Is the Bible Corrupted?

I can't answer these questions. You've got too many versions. You've got the

New Testament and you've got the Old Testament as well. I believe in the Old Testament. Before he was transported, but later it becomes narrated and quoted by some.

So we believe that the Bible was in the time of Jesus, not now.

Is the Bible corrupted? No, I can't say that. If I say that, it's unrespectable because a lot of people believe in this.

Hi and welcome to Midnight Cry, a program that is committed to speaking the truth in love.

I'm your host, Romuald Gossein, and today we have with us Dr. James White who will be discussing with us the very important subject of Is the

Bible Corrupted? First of all, welcome to the show, James. Great to be with you on a very important topic.

Yes, thank you very much. Now, you heard the episode topic, Is the Bible Corrupted?

Has it been corrupted? I mean, that is often the Muslim perspective. In every debate that I have done, that has come up.

Sometimes it's the central aspect. Sometimes it comes up very quickly. Sometimes it is only rather mutedly asserted.

But I do not think that you can have any meaningful exchange between a knowledgeable Christian and a knowledgeable Muslim without the recognition that there is a fundamental conflict between our scriptures.

And since the Koran comes over half a millennium after the end of the writing of the

New Testament, then we have to ask the question, how are we going to answer the contradictions that exist between these books of scripture?

And from the Koranic perspective, we do so by looking backwards, using the Koran as our lens, and saying, well, what agrees with this is true, and anything that disagrees with it is a corruption.

Rather than, I think, the logical way, and that is of tracing the consistency of revelation from Torah through Injil to Koran, which actually is the

Koranic argument in Surah 5, in Surah Al -Ma 'idah, you have the assertion that that is the direction we should go.

I think at least modern Islamic apologists are looking at it backwards in making the allegation of corruption of the scriptures.

Why would this idea of corruption need to come up? Does the Koran itself say that the scriptures are corrupt?

I mean, from what I'm getting from what you're saying is that no, it's actually inviting us to look at the scriptures, that is, whether it's the law, the

Injil, or whatnot, the Koran is inviting us to look at that as a source of relevance and information, evidence.

The modern Muslim automatically assumes that texts like Surah 275 -279,

Chapter 3, likewise, that they are talking about an alteration of the actual physical text of the scriptures.

For example, in Surah 2, it says, but do they not know that Allah knows what they conceal and what they declare?

But then it goes on to say, and among them are unlettered ones who do not know the scriptures except indulgent in wishful thinking, but they are only assuming.

So woe to those who write the scripture with their own hands and say, this is from Allah. This is talking about unlettered people. This isn't talking about an actual corruption of the scriptures.

There has been some very in -depth study done of the verbs that are used in the

Arabic of corruption, concealing, change, etc., etc., and many people, including

Islamic scholars, have come to the conclusion that the Koran does not teach that the actual

Christian scriptures or Jewish scriptures themselves were corrupted, and historically speaking, the first generations of Muslims did not make that accusation.

They saw a direct connection that since the Koran said that the Torah and Injil had been sent down by God, and that's all, to be sent down, since they recognized that, they realized that if they said this has been corrupted, then they were opening up the possibility that the

Koran could be corrupted as well because of the same nature. It is only later in history, once the

Islamic expansion is completed and Islamic scholarship begins to develop and they have to interact with Christian scholarship, that they realize there is a fundamental impasse, there is a fundamental contradiction, especially between the teaching of the

New Testament and that of the Koran, and so they choose to make the Koran normative and therefore look backwards and say, well, this must have been corrupted.

In fact, when I asked Shabir Ali in our debate at Biola University in 2006, how can we know, since he said the

New Testament is a mixture of truth and error, God's words and man's, how can we know which is which? How can we know what is still inspired?

And he honestly said, well, that which agrees with the Koran is inspired, that which is not is not.

It's a very anachronistic way, it's looking backwards rather than following a theme forward, but that's the assertion that is being made.

But that wasn't the primitive assertion. And in fact, when I encounter Islamic apologists today who are quoting liberal scholars, unbelieving, not even

Christian or believing, liberal scholars attacking the Bible. For example, one of the favorite people for a lot of the

Islamic apologists to quote today. I just find that tremendously ironic because Bart Ehrman doesn't believe the

Koran is the word of God. If he applied the same standards to the Koran, he'd come to the same conclusions. That's right.

So James, I mean, if the Koran did come some six centuries later, it was revealed some six centuries later, then was there a void?

What were God's people supposed to do? What were they supposed to follow if God's word was corrupted during that period?

Well, you know, I've not been able to get my Islamic friends to tell me exactly when, where, or how this corruption took place.

When I ask that question, I don't get specific answers. When I say, okay, we have papyri of the

Gospel of John that go back to at least as early as 125, possibly even earlier than that.

Now, when did it get changed? Was it during the lifetime of the apostles themselves?

I mean, were they such bad followers of Jesus that they couldn't even safeguard the message of Jesus for one generation?

Or was it in the second century, the third century? You see, by the end of the second century, we have so many manuscripts of so many different works in the

New Testament that already we are able to reconstruct the majority of the New Testament by the end of the second century.

And so when did this corruption take place? It would have had to have been very, very early. And we're not told.

So the contradiction, as I see it, is that in Surah 544 -48, we are specifically told, in fact, in Surah 547, the

Al -Anjil, the people of the Gospel, are instructed to judge by what is contained therein.

And if people do not judge by what Allah has revealed, then they are kafirs, they are unbelievers.

All right, if those words were revealed, let's imagine for a moment Muhammad, the first time that he gave this recitation in public, and he's saying it to Christians, to the people of the

Gospel. Well, how are they supposed to understand that, that they're to judge by what's contained therein?

The only therein is the Gospel. Well, if they don't possess the Gospel anymore, how can they judge by it?

It's very clear that Muhammad is telling the Christians, look at what your scriptures say and they will confirm my message.

The fact is, they don't. No honest reading of the New Testament would ever confirm the view of Jesus and salvation that's found in the

Qur 'an. And so the truth -loving person goes, look, from a historical perspective, it doesn't seem that the words of the

Qur 'an make any sense in light of modern Islamic teaching that the Gospel has been corrupted. But if the

Gospel wasn't corrupted, then the Qur 'an's in contradiction to an uncorrupted revelation that the

Qur 'an says came from Allah. So which one is it? How are we supposed to come to a conclusion on this?

And that's a question that I keep asking of my Islamic friends. So then do we find ourselves that the

Muslim has to take that position or else if they don't take that position, then they are forced to say that their text is corrupted or it distinguishes itself from the biblical text?

They have to say that their prophet was not receiving a revelation from God if in fact the

Qur 'an is in error in its representation either of Christian beliefs or the

Christian scriptures or something along those lines. And if you for a moment entertain the possibility that Muhammad was in error in any of his revelation, any of his teaching, you're not a

Muslim anymore. And so it is a position that they are forced to. But the problem is to rescue the teachings of the

Qur 'an, they have to ignore the facts and reality of history. It's just a necessity for them.

I mean, what about the divine element in all of this? Would God really allow his word to be corrupted?

You know, it depends on what you mean by corrupted. I mean, if God's intention is that his people have his word, then he's going to protect that word.

So there's two different ways in which a text can be corrupted. There is a technical term of corruption, which means that if there is so much as a letter out of place in the copying of manuscripts, then that is called a corruption.

And all handwritten texts from antiquity, including the Qur 'an, have that kind of corruption because we make mistakes.

It was sitting at a keyboard at a computer, typing out of a book, we make that kind of mistake.

Now, does that mean the book has been corrupted? Not in common parlance, it would not be. But technically, from a textual critical perspective, that is a corruption.

That doesn't mean we don't know what the original was. Normally, when the Muslims are talking about corruption, they're talking about wholesale corruption to the point where the message is either garbled or no longer discernible.

And that's a completely different issue. That's a completely different concept. And there just simply isn't any evidence whatsoever that the

Christian scriptures have been, quote -unquote, garbled, corrupted, or destroyed in that way. But would

God allow that to happen? Wholesale corruption. Would he allow vast amounts of people who are going to be judged by him not to have the privilege of having his word?

If there was that kind of corruption in a text, it would mean that the text itself was not divine.

I mean, there have been works of antiquity that have been corrupted in a wholesale way, but they don't claim to be the word of God.

From a theological and Christian perspective, yes, God has providentially looked over his word and has preserved his word, not in the method of using a photocopier, but in the method that has guaranteed to us that we can know that there has been no doctrine inserted, taken out, hidden, altered, changed, anything like that.

He used his people to transmit that text. And in reality, when you look at it, the

New Testament text is by far the earliest attested and best attested text of any work of antiquity known to man.

So then, if we were to look at this in an alternate view, can you say that the

Qur 'an is a continuation of the revelation of God? Is there any question about that?

The Muslim, while saying that the Qur 'an is the continuation of the revelation of God because they do believe that the

Torah and the Injil were sent down, the Muslim is saying that this is the product of divine agency, while they then give it a special status, in essence saying that God would never allow it to be corrupted, while he did allow the

Christian scriptures and the Jewish scriptures to be corrupted to the point where the Qur 'an has to be the judge over them as to what is and what is not inspired.

The idea, however, I think to anyone who has studied the

Bible, specifically the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, the Ketuvim, and the New Testament scriptures together, seen the incredible fulfillment and understands the message of the

New Testament, the Qur 'an is not a continuation. It is a repudiation. It does not continue down that road.

It hangs a U -turn. It draws back from the tremendous revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

It goes back to the old ways. It goes back toward the Tanakh as far as its legal interpretations and things like that go.

It does not understand the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures, in their discussion of the prophet who is to come, prophecies of Jesus, the role of the

Messiah. There really is no understanding on the part of the author of the

Qur 'an of those vitally important issues. Instead of continuing on, it is a

U -turn, not even on the same level. It is a U -turn that goes down. I know that Muslims say, oh, but the

Qur 'an is so beautiful, but you must read it in Arabic. Okay, if you say so, but the reality is that the message of the

Qur 'an, while we can agree wholeheartedly with its emphasis upon the fact there is one

God who created all things, the Tanakh had already said that. God had already said that with absolute clarity in the book of Isaiah.

Before me there is no God formed, and there should be none after me. Is there any other God besides me? Yea, there is no

God. I know not any. This had already been said long, long ago by the prophet Isaiah.

So it goes back, but it does not even have the same elevated view of God in his relationship to time and creation that you find in Isaiah and Jeremiah and other places like that.

So it's not a continuation, it is a reversal. So is there a test of authorship?

Is there a test of authority? Is there a simple system or mechanism in which we are able to look at a book and determine whether it is sacred or not sacred?

Well, I think that the consistency of God's truth over time has been one of the primary means by which

God's people have made that kind of a decision. And when we test the Qur 'an in that way, as I just said, since it is a

U -turn, a radical departure, a drawing back from the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, then if your evidence of the truthfulness of the

Bible is those beautiful golden threads that have been woven through the tapestry of the revelation of Scripture, of the atonement and of the

Lamb and God's purpose in forming a particular people and bringing the Messiah into the world, if that is a proper judge of what is inspired,

I mean, if men over the course of 1 ,500 years from such differing backgrounds as you have in the

Bible can write a work that has that kind of consistency without being a surface level consistency, but being an in -depth, deep consistency, that is the sign of God's activity.

But then you get to the New Testament and the threads stop. If you put the

Qur 'an after the New Testament, there's no possible way to continue from the one into the other.

The one says God has spoken in times past to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days

He's spoken to us by His Son. And the Qur 'an comes along and says, nope, no Son. I mean, that is not continuation.

That's repudiation. And so if that consistency is the evidence of divine authorship, then the

Qur 'an fails right there. That's right. And really, I mean, Christians do take this question quite seriously because you're undermining the biblical text.

You're basically saying that you cannot trust in the Bible. You can't put your trust in what that says because it has somehow been warped or damaged or corrupted.

Now, my question to you would be, can we trust what the Bible says?

On the theological level, we have the promise of God and the promise to the Lord Jesus that His Spirit would lead us into all truth, that we would have the gospel, we would have gospel truth, it would remain with us.

This is what the Holy Spirit has brought us. Now, on the level of the text itself, in just a few moments,

I can barely even begin to summarize the reason that we can know that we can, that we have a reliable text, that it has been protected by God.

The fundamental way that we can know that is that unlike the Qur 'an, and this would be helpful to be able to draw a contrast, unlike the

Qur 'an, where you had an editing and revision of the Qur 'an at a specific point in history called the

Uthmanic revision, when Uthman gathers the materials of the Qur 'an and creates an edited specific official version, that never happened with the

New Testament. Once the New Testament books were written, they exploded across the

Roman Empire. They were copied by all sorts of people, and they went all over the empire.

That's a wonderful act of God's providence. Why? Because there was never a time when any one person or group of people could gather together all of those scriptures, make wholesale changes, and then send them back.

Once that had happened all over the known world, there was no possibility that anyone could ever take out a doctrine.

Let's say there was a doctrine of la ilaha ilaha. Where'd that go? If it was in the texts in this country, and they did manage to do it, they did manage to take it out in this country, once we have both those texts compared in antiquity, there's going to be a massive difference between the two of them, and we'll be able to see that.

But when we examine the earliest texts in the New Testament, all the way back to the beginning of the first century now, there's no such changes like that.

Or if we put a doctrine in, like Jesus is the son of God, the resurrection, the crucifixion, these alleged corruptions that Islam says, well, again, when we find these older and older texts, they'd stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, they would be a clear difference between these ancient texts.

But whenever we find these ancient texts, they're all saying the same thing. There is no evidence whatsoever, and in fact, a mountain of evidence against the idea that there's ever been that kind of corruption, because the

New Testament texts exploded out over the entire Roman empire very, very early on.

That's right, and we understand that through God's Word that we can have salvation, and it is so important for that Word to be there, to be there for everybody.

And so if that is being changed somehow, then people will not know the true

God. And so I like the way that you did explain that there was that divine aspect, but there's also, we can look at it from a theological aspect in terms of the distribution of the scriptures, in that it was impossible to be able to distort

God's Word because it would be recognized, it would be called out, there would be people that would be raising their hand and saying, hey, there is such a difference from here to there.

So why is the message of Christianity so important? Why is the message of the

Bible so important? Sometimes we can get caught up in differences, but I understand why it's important to establish why we believe what we believe, but then why is the truth in the scriptures?

Why is it so important for people to understand that? The irony in your question is the very essence of what

Islam denies in the Quran is the very essence of the message of Christianity itself, and that is by saying that Jesus is merely a prophet and not the

Son of God, then the act of God's self -giving in Jesus Christ, the act of the incarnation, the fact that God has invaded his own creation so as to provide in and of himself perfect redemption is the very thing that the

Muslim is denied because of the lack of understanding of the author of the

Quran of what Christianity is actually all about. And so that's the great tragedy, is that you have this incredible record of the birth, the ministry, the miraculous actions of Jesus Christ, his voluntary death, his burial, his resurrection, his ascension to heaven, his apostles teaching who he was and what the atonement worked out upon the cross actually means, and all of that, every bit of that is not found in the

Quran and is in fact denied by the Quran. Now there's only one ayah in the Quran that denies the crucifixion, but it's been enough for all the

Muslims to follow it and to deny that Jesus Christ truly died so we might have a sacrifice that can bring us perfect peace with God.

So if a Muslim is being taught that the scriptures are corrupted, that the

Bible is corrupted, does that then mean that they will not pick up a

Bible and read it because they're being taught that it is corrupted so I cannot trust what's being said in there?

It's been my experience when I speak to Christian audiences, when I ask how many of you read the

Quran, the vast majority of them have never read the Quran because they feel what? That it's not truly scripture, that it's corrupted.

And when I ask Muslims, how many of you have read the Bible? Same type of thing. That's why we end up talking past each other is because we don't know each other's scriptures at all, unfortunately.

But the Muslim has an added reason for this. There is one hadith that records one of one of the sahaba that mentioned to Muhammad that he was reading the

Torah and Muhammad's face became red. I can just tell you in hadith studies, Muhammad's face becoming red is not a good thing.

And it was communicated from Muhammad that his revelation is the final revelation and there isn't any need to be looking at what came before.

And so that really does communicate to the Muslim people as a whole. There really isn't any need to be looking at that kind of material.

And so there is a lot of ignorance of what the scripture is really about from the vast majority of Muslims.

So would that be a challenge to a Muslim, the viewers that are actually watching this episode, if they have not read the

Bible, to pick it up, to read it, to ask God whether this is true or not?

I would think that any Muslim who actually reads the Quran, especially reads surah 5, 44 through 48, would have to come to the recognition that from the

Quran's own perspective, these books, the Torah and the Injil, have come from God.

In them is light and guidance. Why then do most Muslims ignore them and not seek that light and guidance?

That's the challenge that I would make to them. And as you read, especially the Gospels, ask yourself the question, is the

Jesus that I'm reading here in a book that is light and guidance the same Jesus I'm reading about in the

Quran? And if he's not, why not? Yes, that's right. I mean, in the many debates that you have done with your

Muslim counterparts, when you try and refer to the scriptures and use a verse as an authority, is that thrown out or is it considered?

Very often it's thrown out inconsistently, especially by someone who's trying to say that Muhammad is prophesied in the

Bible. How come those verses haven't been corrupted but the ones I'm quoting are? There's normally tremendous inconsistency, and when

I challenge it based upon the Greek text itself, based upon the textual criticism, something that I'm engaged in regularly,

I do not get meaningful responses from my Islamic opponents at that point. They are not being consistent at that point at all.

James, thank you for your time. We've been able to discuss, is the Bible corrupted?

We've been able to find answers. We've been able to be challenged. We've been able to see that the

Bible really is not corrupted. I think any person who would read, sit down and just read the scriptures, they will discover that the

Jesus of the New Testament, that the Jesus of the scriptures is a great God. He is a wonderful Savior, and He is one who has come to be able to provide atonement for people.

We hope and pray that you have discovered Him to be so in your own personal life. Until then, please stay in for the very next episode of Midnight Cry, and may