May 23, 2006

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Desert Metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is
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The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll -free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now, with today's topic, here is
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James White. Good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a
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Tuesday morning. Today I've got a lot of ground to cover. I'm not sure how much we're going to be doing any phone calls today.
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We will see, depending on how quickly we get through this material. The reason
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I say is I want to discuss some issues that have arisen since the
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Shabir Ali debate at Biola, specifically the fact that Mr.
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Ali has been in contact with me and hasn't been specifically just on the subject of, in fact, we haven't really gotten around to much discussion of future debates.
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Instead, very shortly after the debate, Mr. Ali contacted me and wanted references to the
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Ibn Masud issue. Now, if you have listened to the debate, you may have missed most of it since it was a very minor thing.
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It was mentioned in passing. I talked about Ibn Masud, who was one of the companions of the
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Prophet Muhammad. And I was discussing the
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Uthmanian revision. And this is even, I mentioned this a number of times in the debate.
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If you're not familiar with this, I need to try to keep everybody with me here. And I think it is important that we discuss this for a number of reasons.
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You need to know about this stuff, but also have backgrounds to debates and so on and so forth.
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The conservative view, the conservative view, please notice the use of the term conservative there, the conservative view of the origination of the modern text of the
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Quran, which is primarily based upon a 1924 manuscript, interestingly enough.
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But the conservative view is that within a few decades after the death of Muhammad, there came about a bit of confusion.
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I should have brought Sahih al -Bukhari in here so I could read it to you.
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I've still got, you wouldn't even know where to find it. So it doesn't matter. I could read you the whole section from Bukhari where he describes how the concern over the various readings of the
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Quran came to Uthman's attention, that people who were traveling through the
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Islamic world were encountering confusion and they were worried about happening to them what they saw happening amongst
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Christians and Jews in regards to various interpretations and readings. It is interesting,
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I've always found Muslims to confuse both interpretation and reading as if they're the same thing. They're not. But and so Uthman decides to come up with a single version and to distribute this.
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And there's going to be unity based upon the fact that you just got this one Quran and things like that. And in discussing that and discussing the fact that this is extremely important in understanding the transmission of the text of the
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Quran, and this is for the believing Muslim, I mean, there are liberals and non -Muslims who even question the
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Uthmanian revision, even question those things as actually having happened in the way they're described as having happened.
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But even amongst conservatives, and I'm dealing with a conservative Sunni Muslim in this debate, and that's the context that has to be placed in.
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This is extremely important because Uthman takes the other manuscripts, the other collections of the
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Quran, which differ on many levels. They differ on the order of the reading, which, of course, would mess up, for example, the
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Quranic codes that Shabir Ali talks about at times that would mess up the columns and the readings and the numbers and things.
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And there are variant readings and texts and so on and so forth in these manuscripts. These manuscripts, which would be to us extremely important because of the fact that they would go back closer than anything afterwards.
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Those manuscripts were burned. And when you burn those manuscripts, when you engage in that type of activity, you are freezing the text.
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In essence, you're freezing as far back as you can go in the study of that particular text.
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In that context, I mentioned Ibn Masud. And as I was preparing for this debate, I was reading a lot on this particular issue because I knew that Mr.
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Ali would go after the textual critical issue, that he has made many comments about the textual critical issue in regards to the
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New Testament. And so I wanted to do background reading and have material ready to provide contrast and things like that.
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Let's face it, the idea of coming up with a single text is nothing new to me.
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What is this? What is the parallel to this desire to have a single text without variations? What's parallel to this?
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Either the Textus Receptus or King James Onlyism. It's the exact same thing. It's the exact same desire.
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It has the exact same argumentation behind it. Except this time they did it within three generations, within, well, three decades of the original period in the conservative viewpoint of these things.
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And so we're actually dealing with the results of it rather than doing it, you know, 1 ,500 years later, 1 ,600 years later, something like that.
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So been there, done that, got the T -shirt, know this attitude really, really, really well. And so I'm doing some background reading.
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I kept running across a story sought in about four different sources.
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It was used, it was expressed in different language. But here is the specific, here's one of the things that I read.
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And since nothing was ever indicated anywhere in all the sources that I was reading that this was controversial, that this was some deep, dark secret, anything alike.
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Here's what I read. Quote, the most serious opponent of Uthman's text was
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Ibn Masud, a companion of the prophet and a great theologian. Ibn Masud refused to give up his copy of the
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Quran to the president of the revision committee and thus incurred the wrath of the caliphate by whom he was publicly chastised.
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He died a few days after from the effects of the beating he had received. This unnecessary and cruel act on the part of the caliphate was disapproved of by his contemporaries and has ever since been looked upon by the
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Shias as an atrocious crime. Now, I had read that.
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I had also read another citation. Quote, Ibn Masud refused to deliver his copy to the committee whose president, although one of the readers of the word of God, had earned much less trust and authority than he.
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This refusal incited such a level of indignation from the caliph that he publicly whipped the old saint.
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One notes that the old companion of the prophet had two ribs broken from the violence of the strikes and that he died after three days.
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This cruelty that drew upon Othman, the hatred of his contemporaries, is today regarded by the
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Shias as an atrocious crime. Now, that is T .J. Newbold, Journal Asiatique, December 1843, page 385.
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So I had read this a number of times, and so I made quick and passing reference to it in my opening statement.
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Certainly it was not any point, and in fact, all it was is an illustration of the fact that the manuscripts that were destroyed differed.
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Anyone who's looked into the sources knows that there were differences between these manuscripts. If Ibn Masud's manuscript and his reading of the
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Quran was identical to that of Othman, there would be no reason for this whole situation to have arisen at all.
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And in fact, if this didn't happen, and if Ibn Masud just, you know, initially just sort of resisted but then gave in,
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I would have less respect for him, to be perfectly honest with you. I mean, if he was a companion of the prophet, he had earlier and more primitive knowledge than someone coming along later.
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If he just rolled over, I would have little respect for him. And isn't it ironic that Islamic apologists basically try to cast
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Paul in that way? They try to say some later guy came along and overthrew the original people.
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Why should we respect the original people who couldn't fight for the truth and resist Paul, which of course isn't what happened, but that's what
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I'd like to say has happened. I would honestly lose respect if Ibn Masud was in a situation where he knew better and yet he would give up.
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But I, anyways, I just mentioned this in passing. Here's what happened. During the break, now, some moderators are kind enough, and I didn't mention this to the moderator beforehand, so there's no way you could know this, but some moderators are kind enough to say beforehand, now, the folks, please don't be rude and rush the podium and tie up the speakers.
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We're going to have a very brief break. You know, sometimes they'd like to go use the restroom, but, you know,
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I didn't get that opportunity. And we're going to go straight into cross -examination. Now, I knew that once we got down to cross -examination,
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I was the first one up. There was going to be the questions from the audiences, and then my closing statement was going to be first.
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So I had to have everything ready for the rest of the debate right then and there. I had to have the files
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I wanted to have up. I needed to have everything organized, the questions ready to go.
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Everything had to be done, and we were taking a 10 -minute break. Well, that wasn't announced, and so we got flooded.
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And the first people up were Muslims. They were young Muslim men. They were disrespectful. They were mean and nasty. Let's just put it that way.
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And they wanted a citation right now about Ibn Masud. And I'm like, what? This is even controversial?
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And I didn't have it memorized. Oh, you should have it. You should bring your materials here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they were just in your face, no meaningful response to anything else
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I had said. But they had their one thing they wanted to go after, which is always a sign of a lost position.
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But anyway, so I asked some of the guys down in the audience to come up and hold people back, basically, so I could have at least a couple of moments.
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Almost the entire break had already been taken up. I had, I would say, around two minutes to 90 seconds.
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And now I'm going, all right, so there's controversy about Ibn Masud. All right, what do
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I want to do here? And I remembered that I had some electronic articles
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I downloaded, text files, that I had, well, actually, they weren't text files. They were initially HTML files that I had saved as text files.
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Now, if anybody knows what that means, that means they're not going to be real pretty. There's going to be extraneous material in them, stuff like that.
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But I had them in my documents folder. So I asked my system to do a search on Masud real quick in that one folder.
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And I picked the, what seemed to be the most likely candidate as far as the file goes, popped it open, searched for Masud, found the citation that I first gave you, which starts, the most serious opponent of Uthman's text was
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Ibn Masud. Cut that, you know, copied it, pasted it into my notes.
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And then as I go back to the source document to get the actual, where this came from, the moderator starts speaking.
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I've got maybe 30 seconds now before the Q &A or the cross -examination is to start.
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So I try scrolling up the document in a, now a text file that was an
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HTML file. So footnotes, references have got all sorts of extraneous material in them, stuff like that.
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I'm trying to find this in about 30 seconds to find the source. I scroll back to what looks like the first reference source that this was taken from, copy it out, stick it into my notes.
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And what I'm going to do is at the beginning of my closing statement, I'm just going to throw that out there.
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They had wanted a reference. Here's the citation since I hadn't cited it in my statements. Here's the citation. Here's the source and move on from there.
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Well, if you've listened to the debate, you know that during the cross -examination, Shabir Ali made a reference to it.
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And so I read what I had put into my notes. So I didn't have to use time in my final statement.
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So there's the background to how that ended up in the debate. And this particular citation, the most serious opponent of Uthman's text was
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Ibn Masud. All right. So I get back and I had honestly put everything else off to prepare for this debate.
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I had, and you can contact CRI and verify this. I had taken some very short term projects in a sense of didn't have a lot of time to work on them.
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I was sort of being of assistance. Sometimes I do that for the CRI journal where they have a hole that develops in their next issue and they need something really, really fast.
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And they've learned over the years that I'm willing to work with them and produce material for them in a very short period of time.
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And I had already done one review. I had reviewed Is the Reformation Over by a
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Noel and the other lady had gotten that in, in about three days, I would say.
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And I had a book, Latham's book on the Trinity and a DVD to review for the
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CRI journal. I am trying desperately to get Is the Mormon My Brother back in print.
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And I want to have the last bit of editing on the added materials that I've, it's all in a file.
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It's just a matter of editing it all and getting into meaningful format to send to a friend of mine who's going to be putting that in and doing the pagination stuff before we can send it off to be reprinted.
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And I want to do that before next week, because next week I'm going to disappear for a little while to write
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Pulpit Crimes. And so I've got to be doing all the background stuff, getting all the citations and all that type of material put together so that I can have it with me while I'm actually working on writing the book.
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So I've got a lot of stuff going on and I've put it all aside to do the Shabir Ali debate.
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Within a day, 48 hours of the debate, Shabir Ali is writing to me and he's graciously talking about Glasgow in Scotland.
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I want to do that if we can talk the university into doing it, that is. And then he wants the references to this.
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Now, this is going to sound like gerrymatitics, but I promise not to be using this argument a year from now. Well, then again,
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I might because I'm not sure how fast the trees are growing for the wood for my for my shelves. But ever heard ever heard gerrymatitics in our debates talking about how all his best books are packed up?
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Well, all my books are packed up. In fact, when we first I've got about 40, maybe 45 percent of my library here in my office.
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It's all in boxes. I have no shelves yet. My library is not functional. The rest of my library is back at the old office.
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And for a while here at this office, my my boxes were just out on the floor and single, you know, but we've got more stuff in that office now because a lot of other stuff has been stuffed into my office.
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It isn't supposed to be in my office, but it won't be in my office forever. So now they're stacked on top of each other.
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So I've got boxes stacked on top of boxes, three layers deep. And so the books that are in the bottom of those boxes, they're simply not accessible anymore.
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For a while, I could at least, you know, sort of rummage through boxes while they're all spread out. I can't do that anymore.
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So the fact of the matter is my library is nonfunctional. I've got a million other things to be doing.
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And Mr. Ali wants references about Ibn Masud, which was not even slightly a central point of the debate to begin with.
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So I wrote back to him and I said, well, tell you what, all I've got, you know, I just don't have time to do this right now.
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But let me give you what I've got. It's electronic and that's it. I can't, I don't have time to be trying to dig through all this stuff and track this resource down, track that resource down.
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Don't have time to do that right now. So here's what I've got. And when
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I have an opportunity to do more, be glad to do so. But, you know, it's not exactly like this was the central portion of the debate.
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So since that time, in fact, it was yesterday, the day before yesterday, I get two papers back from Shabir Ali.
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And it seems similar to situations I've experienced in the past with, for example, geromantics.
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I remember very well when we did the Boston College debates that three days after doing the debate, when
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I got on the air with him on WEZE, he was he was still in debate mode.
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He was still on the same subject. It was like it was like we were 30 seconds after the debate.
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He was still in that mode. And it's almost similar here. Let's discuss all this stuff.
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And I'm like, you know, this isn't the only area I deal with. I mean, I'm going to be writing a book on the centrality and importance of preaching in the church and how that's how that's been abandoned in so much of modern evangelicalism.
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I've got John Shelby Spong and the homosexuality issue coming up. I've got all these other things that I'm doing.
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And it's just like, hello, don't have the foggiest idea what that was. We just might want to.
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I don't know why, because it didn't didn't do anything in front of me here. But anyway, I've got a lot of stuff going on.
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Just don't, you know, could we do this a little bit more slowly? So I even said, you know, I'll get to it when
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I can. You just need to understand. I even linked to the Cantor stuff on my blog.
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Say, there's stuff going on here, you know, and maybe you don't have other debates coming up or something.
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But, you know, I just don't know. So I get these papers back and two issues.
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He goes after the Ibn Masud issue, and he goes after the what was probably most memorable to most people.
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And that was the Mark 1335, Matthew 24 issue in regards to the term kurias. So let's look at Ibn Masud first.
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First of all, the reference that I gave in the debate was wrong. The text wasn't wrong.
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When I was scrolling back trying to find what the citation was in that last 30 seconds before the cross -examination on my tablet
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PC, I got the wrong reference. Now, I sent this to him going, now, this is just what
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I have in an electronic file. I can't verify this. But evidently, the I can't verify this part got lost in a transmission somewhere.
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And it's what was in the debate. That's what I read it as. The reference is not to CADI, which is what
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I had tracked down. The reference is, quote, the recensions of the Quran by Reverend Canon Sell, DDMRAS, fellow of the
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University of Madras, Christian Literature Society, London, Madras and Colombo, 1909. It is an
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English text, page 15, if you would like to track it down and read it for yourself.
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That's a direct citation from page 15 of that particular work. That's where the most serious opponent of Uthman's text was, came from.
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I didn't see anything in what was sent to me about the journal Asiatique, December 1843, page 385 citation.
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But that hasn't been discussed either. So the important one is the 1843 one.
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Why? Because the reference in the other one is the same one. It also goes back to December 1843, page 385,
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T .J. Newbold article. And so there it is. So for those of you who think that I claim infallibility,
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I do not. When scrolling back through text files or HTML files in 30 seconds in the middle of a debate,
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I can find the wrong reference. Now that reference was in there, but it was for a different paragraph.
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And I got the wrong one. So there's the actual citation. There's the actual paragraph. Same thing.
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Now you know exactly where it's found. You can verify it for yourself. So there's that. And if someone wants to, on the basis of the right text, wrong citation, dismiss everything else
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I had to say, well, then you got to solve a little bit of a problem. Because if you go back through our blog, and I have sent some of these things to Mr.
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Ali. If you go back through our blog, I have documented many errors on Shabir Ali's part.
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Errors citing the text, giving the wrong references, not seeing the proper Greek text, or misrepresenting this or misrepresenting that.
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And so if you're going to demand absolute perfection in finding every reference at high speed.
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And I mean, obviously, if I was presenting a paper on this particular subject, that wouldn't have happened because I don't just do it in 30 seconds, just simply because some young man wanted to have a text provided to them.
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But that is the situation there. And then right along the same time, arrives, well,
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I would say within 10 minutes, arrived a paper wherein Mr.
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Ali is seeking to reclaim the Mark 1335 issue.
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And what was that? Well, let me play for you the specific text or a specific example.
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This is Shabir Ali from, I believe, the University of Manchester. No, Birmingham. Birmingham.
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It's from the United Kingdom. And just to give you an idea of what it is, he's been saying for many, many, many years that came up in the debate.
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Let's listen. Okay, then Matthew made changes to the material in order to have people in the stories refer to Jesus as Lord.
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Two, in order for having Jesus himself describe himself as Lord. Three, for having people call
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Jesus son of God. Now, just notice what he's saying there. He's directly making the accusation that Matthew is corrupting the original teachings about Jesus.
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He's given his false view of Jesus. And he is changing the view of Jesus by calling him
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Lord. Kudios. Okay? So just make sure that you catch that. And four, for calling
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God father or for having Jesus himself referred to God as father. So that the two will go hand in hand.
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Jesus calling God father and people referring to Jesus as son. Well, five, for having people pray to Jesus.
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Six, for reducing Jesus's emphasis on the one God. And seven, for reducing the distinction between Jesus and his
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God. By the way, there's eight points that he goes through. That seventh one, where Matthew allegedly reduces the emphasis upon the oneness of God.
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That's all based upon the fact that at one point, Matthew does not cite the entirety of the
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Shema, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh God. Here Israel, Yahweh is God, Yahweh is one.
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He's our God, Yahweh is one. And as Tony Costa pointed out to him, and as I would have if this had come up, that is, again, just one of the many, many instances where Shabir Ali does not recognize that the, or refuses to recognize, that the synoptic writers, and John for that matter, had a specific audience in mind.
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Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience. Mark is not. And Matthew would be wasting papyri, papyrus,
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I guess, one sheet he's writing out at one time. He would be wasting his time and his energy to cite the entirety of the
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Shema, when the Shema is what every Jewish person repeated every morning. So he only repeats the portion that goes directly with what
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Jesus is talking about there. As if somehow, writing to Jews, Matthew would want to de -emphasize the unity of God.
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And there's just, and I think Jay Smith has pointed this out too, but Shabir Ali isn't listening, and the
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Muslims aren't listening. They need to recognize that they need to allow for the synoptic writers to address a particular audience, just as they recognize that various of the surahs in the
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Quran were written, for example, after particular battles in the life of Muhammad, to give the context.
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And without that context, you wouldn't have any idea understanding why that particular surah addresses what it addresses.
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So once again, what was the thesis that I had during the debate? Shabir Ali uses different standards for the
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New Testament than he uses for the Quran. He uses different sources of scholarship. He will accept, as I point out on my blog, he'll use people like Thiem Perkins, who are liberal
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Jesuit theologians at Boston College. But then if someone, but then when it comes to the
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Quran, well, you better only cite Muslim sources, and believing Muslim sources, and conservative believing
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Muslim sources. Because if you cite any type of liberal Islamic sources, then well, you know, that's just to be dismissed, and those are enemies of the faith, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Well, I think liberalism is an enemy of the Christian faith, just as much as he thinks liberalism is to the faith of Islam.
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Just because it calls itself Christianity doesn't mean anything. If you don't believe that God can speak, if you don't believe that God can inspire scripture, then why call yourself a
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Christian? Okay, I mean, someone needs to, I'll do it. Someone needs to send Shabir Ali Machen's classic on liberalism and Christianity.
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Because they are different religions, and there's reasons for that. But anyway, I continue with his own words.
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So there's basically the presentation he makes. And in this very, this very same lecture, he uses the
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Mark 13, 35, Matthew 24. In the context of having, of trying to prove where Matthew uses
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Kurios, where Mark didn't, all right? And what did I ask him?
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What was the cross -examination question? Do you not see? Do you not recognize the fact that you're looking at the
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English text, you're looking at master of the house, owner of the house, and you haven't looked at the Greek.
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You haven't looked that up, and you haven't checked this for yourself, and you are in error. At that point, he graciously conceded the point that that therefore would mean that that argument at that point is wrong.
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Unfortunately, he's, and I really do mean unfortunately, because this really seems to me to be an unwise move on Mr.
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Ali's part to seek to try to regain this point.
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It really, really does. Let me quote from what he's saying here. He says, the difference is significant.
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In Mark, the word Kurios is used in construct with house. That's interesting to me, but he'd use the term in construct.
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That's Semitic language. That's Arabic. That's Hebrew. That's not Greek. As I quoted it in the text, it's
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Hakurios, Teis, Oikios, and, you know, the master of the house, the lord of the house.
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And it is interesting to see the transfer of terminology. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the genitive at that point.
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But, you know, if it's reflecting an Aramaic underlying, then that could be in construct. Who knows?
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Anyway, in Mark, the word Kurios is in construct with house, thus giving a different meaning to the word. Whoa, back up the truck.
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Really? Where does that come from? I mean, certainly every word syntactically that has a genitive modifier, that genitive modifier is going to tell us something about the lexical, semantical domain that we should be looking at for that term.
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That's quite true. But a different meaning? There is a great deal of difference between your lord and the owner of the house.
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Really? Both are addressed to slaves. Both are addressed to servants.
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And in Mark, the phrase Kurios of the house. Who is the house?
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The servants of God. Who's the Kurios? God? The Lord? It's not, the idea, this how, somehow, well, it's much lesser.
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And by taking the house away, somehow Matthew is exalting Jesus? No. They're both giving the exact same message.
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One could argue for the reverse. One could argue, since this is what you can do, once you start playing with this redaction criticism stuff, and once you start hypothesizing, well,
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I think Matthew is just sitting there, and he has Mark in front of him, and he's just slavishly going, I'm going to change this, and edit this, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
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Once you start there, you can come up with anything you want, because you start playing mind reader.
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Why does Matthew do what Matthew does? Why does Mark do what Mark does?
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Or Luke, you know, why, what's all the interaction? You can come up with anything you want at this particular point in time.
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And so, what ends up happening, then, is you look at this one, and I could argue that, well, actually,
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Lord of the House, Master of the House, to the Jews, would definitely raise issues about Yahweh, and so Matthew's trying to avoid that, and he just simply says, you're
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Lord. So I could come up with a theory that Matthew's actually trying to deny the deity of Christ, or I could go the other direction.
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See, you can do whatever you want once you start playing games like this. And remember, folks, you can do the same thing with the
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Quran. All you've got to do is just start with your presuppositions, God hasn't spoken, that there's an evolutionary process involved here.
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No, I can't prove it, but hey, scholars say it, and I can find this scholar here and that scholar there, and we can play these games until the cows come home, and now we can start taking apart the various suras, and we can say this came from over here, and this came from over there, and we can do what
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Old Testament scholars do to the Old Testament. You can go to Moses, and you've got your Yahweh source, and your Elohim source, your
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Deuteronomy source, and your priestly source, and we can chop it up into a million pieces. Sure, we can do that.
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We can do that with the Quran, too. Will Shabir Ali allow that? Of course not. Inconsistency is the sign of a failed argument.
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Made the point then, I'm making the point now, and if Mr. Ali wants to keep trying to regain a point where he was wrong,
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I'll just keep proving this over and over and over again. And, you know, I can't help it if there are certain people who refuse to hear, if they don't have ears to hear,
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I can only be concerned about the people who actually want to see who is being consistent in their handling of the materials.
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So he goes on to say, It is clear that while Matthew retains from Mark the use of the word
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Lord, he has removed it from its original construct phrase, Lord of the house, and presented it in a new construct, Your Lord. In applying the latter designation to Jesus, Matthew has heightened the image of Jesus in this passage as he does elsewhere in his gospel.
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Let's see if Shabir Ali is consistent. Let's see if this is just simply, as I believe it is, a selective reading of inconsistent scholarly sources based upon using the
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Qur 'an as your starting point. The Qur 'an teaches this, therefore, if it's contradictory with the
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Qur 'an, it must be untrue. Is that not what Shabir Ali admitted in cross -examination? That's the only way that we can know what is inspired is what agrees with the
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Qur 'an, right? So we're looking backwards through the lens of the Qur 'an, that's what
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I see Shabir Ali doing, and I think he admitted that. Let's see if that holds true.
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And I told folks in the channel they needed a piece of paper and a pencil today. Turn with me to the story of the
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Gadarean demoniacs, because there is more than one, even though a couple of the Gospels only focus upon one. Gadarean demoniacs, that's
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Matthew chapter 8, verses 28 to 34, Mark chapter 5, verses 1 through 20, and Luke chapter 8, 26 to 39.
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Just giving you the references there, what do you notice? Matthew 8, 28 to 34, that's only six verses.
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Mark 5, 1 through 20, that's 20 verses. Luke 8, 26 to 39, 13 verses.
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Who gives you the longest story? Mark does. Mark gives you the fullest version here. And so, taking
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Shabir Ali's point, Mark has the most material, and now
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Matthew is going to try to tweak Mark to exalt Jesus, right? Isn't that what we're told? That's Matthew's whole purpose here, is for some reason, even though Mark identifies
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Jesus as the son of God, he says all sorts of things that no Muslim could ever, ever agree with. Matthew doesn't feel he goes far enough, and so we need to tweak the view of Jesus, right?
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All right. So, what does Matthew leave out?
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He only gives us a certain number of verses. He doesn't give us the whole story. What does he leave out?
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Does he exalt Jesus? Does he do what Shabir Ali says he does, in trying to make him look greater and bigger?
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Actually, when you look at the two, something fascinating happens.
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Look at Matthew 8, verse 29. And behold, they cried out, What have you to do with us,
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O son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? Now, Jesus there is identified as son of God, and that's one of the points that Shabir Ali says, that's a later belief, and it wasn't really a part of the scriptures.
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In fact, I've heard Mr. Ali, and I know, I'm going to make sure to email him, he may be listening live right now, for all
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I know, which would be fine. Hi, Shabir, nice to have you with us. I have heard him mention, for example, the addition in Acts 8, which is actually from the
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Latin Vulgate, something I discussed in the King James I controversy, as if this was, I mean, it's a very, very, very late addition, no possibility of originality, and he's actually presented as if, well, see, people were trying to prove that Jesus was the son of God, as if there was some fight about this.
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Jesus as the son of God is the most primitive teaching in the New Testament. It's at every level.
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There's no question of this. Could not possibly be a question of this. And to utilize that textual,
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I mean, such a weak textual critical example, just one of the many things that if we got into, I just do not believe that once we actually got into the original text,
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Mr. Ali would fare very well at all. Listen to the comparison in Mark chapter 5.
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Listen to the comparison in Mark chapter 5. And crying out with a loud voice, he said, this is verse 7.
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What have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most high God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.
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Now, which one's a fuller description? In Mark, it's Jesus, son of the most high
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God. It's just simply, oh, son of God in Matthew. So could we not theorize?
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I mean, if we're going to, if we're going to theorize that Matthew is trying to somehow exalt something, then why would he leave out a longer, fuller description of Jesus as the son of the most high
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God? Well, we're not told. But then we have the casting out. But then the major stuff that is missing in Matthew and is found in Mark 5 and Luke 8 includes these words.
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Now, this is not found in Matthew. Allegedly, according to Mr. Ali's perspective, Matthew sees this.
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It's in Mark. He's just slavishly reading Mark. And he sees this.
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And remember, Matthew is allegedly trying to exalt Jesus, trying to make him bigger. He's perverting history.
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Remember, we have to assume absolute perfection of intention on all the memorizers of the
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Quran. But when it comes to Matthew, we can consistently accuse him of being dishonest and Luke of being dishonest and perverting history.
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Inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument. So, beginning in verse 18 of Mark 5, and as he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him.
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But he refused and said to him, go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord, Kurios, has done for you and how he has had mercy on you.
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Here is a reference to Jesus as Kurios that Matthew deletes? He doesn't repeat?
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How does this fit into the... And he went away and began to proclaim to Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him and all men marveled.
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So, here is an opportunity for Jesus to be identified as Kurios. It's right there in Mark. Somehow Mark... How'd that get in Mark?
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Anyways, if Matthew has to be exalting Jesus to make him Kurios, why is it in Mark? And why would then
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Matthew delete it and not include it? The reason? Because he wasn't sitting there slavishly following Mark to begin with and the whole theory about Matthew trying to exalt
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Jesus more is purely false. It doesn't fit with the facts.
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That's just one of many examples. And I could go into Luke there. There's some really interesting stuff in Luke's version of that because he uses
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God at one point and there's some textual variant issues and things like that. All sorts of neat stuff like that. But this kind of simplistic, derived from Islamic sources, looking back at the
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Bible through the lens of the Quran, this kind of simplistic argument does not stand up to the text.
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It sounds real good. And I imagine, especially lecturing in front of Islamic audiences who don't know much about the
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New Testament to begin with, wow, whipping out all those things. And Shabir's a sharp guy. He wasn't using notes. He's got all this stuff memorized.
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That can be very impressive, but it doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean that it actually is relevant.
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The fact of the matter is Shabir Ali said that Matthew inserted
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Kurios in Matthew 24 in opposition to Mark 13, 35, to exalt
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Jesus and it's not true. Now, he can want to make a new point if he wants to. But admit that that's what you're doing.
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Admit that in point of fact, well, you know, I was wrong about that, but I still think that we could argue this.
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Well, then once we start arguing this, let's go to the sources you're using and once again demonstrate the inconsistency between what you're doing.
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Now, I think
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I can be fair in saying that at least at this point, Mr.
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Ali could have known that he was making a mistake here if he had done sufficient research. Now, maybe this is just, because I heard him as far back as 1996 saying this.
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Maybe he's just reusing the same notes. He's memorized this. He hasn't been challenged. Don't ask me why he hasn't been challenged on that.
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And maybe he has, and I just haven't heard it. Maybe someone, if someone knows of him having been corrected on that matter beforehand and he just didn't accept that, then
40:53
I would like to know that. That'd be very disappointing to me, but I would find that hard to believe.
40:59
But I've had, I don't know how long I've had BibleWorks now. I think I started with BibleWorks version two something.
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Yeah, two something. And we keep upgrading. It's been quite some time. It's late nineties, at least I would think. You know, somewhere around there.
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And so he could have obtained, he had a laptop sitting there.
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He was using a laptop. I was using a tablet. He could have, you don't have to be able to read
41:24
Greek and Hebrew to slide a cursor across a word. The Olland synopsis is in BibleWorks.
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You can pull it up. You can look, I looked at it today. There's no reason why he didn't need to know that. And at least
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I've tried to do the same thing in reverse. For example, in Shabir Ali's debate with Robert Maury, a really, really, really, really, really stupid point came up.
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And I do mean a really, really, really stupid point. And that is the assertion was made that in the
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Hadith, it is said that something about Muhammad's personal parts is mentioned in the
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Hadith. And I could not believe how much time was spent on this inane point in that debate.
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It was just horrible. Just, just total waste of time. And Shabir Ali said, no, the
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Arabic's right here. It says, it says thigh, T -H -I -G -H.
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And Maury was saying, it says thing, T -H -I -N -G, which struck me as really odd. When I first heard this,
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I was coming around the last corner toward the worst climb on South Mountain, the really hard point where your heart rate's the absolute maximum.
42:37
And I remember even then going, what are they talking about? This, this must be oxygen deprivation.
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There's no way this actually took place in a debate. And I got back and I listened to it again.
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And the set of al -Bukhari that was being cited that I have is both
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Arabic and English. And I am no expert in Arabic. My studies are progressing and, and making advancement.
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But I looked it up and I, you know, you can sit there and you can look at the, at the English and you can look at the, at the
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Arabic and you, you can try to figure stuff out. And I found consistencies with thigh, thigh and thigh.
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They're all the same word. I saw no basis, found no basis whatsoever for a completely different word to exist there at all.
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I took the time to look at it. And then when, when Shabir Ali himself was lecturing at one point, he, he quoted in Arabic from Surah 112.
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And I was, again, people probably think I'm really weird because I tell you right where I was.
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But when I hear things, when I hear someone speaking and I'm riding my bike, I remember where I was.
43:48
And I remember exactly, I was going around the corner at, at a certain place on my, on my canal route near my house.
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I remember exactly which direction I was going, what time of the day it was. When he's quoting Surah 112.
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And as I'm hearing him, even in Arabic, I caught something. And I went, wait a minute.
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First of all, Surah 112 is very important because it's, it is almost credal.
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It's sort of the foundation of Islamic apologetics. And then it, this word appeared and I went,
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I wonder what that is. Do you have a computer ready to go here? I'm going to play something. I'm going to play
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Surah 112, three in Arabic. And you're going in Arabic?
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Yeah. Just listen to the, to the, the very first word.
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It starts out with an M sound. Okay. Listen to what Surah 112, three says.
44:47
Now, did you hear that? Let me put, listen to that very first word. You heard and then you heard a at the end.
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And I went, wait a minute. That's the section, the translation given by Piktal, for example.
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He begetteth not, nor was begotten. Yusuf Ali has, he begetteth not, nor is he begotten.
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We know what that's about. We know that that's, you know, that's a direct. Let's put it this way.
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Islam could not define itself outside of a negation of Christian theology.
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Couldn't do it. Because the Quran exists in that, in that context. The Quran spends a lot of time saying what
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God isn't. And one of the things that says God doesn't do is beget, nor is he begotten. There was a lot of confusion on Muhammad's part as to what
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Christianity was actually teaching on these particular subjects. But I looked at that and I, again, looked at the
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Arabic and I immediately started making connections, Isaiah 9, 6. To us, a child is born.
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The Hebrew term is Yelid. Yelid Yulad. A child is born, a son is given.
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Now, Muhammad never read that. He couldn't have. And so I, you know, at least
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I'm attempting to do, I'm attempting to utilize the resources that are available to me. To double check things, to make sure that I'm looking at this material in the proper light.
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Now, will I, will I make mistakes? Yeah, especially if I've only got 30 seconds to try to find a reference. I might get the wrong reference, even if I've got the citation right.
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But Shabir Ali had a decade. 10 years from the first time that I heard this mistake made.
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10 years. There's a little difference between 10 years and 30 seconds. Especially when he's saying that Matthew was perverting the message of Christ and I'm just simply trying to find a reference to an incident that took place long after, you know, 30 years after Muhammad in regards to whether a person was or was not whipped because they did not turn over their edition of the
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Quran. Massive difference between the two in that situation. One other thing, and then
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I'll try to sneak a, sneak a phone call in real quick. There are a number of things that if I wanted to, if I had time and it was my way of doing things, there are a number of things that I could go after from the debate where I feel that Shabir Ali made a rather glaring mistake that I didn't have time to point out.
47:28
For example, he makes, he seemingly for some reason wanted to really make a point about Jay Smith being in error.
47:38
Jay Smith has debated Shabir Ali a number of times and they've been pretty good debates from what
47:44
I've seen, the ones I've seen. And he wanted to make sure that everybody knew that Jay Smith had made a mistake about there not being any pre -Uthmanic editions of the
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Quran. Now, obviously dating of the Quran is, you know, it's a science, but even then, you know, you'll have disagreements amongst people.
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And he made reference, and I'm sitting there and I'm trying to, you know, take my little notes and he makes reference to the
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Sana 'a manuscript find. Now, Sana 'a, let me take you back a little ways.
48:20
This is from Christian Research Journal, volume 25, number 3, 2003, 2003, this is three years ago.
48:33
It's called Examining Muslim Apologetics, Part 1, The Bible Versus the Quran, and its author is some guy named
48:39
James R. White, that's me. I remember writing this on the
48:45
Mercury up in Alaska. It's a feature article for the
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CRI Journal, and I described the issue of the
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Sana 'a manuscript. Here's what I said, the indisputable difference between the attitudes of Christian scholars and Islamic scholars is best illustrated by the
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Sana 'a Quran find of 1972, workers restoring a mosque in Sana 'a, Yemen, stumbled across a cache of Quran manuscripts in the structure of the building's roof.
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The manuscripts were stuffed in the sacks and probably would have stayed there had the value of the find not been recognized by an official of the
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Yemeni Antiquities Authority. No scholars in his country were capable of working on this rich find, which
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I find, by the way, this is a parenthetical statement, which I find quite interesting. I find quite interesting.
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They had to go outside the Arabic world to find someone who could work on this. And so the
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Yemeni official called in non -Islamic German scholars to assist. Almost 10 years after the initial discovery, German scholar,
49:44
Gerd R. Puim, was allowed to spend significant time with the manuscripts. Only one other scholar has been given any significant amount of time to study the manuscripts.
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It was not until 1997 that 35 ,000 microfilm images of the manuscripts were finally allowed to leave the country so others could examine the materials.
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The Sana 'a find has tremendous importance for Quranic studies, at least for those who wish to see the
50:06
Quran studied in all its actual historical forms. Initial studies of the find indicate, and here's the important part, that it contains some of the earliest known
50:14
Quranic material. The find also gives evidence of variation from today's Quran in both the reading of the text and its order, something unthinkable in traditional
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Islamic doctrine. Now, Shabir Ali stood up there and said, well, see,
50:28
J. Smith was wrong because we have found Quranic manuscripts in the
50:34
Sana 'a, the Yemeni manuscript find. Yeah, but it reads differently than the modern
50:41
Quran does. Hello! The order of surahs is different, and some are missing, and some are conflated, and there's textual variance, and this is not what the
50:54
Islamic apologist wants to be pointing people to. This is, I mean, from the
50:59
Christian perspective, this is great. The earlier you can get, the better. But you see, the same attitude exists amongst
51:08
Muslims as exists amongst King James -only advocates. We don't want that earlier stuff. I mean, look at how they hate
51:15
Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and why? Because it's earlier than the Texas Receptus, and so it's bad and evil, it's corrupted, and all the rest of that stuff.
51:22
And that's basically what you have going on as well. It's the same attitude you have. In essence, modern
51:28
Islamic conservatives have to assert that you, in essence, have
51:34
Uthman being inspired to know exactly what the right Quran is somehow.
51:39
So you have almost a re -inspiration, another supernatural event taking place, even though I don't think
51:45
Uthman claimed that. But that's what you basically have to have going on in that type of situation.
51:50
You know, I could have, if I had wanted to just constantly be going after whatever it was he said and not trying to clearly communicate my point, inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument,
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I could have gone after the Sana 'a stuff and done all that kind of stuff. But that's not why
52:08
I do debates. It's not... Sure, those are things that other, you know, if they hear him say that and they want to go look into it themselves, perfect.
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That's what I want to see happen. Let the people find out about that. I don't need to be sitting around just going through stuff all the time.
52:25
My point was to make one point, and that is Shabir Ali and Jamal Badawi and Ahmed Didat, they did not and do not consistently use scholarly material in a proper fashion in their attacks upon the
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New Testament. They are inconsistent. And we can document that over and over again. We can get into text as deep as you want.
52:49
We're going to be substantiated in that assertion when we do so. So there's a fair amount of information in 53 minutes thrown at you there, but hopefully it is something that you have found to be useful.
53:05
And I guess when I talk about things like this, yeah, you can turn this down so all the little voices and sounds and everything else no longer freak you out over there.
53:16
You great controller of the electronics. I guess talking about all this Islamic stuff, yeah,
53:22
I did sort of sound like that, didn't I? There's somebody in the Chicago area that just couldn't possibly handle me saying all this stuff and getting to say all this stuff without getting his two cents worth in.
53:34
So hello, mysterious man from Chicago. Yes. Hello, mysterious man from Chicago.
53:41
Yes, that's my middle name, Mystery Man. What's up, Dr. White? Well, as you can see,
53:48
I'm talking about some Islamic stuff today. I just want to say great, great job in the debate.
53:55
Listening to it, it was clearly you won by the grace of God, and I praise God for you. The Lord's blessed you.
54:01
Tremendous debater. Well, thank you. I know that this was a subject near and dear to your heart.
54:08
You've been involved with this for a long time. Yeah. Well, the only thing I wanted to add, you did a great job of presenting his inconsistency, not only in the debate, but around your program.
54:19
The thing I wanted to bring to your attention and to the reader's attention is an article that he writes on his website, Islaminfo .com.
54:25
He has an article called, Changes in the Bible. And here it's documented where you basically exposed his claim that as time went by, the portrait of Jesus evolved.
54:38
What's ironic about that is that he's not even consistent in print, because he gives an example in this paper,
54:44
Changes in the Bible, where he says that Mark 1539, Mark records the confession of the centurion saying, truly this man was a son of God.
54:53
Now he goes on to say, and I'm just going to quote him, the same confession of the same centurion at the same scene, the very moment is reported in Luke also.
55:02
But in Luke, the centurion is reported as saying, certainly this man was innocent. Now he uses this as a demonstration of how the
55:09
Gospels have changed, but in the example he gives, instead of the portrait of Jesus evolving, Luke demotes
55:15
Jesus. Yeah, you're right. I'm reading it right now. You see the inconsistency of his tactics.
55:23
Yeah, that's Islaminfo .com slash new, well you don't even go to new, just go to Bible and you'll find the article called,
55:30
Changes in the Bible. And some changes become evident just by comparing one Gospel with another in the present
55:36
Bibles. You can do this investigation yourself, except if you're going to do it in English, you might find yourself in some trouble.
55:42
One example of this is the centurion's confession of Jesus, the son of God, is reported in Mark's Gospels as follows, Mark 1539, truly this man was a son of God.
55:49
The same confession of the same centurion at the same scene at the very moment is reported in Luke also. But in Luke, the centurion is reported as saying, certainly this man was innocent,
55:57
Luke 2347. In Luke, the title son of God is missing. Mark and Luke cannot both be right here. The confession is reported incorrectly in at least one
56:04
Gospel, as if both are meant to be verbatim statements of everything that was said at every single point exhaustively.
56:12
And that's what he just, for some reason, does not want to see, is that both statements can be true without it being amazing.
56:21
But it is interesting to me, is he going to say then, along with the sources that he cites all the time, that Luke had
56:29
Mark, and therefore he's changing this? And if so, Luke's allegedly, after Mark, Luke's more influenced by the apostle
56:38
Paul than Mark even would be, and therefore he would be expanding on son of God, but he doesn't, and so the inconsistency.
56:45
Well, that actually confirms your point, that these so -called changes are not this deliberate intent of making
56:51
Jesus something he's not. Exactly, exactly. And one thing, just, Dr. White, as you study, what I want you to do,
56:57
I want you, when you study the Qur 'an, and this is for the people listening, I want you to note the parallel stories reported in the
57:03
Qur 'an. The Qur 'an repeats the same story. I've done this on the website. The Qur 'an never repeats the words of the individuals that it records the same way whenever it repeats the same story.
57:16
It contains major verbal variations and contradictions. Now, the problem is, the
57:21
Qur 'an supposedly came from one author. So how is it that the author of the Qur 'an is not able to recount the same story with the same precise wording, especially if the author is
57:30
God? Exactly. And in fact, it was passed down to us without human hands interfering with the transmission.
57:36
Yep. So his argumentation can be used to destroy the Qur 'an. I mean, but, you know, glory to God, I thank God for you.
57:41
And that's, I just want to add those two cents, and just, you know, I couldn't let you get all the attention, yeah? But keep up the great work, soldier.
57:49
All right. Thank you very much for calling. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. Well, and that's very true. The parallel passages in the
57:56
Qur 'an, at least when we're talking about the parallel passages in the synoptic Gospels, we're talking about people writing to different audiences at different times with different linguistic backgrounds and things like that.
58:05
Luke does not write with the same kind of Greek that Mark does or Matthew does, for example. But you don't have those situations with the
58:11
Qur 'an, so why would there be differences? Very, very excellent question. Questions that, Lord willing, Shabir Ali will continue to be willing to discuss in future debates, because that's what is important.
58:22
If you believe it's true, you should be willing to defend it. That's what we do here at Alpha and Omega Ministries. On the Dividing Line, thanks for listening today.