Witnessing to Muslim's, part 4 - Our Bible

Welcome to Lesson 4 on Witnessing to Muslims. If you've ever engaged in a conversation with a

Muslim, you have quickly discovered that there's one thing they all seem to be very familiar with, and yet unfortunately very ignorant of the truth.

And unfortunately more so, most Christians are also ignorant on the subject.

The subject is known as Hierocriticism or Textual Criticism. And what they'll often do is make the argument this way.

The Muslim would say to the Christian, well, there's so many different Bibles, which one is the real one?

They'll argue that they have only one Quran. Well, let's examine this in its context of what really they're saying when they say these things.

When they say there's multiple Bibles, if you question them, typically what they are referring to is multiple translations.

Sometimes they'll even say, well, you have the King James and you have the New International and you have New King James, which one's the right one?

Notice those are translations. There's one original manuscript in the

Greek and in the Hebrew, and really the issue there is, is there only one

Bible or do translations count as a Bible? They don't have the issue as much because they would see translations of the

Quran into other languages as not being the Quran, only the

Quran in Arabic, which by the way, just as a note, when they say they only have one, they ignore the fact that the third

Caliph, 18 years after Muhammad died, Caliph Umar, had said to gather up all of the texts of the

Quran and burn the abhorrent texts, meaning there were more copies of the

Quran because they were transcribed, written down, started to disseminate, they gathered them up and burned the others so that they only had one version.

The only reason to gather the others would mean that there were multiple versions. They had copying errors at best as well.

Now we can take a look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and know that we look at the Old Testament today in Hebrew, the

Old Testament of Dead Sea Scrolls, which goes back a thousand years before the earliest ones that we had and we notice they're the same.

There hasn't been all these changes that they claim. So when you get into the discussion, they're often going to say which

Bible is the real one and you need to disseminate the difference between a translation of the Bible into another language and the actual

Bible. Now it is true that there are some multiple manuscripts of the

Greek and if you look into those things, people that do higher criticism and textual criticism and investigate these things in the different ways, one of the things that comes out of all that is yes, there's two main families of manuscripts and we know exactly where all the differences are because the same copying errors have been propagated and we notice that not a single one of them affects doctrine.

There are things like numbers, a number being wrong or things like that. None of it affects doctrine.

So the question is, do we have a reliable copy of the

Bible? Yes, we do. We have something we can trust in as God's Word and because we have more manuscripts of the

Bible than any other book in antiquity, we know we have a pretty authoritative source of what it is.

It is more evidence to the Bible's accuracy than any other book in antiquity.

And so if we want to look at that, there's the tens of thousands of manuscripts.

We have the evidence. Most Muslims are unaware of that because they've been told one side of the story.

I remember talking to a Muslim who I happened to be at the gym with and started up a conversation on a treadmill.

It's not always easy to start a gospel conversation on a treadmill. But it was interesting how he knew nothing of the origins of the

Bible, but was so sure that we didn't have the Bible and he based it on a difference between King James and New King James and New International Standard.

He didn't understand that and I asked him, if I was to argue that I have several different translations of the

Quran, would you accept that there's differences in the Quran? He says, no, those don't count.

Those aren't in Arabic. And I said, well then your English translations don't count. They're not in Greek and Hebrew.

And this is a problem that they end up doing. They don't understand the difference of a translation and the actual original manuscripts.

Hope that this was helpful. I tried to keep it down at an easier level. Didn't want to get into all the work on it.

But if you study out some of those criticisms, you'll see there's a lot of evidence. There's people that try to use those criticisms, higher criticism, textual criticism, to debunk the

Bible. But the more you actually look into that evidence, the more you see we've got a pretty accurate

Bible and we can rest assure and trust in that Word of God.

So my challenge to you today is to go out, strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.