June 29, 2020 Show with Dr. Tony Costa on “The Shaking of the Islamic World by Top Muslim Scholars Admitting the Qur’an Contains Textual Variants”

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions, and now here's your host,

Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 29th day of June, 2020, and I'm thrilled to have back as one of my favorite returning guests

Dr. Tony Costa, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and we are going to be addressing the shaking of the

Islamic world by top Muslim scholars admitting the Quran contains textual variants, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

Tony Costa. Well, Chris, it's such a pleasure to be back with you again.

Praise God. Well, for the sake of those who have not yet heard you on the show or elsewhere and don't know anything about Toronto Baptist Seminary, why don't you tell our listeners about this grand old cemetery.

I just said cemetery. Did you hear that? I'm sorry. Seminary. That's okay, that's okay, because a lot of seminaries are becoming cemeteries.

Yes, that was completely accidental. Yeah, I don't think that was a Freudian flip, but I think it was very true in many ways, but Toronto Baptist Seminary is a seminary that is

Reformed Baptist in its confession, and it was started by Dr.

T .T. Shields, who was the pastor of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto, and he started it in the early 30s,

I believe it was, and our motto is Cata Christon, according to Christ, and we have been training men for the ministry for several decades now, and also training men and women as missionaries, and we have also taught our men and women also to become scholars.

A lot of them have moved on into doctoral studies in other universities, and are now serving as—some of them are serving as deans of various seminaries, and others have gone on to teach and publish theological works.

Praise God. Well, if anybody wants to do some homework and find out more about Toronto Baptist Seminary, you can go to tbs .edu,

tbs .edu. And before we get involved in the main theme today, which is a really fascinating and exciting theme, because for quite a long time, as you well know,

Muslims have been making use of apostate Christians, former

Christians, and liberals, to call into question the reliability of the

New Testament, due to textual variance and other things, but possibly primarily textual variance.

They've made us somewhat of a hero of Bart Ehrman, the agnostic textual critic who was an evangelical before going into apostasy, but now the tables have turned, and I'm fascinated to hear more about that.

But before that, I know that you have a couple of things going on that our audience should know about.

They involve cultural Marxism and other things. Why don't you tell our listeners what you've got working on the fire there?

Well, thank you, Chris, for that. Starting this Sunday, July the 5th, Sunday evening, for eight

Sundays in a row, I'm teaching an online course on a Christian response to social justice, which would include cultural

Marxism and so -called progressivism, and it is not a credit course.

That is to say, there's no reading or signed books, or no students have to fulfill any course requirements.

This is simply educational to expand one's knowledge on this very, very dangerous ideology that is pervading our governments, both in Canada and the

United States particularly, and in the West in general, and also our universities, our colleges, that are succumbing to this very dangerous anti -God, anti -Christ ideology.

And so, starting this Sunday, 7 p .m. Eastern Standard Time until 9 .30

p .m., I will be beginning a course on a Christian response to social justice.

Anyone who's interested, they just have to go to Facebook, go to Tony Costa Facebook, and you can't miss it.

The banner has a picture of a lion. It's a lion of Judah. And there's information there on how to register for the course.

It's only $99 Canadian, which, if you're an American, it's a deal, because the

American dollar has been soaring while the Canadian dollar has been plummeting, so the exchange rate will be quite affordable and would be worth it.

The other thing I was just going to mention, Chris, I do have a book coming out. It's already, it is based in the process of going to the publishers, but I have a book coming out in 2021, hopefully early, in the early part of the year, the new year, and it is on the earliest

Christian creeds and hymns, and so it goes back into the New Testament and looks at the earliest creeds that the earliest

Christians confessed, and some of the hymns that are in the New Testament text that scholars have been able to identify and extract, and so, and the whole point of this book is to show that from the earliest times

Christians believed very strongly in the death, burial, resurrection of Christ, but also there's a very strong emphasis on the deity of Christ, which, of course, is denied by Islam, which we'll be discussing today, and denied by the cults of world religion and liberal scholarship in general, so that's what's on the horizon right now,

Chris. Now that, isn't that your doctoral dissertation theme? My doctoral dissertation was actually on the definition of worship in the

Pauline Letters, and also the worship of God, and also the worship practices of the early

Christian community, so it's related to my doctoral dissertation, my doctoral work, but it's really an expansion of a work.

It was actually something I was doing when I was studying for my master's degree at the University of Toronto, and so it's something

I've been wanting to write on for quite a while, and I'm thankful that I've been able to get it done.

Great. Well, when you get some copies of that book over to us, we'll interview you on that next.

Sure. Sure. And let me give our listeners our email address right now.

It's chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and as always, please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, and, you know, it might be that you are a

Muslim and you are secretly investigating the claims of Christianity, or it could be a number of things why you would remain anonymous, but if it's just a general question on theology, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

Well, first of all, tell us the background about these top

Muslim scholars, and I believe that there are two of them specifically that have been causing a great stir as of late.

Tell us about this. Yes. Well, the first one is Dr. Yasir Qadhi, Q -A -D -H -I.

You may remember him. He was the gentleman who was having that dialogue with our common friend

Dr. James White, and Dr. Qadhi has, in an interview he had with a

Muslim apologist in the United Kingdom by the name of Muhammad Hijab, there was an internet or online interview that he had where he was being asked about the text of the

Qur 'an and the so -called preservation of the Qur 'an, and then what Dr. Qadhi did was he talked about his years at Yale University.

When he was studying at Yale, he said that his faith was shaken because Western academia was willing to probe questions that Muslims in general will not entertain when it comes to the textual history of the

Qur 'an and its transmission. And what Dr. Qadhi did was he openly admitted that Western scholars are quoting

Islamic sources to show that the Qur 'an has had difficulty in terms of textual variations in its text, and that in his own words, he said, the standard narrative that Muslims are always presenting, he said, the standard narrative has holes in it, and that's a direct quote.

And he goes on to say that these issues should never be discussed among Muslims, they should only be discussed among learned scholars and so forth and so on.

And when this went viral, Muhammad Hijab tried to delete that portion of the video, because a lot of Muslims began to accuse

Dr. Qadhi of being an apostate, becoming a heretic in denying the preservation of the

Qur 'an. Right now, Dr. Qadhi has gone on damage control boat, he's actually backpedaling from what he's said, and I've been on with David Wood on a couple of his shows on Acts 17

Apologetics addressing this, as has Dr. J. Smith as well and others, who specialize in Islam.

And Dr. Qadhi now is beginning to backpedal because he's getting a lot of heat from the Muslim community, and apologists who are basically saying that finally we have a

Muslim scholar here who's admitting what we have always known for decades. In fact, we've known this for a very, very long time.

And so he openly admits, Dr. Qadhi openly admits that there is problems with the textual transmission of the

Qur 'an, he's familiar with the textual variance in the Qur 'an, and so that's one particular scholar.

The other one is actually a good friend of mine, Dr. Shabir Ali, he's also from Toronto, and he and I go back quite, right back to the early 90s where I first debated him in 1992.

And Dr. Ali, even back then, in private, would, when I say private

I don't mean it was confidential that I couldn't share this, but in person -to -person conversation, he openly admitted to me that yeah, there are variants in the

Qur 'an, and they're very much like the variants we have in the Bible, and they don't affect any cardinal teaching of Islam or practice, and so forth.

But he never said that publicly until recently, and I think that's because due to the internet and access on the web,

Muslims are beginning to realize that what they've been told by the Muslim apologists and teachers simply is not true, that the

Qur 'an does have the same textual problems that we see in the transmission of the biblical text, both the

Old and the New Testament, which scholars, Christians, have always acknowledged, at least for 400 years, since sexual criticism has been such a huge move in academia against the

Bible, Christians have always acknowledged textual variation in the transmission of the manuscripts.

So Dr. Ali came out with a series of videos where he openly admitted that yes, there are differences in the

Qur 'an, there are differences in the text of the Qur 'an, and I think he had to do that because he knows that this is something that Muslim apologists cannot hide anymore.

30 years ago, they could do that because no one had access to the web, but now that we have all these

Islamic texts like the Hadith and the Tafsir, we have various scholarly articles online now, you really can't hide this anymore.

And so, these two scholars in particular are highly respected in the

Muslim community, and for them to come out and admit that, I think we commend them for it, but then

Dr. Qadhi started to refer to Christian apologists as Islamophobes because they were trying to twist his words and so forth, but if you listen to the video, you will notice we didn't do anything of the sort.

We simply quoted what he said and he made it very clear that this is an issue that should not be discussed among Muslims, but should only be discussed among learned people.

Now Yasir Qadhi, and correct me if I'm wrong, has he not already before this been viewed by the more militant

Muslim, for lack of a better term, the more strict, the more fundamentalist, haven't those types of Muslims already begun to view

Yasir Qadhi as somewhat of a liberal within their ranks? Well yes, some of them have, not all, but some of them have, because he was educated at a

Western university at Yale, and because Qadhi takes, let's just say, a balanced approach to things, he does have an academic hat as well, and because of that, some of these

Muslims believe that he's been influenced by Western academia, and therefore some of them will find him to be, let's just say, they would charge him with being a little too compromising, but yes, that is true, some of them do view him that way.

Now does he not also believe, which is unheard of in Islam, that Jesus Christ actually died on the cross?

Yes, I think he shares something similar to Shabir Ali, it's interesting that it's these two that have really come out right now with this, but I don't think he would have an issue with that.

Actually I meant Shabir Ali, I misspoke when I went to Yasir Qadhi. Okay, okay,

I think Yasir Qadhi wouldn't have a problem with that view, because he understands that there have been differences of opinion, not by the majority of Muslims, but some of them have raised the suggestion that Jesus very well may have been killed by crucifixion, and that that wouldn't violate anything

Islamic, necessarily. But what Shabir does is, Shabir has taken the view that is held by the

Ahmadiyya, which are a sect in Islam that originates from 19th century

India, and they hold the swoon theory that Jesus was crucified, placed on the cross, but Jesus did not die on the cross, he simply swooned, and then later revived in the tomb, and later ascended into heaven.

And so Shabir's view has been, he's been criticized for that, but Shabir actually holds that Jesus was actually put on the cross, crucified, but he actually did not expire on the cross, he did not die on the cross.

Okay, and yes, the Ahmadi Muslims, I became very familiar with them when

I started to conduct Muslim debates with Dr.

James R. White, our mutual friend, and quite a number of the Ahmadi community came out to those, and one

Imam took me out to lunch at an Indian restaurant, although it was

Muslim -owned, and it was interesting to find out more about this sect.

I know that they are very persecuted by other Muslims all over the world. They are. And a

Muslim that David Wood actually led to Christ in college, who has become very well known in his own right, working with Ravi Zacharias before he went home to be with the

Lord after perishing from cancer. Right, that's Nabeel Qureshi. Yes, he was from that community as well, the

Ahmadi. That's right, that's right. Now, well first of all, tell us about what are textual variants, just so our uninformed listener might get a better understanding of that, and as I opened up the show, it is kind of interesting how

Muslims for years have been pointing to the unreliability of the New Testament because of textual variants, but now they have to answer charges of their own,

I guess. Yes, yes, well, a textual variant is basically, in order to understand this, we need to understand that when

Paul, for example, wrote his letter to the Galatians, that first writing, many scholars get to that, is the autograph, which means the original, actual writing of the

Apostle Paul when he wrote to the Galatians. Now, we don't have any of the surviving texts of Paul or the

Apostles, or even the Gospel accounts. We don't have the original Gospel of Matthew in our hands, that Matthew himself penned.

What we have are copies, and one of the reasons is because these documents were written in papyrus, which was very fragile, and it was something that was not very durable in terms of substance.

It would crack and break apart, and that's why we have so many of them in fragmentary portions.

But what people would do, what Christians would do, is they would make copies. They would copy what Paul wrote to the

Galatians, and then someone else would come along and copy it. And what happens is, because the original writers of Scripture were the only ones who were truly inerrant, because they were inspired by the

Holy Spirit, nowhere does Scripture guarantee that later, fallible copiers would be infallible.

Only the original writers were infallible in what they wrote. And so, scribes who come along much later, of course, don't have that inspiration or inerrancy that the original writers had.

And so, they try to preserve the text to the best of their ability, but because we're fallible creatures, sometimes we can mistake a word or a letter for another letter, and so that introduces variants into the text.

And that is true of both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and of the Qur 'an. And so, what happens over time is these variants begin to multiply, and you end up with thousands of them.

Now, the wonderful thing about having such a large cache of manuscripts,

Bruce Metzger once remarked that we are embarrassed by the wealth of manuscript tradition we have.

We have so many manuscripts that we are able to weed out any errors or scribal variants, or textual variants, different writings or different words that have crept into the text because of, again, missing a word or confusing one word for another.

So, we're able to reconstruct the original text from the multiple manuscripts we have.

So, usually an example I give Chris is that of, for example, the Declaration of Independence, the original

Declaration of Independence written by the Founding Fathers. Let's assume that, just for the sake of argument, that that original document was destroyed in a fire.

The building came down and burned the original Declaration of Independence. Well, would it be lost forever?

Would we be able to recover it? And of course we would, because we have hundreds of thousands of copies of the

Declaration of Independence. And even if some of those copies, the first ones which were copied by hand, even if some of them had errors, or even the printed editions, if they had some errors, we would be able to weed out those errors because we have hundreds of thousands of copies of the

Declaration of Independence. That's how scholars work with the New Testament. We are able to look at the manuscripts in Greek, and then of course

Latin, and then Sahitic, Ethiopic, and Slavonic, and so forth. And what scholars are able to do is they're able to discern where these variants come in, how they came in, and so we have been able to basically go back and reconstruct the original text.

Think of it like a puzzle piece. Let's say a puzzle piece of a thousand pieces, but we have 1200 pieces.

The whole work of scholarship is to weed out those 200 extra pieces that don't fit.

And we're able to reconstruct that original. And the same thing applies to the

Quran. So here's a modern -day example, Chris. Maybe our hearers can maybe understand it this way.

When an author writes a book and sends it off for publication, it's not unusual for reviewers to catch editorial mistakes, or maybe a sentence is missing, and so forth.

And so several other editors will come along and produce a second edition, or even a third edition.

And so a textual variant is simply a different reading that has crept into the text by mistake.

Sometimes there are cases where it is intentional, in the sense that a scribe may find something to be a little off, and they try to clarify it, they simplify it, they smooth it.

Some of them try to harmonize texts. And so if you look at the King James Version, you compare the

Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, you will notice that they are virtually the same in the

King James Version. And that's because the later scribes harmonized Luke's shorter version of the

Lord's Prayer with the standard version we find in Matthew, which is the one you and I, most people are familiar with.

And so this is known as harmonization. And so when we go to the earliest texts, the earliest manuscripts we have, this is why scholars are always interested in the earliest documents, because the earlier the document, the closer you are to the time of composition.

So while Christians have acknowledged this, Chris, for at least 400 years, since the 1600s, when academia started chipping away at the

Bible, Muslims have been using the same mantra over and over and over again, that the

Quran is preserved right down to the letter, word for word, no changes since the time it was revealed to Muhammad in the 7th century in Arabia.

And unlike you Christians, you guys don't even know how Mark ends the Gospel. You have the longer ending of Mark, you got the story of this woman called

Midultri in John 7, 53 to 811. But unlike your books, which have been corrupted, our

Quran is sent down from God. He has preserved it to this day. That's the standard narrative,

Chris, that Muslim apologists have been using. But the evidence, both within Islamic sources and, of course, modern -day scholarship, does not support their narrative.

Their narrative is really a conjectural myth that they have created to basically bash the

Bible and to promote Islam as triumphant and superior to Christianity, and to promote the

Quran as the more reliable text. Not very different from what Mormonism does.

Joseph Smith claimed that the Book of Mormon was the most correct book ever written, even though it was corrected 3 ,700 times.

But Joseph Smith argued that the Book of Mormon explained the Bible and that the Bible could not be properly understood unless it was read through the lenses of Mormon scripture.

And can you tell us, well, in fact, before you do, I'm going to go to our first break right now.

But what I'd like you to do when we return is to tell us what some of these textual variants are and are they serious enough to call into question any significant teachings in the

Quran unlike the Bible, from what I understand, in spite of the many textual variants there are, none of them call into question a serious teaching especially salvific or a pillar of the faith of any kind.

We're going to go back to that question when we return from the first break.

And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of their own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com

And as always, give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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We are now back with my guest, Dr. Tony Costa, and he is

Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

We are talking about the shaking of the Islamic world by top Muslim scholars admitting the

Quran contains textual variants. And our email and address, if you have a question, is chrisorensen at gmail .com

chrisorensen at gmail .com. And if you could, Tony, could you go through some of these textual variants and let us know if they actually significantly challenge the meaning of any text of the

Quran that Quranically faithful Muslims would hold today. Yeah, the textual variants in the

Quran are not detrimental to any major doctrine of Islam or any of their practices.

And so, much like the variants that we find in the New Testament, none of them, and this again has been acknowledged by many liberal scholars, including

Bart Ehrman, none of these variants affect or change or challenge any cardinal doctrine of the

Christian faith. Usually it takes a while to get Bart Ehrman to admit that, though. Yes, it does.

And he's openly admitted that. One of the funniest videos I've ever seen,

Chris, was when a Muslim was interviewing Bart Ehrman, I think it was in a cafe somewhere, and they were trying to get

Bart Ehrman to basically dismiss the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and Bart Ehrman ended up defending the doctrine of the

Trinity based on the New Testament text. It was one of the funniest videos I've ever seen. And so,

Bart Ehrman, his whole point was, look, yes, we do have all these variants, but none of these variants affect the teachings or practices of Christianity.

So if you notice, Chris, this sounds vaguely familiar, this is exactly what Christians have been saying for centuries.

And our Muslim friends, who for the longest time were saying, no, no, no, we don't have variants, it's been preserved down to the letter, lo and behold, they have the very same textual problems that we have in the

Bible. And I've been saying this, Chris, for 30 years or so, since I began my ministry of outreach to Muslims, I've been saying this in my debates,

I've been challenging them on this, using their own sources to show that this was the case, and it's only now with this coming out of both

Yasir Qadhi and Shabir Ali that Muslims are now taking this very seriously. But the point is that I've always known this to be the case,

Chris, but this alarms me, because what it shows is that there's an element of deception here.

When Muslims who know that there are variants in the text and yet keep parroting the same narrative over and over and over again, why else would you call that but deception?

You're hiding the truth from your people. And so, just as in the same way with Biblical textual criticism,

Chris, the variants that we find in the Quran do not affect any cardinal teaching of Islam.

But I'm assuming that since the stricter

Muslims have been denying any variants for centuries, and in fact really not welcoming any investigation into that at all,

I'm assuming that that isn't good enough for them. They still view this, especially since they've used it as a primary apologetic tool to, in their minds, undermine the integrity of the

New Testament, they must think it still nonetheless does damage to their integrity.

Yes, it does. And in fact this is leading to a mass exodus of Muslims out of Islam.

Really? Yes, yes, David Wood has mentioned this many times on his videos that a lot of Muslims who've been looking into this have had their faith challenged and rocked, and it's not because there's an issue with textual variants as far as a

Christian -Jewish perspective goes, but it's just that for all their lives they've been told over and over and over again that the

Quran is preserved in a heavenly tablet, so in order to understand this we need to understand that the

Quran itself claims that its contents were preserved in a heavenly tablet before they were sent down to Muhammad, and so the idea here is that there is this original template in Heaven of the

Quran, all of the words in the Quran, and that what the Muslims hold today in their hands is simply a copy of that template in Heaven which is unchangeable.

And the Quran does say in chapter 15, verse 9, Allah says that we have sent down the Quran and we will certainly be its guardian, and so Muslims have taken that to mean that God himself or Allah will guard the

Quran from corruption and when anything is brought forward that challenges this idea, a lot of Muslims, like the more fundamentalist type, will retreat and go into the defense mode and say, no, no, no, no, no, there's no changes in the

Quran. But here's the rub, here's the rub, Chris. The Islamic sources themselves, when you look at, for example, the

Hadith, which is the record of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad, the writers of the

Hadith openly admit to us that large portions of the Quran have gone missing. They tell us, for example, that when

Muhammad died, his youngest wife his child bride actually, Aisha, she tells us that she had the verses of stoning that were revealed to Muhammad, stoning for adultery, the verses of stoning and breastfeeding adults, we can get into that in a different time, but these verses are no longer in the

Quran because Aisha said that a goat or a sheep came and actually ate the manuscript that it was written on.

And so some of these verses are not in the Quran today. Chapter 2 of the

Quran was a hugely massive chapter. Hundreds of verses have gone missing from there.

Hundreds of verses have gone missing from Chapter 33 of the Quran. And in fact, we are told in the

Hadith that many of the people who memorized the Quran by heart, many of them had died in battle, and many of those verses of the

Quran died with them. So the Islamic sources themselves tell us that we don't have this static

Quran we don't have this preserved text, never changed, etc. This seems to have arisen,

Chris, I think when Muslims started interacting with Christians and trying to seek their conversion, and so the mantra of the preserved

Quran just simply kept being repeated over and over and over again. And we do have a listener question for you.

We have Johnny in Queens, New York and Johnny says,

I recall the Quran and the Bible debate between Dr. James R. White and Imam Shamsi Ali in my neighborhood in 2009 yes, and I remember it very well since I organized it

Dr. White gave a similar presentation of textual variants in the

Quran the Muslim audience was pretty dumbfounded and the claims were totally unchallenged by Ali do these current admissions by scholars pose genuine doubts to the divine origin of the

Quran in the minds of Muslims can this new information be used practically by Christian apologists in their engagements with them well he kind of,

I guess, wrote that before he heard a lot of what you had to say but obviously, and I'm kind of placed in an awkward position as you are, it's posing doubt when it need not pose doubt as far as the textual variants are concerned.

The real reason that they should doubt is the lie that they've been told, that the word for word preservation of the original

Quran has been a miracle that has carried on through this day and that it has not changed in one way right, and he's absolutely right, our questioner is absolutely right we are not saying that, well look, there's textual variants in the

Quran therefore the Quran is wrong, that would be, of course that would be false, because, just like the

Bible, the Bible has textual variants in it as well, it doesn't necessarily follow that because the Bible has textual variants, therefore the

Bible is wrong, so we're not making an argument that the Quran therefore is not the word of God that's another category altogether, what we are saying is that the consistent narrative that the

Muslims have been fed by their leaders is wrong, that they've been lied to virtually, and what we're saying is, look, we're in the same boat we acknowledge, we have acknowledged these textual variants, now as you know

Chris, there are some, you know, there are some fringes even in Christendom that are very much like these fundamentalist

Muslims, the King James only folks, for example, they're very similar, that there are no variants in the

Bible, and the King James version is the only version, and that, you know, if the

King James was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for me, and so they take that approach very much like these

Muslim fundamentalists do, they're not open to criticism. And then unfortunately for them if they are honest with the evidence they will eventually be confronted by one of their knowledgeable friends that, hey look, you don't even have the same exact word for word translation in the 1611

King James Bible you have different versions of the 1611 Bible Right, and the original one had the

Apocrypha as well, so what we're saying here Chris is that we're not using that textual argument as an argument against the

Quran being the word of God, that's a different question, and those will require different approaches and tools, but what we're saying is our textual transmission is the same whether we're talking about the

Bible or the Quran. Okay, we've got to go to our midway break right now, this is the longer than normal break that we need to have on the show, because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today, for the entire program, with about an hour to go, a little less than an hour, is

Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

And our topic today is the shaking of the Islamic world by top Muslim scholars admitting the

Quran contains textual variants. Before we return to our discussion with Dr.

Costa, we just have a couple of important announcements to make. First of all, tomorrow,

I have been waiting a long time for tomorrow, because I have never, as much as I have very greatly admired this brother,

I have never interviewed him on this program until tomorrow, and that is

Erwin Lutzer. And we're going to be interviewing Erwin Lutzer during the first hour on his book,

When a Nation Forgets God, Seven Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany.

And Erwin, I can remember a number of years ago, when

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Chosen but Free. Dr. Geisler wrote an anti -Calvinist book, an attempt at a refutation.

And Dr. White wrote The Refutation of Dr. Geisler's book. Well, I remember

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So I look forward to reminiscing about that with him tomorrow, and especially about talking about When a

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Tony Costa. That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com chrisarnsen at gmail .com

and Dr. Costa, before I go to any listener questions,

I wanted to ask you if there have been moderate to liberal

Muslims out there for for quite a long time, why would these two scholars and then becoming public with the textual variants in the

Quran, why would this be different in the way that it seems to have rattled so many

Muslims, that's even causing an exodus, as you said, of people leaving Islam?

Yeah, I think it has to do with the fact that many of these imams and these scholars who are also imams leading mosques and so forth are now being approached by their members of the mosque, their

Muslim members, because they don't listen to the liberals because they've been told not to listen to liberal scholarship.

But when there are Christian apologists out there, like myself and and David Wood and others who are reaching out to Muslims as a mission field, and they start watching these videos, then what happens is they're listening to conservative

Christians putting out these points and challenging the narrative. And so what it has done is it has challenged many of these conservative

Muslim leaders and scholars. They're realizing that if they don't address this, they're going to start losing members, because a lot of these

Muslims become very dissuaded, they become very confused, and they begin to doubt

Islam. And so I think they're basically trying to save the flock, as it were, from apostatizing, and they're realizing that there's really nowhere to hide anymore.

So it's not that liberal scholars haven't been out there saying this, they have, but most

Muslims don't pay attention to them, because they're taught that they're just unbelievers and infidels and so forth.

But when they hear Christians who are conservatives and who hold to the

Bible as God's Word, and they hold to the doctrines of grace or the doctrines of Scripture and so forth, challenging them, then they realize that, you know, we've got to do something about this.

And so I think that's why Dr. Kadi and Dr. Shabir Ali have come out and have been addressing these issues.

In fact, Dr. Ali is doing a series on this. I think it's because members within their faith community are now beginning to approach them and say, okay, what's going on?

You know, so -and -so is saying this, and when I checked out the references they pointed to in the

Hadith or the Tafsir, I went there and it's exactly what they said. So I think it's an opportunity for them to basically, in a sense, save face from the narrative they've been exploiting them with, and I think it's their way to say, okay, we've got to deal with this before it gets out of hand.

Now, what are some of these variants, specifically? What are the subjects?

Well, there's many of them, Chris, and I'll just give a few examples. So, for example, in 1972, there was a famous manuscript of the

Qur 'an that was discovered in the mosque of Sana 'a in Yemen, and they found this manuscript of the

Qur 'an, and what they discovered was that the manuscript called the

Sana 'a manuscript, anyone can look that up, it's all available online. The Sana 'a manuscript was very interesting because it was what's called a palimpsest.

Now, a palimpsest is simply the scholarly word for a manuscript that has been erased or scrubbed off, they've scrubbed off the lower text and written over it.

And so what scholars have been able to do with ultraviolet light is they've been able to detect the lower text, the text that was erased, and they've been able to look at it, and what they have found is that the lower text does not conform to the reading of the upper text, that is, the text that was written on top or over the erased text.

What they noticed, Chris, is that while the Qur 'an today is arranged in 114 chapters, from the longest chapter down to the shortest, what they found in this manuscript was that the order of the chapters was not like that of the standard

Qur 'an we have today, and what they also found out was that the reading that was erased does not conform to the standard reading of the

Qur 'an today. Now, just to kind of fill in the holes here, the standard text of the

Qur 'an that Muslims today use, which was standardized in 1924 in Cairo, Egypt, is known as the

Hafs edition, H -A -F -S, the Hafs edition. 95 % of Muslims in the world read that standard text.

However, the other 5 % are other Arabic texts of the

Qur 'an. Another famous one is called the Warsh, W -A -R -S -H, which is common in Muslim countries in Western Africa.

And then, of course, there are others as well. So, a quick example of what we're talking about here is that there was a purge that took place about 20 to 40 years after Muhammad's death.

There was a purge that took place in the Islamic Empire, because readings in the

Islamic Empire, readings of the Qur 'an began to conflict with one another, and so the leader of the

Islamic community at the time, they're called Caliphs, the Caliph Usman, ordered a standardized text of the

Qur 'an to be put together, and then he ordered that all other Qur 'ans were to be collected and burned.

And when people start burning things, or when they start shredding paper and so forth, you know that already your suspicions should be raised.

Why are you destroying something that you don't want people to see? Well, obviously you're trying to hide something. Well, this was the first purge.

The second purge took place later in the 8th century under another leader by the name of Al -Hajjaj.

He standardized the Qur 'an again and destroyed all other copies of the Qur 'an. Then, in 1924, in Cairo, Egypt, the

Islamic schools in Egypt began to realize that their students coming from abroad in various parts of the world were reciting the

Qur 'an differently than what they were accustomed to, and so the government of Egypt decided, or at least

Al -Azhar University, the leading Islamic university in the world, decided to put out just the standardized text called the

Hafs text, and what they did was they took all the other Qur 'ans and they submerged them, they flooded them in the

River. So, why are they doing all this? Well, we can see what's going on here,

Chris. Whenever you have to destroy manuscripts or other documents, it's because you're trying to hide something.

What they're trying to hide is the fact that there were real textual differences in the

Islamic text. I'm going to give you an example here. So, for example, in the Qur 'an that was found in Sana 'a in 1972, the lower text read very differently from the standard text.

Here's an example. This is from chapter 9, verse 80 of the Qur 'an, and I'm going to quote it to you.

This is the standard text as it reads today. It says, ask, this is talking about the enemies of Muhammad, those who are fighting against him, ask forgiveness for them, or do not ask forgiveness for them.

If you should ask forgiveness for them 70 times, never will Allah forgive them.

That is because they disbelieved in Allah and his Messenger. That's the standard text, that even if you were to ask 70 times for forgiveness from Allah to your enemies,

Allah would not grant that. Now, that manuscript that was discovered in Sana 'a in 1972, the lower text reads this way, ask forgiveness for them, or do not ask forgiveness for them.

If you should ask forgiveness for them, never will Allah forgive them. That is because they disbelieved in Allah and his

Messenger. So, what's missing there is the reference to the 70 times. Which would have revealed the author having some familiarity with the

New Testament. Correct, absolutely. You've read my mind there, Chris, because if you know in Matthew 18, verses 21 to 22, we're told

Simon Peter comes to Jesus and says, how often should I forgive my brother? Should I just forgive him seven times? And the

Lord says, no, not seven times, but 70 times seven. And so, absolutely, it shows some familiarity with the saying of Jesus about how often we should forgive.

So, what is interesting here, Chris, is that in the older reading, there was no reference to asking forgiveness of your enemies.

It just says, Allah will not forgive them, don't ask for forgiveness. But the later text, the

Haafz reading, has the word 70 in there. You have to ask forgiveness, if you were to ask forgiveness 70 times for them, never would it be given.

So, here's another example, Chris, of a textual variant. So, this is from, this comes from Quran chapter 2 and verse 125, and it says there, and mention when we made the house, this is talking about the

Kaaba and Mecca, a place of return for the people, and a place of security. And then it says, and take, O believers, from the standing place of Abraham, a place of prayer.

Well, in another Quranic text called the worst text, it says, and mention we made the house a place of return for the people, a place of security, and they,

O believers, have taken from the standing place of Abraham a place of prayer. So, here you have a difference in where he tells the

Muslims to take this stand here, that is in praying towards the Kaaba. In the other edition, or the other text of the

Quran, the same passage, it says, and they, O believers, have taken. So, here's the issue,

Chris, that the Muslims will tell you that the Quran even challenges us, that if you can find any mistakes in the text of the

Quran, then the jig is up. Allah said he was going to guard the Quran from corruption, he was going to be its guardian, but even one difference in the text, one different word in the text,

Chris, collapses the whole house of cards. Because what we've been told is that if you can show one mistake, just one, not several, but just one, then the whole thing comes down.

So, this is just, I just gave you two examples here, Chris, of hundreds of different variants that we find in the

Quranic manuscripts. Great. We have

Arnie from Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, among these large number of Muslims who have left

Islam, are there any scholars? Well, we did have the late

Nabil Qureshi, he was a medical doctor, he had a degree in medicine, and he was just working on his

PhD at Oxford, until, of course, he was diagnosed with cancer.

There, I would consider, for example, Dr. James White a scholar, he didn't do his dissertation on Islam, per se, but he's very well -versed in the area, he obviously is not a convert.

I can think of Abdul Murray, who is now the National Director of RZIN, since the passing of Dr.

Rabi Zakarias, Abdul has taken the reign there, and he is a former

Muslim, he's a Shia, he was formerly a Shia Muslim. My good friend in the

United Kingdom, Dr. Sam Solomon, was a former

Muslim who was a Sharia specialist for 15 years, he was a

Sharia specialist who specialized in the area of Islamic Jewish burdens, and he's a convert to Christianity as well, and so, these are just a few of many.

Well, he may have, the listener may have been referring to the exodus of Muslims out of Islam as a result of these two

Muslim scholars. Oh, I see what you're saying, yes, yes, sorry, I probably misunderstood there.

From what I've been reading from the comment sections on various videos that have exposed this particular area, and Twitter as well, there are a lot of Muslims who are questioning their faith, and I don't have a number for you, but what

I can detect from the comments is that a lot of Muslims are beginning to doubt the so -called perfect preservation of the

Quran. And you see, this is the thing, Chris, I'm thankful to God that you and I don't have to be here today trying to defend a text that has basically, has remained unchanged, there is no variance, it's a word -for -word preservation, we're not saying that the original text of the

Bible has not been reconstructed or can't be reconstructed, but what we're saying is we're not using the same type of argumentation that our

Muslim friends are using. And the problem with that is this. Islam is like a three -legged stool.

You've got the Quran, you've got Muhammad, and you have Allah. If you could show that any three of these is questionable or spurious or false, just like a three -legged stool, if one leg is removed, the whole stool comes down.

And so what I'm saying is the Muslims have been raised to believe that Allah is God, there is no other god but Allah, Muhammad is the perfect human being who ever lived, the messenger, the prophet of Allah, and that the

Quran is the preserved word of God. And so when one of those legs go, whether it's for Nabil Qureshi, it was the person of Muhammad, the questionable character of Muhammad, that collapsed his faith in Islam.

For others, it is the demonstration that the Quran is not this preserved text, that Muslims make it out to be.

And so I think that once you've cracked the hope that Muslims had, or you've cracked their confidence in this preserved text, in their mind, it's virtually the same as saying

Muhammad was not the prophet of God, and that Allah, maybe Allah is not the true

God after all. We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, what scholars would you love to debate from Islam that you have not yet had the opportunity to have an encounter with?

Well, there are some scholars in Islam that I would love to debate.

I mean, the leading scholar in Islam was recognized for a long time to be

Dr. Shabir Ali, and I've had about 10 -plus debates with him already. In terms of others,

I wouldn't mind debating Dr. Yasir Qadhi. I think that he is approachable,

I think he's a reasonable man for the most part, so I would probably say

Dr. Yasir Qadhi. I cannot honestly think of any others.

I mean, I've tried Zakir Naik in India, but unfortunately, unless you're an Indian citizen, the government of India will not allow, for some strange reason, they won't allow

Westerners to come into India and debate Indian citizens for some strange reason. But Zakir Naik was another one, but definitely

Dr. Yasir Qadhi. Let's see, we have John in Bangor, Maine, who wants to know, is there any evidence of prominent

Jews converting to Islam? Well, in the history of Islam, there have been recorded

Jews who did convert to Islam. They're mentioned in the Hadith as well. As far as I'm concerned now,

I know there are some, but I really don't know their names.

I seem to recall, and I couldn't tell you his name, I might be mistaken, but I seem to recall

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries mentioning a

Jewish convert to Islam, possibly even an

Israeli convert to Islam, who resides in India now, but I couldn't tell you his name.

We have to go to our final break right now, and if you have a question, please send it in as soon as you can.

chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com, and don't go away, we'll be right back with Dr.

Tony Costa, right after these messages from our sponsors. Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio here.

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We are now back with our guest, Dr. Tony Costa. And Dr.

Costa, we have a listener,

BB in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, in your opinion, what is the greatest threat against Christianity?

And I understand that these threats are very different, but would they be

Islam, Roman Catholicism, or leftism?

What is the last one you mentioned? Leftism. L -E -F -T -I -S -M. Right. I think that the greatest threat to the

West is both cultural Marxism and Islam.

And let me explain why. You will notice that many of these leftists, and the leftists could be placed in the cultural

Marxist camp as well. You'll notice many of these leftists will side with Islamic causes, and that's because the enemy of Islam, as far as Islam is concerned, and the enemy of cultural

Marxism or leftism, is Judeo -Christianity and also Western democracy. And so both leftism and Islam both oppose democratic governments because they both see governments as, governments should be dictatorial, they should not allow for free speech, no freedom of expression, no freedom to criticize, whether it's criticizing the

Quran or Mohammed, or even criticizing leftist thought. We see that working out right now in both in the

United States and in the West, where you would now have a mob mentality. The court of public opinion trumps all truth statements and so forth.

And so you will notice that Islam and leftism, they are strange bedfellows, but you know the old saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And so I think we need to understand here that both of these systems are detrimental to the

West in the sense of undermining our freedoms. There is no

Sharia state in the world that is Sharia, is Islamic law that is enforced that allows for women's rights, that doesn't allow for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to dissent on various views and so forth.

Both leftism and Islam will agree on that. So I see those two mainly as the most dangerous threats to Western democracy.

Now the original question was actually to Christianity, not Western democracy, which

I would include Christianity in there because it is through the principles and foundations of Christianity that we have democracy.

The idea that the man, the human, is made in the image of God and that they have rights, they have integral rights, and the whole idea of pursuit of happiness and liberty and so forth is basically the idea that the creator has endowed his creatures, his image bearers, with those rights.

And so that's why I mentioned both Judeo -Christianity and democracy because they're both interrelated.

And so Islam is a huge threat against Christianity. All you have to do is look at what's going on in Africa right now, where Christians are being wiped out by Al -Qaeda and by various Islamic militant groups there, and see what's happening here in the

West. Why are churches being burned? Why are there threats to destroy stained -glass windows because they depict, for example, a white

Jesus? And why is it that this iconoclasm that we see in leftist thinking of undermining

Christianity? And mark my words, Chris, it won't be long before they're going to start burning the

Bible for mentioning slavery. And so I see both leftism and Islam as both dangerous threats to Christianity because they both see

Christianity as their nemesis. And of course you and I believe that although the church may lose numbers due to an enemy that the church will never be vanquished, the true church that is.

That's right. Well, I want to make sure that you have time to remind our listeners about your social justice course and anything else you want to say before we go off the air.

Sure. Well, those who are interested in taking the course, it starts this coming Sunday, July the 5th at 7 p .m.

Eastern Standard Time. It runs until 9 .30. And so I'll be teaching on a Christian response to social justice, which will include, of course, cultural

Marxism and progressivism. We'll discuss various issues like Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, and so forth, so -called white privilege.

And anyone who's interested, they can go to my Facebook, just go to Tony Costa, Facebook.

There's information on registration there. It runs for eight Sunday nights, and it'll cover basically all of July and August.

And it's $99 Canadian. So all the information is available on my Facebook.

Great. And if you want more information about Toronto Baptist Seminary, you can go to tbs .edu,

tbs .edu. And I always have such a great time with you on the program,

Dr. Costa. I look forward to not only having you on the show again soon, but I look forward to you participating in some kind of a debate or conference out here in the

Carlisle, Pennsylvania area again at some point. Every time I've had you involved in something, those who attend are totally blown away and very grateful that they attended.

Thank you, Chris. And it's always a joy to be with you. You too, brother.

And I want everybody listening to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. Don't forget to mark your calendar for tomorrow for our interview with Erwin Lutzer during our first hour and Pastor Keith Foskey during our second hour.