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Morning. Jude 3 says, Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.
This morning we're here to talk about defending our Christian faith with those who are of the Muslim persuasion and how we can better present the gospel of Jesus Christ. And apologetics is such an important branch of Christianity.
It cannot be separated from evangelism and it often cannot be separated from the preaching of God's word. If you read through the book of Acts, this is clear. As you read and you see what Paul is doing, he's constantly trying to persuade men with the word of God.
And so that's why we're here this morning. We tried to bring the best that we could possibly get here and we were able to bring in Dr. James White from Alpha and Omega Ministries. He has participated in exactly 111 public moderated debates.
I stayed up last night painstakingly counting each and every single debate that he ever did so I could make sure I could present this figure accurately. He's an avid cyclist and a man who is in love with Jesus Christ and seeks to help others be able to present the truth of who Jesus Christ is.
He has written over 20 books and we're going to try to highlight some of them this weekend. We highlighted last night the Forgotten Trinity and talked about how that clearly articulates the doctrine of the Trinity.
Also he's written a book called Letters to a Mormon Elder in which he acts as if he's writing letters back and forth with a Mormon elder and he explains certain doctrines very clearly, very succinctly.
Again, another marvelous book if you wish to learn how to better share your faith with those who are Mormons. But this morning he's going to come and talk to us about Islam and why don't you come on up and share what you've got Dr. White.
Well it is an honor to be with you again this morning, especially after an introduction like that. I feel warmed and loved to be here in California. Thank you Drew. It is good to see all of you here. How many of you were here last evening just to have an idea?
Okay, alright. You'll still be able to follow along, don't worry, whether you were able to make it last evening. But we're going to be continuing our study of Islam and this morning, I don't know, I just felt it would be best to try to focus upon some of the biblical teachings.
I'm going to continue dealing with Islam. We're going to be looking at the Koran and a few things like that. But I want to look at the Gospel of John. If you turn with there in your Bibles, I will be displaying the text as well and showing you some things by the marvels of electronic gadgetry.
Do you ever preach from an iPad, bro? You never preach from an iPad. Am I the first person to do this from an iPad? No, Drew does it when he's here. Oh, okay, you do it from an iPad, there you go. A Macbook.
A Macbook, but not an iPad. I don't have one. So I'm setting a record here. You are. Thank you very much. You are looking at the first person to have ever preached from the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London using a computer.
And you know what the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, that's Spurgeon's Church. So I was the first one to do it. I was never invited back. So just, I'm not sure what that means, but we'll just let that slide.
But John chapter 8, won't have time this morning to delve too deeply into the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, but I just wanted to make some comments and to make some application from this particular text in regards to why it is that I have such a passion to proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ to the Muslim people.
And not unfortunately as many mission agencies are doing today, call them to be secret Christians or things like that, but actually to call them to a full confession of faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
But in the biblical sense of the term Son of God, unfortunately one of the things we will be looking at is that many Muslims believe that what we believe by Son of God means that God took a wife and had a kid.
And that's pretty much how the Quran presents it. We'll see that later on. That's how Surah 5, verse 116 presents the idea that God took a wife and that He had a child. And the Quran over and over again condemns that concept.
When we talk about the Son of God, when I say Jesus Christ is the Son of God, I am not saying for even a moment that Jesus Christ has a mother and that He came into existence at a point in time and that's what makes Him the Son of God.
Yes, He has a mother in the Incarnation, the Virgin Mary, but as the Son of God, Jesus Christ has eternally existed in that relationship. Son of God refers to the relationship that has eternally existed between the second person of the Trinity and the first person of the Trinity.
There has never been a time when the Father was not the Father and the Son was not the Son. There was never a time when the Father was alone and then the Son came into existence. This is a relationship term.
It speaks nothing to temporality or to some concept of a man and a woman having an offspring. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Muslims in the world think that that's what we're talking about and it is not.
In John chapter 8, beginning at verse 23, we read, And He was saying to them, You are from below, I am from above. You are from this world, I am not from or of this world. Therefore, I said to you that you will die in your sins.
For unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. Therefore, verse 25, they were saying to Him, Who are you? And Jesus said to them, What have I been saying to you from the beginning? I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you but the one who sent me is true.
And what I have heard from him, these things I am speaking into the world. And they did not know that He was speaking to them of the Father. Therefore, Jesus said to them, When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that, and then notice the phrase again, I am.
And that I do nothing of or from myself but just as the Father taught me, these things I am speaking. And He who sent me, the one who sent me is with me and He has not left me or abandoned me alone because, and then please notice this, I always do the things that are pleasing to Him.
Now, at this point, I would normally in a discussion with a Muslim, point out what Jesus said specifically in verse 24. Therefore, I said to you that you will die in your sins. Now, we stop right there.
That sounds very final. That sounds like something you do not want to do. You do not want to die in your sins. You do not want to enter into the presence of God responsible for that load of sin which is yours.
And there's so much here that, let's be honest, as we are talking to people, secular people in our society who are now, I would say by far the majority of people in our society, this is not something we share in common.
Many of them will say, what do you mean my sins? I'm a good person. I've done, I haven't done anything really bad. There is no sense of sin. But interestingly enough, when we're talking with our Muslim friends, this is not something we really have to argue about because Islam teaches that, yes, you are a sinner.
Now, they don't believe in the doctrine of original sin. They do not believe that we are fallen in Adam. But they recognize that unless you're one of the prophets, you have sinned. And certainly when you join that together with their doctrine of the fire and the fact that the fire is a horrible place to go.
I started last night to tell you a story. I guess I'll go ahead and illustrate it now very briefly. There is a sin that we're going to be talking about in Islam. It's the worst sin in Islam. It's called shirk, S-H-I-R-K.
We would call shirk idolatry, in essence. It is the concept of association. In fact, in Arabic, the term shirk, when it's used in just standard secular usage, refers to like a corporation, an association of people together to do business.
But in religious context, shirk is the association of anyone or anything with Allah. So, it is dividing his worship with something that's in the created order. And to die as a mushrik, a person who commits the sin of shirk.
Whenever you listen to Arabic, you may have noticed, have you ever heard of the jihad? And who are the people who commit jihad? The musharim, those who engage in jihad. And so, a mushrik is a person who commits shirk.
If you die as a mushrik, there is no forgiveness for you. Any other sin, Allah can forgive to you. Any other sin. In fact, I'll tell you a story a little bit later on, but Muhammad told a story in the hadith about a man who had killed 100 people.
And Allah simply forgave him. A mass murderer. Worse than anybody, I mean, can we even think of anybody today who on a personal level has murdered 100 people? I mean, we think of Gaysi and people like that, but they only killed a smaller number than that.
100 people, and yet Allah simply forgave him of that sin. And so, Allah can forgive any sin, but one sin he has said, and we're going to take the time to look at this a little bit later on in the Quran.
One sin he has said he will not forgive is association. Now, with that in mind, you think about the fact that Muslims believe that we are engaging in shirk when we worship Jesus Christ. The songs that you sang today in a Muslim ear would be examples of shirk.
Now, according to Islamic teaching, Muhammad himself was precluded from praying for his own parents when they died. Why? Because they died as Mushrikeen. They had committed shirk. They were pagans. They were idolaters, polytheists.
So, he was not allowed to pray for them. Muhammad has been given two forms of intercession, special forms of intercession. One hasn't taken place yet. That will happen at the end of time when by his intercession, his ummah, his people will be brought out of the fires of hell.
Anyone who has said the shahada will be brought out of the fires of hell due to the intercession of Muhammad. But then he was given one other special kind of intercession for one person. You see, when Muhammad first started as a prophet, he was a minority prophet in Mecca from 610 until 622.
And he had a rough time there. He was persecuted. He was mistreated. And his uncle, Abu Talib, protected him. Abu Talib protected him from becoming a Muslim. In fact, on his deathbed, Muhammad was there encouraging him to say, la ilaha illallah, not necessarily the rest of it, but say that there is only one true god, Allah.
But he wouldn't do it. The rest of the family was there saying, don't deny our ancestral gods, etc., etc. And so, Abu Talib died as a mushrik. And the one sort of lessening of the rule, the one exception is that Muhammad was allowed to intercede for Abu Talib.
So what's the result of that? Abu Talib has the best place in hell. He has the best place in hell. He has the place with the least punishment in all of hell. And you know where Abu Talib is today according to the hadith?
Abu Talib is wearing sandals. That are so hot, his brains boil. That's the best place in hell. Is to be wearing sandals that are so hot, your brains boil. That's the garden spot. Give you an idea of how serious shirk is and give you an idea of how serious the fires of hell are.
I can tell you many other stories from the hadith where the reality of hell and the reality of hell fire is presented. And so clearly, if Jesus, who is viewed as a prophet, remember last night when the man was asking the question about the fig tree, every time he said Jesus, he said, peace and blessings be upon him.
Peace and blessings be upon him. And so he's a prophet and here you have Jesus saying, I have said to you that you will die in your sins. That seems to be speaking to no forgiveness. No forgiveness in this life or even in the life to come.
And then he says, one other thing, for unless you believe that's Ego Aimi. Ego Aimi. You'll see if you're not familiar with the text, the Greek text is on the right hand side there. And the first two words, the second line, Ego Aimi, I am.
Now various translations will render that as I am, I am he with the he in italics or something like that. But very, very briefly, the I am statements in the gospel of John are extremely important. In John 8, 24, you have Jesus saying, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.
John 8, 58, Jesus says before Abraham was, I am. And what did the Jews do when they heard him say that? They picked up stones to stone him. Why would they be stoning Jesus? Then in John chapter 13, verse 19, Jesus again says, I'm telling you these things before they happen so that when they do happen, you will know that I am.
Pulling directly from Isaiah 43, 10, where Yahweh had said to his people, I'm telling you about stuff before it happens so when it does happen, you may believe and understand that I am. And then in John 18, 5 through 6, when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus, he says, who are you seeking?
And they say, Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus says, I am. And then John, just to make sure that we catch that, stops and says, now Judas, who is betraying him, was with them. And when Jesus said, I am, what happened?
The soldiers fell back upon the ground. The soldiers fell back upon the ground. Now, it's always amazed me how people try to get around this, what it means. People who deny the deity of Christ, they'll say something along the lines of, well, you know, there was just such moral purity in Jesus that those soldiers fell back upon the ground.
Well, that happens every day. You know, that's one of the big problems we have in the military is, you know, soldiers run around Iraq, they run into someone who's very morally upright, and there they go all over the place.
We've got broken bones and bruises and there's a special unit that just goes around and repairs soldiers because they fell back upon the ground in the presence of moral purity. Really? And yet, I hear people making this kind of argumentation in print.
Seriously. Clearly, John is communicating something to us. The reason they fall back upon the ground is because of what Jesus is revealing about himself. And John has drawn this picture all the way through the gospel to help us to understand.
Now, be careful. Don't just jump from the gospel of John back to Exodus 3 .14. That's too big a leap. Because, yeah, we all know what happens in Exodus 3 .14, right? The burning bush. And when Moses says, who do I say sent me?
God says, I am that I am. And egoimi is used there, but it's not the actual heart of the statement. The actual connection is back into Isaiah and the Minor Prophets, where this phrase, anahu in Hebrew, egoimi in Greek, is used as a name of God.
It's used as a name of God a number of times. And that's exactly why the Jews pick up stones to stone him. So what is Jesus saying? Unless you believe what I reveal about myself, who I am, you will die in your sins.
There's lots of people today who are willing to believe that Jesus was a good teacher. I'm not really sure why people in our society want to say Jesus was a good teacher. Have they ever read Jesus' teachings?
I mean, seriously. He so focuses upon who he himself is. He makes himself the center, the very source of spiritual life. I'm not really sure they agree that he was a good teacher, but they just don't want to go along saying something negative about Jesus necessarily.
And so they want to say he's a good teacher. Maybe some people even say he was a prophet. I mean, many of the Jews would have accepted him as Messiah. Remember in John chapter 6, he feeds 5 ,000 people.
What do they want to immediately do? Let's make him king. I mean, talk about an army that can move. We don't have to worry about supply lines. Our general can just simply take a couple loaves and a few fishes and feed everybody.
I mean, we could run the Romans right out of this area and take over. They want to make him king. Jesus, of course, sends him away because that's not the kind of kingship that he's seeking. But there have been a lot of things that people would have been willing to believe about Jesus, but Jesus would not accept an edited version of himself.
And he says, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. And the Jews would have accepted an edited Jesus, but they wouldn't accept the real Jesus. Now those are strong words and Jesus doesn't back down.
By the end of the chapter, the same people, right at the end of this particular discussion, the Jews, some of the Jews who heard Jesus' words, it says they believed in him. And interestingly enough, it's a form of the verb that refers to a point action.
It's not the normal form that John uses of saving faith, which is an ongoing action. And it says they believed in him, but by the end of the chapter, when Jesus starts exposing their hearts, by the end of the chapter, they're joining and picking up stones to stone him.
There can be false faith. There can be people who, I like what he has to say. And 20 minutes later, I think we need to die. How fickle people can be. But Jesus doesn't back down. He continues to use this phrase.
He continues to press these things. Just two chapters later in John chapter 10, he's going to say that he and the Father are one and bring about the salvation of God's people. And the Jews pick up stones to stone him again because they realize no mere creature could claim that kind of unity and oneness with the Father and bring about the salvation of God's people.
They knew that the Bible, the Old Testament had taught that God was the only source of life, that God was the one who redeemed his people. So if Jesus is claiming oneness with the Father, claiming that whoever's in his hand will have eternal life, they knew that the Bible taught that comes from God himself.
And they knew he was making claims for himself that only the divine could make. And so they want to kill him for that. Jesus then identifies them as false judges, quoting from Psalm 82 .6. In Psalm 82, the judges of Israel who were not doing what was right were called false judges.
They will die like men and fall like any one of the princes. Even though they were called gods, they were put in God's place to judge. He identifies them as false judges. Jesus never backs down from making this identification of himself.
So how is this relevant to our topic this morning? Well, it's simple. Our Muslim friends tell us that they are the second largest religion in the world that teach people to love Jesus. And Muslims will tell you, you cannot be a Muslim unless you believe in Prophet Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him.
But what do they believe about Jesus? Who is Jesus in Islam? Well, the term Isa appears in the Quran 25 times. When you throw in the other verses that are about him and the context, you might get, you have less than 100 total verses that would be relevant to the subject of Jesus.
Jesus speaks in the location on the planet. And that's in Surah 19, Surah Mariam, where Jesus speaks from his cradle. Mary brings him to his people and they're accusing her of having done something wrong because she wasn't married.
And she points to Jesus and Jesus speaks from his cradle and says he's a prophet. Now, interestingly enough, this is one of the many places where the Quran has drawn from preceding sources. Because that same story of Jesus speaking from the cradle appears in the Arabic infancy gospel that was written about 150 years earlier.
In fact, there are a number of places where the Quran draws from other sources that pre-existed it, even though it denies that. The Muslim believes the Quran is the eternal words of Allah that have been written upon a tablet in heaven.
And in fact, Muslim orthodoxy developed over the next couple hundred years to say that the Quran is uncreated. It's as eternal as Allah himself is. So it's a little bit odd to find it quoting from the Arabic infancy gospel, to be incorporating stories from the Gnostic gospels.
For example, the infancy gospel of Thomas where Jesus would form little clay birds and then he'd breathe on them and they'd become living birds and they'd fly off. That's in the Quran. And other stories that have been incorporated into the text of this particular book.
That the author of that book did not show a whole lot of discernment as to the sources that he was utilizing, even though the book itself quotes the enemies of Muhammad saying, these are just the fables of old, these are stories we've heard before.
And yet, we can identify some of these particular sources. But only once does Jesus, as I said, speak from an identifiable location. Every place else, Jesus is basically a disembodied voice. He just sort of shows up and says something about monotheism and argues basically for the prophethood of Muhammad and then that's it.
Unlike us, when we read from the gospels, Jesus was in this place and it was at this time of year and Jesus did this and this is who was present and the gospel is rooted in history. Totally unlike the Quran.
Totally unlike the Quran. And so, this Jesus, how do you love a disembodied voice? How do you, how do you show honor to someone? You just can't love this Jesus. In fact, one liberal Muslim, there are some, they don't live in Muslim countries, but there are liberal Muslims.
One liberal Muslim who teaches at Cambridge as I recall, said the Jesus of the Quran is not a person, he's an argument. He's not a person, he's an argument. And I remember a number of years ago, I interviewed a young man who was converted.
He was born on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not exactly the most missionized area in the world. And he grew up in a Muslim family. Years earlier, a missionary had come through and had left a New Testament with his family and for some reason they had never destroyed it nor had they ever read it.
And his parents made the common parental mistake. You know what they said? Don't read this. You would think we'd figure that out eventually, you know? The best way to have made sure that book went unread is read this before you, as part of your chores, before you get pizza.
Never would have been read. Amen. See, so there's a father out there who knows what I'm talking about. Instead they said don't read this. So he did. And without any human intermediation, simply reading the word of God, this man was gloriously converted.
And he had escaped to London having been imprisoned, beaten. He was hiding in London because his family was searching for him in London to kill him. And he mentioned in that interview, he said, it was amazing to me.
I knew who Jesus was from Islamic sources. But to read the Jesus of the New Testament, he came alive. It was so different. So if you can get a Muslim to read, to know who Jesus is from the New Testament, it doesn't have to be John, it can be Mark, it can be Luke, it can be Matthew, anything.
You are doing a great thing because they will be forced to recognize the massive difference that exists between the Jesus of the Bible and the Jesus of the Quran. And yet the vast majority of Muslims' response to that will be, well I just believe what the Quran says.
Think about it for a moment. 600 years removed. Muhammad dies in 632. The revelations he claims to receive are from 610 to 632. 600 years removed from the time of Jesus. And the Muslim will believe every word the Quran says, even quoting Jesus, though there is not one scintilla of historical evidence that would substantiate that Jesus ever said anything the Quran says he said.
Not one. Nobody before that ever said Jesus said these words. But the Muslim will say, I accept that. But they'll look at the Gospels and go, I don't accept that. Oh yeah, it was written in the first century but it's been changed, it's been perverted, it's been corrupted.
Where does the double standard come from? Well it comes from making the Quran the lens through which you read everything else. And that becomes the problem. Another major problem is I forgot to look at the clock when I started.
So when do I need to be done? 1 .30. I'm sorry? 1 .30. That's why I asked the guys in charge down here and not the people in the back row. That's why I do that. Seriously. 10 .15? I'm not getting a word out of this guy.
He's ignoring me. He has no standards for ending. Oh, I'm not going to say anything more about that. Okay, I'm going to wrap up at 10 .15 one way or the other and we'll continue on from there. Now, here is what normally stops all of our conversations.
No, not all of our conversations. Here is what normally stops most Christians' conversations with Muslims at this point. We have a message in the New Testament that puts Jesus at the very center. He is the one that we are trying to present them to.
We're trying to present the full truth about who Christ is. But how can you stop that conversation? You stop it by questioning the accuracy and inspiration of the text that we're reading from. Most will allow you to read from John chapter 8, but it will not be long.
It might take a few moments of conversation. It may take 10 minutes, but eventually you will encounter, yeah, but we really don't know that Jesus said that. Now, this is from someone who was absolutely convinced that what Jesus says in the Quran, he said.
And so, one of the biggest issues we immediately face is the fact that the Muslim will use one standard in the examination of his scriptures and a completely different standard in the examination of the Bible.
Even though his own scriptures make reference to the Torah and the Injil, the law and the gospel, having been, Natsal, sent down by God. And that they contain light and guidance. This becomes the real conversation stopper because, let's be honest, for most of us, the Bible that we have always possessed has had a leather cover.
I'm looking at the pastors here. It has a leather cover. It used to have gold edges. Looks like it's been a little bit well used there. And we all know the Bible has always had thumb indexing. No, not really.
That's not how it came. But honestly, that's how we've always experienced it. I remember the first time I heard a preacher say something about, in the Greek it says, and I was sitting there going, why should we care about what it says in the Greek?
I don't know any Greeks, you know. It just, there is a history about our text, and most of us feel a little uncomfortable talking with other people about it because we don't spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves.
And let me just, I'm just going to ask for an honest, what's the normal Pew translation you have here? Translation that everybody, okay, you use the NASB. I work for the Lachman Foundation, thank you very much.
Very good, NASB. I know the NASB. I've been a critical consultant for the NASB since 1996, something like that. I had hair back then. But have you ever noticed down at the bottom of the page in the little teeny tiny font that I can't read anymore, and hence looks like smudges at the bottom of the page, but if you, if you wear your reading glasses, sometimes in the center column, sometimes out the bottom of the page, there are these little notes that say, some manuscripts read this.
Anybody ever notice that? Okay, honesty question here, how many of you have ever been just a teensy weensy little bit bothered by that? Come on. Okay, so much for the honesty part. Here, there, the majority are going, there are notes down there?
I never, really? What's he talking about? I don't see any notes down there, and that means you need to see your optometrist very quickly. They're down there, and as a result, people will say, see there's variations in the manuscripts, and guess what?
There are. There are. It's one of the, one of the main areas of my study is dealing with New Testament textual criticism, and all the manuscripts we have. And you see what has happened is, most Muslims do not believe there are any variations whatsoever in the transmission of their text.
In fact, I forgot to bring it this morning, I'll bring it this evening, but I have my Arabic Quran with me, and I'm gonna pass it around so you all can take a look at it. But you won't find any notes at the bottom of the page in the Arabic Quran.
You won't find any notes that say some manuscripts say this, and some manuscripts say that. It's just one reading, and the vast majority of Muslims, not every single one, but the vast majority of Muslims really, really, really, really do believe that what they're reading is exactly what Muhammad dictated, or at least exactly what the third caliph, the third leader of the Islamic State, Uthman, said, Muhammad said.
And they think that this is clear evidence that since we have no variations in our text, you have variations in yours. Ours is from God, yours has been corrupted, yours have been changed, and so I really don't know that Jesus ever said, I am.
And for most Christians, let's face it, that's the end of that. I mean, seriously. We don't, we don't really spend time on this, but we need to because this is what, this is what we're getting hit from from every side, not just from the Muslims, but that's what the atheists and unbelievers are doing too.
That's what my daughter ran into when she went to community college, Glendale Community College, 18 year old freshman. She had a radical anti-christian, bigoted man, a profane man. I didn't even know you could use words like that in a public school setting, but it was a regular part of his teaching.
And one day, my daughter just couldn't put up with it anymore. She's me in a female body, so you can imagine what that's like. And she, she took him on and he just, he just lost it in front of the whole class.
And finally, he's yelling at her, you don't know who wrote the Gospels. You want to just Google it. Well, there you go. That's, that's the, that's, that's the final argument in our society today. Google it.
Well, okay. You know, that's, that's the final arbiter of all knowledge is, is, is Google. And so, it comes at us from every, every which direction. My grandparents didn't have to really worry about this a whole lot, but you know what?
If we want to be Christians who actually speak forth the Gospel in our society, we need to know these things today. We can't, we can't stick our heads in the sand anymore. We need to know where these, where these things are coming from, why we can trust the Scriptures.
So, let's think about the Gospel of John for a moment. Most New Testament scholarship today, and I use that term very, very, very widely and very, very generally, would say that the Gospel of John is the last of the Gospels to be written.
A lot of even very conservative theologians would say that. Most theologians today say that Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke used Mark and then you have John. And I don't like that idea personally.
I, I think there is an oral preaching of the Apostles that all the Gospels drew from. That's why they have the parallels that they do. The idea of, of slavish literary dependency I don't think is a, is appropriate, but that puts me in the minority, no question about it.
But be that as it may, John, people look at that and go, well, it used to be back in the 1870s or so. If you went to school in Germany, you would have been taught that John was written no earlier than 175 AD.
You'd have been told that all scholarship recognizes that John was written long after the times of Jesus. Why? Well, because it has such a developed view of Jesus and the Jesus of John is so different than that of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
That's what you would have been taught there in Germany. Then somewhere around the 1930s, and I have some pretty pictures for you here, 1930s, a man was rummaging through the, some papyri that had been collected in Egypt and brought to the United Kingdom, to England.
And he was working through these, these fragments and he came across this little thing. And he started reading it. Now, it's not easy to read stuff like that. You've got to be pretty well-trained. But he started reading it and he realized, you know, this sounds very familiar.
And he realized he was reading a part of the New Testament. And so he took this little fragment, this fragment's about the size of a credit card. In fact, what you're looking at right now is, at least for now, the earliest fragment of the New Testament that we possess.
The vast majority of scholarship would recognize that that little fragment right there is the earliest fragment we have in the New Testament. And it's dated around the year 125 AD. 125. Now, that means it could be as early as 100 or as late as 150.
It's about a 50-year range because it's based upon writing style in comparison to other manuscripts that we do know dates from. So, about 125 AD. And guess what, in the providence of God, guess which book it happens to be from?
The Gospel of John. John chapter 18, verses 31 through 34 on the front side and 37 to 38 on the back side. Interestingly enough, it's Jesus's discussion with Pilate about truth. Isn't that interesting?
But that would be the, now notice I said for now this is the earliest. Dan Wallace announced in a debate that he had with Bart Ehrman back in February that in February of next year they will be publishing the findings of a new manuscript find.
And he says that what they've found, we can't start jumping up and down about this quite yet, but he says that he is absolutely confident that they have now found about six more New Testament fragments to go to the second century.
One of Luke that's as old as this and one of Mark that's first century, which would be by far the earliest manuscript find we've ever found. But don't get too excited yet because, as I said, it's going to take some time to work through those things and demonstrate this.
Further, I hate to tell you this, but your speaker is a bit of a geek. Here is a picture, a couple pictures from my debate with Bart Ehrman a few years ago. Bart Ehrman, by the way, is really the leading critic of New Testament Christianity in the English-speaking world today.
He is an apostate, a graduate of Wheaton College, Moody Bible Institute, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He now calls himself a happy agnostic. Agnostic he is, happy I'm not so sure about, but he's written a number of books like Forge, Jesus Interrupted, Misquoting Jesus, etc., etc., etc.
And you'll notice what I'm wearing. That's my P52 tie. Now don't worry, it's not actually P52. I didn't steal it and make a tie out of it, but that's actually a fully readable tie where you can read both the front and back of P52 on the tie.
And there I am giving Bart his own copy of my P52 tie, which is one of the only times during the debate he actually smiled. So it was interesting, but I didn't bring any of my P52 ties this evening. Let me show you just a couple of these early, early manuscripts and then give you an example of how the New Testament has far earlier evidence and far greater evidence than any other work of antiquity.
Because when I said 125, most of you are like, okay, 125. What does that mean? Just, I'll show you a graph that will show this later on, but just keep something in mind. For other works contemporaneous with the New Testament, like the historians Pliny, Tacitus, people like that, the average time period between when they wrote their books and our first manuscript copy is between five and nine hundred years.
And we're talking about that little manuscript is within, if you put John at say 80, is within 40 years. So it's difference between 40 years and five to nine hundred years. It starts to give you just a little idea of the richness of the evidence we have.
Now here's one, I forgot to tell the pastor about this, but any questions you have about this, he will answer all your questions after the service. Just hear that, or what's that, Drew will? Okay, all right, I'm sorry.
This is P115. I am going to retape this because it's going to drive me insane here real quickly. Thank you very much. There we go. You were going to have me in your lap about the third time by I just didn't want to, just didn't want to do that.
This is P115. You can sort of tell it's a, let's just say that particular page hasn't aged well. Then again, how will any of us look 1800 years from now? So I think it's actually done fairly well. But here's a, here's a very early papyri, P115.
It's one of only two papyrus fragments we have of the Book of Revelation. Ah, yes. Now what do we find in the Book of Revelation? One of the things we find in the Book of Revelation is the number of the beast.
And what's the number of the beast? You all didn't even have to look it up, did you? Because you and I both know, we could stop some guy on a Harley out here on the road and say, what's the number of the beast?
Go, right here, 666. Got it on my forehead, got it on the back of my head here too. Everybody knows the number of the beast is 666, right? Except there's a little problem because you sort of blow up that section there.
And the two earliest manuscripts we found in the Book of Revelation, they don't say 666. They say 616. It's right there. Six, they don't, it wasn't written in Roman numerals. 616. Like I said, if you want to know why that is, you're gonna have to ask the pastor.
But I think Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary has actually gotten, I think he has the best insight on this. I've got to give him credit. He has thought about and thought about this. And he has come up with the conclusion that 666 is the number of the beast, but 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast.
And with that, I'm going to lightly move along. Here is a fragment, not, this isn't a fragment, this is a full manuscript actually. This is manuscript P72 from 175 to 200 AD. This is the earliest manuscript we have of 1st and 2nd Peter and Jude.
In fact, I forgot to bring my little laser thing along with me to point this out to you, but if you look at the very top of the second page, you can actually read it. Petru Epistle Be, Peter's Epistle Be, 2nd Peter.
There's, that's the end of 1st Peter and the beginning of 2nd Peter. And I got to see this exact page in 1993 in Denver, Colorado. It was on display there. And I went in and my friend Rich Pierce is with me, and I started looking at it, and I started translating it.
And you see those little lines? There's some lines over certain words. Those are called Nomina Sacra. The Christians, for some reason, developed, and they're the only ones who did this, an abbreviation system where words that were used frequently in the New Testament were abbreviated.
You just put a line over it for, so God, Christ, Jesus, Lord, Savior, Spirit. Words that would be used a lot would be abbreviated, maybe because they didn't have a lot of papyri to write on. Most of them were rather poor.
We're not sure why, but you can see the Nomina Sacra right there. And what's really neat about 2nd Peter, one, is this is one of the earliest references to the deity of Christ. This is one of the things I would point out to my Muslim friends who say, well, the New Testament's been corrupted, and maybe Constantine changed stuff, and all the rest of that kind of silliness.
But, and remember the Da Vinci Code? How many of you would actually admit to either having read or seen the Da Vinci Code? Go ahead, come on, I did too. A small number of you, okay. It was, I mean, for a while you couldn't walk through the airport without seeing, you know, 10 people at every gate, you know, reading the Da Vinci Code.
It was just all over the place. Well, that was the thesis in the Da Vinci Code, was that Constantine had changed all this stuff, and he had gathered up all the old gospels that presented Jesus as a married guy with kids, and turned it into the gospels that we have today, etc., etc.
That was the silly theory behind it. Well, here's a manuscript that was written 150 years before Constantine came along, and right here, we'll blow it up for you so you can see it. There we go. That is what called, that's what's called a Granville Sharp construction.
It said, describes Jesus as our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, and the terms God and Savior apply to one person, and that is to Jesus. So, long before Constantine comes along, in the earliest manuscripts we have, we clearly have the deity of Christ over against the theories of Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code and other things like that.
Well, I'm sitting here translating this thing, and I'm just, I'm just in, I'm just in ecstasy looking at this thing, and people would come walking up, and they sort of look at it, and it's in a hermetically sealed box, and they read the description.
They'd look over at Rich, and they'd go, can he read that? And Rich would go, yeah. Look at this, Harold, this guy is reading this ancient, and people start gathering around, you know, and the security guys are doing this number, and so Rich would drag me off to go look at something else for a while, and then I'd come back, and uh, you know, I'm sort of drooling on the box, and it was really, really great to be able to see this, especially when you realize that whoever wrote this probably risked their lives to do it, because remember, until 313 AD, Christianity was religio illicita, an illegal religion, and you could be killed for possessing or copying the Christian scriptures, and so here's someone 18, now that's not the best handwriting in the world, okay?
I mean, this guy did not win his first grade handwriting competition. I did, but he didn't, and so this probably, this was not some professional guy. This was probably a businessman or someone that could read and write, and he probably went into a Christian fellowship, and they asked him, you know, they brought this thing out, and he started reading from it.
He goes, what's that? Those are Peter's epistles. We don't have Peter's epistles in our church. Could I make a copy? And you see, the early Christians always answered yes. They wanted the word of God to go everywhere.
They didn't go, um, could I see your professional copyist card, please, sir? Do you work for Xerox? You know, we need to make sure that the copy you make is going to be just picture perfect. They didn't ask that question.
His lines aren't exactly perfect, you know, one goes up, one goes down a little bit, you know, and he's not writing on vellum, which would have been a smoother parchment type thing, would cost more money.
Most of these folks weren't overly rich, like I said, lots of slaves, lots of poor. Papyri would have sort of bumps in it, so some of the letters don't look quite as good as other letters and things like that.
But you see, people wanted to possess the word of God. And yes, as a result, they might have misspelled words, might have skipped a word, might have transposed some words because they're familiar with another way of the text reading.
That's why you have those little notes at the bottom of your page. But you see, we have hundreds and thousands of these, and we can compare them together. And you see, the way that God preserved his word, the way that God preserved the New Testament, was he had it go out all over the known world immediately.
You see, anybody remember Shirley MacLaine? I'm dating myself here. Don't admit this, Pastor. I don't, I, but anybody in the past, some of us older, remember Shirley MacLaine? Yeah, some of the ladies going, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Remember when she sort of lost it back in the 1980s and she got involved with the New Age stuff and she did that movie, Out on a Limb, where, you know, she's walking along the seashore with her, with her New Age guru who's teaching her to say, I am God, I am God, I am God.
And we're all sitting at home going, no, you're not, no, you're not, no, you're not. And she started going to this guy, this chick that would trans-channel Ramtha, this spirit thing, you know, and all that stuff.
And she used to run around and tell people, you know, reincarnation used to be in the Bible. They took it out, the Council of Constantinople. Now, you're all looking at me going, well, did they? I mean, let's face it, just, just simple question here, don't feel badly if you don't know, but how many people know when the Council of Constantinople?
Notice I didn't say where because that's sort of a dead giveaway. Council of Constantinople, held in Detroit, right, okay, sure. But anybody here, without Googling on your smartphone real quick, that's what the young people are doing, I'm going to find out real quick, tap, tap, tap, when the Council of Constantinople was?
Anybody? Wrong. No one else is going to guess now. 381. Did you say 800? It was 381, 381 AD. Now, even if you know where it was, would you feel over the comfort of saying they didn't do that, and most of us don't know what happened to the Council of Constantinople.
So, it's real convenient to make that kind of assertion. Now, anybody who knows the Council of Constantinople knows that there was no such discussion of anything even related to that. But even more so, what you need to understand is that could never have happened.
Why? Well, for example, we've got entire manuscripts of the entirety of the New Testament that were written well before 381. And so, what'd they do? Go back and edit everything? How could they? I mean, how long did it take us to find Osama Bin Laden with satellites?
How in the world could Constantine find every New Testament manuscript, some of which had been buried in the sands of Egypt for 50 years, back in 325 or 381 or anything like that? It couldn't have happened.
And so, you see, because Christians wanted the gospel message to go to everybody, the New Testament explodes out across all of Europe, North Africa, etc., etc. And what that means is there was never, ever a time when Shirley MacLaine could have been right or anybody else could have been right.
There was never a time when any one man, there was no papacy yet to even speak of, when any one man, group of men, a council, anything like that could gather up all the manuscripts and make wholesale changes.
It's not possible. And as we find earlier and earlier manuscripts in widely diverse places, what we find is those earlier and earlier manuscripts, guess what? They read the same as the later, later manuscripts do.
If there had been changes, there'd be these massive differences, entire books added and changed and wording different. That's not what happens. That's not what happens. So, you see, the reason we can look at someone like Shirley MacLaine and say beyond a shadow of a doubt, on the level of evidence that would be acceptable in a court of law, you are wrong.
It's impossible for that to have happened because we have manuscripts that went everywhere. Now, the results are small copyist errors we have to examine, but the flip side is what we really need to think about.
And the flip side is what happened with the Quran. Now, we're going to talk about this more later, but very briefly, the Quran is an edited document and the Muslim sources say so. During the reign of the third caliph, Uthman, there was concern about differences in the citation of the Quran.
And so, he had one mushaf of the Quran, a manuscript of the Quran that had been compiled shortly after Muhammad's death brought, but they had missed some things. And you can look this up, if anyone wants to check this out, Sahih al-Bukhari, volume six, pages 509 and 510, if you want to read it for yourself.
There are other references to it as well, but that's the primary section. Uthman put together a committee headed up by Zayd ibn Thabit, and they created the official version of the Quran. And they made copies of it and sent it to all the major Islamic cities in the world at that time and said, this is what you'll use, anything else, burn it.
Anything else, burn it. Now, when you do that, you create a relatively stable text. When you use the government to say, this is it, burn everything else, you can create a pretty stable text. But how many of you would like to have the U .S. government version of the New Testament to read?
No one really want to have that personally. I really wouldn't trust it. And what's more, what do you have to believe? What do you have to absolutely believe? That Uthman got it right. And you see, one of the elements of Islamic belief is that Muhammad is the final prophet.
There are no prophets after Muhammad. Uthman was not a prophet. So you're going to say that Uthman was divinely guided, that he was had prophetic capacity and power, that this committee he came up with.
There were other Muslims at the time that violently disagreed with what Uthman did. One of them was a man by the name of Ibn Masud. And Ibn Masud was one of the men that Muhammad during his life has said, if you want to know the Quran, go to Ibn Masud.
He's one of the greatest reciters of the Quran. And Ibn Masud had a different version of the Quran than Uthman came up with. And his readings have been found in manuscripts. We're going to look at this.
I'll show you manuscripts that have Ibn Masud's readings that are different than are found in the modern day Uthmanic Quran. Here's the problem. Uthman guaranteed a very stable text of his Quran. There's no question about that.
When you have the government and the sword, that helps. But you see, once you burn the sources you used, you cannot now get past that point in time. You can't find more p52s. You can't find more whatever this new manuscript is going to be called, the Gospel of Mark, that goes to the first century.
You have to trust that that particular editor and redactor got it absolutely right. And how do you know what he put in and took out? In the days of Uthman, there was a huge controversy about who was supposed to be succeeding Muhammad, which has led to the division today between Sunnis and Shias.
And there are Shiites who have argued that Uthman made changes, took out references to Ali. How do we know if you burn what came before? How do you know? You see, folks, there was never a Christian Uthman.
There was never a time when anyone had control of the text of the New Testament to be able to change, edit, redact, put in, take out. It never happened. It couldn't have happened. So in reality, we have a much, much better argument for the originality of our text than the Muslim can make because of their own history of their own text.
Now time is out, but I will continue. We're going to look at a couple more manuscripts. Now I'm going to give you that graphic that shows you the vast difference between the New Testament and what we have in any other work of antiquity.
We're going to keep looking at that and then make some more application in the next service. So thank you very much for your attention. Drew, I'll let you close.
Right now we're going to take an offering to help support Alpha and Omega Ministries, which James Wright is the director of. You can make the checks out and should make the checks out to Alpha and Omega Ministries.
So we'll pray for the offering and then we will sing a song. Lord, we come before you. Thank you for what we've learned today, God, and just seeing how you've preserved your word through a mass spread of the gospel and a mass spread of documents.
Lord, we thank you for doing that for us, for sovereignly preserving your word throughout history. We pray that we would be able to understand this more as Dr. White continues to speak about it and that you'd bless the offering that's about to be taken for his ministry.
We ask this in your name. Amen.