you don't have to actually prove which church is the true church. All I'm going to ask you to prove tonight, or give us a little bit of evidence of why you believe Paul to be a true prophet of God, or why you believe that the apostles really authored the Gospels.

So really that's all I have tonight, and if you could just provide a little bit of evidence and then we can go from there. So I'm not going to take the whole 20 minutes, I'm just going to ask you for a little bit of proof to substantiate these claims.

Go ahead, James.