On Xia Ahmad's Allegations of "Corruption" Part 2

Now, this fourth alleged corruption is a simple textual variant.

On the screen right now, you have a screenshot of John 935 from the

Lagos Libronics Library. You have the Nestle -Aland Greek text on the left. Then you have the

Nestle -Aland textual apparatus, each of the manuscripts noted in green. You can click on it.

It'll tell you what its name is, where it's located, when it was written, etc., etc. And then you have

Metzger's textual commentary over on the right -hand side. And so, when we look at this alleged corruption, this textual variant, in fact, then zoom in on it a little bit so you can see the information.

Here you have, on the left -hand side, the giving of the information. You'll notice the two readings.

You see theu, that is, of God, and then the manuscripts that read that way.

And then the text, Anthropou, son of man, and that is found in P66, P75, Oliph, BDW, a few others,

Syriac, and some other translations. And so, in essence, you can then look over.

You'll see Dr. Metzger's commentary. The external support for Anthropou is so weighty, and the improbability of theu being altered to Anthropou is so great that the committee regard the reading adopted for the text as virtually certain.

And so, son of man is the adopted reading. But again, if you have the Nessie -Alan text, you know that there are a few manuscripts that read otherwise.

Christians have a tremendous amount of this kind of information available to them. And it would be wonderful if I could present to you right now something similar for the

Quran, because I think it's very important that we are aware of the fact that there is a variant reading here.

I think that the textual footnotes provide, not only in Greek text, but when there is a major variant within the

English translations as well, is very, very important. It's a good thing to do. I know there are Christians who don't like that, and I understand their reasoning.

I just firmly disagree with it, and think that if they would engage with history and engage with the subject of the translation of the text, the transmission of the text, that they would see it as the same.

But for the Muslims who are watching this, why don't you have something like this?

Why isn't there a Bible Works or a Libronics for the Quran? I have the

Aleem 6 .0, nothing close to this. You can't click on anything there and find out about the various manuscripts of the

Quran and how they read. You can't do anything like this for the

Quran that we can do for the Bible. Christians are very, very open in their discussion of these things, because we believe the

Bible to be true, and so you don't have to hide anything. There was no Christian Uthman in history that came along and burned everything, and therefore we can examine these things.

Now, it's not that there aren't some small examples of this kind of thing.

Here for example, you have from the al -Mushaf al -Sharif, which is the

Mushaf that is found in the Tabqapi Palace Museum, just published by folks in Turkey.

You have just one example here of a listing of a table where they are showing textual variants between various early manuscripts,

Mushafs, of the Quran, and this is just one table showing differences between, at certain points, between these

Mushafs. Now, this is sort of a little bit like what you would have in the Nasiallan text.

It gives you some textual critical information, but the reality is we just simply have not done what needs to be done in collating all of this material and putting it together so that we can produce a critical edition, and in fact, there's some fear.

For example, just recently a Palimpsest manuscript was purchased at auction, and no one knows where it went.

So many of these pages are just basically disappearing. There's fear that some people are actually hiding things like this so that we can't produce this kind of stuff, because for example, here is another very important table showing some of the differences in the

Fog's Palimpsest in Surah 2, 222, and it shows how the

Ibn Masud readings, which are at the top of this chart, are maintained in this very early manuscript, but then how there is an editing that goes on later, and this editing is changing the

Ibn Masud readings over to the Uthmanic readings, and so there is this editing going on in the text, and if we had more of these manuscripts, if there was more active searching for these kinds of things in a critical sense in Islamic countries, could we not maybe come up with something similar for the

Quran? Well, I think we most certainly could, but there isn't a whole lot of interest in doing that on the part especially of the primary leaders in those countries and allowing especially

Western scholars to do that kind of thing. And so once again, the point is when you use accusations, when you use accusations such as corruption, then you need to be consistent in your language.

What do you mean by that? Do you mean a simple text to a variant? Then here is evidence that you need to talk about the

Quran in the same way. Most people hear corruption and they hear, I can no longer know what it originally said, and that is not the case in these situations.

And so once again, responding to these allegations from what we might call the Muslim street and demonstrating that when you really examine the information, it does not substantiate the kind of argumentation that is very commonly produced by Muslim apologists.