When Your Source Proves Faulty: Islamic Apologists Caught

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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What you were just watching was a portion of a video produced a number of months ago by one of the

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Muslims. I've already responded to the video and one of the Muslims has, to my knowledge, never had any response to it.

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And the reason I'm addressing this today is because I think I found out why. That is, this morning

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I was doing what I enjoy doing. I was riding my bicycle. I do that for many miles a week.

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And I listen to things. I listen to lectures, I listen to debates, I listen to vocabulary lessons, and so on and so forth.

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And I happened to be listening to Dr. Gary Miller. Now it had been suggested to me that I would find

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Dr. Miller to be amongst the most erudite and scholarly critics from an

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Islamic perspective of Christianity. And so I was listening to him and lo and behold,

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I found out exactly where one of the Muslims got his entire argument.

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He took it directly from Gary Miller without mentioning that, without indicating that, but he took it directly from Gary Miller.

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And the problem is, Dr. Miller is wrong, and so when I point out the error, since to my knowledge anyways, from what

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I've been seeing on the web, Dr. Miller is no longer involved in doing these kinds of things. I don't know what he is doing, but he's not doing this.

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If you borrow somebody else's argument and they're no longer around to ask about the refutation of their argument, you're sort of stuck.

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And I think that's what happened to one of the Muslims. He used a bad argument, and I've only listened to about 20 minutes of Dr.

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Miller's stuff, and there were a lot of bad arguments presented there. They're presented in a very erudite fashion, but that doesn't change the fact that Dr.

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Miller is sadly, greatly in error in his mishandling of the text of the

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New Testament. And I think the fact that he speaks with a very scholarly tone convinces people that he's rightly handling this material, but the fact is he's not.

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And so, here we have the assertion from one of the Muslims that I am a patrapassionist.

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Now, I've already refuted that, and I've already demonstrated that he was misunderstanding two different texts, completely different contexts,

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John 20 -28 and 1 Corinthians 8 -6, and engaging in rather obvious mixing of categories.

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And likewise, not showing a whole lot of understanding of the fact that the term

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God is used in the New Testament of the Father, Son, and Spirit, and it's not always just used of the

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Father, that I'm not a patrapassionist, that I make very clear distinctions in my teaching and my writings on this subject.

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But the main reason I wanted to put this video up today was to contrast what one of the

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Muslims said with Gary Miller's own words, so I'm going to provide the clip here where Gary Miller presents the argument that clearly one of the

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Muslims just took it and says, ah, any time that anyone says that John 20 -28 is about Jesus, which it obviously is, there's no question about that, the language cannot be tortured so much as to avoid the fact that Thomas is directly responding to Jesus.

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The grammar is unquestionable. There isn't any argument here that Thomas is saying to Jesus, my

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Lord and my God. He's not identifying the Son as the Father in any way, shape, or form, and only if you identify

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God as being only the Father, which you would have to torture 1 Corinthians 8 -6 to make it mean that, especially since the same apostle used the term

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God of Jesus. Do you come up with a problem? It is a misunderstanding, a mishandling of the text description on the part of Muslims and on the part of Dr.

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Miller at this point. But I just wanted to demonstrate that this is indeed where one of the

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Muslims got his arguments and later on, when I have time, it's very clear that Osama Abdullah also got his argument about John 8 from Gary Miller.

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He made the exact same mistake that Gary Miller did, that, well, all you have in Exodus 3 -14 is ha 'on.

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It's egoi miha 'on, actually, and so I'm starting to see now where a lot of the modern apologists seemingly just can't get beyond the

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D. Miller period, and they just keep repeating the same errors over and over again.

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Let me just say to Islamic apologists, if you want to get anywhere, you're going to have to start doing your own homework.

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You can't depend upon these people because they weren't very good at what they did. And when the best people they're debating are

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Jimmy Swaggart, that tells you a little something about the level of apologetic you're producing.

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You're losing on the debate level, folks. You need to step up your game. You need to step up your research.

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Now, of course, I say that because my firm conviction is that the more you research the truth, the more you're going to be drawn to Jesus Christ, and that's exactly what

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I want to see happen. So anyway, we'll be looking at those, but here is Gary Miller's presentation of this argument, the very same argument that one of the

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Muslims used without attribution, falsely against me, and I think this explains why he's never responded, because he can't.

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He can't go back to his sources. He did not come up with this on his own. He borrowed it from somebody else. So here's the clip from Gary Miller.

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As to impossible evidence, an episode is recorded in the 20th chapter of John, and a certain

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Thomas is quoted as saying, my Lord and my God. In interpreting this,

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Christians maintain that Thomas was addressing Jesus by both of these titles.

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Now, Muslims would have no objection to the term Lord, as the Bible explains.

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The word means master, and Sarah is said to have called her husband

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Abraham by this title. First Peter 3 and 6 tells us this.

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The suggestion that Thomas addressed Jesus as literally being God is a different matter.

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Jesus had already pointed out that the Hebrew scriptures themselves address men as gods.

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This would allow for Thomas' use of the term. However, Christians prefer to use the explanation given by Paul in 1

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Corinthians chapter 8. In this place, Paul said that there are many lords and many gods, and in his words, yet for us there is but one

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God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. But the difficulty with applying this verse to what

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Thomas said should be obvious. We are left with an unorthodox doctrine, namely that Jesus is the

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Father. Paul has said there is for us one God, the Father, and one

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Lord, Jesus Christ, and yet the Christian wants to insist that when Thomas said, my

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Lord and my God, he spoke them both directly to Jesus. This is an ancient heresy.

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The church calls this Petropassianism, or Monarchianism, or Sabellianism.