Response to Ijaz Ahmad on John 9:38, 20:28

This morning I was sent a video that immediately grabbed my attention and put everything else I had planned for the day on hold, some of which really can't be put on hold, but I still.

Had to.

Because talk about a teachable moment, this video will really help us to establish some of the most important elements of, well, what this ministry is all about, the reliability of the New Testament, the deity of Christ, and in our dialogues with the Muslim people, the fact that the vast majority of Islamic apologists are seemingly, by the very nature of the relationship between Islam and Christianity, forced into a utilization of double standards.

And they just seemingly, as often as you point them out, they just can't avoid using double.

Standards.

And here's going to be a very important illustration of it. Now what I'm going to do, this is a video from Ijaz, who is well known in Muslim apologetic circles, part of the MAP group, the Muslim Apologetics group.

Ijaz is a nice guy. We've disagreed with him many times before, sometimes very sharply. But the fact of the matter is that he has, over the past year or so, been saying a lot about studying textual criticism.

And in certain emails that have been sent to me, made some fairly large claims of abilities in this area. Well, seemingly, here's sort of one of the first examples. And it was quite interesting. And what he tries to do is to, he tends to use very extreme language, in the sense of with certainty, absolutely, etc. etc. when he hasn't actually substantiated the utilization of that kind of language, which unfortunately some Christians do the Quran, but again that doesn't justify the error.

And what he tries to do is to demonstrate the unreliability of the text in the New Testament by looking at two texts in the Gospel of John. One in John chapter 9, a text called Variant. And the other in John chapter 20, verse 28, one of the key texts on the deity of Christ in the New Testament.

And I'll have to admit, I've never seen the approach that was utilized in John 20, 28. This was new. I mean, I've dealt with people who deny the deity of Christ for 30 years. Now there's a reason why I've not read this before.

It's because it's such a bad argument. Not even the most radical skeptics will buy this one, and you'll see why. It is utterly fallacious on any ground, and I'll document that. But I think that's the more important of the two, so I'm going to start sort of halfway through the video and respond to the John 20, 28 stuff first, then we'll circle back and deal with the John chapter 9 assertions.

And this is going to be a little technical. We're dealing with text criticism. I'm going to be showing you Greek, I'm going to be talking about lacunae and manuscripts and papyri and unseal and majuscule and all sorts of stuff like that, and that's just par for the course.

A lot of the folks that watch The Vowing Line, that's the stuff they love anyways, so it fits in perfectly. But you have to deal with it because Ejaz brought it up. So here you go, let's dive in right here with the John 20, 28 discussion.

This verse is traditionally used to demonstrate that the earliest Christians, the disciples, viewed Jesus as a God and worshipped him. One Christian author, Dr. James White, in the Forgotten Trinity, writes about this verse, and there is simply no reason, grammatical, contextual, or otherwise, to deny that in the same breath Thomas calls Jesus Christ his God.

Now, let me just stop right there for a moment. What I was specifically referring to there had nothing to do with textual criticism or any textual variance because there are no textual variants. Ejaz is making one up here, as we're about to demonstrate.

What I was talking about is the common, erroneous argumentation of many Muslims and Jehovah's Witnesses that what you have when Thomas said that he was going, my Lord, my God, as if there were two objects.

And you can read the chapter, this is very clearly what I'm addressing there. And what I was saying was, no, it says the answer is said to him, what he says is addressed to Jesus, you can't divide it up, the kai is connective and not disjunctive, everything I said there was true, and even after what Ejaz brings up here, it's going to remain true, because there is no textual variation here, even though he's going to try to pretend that there is one.

Yet, we do have a reason to deny that Thomas called Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, his.

God.

In our earliest manuscript of John chapter 20, that is, papyrus 66, the words, and my God, are missing. In this transcript, the Greek words highlighted in black are missing from the manuscript. While the words, my Lord, are there, the words, and my God, are not.

Christian scholars traditionally view these missing words as a lacuna, or a gap, in the manuscript. There are various means and ways...

Now, let me just stop there. Christian scholars consider, no, as I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you the manuscript. He didn't do that, maybe he didn't have access to it. To be able to find it, really, even online, you have to be able to read magisterial text fairly well, and maybe he can't do that, I don't know.

I don't know why he didn't show it to you, because if he showed it to you, it's going to be pretty obvious what's really going on here. This is rather confusing. But lacuna just means there's something missing from the text.

This is because of a physical defect, and the manuscript's gone there. It's a partial manuscript, it's damaged. So it's not considering it, or something like that, that's what the term lacuna would refer.

To.

There's a lacuna in that page. There is a portion of the page that's missing. This is papyri, it's 1 ,800 years old. As I like to say to people when I'm teaching about this, what are you going to look like.

In 1 ,800 years?

So what is, you know, what would your class notes look like 1 ,800 years from now? It's amazing we have any manuscripts at all, especially given the persecution of the church, up until the Peace of the Church in 313.

So you put all that together, and it's not, well, scholars consider this or something, it's just, there's a hole in the manuscript. It's toward the end of the book. We'll look at that in just a second.

"...is to fill in the gap, yet this filling in by adding the words, and my God, which are found in later manuscripts, is nothing more than speculation and guesswork.".

Now please note this. Nothing more than speculation and guesswork. So what's the assumption here? What we're going to demonstrate is every single Greek manuscript of John 2028 ever found says the same thing.

You find an early manuscript. It has all the same words as all the later manuscripts, but there's a hole in it. What do you do? Ejaz assumes it must have said something different. And the rest of scholarship goes, yeah, it said the same thing.

Now why would they do that? Because if you're going to assert that it says something differently, you need evidence.

You need to prove it.

Because the proper assumption of all of scholarship has always been, well, when you've got, let's say, well, the most widely attested and earliest attested, depending on what comes out of the green manuscript stuff, but still right now, if P52 is the earliest papyri fragment we have, guess what it's from?

The Gospel of John. Only two chapters from right here. The earliest attested of the Gospels and the most widely attested is the Gospel of John. And so let's say we have a thousand manuscripts, probably more than that, but let's be conservative.

A thousand manuscripts of John from as early as 125 till whatever the latest manuscript would be, all the way into the time of the printing press. Thousand manuscripts. They all say the same thing. No early church father has anything different in citing it.

They all say the same thing. And in the earliest one, because it's toward the end of a book, that's where damage would be toward the end or the beginning, unless the beginning was at the end of another book.

So in other words, where the pages would be exposed to wear and to damage and things like that, it's toward the end of the book, and so the page becomes fragmentary. Well, look, there's a hole there, so it must have said something different.

That is not the assumption of any scholars I know at all. That is radical skepticism, and I'll show you that it is something that Muslims should.

Never accept.

Because again, remember, you have your sacred text too. And you'd never accept this kind of reason when it comes to yours.

Never in a day.

But that's one of the reasons we're doing this particular video. But notice, nothing more than speculation and guesswork. Guesswork would only be on the part of a person saying it differs from all the other manuscripts.

That's where the speculation and guesswork would be. That's what Ijaz is doing, but then he doesn't give us a single bit of argumentation. This kind of argumentation would be blown out of any scholarly symposium, unless it's a scholarly symposium of something like the Jesus Seminar, where all bets are off and you don't have to defend anything anyways because it's all theory and speculation.

What Christian scholars do is measure each letter in the manuscript, then using the later addition of, and my God, they attempt to see if the later phrase fits into the gap using the same size of lettering.

If it fits, then it's one possible way of knowing what the gaps are missing. But on the other hand, this is purely speculative.

It is not purely speculative at all. I mean, if I was having to grade this, I'd have to fail Ijaz, just right out the door. I mean, this is really, really bad. I'm sorry, Ijaz, like is individual, but this is really, really bad.

This is not an unknown text.

We have hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of this text, not from one line, but from many lines. If there was something different here, where are your manuscript copies that have something different later on?

Where are they?

Did they just disappear? That's the speculation. That's the guesswork. That's the, yeah, it was there, but it got beamed up to the Enterprise explanation. Serious scholars have to go, well, there was something else there and here's the evidence of what it was because here's these manuscripts that read like this, but you don't have any manuscripts that read like that or anything else other than my Lord and my God, which is why the commentaries and the critical editions, they don't show any variant here because there is no variant here.

So the speculation and guesswork, it's all on Ijaz's part completely. And yet he's trying, he's turning it around to say, we can't trust the New Testament because I'm engaged in speculation and guesswork.

Wow.

As soon as I saw this, I was like, I've never seen this before and we need to get some information.

Out on this.

Not because I'm concerned about people going, oh no, I can't trust the New Testament, but because here is just such an awesome example of uneven scales using argumentation that not even, I mean, I'm 99 certain if I were to go, really, seriously, honestly, no, don't.

Think so.

I don't think so.

There is no way of knowing with certainty that the words and my God were written in the earliest manuscripts of this chapter of John. They've taken a possibility and made it into a certainty where evidence wise, the possibility is shaky at best.

Shaky at best. No manuscript we possess anywhere, no early church. Father, nothing says otherwise. But because there's a hole there, it's shaky.

Wow.

That is absurd. That is utterly untenable. That kind of application to any written document, including the Quran, results in utter devastation of the ability to do any meaningful history at all. Let me give you an example.

Let me give you an example.

I'm going to show it to you in here in a second, we're going to get there, don't worry. Here is my top copy manuscript. I've got the cheapy $500 version rather than the $5 ,000 version, so it's a little bit smaller.

But anyway, here is one of the pages of the top copy manuscript and look, lacuna, here, lacuna, hole. Now let's say I want to come up with a theory that says that what's in here differed from what's in every single manuscript copy of the Quran ever found.

No I can't give you any evidence. No I can't give you anybody who cited it differently. No I can't get you any manuscripts that have it differently. But that means everything in that hole, the evidence of the Quran is shaky at best and therefore you can't trust the Quran as scripture, right?

And you're going to sit there and you're going to let me get away with that, right? Well Ijaz has to. If he's going to stand behind this, every page of the Quran that I can find that has lacuna in it, I can go, there you go, shoot them.

Don't know what it says now, huh? Because if there's ever a lacuna in any manuscript anywhere, guess we don't know. Oh, well it has to be earlier ones. Okay, let's go for those earliest ones. Let's go to the Sa 'ana manuscripts.

You know how many lacuna I can find in the Sa 'ana manuscripts, Ijaz? You just allow me to destroy the reliability of the entirety of the Quran if your argument has any merit at all, which thankfully for both of us, it has that much.

None.

We're not even talking about this being, well, it's an 80 -20. No, it's a zero. It is a complete failure. It is out the door.

That's how bad it is.

I really hate to have to say it. I normally like to say, well, it's an interesting perspective. This is not an interesting perspective. This is really bad.

In the end we ask, can the New Testament be trusted as scripture? Can we trust the conjectured insertions that deify Jesus? Can we trust the scholars that speculate about possibilities to fill in gaps in scripture?

Can we trust conjectured insertions and speculations as scripture? The answer is no. And that is why the Quran in chapter 4, verse 157 says,. مَا لَهُمْ بِهِ مِنْ عِلْمٍ إِلَّا اتِّبَعَ الظَّنِّ. They have no certain knowledge.

They follow nothing but conjecture. For surely, conjectured insertions and speculation are not certain knowledge, but just that, conjecture.

Now, what we have here is conjecture on Ijaz's part, without any foundation provided, without any evidence given, that would never pass muster in any scholarly work that I'm familiar with at all. Then join that with, if you're going to say you can do that, as long as there's a lacuna, then you can call into, in an early manuscript, you can call into question the reading of that manuscript and the reading of that entire book, no matter what the rest of the manuscript tradition says, that means the Quran, gone, because of the Su 'ana manuscripts and because of the lacuna that exists within them.

Has to be a fair application. If you're going to use the argument one way, you've got to go the other way. That means the Quran is conjecture. I know there are early manuscripts of the Quran that do not contain surah 4, so that's conjecture.

So he just used conjecture to prove conjecture. See how this goes? As soon as I listened to this, I was just like, oh, wow, this is probably one of the most desperate arguments I've ever heard. Let me show you, and we'll go back to the beginning.

And by the way, I mean, using surah 4, 157 for that is particularly bad, because of the whole history of the crucifixion, and the Quran is against that, and all the rest of that stuff. But let's take a look.

Here is what Ijaz should have shown you. Here is the actual page from P66. And you can see that the page would have basically gone like this. And this is what we have left of that particular page. Now, if you've seen pictures of P66, like John chapter 1, totally complete.

You can read everything. There's nothing missing. It's a nice, easy-reading manuscript through most of the Gospel of John, but then you get toward the end that it starts breaking up, simply because of its age and, you know, the history that it went through.

Like I said, it's amazing we have any of them, given their antiquity and papyri and things like that. It's amazing that we have any of them at all. But here is Apocrypha, and then the beginning of Thomas right here.

So, Thomas answered and said to him, here is the end of Aalto, right here, and we have Ha-Kourios, and this is called a Nomena Sagra. And so, some manuscripts use three letters, others two. You notice the line over top.

It's an abbreviation form that indicates a Christian manuscript. Nobody knows all sorts of theories, but nobody knows why the Nomena were developed. But they were used. Kourios was one of the words, as was Theos.

So, Ha-Kourios Mu, and then it starts breaking up here, but you can see the Upsilon right there, and then the beginning of the Chi for Chi Ha-Theos Mu, which would be out here, but it's not there. This is not a textual variant.

It is simply the fact that this manuscript does not contain this. Now, anybody knows anything about New Testament manuscripts. For example, years and years ago, I caught an error in a book that had been in print for 30 years, because it said that Jesus was called the Alpha and Omega in Codex Vaticanus in Revelation Chapter 1.

And I knew that wasn't correct, because Codex Vaticanus ends in Hebrews Chapter 9 and does not contain the book of Revelation. Now, is that relevant? That halfway through Hebrews Chapter 9, the rest of Codex Vaticanus has been lost?

Not from a textual perspective, in the sense that you're not going to see in a critical text, textual variant, textual variant, textual variant, Vaticanus does not contain, Vaticanus does not... No, because that part of the book is just gone.

You don't know what it read, so it's not a textual variant. It's just missing. Anybody who does any meaningful work in history itself with these manuscripts knows that you're dealing with fragmentary text.

When you can get an entire text, that's awesome. But history is history, man. You know, floods and bugs. Floods, bugs, and fires. That gets rid of a lot of papyri. A lot of papyri over the centuries. So, it's just simply missing.

But, Ijaz was talking about filling in the lacuna, and how scholars do this. So, let's do that. Let's fill in the lacuna. And we can do so because I happen to have the P66 font. There are fonts you can purchase.

I forget how long ago I got this. I'm awfully glad I did. It's basically created on the style of the scribe of particular manuscripts. So, here's the P66 font. You can see I can move this around here.

So, you can put the beginning of the kappa right there. And there's where Kai-ha-the-asmu-legai-al-to would be the next line. And my God. He says to him. So, you'll notice that when you match the size Look at the kappa here.

See, it's right there. About the same size as that kappa there. There you go. Right there. You put that together. And that's pretty much the size you've got here. And then you go ahead and put the al-to here.

There's the beginning. This would have been the border on this side. Pretty much the border with this over here. It had to say something. And any serious allegation that it read something else would require some evidence.

Some argumentation. Not merely the assertion of conjecture. This isn't conjecture. Every other manuscript of the Gospel of John says this.

Every single one.

And so if there is ever anything else there then if you're going to allege that you need to provide proof. So where's the proof? Where's the evidence? Instead, this fits perfectly. You put al-to. Let's continue on.

Here's the next phrase. And you can see here how the epsilon is formed. You can see the epsilon right there. And so we put the... It wants to play around with that. But basically put it right there. That's pretty much the same border as...

And then it's papistu. And then we put the... Oh, I thought I put the one over there.

I forgot to.

Goes over here. Has believed. And then here's the next line. You can see how the alpha right there is formed. You can put that right there. And in fact, what's really interesting is notice how when we do this we put the alpha there.

There's the end of the original row and there is the lower portion of the original iota. And man, we can almost get it smack dab on there with this particular font. Remember, the fonts... The problem is, again, the form of the letters...

Every time you write a letter it's going to be a little bit different. And then lines, the letter spacing, a lot of that depends on how the scribe was feeling. They tend to be a little bit tighter earlier on in their copying and then get a little bit looser as their hand's getting more tired, stuff like that.

But you can get really close. That would be where it is right there if you line the two of them up perfectly.

But we know what was there.

There isn't any question about what was there. No serious scholar questions what was there. This is simply... P66 has a hole in that page. And to turn that into a foundation for saying conjecture? Bias?

Prejudice? It's an abuse of textual criticism?

Ijaz?

You shot your credibility and textual criticism in the head.

With this.

Why? Why? I mean, your own argument now means,.

Right here,.

Go look it up yourself. Do we need to get out the Anna manuscript graphics? I've got a bunch of them. I could have pulled them out too. If I didn't have enough stuff to do, that's what I would have done.

I would have pulled out a bunch of the Anna manuscripts, put them up there, all sorts of lacuna, and therefore, since they're the earliest manuscripts we have, you can't know. It's all conjecture, all speculation, right?

No, it's not. No one should ever use that argument against the Quran because no one should ever use that argument against the New Testament either because it's bogus argumentation in its entirety. In its entirety.

So,.

The earliest writings, not only of Paul, but of the Gospels, hear the Gospel of John. Yeah, they all referred to Jesus, not as a God because we are monotheists, but as God. Thomas, when he said, if Jesus was a Muslim, the first thing he should have said is, how dare you, Thomas!

But he didn't.

Instead, as you can see on the screen right now, blessed are those who not see,.

Yet believe.

That's the important thing to take away from this.

Now,.

Let's look at the rest of the video because there is another very interesting.

Issue here.

Today, we will be addressing the following question. Can the New Testament be trusted as Scripture? There are some over 2 .2 billion Christians in the world today. Over 5 billion copies of the Bible have been printed.

It is one of the most well-known and well-studied works in history. Yet, not everyone trusts the New Testament as Scripture, despite being widely held to be the Word of God. The New Testament's text presents core problems that undermine the modern Christian faith.

Today, we will be looking at two passages from the New Testament that demonstrate conclusively why the New Testament cannot and should not be trusted. Both of these passages come from.

The... Now, did you catch that?

CONCLUSIVELY! CONCLUSIVELY!

Given what we just saw, to say that Ejaz tends to overstate would be a major understatement.

CONCLUSIVELY!

Well, we just proved CONCLUSIVELY that what Ejaz Ahmed said was completely bogus. So, if you say CONCLUSIVELY and then you are THOROUGHLY refuted, not just, well, maybe, well, possibly, but GONE! No argument left!

Maybe you ought to reconsider the entire paradigm that you're bringing to your studies, maybe? Possibly? I think so.

...attributed to John. The fourth gospel, D .A. Carson, Christian scholar in his work, The Gospel According to John, refers to this gospel as being the most explicit when it comes to high Christology, meaning that it is the gospel that most clearly teaches that Jesus is God.

Most Christians use passages from this gospel as proof texts for both the historical and theological evidence of Jesus being God. That's why we've chosen to examine this gospel. The two passages we'll be looking at are John 9, 38 and John 20, 28.

We'll begin with John 9. In this chapter, a blind man is healed by Jesus. When a blind man who can now see encounters Jesus, he inquires about the man who cured him. When the blind man learns that Jesus, the man he is looking at, is the one that cured him, the gospel says that the blind man proclaims belief in Jesus and then worships him.

The verse reads as follows. Then the man said, Lord, I believe, and he worshipped him. Yet there is a glaring issue with this verse. The earliest manuscripts don't have it. The earliest manuscripts were written...

Now, before we look at John 9, 38,.

Why.

Pick these two? Well, because Ejaz is making the claim to be doing all this study in textual criticism. Why not go for all the other references that even critics like Bart Ehrman will admit.

On their face.

Have John teaching the deity of Christ. How about go for John 1, 1? John 8, 24 8, 58, 13, 19, 18, 5 through 6, the I Am passages. I'm still waiting for someone to actually try to deal with John 17, 5 John 10 and I Am the Father, We Are One, bringing about salvation of God's people.

I mean, there's just so.

Much.

That clearly points to someone that is not an Islamic prophet, okay? Very clearly does not.

Fit into a Quranic.

Mindset by any stretch of the imagination. It's because.

You only have a limited amount.

That you can do here. And what you can do is you can go after John 9, 38 which is probably why most people don't use it as a key text. I mean, I think it's relevant. Certainly the use of the Greek term proskuneo, worship of Jesus in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

It's more of a synoptic issue that Jesus receives proskuneo. That's not one of John's terms. That's one of the arguments we'll see here in a moment as to the non-originality of John 9, 38 is that proskuneo is not one of John's popular terms and therefore that's relevant.

But.

Even with that the overall message of the Gospel of John is perfectly consistent with a blind man saying calling Jesus proskuneos which had meaning in and of itself and worshiping him.

So.

Let's not pretend.

That.

Looking at these two texts is in some way even a semi-fair examination of the Gospel of John in regards to this particular.

Issue.

In this manuscript, verse 37 ends with and it is he that is talking with thee. Then transitions into verse 39 beginning with the words for judgment I have come to the world. There is nothing here about a blind man worshiping Jesus.

In the earliest Bible collection Kodak Sinaiticus there is also an issue with this passage. It was added by someone later on. Kodak Sinaiticus dates to sometime during the 4th century CE. That's roughly 330 years after Jesus peace be upon him walked the face of the earth.

In this manuscript we can clearly see four nearly written columns equally spaced and easy to understand. Yet something stands out. An addition to the top right hand corner. What is that addition you might ask?

That addition is verse 38 about the blind man worshiping Jesus peace be upon him. At some point after scribes authored Kodak Sinaiticus a later editor 330 years after Jesus and 200 years after Papyrus 75 they decided to add this verse into the gospel.

What are the implications of this addition? Given that Christian scholars traditionally view the gospel attributed to John as having the highest Christology that is, the view that the gospel teaches that Jesus.

Now here it's going to get interesting.

So.

Before we get to Ijaz's extremely intriguing attempt to mind read scribes let's look at the actual evidence itself and consider what's actually here. Here is the textual data over on this side.

What.

You actually have is there is clearly an important variant. In fact it's very similar to the text in Luke Father forgive them for they know not what they do. The reason being it is omitted as was just noted by P75 the original hand of Sinaiticus and Codex Washingtonianus and then a number of other early translations.

Now what is significant about this. And then by the way then you have word order variation in the original hand of P66 then it's corrected in P66 as well as far as word order variation goes.

But.

The verse is there.

What's significant.

Is that P75 in Sinaiticus would be Alexandrian W Washingtonianus.

Is.

Considered by most to be the earliest representative of the Byzantine text type. You have wide geographical representation of the omission of the text in early text. Now it's also found in early text as well such as in P66.

And.

Alexandrianus and so on and so forth. We do have.

That.

But it is a major textual variant and should be noted as such just as.

Father.

Forgive them for they know not what they do.

Should be noted far more than it is. That's something I've been known to make people write uncomfortable about. Pointing out that there's a major textual variant there.

But.

Having.

Said that and having noted that anyone with access to a critical edition of the Greek New Testament has that information before them and it's not hidden away in a corner anywhere or anything like that.

It is the application of this variant by Ejaz that is so very troubling. Because again well let's listen to what he says.

God several questions need to be asked given that the editor of this manuscript would have known about John 1 and John 8 58 those being the prologue and the I am statement. Why then would they feel the need to invent and then insert a verse about Jesus being worshipped?

It's as if the editor did not interpret or view the verses in John that are used today as proof texts for Jesus' divinity as evidence that Jesus was a God. Rather the editor found those verses lacking in their deifying of Jesus and so had to insert a passage that clearly shows that Jesus was worshipped and that he acknowledged this worship.

Now.

Here is where again Ejaz flies off into fanciful theorizing without providing a scintilla of evidence other than evidently his ability to mind read people who lived 1800 years ago. Let's remember something.

It's in.

P66.

It is just as early as the deletions of it. Since it's in multiple lines in multiple other manuscripts.

Are you.

For example did you hear what he just said?

The author.

Of Sinaiticus he thinks, now by the way there are multiple scribes of Sinaiticus so much for that, but he thinks, he's theorizing.

And I know he's doing this for Muslims. I realize that he's trying to.

Help Muslims disbelieve that's what he's doing.

And so.