What Every Christian Should Know About the Qu'ran, Part 1

Today, we're going to speak about what every Christian should know about the Koran. Which has been criticized for its title.

Yeah, let me just say, we'll speak about it. And here's why. People say, it's not what every

Christian needs to know, only if you're really going to be dealing with Muslims. Oh, yes. They're like, you went into too much depth.

It's like, well... Really? Yeah. It really depends on whether you want to be prepared to speak to your

Muslim friend or not. And so, it's been criticized on that level.

That's okay. I'll let that slide. Let me allow for you to speak. You write on page 12, something

I think that is really the edifice of this book. You say, I'm not attempting to write a book that is, as its heart, a refutation of the

Koran. And as far as I can tell, when I read the book, this was really just a concern for the church to know who they are dealing with when they're looking at their

Muslim neighbor. And I thought it was brilliantly done. But you start off the book very early with the history of Muhammad in Mecca and the

Koran itself. And maybe you can give us a bit of an introduction to that and explain to us exactly what happened with this

Prophet Muhammad. Well, that's obviously a really large area of discussion.

And today, there's a lot of question as to exactly how we should approach that.

Just last evening, I was speaking on a completely different subject. And someone asked me about my viewpoint on one of the many theories that are currently floating around that are alternate theories as to the history of Islam, where it came from.

And this was the story about how it wasn't Mecca. It was Petra. Oh, yes. Dan Gibbons.

Right. So there's all sorts of competing narratives in regards to the history of Islam.

And I'm not trying to deal with any of those in the book at all, because I want a

Muslim to be able to read the book and to come away saying, here was a Christian who accurately represented what we believed and yet raised all sorts of questions that are valid questions, that are meaningful questions.

And so there's a place for debating the issues in regards to the historicity of all of the narratives concerning Muhammad.

There are people who do not believe Muhammad existed, that he's a fictional character. The problem is, if you start there, that's about as far as you're going to get in any conversation with a

Muslim, with most believing Muslims. There are Westernized Muslims. There are many nominal

Muslims in the world that are Muslim primarily in name only. They don't really have a strong commitment to the faith.

They're not saying the daily prayers and so on and so forth. You have to find out what kind of a person you're talking to, because especially once you leave heavily

Islamic areas, get into areas where Muslims are very much in the minority, I find an incredibly wide variety of people that you encounter.

And if you want to find out about talking to Muslims, get an Uber or a cab. Every single person that I have ridden with for the past three years.

That could just be a miracle of the Lord, I suppose. But long conversations on the subject of Islam.

And in those conversations, wide varieties of views and what they'll accept and what they'll not accept.

But in general, if you're not starting with their narrative as to who

Muhammad was, you're not going to get to anything else. Because you're just going to be stuck on that one subject.

So if you want to get past that, if there's certain things that you want to communicate in a brief amount of time to a

Muslim individual that you hope will cause them to hear and to listen and to think and to expand their interaction with what you as a

Christian believe. Because many of them think they know what Christians believe, but very often have a very skewed perspective.

Just as the vast majority of Christians that I know of have almost no meaningful knowledge of real

Islam or Islamic theology. They don't know what Tawhid is. Nothing like that. So unfortunately, our communities don't know each other very well.

Almost no Christians I know have ever read the Quran, even though it's only 14 % the length of the

Bible. It's just a little over half the length of the New Testament. So it wouldn't take a lot long to do.

And unfortunately, it's about the same percentages when you ask Muslims what they've read of the

Christian scriptures. So our two communities are just talking right past each other. So with all that said, it just seems to me that if your goal is to communicate

Gospel truth rather than engage in comparative religious studies, then the best thing to do is to just simply go with the

Muslim narrative in regards to who Muhammad was, when he lived, when he died, issues like that.

Don't bother getting into all the other stuff. Utilize that narrative. And then from that basis, once you have the fact that they're hearing you, they're recognizing that you are showing them the respect of having done some study and some thought as to what they believe, then you're going to be able to present those areas of Christian truth that are the most important to communicate with real clarity to a

Muslim. So you will notice, as you well know, you have attended many of the debates that I've done here in South Africa on the subject of Islam.

I've lost track of how many there have been. There have been many. Quite a few. In mosques and from Anglican churches to mosques and everywhere in between.

Universities and buildings that get burned down at universities and everything else, from what I understand.

So you have heard that one of the ways I attempt to lower the temperature of the discussion is that when

I have to make a statement concerning the Quran's author, I'll refer to him as the author of the

Quran. I rarely say Muhammad. And that's not a trick.

It's just simply, there are questions as to whether this volume, and this is the one

I have with me today, is the study Quran. That's why it's so big. It's the first Quran I've ever seen that has more notes on the page than text.

That's why it's as thick as it is. The Quran's not that long of a book. But the author of, some people believe that there are multiple authors of this.

There are some that believe that there was an initial author and then later redactors. There are all sorts of theories.

And the reality is that when it comes to the study of the early sources of the

Quran, we're still in the infancy. In comparison to New Testament studies, there is considerably less, despite the fact this is 600 years closer to us in history.

We're still in the infancy of the study of these things, in comparison to New Testament studies.

So part of it is just simply to be scholarly and accurate in saying, the author of the

Quran said this. The author of the Quran seemed to have this understanding. But there's a real practical reason.

And the practical reason is that there is a strong sensitivity on the part of the vast majority of Muslims regarding the person of Muhammad.

There is an assumption that there is going to be some type of a desire to show disrespect toward Muhammad, as they call him the prophet.

And so why not just bypass that? And if you have to say, it seems like the author of the

Quran understood that Christians believe this but was in error about that. When you state it that way,

I think it's just a practical thing that I think is useful for folks.

But fundamentally, I remember one of my favorite debates, one of my favorite debaters from the

Muslim perspective, I was really taken aback by the fact that when we were talking about prophets, he really took the position that prophets are pretty much sinless individuals.

If there's any sin, it's very, very, very minor. So there is a, one of the fundamental differences that needs to be understood between Christians and Muslims is in Islam, there is a much higher focus upon the moral and ethical character of the ones through which the message comes than you have in regards to Christians and their scriptures.

Yeah, for sure. We can have a donkey giving the word of God and it's okay. We can clearly recognize that Jonah was not filled with love for the inhabitants of Nineveh.

Yeah, for sure. And we recognize very clearly what

Peter said. He said, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

Holy Spirit. So yes, men spoke. They used human language. They speak from the context in which they are living.

But they are being carried along by the Holy Spirit so that what the result is, is what comes from God.

That is not the Islamic understanding of where this comes from.

The Islamic understanding is that the Sunni understanding, the historic

Orthodox Sunni understanding is that this book is uncreated.

That it was, that it has eternally been written on a heavenly tablet.

And that it was sent down in one, at one instance in the month of Ramadan.

It was called Laylat al -Qadr, the Night of Power. To the angel Jibril. And then it was delivered to the prophet over the course of a couple of decades as need arose for that particular portion to be given to him.

Until traditionally the last portions of Surah 9 were delivered to him.

And that was the final giving of the Quran which was then memorized and recited and so on and so forth.

And so the whole concept of how scripture is given what we rather inappropriately describe as inspiration which is not the best word inspiration means to breathe into something and that's the

Latin the Greek is much more expressive but technically the idea of the communication of divine revelation much more nuanced in Christian thought and it's plainly evident to me the author of the

Quran had never heard of the understanding of that process that is prevalent amongst

Christians even in his day. And clearly by his death in 632 the traditional date of his demise there were tremendous

Christian works in existence that had that nuanced understanding of how it is that God gave the scriptures.

There's no evidence that he or anyone around him had any knowledge of anything like that. I find it to be a significantly simplistic understanding of basically an angel coming and said say this here it is.

And really the traditional orthodox understanding this is very important by the way and I know

I'm not getting to a lot of Muhammad but this is very important the traditional

Islamic understanding is that there is not a fingerprint of Muhammad on the Quran. There's no none of this is his interpretation his understanding for example what he understood of Christian theology to you and me is incredibly important.

And there's the later event in his life where he meets with the

Christians from Nashran which ends up being the background of portions of Surah 3 to you and me that's absolutely central important stuff what did he understand did he have a misunderstanding what about the

Christians he had encountered did he encounter unorthodox Christians that communicated an unorthodox view of Jesus these are vitally important questions that are irrelevant to the

Tafsir literature Tafsir literature is the commentary literature where commentaries are written on the subject of the

Quran it's called Tafsir irrelevant because what Muhammad knew doesn't matter because it is a mechanical what we would say today

MP3 recording device that's all he is he is a mechanical device information in, information out no interpretation, no alteration boom there it is now

I think most Christians recognize that's not what we believe there are some Christians that sometimes have a rather mechanical understanding almost automatic writing style which was not held by early church fathers, shouldn't be held by us today because we can recognize when

I teach Greek the first book we read is 1st John, why because on a scale of 1 to 10 1st

John is about level 2 vocabulary, syntax, grammar it's simplistic if I wanted to destroy my students and make sure they never continued their

Greek studies, I'd have them read Hebrews because they are going to give up because it's level 10 out of 10 it's high level vocabulary, incredibly difficult syntax obviously

John and whoever wrote Hebrews which I think was a sermon made by Paul that was written down by Luke but anyway whoever wrote that we're not the same person completely different styles completely different ways of speaking so the idea of automatic writing does not make any sense as to how the

New Testament came into existence so we have a much more nuanced, I think much deeper much higher in my opinion, view of how that took place but the orthodox

Sunni and you'll encounter non -orthodox Sunnis especially outside of majority

Muslim countries but the orthodox Sunni understanding is that this is an exact representation of what's on that heavenly tablet which is uncreated which means even the

Arabic language in essence has an eternal characteristic to it and as you know you cannot have a conversation on the subject of Islamic theology without utilization of Arabic can't be done the fundamental definitions of all of that faith are found in the

Arabic language I remember I was speaking in Boulder, Colorado I made some comments about the centrality of Arabic and one

Muslim came up to me afterwards and he said, I'm not really so sure that you're really right on about that half hour later we've been talking about a bunch of stuff and I stopped him and said how many

Arabic terms have you and I used in the past half hour that only you and I understood and no one around us understood and yet they were central to our conversation he sort of looked down and said okay, point taken it was obvious, it's absolutely central so even the language in which it was written is something that has a divine aspect to it so everything we can talk about regarding Muhammad the fact that they assert that he was illiterate which is highly unlikely given the amount of caravan trading he was involved in there's documents to be signed but let's say he was at least not a literate man in the sense of having read much of the world's literature which seems clear what's very plain whoever wrote this only had an oral familiarity with the contents of the

Christian scriptures historically we do not have any manuscripts in Arabic of the

Old and New Testaments that would have been in that area during his lifetime so it does not appear that either the

Old and New Testaments had been translated into Arabic during his lifetime in actual fact, Doc, let me just intervene there and say do we find any of the

Gnostic texts that were written in Arabic because one of the accusations in one of the schools of thought today is that what had been introduced into the

Quran very early on and into the mindset of specifically the Prophet himself was that he encountered

Gnostic Christianity which in actual fact if you look at some of the narratives even in the Quran that relates directly to some of the

Gnostic texts because there are a number of references in the Quran to stories that are found only in what's called the

Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Arabic Infancy Gospel as well, which we know were written no earlier than 200 years after Christ and the

Arabic one was probably about 500 years after Christ and so would those have been, now the

Arabic Infancy Gospel would be Arabic but its origin and sources would go pre -Arabic and the

Infancy Gospel of Thomas the very way in which those stories are told and every other reference, there's almost no references whatsoever to the

New Testament almost none at all if you take this and then you put the

New Testament here and you put the Tanakh the Old Testament here the

New Testament is filled with direct citations of this intimate relationship there is a chasm here absolute chasm here now this assumes that its reader knows both of these absolutely assumes it and that would refer to the

Torah and Injil both when for example the story of Lot Sodom and Gomorrah is told four different places 7, 26, 27, 29 in different words interestingly enough which raises all sorts of other issues but when that story is told the author is clearly assuming that whoever is reading this has already known these but the point is not so much that they've read these but that they've heard the stories and the way in which the story about Jesus and the clay birds the speaking from the cradle all of that could be transmitted orally its not a citation its never says and it is written somewhere quote that's not what you have its remember that it was said and you've got these paraphrases so this book reflects an author who has had interaction with Christians and Jews, more

Jews than Christians absolutely but you don't have literary dependence you have oral dependence not literary dependence so Mohammed is he illiterate he's had conversations he allegedly is married to Khadijah and again this is the

Muslim story and he becomes deeply concerned about idolatry you have to recognize whoever wrote it was consumed initially on the subject of polytheism and idolatry this is a person who recognizes the foolishness of multiple gods absolutely and that is a true insight he's not the first one, not the last one but there's no question about it and I think its really important and I know

I'm going all over the place I apologize but if you read this book do not start at the front and read it to the back you will be so confused you won't know which end is up it was never meant to be read that way now it is an interesting question as to why it's organized the way that it is because it's very confusing it's organized by size you have surah al -fatiha the opening 7 verse prayer basically and then beginning with surah al -baqarah surah 2, the cow it's the longest, it's a book unto itself hundreds of verses called ayat and then surah 3 is a little bit shorter surah 4 is a little bit shorter it's not actually word wise exactly spot on but generally you have decreasing size until you get down to the last few surahs which are just a few verses long and so if you read it straight through which

I with some humor recall very clearly after September 11th in the

United States, the attacks on the World Trade Centers I remember reporters running into Barnes &

Noble bookstores this is back when we still had bookstores most bookstores don't exist anymore in the United States thanks to consolidation under the internet but anyway and they're buying copies of the

Quran and they're flipping through trying to find something to add to their reporting because they don't have a clue what's going on and they can't make heads or tails out of it and you can't make heads or tails out of it if you try to read it straight through you must remember that chronologically it's written in a completely different order and so the point the reason

I bring this up at this point is that when you read it in the best chronological guess that we can give there's a chart in the book that gives you the best chronological guess that we can come up with it's in the somewhere in the 40s yeah there's the chart if you read it that way at least you are walking through Muhammad's life and hence when you know something about his life at least from the

Muslim perspective his years after his initial calling in 610 by the angel

Jibril which interestingly enough he responds to by wanting to commit suicide which I think is very very relevant and important may not be able to develop it but it's there but from 610 there is a period of time where he is a minority prophet in Mecca and he is hated he is abused he is mistreated there is a story told he is in prayer prostrate in prayer and some of his enemies come along and lay camel entrails intestines on him and his little daughter has to come along and take them off of his back you know he is being protected by his uncle

Abu Talib because he is a member of the Quraish tribe which is their primary income is from the idolatrous worship in the

Kaaba so he has to be protected and so on and so forth and then in 622 you have the

Hijra you have going from Mecca to Medina originally called Yathrib but eventually becomes the city of the

Prophet and then over the next number of years you have the battles taking place Uhud and the trench and so on and so forth between the

Medinans and the Meccans and then finally you have the victory of Mohammed over the

Meccans and marching into Mecca and the beginnings of the consolidation that leads to that century of Islamic expansion between 632 and 732 where Islam spreads all across North Africa up into the

Holy Lands across the Straits of Gibraltar into Europe and finally is stopped with the Battle of Tours in 732 so for 100 years just this massive expansion into primarily

Christian lands all across North Africa and places like that so then you have all the stories of his wives, you have the issue of Aisha, you have the issue of Zaynab bin

Jash there's all sorts of things there and these are these end up in the text of the

Quran which is fascinating if somehow it's uncreated and written not even written, you can't even say it was written in the eternity past because that would be a point of time in the past so it's always been on this tablet and yet especially

Surah 33 and the story of Zaynab bin Jash is just in my opinion the most human story in the

Quran by a long shot the very idea that this is eternal revelation where and I've mentioned it,

I don't know if you want me to go into it but where Muhammad had he had adopted a young man named

Zayd, he was even known as Zayd bin Muhammad Zayd, the son of Muhammad and Muhammad had given his cousin

Zaynab to Zayd as wife and so at a point in time later

Muhammad comes over to Zayd's house Zayd is not there Zaynab is there and according to Al -Qurtabi and Al -Tabari these are two very well known

Islamic, trusted Islamic sources I'm not making these things up she's not fully dressed she's wearing something that's rather flimsy and Muhammad is just stunned,

I'm not sure how he would be stunned but he's stunned by her beauty and by what he says once Zayd gets home and finds out about it

Zayd realizes that Muhammad wants Zaynab so he goes to Muhammad and says

I'll divorce her well here's the problem in Arabic culture you cannot marry the divorced wife of your son or adopted son and so Muhammad says keep your wife well once Zaynab realizes that the prophet wants her she doesn't want

Zayd anymore so there is a divorce and so one day

Muhammad goes into one of his revelational trances while Aisha is there and once he comes out he smiles and says who is going to go tell

Zaynab that she's been given to me as wife and so you get this revelation this revelation comes down from the

Quran that first destroys adoption the verse at the beginning of surah 33 ayat 3 and 4 you're no longer to call people after their adopted father's name you call them after their original this has deeply damaged adoption in Islamic lands so that's the first thing the revelation does is well

Zayd isn't really Muhammad's son first of all and then later on in the surah basically

Allah rebukes Muhammad for hiding in his heart what he knew to be true and that was that Allah was giving

Zaynab to him as wife and Aisha as soon as she heard it said oh no she's going to hold this over us because she's going to be the only wife that was specifically given to the prophet in the

Quran itself and she did and this also gave him more wives than the

Quran allowed so you had to have the basically saying the prophet's the prophet he gets to do stuff that everybody else doesn't get to do in essence it's such a human story it's so centrally focused upon Muhammad fulfilling his own desires that the idea this was written you know in eternity past boggles the mind but it's helpful when reading the

Quran to at least know where that happened what the context was where they were you know you can put it in some kind of a context in that fashion and that's very very helpful so anyways

I didn't mean to go into all the detail on that that's good I think for the introduction you already mentioned that the man in the book and I think it's good if we reflect on the very character of the man because a lot of times

Muslims won't have an issue if you speak about the Quran as long as you do so respectfully they won't even bother if you speak on Allah but the moment you speak about Muhammad you need to be very wary as to what you're saying where you go with this and you started off and you mentioned that there is the the nominal understanding from Islam that the prophets need to be perfect or even sinless and even though when we look at the life of Muhammad we can see quite clearly in some of the earlier sources that there's a lot of things that are taking place which in actual fact is not to be contributed or even attributed to somebody of great stature or even of impeccable character do you think it is important to focus on that and to in our witness to Muslims I find whenever I speak to Muslims the moment the question of Muhammad comes up and I ask these questions that there is somewhat of a resistance to go any further there is and I think

I think it's always best to get into that this area if you need to get into this area only after establishing some type of relationship you know if you're standing on a street corner someplace you've never met this person before this is probably something you don't want to get into at this point in time that's why you and I both know people who think that it's actually the best thing to do is to the first thing you just start attacking

Muhammad but they think witnessing is offending Muslims not actually communicating with Muslims there's a difference between the two so I would say that if there is an attachment on the part of the

Muslim to Muhammad in such a way that it's keeping them from hearing the Gospel message well then you're going to have to deal with that but it does need to be done in the context of a relationship and I would say it needs to be done with you already having made it very plain that you are a sinner saved by grace and that you that anyone who is not clinging to Jesus Christ abides under the wrath of God in the first place so that would be helpful there isn't any way to completely defuse that particular topic but if it's done with a willingness to place him in the context in which he actually lived which we have to do whenever we're dealing with if you have to deal with David you've got to place him in the context in which he lived not in the modern context that's a failure that we engage in all the time the best thing you can do is just to be as fair as you can and then to come to the conclusion here was someone who engaged in this activity and this activity and these activities are relevant to his claims to be the final prophet and then what

I would do instead of just then stopping and saying so what do you say about that to sort of move back to a gospel issue would be to address for example one of now this is a whole other area so stop me if you don't want to go here but this is this is the core in the

Quran but as you and I both know this is not big enough to produce Islamic theology and law there's something called the

Hadith literature which are the sayings and actions of Muhammad and his companions that were collected over the next 300 -400 years and huge area of discussion you can get doctoral degrees in minute little areas of this study in Egypt and other places in Saudi Arabia Al -Azhar and places like that so huge distributes amongst

Muslims as to what is a Sahih Hadith that is a sound Hadith and things like that we won't go into that though I did cite many many

Hadith sources in the book you have to be able to explain things but there is a particular

Hadith and I did take the time over the past number of years

I converted the two largest collections Sahih al -Bukhari and Sahih Muslim to MP3 format and listened to all of it while riding my bike that's when

I do things like that I spent a lot of time on a bike so you find a tremendous amount of fascinating material in the

Hadith collections they're very very large but you find a story in the Hadith about how on the final day of judgment and this is called a

Mutawattar Hadith it's a Hadith that is universally accepted because of its background because it's being included in multiple collections so on and so forth but you have the

Hadith on the final day of judgment all mankind is going to be very frightened in front of Allah and they come to Adam and they ask

Adam to intercede for them and Adam says I cannot, this is not for me to do I was a sinner and so you need to go to and then they direct to the next person in the major chain of people so you've got

Moses, you've got Abraham down through the prophets and eventually they come and each one says this is not for me to do,

I sinned and such and then they come to Jesus and Jesus says this is not for me to do but he does not say it's because of sin that's one important aspect of it that needs to be kept in mind but what

Jesus does and this is why it's relevant to the character of Muhammad what Jesus does is he says go to Muhammad so here is a situation where you have the very thing that the

Christian scriptures say Jesus does do which is intercede for his people before the father the

Hadith is saying Jesus says that's not for me to do that's Muhammad's job and so my just sort of basic suggestion would be if you have to deal with the character of Muhammad at least connect it to something like this where you can say you know there's no evidence that the writer of the

Quran had ever read these words and you can go to Hebrews chapter 7 you can go to Hebrews chapter 9 you can go to Romans chapter 8 the one who died rather who was raised from the dead who intercedes for us introduce them to some of the because the vast majority of Muslims I've ever met have never read

Hebrews have never read Romans and so it gives you an opportunity of providing a contrast that then what you're hoping is the spirit of God will utilize that type of an opportunity so yeah the character of Muhammad needs to be analyzed fairly and I'm afraid that very often people consider it a compromise of their

Christian faith to extend fairness to someone they consider to be a false prophet

I simply say if I'm the follower of Jesus Jesus is the way the truth in life so I have to be truthful which means that if I attempt as best

I can to be completely fair and truthful in what I say then my actual criticism will carry more weight and be more effective than if I'm just trying to throw everything including the kitchen sink at Muhammad and see this is something

I learned decades before my first debate with a Muslim because there's an amazing number of parallels between Muhammad and a man by the name of Joseph Smith Jr.

and my first area of ministry and study was on the subject of Mormonism and I wrote a book again this book came out in 2014 so I wrote a book that came out a quarter of a century before this where I addressed false prophecies and issues in the character of Joseph Smith but I recognized even back then focus upon what you can absolutely document to the hilt be absolutely fair and don't go into stuff that is highly controversial in the sense of well he might have done this he might not have done that we're not really sure because that ends up blunting the real criticisms that you need to make of Joseph Smith I think it's exactly the same thing when you're dealing with Muhammad be fair be balanced and then run for the gospel as soon as you can which you can do using something like that Hadith story where you can introduce the

Muslim to something they've probably never heard before and really hope that in hearing what

Jesus does that beautiful text in Hebrews chapter 6 where he is that anchor for the soul he's gone into the holy place where he is he is our forerunner these are things they've never heard and so I'd much rather be talking about Jesus as my forerunner in the heavenly places than spending a whole bunch of time talking about the various character flaws of Muhammad I think something that is a positive conversation that you can have with Muslims is you touched upon this earlier is when you speak about the origins of the

Quran you can speak for instance about his doubts in actual fact you just mentioned that when

Muhammad received the revelation his first initial reaction was I'm possessed the jinn have taken me the other thing which

I also want to talk about because Christians don't really know it and you didn't go into great depth with this in your book is the different readings or the seven aroof which is also mentioned and what

I find is some Muslims don't even know that this really is an issue that's a completely other area because that drags us off into the entire which

I did mention briefly earlier when I said we are in the infancy stage of any kind of critical analysis of the text of the

Quran the Arabic Quran that the

Muslim carries about in most parts of the world anyways is the 1924 Egyptian edition that came out of Cairo and that was simply produced because the schools there wanted a standardized version this was not let's get together all our best manuscripts, our best scholars nothing like that at all this is the most uncritical text you could possibly have and yet it has become the so standardized so standardized is that Arabic text that I remember one particular

Islamic speaker Yasir Qadhi who has memorized all the Quran in Arabic he was lecturing and he had one of those senior moments when he's not all that senior where you just couldn't get something to come out right and he couldn't quote the one text he wanted to quote and so here's what he said he gave the name of the surah and he says it's on the right hand page at the top everybody knew and that was a real reference because the printings are all identical there's no differences whatsoever and so yeah if you went to that surah on the right hand page at the top that's what you're going to find that's how absolutely uniform the citations are well the problem is that uniform text no manuscript that we have of the

Quran is identical to that and yes as you pointed out the vast majority of Muslims have no idea there's a textual background behind this just as the vast majority of Christians don't know there's a textual background behind their own text even though all of our modern

Bibles have all those little notes in the margins or at the bottom of the page saying this manuscript says this, this manuscript says that you do not find that in the

Quran whatsoever this is as close as you're going to get and they really sort of stay away from that as well so that textual issue is vitally important because the

Muslim thinks ours is all messed up and theirs all say the same thing that's just not the case that's just not the case but they that is not the only people who discuss that are

Muslim scholars in somewhat secular Muslim countries like Turkey and those who are involved in apologetics other than that there's absolutely no discussion of that textual issue

I think it's vitally important I am concerned that sometimes Christians go way beyond what they should say about it because we don't have all the information so we can only make certain statements concerning the history of the

Islamic text there are some people that want to go so far as to say well we can just prove that we have no idea what the

Quran originally said it's 600 years younger than the New Testament which means it's had to go through a considerably less lengthy period of time of handwritten transmission.

I think we've got a pretty good idea of what the Quran originally said but the Muslim argument is there's never been so much as a well

I've heard some people say so much as a vowel point, well there weren't any vowel points originally so that's not a problem but so much as a letter of the

Quran changed and we have manuscripts where you can demonstrate that's just not the case so yeah but let's be honest they're not going to be overly likely to be learning too much of that stuff from us but if we can challenge and go back to their own scholars that can be definitely a useful area to get into but it requires a tremendous amount of specialized study

Agreed. You also mentioned in the beginning that it is important for us to focus specifically on the history of the

Quran and in your in the book you speak about the different methodologies and you spoke about the difference of inspiration between the

Christian revelation and the Quranic revelation you also mentioned in the book that there is a vast difference between the revelation of the

Quran and the multiple attested text like for instance the New Testament can you explain to us what you mean with that?

Yeah this is a I really wish especially

Christians living in areas where there are a large number of Muslims I really wish this would be something that they would get hold of because I really consider it to be extremely important that's why

I've debated it twice we debated it once in Pachastrum with Yusuf Ismail, I debated it in London with Adnan Rashid and this is the difference between the free transmission of the text of the

New Testament and the controlled transmission of the text of the Quran so let me explain what those two terms mean because obviously most people that's not the type of terminology people are normally utilizing.

When we say that the New Testament text was freely transmitted what we mean is there was no controlling group or authority that controlled the transmission of the text of the

New Testament. When you look at the New Testament, I'm talking only about the New Testament here, the Old Testament is a different issue and it's much more,

I mean we're talking apples and oranges here because the Old Testament text is so old so ancient in comparison to the

Quran that you can't really compare the two things but when you look at the

New Testament, you have multiple authors writing it multiple times to multiple audiences and so you don't have the

New Testament being produced in one place and then one copy of the

New Testament as a whole being copied off and sent here and copied off and sent there. That's not how it happened.

The Gospels are written separately from one another most of the New Testament is epistolary literature

Paul's writing from different places to different churches at different times and it only becomes collected over a period of time long after the original writers have passed on the scene.

So you don't have any one group that ever controls the text of the

New Testament because the persecution of the early church by the Romans, they had to be making a lot of copies because the

Romans were destroying copies and so you have multiple lines of transmission going all over Europe and so no one could control it.

So that's called a free transmission of the text. There's no external controlling source.

The Islamic sources themselves and of course there's dispute as to the accuracy of these but the

Islamic sources themselves refer us to what's called the

Uthmanic recension and specifically what you have is within a few years of Muhammad's death during the caliphate of Abu Bakr there is an initial collation made of the

Quran it's very plain from these sources the Quran did not exist as a singular literary body in Muhammad's lifetime.

Now I've had many a Muslim dispute that but the Muslim sources themselves are pretty clear on this.

That it was during Abu Bakr that there was the initial collection into one form one written form but only one manuscript was made, one mushaf was produced and it's years later during the third caliph's reign,

Uthman that people are starting to quote the Quran differently as the empire is expanding and so they come to Uthman and say save us from what happened to the

Jews and the Christians and so Uthman gets that earlier manuscript but he does a recension he puts together a committee says they find material that wasn't originally found, we were even given one of the verses that had not been in the original collection so there is an entire recension done by Uthman now there are other men such as Abdullah ibn

Masud that Muhammad himself had said was the one to go to he's the expert he was not involved in this and he was not overly appreciative of Uthman's recension.

Yeah and I think at one stage he even mentioned it no there's only 111 surahs there's not 114. Well Uba Ibn Kab had his number the numbers vary between 111 and 116 but especially in regards to just the text of the

Quran basically Ibn Masud said don't don't use

Uthman's stuff I'm the one that knows what's going on there and so to make a long story short

Uthman commanded he had copies written out and sent to the major Islamic cities and then he said anything else needs to be burned and we have evidence of this from outside Islamic sources as well which is which is really fascinating and I've gone into this in the debates we give the citations and so on and so forth anyway the point is that this is a controlled transmission this is a overarching power that is saying this is the version that we are going to transmit we are going to take this reading not that reading and that's a totally different methodology than you have in the

New Testament now a lot of folks who don't know anything about historical transmission of text would go well

I sort of like I sort of like Uthman's idea you know because I don't want those notes down at the bottom of the page so I sort of like this idea of an official thing the problem is how do you know

Uthman got it right especially in light with others saying he didn't why didn't he have it right and if you destroy their stuff then you have no way of comparing them to find out and so while we do have the

Romans destroying Christian scriptures they're doing it randomly it's Christian scripture we're going to burn it they're not doing it for a purpose they're trying to promote a particular perspective and so that free transmission going all over the

Mediterranean basin gives us significantly better foundation for understanding what the original

New Testament read than any kind of controlled transmission that you have in the

Quran you can only go back at best to Uthman depending on how successful he was he wasn't completely successful we know of specific readings that go back to Ibn Masud he seemed to be the big guy but we know that Ubay ibn

Kab had different numbers so on and so forth but still as far as full manuscripts and stuff like that go it wasn't until the

Sa 'ana manuscripts were found that we had anything that could be considered pre -Uthmanic or at least contemporary with Uthman so it was a much more complicated situation vast majority of Muslims don't know anything about what we were just talking about at all and almost no

Christians know about that same area but fundamentally this is the important thing it is far better to have a free transmission of a text than to have a controlled transmission of a text and we have a free transmission of a text combined with the fact we also have earlier manuscripts in the

New Testament than any other work of antiquity and we have more we have an embarrassment of riches as far as the massive documentation we have of the text of the

New Testament in comparison to the Quran which is 600 years younger the New Testament has gone through half a millennium extra period of time of handwritten transmission and yet I would say currently especially that the state of the study is the

Christian New Testament studies far beyond anything that Islam has produced at this point even though their text is younger for sure do you want to comment quickly on while we end just quickly while we are on this topic on the

Birmingham folio that was discovered and the age of that because a lot of Christian apologists use that to say that this predates even

Muhammad well the problem with that is the only way to date these things the way to date ancient manuscripts is always a subjective has a subjective element to it and even when you do radiometric dating you can it was very very common in the ancient world to utilize papyrus or not papyrus but parchment which is animal skin very expensive and when you would produce it you wouldn't just produce what you are going to need for one book you know if you are going to kill

Bessie the cow you are going to produce some extra in the process and keep it around and so the parchment can be much older than the text that is written upon it there is no evidence this is what is called a palimpsest where something has been washed off and written on top of it that I know of but basically

I say give it a while when stuff like this gets discovered there is going to be scholarly analysis it is going to take decades to really get to the bottom of it so that would be interesting but I wouldn't put a whole lot of weight on it as yet.