Presenting the Gospel to People of the Muslim Faith, Part 5

Now it's not on mute, there we go. Alright, now you've got y 'all sugared up.

That means about 20 minutes from now, the insulin kicks in, and if you're next to someone who starts snoring,

I'd appreciate it if you'd kick them in the ribs for me. It's somewhat of a distraction when that happens.

I had a guy once sitting right down front right there. He was a very large man, and when he went to sleep, let me tell you something, you couldn't even hear me talking over him.

And that was just one of the worst experiences at a conference I've ever had.

You know, every once in a while I'd go around, and then he said. It was something

I'd really rather not repeat. Drew, would you help me out with that? I've often said, especially given how bright my laser is, the

ASU laser, laser. Given how bright my laser is, if you fall asleep with your mouth open,

I shoot this right in your mouth and your eyes will glow. And so, we'll then take a picture and put it on YouTube and Facebook and that's just how it'll be.

Someone did point out it was somewhat ironic that we stopped where we did with what's on the screen. The Quran, direct words of God, not of men.

There you go. Nothing like knowing right where you are in the conversation. We will move on from there.

Thank you very much. Okay. As I mentioned briefly this morning, Muslims do believe that there is more revelation than what is found only in the

Quran. And here comes the Quran and the ladies who ran out to get their brownies before everybody else will get to see the

Quran early. And we're going to pass it through this direction and then you folks in the middle will finally get a chance to see it.

But they believe that multiple books have been sent down by God.

And so, there is a concept of revelation and in fact, Muslims believe that many thousands, in fact,

I've heard over 100 ,000 prophets have been sent to various peoples, always in their own language.

And what binds them all together is the statement, la ilaha illallah wa muhammadan wazoolallah.

Well, okay. Let's take the second part off. Just there is only one God, not Muhammad. That's the final version of it.

But many books have been sent down and so there are other scriptures, but only the

Quran has the promise of being fully preserved, at least in the minds of most

Muslims today. Now, you could actually argue that from the Quran that you could argue other books would not be corrupted either, but that's another issue.

The Quran acts as a guard, a muhaiman over the other preceding books.

And as I mentioned briefly this morning, what most Muslims understand that to mean is that it's a corrector. It corrects.

That's why when I point out that they're basically looking at our books through the lens of their book, that's okay.

That's the way it's supposed to be. It's the final revelation. It's what you're supposed to look back at all other books through, is through the

Quran. Remember when Shabir Ali, when I asked him, how can you know? He says, well, if it agrees the

Quran, it's inspired. If it doesn't agree with the Quran, it's not inspired. And that makes it very, very difficult to try to reason with most

Muslims because they're taking their book and they're not applying standards of rational examination to their book, but they will apply standards, sometimes not fair standards, to everybody else's.

And that's something to keep in mind as well. Now the

Quran experienced what we can only call a governmentally controlled textual transmission.

And I think this is important. I was just talking about this to some of the brothers and I think this is something you'd really need to,

I know it's, I've thrown a lot of stuff at you, but if you can try to tune in here, this is somewhat important.

The Islamic State took responsibility for the transmission of the text of the

Quran fairly early on. We're going to read some of the specifics here in a second. That means it has a generally unified textual history.

It's not like the New Testament. Like I said this morning, it wasn't like it went all over the place. Instead, you had a controlled version of it.

And that means that generally, even though there are handwritten copies, that they're pretty much the same one to another in most instances.

Because of that, the one that you're all looking at that's going around is the 1924 Egyptian edition, viewed by most as the official version in Arabic.

And there is a major difference between the centralized governmental control of the collation and transmission of the

Quranic text and the non -centralized, non -controlled transmission of the

New Testament. Very, very different. And the Muslim thinks that it's much better to have just one version.

They think that's a sign of God's providential preservation of that text.

I say to you, it's just the opposite. That is, if you have an edited text, you have an editor, you have

Uthman, who comes up with the final version of the text. That's not a good thing, because you have to trust that he got it right.

It's much better to have what we have, a wide variety of manuscripts, because they don't all come from the same source.

Therefore, they truly do act as a balance upon one another. And that's why I think we have a much better argument for the originality of our text than they do.

Now, finally, I've been promising to get to this. Here is the specific text from the

Hadith. Now, let me define the Hadith once again, very briefly for you. The Hadith are, the

Hadith is actually singular. Ahadith is the plural. And the

Ahadith, the Hadith, as we would mispronounce it, I think in English, are actions and statements of Muhammad that have been collected over the centuries after his death.

They have been collected into certain collections that are multiple volumes.

My collection, for example, of Sahih al -Bukhari, I believe, is eight or nine volumes long. Sahih al -Muslim is eight or nine volumes.

You've got Jami' at Termini, Sunan Abu Dawud. There's about six, what are considered to be

Sahih or sound collections amongst the Sunnis. The Shiites have Ashafi and things like that, which is a little bit different as to their collections of Muhammad's statements and actions.

They also include statements and actions of Ali and other of the Imams and things like that. So there's differences between the

Sunni and the Shia at that point. These collections, you can go to Al -Azhar

University in Egypt and get an entire doctoral degree in nothing but Hadith studies. I remember last summer on one of the hottest mornings in Phoenix, come

July in Phoenix. That's why if we didn't have July and August in Phoenix, everybody lived there.

Some of the mornings, the low will be 93. We've had actually a low of 96 in the morning with a lot of humidity during that period of time.

So I was up at about two o 'clock in the morning to do a ride, and I remember riding along just sweating profusely and thinking about how absurd it was that what

I was listening to was a lengthy lecture on Hadith sciences by Sheikh Abu Amr Yasir Qadhi and exactly how you determine what a

Sahih Hadith is and stuff like that. I thought, man, if I ever get hit by a truck out here, they're going to pick me up and start listening to my iPod and call

TSA immediately. It's just going to be really, really, really weird.

But anyway, this particular narration is

Sahih. That means it is sound. There is a, the science is it has to have what's called an

Isnad chain, and that is it has to identify which of the companions it came from and then he narrated to such and such a person who narrated such and such a person who narrated to such and such a person.

This was the system that they developed over time and they rate all the people as to their memories and all the rest of stuff.

It's just, it's an amazing thing. I don't think it's an overly historically accurate thing, but it's an amazing thing anyhow.

Here in Sahih al -Bukhari is the actual citation that I have mentioned to you more than once and we finally get around to actually reading it.

Abu Bakr then said to me, Umar has come to me and said casualties were heavy among the

Qur 'an of the Qur 'an, i .e. those who knew the Qur 'an by heart on the day of the battle of Yalmama.

Now I just normally stop right here, let the people laugh, especially the young people.

I just stop. They had a battle of Yalmama. I didn't know that.

I just let you get it over with because it's gonna happen one way or the other. Just doesn't matter.

I got, you know, the first few times I read this in public I just tried to get past it, but it was just, you know, when you try to suppress something it only gets worse and so I'm just used to the battle of Yalmama.

So what is being said is Abu Bakr is the first caliph after Muhammad, okay.

Now the Shiites would say, in fact, the Shiites, are you familiar with the term they use for the

Sunnis? Bakrites because of Abu Bakr. The Shiites believe that Ali was meant to be, that the leadership of the

Ummah was supposed to go through the relatives of Muhammad and Abu Bakr was not a relative of Muhammad in that sense and so we're looking at this from a sort of Sunni perspective here, but Abu Bakr then said to me,

Umar has come and Umar is the second caliph and then the third caliph is

Uthman. So Umar has come to me and said, casualties were having among the Qur 'an, those who had memorized the

Qur 'an by heart. The battle of Yalmama was one of the earliest and it's very interesting battle because it was against a man who claimed to be a prophet and so there was sort of a sort of a division amongst the

Arabs at that point along religious lines. What if they had lost? Islam would be a completely different thing than it is today, which is rather interesting, but notice what he says, and I'm afraid that more heavy casualties may take place among the

Qur 'an, those who have memorized the Qur 'an. On other battlefields, listen to this phrase, this is from an

Islamic source, you can you can get this online, this is considered to be sahih, sound narration, whereby a large part of the

Qur 'an may be lost. Now I've had Muslims, I debated a

Muslim at Duke University back in 2008,

I think it was, and he insisted that at the time of Muhammad's death, the

Qur 'an not only had been completely written down, but there were 30 ,000 people that all had it memorized the exact same way.

The Islamic sources just don't substantiate that, and here if that was the case, then how could a, if the

Qur 'an had actually been written down at this point in any form, how could it be lost just from people dying in battles?

Clearly the Qur 'an exists at this point solely in an oral sense, with some portions of it having been written down rather haphazardly in one way or another.

So therefore I suggest that you, Abu Bakr, order the Qur 'an be collected. Now this is taking place right, just a couple years after the death of Muhammad, all right.

So I started looking for the Qur 'an and collecting it from what was written on palmed stalks, thin white stones, and also from the men who knew it by heart.

So there had been some things written down. Some of the surahs are actually almost, well surahs 113 and 114 are sort of magical incantations really.

And so people very early on started writing them down and and carrying them with them and stuff like that. So there were some sections that were written on palmed stalks, thin white stones, camel's shoulder bones, and things like that.

And also from the men who knew it by heart, till I found the last verse of surah al -Tabah, al -Tabah means repentance, that's surah 9, with Abu Kazami al -Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him.

Now that's interesting to me, that the man that Zayd ibn

Thabit here is one who's narrating this, that that he admits that at least one of the verses of the

Qur 'an he found with one person, nobody else remembered that verse. Now it may have been one of the last ones narrated that might have explained why that was.

But remember people died at those battles before this.

Was something lost then? Good question. There's no way of knowing. It's interesting that this is admitted.

So then the complete manuscripts, the copy of the Qur 'an remained with Abu Bakr till he died, then with Umar, he's the second caliph, till the end of his life, and then with Hafsa, the daughter of Umar, that's

Sahih al -Bukhari 6509, the very next section goes on to say, Hudayfa was afraid of there the people of Sham and Iraq's differences in the recitation of the

Qur 'an. So he had been traveling and discovered that amongst, this is about 18 years later, this is around six, somewhere between 650, 652, 653, around in that time frame.

And he's been traveling and he's discovering that there's differences between how people are quoting the

Qur 'an. And notice what is said. So he said to Uthman, oh chief of the believers, save this nation before they differ about the book, the

Qur 'an, as Jews and Christians did before. So you see those

Jews and their Christians, they're always arguing about their scriptures. So save us from that.

Make, keep us unified. Now we look around Islam today, that didn't really work.

That really didn't work. Because even if you unify the Qur 'an, the Qur 'an does not exist in of itself.

It exists within a tradition. And that tradition really becomes the matrix in which it is understood and interpreted, primarily coming from the hadith.

So Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, send us the manuscripts of the Qur 'an so we may compile the Qur 'anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you.

So in other words, Hafsa still had that first one that had been done under Abu Bakr. And so she sends it.

Hafsa sent it to Uthman. Uthman then ordered Zayd bin Thabit, Abdullah bin Az -Zubair,

Sayyid bin al -As and Abdur -Rahman bin Harith bin Hashim. You try to say these things really fast.

It's really sort of fun. To rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies. So a second committee is set up and Zayd bin

Thabit had been on the first committee. To write the manuscripts in different, in perfect copies.

Uthman said to the three Qurayshi men, so in other words, they're of the Qurayshi tribe as Muhammad had been.

In case you disagree with Zayd bin Thabit on any point of the Qur 'an, then write it in the dialect of the Quraysh. The Qur 'an was revealed in their tongue.

Okay, so they do their work. They did so. When they had written many copies, Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa.

Would love to see that. No one knows where that is. Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied and or that all other

Qur 'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.

Now Muslims will say, well that's what you're supposed to do with holy books. That's that.

He wasn't trying to hide anything. It's just that this is the final version and anything else is still a holy book, but the only way to dispose of it is to burn it.

The problem is that there were numerous other people at this point in time that did not think that these men were the most qualified men to come up with this final version in the first place.

And one of the biggest names there was Abdullah ibn Masud, who was one of the companions of the

Prophet and the Prophet had pointed to Abdullah ibn Masud and had said, if you want to know the

Qur 'an, ask him. And he even claimed he could tell you when every surah and any ayah of any surah, where it was revealed and when it was revealed.

And he had his own version and we'll we'll look at that in just in just a second. Zay bin

Thabit added, now this is the second, this is the second compilation. This is in the 650s.

A verse from Surat Azab was missed by me when we copied the Qur 'an and I used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it.

So we searched for it and found it with, guess who, Kuzaymi bin Thabit al -Ansari. The verse was, among the believers are men who have been true in their covenant with Allah, Surah 33, 23.

So even the one that Hafsah had had, that one manuscript, didn't contain this.

So there was a continuing compilation, even at the time of Uthman, even from the

Islamic sources. Now I mentioned briefly before, what's really important about this is after Uthman comes

Ali. And Ali is caliph for only a short period of time and basically civil war breaks out amongst the

Muslims during Ali's time. He has this big battle with Aisha, who is one of Muhammad's wives and and it's quite, it's quite the mess.

And you really have the origins of the Sunni -Shia split right at this time and it's focused upon succession.

And so you've got the, you've got Uthman compiling the Qur 'an at the very time that everyone's arguing about who's supposed to be the leader in Islam.

And then he burns all the sources he used. Hmm. You would think that would make most people go, hmm.

But most Muslims never even given a thought. It's just, you know, the

Qur 'an exists as the Qur 'an. It's history. Well, let's be honest. I grew up in a

Christian home and I figured the Bible had always had a leather cover and and and gold edges and thumb indexing.

I didn't know much about the history of it and how it had come together and stuff like that. Most Muslims are in the exact same boat.

In fact, you know more about the history of the Qur 'an right now than most Muslims in most Muslim countries because this is not something that's normally discussed.

I mean, how many of you had seen p72 or p52 or p66 before this morning or even knew that they existed?

So we can understand how some of that some of that works. Now, in Ibn Abi Dawud, in his his book,

Kitab al -Masahif, page 23, he notes, many of the passages of the Qur 'an that were sent down were known by those who died on the day of Yamamah, but they were not known.

See, I can now go past it and not and and and you've been inoculated and it's okay now, except I'm noticing the pastor really likes the battle of Yamamah.

You get a real kick out of that one, don't you? I just, is that going to end up in a sermon pretty soon?

Sunday, it's coming Sunday. You don't want to be at the battle of Yamamah. That's not going to be the only thing you remember from this, is it, please?

That that and that and the laser thing, that's that's going to be, yeah, that's about that's about it. I'm a funny

Scottish looking guy, bald guy who's talked for a while and talked about the battle of Yamamah, that's all I remember. But anyway, they were sent down, were known by those who died on the day of Yamamah, but they were not known by those who survived them, nor were they written down, nor had

Abu Bakr, Umar, or Uthman by that time collected the Qur 'an, nor were they found with even one person after them.

So here is an early source saying parts were lost, parts were lost.

I don't have this quote up here right now, but Aisha, Muhammad's favorite wife, the young, the youngest,

Aisha indicated that there used to be a verse in the Qur 'an about stoning of adulterers, and it had been written down on a piece of parchment.

But the day that Muhammad died, they were so distracted by dealing with his death that a tame goat entered into a room and ate it.

And that's why it's not in the Qur 'an. It's in the Hadith. It's in the Hadith, isn't it?

It's there. I'm not making this stuff up. It is there. One of the earliest

Christian writers to write against Islam, this is one of the areas of real fascination.

I'm really hoping the Lord opens up opportunity for me to do further graduate work in this specific field.

That is the earliest Christian responses to Islam and what they can tell us about what

Islam was like at that time. But the Apology of al -Kindi from around AD 830 says, then the people, now listen, this is a

Christian writing. Listen to how similar this is to what we just read from Sahih al -Bukhari, which would not have, al -Kindi would not have had access to this at this point in time.

Then the people felt a variance in their reading. Some read according to the version of Ali, which they followed to the present day.

Those would be the Shiites. Some read according to the collection of which we have made mention. One party read according to the text of Ibn Masud, Abdullah Ibn Masud, as I said.

And another according to that of Uba' Ibn Kab. When Uthman came to power and people everywhere differed in their reading,

Ali sought grounds of accusation against him. One man would read a verse one way, another man another way, and there was changed interpolation.

Some copies having some more and some less. Now that what we do know that Abdullah Ibn Masud had a fewer number of surahs than the 114 today.

Uba' Ibn Kab had 116. So there's even a different number of chapters or surahs in these various collections.

When this was represented to Uthman and the danger urged of division, strife, and apostasy, he thereupon caused to be collected together all the leaves and scraps that he could together with the copy that was written out at the first.

This is a Christian. Doesn't have access to Sahih al -Bukhari. It's the exact same story with just a few slight differences.

But they did not interfere with that which is in the hands of Ali or of those who followed his reading. Uba' was dead by this time and as for Ibn Masud, they demanded his exemplar but he refused to give it up.

Now it's interesting there is a, there are contradictory stories as to what happened with Ibn Masud.

Basically if you have Shiite leanings, Ibn Masud was sort of a hero who opposed

Uthman and would not give up his manuscript and in fact was beaten by the governor and died because of his beating.

The Sunni tradition is more that Uthman and Ibn Masud sort of got together and Uthman came and visited him when he was dying and all was good and so on and so forth.

I think the Shiites got this one right because I've read enough about Abdullah Ibn Masud. This guy, this guy was, how would

I describe him? He was, he was a man's man. He was, he was, he was on his deathbed he was singing with Frank Sinatra, I did it my way, you know, and I, I just don't get the idea that, that he decided that, oh okay,

I'll, I'll go ahead and give up my readings of the Quran and let these other guys, I, I don't believe that for a second.

His readings continued on for a very long, long time and this specifically says that Ibn Masud, they demanded his exemplar, his manuscript, but he refused to give it up.

Then, there's the source at the bottom of the page, it is reported from Ismail Ibn Abraham, from Ayub, from Nafi, from Ibn Umar, who said, let none of you say

I have acquired the whole of the Quran. How does he know what all of it is when much of the

Quran has disappeared? Rather, let him say I have acquired what has survived. That's an interesting, again, early perspective on the fact that there were elements of the

Quran that were missing by that particular point in time. Now, many Muslims believe the

Quran has no meaningful textual history, that the Quran they possess today is a mirror image of Uthman's version, but the fact is that there are textual variants in the early copies of the

Quran and evidence of an early editing process seeking to remove Ibn Masud and Uba Ibn Kab's influence on the text of the

Quran itself. Now, what you're going to see here, I can guarantee you, 99 .99

% of the Muslims living in the world have never seen. I remember presenting this material in a debate at a very large

Presbyterian church in the Bronx, and this was one of those beautiful Presbyterian churches that had been built back in the 1800s, you could seat a thousand people in there.

Well, you're only supposed to seat about 800, we got a thousand people in there, and there hadn't been more than 20 people in this place in the past 50 years that had gone way liberal, and they had, you know, a couple little folks that met in there, and that was it.

Well, they let us have a debate in there, I'm not sure they'd ever let us do it again, but, and we had about a thousand people there, 800 of them were

Muslims, and I presented this information, and it was, you could hear a pin drop, hopefully not a grenade pin, but you could hear a pin drop.

When I presented this stuff, I mean, it was, it was eerily quiet as I made this presentation, it was very, very strange, so you're going to see stuff that, as I said, the vast majority of Muslims in the world have never, ever, ever seen before.

We already looked at that one, I'm not sure why that's there twice. Now, if you have, if you see the

Quran going around, this looks like the page in, this is surah 3, 158, all right, and what you've got here is,

I sort of blow up the text for you a little bit here, and here is the text under consideration, and here is the same text from Quranic manuscript 328, found in the

National Library of France in Paris as dated to around a hundred years after Hijra. So what was the

Hijra? It was in 622, that's when Muhammad went from Mecca to Medina, and so here you have the printed text, and then here is the text, and you say, how do you have something from the

National Library of Paris? Well, this is one of the areas

I've really wanted to study, and so the Lord's people provide me with the funds. I have in my library a museum replica, this literally, when it's open is about this big, and it is a museum quality replica of both the

London and Paris manuscripts of the Quran. They were 1400 bucks a piece. There's about three sets in the

United States, and yours truly has one of them, thankfully, and so with a good photocopier, we were able to pull these things out, and so as reading

Hijazi text is hard, even for those who read modern Arabic, let's expand the text a little bit. Now what you can see is that the

Paris manuscript has an extra aleph not found in the modern printed Quranic text, but in this case that extra aleph completely changes the meaning, and the ancient text says that those who die will not be gathered to Allah, while the modern 1924 printed text says they will surely be gathered to Allah.

Now, please make sure you understand why I point this out. I'm not saying that we can't figure out the original reading, but I am pointing out how important it is to have a full, unedited, widely dispersed manuscript tradition with which to make such determinations, and so it really changes.

Oops, sorry, I needed to click one more time, I guess, so you could see that. There we go. So the printed text says will surely gather them.

The ancient text says will not gather them. So in other words, it's a negation. It's yes or no.

That's a fairly major difference between the two texts. Now we also have the impact of Ibn Masud.

The fact is that there were competing readings in the earliest centuries of the transmission of the

Quran. Specifically, the tradition of Ibn Masud, as well as that of Uba' Ibn Ka 'b, persisted in the earliest manuscripts of the

Quran long after the Uthmanian attempt to enforce a particular set of readings.

This can be seen in the earliest Islamic traditions, for example, in reference to Surah 1793.

Regarding that, Abd Razak mentions a tradition from Mujahid who said, we did not know what a house of ornament, zukruf, was until we saw in the qira 'ah of Ibn Masud a house of gold, the haab.

So what does he mean here? Well, here's the text once again. And here is the relevant text blown up so we can see it a little bit better.

And then we bring it up. The current reading found in the Uthmanian version in the current 1924

Egyptian version speaks of a house of ornament, zukruf, while the Ibn Masud reading has a house of gold, the haab.

Once again, without the materials destroyed by Uthman, how does one logically and truthfully determine such issues?

That's the problem when you have editing. Is that how do you know the editor got it right the first time?

So is it a house of ornament or is it a house of gold? The difference would be right there.

Depends on which reading you take and who you believe as to who had the greatest impact.

Now, Surah 2, 222 provides another example, this time based upon Fahd's palimpsest manuscript.

Now let me explain what a palimpsest manuscript is. Let me just ask, does anyone know what a palimpsest manuscript is?

Why are you laughing? We have seminary guys down here. You all know what palimpsest manuscripts are, right?

I just heard him say, just shake your head. I may be old, but I ain't deaf.

A palimpsest manuscript, remember these were written on parchment. Parchment is leather. And so what you could do is you could wash off the ink of what you had been written before and reuse that piece of parchment.

The problem is you would be writing on it with a quill or with something like that, which means you would scar the surface.

And so a palimpsest is whereby using infrared or ultraviolet light, depending on what your situation, we can actually read what was originally written on something that had been washed off and reused for something else.

You're reading the text that had originally been written on it by looking at the scarring on the actual parchment itself.

So you can read that underlying text even though it's been washed off. That's a palimpsest manuscript. We have New Testament manuscripts that are palimpsest manuscripts that are very important in the study of the

New Testament text as well. And so we have something called the Fahd's palimpsest manuscript for the

Quran. And so using ultraviolet light we can often read the original writing.

When we read the original text in the Fahd's manuscript at Surah 2, 222, which

I have here on the top, and compare the current edition, we see not just variation, we see wholesale editing.

Words are changed, the word order is changed, verbal forms are altered, grammatical terminations are changed, etc.

This is clear evidence of the continued attempt at least a century after Uthman of writing the

Quran of the readings of Ibn Masud. So the underlying text, and if you know anything about Arabic, you know that once you start changing what a subject is or something like that, now you're going to be changing the grammatical terminations of other words down the sentence.

You're gonna have to change the word order. This isn't just a scribe being lazy or not having good close -up vision or being distracted by a flea.

This is editing. This is specific editing of the text which represents the difference between Ibn Masud's readings, which are found in the

Fahd's Palimpsest manuscript, and then Uthman's readings, which are found in the later version of it. And if we had even fuller manuscripts like this, how many other of these types of variants would we be able to find is the question.

And this is when it was really, really quiet in my debate with 800

Muslims, some of which standing alongside the walls just staring at me as I showed them things like this.

This is why Sufyan al -Thawri's relatively short tafsir. A tafsir is a commentary.

It's a commentary on the Quran, sometimes very brief commentary, sometimes more in -depth. The earliest ones tend to be very brief.

This is why Sufyan al -Thawri's relatively short tafsir, for instance, can list 67 variant readings, 24 of which are attributed to Ibn Masud.

And so here you have an early commentary on the Quran written by a Muslim, and at the time they don't have any problem mentioning the fact that, well,

Ibn Masud said it read this way and Uthman said it read this way. They didn't have a problem with that. They hadn't yet started doing

Christian apologetics and so they hadn't developed the orthodoxy that, well, there's never been any changes in the

Quran. The existence of these textual issues has been well known to Muslim scholars for centuries but has fallen out of general

Islamic recognition, especially in our lifetimes. Islamic scholars know these things, especially in Turkey and places like that, but most

Muslims just walking down the street have never heard of any of these things. Now there's two kinds of variation that we need to recognize.

There is tarif. Tarif means distortion or change. Tarif al -mana means distortion of the meaning.

And tarif al -nafs or tarif al -lafs means distortion of the text. And in the history of the

Muslims, there have been scholars who believe that the had experienced distortion of meaning but not of the text.

And so Christians distort the meaning of the text but they hadn't actually changed the words of the text. And then there were other

Muslims that believed the actual text of the Bible had been changed. That would be tarif al -nafs. And there's two competing streams.

It has become predominant today and especially amongst Muslims today is almost universal but not completely. That the distortion of the

Torah and the Injil is a distortion of the text itself, the actual words. But for many, many years there had been two streams of viewpoints on that.

And some very big names, very big names in early Islamic history limited the distortion of the text to tarif al -mana, to the distortion of meaning, not that the text itself had been changed.

Because they recognized that if it was sent down by God and it's been changed, if the Torah and the Injil could be changed, why not the

Quran? It's just sort of arbitrary to say, well that's the one that couldn't be. And they recognized that.

Here is just one page of a number to be found in the 2007 Turkish publication.

Whoa! We got it up there? There we go. Of the 2007 Turkish publication of the

Topkapi manuscript listing variations between the major early Quranic manuscripts.

These lists are produced by Islamic scholars, not Orientalists, not Christians. Now I have the smaller version of this.

My version of the Topkapi manuscript was only 250 bucks. I couldn't afford the $5 ,000 one.

Sorry about that. But there you have a listing and you can see the variant readings in the chart.

This is not a critical edition, but you can see these the various surahs and the references and the differences between these major manuscripts of the

Quran at these various points. And so there are Islamic scholars who have been discussing these things, especially during the height of Islamic culture.

There were a number of discussions of these things, but unfortunately that was a long time ago.

And it still exists and Turkey has at least until recent years been a primarily secular

Islamic state. But that's changing as more of the radicals are coming into that area as well.

Now before I dive into a lot of the theology that I've been promising you for a long time,

I think it might be a good idea if before we continue doing that, we take a couple minutes if you'd like.

And if you've got some questions about what we've covered up to this point that you'd like to have clarified before you completely forget what they were.

Because we're going to transition at this point into a discussion of the actual theology of the Quran, what it teaches about Jesus, all these things

I've been sort of alluding to, but saying we'll get to it, we'll get to it.

What I've been covering this evening,

Muhammad, the history of the Quran. Any questions, anything that's got you completely befuddled before we look at anything else?

Yes sir, in the Lakers, bright, bright Lakers jersey. Yes. How many times do you think the

Quran has been edited? How many times do I think the Quran has been edited? Well, historically, the

Muslim sources say twice, under Abu Bakr and under Uthman. I have a number of scholar friends who point to a period around 705 as a time when there seems to be some real evidence of editorial activity in regards to the

Quran. One of the things they point to that is very interesting, but unfortunately it's not conclusive enough to go very far with it, primarily because we can't do the archaeological work that we need to in Islamic countries today to be able to confirm these things.

One thing that is fascinating to me is the issue of the Qibla. Do Shiite mosques have the

Qibla like Sunni mosques do? They do not. Interesting, where do they face for prayers? Okay, they do.

Mosques have what's called the Qibla. The Qibla is the mechanism, it points you to where Mecca is, it points you to the grand mosque in Mecca, and so wherever the mosque is built, it's determined what the direction to Mecca is, and that's how you know which direction to pray.

Now, of course, today with smartphones, every Muslim has a GPS activated smartphone, you know exactly which direction to face, but archaeology back before, you know, back in late 1800s when

Britain still ruled many of these nations in the colonial period, some of the earliest mosques were excavated, and what they discovered was very, very interesting, and some of the earliest mosques going back into the very primitive period of Islam, the

Qibla did not point to Mecca, the

Qibla pointed to Jerusalem. Now, what's interesting about this is that these are mosques that were built 40, 50 years after Muhammad, and yet the

Quran itself records, Islamic history records, there was a period of time when

Muhammad instructed his people to pray toward Jerusalem, but it was during Muhammad's lifetime that the Qibla, the direction was changed to Mecca, so why would you have mosques built at a later time period that are facing, that the

Qibla is facing toward Jerusalem rather than toward Mecca, unless the

Quranic recording of the change of the Qibla is actually a later edition that had nothing to do with Muhammad at all.

So, in answer to your question, we can't prove that, it's a fascinating thing, it would be nice if you could do more archaeological research, but the

Muslims don't want to do archaeological research into this subject in Islamic countries, and so was there another editing around 705 that would have allowed, for example, the changing of the

Qibla and stuff like that? It's possible, it's possible, but the Islamic sources specifically mention only those two instances, under Abu Bakr and then under Uthman, but who then made the

Fogg's Palimpsest manuscript and got rid of Ibn Masud's readings and then did the editing to match it to Uthman's?

Those are questions that the state of the manuscript evidence and the availability of it precludes us from answering those questions as of yet.

Maybe someday, don't know, don't know. Other questions that I promised to answer more briefly on these particular subjects?

All right, you look really reluctant to that, oh. You indicated, you may have answered this question, but you've indicated when we were talking, you were talking about how the

Qur 'an was written out of any type of form, rhyme or reason. Right.

What is the intent on it? Why was it, why was it organized the way that it is? Islamic tradition is that, later

Islamic tradition always says this, that the organization of the Qur 'an is actually provided by Allah through Muhammad.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that, it seems to be pretty much based upon the size of the surahs, and remember, like I said, within one surah, you can have material from both the

Meccan and Medinan periods in Muhammad's life. That's why for most of us, it is just so hard to even begin to try to follow any context in the

Qur 'an at all. That's why those reporters found nothing on September 11th and 12th and 13th.

You just can't figure it out that way. By the way, there are some very interesting versions of the Qur 'an that are useful to you if you want to read it, and I would not discourage you from so doing.

It does open up doors. I'll be perfectly, perfectly frank with you. There are a number of debates that I've done where the only reason that I think the

Muslims listened to what I had to say was because they could tell I had taken the time to read the Qur 'an and try to understand the

Qur 'an, and, and look, how many of us would listen to someone in a debate or a lecture when they started off saying,

I've never read the Bible, but I think it's baloney anyways. I mean, automatically that person has zero credibility for most of us to begin with, and yet most of us expect the

Muslims to listen to what we have to say, and we've never even taken the time to hardly know anything about what their religious belief is or why they believe what they believe, what their sources are.

Same thing with going up to Salt Lake City, you know. I mean, I've often said to people when you go to do missions to Mormons, if you're going to do it regularly, read the

Book of Mormon for crying out loud. I mean, because they're going to ask you, how many times you've been asked, well, have you read the Book of Mormon? All the time, and when they ask if you read the

Book of Mormon, I go, I read the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Purgatory at Price, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Marvelous Work and Wonder, Articles of Faith by James Talmage, how about you?

And it, it provides you with, it provides you with a basis. I mean, I'll never forget, I, I walked into the mosque at ASU.

There was a mosque right off the campus of ASU in Tempe, Arizona, and on a certain day, they have a thing where you can sort of do a walk -through and get to visit the mosque, and so I showed up, and the funny thing was, they had a group of Boy Scouts there from a

Mormon troop. So the Mormons were visiting the Muslims. It was really interesting. It was sort of like the blind leading the blind here, and, and I sort of sat in the back, and I listened, and the guy asked if there were any questions, and some people had asked some questions, and it got sort of quiet, and so I said, would, would you mind if, oh, no, no, no, go ahead, and so I said, could you comment please, because he had just said something about what the

Quran said about Jesus, but he hadn't told these little Muslim Boy Scouts almost anything about what the Quran actually does say about Jesus, and so I, I, I, I put up my hand, and I, and I said, could you comment please on the third ayah of Surah Talhah, which says, and whether this is actually in reference to the

Quranic rejection that, that Jesus is the son of God. You should have seen this poor guy. He's a nice guy.

But let me tell you something. Muslims are not accustomed to Christians quoting the Quran in Arabic to them, okay.

That is not something that is, we'll have to talk about that afterwards, he said, you know, and he, he finished up real quickly.

We had a nice conversation later on, and they, they let me, they let me take my, bring my class in, and observe the prayers, and, and have a conversation with them, and all the rest of that stuff, but the point is,

I had the opportunity of talking to this man. I had a man come up to me after a debate in, with Adnan Rashid in London on whether the

Quran misrepresents the Trinity, and I had a Muslim come up to me, I mean literally at my table as I'm packing my stuff up, and he says,

I just want to thank you. I had never understood what you people believe.

This is the first time anyone's ever explained to me what you believe in a way that I can understand what the differences were, and the only reason he listened to me is because I demonstrated

I had taken the time to know what they believed. It's, it's a simple thing of respect. It opens up an opportunity of dialogue.

It really, really does, and so I think it's, I think it's sort of important. I really do. Go ahead, because I, I think it might be, it might be best, honestly, to just go ahead and finish off this evening with the questions, and then start fresh tomorrow night with the theological stuff, because I'll be able to,

I'll be able to put it all in, in two sections tomorrow evening, and it'll, it'll, it'll make sense, because I think after everything

I've thrown at you tonight, anything I add now is just going to be like, it's sort of like the

Lucy Linus effect, you know, and the peanuts, you know, when Lucy yells at Linus, his hair goes straight back, you know, it's just sort of like I'm, I'm using a fire hose here to, you know, and it might be good to give you a night to sort of assimilate some of this, so if you've got some broader questions, go ahead and ask the broader questions, and I'll tell you if I'm going to answer it tomorrow night or not.

Yes, sir. I have a Muslim friend, I've been praying, my wife and I pray for him every night, and he's been over several years now, and I just frankly don't know how to approach him.

Don't know how to approach your Muslim friend? Do you have conversations with him?

Yeah, conversations, and I try to ask him questions, but he always comes back with a sort of a glassy stare, and he doesn't give me any real good answers, so I can't write right off the top of my head and give me any illustration, because it's been over a period of time that we've talked together, but is he an observant Muslim?

Does he say, does he say the five daily prayers? Does he say the five daily prayers? No. He's not an observant Muslim then?

He's not observing the faith? He's not? I don't know that he does. Oh, okay, so you don't know that he says the prayers or not?

No, I'm still trying to break through the ice. A lot of Muslims, I mean,

Muslims are Muslims. There's going to be people who are more and less open to having dialogue, but most

Muslims I've talked to would not be offended if I asked respectful questions of their own personal faith.

I would ask them, do you say the fajr prayer in the morning? Do you follow the prayers?

Have you ever wanted to go on hajj? You know, what does the shahada mean to you? The very fact that you know these things might be the very thing that opens the door to further conversation, but again, in my experience, getting someone to read the text of scripture and to to find out who the real

Jesus is, read something short like Mark, give them the Gospel of John, say, and do it something along these lines, say, is there something you'd like me to read about your view of Jesus?

Would you be willing to read something about my view of Jesus if I would read something about your view of Jesus? Or asking, you know, could you share your favorite text about Jesus from the

Quran and let me share with you my favorite text about Jesus from the New Testament, and we can talk about it.

I mean, there's all sorts of different ways of doing that and getting that interest going and that conversation going, and we just have to overcome the fear of being able to do so, and it seems to me with Muslims, we already have that connection.

We have, we, you know, they believe in a book that talks about my savior, so let's talk about that.

Let's, or you can ask a question. I mean, we're going to look at a text tomorrow night, which

I think is extremely important. I've mentioned it before. Surah Tal Maida, ayah 116, surah 5, 116, where you have the only place in the

Quran where the three are defined, the three that we're not supposed to say. The Quran says to the people of the book, do not say three.

Hellfire awaits those who say three. Three what? There's only one place in the Quran where that's defined, surah 5, 116, and ask them to read that and explain what do you think, what does this mean to you?

It can open up opportunities. There are, you can also, you're going to have to deal with the doctrine of God one way or the other, but you can also address the issue of, of Romans 5, 1.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. You can talk about the peace you have with God, because the fundamental issue in regards to salvation with Islam is that it does not provide peace.

It might provide apathy, but it doesn't provide peace to someone who's actually experiencing conviction of sin, because there is no mediator in Islam.

You have a holy God, you have hellfire, you have sharia, but you don't have a means of truly knowing you have peace with Allah, other than the one way the

Quran does say that you can know you're going to have eternal life if you die committing jihad.

That's the only thing that's promised. Yes, sir? Reading the

Quran in English, will that engender that same effect or close? Well, let's remember something.

To the Muslim, if you say you've read the Quran, they're going to ask, did you read it in Arabic? And if you didn't read it in Arabic, then you've actually not read the

Quran. However, only about 16 to 19 percent of the world's Muslims are Arabic, so the vast majority of Muslims have quote -unquote never read the

Quran either, if they use the same standard. And so, it was interesting when I was in the mosque at ASU, they had

Yusuf Ali's translation all over the place. Yusuf Ali's translation, it stinks. I mean, I'll be perfectly honest with you, it's one of the worst translations

I've read of the Quran. I've actually found the best, I'm using the best translation I've ever found of the

Quran for my book that I'm writing for Bethany House. It's unfortunately almost impossible to get hold of, but in English, I have found it to be really, really fair.

It's a Turkish translation in English. It's really, really good. It's called Majestic Quran, and it doesn't, it's one of the most unbiased translations

I've found, but I have read portions of the Quran because I've translated portions of the

Quran from Arabic, but I've not read all of it in Arabic, so, but neither have the vast majority of Muslims.

So, what's important to you is a Islamic translation. Let's face it, there may be good non -Islamic translations of the

Quran, and there are, but how many of us would trust a translation of the Bible done by a non -Christian?

We'd automatically have questions. Who was this? What's their credentials? Why did they do this? Etc, etc, etc.

So, yes, sir. Oh, yes.

Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. Abraham's very, very important in, in Muhammad's understanding of, of the relationship of the

Islamic faith, the Jewish faith. Remember when I, when I played the clip about Hajj, it may have gone past you too fast, but it was talking about the

Kaaba, and it said it was the place where Abraham and Ishmael had established monotheistic worship.

The, the story is that, now the Quran does not specifically say it was Ishmael that was offered on Mount Moriah, but Muslims think it was.

They allow for some disagreement about that, but, but Abraham, uh, the story of Abraham, his, his monotheism, his rejection of the polytheism of his family, uh, central, uh, to the stories of the

Quran. Oh, yeah, there's a lot of that there, a lot of that there. Now, what you need to understand, many biblical stories end up in the

Quran as well, but they all get cleaned up because, you see, the, the, the Muslims do not believe that prophets could ever be overly sinful.

So, for example, this is one that's fascinating to me, is that in narrating the story of David, Nathan still finds his way into the

Quran, but since the sin of David is never mentioned, you have no idea why Nathan's there.

So, Nathan still confronts David, but there's no sin with Bathsheba and no murder of Uriah, because a prophet wouldn't do that, but Nathan still comes, comes into the story.

Uh, it's, it's fascinating, uh, really to, to see, uh, the, the cleaning up of the stories and, of course, in Muslim perspective, that makes the

Quran superior because they just think it's horrible that we, that the Bible narrates

Solomon's later life, uh, or, or what happens with Noah, um, after the flood and, and the drunkenness and stuff like that.

Well, that's terrible, uh, that can't be from God. From their perspective, it really sort of whitewashes the reality of sin amongst people to, uh, to take the perspective that they do on the issues, uh, found in the

Bible and the different stories of that in the Quran, yeah. Now, remember, the Quran is not difficult to read, it's lengthwise, it's shorter than the

New Testament. It's about two -thirds the length of the New Testament, so you can actually get through it pretty quickly. I mean,

Surah al -Baqarah will take you forever, but, um, uh, and it's interesting in, in early history,

Surah al -Baqarah actually separated, uh, actually circulated as a separate book from the Quran. It was so huge, it was so big, but anyway.

Yes, sir? Do you think the Sunnis and the Shiites will ever come to an agreement to stop killing each other?

I'm sorry. Let me ask you this, do you think Boston Red Sox fans will ever wear a

Yankee hat? Do you think the, do you think the

Cubs will ever win the World Series? I mean, what? I ain't saying nothing about USC, okay?

Uh, I'm gonna, uh, tomorrow I'm gonna be waiting for a ride at the hotel and nothing's ever gonna show up, and, and I'll discover that tomorrow night's been canceled if I ever said anything about that at all, but, um, no, uh, fundamentally it's impossible.

Uh, no, ain't gonna happen, can't happen as far as I can see. Yes, sir? Um, when we were watching that conversion experience in Brooklyn, you might...

Well, no, I wasn't in Brooklyn, I was in, in, uh, in Sydney, Australia, but the guy was from Brooklyn. Okay, um, and you might answer this tomorrow.

It seemed like, uh, from that point they were safe? From that point they are forgiven, and from that point they are

Muslims. The whole issue of salvation, and yeah, this is something we're gonna have to get into, but let me close our evening by telling you a story from the

Hadith, and this is, again, I think one of the, one of the best things I've done in, in, in not only helping

Christians understand this, but in talking to Muslims, is I've spent so much time studying the Hadith, which if you've ever read, uh, there are some sections of Sahih al -Bukhari that almost drove me right off the road while I was writing.

Um, there are sections about ritual cleansing and women's cycles and things like that that just go on and on and on, and I was just like,

Lord, why? Uh, but, uh, I kept, I kept doing it anyways, but there are, there are many different views as to what salvation is represented in the

Hadith. The Hadith are not a consistent body of, of stories. I mean, the very, one of the main reasons there are so many differences between even

Sunnis, I mean, you read the, the Shiite Hadith, totally different than the

Sunni Hadith as far as, I mean, just very, very different. I mean, many of the Shiites will read Sahih al -Bukhari and things like that, but they see influences of, of, of the

Sunni stuff in that. Um, but they're not consistent with themselves, and many of the stories that are told can be interpreted in different ways depending on, you know, where you start and who your favorite scholar is and all the rest of that stuff.

One of the big arguments amongst, especially the Sunni, is it seems like Muhammad taught that all

Muslims would enter into hellfire, some very briefly, some for a longer period of time. There is no question that one of the most oft -repeated

Hadith stories is about what's going to happen at the end of time. At the

Great Judgment Day, all of mankind will be greatly afraid of Allah, and they will come to Adam as, as a whole.

They will come to Adam, and they will say, intercede with our Lord for us.

You are the first created man, and Adam will say, that is not for me to do. I fear my,

I have never seen my Lord so angry as today, and besides that, I am the one who sinned and brought so much of this about.

Go to Noah, and so they go to Noah, and Noah says, I am not the one that is to do this.

I sinned as well. I fear Allah. Go to Abraham. They go to Abraham.

Abraham says, it's not for me to do this, and he mentions his own sin and his own fear. Go to Moses, and Moses says,

I'm not the one to appear before Allah. I killed the Egyptian. He mentions his sin, and then he,

Moses says, go to Isa. Go to Jesus. When they go to Jesus, Jesus says, it is not for me to do this, but he mentions nothing about sin.

He does not mention about being afraid of Allah's judgment, but he says, it's not for me to do this, which of course we know actually it is exactly what

Jesus does, but there's no reason for me to ever believe that Muhammad had any knowledge of what the

New Testament teaches about Jesus as intermediator, intercessor, or anything else. He was ignorant of those things.

So he says, go to Muhammad, and so now they go to Muhammad, and Muhammad does not say it is not for me to do this.

Muhammad accepts that it is for him to do this, and he goes before Allah, and Allah teaches him a special way of worship that no one has ever been taught before, and he worships

Allah in this way, and as a result, when Muhammad does this a number of different times, and the hadith aren't perfectly in agreement with how this happens, but each time that Muhammad intercedes before Allah, a part of his ummah, his people, is taken out of the hellfire, and who is his ummah?

It's only those who have said, la ilaha illallah, and for him, wa muhammadan wazula.

But if you've said, if you've made that confession of faith, then he takes a portion of those people out, until finally the last time, three or four times, finally the last time that Muhammad does this, the people have been in there so long they're called the people of the fire, and they come out, and they are blackened by how long they've been in the fire, but the one part of them that is not allowed to be touched by the fire is the mark of prostration on their forehead, because the

Muslim touches his his forehead to the ground in the prayers, and so that's the one part that is not burned is the mark of prostration, and they are brought into paradise, and they get to have eternal life as a result of the repetitive intercession of Muhammad in their behalf.

And so he, there are conflicting stories. Some of the hadiths say, as long as you've said, la ilaha illallah, you will go to paradise, no matter what else you've done.

But in the same hadith, you have companions of Muhammad crying unconsolably, because they do not have any promise that they actually are going to get out of hellfire.

Why? Because the hadiths are not consistent. Result, you have some

Muslims who believe one thing, and some Muslims who believe another thing about the final state that they're going to, they're going to be able to have.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of different perspectives on that particular subject, there really are. Okay. What I was trying to think about was like, we always think of it as a work -based, but it seems like almost a faith -based.

Well, not faith as we would put it. Not faith as we would put it. The object of faith would be different, certainly

Allah, but very much the actions of Muhammad and the Qur 'an.

And there is, as you heard him say, he said, your slate is clean from everything you've done up to this point.

But after this point, then you need to rely upon the forgiveness of Allah, but there's no mediator who can promise to you that forgiveness.

And there is, the only thing that is given to you that you can know that you have acceptance of the law is if you die in the state of jihad, you have committed jihad, you're a mujahid.

So again, there's a lot of different perspectives on it, and remember what he said, it says it is your sincerity that matters from that point on.

Well, whoever comes up with perfect sincerity, you know, that's where the issue, we will definitely talk more about that tomorrow night.

Okay. Drew, did you want to close our time with a word of prayer? Sure. Okay. All right, let's do that.

Let's pray. Lord, we come before you and thank you again for Dr. White being able to come here,

God, and everyone being able to meet here tonight and those who spent their time making the cookies, God, that we may enjoy those and have some fellowship together.

And for the people who've given up their time to play the music or to run the sound and all the different things that they've been able to do and dedicate their time that this may work out,

Lord, we thank you for that. God, we pray that what we've learned tonight, what we've learned this morning and last night that we would take and we apply it to our lives.

God, we pray that you would just give us a heart of compassion for those who are lost, Lord, for those who are lost in the

Muslim faith, those who are lost in whatever faith they're in, God, I pray you'd give us a compassion for them and a desire to reach them,

Lord. We pray as we depart from here and we go home and we seek to return tomorrow night, that you'd give us traveling mercy.

We ask this in your name, amen. Thank you for coming. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow night at the same time, six o 'clock.