Video from the First Night of Class: #2

Colleague of Vancouver, Washington, for Dr. White. Hey, Dr. White. I'm originally from Saudi Arabia, but my question is that you made a claim that, or a statement, that Uthman destroyed some earlier

Qur 'ans. Yes. Which is true. But here's my question. Now, are there any 1st century or 2nd century writings that were destroyed by the

Church? And in the light of tonight's, you know, debate, or tonight's, the title of the debate, why were they destroyed, if there were any destroyed?

And, like, why also, in the same way, in the same breath, I would say, why did Uthman destroy these

Qur 'ans? First of all, the only thing I can think of about any books being destroyed was when occultic books were destroyed by people who were coming to know

Christ, recorded in the Book of Acts. You need to remember something. When you say the Church, the

Church was a persecuted minority who were having their members put on stakes and burned by Nero in the 1st century.

So they had no authority or power to be destroying anything. If there were any books being destroyed, they were being destroyed by the

Roman Empire, and they were the Christian scriptures, which took place for about another 200 years until the

Peace of the Church in 313. And so there is no parallel, and could never have been any parallel, in the history of the

New Testament that you have to the Uthmanic revision found in al -Bukhari. And in, which

I've got right here, al -Bukhari, when you say, why were they destroyed? Good question. As I read the narrative of this

Hadith, there can be only one possible reason. And that is that there were people who were very, very concerned that the

Muslims would become like the Jews and the Christians, and dispute over their scriptures. The only reason, therefore, to destroy those other materials is that they contain variant readings.

And that would indicate that at a very early period, because this is within 20 years, 23 years, maybe, depending on exactly where you put this, of the death of the

Prophet Muhammad, these issues were already coming up. And so, I do not believe, in fact, this is an area that I'm doing intensive study in,

I do not believe that there is any parallel between the early transmission of the text of the

Quran and that of the New Testament, for many, many reasons. But one of the key issues is the difference between having a religious state that uses the power of the sword.

As you know, Uthman then copies these and has them sent to these centers, and they become the standard. The early

Christian church could never do that. When you're hiding from Roman soldiers, it's really, really hard to be trying to track down variant copies of your alleged scriptures.

The early church did not have the power and authority to make that kind of change. That's vitally important in seeing the differences between the two books.

You spoke about the Gospels, and you did rightly say that Mark is a shorter Gospel than Matthew, and you gave the statistics regarding that.

I'm amazed that you remember the number of words in each Gospel. However, as I recall from my own learning, the

Gospel according to Mark, though shorter, is episode for episode longer than the Gospel according to Matthew.

Matthew is longer because it includes material which is not found in Mark. But if the material is in Mark and Matthew, Matthew is the shorter of the two.

But even if we accept that Matthew has telescoped the material in this way, doesn't that change the information in the sense that here we have a man coming up to Jesus and saying,

My daughter is at the point of dying. And Matthew changes it to have the man say, My daughter has just died.

They're two different things. Probably before I go to bed this evening, and by the way, I also know that you give the

Koran codes and 6 ,555 in the whole nine yards. I even memorized what you said about that. You're very good.

Predominantly worthless information in my circles, but it's fascinating at parties. But other than that, but probably before I go to bed this evening, probably early in the hours of the morning,

I'm going to be putting on my blog a quick update about the debate this evening.

And then when we get a chance to fly home, get a chance to, you, of course, have to go farther, but we get home and have some time,

I'm going to write probably a much fuller discussion of our debate and what took place.

Now, in the process, I may telescope a number of your statements. I'm not trying to misrepresent you because I'll telescope mine as well.

I mean, I want to get to bed sometime tonight. That does not mean I'm changing the information. I am simply giving the information in a shorter version, and then

I can expand it later on. Mark is giving us the specific blow by blow. He comes, he says what's happening, the healing of the woman with the issue of blood.

Then the elders come and say, don't bother, she's died. And then Jesus says, don't have faith, et cetera, et cetera.

He gives the whole story. All Matthew says is, come, my daughter's died. Doesn't give the second.

He puts those two together. Now, if you're saying, well, that's not how a reporter should do that if he's going to show up in a court of law and give an exhaustive account.

But if you call home tonight and give an account of what took place this evening, you're going to do the same thing, and I'm going to do the same thing, and no one's going to accuse you of lying in the process.

But we're not writing Scripture, though. That's the difference. But again, the question you seem to be proposing is, can

Scripture use regular human language? I mean, Matthew only had so much room to write in.

He had to choose how much space he was going to dedicate to any particular story. It was very different than we have today.

If you and I want to write big, huge, long books, we can write big, huge, long books. He only has X amount of space.

He's only going to give a certain amount of information, and he chose to telescope it. He's not contradicting what

Mark said. If you put the two of them in a room, he would say, well, yeah, of course, I know that, but I just didn't want to go into that level of detail.