Topic 1.

The Accuracy of the Qur'an and the Bible

A. Introduction

Thank you for the privilege of speaking to you tonight. We live in a great day of opportunity. Never before have we been able to seek out the truth on the issues that really matter as we can today. With privilege comes responsibility. The issues our two religions raise deserve the most careful, fair, and objective study that we can apply. None of us has the luxury of blindly following what we want to believe is true. No one likes to have their holy books or beliefs criticized. But, we must examine them and seriously listen to the questions and criticisms others raise about them. We must, because first of all, our eternal destinies are at stake. And second, Truth is too important, too precious, too wonderful to use as a pawn in partisan religious arguments. The standards of criticism I use will be fairly applied to both books. I am a committed Christian and I believe with all my heart the truth of the Christian faith and the teaching of the Bible. But I also recognize that if anyone's faith is to be based on truth it must be able to stand up to hard questions and criticism. In examining the accuracy of the Qur'an and the Bible there are many ways the topic can be approached. There are many kinds of evidence. Accuracy is a broad word. I am going to examine one aspect of accuracy, the crucial one of historical reliability. Because of time limitations, I am only going to emphasize the evidence for the part of the Bible that is most crucial to tonight's dialogue: the Gospels in the New Testament of the Bible. The question is, do these four Gospels present a historically accurate picture of Jesus? Do they present His actual words, teaching, and claims? Concerning the Qur'an, does it present a historically accurate picture of Jesus? Basic to all of our thinking tonight, both mine and I think Mr. Ally's, is that revelation from God should at the very least be historically accurate. We believe that God does not leave Himself and His acts in time without adequate witness or testimony. And that is what we are here to examine tonight--the historical evidence God has left concerning Jesus Christ.

B. The gospels

The Gospels of the New Testament are the most reliable written testimony we have concerning the life and teaching of Jesus the Messiah. This is borne out by the available historical evidence. What do I mean by historical evidence? I mean actual manuscripts recording Jesus' teaching and actions. I mean other ancient documents that confirm the accuracy of the Gospels. I mean archaeological evidence. We do not have the original handwritten manuscripts of the Gospels, but we do have actual copies of portions of them from within a generation of the lives of the Apostles. We have the sermons and letters of Christians who personally knew the Apostles, and these Christians quoted from the four Gospels and the other writings of the Apostles. We have 230 portions of the New Testament, from small bits to entire New Testaments, from within the 500 year period before Muhammad was born. And since the time of Muhammad, we have thousands of manuscripts of the Gospels and New Testament that further confirm the contents and authenticity of the earlier portions. This manuscript evidence has been exhaustively researched for changes and mistakes through the science of textual criticism so that we know that the text of the New Testament is 99.5% pure as far as how it compares with the original. Also, other literary evidence and archaeological evidence has confirmed that the Gospels and other New Testament books were written within the first century after Christ's birth, and the great majority of them before 70 AD, well within the lifetimes of the Apostles of Jesus Christ and His other first followers. The conclusion from this evidence, which is documented in many books, is what the Gospels claim for themselves: that they are eyewitness testimony of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, the honest accounts of men and women who spent three years with Jesus as He conducted His miraculous ministry.

C. The Qur'an

How accurate is the Qur'an concerning the historical facts of the life of Jesus Christ? First of all, it must be noted that the Qur'an came to be written down 600 years after the events of Jesus' life. It is the testimony of a book that claims to be revelation from God, but as mentioned earlier, revelation should be at least historically accurate. The account of Jesus' life and teaching from the Qur'an is very different from that in the Gospels. In fact, it contradicts the Gospels onmany of the most important claims of Christ and events of His life, especially the crucifixion and resurrection. From a historian's point of view, in order for the Qur'an's view to be more accurate than one written by eyewitnesses 600 years earlier, it would have to come with evidence showing that its testimony was at least as historically plausible, and ideally with evidence that the other view was wrong. Does the Qur'an do this? No, instead it asserts its account of Jesus is the correct one solely on the basis of its claim to be revelation, without providing the evidence to back up its assertion.

D. Revelation as a proof

It is not enough to assert the Qur'an is revelation, and then on that basis assert it has the right to correct the Biblical Gospels. Even supporting the Qur'an with arguments like its inimitability, or asserting it is free from contradictions is not sufficient to establish its authority to correct the Gospels. None of these kinds of evidence is relevant to correcting historical evidence, nor do they establish the ultimate truth of the Qur'an, or the Qur'an's authority over any other book. For instance, the claim that the Qur'an is unsurpassed in its linguistic beauty and style in Arabic is irrelevant in overturning historical evidence, and is also irrelevant for non-Arabic speakers. At most, if true, it can only prove the Qur'an is the most beautiful book in the Arabic language. Asserting it is free from contradictions can at most, if true, only prove it is consistent, which is something we would expect from even ordinary books written by a single author.

E. Muslim use of western Biblical criticism

Some Muslims seek to assert the Qur'an's authority over the Bible by attempting to show that the four Gospels of the New Testament are corrupted. A popular way of attempting this these days is by trying to show that they are the products of a long and varied literary development from an Islamic-style Injil, and that the original view of Jesus has been changed almost beyond recognition. They then assert the Qur'an has the right to impose its view of Jesus as the right one. But this is putting the cart before the horse. First it needs to be proved why the Qur'an even has a right to pass such judgement on the Gospels. Why should a book from the 7th century which claims to be revelation have the right to correct a 1st century book recording the testimony of eyewitnesses? Muslims who use this method don't establish the Qur'an's right to do this. Rather they are just criticizing the Gospels. And this manner of criticizing the Gospels is illegitimate. It is wrong. By borrowing from an extremely skeptical branch of Western scholarship some Muslims develop clever, hypothetical literary theories about the development of legends concerning Jesus. They say that after a long period of oral tradition which developed these legends they were eventually written down in the gospels we now possess. They then present their theories as fact without any actual manuscript evidence. Skeptical Western Scholars have developed their theories mainly because they do not believe in miracles. Muslims borrow this thinking from extreme, skeptical Western scholars, not because they don't believe in miracles, but because they need to create a version of Jesus that agrees with the Qur'an. Without attempting to prove that the Qur'an has a right to change the message of the uncorrupted Gospels, they criticize the existing Gospels and try to make them somehow fit their agenda. This is imposing a view on a text, not presenting historical evidence. It is wrong and misguided. Also, if these Western methods are used on the Qur'an in the same way Muslims use them on the Bible, the Qur'an comes out in even worse shape because there is a 150 year gap between the events of Muhammad's life and the earliest copies of the Qur'an and the earliest Muslim historical sources. Not only is this method flawed at the outset, Muslims are using a double standard when they use it against the Bible but not the Qur'an.

F. Contradictions

Some Muslims also make a big point of looking for contradictions in the Bible. They think they must do this to uphold the Qur'an's claim to supersede the Bible since the Qur'an claims that true revelations will not have any discrepancies in them. But if one goes with that intent, of course one can find problems. If someone approaches anything with a bias of skepticism, it will be hard to be convinced out of that bias. Most Muslims I have talked with consciously or unconsciously have a bias against the Bible, not necessarily because they have studied it with an open mind, but because their belief in the Qur'an's absolute authority requires this bias of them. Also, we would expect a book with one author to not have contradictions. The Bible has more than 40 human authors that God used in writing it. It only stands to reason that there would be things that at first glance would look like discrepancies. But I have found that if you go with an open mind and search for real answers, you tend to find good answers to the difficulties the skeptics raise. Instead of these illegitimate methods, do these Muslim critics present manuscript evidence of an Islamic-style Injil? Do they present other documentary evidence? Do they present archaeological evidence? No, they do none of these. Rather, they just criticize the existing Gospels on the basis of false assumptions. The more appropriate, scholarly, legitimate approach, if a Muslim wanted to prove the existence of the Injil that the Qur'an speaks of, is to produce that actual Injil, or present alternative historical evidence that is at least equally credible as the present Gospels. This would mean presenting actual manuscript evidence that shows actual changes to the present gospels so that one can see corruption or a revisionist approach to the life of Jesus at work. Another line of legitimate evidence would be for historical, documentary evidence of some meeting or committee that gathered and made the necessary changes to all the Bibles and translations, and then destroyed the originals. Permit me to make one more observation. If one carefully reads the Qur'an and its testimony to the prior Scriptures, one comes away convinced that Muhammad believed the real Injil was in existence in his day and available for any to study it. If this was so, then Muslims should have preserved it so that Christians could be properly corrected.

G. Conclusion

In conclusion, the Gospels of the New Testament of the Bible are the testimony of eyewitnesses and their companions to the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. If Muslims want to assert they have been corrupted from an Islamic-style Injil, then the burden of proof rests with them to present actual historical evidence that these changes have taken place, and that the Islamic-style Injil existed in reality. Attempts to assert the Qur'an's authority on the basis of revelation must be backed up with historical evidence of an equal or greater quality than what exists for the Biblical Gospels. Thank you for listening. If any one here would like to receive a free New Testament and a free copy of a book explaining the historical evidence for the Gospels in more detail, please write to me through my website, http://www.spotlights.org There will be cards with the website address as you go out. Thank you very much