Is the New Testament a Reliable Record of Jesus' Teachings? White vs Ismail

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Very welcome to all of you. You have to excuse my English. I'm a real Afrikaner and a real puck. In my five years here, I have learned to speak a good Afrikaner English. But welcome to tonight's debate and I hope you enjoy it a lot.

If you have any questions, you can post it on Facebook, on Raju Kristi's Facebook page or you can tweet it on Raju Kristi's Twitter page. Okay, and then I'm going to hand over to Professor Flip. He's going to be the moderator for the evening and he's going to handle the rest of the things.

Have a good evening. From my side also, a hearty welcome to everybody. Specifically to our two speakers tonight, you will see that they are extremely competent and sharp people. You will have to be wide awake that you can really keep up with them.

Let me first say a word of hearty welcome to Yusuf Ismail. He's an attorney from Durban and more specifically, he's an Islamic scholar, a public speaker, and a debater on religion and contemporary society.

Having debated many prominent apologists and philosophers, he has debated arguably the best Christian philosopher of the century, William Lane Craig, Mike Lycona, Jay Smith, John Gilchrist, and many others on a variety and a range of topics and issues covering the relevancy of religion in the 21st century, the authenticity of scriptures, and the issue of peace and violence in world religions.

I had the privilege to... This is the second time I have to moderate a debate where he is a speaker. I can assure you he's got a very sharp mind. And when I listened to him the first time, I thought, wow, I wish the students, the theology students, would know such a lot of theological resources, but also know how to answer the questions that are raised by these theologians he is quoting.

Let's give a hand to Mr. Yusuf Ismail. Then we are greatly privileged to have Dr. James White with us. He's the director of the Alpha and Omega Ministries, that is a presuppositional apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.

He received his BA from Grand Canyon College, his Master's from Fuller Theological Seminary, and then he also received a THM, a THD, and a DEMUN degree from Columbia Evangelical Seminary. He has served as a professor of Greek, of Hebrew, of systematic theology, and various apologetic topics at the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary Extension Campus in Arizona and the Columbia Evangelical Seminary.

He's also a critical consultant for the Lockman Foundation, and he has written over 24 books. Dr. White has participated in over 130 public moderated debates covering topics such as Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, the King James Only Movement, Jehovah's Witnesses, and atheism.

His debate opponents have included scholars such as Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, and Marcus Borg, and popularizers such as Dan Barker and John Selby Spong. Dr. White has also been an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona, since 1998.

He's married to Kelly, and they have two children, a son called Joshua and a daughter called Summer. He's got one grandchild. Now, what we will be doing tonight is, Dr. White will be the first speaker on the question, is the New Testament a reliable record of Jesus' teachings?

And he will have 30 minutes, and then after him, Yosef Ismail will also have 30 minutes. Then I will give them each 10 minutes for rebuttals, and then Yosef Ismail will speak first of all on, is the Quran reliable?

Is it a reliable record of Muhammad's teachings? He will then again have 30 minutes. Dr. James White will have 30 minutes to respond on that, and then there will be 10 minutes, 10 minutes rebuttals again.

And then, if we can fit it in, we will have a few minutes for Q &A, questions and answers, but I will give them each five minutes for concluding remarks. The goal of this discussion is to learn what are Muslim viewpoints of the Christian's understanding of the Bible, and vice versa, what are Christian's viewpoints of the Quran.

How reliable are these documents? The speakers will not be abrasive. They will respect each other, and if not, I will stop them. And we plead with the audience to be the same. Dr. White, you are first.

The Free Transmission of the New Testament and the Manuscript Tradition

All right, it is an honor to be with you here this evening. We'll be discussing some things that the Muslims in the audience have probably never heard of before, and the Christians in the audience have probably never heard of before.

And so, I hope you will give equal attention to both sides, no matter what side you might favor right now. I hope you will, if you're on my side, I hope you will listen very carefully to what Yosef Ismail has to say, and vice versa as well.

I hope you'll listen to what I have to say, even if you come here this evening as a Muslim. Now, real issue. I really want us to understand what the real issue tonight is. Few today understand the history of ancient documents.

Most people sitting here probably think that the Bible you have in your hands, or the Quran you have in your hands, just arrived in the form that it was. The Bible's always had a leather cover, it's always had gold pages, and it's always had a thumb index.

That's actually not the case. The process of transmission in antiquity is vastly different than it is today. Today, we can just hit print, and out comes something from our computer. That is a very, very modern thing, I assure you.

Hand copying was the only way to produce documents for distribution until relatively recent times. Every document produced prior to printing, and actually even after printing, has been corrupted, quote, unquote, in its transmission.

I need to define the term corruption. Corruption is any variation or alteration in the text, no matter how minor it might be. Some of you have heard about the adulterer's Bible. It was one of the early printings, the King James Version, and as they set the type for the Ten Commandments, they forgot the word not, and thou shalt not commit adultery.

And many hundreds of copies were printed before someone noticed the problem, so it became known as the adulterer's Bible. So, even in the invention of printing, you still have corruption of the text due to the fact that, well, we human beings, we do some rather intriguing and interesting things.

Now, there are over 5 ,700 catalogued Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, comprising ancient papyri containing only a few lines of text, all the way to complete manuscripts from as late as the 15th or even 16th centuries, because some people thought that, just like the iPad, printing really wasn't going to catch on.

Well, they were wrong as well. And so, people continued to do hand-copying even well after the invention of printing because printing presses were just not all that prevalent for a lengthy period of time.

Now, including ancient translations, such as those into Latin or Coptic or Sahitic or the languages such as that, more than 24 ,000 manuscripts of the New Testament are known. Now, I'm speaking only of the New Testament this evening.

We would not even have time in 30 minutes to even begin touching the subject of the Old Testament. We're looking primarily at the New Testament this evening. Now, no ancient work comes even close to the New Testament with reference to the number of witnesses and the number of early witnesses.

Now, I'm not including the Quran when I speak of ancient works. The Quran is not a work of antiquity. It's a work of the medieval period. And so, it's not really in the comparison at this particular point in time, though I will probably later on make some comparisons between the two that I think are extremely educational.

Now, here is a graphic that gives you an idea. On the graphic, you will see a center point. And then, radiating out from the center point are various yellow circles. For example, the largest yellow circle on this side, right here, represents the works of Homer.

The size of the circle indicates how many manuscripts we have. And the distance from the center tells us how much time has elapsed between when a work was written and the first manuscripts we have of that particular work.

And so, in this case, Homer is the largest with 643 manuscripts. And there's about 500 years between when Homer was written and the first manuscripts we have of that particular work. The next one is Sophocles, out toward the outside a little bit.

We have 193 manuscripts, but there's 1 ,400 years between when it was originally written and the first manuscript copies we have. Now, the big yellow sun on the left is not the sun at all. That's the New Testament.

That is the number of manuscripts we have, including translations into other languages, of the New Testament. And you'll notice it gets very, very close to the original source. That is because it is by far the earliest attested of any work of antiquity in our possession today.

That means we have manuscripts of at least portions of the New Testament that date to within— well, some would argue we have a couple scraps that go into the first century, and we have a number that go into the second century as well, making it very early attested.

And, of course, the sheer number of these manuscripts really presents one of the problems for scholars who work in this area because we have so much information. In comparison to someone—if someone here is a—do we have any scholars of Sophocles here?

You all would probably love to have the problems that we have in regards to the number of manuscripts we have of the New Testament. That is an interesting, I think, comparison. Now, I want you to think with me about something.

The more witnesses that one has, the more manuscripts that one has, the more variants one will have. If you only have one witness, how many textual variants can you have? None, because there's nothing else to compare it to.

Once you have two manuscripts, then there's going to be a difference between the two. Once you have ten, then you're going to have the differences between the ten, etc., etc. So, if you only have one witness, you'll have no textual variants, but you likewise will have little basis upon which to believe you have the original text.

You'd have to trust. If you only had one version, you only had one example, you'd have to trust that whoever produced that one got it exactly right. Most of us can intuitively recognize it would be far better to have ten copies than to have one copy.

But what does that introduce? It introduces textual variation between them, and we have to compare them one to another. The more witnesses you have, the confidence you have that you possess the original text increases.

It increases, and that's a very important thing to remember this evening. Now, taking the most liberal estimate, we have about 400 ,000 variants in the manuscript tradition in the New Testament. That sounds like a huge number, until you start thinking about it.

About 99 of those variations cannot be translated out of Greek. That is, they do not impact the meaning of the text. For example, there is, if you've ever taught Greek or learned Greek, there's something called a movable new.

And I remember a fellow that took Greek with me, and he just could not get the concept of the movable new. It was like saying an apple versus a apple. You're supposed to say an apple, some of us skip over that, but Greek had the same kind of concept in it.

And many of the scribes didn't understand it either. Now, you can't, it has no meaning, it has no impact upon the meaning of the text whatsoever, but a lot of scribes made an error, and as long as one scribe made an error, that's one of those 400 ,000 variants that we talk about in the manuscript tradition.

Of the remaining variants, the vast majority are simple errors of sight or hearing, depending on how the manuscript was produced. That is, was it a person copying another manuscript, or a person in a scriptorium who is listening as a manuscript is being read to them, and taking it down via dictation.

Now, one of the very particularly common errors that we find in the manuscript tradition is homoi teleuton, which means similar endings. How many times, you students, you have been working on a, you've been diligently working, because your professors are here, diligently working on a term paper, and trying to get it done early, and you're checking your sources, and you're copying from a source, and you're typing it into your computer, and you type the word education, and it ends with T-I-O-N.

Now, T-I-O-N is a common ending in our language. And so you type T-I-O-N, and your eyes go back to the book that you're copying, and you see T-I-O-N, and you continue. The problem is the T-I-O-N you saw was the word location on the next line.

And so you've continued on from there. Now, the problem is you have now inadvertently deleted an entire line of text, and you didn't even realize it because of similar endings, I-N-G-E-S-T-I-O-N.

Those types of endings are the ones that catch us, and the same thing happened to the scribes of the New Testament. On the screen in front of you, you need to realize that for the first 800, 900 years of the history of the text of the New Testament, it was written in what's called majuscule text.

All capitals, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation. It's simply a long line of capital letters. And so you're copying that long line of capital letters, and you come across this line right here, and it actually says, Hinatechnotheou kleithoumen kai esmen diatouta.

But you get to the end of the word kleithoumen, and I've used, that's interesting it's using that font, but I've used the red right here, you can barely see it here, but there's kleithoumen, and then here's kai esmen right here, and your eye, you write kleithoumen, your eye goes back, sees the new M-E-N, and you continue on from there.

You've now accidentally deleted the phrase kai esmen. This is the exact textual variance you'll find in 1 John 3 .1. In 1 John 3 .1, in the ESV, NASB, NIV, etc., etc., it will say that we might be called the children of God, and such we are.

But the King James doesn't have the phrase, and such we are. Is it because the King James translators didn't like adoption as sons of God? No. It's because the manuscripts they were dealing with, which is a very small number of manuscripts in comparison to the number that we have today, did not contain this reading, and it's a simple error of homoeoteluton.

Thankfully, we don't have just one manuscript of 1 John. We have many manuscripts of 1 John, and they come from different times and different places. And because we have these many manuscripts, and because we understand the nature of the type of errors that scribes would make, we can identify this kind of error very, very clearly.

This is the vast majority of the errors that we see in the New Testament. These kinds of scribal errors are common and expected in any widely transmitted document. As long as anyone has a robust manuscript tradition representing various geographical areas and containing early witnesses, these kinds of variations are rather easily detected.

But all of these considerations— here, folks, if you're starting to drift, tune in. All of these considerations relate primarily to a freely transmitted text, not to a controlled, edited, or redacted text.

This is the key issue this evening. We need to understand the difference between those two kinds of texts. And let me make sure that you see this. A freely transmitted text is one whose transmission is not controlled by an external authority such as a government.

It is widely copied without constraint. A controlled text is one that is copied under the guidance of an external authority. Everything I've said to you about comparing manuscripts, everything like that, that only applies to a freely transmitted text, where copies were able to be made by different people in different places, and there was no one standing over them going, no, you need to change this to that, or no one who had the ability to alter the transmission of that text over time in a purposeful direction.

The New Testament is a freely transmitted text, and as we'll see later on, that is the contrast this evening. A freely transmitted text will have more textual variance, but will have greater confidence as to originality.

A controlled text will have more uniformity, but much less confidence as to originality. Now this is the thesis of the debate. If Mr. Ismail is going to interact with my position this evening, this is the point that he is going to have to deal with.

And that is, my assertion is, a freely transmitted text will have more textual variance. You know, if the government isn't in control, if the government isn't saying, well, we're going to produce one version, and we're going to distribute it, and if you don't have our version, we're going to take your version and destroy it.

The result over time is that that one government-approved version is going to have a pretty clean transmission over time. But the problem is, it has a much less level of confidence as to originality.

Why? Because once you have an external authority that comes in and says, this is going to be the text, what do you have to believe? That they got it right the first time. And especially if they destroy the materials that existed before it, you can only take your confidence back to that point of the redaction, of the editing.

And you have to trust they got it right at that point, because you can't go any earlier than that. And that is the fundamental difference in the transmission of the text of the New Testament versus that of the Koran this evening, as we will illustrate over and over again in various ways.

A freely transmitted text can promise to present the original readings in its manuscript tradition. A controlled text cannot promise the original text past the last redaction or revision, especially if previous versions are destroyed.

So in other words, even amongst all of those textual variants in the New Testament, I have absolute confidence that one of the readings found in the manuscripts is the original. We still have all the original readings.

We may have to study them to find out which one's which, but we have the original readings. But if you have a controlled text, you can't make that claim. All you can say is, well, we know what it read at this point in history anyways, but before that, we don't know.

We can't tell because there is redaction, there is an editing, there is a controlling of the text. That is the fundamental difference that we're looking at. So how did we get the New Testament? Well, by the way, I made this graphic, so any oohs and aahs would be appreciated.

Man, everyone's so nice. Thank you. We need to recognize the New Testament is written by multiple authors at multiple times in multiple places to multiple audiences. And that means you might have Paul writing in Thessalonica.

He might be in Rome. You might have John in Ephesus. You have the same author writing from different places and writing to different churches at different times. And so these manuscripts go all over the world.

And let's say Paul writes to the church at Colossae and someone comes through and they say, you know, we haven't seen that letter. Could we copy it for our church? And so a copy is made and that letter then goes to another church and to another church.

And this is how the letters are copied over time and present and move all around the known world. Eventually what happens is that you have these copies coming together and collections start being made.

So, for example, I recently, just a couple of years ago, had the wonderful opportunity of seeing a manuscript P46 at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. And that is one of the earliest manuscripts that we have from the New Testament.

There's manuscripts of Paul. There's manuscripts of the Gospels. You have manuscripts like P75 of the Gospels and things like that. These are collections that take place over time. And then eventually you have entire New Testaments coming together.

But my point is this. There was never, ever a time when there was ever a controlling authority that could control the entire text of the New Testament. And so when people come along and say, well, you know, all these doctrines were inserted and so on and so forth, there was never a time when that could happen.

It is vitally important to realize the transmission of the text of the New Testament did not follow a single line of transmission. The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors with books being sent to multiple locations.

You would somehow have to be able to control all those multiple lines to be able to make purposeful changes in the text of the New Testament. And there was never a time when that could happen. This means the text was never under the control of a single individual or group.

At no time in its history, at the time of authorship, or at any point during its time of transmission, were the New Testament documents under the control of an individual or under the control of a group.

As a result, we can look forward, in fact, to finding even earlier manuscripts of the New Testament documents as the free transmission of the text has provided us with a solid basis for asserting that we continue to possess the original readings of the authors themselves.

I want to reiterate that point so you hear what I'm saying. Because of the nature of how the New Testament was transmitted, it demonstrates something called tenacity. Tenacity. The transmission of the New Testament textual tradition is characterized by an extremely impressive degree of tenacity.

Once a reading occurs, it will persist with obstinacy. What does that mean? Well, that means even silly readings are still found in the textual tradition. For example, there is one rather humorous manuscript.

Evidently, you know, some of you recognize what it's like. Your alarm didn't go off at the right time. You go rushing into class early in the morning. You're not an early morning person anyways. Your coffee tastes bad.

It's just very difficult for you to do a really good job that morning. Well, there were scribes who had days like that. And there was this one scribe. He must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed one morning.

And so he is copying a manuscript that has two columns of text. And you're supposed to read down this column and then read down this column. But he wasn't really paying attention that morning. And so he just copied straight across.

And unfortunately, this was in the genealogies of Jesus. And so in that manuscript, God has a daddy named Ferris. I don't know. How did you not catch that? You know, I mean, you really got to not be paying attention to what you're doing.

But you know what? We still have that manuscript. And it's a good thing we do. And you go, why is it a good thing that we would have a manuscript that has a silly error like that? Because the New Testament manuscript tradition is tenacious.

Once a reading appears, it stays there. You say, well, how is that a good thing? Think about it, my friends. That means the originals stay there, too. The originals stay there, too. And that's my confidence in practicing New Testament textual criticism, is that I can be looking at an extremely complex variant.

And Mr. Ismail, I'm sure, is going to talk about a number of extremely complex variants. But I can look at it. And today we have more information than any generation has ever had before us. On this iPad, I have more textual information than any generation before me had in one place in any library in the world.

It's amazing, absolutely amazing. But I can look at that information, and I can have absolute confidence that one of those readings is the original. I'm not just tilting at windmills. I'm not just engaging in some kind of academic exercise here.

The original reading is still there, and I need to determine which one it is. And that is an artifact of the way that God has preserved the New Testament text by having it explode across the known world.

Now, remember, during the first 300 years of its existence, up until 313, and the peace of the church, what was going on? Christians are being persecuted. A papyrus found recently that documents the Romans going into a church in Egypt and destroying 300 manuscripts in that single church.

In that single church. And there are many Christians who lost their lives for even possessing the Christian scriptures. And so the Christians realized, we need to be proliferating this text because there are people who are destroying it.

And so there was a lot of copying going on, but not everybody had their copyist card. Not everyone, you know, if you say you really can't have a proper transmission of the text until you can do it perfectly, you know when God would have had to have waited to give us a revelation of himself?

1949, that's when they invented the photocopier. Well, obviously God didn't want to wait that long. And God felt it was quite appropriate to give us his word in a way that would have to be transmitted over time in this fashion.

And that he has done. And he has done so in such a way that we can have confidence. In fact, someone, a friend of mine used a very good illustration. He said, what we have in the New Testament is like having a 10 ,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

Now, what would be worse? To have 10 ,100 pieces or 9 ,999? Any of you ever done a 10 ,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and then discovered the cat ate the last piece? It's a bad thing. It really makes you mad.

It's a whole lot better to have to figure out what the 100 extra are than it is to be missing 100 or 1 ,000 or something else like that. And the reality is, in the New Testament, what we have is like a 10 ,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

We got 10 ,100 pieces. And what textual critical scholars do is they find out what those 100 extra pieces are. But the originals are all still there. That's vitally important to understand. Let me quote.

There we go. It is precisely the, oh, this is a quote. It is precisely the overwhelming mass of the New Testament textual tradition. Assuming the Huguenots Nusa Desaskalia of New Testament textual criticism, which provides an assurance of certainty in establishing the original text.

We can be certain that among the New Testament manuscripts, there is still a group of witnesses which preserves the original form of the text, despite the pervasive authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the prestige of the later text.

That, of course, is from the rather well-known work by Kurt and Barbara Alon, The Text of the New Testament, pages 291 through 292. The Alons, of course, have run the New Testament Institute in Munster.

Kurt, of course, has died, but for many, many, many years. So, here is someone who knows all of the textual variants and says, we can have great certainty that the original is still there. He believes in that integrity of the text.

Now, what we hear very often from people, we hear words like, there are more variant readings of New Testament than there are words. Because there's 400 ,000 variants, there's only 138 ,162 words in the Nessie-Alan 27th edition of the Greek New Testament.

So, that means there's three variants per word. No, that's not what it means at all. But you will hear statements like that. We do not have two similar manuscripts of New Testament in their contents. If what you mean by that is a photocopy of each other, that's obviously the case of every work of antiquity.

That's nothing new. It is impossible to know today what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Paul might have written. These kinds of statements are very, very common in our day in what I will very honestly identify as radical skepticism.

These statements represent skepticism beyond that even of unbelieving scholars like Bart Ehrman, who recognized that such statements go far beyond what the actual data could possibly substantiate. The picture of the New Testament presented here is never presented by anyone who has done first-hand study of the New Testament documents.

Never. Let me give you an example. A number of years ago, I asked my computer to compare the two most dissimilar printed texts of the New Testament. In other words, for those of you who know the field, to compare the Westcott and Hort text with the majority text, the Robinson and Pierpont majority text.

So, in other words, the Byzantine versus Alexandrian manuscripts. Here in Hebrews chapter 6, verses 8 through 20, you'll see on the screen that I have marked in green, if you can see it, right there. There's one right there, one right there.

Don't worry, doctor, I'm not going to hit you with a laser. And there's, I think, one, no, there's only three. Only three places where these printed editions, which represent the widest variations in the manuscript tradition, vary from one another, and they are not major issues.

There is no question on the part of any scholar that we know what these verses said originally. This is what was written. There can be no question about that. It would require absolute radical skepticism to come to any other conclusion than that.

So, what you have from radical skepticism is that they'll give you graphics like this, where the blue line represents the number of words in the New Testament, and the red line represents the number of variants.

But then, if you know something about the New Testament, then you know some of the facts about that. You know, for example, what they don't tell you, is that 99 of all those variants do not impact the meaning of the text.

You also discover that 1 of 400 ,000 equals about 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words, is 2 .9%, or one meaningful variant every three pages. But only half of these are viable. In other words, if you run across a manuscript written, oh, I don't know, 1 ,400 years after the original, and it has one mistake in it that no one else has ever made, that's not found anywhere else in the world, that doesn't have a chance of being the original.

And so, it's not a viable reading. So, only about half of these are viable. So, there's about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable meaning New Testament textual variants. That's a very, very different picture. And I forgot to...

I'm sorry? Yes. That's a different picture, and let me show you what that picture would look like. Now, the blue line is the number of words, and the red line is the number of variants. Very different picture than what is normally presented when people attack the text of the New Testament today.

So, 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful and viable variants, over 2 million pages of hand-copied text spanning approximately 1 ,500 years prior to the invention of printing, is an amazingly small percentage of the text, reflecting an amazingly accurate history of transmission.

One might say it is downright miraculous. Now, the real issue again, free transmission versus controlled transmission. One is superior to the other. Having a controlled transmission of the New Testament text or any work of antiquity diminishes the confidence that you can have that you possess the original.

Because once someone has control of the text and can manipulate the text, then you have to have utter confidence that one particular person or group got it right. You see, with a free transmission of the text, I don't have to trust in any one particular person, because the source, the streams, come from so many different places, and we can compare them with one another.

So, free transmission of the text versus controlled transmission, key issue this evening. I honestly think if you want to evaluate how this evening goes, ask yourself the question, did both sides address that issue?

Multifocality, the fact that the New Testament writers, you have multiple writers writing it multiple times to multiple audiences, vitally important issue, and then the tenacity of the text, the fact that the writings, the original readings, they still exist, they are still there, and so when Mr. Ismail raises various textual variants, please realize those of us who work in this field know all about them.

Some of us, believe it or not, we don't have a lot in the way of life. Some of you saw how excited I got when the moderator mentioned my granddaughter Clementine. She's the joy of my life, she really is, and she is the cutest baby that's ever been born, and that is without question, okay?

So, and you're supposed to say that, but she actually happens to be. I wish I had a picture I could put up so I could prove it, but some of us don't have a life, though, because to be honest with you, you know one of the things that I read regularly?

I have a rather thick book, and it's nothing but all the textual variants of the New Testament, and every once in a while, I just sit down, I just read through a few pages, expose myself to some more, look at these types of things, and some of us actually find that to be very interesting.

Some of us do that so you don't have to, but the reality is any variation that Mr. Ismail is going to present, we've seen before, and you know why? Because Christians are wide open with their text. You can go to the bookstore right now, I bet you can buy a Nessie Olin text, you can buy a United Bible Society's text, all this information is going to be right there, it's on the internet, it's all over the place.

But you cannot today buy a critical edition of the Quran, because one doesn't exist. Now they're working on it, but one doesn't exist. That's the difference. You see, we can look at this information, we put it all out there, and we say, this is how God has preserved his text.

Yes, we have textual variants, but those textual variants are the result of the very means that God used to preserve his text. He had it go out all over everywhere. Every Christian said, we want everybody to know the gospel.

You want to copy this? Great, make a copy. And as a result, there are textual variants. But as a result, I can stand before you this evening, and say, because of the tenacity of the text, we have all the original readings.

God has preserved his word, even during those periods of persecution, and into this time of unbelief, God has preserved his word for us. Thank you very much.

The Quran, Canon, and the Gospel Evidence

And now, also half an hour to Mr. Yusuf Ismail.

I seek protection in God from Satan, the accursed one. In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful. Good evening, and welcome to all of you. The discussion for tonight, as James has correctly articulated, is the New Testament a reliable record of the teachings of Jesus?

When you look at the New Testament in general, it's a well-known fact that in Christianity, depending upon the church, Bibles can be divided into either the Protestant Church, the Roman Catholic Church, they have got their own canon.

Amongst Roman Catholics, you've got 73 books which they believe to be the inspired word of God. The Protestants, you've got 66. The Anglican Church has its own canon. The Greek Orthodox Church has its own canon.

Coptic Church, the Ethiopic Church, the Syriac Church. So if you look at their books, their New Testament that they would have would not be similar to what those in the Protestant world has. If you look at the interpreters' dictionary of the Bible, they basically say that it is safe to say that there is not one sentence in the New Testament in which the manuscript tradition is wholly uniform.