Islamic Apologetics and Islamic Apologists

Well greetings, welcome to the dividing line. It's a Wednesday. We're doing the program a day early for the obvious reason that tomorrow and Friday is

ReformCon here in the Phoenix area. Pick the perfect week.

I actually saw my son post a something on Facebook from his weather app.

Let me look here. Oh man, it's back down. Break the jackets out.

Only talking 117 on Saturday. He had posted one that had 118.

But yeah, tomorrow 109, Friday 115,

Saturday 117, Sunday 115, 113, 108. Yeah Yeah, that's

Phoenix. That's June. Yep. Yep. Yep. Now it's dry as a bone, dry as a bone.

But of course Brother Callahan would call me right as I'm starting the dividing line, so I can't talk to him right now, but anyway

Nope, I already did. I moved it. It's right where it needs to be, right where it needs to be.

Anyway, so we've got ReformCon and I'm gonna be busy

Thursday and Friday, so we're sneaking it in early. Just saw something posted a little while ago that it looks like the

Yes, yes, stop, cease, desist. Thank you. Why are you still doing that?

You know, I thought when you hit the button, it's supposed to stop shaking, but it's just buzzing away there.

Finally stopped. And then I put it down, buzzed again, just sort of like I can do this all

I want. They have a mind of their own. They're a little bit scary, these voluntary digital devices that undoubtedly will become part of the

New World Order or something. I don't know. The live stream is going to be made available to everybody for free, so all

I saw was Jeff said, we've found a way to make this work, and I don't know what it is.

Didn't have a chance to look at it. So what? You know, I said that before, too. Yeah, yeah, it didn't really work out too well, but I would imagine he's sort of busy right now with all this stuff going on.

We've got folks flying in from all over the place and and hit the button twice to totally silence your iPhone.

Okay. All right. Well, I only hit it once. I've got all those apps that tells me who's calling and stuff, and I think it messes stuff up.

But anyway, so that's why we're doing the program early today. I want to get into some

Muslim apologetics today. I listened this morning. You know,

I'm gonna go ahead and do it this way, because I was gonna write something out, and writing takes a long time, unless you use emojis to translate the

King James Bible. Do you see that? Oh, yeah. Yep. There is a new

King James Emoji Bible. Yep. Yep.

I think I saw it this morning or yesterday morning. It started this morning. Al Mohler tweeted something about Dear Millennials.

No, no, no, no, no. No, not emojis. No, there are some.

No, no. So, you know, obviously, Dr. Mohler's, you know, in the same camp that I am.

I'm a terrible, horrible, nasty old man, and I'm out of touch, because I sort of sit back and go, you know, emojis, huh?

Most studies are now saying that Millennials, on average, do not read a single book per year.

And now you have an emoji Bible. There's this thing about growing up, you know, there's this scary, very scary, huh?

The selfie Bible? I don't know. Okay, I'm about to ban someone from Twitter.

Need a bit of powder on your head. Oh, yeah, like,

I'm gonna do that. Like, I don't care, Jonathan. Yes, he gets shiny, but he...

Anyway, anyhow, hey, we can just turn these things off. We did it for years and years, and if people want me to start wearing makeup and stuff like that, we can turn it off and do something else.

Trust me. I mean, I'm 99 .9 % serious about that. I don't have the foggiest interest in worrying about dressing up or putting on makeup or anything else like that.

It's just not gonna happen. Not in this life. Anyway, that distracted me from something else that was actually interesting.

And now I've lost it. It's gone. It's gone. Oh, oh. This morning

I listened to... I think I linked this. In fact,

I'm pretty sure I did. Either on Twitter or Facebook or both. I don't remember. Jonathan McClatchy has been doing this webinar stuff on Saturdays.

They had asked me to do something, I think, back in March or something. I wasn't able to do it. I've actually got an email from him that I need to respond to about maybe something in November.

It's just really hard for me to schedule stuff that far down the road. Anyway, this past Saturday, Michael Brown joined the webinar and did a wonderful presentation, about 45 -50 minutes, on basically the framework of a meaningful understanding of Messianic prophecy.

Prophecies of the Messiah and issues. He knows the Jewish rabbis and the traditions so well.

It's really, really interesting to listen to someone who really has a solid handle on that stuff.

If you've not seen his five -volume Answers to Jewish Objections to Jesus, then you need to get hold of it.

It'd be an awesome addition to your library. After that, see, this is the same webinar where a few weeks ago, maybe a month or so ago,

Yusuf Ismail was on talking about Muhammad in the Bible. Now, Muslims have to find

Muhammad in the Bible. They don't have a choice. The Quran says that Muhammad is in the

Torah and the Injil. It's in the Bible. And so, they've got to find him. Now, I don't know of a single, you know, it's funny, my

Muslim friends love to quote critical scholars. I don't know of a single critical scholar in the world that believes that Muhammad is in the

Bible. Now, that includes critical scholars that believe in such thing as prophecy. The more my

Muslim friends try to find Muhammad in the Bible, the more they utterly destroy any foundation they might try to build to create a consistent methodology of doing theology positively within Islam and then doing apologetics to Christianity.

Now, one of my chief concerns is that I can count on one hand with a few fingers left over the number of Muslim apologists that care about that.

That care that they self -consciously cannot produce a consistent theology and apologetic that does not use double standards.

I, they're just so few, just so few. And so Yusuf Ismail was on this webinar and there was this long, you know,

Yusuf didn't exactly go, interesting enough, he didn't go the Achaemenid direction, which

I sort of wondered given his relationship with you with IPCI exactly what that means.

But anyway, the big thing recently has been

Isaiah 42. In fact, I even, I even bought a little Kindle book recently and recorded it.

I'm so thankful, by the way, for those of you who do recordings off your Kindle like I've taught people how to do. I found a new dongle and I discovered that for like three and a half years

I would have these times where, where the the reading would become really staticky and almost, well at times impossible to understand, and then it would slowly recover.

Had nothing to do with my Kindle or my computer. It was the dongle. And I ordered a new one and sound quality, everything, 1000 % improved, no more of those problems.

Get a decent dongle. Don't get the the super cheap little ones. Get one with like some volume controls on it, something that has some substance to it.

It really helps. But I recorded this book from a Muslim scholar and it's all on how there's absolutely no question.

I can guarantee you Yusuf Ismail's read this book. No question that Isaiah 42 is about Muhammad and listening, listening to this stuff just, you know,

I'm just gonna be perfectly honest with everybody. It fundamentally convinces me of the bankruptcy of Islamic apologetics as a whole, that people would be willing to go this far.

At least, you know, I know one Muslim. I'm not gonna name him just because I don't want to get him in trouble, but I know one, one Muslim that says, hey, you know, the

Quran says it, so I believe it, but it doesn't tell me where. It doesn't tell me what text, so I'm not wedded to any one of them.

And I can just honestly say, I don't know which ones specifically refer.

Now, I've got a problem with that because it seems to me that this is such a central issue for Muhammad in the

Quran that we do know, there's really no question about the fact that we do know the state of the text in the days of Muhammad.

And so if Muhammad's idea was, hey, it's right here. It's right in your scriptures.

And here I am. Then we should be able to find that today. The fact of matter is we cannot. The abuse of John 14 and 16, and it is an abuse of John 14 and 16,

Deuteronomy 18, Isaiah 42, just really is a major, major problem for the

Muslim who really wants to be consistent in the defense of his faith.

Unfortunately, a lot of Muslims are not concerned about that. Anyway, so Michael gives his presentation and Sam Shamoon comes on and asks him some questions and some other people come on.

And then Yusuf Ismail comes on. Now, it was fascinating to listen to the exchange, the sort of mini debate between Yusuf Ismail and Michael Brown.

Now, obviously, I know Yusuf a whole lot better than Michael does, but it is interesting to listen to two men that you know pretty well.

Obviously, I know Michael far better than I know Yusuf. Engaging and, you know,

Michael and I have our different strengths and Messianic prophecy is in his wheelhouse.

I mean, I wouldn't go there. That's not my, that's, I read Michael's books for that. So this is right down his alley and it was, there were a couple times where you could just tell, you know,

Michael is a really nice guy and he keeps going, he keeps going, well,

I want to be respectful here. I don't want to express disdain here, but the questions you're asking are just inane.

He's really struggling to not say, Yusuf, you've got to be kidding me.

What, do you not hear what you're saying? Which all of us who've dealt with Yusuf Ismail want to say that repeatedly, over and over again.

I mean, remember when I played Daniel Wallace's rather strong, thorough refutation of Yusuf Ismail's comments from our debate in the mosque in Durban?

That has not impacted Yusuf Ismail. He's, he's still repeating the same stuff and still thinks he's right.

So the author of the book, I mean, I corrected him, then the author of the book he was quoting corrected him, but what do they know?

Yusuf doesn't even read Greek and yet, you know, so we've all had the really strong temptation at times to go, seriously?

I mean, wow. Anyway, at one point though,

I just started to lose it a little bit because Yusuf tends to just wander all over the landscape when it comes to topics and you refute him on one thing and he just moves off to something else like, like you never even mentioned it and next time you debate him, he'll bring up the exact same thing you refuted him on the last time, which is very troubling.

It really is when you think about it. Well, here came this standard

Muslim objection. Now we all need to be prepared for this. And I don't have it queued up right now.

I'm just, just going off what I listened to this morning. All of us need to be ready for this because it is a standard

Muslim objection and that is, well, you know, but Jesus said in Matthew chapter 10,

I'm only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Now, everyone listening to this program, how many times over the past 10 years in listening to Muslim after Muslim after Muslim have we just sat back and said, well, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait.

How can you honestly and fairly quote

Matthew chapter 10 and come to the conclusion that it was Matthew's intention to actually communicate to you the idea that from Matthew's viewpoint,

Jesus was only the Messiah for the Jews. Given that, not only are there all sorts of other indications in the same sections of Matthew about the gospel going to the

Gentiles, but the end of the book specifically has Jesus sending his disciples into all the world.

It is dishonest if you know that Matthew 28 is there.

Now, I understand that there are some Muslims that will, you know, they'll read something in that and go, and I heard there's some question about the originality of the end of Matthew.

Now, none of them ever check it out. There is no doubt about the originality of the end of Matthew.

There is, you know, I might as well just simply say, well, you know, there is there is doubt about the originality of Surah 112,

Surah Talaqlas. We don't know that Muhammad ever actually quoted that.

I mean, it's just really easy to make up this stuff and just go to the skeptical thing and say, well, we don't have a video of him actually giving it originally.

I mean, you can go into hyper skepticism all you want, but the fact the matter is there is not a shred of anything but pure theory based upon theological speculation about Matthew 28 not being a part of the original

Gospel of Matthew. Nothing. It is it's pure speculation intended to defend whatever heresy someone is doesn't like what's in Matthew 28 to talk about.

So, here's Yusuf. Now, Yusuf is not an ignorant

Muslim. I mean, most Christians are ignorant about Islam and most

Muslims are ignorant about Christianity. Okay, that's just a fact.

Our communities don't do real well in talking to one another and let me make a simple statement here that Yahya Snow undoubtedly will rip out of context and turn into a video because that's what he does.

That's all he does. Off the top of my head, I can't remember a time when

Yahya has actually made one of these videos that was actually dealing with the substance of what

I was saying. That's a commentary in of itself. But anyway, when

I listen to debates, I'm gonna play a section of a debate that took place in Melbourne. Great debate.

Appreciate the attitude of both the men that participate in it. But I'm making an observation here.

It seems to me that your best

Christian debaters show significantly more concern about having in -depth and accurate knowledge of Islam than your best

Muslim debaters show of having an accurate and in -depth knowledge of Christianity.

I stand by that as an observation and I think it's absolutely true.

It's absolutely true. I think we'll see that, like I said, in this debate here in a moment.

Anyway, Yusuf Ismail is not an ignorant Muslim. He's not your standard

Muslim. He engages in Dawah. This is what he does. He reads lots and lots of books.

He communicates with Shabir Ali and they share a lot of stuff together and all the rest of this kind of stuff. So how many times has

Yusuf Ismail been corrected in this abusive misrepresentation of the

New Testament and specifically the Gospel of Matthew? Over and over and over again.

So how on earth can you keep repeating the same thing over and over again?

And when Michael heard it, see, Michael doesn't have that background with Yusuf. When Michael heard it, he's like,

I'm pretty shocked you'd say something like that. Because every

Muslim needs to understand the chronological order in which things are found in the Quran because of abrogation and stuff like that.

So why wouldn't you notice that Matthew 10 is about one particular period of time during the ministry of Jesus, but it's not the entirety of the ministry of Jesus.

And after that time period, in light of events in the ministry of Christ, Jesus sends his disciples to all the nations.

So Michael goes, inconsistency, double standard, hypocrisy.

And he's right. He's smack -dab right. And we have pointed this out over and over and over and over and over again.

To the Muslim who doesn't engage with Christians, we simply have to be ready to point it out again and be patient in the process because we cannot know whether they have or have not ever truly had knowledge given to them of this issue, but that's not the case with Yusuf Ismael.

He well knows. He well knows that that is an abuse of the text and he just keeps doing it over and over again.

What do you do with someone who will not be corrected? No matter how clear the refutation, no matter how overwhelming the documentation, just keep saying it again and again and again and again.

What do you do? And when Michael dismantled his argument, and he did,

I mean, it was a thorough, logical, complete refutation.

There was no recovering from it. I'm sitting there going, I wonder what the response is gonna be.

How's Yusuf gonna bail himself out of this one? It was a standard

Ismael move. Go back to a different topic. Go back to Isaiah 42. Just completely abandon any defense of what you just said.

Just let it slide. And here's the problem. He'll do it again.

Somebody else, somebody he thinks he can get away with it. He'll go back to Matthew chapter 10. He'll repeat it again.

Despite the fact that multiple people with hundreds of times more knowledge of the

New Testament than he has have thoroughly refuted him on the subject, he'll keep repeating it.

What do you do in a situation like that? What do you do in a situation like that? So I was gonna write something up on it and say

I just... So very frustrating to see this kind of thing.

But decide, you know what, let's just let's just throw it out there because I'm gonna be looking at this debate and you know, when

I look at... I've not met this particular Muslim that is engaging in this debate and he himself says he's not really big on debates and doesn't like the terminology and doesn't want to offend anybody.

I appreciate all of that. But still my hope is that even as I address some of the common misunderstandings that he repeats, my hope is he would be the type of person who would listen and consider and go, you know what,

I won't do that again in the future. And I mentioned that there was a Muslim apologist talked to me in London and said, you know, half of the arguments

I used to use against Christians, I can't use anymore because of you. Great! That's someone who's listening. Sadly, not everybody listens.

Not everybody listens. And Yusuf Ismail once again gave us evidence in the webinar.

Go ahead and listen. And evidently, I guess things got pretty nasty in the chat in the side window.

Even Michael stopped and made comment about, come on, this is getting very insulting. And so I would almost like to read it if I could find it.

I'm not sure if anybody saved it or if it's even possible to save those things. I'm not sure how the webinar works. I'm not sure what software they're using, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But a couple of times Michael actually did respond to Yusuf who was texting things.

And so I'm sure he was involved in what was going on. Whatever the the encounter going on was. That'd be extremely distracting.

I mean, I've sort of gotten used to sort of glancing over, seeing Twitter, seeing the channel, stuff like that.

But I don't watch the YouTube chat that goes on with the YouTube channel.

I don't, I don't... Yeah, yeah, you do that. Don't find it interesting.

Anyway, well, I still don't even have it up. I'm not even sure that would work overly well on this side. Too many, too many things to be looking at.

If you think, if you think I'm distracted now, look what happened there. Okay, do you have, you have the video here?

We're just gonna sort of hop, skip around a little bit and make some comments. But like I said on,

I said on Facebook or Twitter, one of the two, I said I, this was an excellent presentation by the

Christian side, the professor from Melbourne, who I do not know and have not met.

And maybe someday I will, because he teaches Arabic. He's a, he's an obviously very sharp guy. But what we need to recognize is he's responding to what would probably be the majority view of Muslims, and that is the

Quran has never been changed. That it is word for word identical. Now Yusuf Ismail has admitted that's not the case.

Adnan Rashid had to admit that that was not the case in our debate in, in London. And so, and he did again,

I was thinking about the first debate in London, and then he did again a few weeks ago. Yeah, you know, that doesn't change the meaning, you know, there's just a few little things like here that there.

Okay, okay. So the thesis was, has the

Quran been changed? We have to, we

Christians have to be extremely careful how we answer that question.

If we, I realize the other side, 99 % of the time is not going to care whether we're being accurate or not.

You should do this because it is relevant to your God, it is relevant to your service to Christ, it is relevant to being consistent and seeking to be his servant.

You shouldn't do it because of numbers, or how often you get treated in the same way, or things like that.

If you fall into that, that trap, you're going to be, you're going to be in trouble. I realize that what

I'm saying is going to put you at a disadvantage in many conversations.

And there are people who would say, Nat, just don't even bother. Just go ahead and go for it.

Use a double standard. I can't tell you to do that. It's not an option for a Christian. It just isn't an option.

But the reality is that when we say, has the Quran been changed? If we ask the question, has the

New Testament been changed, we have to define our terms. Are there textual variants in the manuscripts of both the

New Testament and the Quran? Of course, there are in every handwritten document ever produced by mankind.

Especially any document that has been widely copied by hand over a period, especially of literally centuries.

No document ever made does not have those variations. Now, are there

Christians that are ignorant of that? Of course, there are. Are there Muslims that are ignorant? More evidently than Christians.

And at the beginning here, you're going to see some claims from Muslims, modern

Muslims, that the only parallel I can come up with for these claims are the King James only guys.

They are that disconnected from the reality of the history of the text of the Quran. So I would have to make it the lower level of Islamic dawah is what is being addressed here, which unfortunately represents the majority viewpoint of the

Muslim people. Which would mean that there's a whole lot of education needs to go on to have a proper and accurate understanding of these facts, these issues.

Jump in here. I keep talking about it, and we're halfway through the program. Quran and its transmission.

And let's be clear about what the focus of this is. It's the claim that the words that come from the lips of Muhammad from 610 to 632

AD are exactly identical with the words that is found in the

Qurans that we have today. What we're not talking about is English translations of the

Quran. There's about 106 of those, but we're only focusing on the Arabic. So you're going to learn some.

Well, that's interesting. 106 English translations of the

Quran. How many times do you have Muslims who will say, well, you got the

NIV and you've got the numeric standard. Which one's the right one? You have 106 English translations of the

Quran. Which one's the right one? Well, the Quran only exists in Arabic. Okay, then we need to look at the English and at the

Greek and Hebrew, right? Got to have the same standards, got to have the same arguments, so on and so forth.

But 106, that's interesting. Tonight from me, one of my other jobs is

I teach Arabic. Many Muslims make incredible claims about the

Quran. This is one from the Turkish billionaire Fethullah Gulen. He says, the Quran's text is entirely reliable.

It's not been altered, edited, or tampered with since it was revealed. All Muslims know only one

Quran perfectly preserved in all its original words. American writer

Suzanne Hanif says, the Holy Quran is the only revealed scripture in the history of mankind that has been preserved from the present to the present time in its exact original form.

Jamaluddin Zarabozo says, you can travel to any part of the world and pick up a copy of the Quran and you'll find it the same throughout the world.

Abdullah Yusuf Ali, a famous translator of the Quran, says, the Arabic text we have today...

Now, this is interesting because, of course, Yusuf Ali, his translation is the most popular

English translation, not because it has won that position by strength of translation or text or things like that, but primarily because it's been promoted by the

Saudi government. So you get enough money behind something. That's sort of how it works.

But I'm pretty certain that I have read notes from Yusuf Ali that discuss textual variance.

So this is strange to me. But, you know, here's the quote. Identical to the text that was revealed to the

Prophet, not even a single letter has yielded to corruption.

This book that comes out of Abu Dhabi and available in bookshops around Australia says the

Quran has remained unchanged even to a dot has not changed. No variation of the text can be found.

Now, he's giving a lot of examples here. And I have encountered many a

Muslim that held that this is what they believed. Obviously, it's not because they had researched it themselves, but this is what they had been taught.

This is what they had read. They're trusting these sources. And they really believe that the

Quran as it exists today, not even a... And the problem is there were no dots originally.

So even to a dot, the dots were inserted a century later.

The diacriticals are a later addition to the text. So that doesn't even make any sense.

But there are variations in the razm in the actual consonantal text in the

Quran. There isn't a question about this. We have the manuscripts. We don't have the wealth of textual critical material that we have for the

New Testament for the Quran by any stretch of the imagination. But we have sufficient manuscripts to demonstrate the variations that existed.

And the early Tafsir literature, the early commentary literature on the Quran is filled with references to textual variants.

Well, filled with. They weren't embarrassed to talk about it. It was a known fact and it wasn't considered to be a huge admission or something to talk about these things.

And so it's not even a questionable thing. I can put the thing. He's going to do the same thing, but put the stuff up on the screen.

Here it is. Here's where something's been written in and here's where something's been taken out and here's where this has been edited here.

And it happened in written documents. It doesn't mean that we can't come up with the original any longer, but it does mean that it will require study and diligence and fairness and some level of objectivity to utilize the materials that we do have to be able to come up with the original text.

And if if you believe stuff like this, you're not going to be really investing in the project of determining the original text because you figure that what you've got right now is good enough.

That's why King James onlyists are not contributing to CSNTM or to textual critical projects dealing with the restoration of the original text in the

New Testament. The King James is good enough for me. And if, well, the Uthmanic recension is good enough for me, is your attitude as a

Muslim, well, there you go. Which is why a large portion of the push for a critical edition of the

Quran doesn't come from the Islamic world. It comes outside the Islamic world. And the reason for that is because this kind of a perspective is the majority view.

It's, which means the majority of Muslims who have thought about this subject are deceived on the history of their own text.

Now, are there Christians who are completely ignorant about the history of their text too? Yep, sure are. But the reality is if you go to a

Christian bookstore, unless you're going to Peter Ruckman's bookstore or Gail Reblinger's bookstore, if you're going to a real

Christian bookstore and you buy five books on the subject of history of the Bible, they're all going to tell you the same thing. They're all going to tell you there are variations between those manuscripts.

Now, how clearly they're going to express that and explain that depends on the book you get, depends on the knowledge of the author.

But the reality is, well, it's real simple. Why do I keep forgetting to bring an

Arabic copy of the Quran here? I have one sitting in another room, but so we'll look at the study.

Oh, I can't do that because the study Quran doesn't have it. Let's grab Yusuf Ali here.

Oh, actually, this is Ahmed Ali. Well, anyway, the point is you've got the Arabic text along the side.

What you're not going to find down at the bottom of the page are any footnotes. Unlike if I grab a

New American Standard or I grab a ESV, there are going to be footnotes, there are going to be side column notes, there are text notes that will not only say or and give an alternate translation, but some manuscripts say this, some manuscripts say that, and the different translations have more notes than others.

The New King James has a lot of notes. But the reality is that Christians are up front about this and we put right into our

Bibles. Here's where variants are. Is that an exhaustive list? No, it's not an exhaustive list.

I'm, you know, working on this project. Everybody knows now I'm working on this textual critical project, will be for years, and just in preparatory stuff.

I mean, it's, you know, probably the next year's going to be almost all preparatory, just huge amounts of reading and stuff like that.

But one of the things is also reading the primary manuscript I'm going to be focusing upon, becoming very intimately familiar with it.

And I ran across something. I was chatting with, we've got some real geeks in our chat channel. We really do.

We got one guy, Garrett, who took textual critical stuff from Wallace.

And then we've got Alan Kirshner in there, Deo Valente, who's doing his PhD under one of the leading scholars in the field.

And so I've got some guys in there that I can bounce stuff off of, and both of them have been very helpful in resources and bibliographies and all sorts of stuff like that.

So we were chatting about something that I had just happened to run into while working with the text of the papyri.

And that is that P45, my text, contains, we have

Acts 13, 48 in P45. And the key disputed term in Acts 13, 48, tetagmenoi,

P45 doesn't contain it. Not just in the sense that because it's fragmentary, it's in the missing part.

No. The author of P45 did not include tetagmenoi. Now, will you find that in the side column of your

ESV? No. In fact, you won't find that in the

Nesjalland 28th edition or the UBS 5th. None of them noted that. You can look it up in in accordance, and you can read the

P45 module, and it's not there. But I haven't yet to find,

I didn't check CNTTS. I bet CNTTS has it, but I didn't pull it up to look at it.

But it there, can an

English translation provide an exhaustive textual database to you? No, it would be four volumes long, and or if it was one volume, it'd be, you know, huge.

But the information's there, and if the average Christian is just reading the book, they're going to go, oh, this is interesting.

There seems to be some variations here. They're going to see that. You don't see that with the Quran. You're not aware of these things.

And so it does seem to me that your average Christian has access to more knowledge about the background of his text than the average

Muslim does. And that's why this stuff can get as far as it as it goes.

Muhammad Ali says, no copy differing even in a diacritical point is met with a manuscript with the slightest variation in text is unknown.

And finally, Al -Hajjah Jijola decided to borrow from Jesus' words. He says, the

Quran is fully preserved and not a jot or tittle has been changed or left out. So these are the kinds of typical claims that you'll often find people making, but there's one thing wrong with them.

They're not true. If you go to this bookshop in Jordan, which I've been to in Amman, you'll be able to see 24 different versions of the

Arabic Quran. I'll put the English terms up there. You can order them online and they'll be here within a couple of days.

Or you could go to Lebanon. And again, there are 13 different Arabic versions.

Is there something weird about a website called easyquranstore .com? I don't know.

It's just you know, easybiblestore .com. I don't know. I guess it's all right.

It's just, I don't know, it just struck me as rather strange. That's what they call it,

Joel Osteen's place. Yeah, I don't think Joel has any. Easy Bible. Yeah, I don't think they have any Qurans there yet.

Give them time. The Quran that you can buy. These are not English translations. These are Arabic versions.

But if you want to save yourself your airfare, you can just come to my table and have a look at my little collection of 17 versions that I've collected.

As I've travelled and lived in Muslim countries, gone to Islamic bookshops and said, what versions of the

Quran do you have? So how did so many Arabic versions arise?

Where did that come from? Well, they didn't come from Muhammad. We have to go back to his time.

Muhammad never wrote a Quran and he never sanctioned a full written version of the

Quran. There's two reasons for this. Firstly, he couldn't read or write. He was illiterate and secondly, he could have received a revelation right up until the moment that he died.

So the Quran, in effect, couldn't be completed until he breathed his last breath.

And as a result, his followers had to wait until he died in 632 to compile a full

Quran. There were some verses written on stones and leaves and camel bones. There's one there,

Surah Al -Fatihah. And many people memorized some of these verses. But after his death, many of his followers who'd memorized parts of the

Quran or the whole of the Quran, they were called Hufadh, were killed in a battle in Yamana in December 632 and there was a fear that the

Quran might be lost. And so the Caliph, Muhammad's successor Abu Bakr, ordered that a

Quran be written down in full and he got Zayd bin Thabit to go around and collect the parts that he could find, get them from people and write them on a scroll.

And this copy was given to Hafsa, to one of Muhammad's wives. But he wasn't the only person who was collecting copies of the

Quran. In the Hadith, Sahih al -Bukhari says the Quran was collected in the lifetime of the

Prophet by four men and it names him Ubay ibn Ka 'b, Abu al -Darda, sorry,

Mu 'adh bin Jabal, Abu Zayd and Zayd bin Thabit. And Muhammad had told his followers, there are four men that you should learn the

Quran from and he named them Abdullah ibn Masud, Salih, Mu 'adh and Ubay bin

Ka 'b. Now, we need to note that because, as he's going to note here in a few moments, the primary source of information concerning variants in the consonantal text, not in vowel pointing.

Vowel pointing is highly interpretational, as he's going to point out here in a moment. But, the primary source from my reading, in the early

Tafsir literature, of variants from the Uthmanic official version come from a man that is mentioned right there in that second hadith,

Abdullah ibn Masud. And his readings constitute the majority of the variants that are noted by the early

Tafsir literature. Ubay ibn Ka 'b, another very important one as well.

So, very important to keep these things in mind. When we're talking about a controlled text and we're talking about a text that is controlled by governmental authority, you don't have a freely distributed text here.

Then, anyone who could control the text at a period of time, very important.

Very, very important. One of the fundamental differences in how the New Testament and the Qur 'an were transmitted, free transmission versus controlled transmission.

Been over this before, but just just mentioning it again. There's also some of the same people who were collecting the

Qur 'an in the lifetime of the Prophet. Now, you see, see, I mentioned something.

I just happened now to look down at the channel and Garrett the

Geek confirmed for me that CNTTS lists

Tetegmenoi in brackets in p45. So, there you go. I've got

CNTTS and I just, like I said, just didn't bring it up. That would be, as far as I know, that would be the only currently digitized textual resource that would probably contain that information because it's not in NA28.

I'm 99 % certain that's not in, oh, sorry about that. Get that out of the way.

If you don't mind, I'm just gonna look real quick here because now that I mentioned it, X1348, New Testament textual,

I wish that link would work better than it does. X1348. Yeah, UBS 5, which does have a variant at X1348, does not include that information at all, which

I would expect. So, yeah, if you didn't, if you weren't looking at, let's see, why don't, let's see here,

CNTTS apparatus. There it is. And X1348.

Yeah, I'm not, I'm sorry, I'm not giving it to you. It's that the text is so small that that you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to see it, honestly.

But I'm just looking for Tetegmenoi. To do, why doesn't, why am

I not seeing P45 here? To do, this is,

I'm doing some nice musical interludes here. Huh. I'll have to look that, look that up a little bit more.

But CNTTS would be the primary source for that, for those of you who are looking at early

Christmas list for your wives or something like that, to put on your Christmas list. The CNTTS apparatus or something along those lines.

Let's get back to the, to our thing here, we're running out of time. But there was a problem. It was a big problem that they did not agree on what the

Quran should be. Abdallah ibn Mas 'ud would not accept the final two surahs or chapters of the

Quran. And he wouldn't accept al -Fatiha, the first chapter. He said that was just a prayer that Muhammad prayed.

He said do not mix up with the Quran that which is not in the Quran. These two surahs are not included in the

Quran. So he, being one of the people that Muhammad had said learn the Quran from this man, had a version which only had 111 surahs, whereas the current

Quran has 114 surahs. One of the other men, or two of the other men,

Abu Musa, one of the four recommended by Muhammad, included two extra surahs that are not in today's

Quran. We still have copies of these and if you read them, they read very much like Quranic chapters.

They were called surah al -Khala and surah al -Hafth, also known as surah al -Qanud.

So that made his Quran had 116 chapters or surahs. Another man,

Ibn Ka 'b, combined two of the chapters together, making 115 chapters.

And so within 20 years of Muhammad's death, four major collections of the

Quran were being accepted in different cities. And you can see them. These again, some of the men that Muhammad said learn the

Quran from these men. And they had differing numbers of chapters, things that they accepted, things that they included, things that they left out.

And there were about another 12 other versions that were also floating around at this time.

As Islam continued to spread throughout the world, this then became a problem.

As Muslim troops were gathering on the border of Armenia to invade it, Muslim troops came from all over the parts of the

Muslim world, and they were in a mosque in near Armenia and reciting different versions.

And they said those who follow Abdullah Ibn Masood's version go there.

Those who follow Abu Musa go there. And they were reciting the same chapters, but they were reciting different things.

And a bit of a dispute rose up about which one was the correct version. And so this man named

Hudhaifa went and complained to the caliph, Uthman, he said, we need to have only one version.

And so Uthman ordered a committee of four men, include one of them being Zayd bin Thabit, to compile an authorised

Quran. And he said, gather up all the other bits that you can find and burn them. Not all of the copies were destroyed.

Some of the people hid theirs, they were told to hide it so they couldn't be destroyed because they believed they were authentic.

People rewrote the verses after the first copies came out. And so multiple copies continued to circulate.

Unfortunately, we don't have any original copy of the Quran from this period. German scholar and Muslim convert

Professor Anne -Marie Schimmel says that no original Quranic text has survived.

And now I did want to mention this. How many times have

I heard Muslim apologists quote a Christian source that says we do not have the original manuscripts of the

Bible, which, of course, we don't. I mean, it's not even a... It's a given.

And yet it's quoted in a context. So it's given a spin that's supposed to mean something to us.

But here you have Muslim scholars saying no original

Quranic text has survived. Now, I do know some Muslims who actually do feel that we have some

Muthmanic manuscripts. I doubt that's the case, but it wouldn't be one of those specific ones that were produced at a particular time period.

But here you have, you know, I wonder if the Muslims who quote Christians saying we don't have the

Quranic world. But we have copies of early manuscripts, not the originals, but some copies.

Very early, early manuscripts. And you can go and travel around and see these in Istanbul.

There's a couple there. The Cairo one in Sana 'a, big collection. I'll talk about that later.

Istanbul and Tashkent have a version there. The National Library in France has some.

Birmingham has some. They're scattered around. These are probably the ten most ancient ones. But they're not the same.

You can look at those. In fact, we have facsimiles of these early collections here.

My student Dennis can show you those. And you can compare them and see some of the difference that exists right from the earliest days.

Some of those problems you find words being inserted into the text. This is one copy from the

French National Library. And you can see there the brown writing. But in the midst of it is a little black word called bimithlihi, which is similarly.

That wasn't in the original, but at a later stage someone put that in so it would conform with the standard text that's accepted today.

Abdallah ibn Masud's and Ubaid bin Khab's versions did not have that word in there.

It was added in later on. See that there. In the top copy manuscript, you can see, again, a phrase that's been added in there that says

Allah yakhliku ma yashaa. So God creates what he wills.

Again, that wasn't in the early text, but it was added in later on. So these are some of the earliest ones that we have.

Now, by the way, that is a theologically significant variant. That's not just, it's all the same stuff, it doesn't really matter.

You know, you're just moving some words around, but it all has the same meaning. That's a theologically significant variant.

And the question becomes, again, when you have free transmission of a text, we understand where variants come from and you can correct them because of the multifacality of the number of manuscripts.

You've got controlled manuscripts. Then the question becomes much more, why is there a change here?

Because the variants are being controlled. It's not just a scribe went, oops, but controlled texts mean edited texts or at least raise a much greater probability or possibility of edited texts.

And that's one of the major, major issues we must keep in mind. I wasn't going to play all this stuff.

I was going to actually I wanted to get to the Muslims comments and respond to some of the things he said. Well, we'll keep it there.

I thought this was just such a well done presentation. Now, again, if if the

Muslim had gotten up and said, hey, you know what? We've known all about these things for a long, long time. And my

Muslim brothers and sisters need to understand that our text has a history. Then it would have been a completely different debate.

And but unfortunately, that's normally not what you end up hearing and experiencing.

In the conversation that takes place between Muslims and Christians, that's where it needs to be. There there needs to be an acknowledgment of the part of Muslims.

This it's this way because of this. It's this way because our text has a history.

But unfortunately, a lot of times the Muslim Christian dialogue doesn't doesn't get exactly where it needs to go there.

So hopefully you found some of that useful. Tomorrow, my presentation at Reform Con will be on hyper

Calvinism on Friday, doing a breakout session, and that will be on that OPC document that I mentioned from 19, what was it, 48?

I think it was 1948, 49, somewhere around there. And I think. I think the

Q &A with John Sampson, I think, is tomorrow as well, I think.

You can look it up and it'll be live streamed, and so hopefully you'll find it to be

Scott Oliphant is speaking on the subject of revelation, which should be really fascinating. So at the very least, there should probably be some very interesting folks in attendance as well.

So well worth your time to to check it out. Lord willing, we'll be back next week on our regular schedule on Tuesday, whatever the regular schedule is.

Normally it's Tuesday, Thursday, but we'll see how that works out. Thanks for listening, watching, whatever it is you did.