Inconsistency of Islamic Apologists

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. Good afternoon, welcome to the Dividing Line. If I sound strange, well, that's not overly unusual, but we are coming to you via Skype and don't really have a whole lot of trust in the system today.

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I'm using my little portable modem to get through on Skype and so you may hear a few of those what we call max headroom moments where the voice over internet protocol sort of makes me sound a little bit strange, but we will do our best and I'll sort of keep an eye on the chat channel as to how we're doing as far as that goes.

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I'm coming to you from the mountains of Colorado, which may have something to do with that, especially when clouds float by and things like that when you're at this type of an altitude,

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I don't know. But it's good to be with you today. Lord willing, we will be with you at the same time on Friday.

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I know these are unusual days, but when you travel, you do what you can arrange and we're going to try to do a program at the same time on Friday as well, this time from down in a place called

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Evergreen. So we will see how that works out and we'll just do the best that we can.

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Before I get to the main topic today and reviewing something

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I just recently listened to, yesterday we were driving through the mountains and the vice president of the ministry was telling me about something that I then encountered in the internet itself and I just couldn't do anything else until I discussed this particular issue and I'll put the modem back where it belongs there, hopefully it just sort of fell down.

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I want to keep it as close to a window as I can to keep the signal strong. But anyway, I'm just absolutely taken aback by what is going on in our culture today.

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Some of you, most of you probably, I guess I was behind because I was traveling, but most of you have heard about the situation that has developed in regards to Brad Pitt's mother.

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Now, you know, she looks like a real nice lady, but evidently she penned a letter to the editor of her local newspaper,

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Missouri's Springfield News Leader. Now just let me just stop for a moment. The Springfield News Leader, I mean, does anyone really need to get overly upset about what appears in the

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Springfield News Leader? But anyway, and she is a conservative and she was advocating support for Mitt Romney and she referred to him as a family man with high morals, business experience.

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And then she made a mistake, at least a mistake for anyone related to anyone in Hollywood, I guess, because she said who is against abortion and shares

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Christian conviction concerning homosexuality. And then she said any

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Christian who does not vote or writes in a name or is casting a vote for Romney's opponent,

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Barack Hussein Obama, a man who sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for years, did not hold a public ceremony to mark the

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National Day of Prayer, and is a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same -sex marriage.

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I hope all Christians give their vote prayerful consideration because voting is a sacred privilege and a serious responsibility.

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Now what do you think she's gotten for saying that? For saying what a large number of people,

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I mean, isn't it a fact that Barack Obama's middle name is

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Hussein? He uses that when speaking to Muslim audiences for some odd reason, but no one else can mention that.

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Is it not true that he sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for many years? He did.

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Is it not the case that he was one of the, if I recall correctly, as a state senator, was one of the few that voted against a ban on partial birth abortion?

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I mean, partial birth abortion, that's just, that's just, that's, I can't even begin.

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The Nazis never thought of partial birth abortion. I mean, that's just beyond them. It's an amazing thing.

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And I think I saw something on television just recently. Wasn't that Barack Obama supporting the redefinition of marriage?

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I think so. I think a lot of people saw that. In fact, we played his comments here on this program.

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So in other words, everything she said was factual. And evidently the bad thing is she is on the wrong side of the cultural divide, if you relate to anybody in Hollywood.

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The backlash has been absolutely amazing. The list of insults that I have seen, the death threats, the just, just the complete vituperation that marks the kind of responses should remind us of times in the past.

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There were these guys called the Brown Shirts in the 1930s in Germany, and their preferred way of political dialogue was intimidation, shouting people down, not meaningful argumentation.

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They weren't challenging anybody to a debate. They just walk up to you and put your lights out.

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And it seems we've got a lot of people like that in our society these days, but no one can say anything about it because they are the cultural elites.

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I wonder what it's like to be Brad Pitt's mother at a time like this.

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It is an amazing thing to consider that in a society such as ours, this kind of of behavior is not, you know,

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I'm not saying those people should be shut down. I mean, I think threatening someone's life obviously is something that should be looked into, but the kind of profanity and vulgarity that was sent her direction, that tells you much more about the people that are using it than it does about her by a long shot.

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But what's concerning is one side in society, in the media, is given a pass on that.

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That's OK. Could you imagine if some other

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Hollywood star's mother had come out and said something on the other side?

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And if someone had responded the way these people respond to Brad Pitt's mother, can you imagine? We'd have nightline versions and special editions of 60

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Minutes. And I mean, it would just it would just be unbelievable. But you're not going to get that today because one side in the spectrum gets to say pretty much whatever it wants, as long as it's on those particular subjects.

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And it is absolutely amazing. Of course, I just looked in chat channel and found someone quoting me.

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I wonder what it's like to be Brad Pitt's mother, end quote, quote, and then James White. So it's helpful when people are listening to exactly what the point of your of your of your assertion actually is.

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And then then they then they then they miss it. But anyway, the cultural stuff

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I'm going to have to put to the side. I have a lot of stuff to try to cover today. And we have a regular length dividing line and who knows what

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I'll need to address come come Friday. New things that have have developed.

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But. The one thing I want to get into just before we sort of take a look, we're going to sort of be pushing things a little bit,

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I'm going to be playing a sound file. And normally this works, but the sound file isn't the best quality.

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And so put that across Skype and everything else and you're going to you're going to have to listen a little bit more closely than I think you're accustomed to listening.

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But hopefully that that will work out. I am I have often expressed my concern at the fact that when we engage in dialogue with Muslims around the world, that there is a a clear evidence and in fact,

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I would I would argue necessary. Double standard that rears its head over and over and over again.

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The very first debate that I did with Shabir Ali, I used the phrase and have used it many times since then, that inconsistency is the sign of a failed argument.

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And I was using that in regards to the fact that Shabir Ali will use one world view.

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He will use a secular, materialistic, naturalistic worldview and and the associated scholarship to attack the

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New Testament. And he will allow the New Testament to be torn up into little shreds and and and this part portion of the

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Book of John is put against that portion of the Book of John and all that kind of stuff. He's he's very much in favor of doing all that.

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But should anyone suggest that you look at the Koran? And ask the question, well, you know, really, is is the

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Koran a consistent document? Does it have a history? Let's let's start applying these same theoretical principles of the people that you cite all the time in regards to the

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New Testament. Let's apply them to the Koran as well to see if your argument actually refutes your own position.

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Oh, well, we're not allowed to do that. The Koran is the absolute word of God and and Muhammad had nothing to do with it.

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So we can't look at historical context and and we can't look at the consistency of the Koran from one point to another.

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And we can't we can't follow any historical development over time. We can't look at the the

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Meccan surahs and then look at the Medinan surahs and and see if there's a difference between the two. And does this have to do with the fact that Muhammad is now in part, you know, is in charge of an army?

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And no, we're not allowed to do any of that, whereas any kind of theory, no matter how far fetched it might be, is fair game for those on the

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Islamic side in their attacks upon the New Testament. There is a group centered in London, but they have representatives around the world.

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In fact, Abdullah Kunda is their Australian representative down down there.

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But the Muslim Debate Initiative is an organization. I'll be engaging a couple of their gentlemen in debate in London and they they call for open, honest dialogue.

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And that's a good thing. And we have engaged them a number of times and they have they have been good debates and they've been helpful debates.

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And I hope that that that continues on. One of their debaters is named Paul Belal Williams.

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He is a former Christian or, of course, he claims that I'm not getting into the theological issues of that particular subject at the moment.

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But I met him when I debated Adnan Rashid, and I think

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I don't know what the situation is now, but I think that at that time,

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Adnan was that may have even been before MDI came into existence. So I won't I won't even make any comment as that because I know that there's somewhat of a split there right now.

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So, in any case, I've met him. He's moderated a couple of debates that I've done over there, but I had actually written a few months ago hoping that he would debate me on the subject of Surah 4, 157 and the historicity of the crucifixion, because I think there are a few topics that demonstrate the disconnection of Islamic theology from the field of history better than Surah 4, 157 and its denial of the historicity of the crucifixion.

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And it's my understanding that I believe

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Sami Zatari has agreed to debate me on that particular subject. But I specifically invited

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Paul Williams to debate that particular issue, but he declined.

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My understanding is that the day before yesterday, a debate was held in London.

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I have not had a chance to hear it yet, but I've seen some of the comments that have been posted in regards to this debate, and it was on the subject of the deity of Christ.

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And in essence, what Paul Williams and Shabir Ali and what we've been listening to and to Abdullah Kunda in his debate with Samuel Green from Australia just a few months ago, very, very similar.

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The approach basically is this. You undercut any testimonies to the deity of Christ from the

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New Testament that come from the Book of John by basically stating that the Book of John is historically unreliable.

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And you can go to all sorts of quote -unquote Christian scholars who will tell you that John's a spiritual gospel or that John is so completely different from the synoptics, there's no way to harmonize

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John or things like this. And so what they'll do is they'll take people who have a perspective that looks at divine revelation in the abstract and demands the right to separate out elements of that revelation and put them at odds with other elements of that revelation.

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So they demand the right to cut the New Testament up into pieces, even cut the same author up into pieces, and place them at odds with one another so that they can then say, well, we really don't necessarily need to view this as historical.

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Or many of them, especially since they are liberal scholars, are attempting to make spiritualized applications but do not want to affirm that there is anything historical in regards to the nature of John's gospel.

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Or really, many will go for all of the gospels themselves. My concern is that, and my understanding is, that Paul Williams did this in the debate on the deity of Christ as well.

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And that doesn't surprise me, having listened to many of the lectures and things that MDI has been putting out.

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And this is nothing new. This really began in its modern form back in the 1800s in India, when a

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Muslim priest scholar began to utilize the German rational critical material that had been developing for over 100 years at that time, the

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Tübingen school and material like that, against the missionaries there in India.

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And most missionaries weren't exactly taught in German liberalism at that particular point in time.

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And so it was a very effective thing. In fact, I would say that has been what has made

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Shabir Ali and others so effective, is that most apologists have not been exposed to liberalism, and hence have not had to work through the worldview issues, the consistency issues, the historical issues that liberalism raises.

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I've said a number of times, sometimes you don't know why the Lord puts you through things until you are way down the road from that particular point in time.

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But I, due to being poor as a church mouse, and the fact that my wife became pregnant with our first child, had to stay in the

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Phoenix area, and the only place I could go to seminary was Fuller Theological Seminary. And while I had a number of professors from Grand Canyon College, where I had done my undergraduate work, still

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I had a number from the main campus who were way to my left as far as their view of scripture and their view of many things.

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And so I really had to study liberalism, and it wasn't enjoyable.

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And I had some people say that I shouldn't be doing that. I think John MacArthur has said seminary should not be a battleground.

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Well, maybe, but that was the situation that I was put in.

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And so I've had to deal with liberalism, and I understand the liberal mindset, and I know where the presuppositional issues come in.

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And that's what really makes me concerned, and I'm not sure that concerned is the right term, but it really upsets me that Islamic apologists who affirm orthodox

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Islamic belief, and when I say that, I'm not talking here about liberal Muslims who would spiritualize the

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Quran, spiritualize Muhammad, in essence westernize completely the historical claims of the

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Islamic faith. I'm talking about people who would claim to be orthodox Sunni or maybe even orthodox

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Shiite Muslims, and hence they believe the

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Quran has eternally existed. They believe that what they have in the

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Quran today is exactly as it was dictated to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, that the miracles recorded therein, many of these would, many of these folks would believe, all of them, let me take that back, all of them would believe in Muhammad's night flight, that he rode a beast to Jerusalem and then ascended into heaven, and he went through all the levels of heaven, and he's met the various peoples and prophets and so forth, and all of that they would believe actually took place historically, and they would actually believe that Jesus either said or will say the words that are attributed to him in the text of the

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Quran, and yet at the same time, they would embrace the most destructive forms of criticism in regards to the

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New Testament and not realize that to do both at the same time is to involve yourself in an irreconcilable contradiction.

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Because none of the scholars that they like to quote would ever agree with them that the words attributed to Jesus, for example, spoken from his cradle and recorded for us in the

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Quran, that there is any basis for believing that Jesus actually said those words, and in fact, those same guys, there's a story very similar to this, it's in the

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Arabic infancy gospel, and since other parts of the Arabic infancy gospel and the infancy gospel of Thomas and there's all these sources that show up in the

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Quran, then clearly you must believe that those are the preceding sources and that this is where Muhammad got this stuff from, right?

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To which they will say no. And so they will not apply the methodology to their own book that they will very gladly apply uncritically to the

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New Testament. Let me give you an example, and this is going to be a part of the book,

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I hope it's going to be a part of the book because the book's getting longer than it should be, and so I'm not sure.

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We'll see. But what I want to do is include a section.

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And ah, I just saw a link come up. Thank you, Monty. I haven't found any recordings yet.

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I haven't found the recordings yet either. I'm sure that as soon as they're available, it was only July 9th, so it takes us time to get stuff posted too.

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But as soon as it's up, I can guarantee you I will have it on my iPod and will be listening to it with great interest.

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But anyway, one of the chapters that I want to include in the book is a comparison of the fifth chapter of the

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Gospel of John with the fifth surah of the Quran.

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Now, why would I do that other than the numbers are the same? Well, there's a number of reasons, primarily because surah five is, in my opinion, surahs four and five are the two most important surahs in the

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Quran in regards to what the Quran teaches about Christianity. Since the

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Quran comes 600 years after the birth of Christ and after the founding of the Christian church, then it's important for Christians to understand what the

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Quran says about us, about the Al -Anjil, the Al -Kitab, the people of the book, the people of the Gospel. And I truly believe that a fair reading of surah five reveals certain things about the author's understanding of what it is

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Christians believe. I debated Bassam Zawadi on that subject in London a few years ago, and Abdullah Al -Andalusi wants to revisit the very same topic in a debate coming up in September, which

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I find interesting. It is somewhat of a parallel to the year... What year was that?

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It was 2000, if I recall correctly, when within about six months, I debated

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Tim Staples in California and then Robert St. Genes in Florida. Interestingly enough, on the right and left coast, far, far away from each other, on the subject of papal infallibility, and they presented completely contradictory and different ways of defending papal infallibility.

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Same dogma. And one of the illustrations was

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Staples tried to defend the orthodoxy of one of the popes, and St. Genes said he was a heretic.

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So you had a 180 -degree difference there. So I'm not sure exactly how

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Abdullah's approach will be different. He had sent me an article a number of years ago now, and if he's finished that article,

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I would appreciate seeing the rest of it. I wouldn't want to go on something that he himself said hadn't been edited and wasn't ready to go yet, so I'd appreciate it if you would send that to me.

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But anyway, it was interesting to see the differences there, and now evidently there's differences in how to approach this.

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But the point again being that Surah 5, I think, is one of the most important surahs. The people of the

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Gospel are directly addressed. The people of the Book are directly addressed.

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We are told not to say three. Who are the three? All these things, I think, are extremely important.

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And so looking at that surah would be very important. And then to compare that with John 5. John 5 is, of course, from the

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Gospel of John. Muslims will always say the Gospel of John is historical. It's not grounded in history, etc.,

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etc., but it's also one that they will quote all the time, which I've always found interesting.

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They will quote Jesus' words, I can do nothing except what I see the

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Father doing. I can do nothing of myself. I've never had one of those

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Muslims explain to me the phrase, from myself.

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And I would be very interested in hearing what Paul Williams would say about something like that, even though I do not believe that he is actually functionally

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Greek literate at that point. But be that as it may, its relevance is very important in regards to the deity of Christ.

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And then you can sort of compare. They're similar in length. Surah 5 would be a little longer.

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But they're similar in length, similar topics, and so by comparing them, I think it would be very useful.

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Because I could point out that whereas Surah 5, verse 116 quotes the words of Jesus in response to Allah prophetically in the future.

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Remember the text. Allah says to Jesus, did you say to men, worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of Allah.

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Well, those words allegedly haven't been spoken yet, but they will be spoken in the day of judgment. So the

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Muslim will accept a prophetic claim of this is what's going to be said in the future, and this is going to be

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Jesus' response. Written by someone who never knew Jesus.

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Oh well, but they would say he did because in the Quran he met Jesus. Jesus was in the second level, the seven levels of heaven.

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I think it was the second level. I'm going off the top of my head there. He certainly wasn't in the highest level. They'll accept that, but then they'll say, but the words of Jesus of John chapter 5 are too fanciful for us to believe.

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Now think about that for just a moment. You have someone writing in Arabic who's never been to Jerusalem except in a flying there on a beast with wings and then going from there to heaven, which even the earliest

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Muslims seem to think was more of a dream or a vision than actual reality, but the point is he didn't claim to be intimately familiar with Jerusalem.

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He certainly wasn't there during Jesus' lifetime. He's writing in a different language 600 years later and he's giving a prophetic perspective as to what's going to be going on in the future.

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They'll accept that, but then you look at the gospel of John. It is right now our earliest attested gospel that may change, but only for the good in the sense that, as some of you know,

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Dan Wallace and others are telling us that within less than a year now, actually half a year, we will be seeing the book coming out documenting the finding of these new papyri manuscripts, which will make

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Mark the earliest attested gospel and then Luke sort of tied with John as far as right around the same time as p52, the current earliest papyri manuscript we have, which comes

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John chapter 18 from around 125 AD. But be that as it may, right now it is the currently earliest and certainly with I think still remain most widely attested gospel of the four.

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It clearly is a gospel written by someone intimately familiar with first century

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Jerusalem. This is why I'd like maybe someone in channel to look up.

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It may be difficult to find, but I have linked in the past to an excellent discussion.

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I have it on my system here. The problem is I don't remember where I got it, but it was an excellent discussion on the truth of the scriptures and the variety of the scriptures, the veracity of the scriptures,

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I'm sorry, by four Oxford Cambridge scholars from England.

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I think Dr. Jones is a part of it. Peter Jones, I think was the first speaker, as I recall.

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And then Dirk Junkind spoke, and there are a total of four. And especially that first presentation is so important,

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I think, for Christians to understand today in light of the fact that we can't stick our heads in the sand anymore.

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We have to deal with the kinds of attacks that are being made upon the New Testament. And what he did is he drew from the work of Richard Baucom and others who engaged in this tedious work, tedious work of examining the names on the bone boxes that were being discovered in and around Jerusalem and being cataloged, and discovered that when you take the

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Gospels and you look at the relative frequency of names in the

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Gospels as they represent the people who were alive in the days of Jesus, and then you compare that with the bone boxes, in other words, completely secular, not secular, outside of the

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New Testament data, the percentages are almost identical to one another.

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It's fascinating that they knew exactly what names were being used and exactly the proportion that they were being used in as well.

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And then the fact that they used these names and because, for example,

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Mary was such an incredibly common name, they would differentiate.

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I mean, if you're walking down the road and you shout out Mary, about 29 to 33 percent of the women are going to turn around and look at you, because that's just the way that it worked.

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And so they used means of differentiating. They were talking about someone, they would say,

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Mary, wife of Cleopas, or Mary from such and such a city. And if you had to differentiate within your conversation, that is how you would do that.

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But the problem is now you have to know all these place names. And the

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Gospels are filled with place names. Now think about this for just a moment.

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If someone was writing, say, the Gospel of John from Egypt, all right, and they're writing, let's say, 20, 30 years after Jerusalem's actually been destroyed.

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The Roman legions have come through and have wiped everything out. There's refugees all over the place.

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And so put yourself in a situation, do a thought experiment here. For example,

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I'm up in Colorado. And so I'm, let's see, it was 654 miles, if I recall correctly.

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Maybe Rich can confirm this. And Rich, I can't see stuff in the Skype window, so you'd have to do it in channel.

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But if I recall correctly, it was 654 miles from Phoenix to Salt Lake City.

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And so I figure being up here in Colorado, okay, I'm probably around 800, 700, about 700 miles.

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Okay, I just got confirmation from my host here. We're about 700 miles from Phoenix.

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Guess how far Mecca is from Jerusalem? It's about 750 miles, about the same distance.

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Now, I live in a day with the internet and all sorts of things. But guess what?

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I did not know until I drove across I -70, the exact physical relationship between Vail, Avon, and Edwards.

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Okay, even though I live within 700 miles, I could have Googled it.

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But put yourself in a day before your ability to do that. How much would you know, given that most people never traveled anywhere near that far, how much would you know about place names of small villages and things like that, of a place that's 700 miles removed from where you live?

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What would be the possibility of someone living in Egypt being able to not only get the percentage of names right, because by the way, the names amongst, this was a fascinating point that Dr.

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Jones brought up, the names amongst the Jews in first century

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Judaism in Egypt were very different percentage -wise than the names amongst the

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Jews in Jerusalem in first century. So even if you were a

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Jewish person writing in Egypt and you were trying to project this as being in Jerusalem, you'd still get the names wrong.

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You'd still get the names wrong. And so there's so much evidence that when you look at the

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New Testament, what you're looking at comes from the days of Jesus, and it was written by someone who knew that area at that time, knew that culture.

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Totally unlike the Quran. Totally unlike the

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Quran. Someone's asking, was it Peter Williams? It might have been Peter Williams. It's definitely

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Dirk Junkin and Simon Gaffer Cole was there as well. You're correct about that. So I think you're getting close there as to who was the speaker.

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Maybe Peter Williams was the first speaker. That's a possibility. Anyways, looks like some folks in channel have found where that particular lecture is found.

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So the point is there's all this evidence of the veracity and historical foundation of the

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New Testament documents that honestly we did not have only 20 or 30 years ago because no one had gone through the bone boxes.

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No one had gone through the names. The data was sort of sitting around, but can you imagine how boring it was to go through all that stuff?

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Now we can demonstrate the historical connection for all of these things and demonstrate that.

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Monty just posted in a channel that apologetics315 .com has the

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MP3 listed search under our New Testament Gospels reliable, and you should be able to pull it up from there.

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There's also tapesfromscotland .org has it as well. So I posted this.

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I said this morning I listened the second time to a three and a half hour seminar recorded in Scotland, I believe in Edinburgh. The presenters were

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Peter J. Williams, Dirk Junkin, and Simon Gaffer Cole. Okay, there you go. So maybe

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I'll, if turrets and fan, if what you could do for me, sir, is repost that, then that'll make everybody happy and you'll get to listen to it another time.

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Anyway, all of that to go back to the contrast between John 5, which is placed in history.

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What's the beginning of John 5? The healing of the man by the pool of Bethesda.

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And what have we found in Jerusalem over the past hundred years? The pool of Bethesda.

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And what did the Gospel of John say it had? Five porticoes. And when we dug it up, guess what?

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Five porticoes. In other words, it has been archaeologically located. The Gospel of John places the specific conversation, the specific miracle, and what results from that in a historical context.

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And in a historical context that we have been able to verify. Now, you keep that in mind and compare that to what you have in Sura 5.

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There's no historical foundation. There's no ability to place the statements of Sura 5 and the condemnations of Christian belief in any type of historical context whatsoever.

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So that's one of the things that I want to be writing in the book about.

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It's something that I would challenge the MDI gentlemen to really think about. I know that your audience loves it when you use our liberals and use our unbelievers.

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And your audience really likes that. But I'm just asking a simple question. How consistent is it?

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And I keep looking for that first consistent

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Islamic apologist who will use the same worldview to defend his faith that he will use in attacking mine.

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I've not met that person yet. And so anyways, I wasn't going to talk about that that long.

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I apologize. But sometimes, especially when you're writing a book, you start talking about what you're writing about and it goes on forever.

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According to my little clock here, we have about 20 minutes left.

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That is enough time for me to start listening to this. There was a debate that took place.

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I don't have the date here, but it was within the past couple of weeks between David Wood and Sami Zaatari.

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Sami Zaatari is one of the MDI fellows, the Muslim Debate Initiative fellows.

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And he was in the United States and they did a number of debates. And this one was set up pretty quickly. I wanted to, again, since I'm not dropping the response to Abdullah, but since I'm traveling and the quality of the recording of Abdullah's debate, and I know

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Abdullah listens and especially due to Abdullah's accent, and Abdullah doesn't think he has one, I know.

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But again, I just didn't think playing that, given my setup here while I'm traveling, would work.

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I'd have to be repeating everything he said. So we'll go back to that when we have the opportunity. And I'm back in Phoenix.

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But you're still going to have to listen even with this. What I want to listen to is specifically the rebuttal periods, specifically from Sami Zaatari.

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Because I was a little taken aback, again, and it's because after a number of years, my assumption is that those who are seeking to really understand the position they're denying will more accurately express objections against it.

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And that's what I'm looking for from all Islamic apologists. And of course, that's really what you should see from Christian apologists interacting with Muslims as well.

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There should be growth on our part. There should be growth on my part. I mean, you know, I continue to listen to lectures and read the

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Hadith literature and study the Quran. And hopefully my understanding increases and the accuracy of the argumentation that I present increases as well.

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If it's not, I think there's somewhat of a problem there. But in the rebuttal period, there were things that came up from Sami's presentation that I found really problematic and I wanted to respond to.

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So in the last 10, 12 minutes or so here, we have some of Sami Zaatari's, at least unless I have clicked on something.

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One of the problems is when you're doing this while traveling, I only have a 15 inch screen on my MacBook Pro.

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And that means there's a bunch of stuff here. And sometimes when you're moving things around, especially with sound files, you make a mistake.

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But let's see if we can get to Sami's rebuttal period here and interact with him.

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Okay. I see what it did. All right. Let's go back here and try that.

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And it doesn't want to do that either. I'm just going to remove that and let's try it again.

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Okay. I got it here. Now, one of the arguments, I need to give you some background. One of the arguments that David Wood had made was that if Jesus is as the

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Quran presents him, then he was a failure. Why? Because in the first century, you don't find any of his followers being

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Muslims. The earliest evidence in the

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New Testament and then outside the New Testament is that the followers of Jesus believe in the crucifixion.

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They believe in the resurrection. They call Jesus Kurios, Lord. The very Greek term is used in the

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Greek Septuagint as the replacement for the name of Yahweh. The earliest enemies of the

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Christian faith described them as singing hymns to Christ as to a God and so on and so forth.

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And so if Jesus had meant to teach his disciples to be

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Muslims, he failed because that's not what they were. And so that's what

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David had said. And so here's Sammy's response to that. There's one standing on stage right now.

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So Sammy's response that is, well, I'm a pure monotheist.

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So Jesus didn't fail. But as David will point out, Sammy's not a

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Muslim because of Jesus. And David's point was, we need to look at the first century or at least the first century, say up to AD 130, because Jesus died somewhere between 30 and 33.

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So that first century, that's when he dies. And so where are the

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Muslims in that time period? Where are the true followers of Jesus who, to use Sammy's language, are pure monotheists?

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There's no evidence of their worshiping Jesus, referring to him as Kurios, praying in his name.

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We have all that in the New Testament. Where is the evidence for the real disciples of Jesus who evidently didn't write anything?

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They got taken over by the false disciples of Jesus over against the promise of the

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Quran, all that kind of stuff. Where are they? And if David doesn't tell the it wasn't until the third century that not the

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Trinity, that Jesus was officially declared as a God. Now, this is where I really wanted to provide some response to Sammy.

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I would really call upon all Muslim apologists to do some serious reading and serious study in orthodox, meaningful

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Christian church history. Just as we,

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I mean, David Wood, Sam Shamoon, Nabeel Qureshi, Samuel Greene, those of us who are engaging regularly with Islamic apologists, and there are others,

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I don't want to leave somebody out, but those are some of the people who probably over the past three years have done the most debates.

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Who do we read? When we study you, we read Ibn Ishaq. You have to read

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Ibn Ishaq. Almost all of your history of Muhammad is based upon Ibn Ishaq. We read

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Sahih al -Bukhari, Sahih al -Muslim. We read al -Tabari. We read your sources.

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We've obtained your sources and we read your sources. But when you guys talk about our history, again, you don't go read so much

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Philip Schaaf as you do liberals who are cherry picking history, or what's worse, in a situation like this, you just completely miss the boat.

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And Sammy, you've completely missed the boat here. Now you say, this is the first time Jesus officially declared to be a

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God. What do you mean by officially declared? There seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion on the part of my

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Muslim friends as to what the history of the church is about and what would an official declaration be.

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Could there have been an official declaration before the Council of Nicaea? It seems, later on in the debate, that Sammy admits there couldn't have been because he seems to recognize that this is at least viewed by some people as the first ecumenical council of church.

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But this was not the first council of the Christian church at all. In fact, councils had been called in Eastern Christianity to deal with the subject of modalism or civilianism 100 years before this.

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That had clearly affirmed the deity of Christ. The reality is that not only do the

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New Testament documents clearly affirm the deity of Christ, but the first documents written outside of the text of the

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New Testament likewise clearly affirm the deity of Christ. And we have quoted these ad nauseum over and over and over again, but I would just refer you just to the writings of Ignatius.

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Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, dies 107 -108, a martyr. Writes seven letters as he is going to Rome to be martyred.

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In those seven letters, at least, even taking the most liberal understanding of the texts, at least ten times refers to Jesus Christ as God.

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And not just as a God, but he speaks of him as of spirit and of flesh, generate, in -generate, first passable, then impassable,

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Jesus Christ our Lord. He has a high developed Christology, and this is within the first decade of the second century.

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So to even make an argument that, well, it was three centuries down the road, it was the

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Council of Nicaea before Jesus declared to God, is to completely demonstrate, is to demonstrate a complete misunderstanding, excuse me, of the historical record of the

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Christian faith itself. And I would just highly recommend to Mr.

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Zotteri and to, you know, again, I was reading some of these reviews, this debate, and people are like, oh,

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Paul Williams has just a masterful understanding of all this stuff. Well, if you do, then let's demonstrate it.

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Let's show that there's a recognition. Well, okay, yeah, it does seem that you have this extremely early testimony to the deity of Christ.

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Now you need to explain that. Where did it come from? How did that come out of monotheistic Judaism, which was thoroughly opposed to any kind of syncretism?

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We're not talking about Egyptian Judaism or anything like that.

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We're talking Tanniatic Judaism, Second Temple Jerusalem, that's the Second Temple Judaism in Jerusalem itself.

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That's what you've got to deal with, this belief in the deity of Christ coming out of.

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And they were absolute monotheists, just as all Christians are too.

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We are absolute monotheists. Our belief in the deity of Christ does not deny monotheism.

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It is a part of that monotheism. And of course, that takes us back to the accuracy of the Quran in its representation or misrepresentation of the doctrine of the

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Trinity. But while the Council of Nicaea did affirm that Jesus was homoousios, of the same substance, the

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Father, he's not just a demigod. He's not a creature. That is by far not the first time that that was taught in any way, shape or form.

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Now, the Aryans who believed that Jesus was heteroousios of a different substance, and I would refer people back to the two and a half, three hour program we did on Christology just about,

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I don't know, four or five months ago now, if you want to dive back into all of that. But even the

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Aryans' doctrine of Jesus would not be commensurate with the

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Muslim doctrine of Jesus. I think people understand that. According to the

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Quran, Jesus is a mere rasool. He does not pre -exist. He is not in any sense divine.

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He is not in any sense involved in the creation itself. But Arius would have affirmed all of those things.

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What his denial was, was of the eternal nature of the sun. He said there was a time when the sun was not.

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But Islam denies Jesus is a sun at all. And so that has to be kept in mind.

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Even when looking at Arianism, you're not looking at a vestige of an earlier

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Muslim understanding. It's just not there. In the third century. Now, why is that?

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Anyone who studies early Christianity, and this is an undisputed fact, all you have to do is just go into academics, will know that within the first 300 years, there were many

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Christians who believed that Jesus was not God. Now, again, when

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Sammy uses this kind of, and this is an undisputed fact, and he paints with absolute black and white here, and all you got to do is go into academia.

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We've all heard this before. This is Bart Ehrman, critical scholars, the people who agree with me.

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And that means if you disagree with me, you're not a critical scholar. That's the easy way to get around these things. But how do you define who a

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Christian is, Mr. Zafari? What's the definition you're using here?

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It's funny that when it comes to Islam, you don't have any problem coming up with a definition.

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And you don't have any problem with a very strict and very narrow definition that is very easily identifiable.

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So, as I have said in many debates with Muslims in the past, would you identify a person who denies that Muhammad was the final prophet?

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Would you identify such a person as a Muslim? And to a man, well, of course not.

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No, a person's not a Muslim. Well, a person who does not believe what the

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Bible teaches about Jesus, the Messiah, and the fact that he is Lord, and the fact that Thomas referred to him as my

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Lord and my God isn't a Christian. It can be something else.

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I mean, the Gnostics, for example. Do you really believe that those people were Christians?

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Even from a Quranic perspective, I don't think the author of the Quran would identify Gnostics as Christians, even though they talk about Jesus, because of what they believed about him.

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He didn't even have a physical body, according to the Gnostics. He did not have a physical body.

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He could walk through sand and not leave footprints because he did not have a physical body. Would you call a person who denies that Jesus has a physical body a

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Christian? Well, you would have to say no, because you've already said in your opening portion of the statement, a

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Muslim has to believe that Jesus was a prophet of God, that he was born of Mary. So you would deny they're

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Christians, and yet you're quoting from people who would call them Christian Gnostics. And so you go to that type of scholarship and say, ah, see, there are all these different kinds of Christians, but you're not, again, playing fairly.

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You're not using the same standard in looking at historical sources for Christianity as you do when you look at Islam.

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You're using unfair weights, which is something the Qur 'an tells you not to do, by the way.

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That's what a double standard is. And obviously, this is where it comes out in the argumentation here.

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And they didn't believe in a trinity. In fact, there's thousands of them today, millions of them. Many Christians, I just randomly talk to a

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Christian and I tell them, do you believe Jesus is God? You know, we're Muslim, you're Christian. Sometimes we talk about Jesus.

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I say, yeah, I love Jesus. I believe he's a special man, a prophet, but he's not God. And they tell me, yeah,

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I believe the same thing. There are millions of Christians today. So if this is a fair argument from a

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Muslim debate initiative speaker, and Sami Zatri is one of the main ones, then when

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I talk with ignorant Muslims, and I talk with a lot of them who do not know

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Tawhid properly, they don't know the Qur 'an properly, their imam is weak, how come

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I can't use them as a representation argument against Islam? Why wouldn't that be fair of me?

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I try not to. Even once I just mentioned in passing the fact that when

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I took one of my Golden Gate classes, and I think I'm about out of time here, but when I took one of my Golden Gate classes to the mosque, that the imam confirmed a particular interpretation of, specifically, was the third ayah of Surah 112.

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And Abdullah Kunda came back and said, well, you know, just an imam's opinion doesn't really matter. And it's not like I was trying to hold all

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Muslims that. I was pointing out that here, a man, modern Muslim, an imam, he understood this to be the same way.

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You can demonstrate this from early documents as well. I try to be accurate. So why would

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Sami, as a MDI speaker, be making this kind of argument? Well, I talked to a Christian once, and he didn't even understand the

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Trinity. Therefore, it must not be relevant. I don't think that's a proper form of argumentation at all.

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And I would encourage Sami to look elsewhere for that kind of argumentation. Well, we didn't get very far on that, but hopefully we'll be able to continue that, maybe even on Friday, depending on how things work out as we try to get together with you again on the program.

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Same time, which is four o 'clock here in Mountain Time, but six o 'clock,

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I believe, Eastern Time. We'll be trying to get together with you again on The Dividing Line on Friday. I will try to blog or at least let other people know to blog if that's not going to work out, but hopefully we will be able to do so.

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Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on The Dividing Line.

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59:33

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