Presenting the Gospel to People of the Muslim Faith, Part 3

We want to encourage you to go to the back of the information table and grab a flyer about Alpha and Omega Ministries that will share some information and also point you to their website, which you can buy several of Dr. James White's books.

You can buy some of the debates he's done in audio format. He's debated Bart Ehrman. That would be a wonderful debate to listen to as far as when it comes to textual criticism, some of the things he discussed last hour and will be discussing with us this hour.

James has also written a book known as the King James Only Controversy, which will give you great insight into the subject. The King James Only Controversy is that some people believe that the King James Bible is the infallible, inerrant, inspired word of God, and it is the only one that is so.

He has written a book to refute that as well as demonstrate some areas of textual criticism for us. That's a great resource that you can look to. He will continue to share with us a few more aspects about that this hour.

Coming up, Mr. White.

Early Manuscripts and the Reliability of the New Testament

All right, and there was light, there we go, all right. Good to see all of you back. I even picked up a few folks possibly, but we're sort of halfway through, so I hope you're still with me. I hope you remember where we were.

We are looking at some of the evidence, some of the New Testament manuscripts that go back to very ancient times. I want to wrap this part up. Then I'm going to remind you all that what we're talking about here is we looked at the Gospel of John.

We looked at its testimony that Jesus said, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. And yet the objection we raised from the Islamic perspective was, yeah, but how do we know Jesus said that?

How can we trust these manuscripts haven't been changed, altered, so on and so forth? And so once we get a chance to look at these, then I want to sort of ask a question. It would be a question you could ask of a Muslim.

Maybe if we have any Muslims with us, this would be a question I would ask of them. From the text of the Quran, make application, and hopefully all of that in the next 46 and a half minutes. It'll go fast for me, maybe not so fast for you, but we'll see how that works.

Up on the screen, you can see manuscript P75. This is a Gospel manuscript containing Luke and John. It probably contained all four Gospels at some point. It's an extremely accurate, very, very early manuscript that we have.

This is actually the beginning of the Gospel of John. I can't blow it up. I don't have that neat capability of doing that for you right now, but right at the beginning there, you have, Enarkayin halagas kay halagas en prostan theon kay theos en halagas.

In the beginning, it was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Again, an early testimony to the deity of Christ. Then we have a manuscript such as P66. This is also the beginning of the Gospel of John.

I can blow up that particular section there and let you see, and the Word was God. I like this particular one, especially because you can see what the book would have looked like. Normally, you just see one little page, but here is what the book as a whole would have looked like.

You can sort of see what happens to papyri. Papyri is made of taking the leaves of the papyrus plant from Egypt, laying them at right angles to one another, pressing them together. You can form a pretty smooth surface on one side.

Some historians actually theorize that Christians were the ones who developed the codex form of the book, the book you have in front of you with pages bound together in the middle. Very few New Testament manuscripts have ever been found in a scroll form, but instead they are almost all found in the codex form, the book form, that we are accustomed to today in our Bibles and books that we would read, even though that form seems to be passing away too, as we now have the Kindle and the Nook and the iPad and so on and so forth as a very convenient way of reading as well.

They don't smell as good, they don't feel as good, but I have an entire library on my iPad here, so it is amazing what you can do along those lines. But once again, this is a very, very early manuscript of the Gospels going way, way, way, way back.

And then we have this manuscript here. You'll notice it has the same type of, you know how the edges of the papyrus, I mean again, if you're 1800 years old, you're not going to look really good, and the edges of papyrus start to break off.

This is P46 from around AD 175 to 200, and this is actually, you can see, I'll blow this section up here, it says, Prosphilipasius, that's to the Philippians, and so this is the earliest manuscript we have of Paul's writings.

And I got to see this just a little over a year ago in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland. And I got to tell you the story, it was, they have them in these, they have a number of the pages, this very page in fact I got to see, and they have them in this, obviously encased in glass, and they have very low light on them, for obvious reason, you put really bright light on, they're going to fade away over time, so it's very low special light, and we're sitting there, and there's four of us, and we're trying to read it, but the light is so low, until finally we got the idea, you know, the light's coming from above, and so that means it's bouncing off at an angle, so we're all, I'm down like this, looking up at, okay, I can read it better like this, and they have cameras on these, so pretty soon security shows up, there's the Christians, worshipping the manuscripts again, you know.

So we explain, well actually we're reading it, you know, and I'm telling them, you read that? Yeah, see there's this, and it was really, it was really neat, and, but they have a bunch of these pages, so I've actually seen this manuscript as well for myself, and then this one, this particular manuscript isn't all that super, super old, it's from AD 250, it's just a little fragment from Acts chapters two and three, but that's yours truly there, I was down in Sydney, Australia, I had half a day off, and so what would I do when I'm in Sydney, Australia with half a day off, do you go see the opera house?

I'm not really into opera, do you go do what my wife did last time we were in Sydney, where she did this thing where you climb over the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, you have to be, you have to wear these special suits and all this stuff, no I'm not into heights, so I didn't do that, I happen to know that manuscript P91 was at Macquarie State University in Sydney, so I went and saw the manuscript, and there I am holding it, and I can guarantee you something, the curator of the museum, who himself is a papyrologist, one thing I could tell very, very, very clearly, was that his wife got tired of talking papyrology about 50 years ago, because he was really excited to get to talk with someone who wanted to talk about papyrology, this is great, so that's what people like me do when we have time off, but anyway, now after the peace of the church in AD 313, that's when Constantine stopped persecuting Christians.

Christians could have professional scribes copy the scriptures. At this time, the great vellum or leather manuscripts began to appear, including the three greatest of these, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and Codex Alexandrinus.

Sinaiticus and B may well have been among the Bibles copied with imperial monies at the time of the Council in AD 325. I just want to show you some of these pictures, I'll hurry through them. Here is Codex Sinaiticus, that's pretty much how it looked, A, it's supposed to be Hebrew.

A, that's one, my iPad doesn't like Hebrew for some odd strange reason, but it's normally the Hebrew letter Aleph, but that's pretty much what it looked like when I saw it in the British Library in London in 2005, but let me show you, let me blow that up so you can actually see what it looks like.

That's handwritten folks, now compare that with the papyri that we saw before. The regularity of the print is absolutely amazing, I have entire books in my library on nothing other than the scribal habits of Codex Sinaiticus, I mean it's amazing.

This book has been studied so much, you can see some of the marginal, some things written in the margin there, down here in the corner you can see even something written between lines where a later, an editor, sometimes at the very same time it was being copied, where an editor would make a change or something like that, but you can see how Codex Sinaiticus, how it looked.

Now this was, when it was discovered in the 1850s, was the oldest copy of the Old and New Testament that was in existence at that time because it is a Greek edition of both, so it has the Greek version of the Old Testament in it as well, and it is all online now.

If you'd like to see all of Codex Sinaiticus, codexsinaiticus .org, you can either have it in straight on light or the bottom is called raking light, where the light comes from the side, you can even see the very surface of the manuscript itself, the vellum manuscript, and this one's rather interesting, it's specifically interesting in regards to Islam, because I chose this because this is from John chapter 14, and we're not going to have a whole lot of time to get into this, it's a whole other subject, if you'd like to see a whole debate on this, I debated Shabir Ali on this topic in London in 2008, I think it was.

Anyway, Muslims actually believe that the Quran says that our scriptures prophesy the coming of Muhammad, that Muhammad is found in our scriptures, and one of the texts that Muslims believe is about Muhammad is found in John chapters 14 and 16 where you have discussion of the Holy Spirit, and many Muslims will tell you that the term in the Greek language for the helper or the advocate is parakletos, we call it the paraclete, and many Muslims will tell you, well that was originally perikletos, which means the highly exalted one, which is what Ahmed means, which is a form of Muhammad's name, which is exactly what the Quran says, that we would find the name Ahmed in our scriptures.

Well, a number of years ago, again I make ties, and I made a tie out of codexalexandrinus, I could have used Sinaiticus, this is the same text, and right in the middle of it is John chapter 14, and right in the middle is parakletos, and here you have, it's the third line down starting the fourth letter over, parakletos in codex Sinaiticus, now what's important about this?

Well, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and Alexandrinus, all these manuscripts were copied hundreds of years before Muhammad came along, so why would anybody change, if it was originally perikletos, why would anybody change it until Muhammad came along?

Hundreds of years before Muhammad came along, all the manuscripts, every manuscript that has ever been found says the same thing, there's no evidence that it ever said anything other than what it does, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that John 14 or 16 has anything to do with Muhammad at all, you can demonstrate that from the manuscripts, you can demonstrate that from the context, I have a whole presentation on that subject that we can go through at some point in the future if everyone actually wanted to do that, but anyways, there's codex Sinaiticus, it is a fascinating thing, and then here's codex Vaticanus, also from around that same time period, a very, very important manuscript, and as I mentioned, codex Alexandrinus, which I saw when I went to the British Library, I saw Sinaiticus here, Alexandrinus here, behind me there was a Tyndale Bible and a 1611 King James Version, I was like, wow, I was in heaven.

Manuscript Evidence Compared to Other Ancient Works

Anyway, let me show you that graphic that I was telling you about, and then we will move on from there, as you can tell, I've got a lot to cover here, but this is a graphic that was created by someone down in Australia, and what you have, and I really wish I had brought my laser, no one just happens to have a laser in your purse or something, huh?

Oh, the pastor's running, he's going fast! See how fast you can get there, and let's sing a few stanzas of Just As I Am while the pastor gets laser from his office there, but either that, or he just really doesn't like what I'm talking about, one of the two, I don't know him quite well enough yet, his initials are LDS, which sort of concerns me just a little bit, because mine's JW, RDL, I have seen Mormon's Jehovah's Witnesses debating in parking lots before, it frequently gets ugly, watchtowers flying around with the Book of Mormon, it can really get bad, so, ah, there we go, dun, dun, dun, that's the only tech tool, only one.

You can have it, just for today. Okay, now, can I compare, oh, he left again, see? I think he's just going over there, there we go. Now I'm going to bring mine this evening, and we will have a comparison of your laser with my laser this evening, and it will be very interesting.

Right there in the middle is where a manuscript would be written, so year zero, alright? And so what this does, it compares various authors as to when their manuscript was written, when they first wrote something, and then how long it is before our first manuscript.

So this circle here is Homer, we have over 643 manuscripts, I think that number has actually increased since this was made, but when this was made, 643 manuscripts of Homer, and so you can see how big the circle is, and the average distance, you can see it right here for Homer, is 500 years, so 500 years after Homer was written, we have the first manuscripts, and we have 643 of them.

If you go up here to Sophocles, we have 193 manuscripts, but it's 1400 years between when it's first written and the first manuscripts, alright? And Euripides, Euripides, Euripidos, 1300 years between when it's written and the first manuscript, we only have nine.

Pliny, we only have seven, and it's 750 years. You can just see for all these works that are around the same time as the New Testament, small number of manuscripts and a long period of time between when they were originally written and the first manuscripts we have.

That's not the sun, that's the New Testament. And you can see 40 to 70 years from when it's written, 24 ,000 manuscripts, that's including the Latin translations, Boheric, Coptic, Sahitic, a number of the early manuscripts and the early translations and other languages that we have.

But you can see the massive, massive distance and the massive difference that exists between what we have as evidence for the New Testament and what you have for any other work of antiquity. Now the Quran's not on there because the Quran's not a work of antiquity.

It's a medieval work. You would think that we would have more accurate texts of the Quran because it's 600 years younger than the New Testament is. When we compare the New Testament with books that are written around the same time as the New Testament, as you can see, there is a huge, huge difference in the evidence that we have for these particular things.

The Quran, the Torah, and the Injil

Now, having then demonstrated that we do, that scholars do, take a tremendous amount of time and effort to think about the accuracy of the text that we have, and the reason why you have those little footnotes down at the bottom of the page is that we are wide open with our text.

I mean, I can pull up, let me show you something here real quick. I can pull up Accordance Bible software here, and let me see what we've got here. Yeah, this is the Old Testament. But there you see the Old Testament text, and over here is the textual critical data.

So when there's a variation, when the Greek Septuagint has one reading, etc., etc., we provide all this type of information. If I were to open up the New Testament, we'd have the exact same thing. We'd have the Greek on the one side, and we'd have the textual.

There are entire volumes that are published. We are wide open with these things. There is no such thing as a critical edition of the Quran. There is no such thing as an edition of the Quran where you can go, and you can look at each page, and here's where this says this, and that says that, and this manuscript says that.

They're working on it. It's called the Corpus Quranicum, but it doesn't exist yet, and that really says something because any handwritten manuscript from the past has a history, and here is one of the questions that I would present to my Muslim friends.

Here is the Quran, and in Surah Tal Maida, Surah 5, called The Table, we have a discussion that begins here in, well, this is verse 44. Let's read along together. Well, you don't have to read it with me, but it was we who revealed the law to Moses, the Torah to Moses.

Therein was guidance and light, so the Torah contained guidance and light. That is something that's said in the Quran as well. It comes only from Allah. By its standard have been judged the Jews, by the prophets who bowed as in Islam to Allah's will, by the rabbis and the doctors of law, for to them was entrusted the protection of Allah's book, and they were witnesses thereto.

Therefore, fear not men, but fear me. Sell not my signs for a miserable price. If any do fail to judge by the light of what Allah hath revealed, they are no better than unbelievers. So Allah revealed the Torah.

In fact, there's a story. I believe it was, it's either in Al-Tabari or Al-Qurtubi, one of those two sources, where Muhammad was sitting on a cushion, and the Torah was brought in, and Muhammad got up from the cushion and placed the cushion forward and said, place that on the cushion.

And when the Torah was placed on the cushion, he said, I believe everything in this book. That's part of the, that's from the Islamic sources. And so, in fact, the Quran over and over again makes the argument.

The primary evidence of the uniqueness of the Quran is that no one can ever write anything like the Quran. It is utterly unique. The problem is there's one text in the Quran that actually says the same thing about the Torah.

The Torah is inspired because no one could write anything like that as well. So it's interesting. And so you have the assertion that in the Torah is light and guidance. It was sent down by Allah. We are ordained therein for them, and this is one of the only places, only places of the Quran quotes from the Bible.

And of course, all of us know this. Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal. It's called the Lex Talionis. Now without looking, does anyone here know what the reference to that is?

Almost nobody does. But how many of us know an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Everybody does. So there's no evidence that the author of the Quran was actually quoting directly from the Lex Talionis, but it was a well-known, a well-known verse even back then, even though most of us wouldn't know where to find it in the Old Testament in the book of Numbers.

But if anyone remits the retaliation by way of charity is an act of atonement for himself, and if any fail to judge by the light of what Allah hath revealed, they are no better than wrongdoers. So what's being said?

Allah has revealed these things, and we are to judge by what's contained in these things. And in their footsteps, we sent Jesus, the son of Mary, confirming the law that had come before him. We sent him the Gospel, the Injil, therein was guidance and light and confirmation of the law that had come before him, a guidance and admonition to those who fear Allah.

So what do we have? Allah sends down the Torah, and in the Torah is light and guidance. Alright? So Moses receives a revelation from God, and it contains light and guidance, and the Jews are supposed to live by what's found in the Torah.

And if they don't, they're no better than unbelievers. Then, in their footsteps, we sent Jesus, Risa Ibn Maryam, confirming the Torah, confirming what came before, and we sent him the Gospel, and guess what's in the Gospel?

Guidance and light. And it's in fact a confirmation of the law that had come before him. And so you've got the Torah, and now Moses, given the Torah, Jesus, given the Gospel, and the Gospel confirms, he confirms what's come before.

There's a chain being created here in the text of the Quran. It is a guidance and admonition to those who fear Allah. And then notice the next verse. Let the people of the Gospel, now this only occurs a couple times in the Quran, Al-Al-Anjil, the people of the Gospel, that's us.

Al-Al-Kitab can be either Jews or Christians, or Jews and Christians together, depending on the context. But Al-Al-Anjil, that's us. This is a specific exhortation to you and me in the Quran. Let the people of the Gospel judge by what Allah hath revealed therein.

If any do fail to judge by the light of what Allah hath revealed, they are no better than those who rebel. Now, how could these words have any meaning if, as most Muslims today believe, the Gospel was corrupted in the very first generations?

You see, what most Muslims will tell you today is, well, okay, so you have that text in John chapter 8, and you've got a lot of texts in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is clearly identified as God, 20 -28.

You've got Jesus in John chapter 17, talking in ways that can only be of God. He talks about being glorious in the presence of the Father before creation itself. He says, glorify me, Father, with the glory which I had with you before the world was.

I mean, clearly this is one being described as God. Even Bart Ehrman, the critic that he is, says, well, the Gospel of John clearly presents the deity of Christ. But it's not just in John, you've got it in Matthew.

Matthew 11, you have the Gospel of John in Matthew, where Jesus is talking about, no one knows the Father except the Son, no one knows the Son except the Father, and so on and so forth. And you have Jesus being called Lord, and Son of God, and Son of Man.

Even in Mark, you have them asking him, are you the Blessed One, are you the Son of the Blessed? And he says, I am, and you shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with glory. And he's pulling from Daniel chapter 7, where you have a heavenly figure that's presented before God, and all of his servants worship him, and they tear their clothes and say, it's blasphemy.

You have all this evidence for the deity of Christ, and Jesus is the Son of God. And we've seen the manuscripts that demonstrate this goes all the way back to the earliest time periods. And yet, the Quran says to you and me that we are to judge by what's contained in the Gospel.

Now how could these words, when they were first written down, well, when they were first dictated, because you see, when Muhammad would receive revelations, he would become quiet, he would sweat, his face would become red, and then he would come out of this translight-like state, and he would give forth a portion of the Quran.

Now allegedly, all the Quran was sent down on Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, during the month of Ramadan. And then portions of it were then given by the angel Jibril to Muhammad until the entirety was revealed prior to his death in 632.

And so, when this portion, and we don't know exactly what order it was revealed in and things like that, there's a lot of confusion about that, but when this portion of Surat al-Maidah was revealed, and it was said to the people of the Gospel, judge by what's contained therein.

And what's the therein? I know this much Arabic, I've studied with my Arabic tutor, I can muddle my way through, and I have specifically sat down with him on this particular text and numerous others and said, okay, grammatically, when it says, when it talks about the Injil here, it then says, fihi, in it, therein, judge by what is in it.

What is the it? The only possible thing is the Gospel. So if Muhammad says this to the Al-Anjil, the people of the Gospel, in his day, what must they possess? They have to have the Gospel. If the Gospel has already been corrupted, if it's already been lost, if it's already been destroyed, if it's already been distorted beyond recognition, how could they ever fulfill these words?

Muhammad was saying to the Christians of his day, judge by what's contained in the Gospel. So what did they have? They had it. Well, guess what? We know what they had. I just showed you entire manuscripts of the New Testament that had been written hundreds of years before Muhammad.

So when the Muslim looks at me and says, well, I don't know if that's what... I do know that's what John wrote. And if you as a Muslim are going to tell me, well, I just don't accept what John 8 says, because, you know, it contradicts what the Qur 'an says, and that means it's been corrupted.

But the Qur 'an tells me as an Al-Anjil, one of the members of the people of the Gospel, to judge by what's in the Gospel. That means I possess it. And when I judge Muhammad by what's in the Gospel, he fails.

So if I obey the Qur 'an and do what the Qur 'an specifically tells me to do, and judge by the Gospel, the Qur 'an fails. So what is left for the Muslim to do? You see, the problem is the author of the Qur 'an didn't know the Gospel.

He didn't know. There was no translation of either the Old and New Testaments into Arabic in the days of Muhammad. In fact, the earliest manuscripts we have come from the very end of the 9th century. Muhammad died in the early portion of the 7th century.

And Muslims will tell us that Muhammad was illiterate, so he wouldn't have been able to read it in his own language if he even had it. He certainly didn't have access to it in the original languages. Muslims tell us he couldn't read anything in his own language, let alone Hebrew or Greek or something like that.

It seems to me that the author of the Qur 'an believes that the Qur 'an is consistent with what is found in the Torah and the Anjil, but he doesn't know the Torah and the Anjil. This is the only place, like I said, where the Torah is quoted in the Qur 'an.

Never is the Anjil quoted in the Qur 'an. Never is there any evidence provided by the author of the Qur 'an that he knows anything about Paul's writings, anything about what's contained in the Gospels, anything like that at all.

Now compare that with the New Testament and how it treats the Old Testament. I hope your translation maybe has some way of setting off Old Testament citations. Like the New American Standard does it in all caps, and some translations maybe use bold or italics or something like that to show you when the New Testament writer is quoting from the Old Testament.

And there are entire books like Hebrews where you have entire chapters quoted. The New Testament writers are intimately familiar with the Old Testament, and they draw from it and quote it and argue from it and so on and so forth.

But the author of the Qur 'an knows nothing about the Torah or the Anjil. He's heard about them. He knows about people who follow them. But he himself has no knowledge of it. But wait a minute, if the author is God, God knew what was in it.

But that raises the question, is the author God? So, let the people the Gospel judge by what Allah hath revealed therein. If any do fail to judge by light of what Allah hath revealed, they are no better than those who rebel.

To thee, to Muhammad, we sent the Scripture in truth, confirming the Scripture that came before it, and guarding it in safety. Now the interesting thing is this Arabic term, the term that's used here, Muhayman, most of the Muslims interpret that as correcting rather than guarding.

That's not the actual classical meaning of the word. Guarding it in safety, so judge between them by what Allah hath revealed and follow not their vain desires, diverging from the truth that hath come to thee.

To each among you we have ascribed a law and an open way. If Allah had so willed, he would have made you a single people, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But his plan is to test you in what he hath given you.

So strive as in a race in all virtues. The goal of you all is to Allah. It is he that will show you the truth of the matters in which you dispute. So in other words, here's, now the Quran's been sent down.

And so Muslims are supposed to follow the Quran, and the Christians are supposed to follow the Gospel, and the Jews are supposed to follow the Torah. They've all been sent down by Allah. There's nothing here about, yeah, except the first two have been all corrupted and changed and gotten rid of and so on and so forth.

In fact, for many Muslims, one of the tough questions to answer is, if God sent down the New Testament and God sent down the Old Testament, why couldn't he preserve those? How come they've been changed, corrupted, to where most Muslims really don't believe there's anything left?

Then remember the clip I played of Shabir Ali? I asked him, how can we know? And he says, well, if it agrees with the Quran, then it's inspired. If it doesn't, it's not. That's a rather arbitrary way of doing it.

But you have an argument here. God sent to Moses, God sent to Jesus, God sent to Muhammad. And so this is an important portion of the Quran. This is part of the very argument for Muhammad's prophethood.

And so I look at it and I go, alright, I know what the Gospel was. I know what was contained in the New Testament in the days of Muhammad. And a lot of Muslims will say, yeah, but actually, see, God sent down a book called the Gospel to Jesus.

And it's gone. Assuming that the author of the Quran understood the fourfold Gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and rejected that. Rejected Paul's writings. And in fact, sadly, amongst modern Muslims, especially here in Southern California, I would assume, what they do is they grab hold of various anti-Christian writings, sometimes Jewish writings, sometimes atheistic writings, and they love to attack Paul.

Oh, Paul is the big boogeyman. He's the one that messed everything up. He's the one that changed everything. He perverted the faith. And I like to go, wait a minute, wait a minute. The Quran promises that the true followers of Jesus will be victorious until the end.

And so you're telling me that Jesus' disciples were such wimps that a guy like Paul can come along and completely change Jesus' message. And they either couldn't stop him, or they couldn't write their own books, or there's no record of them doing anything.

They just all gave in? This guy just came along and perverted everything? Seriously? I mean, the companions of Muhammad are these great, wonderful guys, but Jesus couldn't even pick guys with a spine?

That doesn't make a lick of sense to me. In fact, it's rather offensive. But that's exactly what's being said by many Muslim apologists in the United States today, is that Paul just perverted everything, and Jesus' real disciples just went, oh, okay.

And there's absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever. None. But that is the assertion that's being made. So I ask the Muslim, what have I misread about Surah 5? How could the people of the Gospel in the days of Muhammad judge by the Gospel if they didn't possess it?

If they did possess it, if these words have any meaning, then we know what it was, we have manuscripts that clearly demonstrate that, and that takes us right back to the text. And asking the question, all right, we've demonstrated, we know what John wrote, we know what Matthew wrote, we know what Paul wrote, this was the Gospel possessed by the Christians, this is what their revelation was, and what it teaches about God, Jesus, salvation, is completely different than what Muhammad understood.

So why is he a prophet? If his book says that the New Testament was sent down by God, and it says X, and now he's contradicting that, seemingly out of ignorance, he never accurately represents it, he doesn't argue against it in any meaningful fashion, then why should I accept Muhammad as a prophet?

And so what is the absolutely consistent approach of Muslims? Even though their revelation comes last, even though it's the one that makes reference to the Torah, it's the one that makes reference to the Injil, they make it the standard of everything else.

They can't produce a critical edition of it, they don't do the work that we do to make sure that the text is actually the original text, they just assume that Uthman's Quran is it, but it's the final standard, then you look through that, and everything else must have been changed, even if that introduces contradiction in the text of the Quran itself.

And when you try to reason with them, like I said, you can go online right now, look it up for yourself, a debate took place this week between Robert Spencer and David Wood, and Anjum Chowdhury and an imam from Lebanon, I can't remember his specific name, on the existence of Muhammad.

Look it up, you can find it, it's easy to find, it's on YouTube, it was broadcast on ABN, and the only argumentation the Muslims could give for the existence of Muhammad was the Quran says so. And every single argument that was then presented that demonstrated changes in the Quran, or questions about the historical reliability of the Quran, edits of the Quran, things that are missing from the Quran, even though the quotes come from Islamic sources, were just simply dismissed, because the final authority is the Quran.

And that's what you have to deal with. So, in light of Surah 5, I then go back, and I say, okay, let me judge, let me do what this text says. This text says, let the people of the Gospel judge by what Allah hath revealed therein.

And I ask, do you know what Allah hath revealed in the Gospel? Do you know what the testimony is in the Gospel? For example, we will look at this more carefully in a little while, but I guess I can pop it up fairly quickly, this is an excellent particular program here, so let me just show it to you.

Surah 4, give you the translation, Surah 4, verse 157. Speaking of the Jews, it says, They said in boast, We killed Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah. But they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them.