Where is the Injil?

Abu Loren wrote: I'm not going to debate with you because you have absolutely no understanding even of the Bible that you are defending.

We don't take him seriously because he is a fraud. He gets all of his information from anti-Islamic sites and post them here. To make matters worse we constantly discredit his claims by giving him valid proof but he keeps coming back.

I cannot speak for or against Experiential on all he writes, but the post I was referring to had useful information in it.

I submit that there are genuine words of Jesus' (pbuh) in the New Testament. However, the majority of the NT is 'doctored' and added later by Trinitarians.

Alas, my textual critical information, supplied in the critical apparati of my Greek New Testaments, Metzger's Textual Commentary, and my books on the text by Philip Comfort reveal a very different story, that no such doctoring occurred. You need to supply me with hard data on this. Asserting this in the light of the New Testament's very well studied textual history needs hard evidence. I need manuscripts, readings, dates. Have Islamic doctors thoroughly collated New Testament manuscripts? I need the had data to supplement the thorough hard data I have right here at my fingertips. Remember how I was able to rattle off the list of manuscripts concerning Luke 22:20? I didn't get those from my head or from the back of a cereal packet. ;o)

No because he cannot preserve something that is tainted.

Then Muhammad cannot be the Paraklete of John 14-16. This passage therefore cannot be relied on to prove that Jesus predicted Ahmad. Jesus is clear in the passage and the verse is totally undisputed in the textual tradition- the Paraklete is to remind us of ALL that Jesus taught. That means the Paraklete's job is specifically about preserving the Injeel. If it is tainted, Muhammad cannot be the Paraklete. If he cannot preserve the Injeel, Muhammad cannot be the Paraklete. That's my whole point. You can't win whatever you try on this one. But if you accept John 14-16 as authentic and be consistent, Jesus will jointly send with the Father another Paraklete in place of Himself, having gone to the Father, and through this Paraklete Jesus and the Father will live in the disciples, as in the actual disciples Jesus taught in person in AD 33. This Paraklete was already with the disciples and would be in them. This Paraklete is invisible, and the world cannot know Him. He comes from Heaven, not Arabia. This Jesus explicitly teaches in very Trinitarian language, undisputed in the manuscripts. Therefore if you adopt the Christian viewpoint and that Acts 2 shows the fulfilment of this promise, and that the Paraklete is the Holy Spirit as in God Himself, then you will have no problem.

    Not interested in going over these over and over again, it's pointless. We will just go around in circles.

And there lies the nub of the problem. You aren't interested enough.

In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful...

Experiential, your claims regarding the New Testament also seem to reflect poor research on your part.  You have simply repeated the standard claims of Christian apologetics with no scholarly evidence.  Please consider the following:

Experiential wrote: There are thousands of copies and fragments of the New Testament that we have today most of which pre date Mohammad. So obviously this would have been the same Injil Mohamad had access to in 600 AD. The New Testament is the most validated of all ancient writings. More ancient copies exist than any other ancient writing, for example the Roman history of Julius Caesar, and others. Plus these copies cover a huge and wide geographic area that prevents them from being gathered together and falsified. There are more than 24,000 partial and complete manuscript copies of the New Testament. These manuscript copies are very ancient and they are available for inspection now. There are also some 86,000 quotations from the early church fathers and several thousand Lectionaries (church-service books containing Scripture quotations used in the early centuries of Christianity). As a result the New Testament has an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting its reliability.

This is a common Christian argument.  "The NT has over 24,000 manuscripts!", they exclaim with great enthusiasm.  It sounds impressive until you consider the fact that the majority of these manuscripts are from medieval times, nor are there any originals.  According to Bart Ehrman:

"Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals." (Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why", p. 10)

In addition, the majority of these manuscripts are fragments, and not complete or even partially complete manuscripts, and there are numerous differences between them.   In fact, the number of differences is quite large, as Ehrman notes:

"...there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." (Ibid.)

Experiential wrote: Who are you to say the Gospels should begin with the words "The Gospel According To Jesus Christ....". As far as I�m concerned they have more credibility because they are not trying to announce any thing or prove any thing except the recording of history. And you can assume all you like but the facts speak for themselves. History and the Quaran both confirm the New Testament we have today as the Injil Mohammad had.

Actually, given the ancients' proclivity for forging documents in other people's names, even if the Gospels began with the words "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", it would not be definitive proof that the document was written by or on behalf of Jesus (pbuh).  In fact, as Ehrman notes, there were documents circulating which claimed to have been written by Jesus (Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, p. 8).  But I agree with you that "the facts speak for themselves". 

And here are the facts: It was common place for ancient writers to write important documents in the names of famous people.  This phenomenon was known to many ancient observers. Ehrman explains this phenomenon as follows:

"Ancient authors who talked about this practice of writing a book in someone else's name said that it was both lying and deceitful and that it was not an acceptable practice." (Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, p. 9)

He also notes:

"Many early Christian writings are 'pseudonymous,' going under a 'false name'.  The more common word for this kind of writing is 'forgery'..." (Ibid.)

Experiential wrote: Take a look at your Quran. What was Uthman afraid of when he burnt the first copies of the Quran? Because of the variations in the way the Qur'an was being memorized and recited after Muhammad's death this caused problems. Uthman and a team of others did a certain amount of editing to produce a standard text of the Qur'an. Then Uthman ordered that all other Qur'ans be burnt and his version be made the only standard version for the Muslim world. Oral and written tradition now had to conform to Uthman's standard version. The Bible has never had a wholesale burning to standardize its text in the way that the Qur'an was by Uthman. So much for the Quran being the infallible divine word of God.

This is another common Christian argument.  But it is, as usual, full of generalizations and very little in terms of facts.  I will deal with this issue in a separate post, inshaAllah.

Experiential wrote: In regards to the Dead Sea scrolls you need to do your research better. You are confusing the Old Testament Dead Sea scrolls found in 1946 in Israel with the Gnostic books found in Nag Hamadi Egypt in 1945. The Dead Sea scrolls were all Jewish (not New Testament) manuscripts that actually confirm the Old Testament Torah we have in the Bible today. There were no New Testament writings among them. They were not your lost Injil.

I agree with you here, partially.  The Dead Sea Scrolls were definitely all Jewish documents and no New Testament manuscripts were among them.  However, your claim that the Dead Sea Scrolls "actually confirm the Old Testament Torah we have in the Bible today" is not entirely accurate.

Here are some facts:

1.  Even though the Dead Sea Scrolls, as noted by scholar Geza Vermes, are generally believed to have been written between 200 BCE and 70 CE (The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 13), that would still put them a few centuries after the actual books of the Tanakh were written.  For example, the book of Isaiah is thought to have been written in the 8th century BCE (Ehrman, "Forged: Writing in the Name of God, p. 127), which would mean that the copy of Isaiah found in the Dead Sea Scrolls was written around 600 years later.  That would be like a copy of the Quran being written in the 13th century CE.  No one could rationally argue that such a copy would prove that the document in question has been faithfully preserved in all times.  There is a gap of hundreds of years which is not accounted for.

2.  The Dead Sea Scrolls contain not only the "canonized" books of the Tanakh, with the exception of Esther (Vermes, p. 11), but also apocryphal books.  Vermes notes:

"A good many further compositions pertaining to this class [the Pseudoepigrapha] have also come to light, such as fictional accounts relating among others to Joseph, Amram, Moses, Joshua or Jeremiah, as well as apocryphal psalms..." (Ibid.)

3.  Vermes also notes that in the Psalms Scroll from Cave II were "seven apocryphal poems, including Chapter LI of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, not annexed to, but interspersed among, the canonical hymns" (The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 16).  What this meant, explains Vermes, is:

"...that at Qumran the concept 'Bible' was still hazy, and the 'canon' open-ended, which would account for the remarkable freedom in the treatment of the text of the scripture by a community who life was nevertheless wholly centered on the Bible." (The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 17)

Given these facts, it is absurd to claim that the Dead Sea Scrolls "actually confirm the Old Testament Torah we have in the Bible today."  What they actually show is that the ancient Jews did not have a canon and were actually pretty liberal in their handling of the texts.

Experiential wrote: The Nag Hamadi books you are getting confused with were Gnostic �christian� writings with strong pagan influences particularly from Egypt, but also Persia, Rome, and Greece. They were written much later than the eye witness accounts of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John and in different languages .eg. Egyptian Coptic Christianity has the Jewish religion as its foundation and these Pagan and Gnostic texts do not line up with Jewish traditions. And as they were written later and not in the earlier languages they lack authority.

This is largely true.  But the Gnostic books are no different from the canonized books of the New Testament.  They share the same trait since they all claimed to be written by or in the names of Jesus or his disciples.  Therefore, like the canonized books of the New Testament are simply Christian "forgeries", the Gnostic books of the Nag Hammadi library are what Ehrman calls "Gnostic forgeries" (Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, p. 212).

Experiential wrote: The gospels have more credibility than your Sunna. The earliest copies of the Gospels date from the same generation of followers who knew Jesus. Unlike your Sunna which had been passed down mostly orally for more than a hundred years after Muhammad's death in AD 632. Unlike Christian history � those early Muslim believers would be gone.

These are simply more inaccurate statements on your part, without any corroborating evidence.  First, you made the bizarre claim that the "earliest copies of the Gospels date from the same generation of followers who knew Jesus".  Care to name any?  I know of perhaps just one; a fragment of the Gospel of John known as P52, which is dated to around 125-150 CE.  The rest of the "copies" were written at much later dates. 

Second, you made the ridiculous claim that the Sunnah "...had been passed down orally for more than a hundred years after Muhammad's death..."  Had you done your research, you would have known that the early Muslims actually put the Sunnah to paper in the first century of the Islamic calendar.  The earliest known compilation is known as "The Sahifa of Hammam bin Munabbih", which is dated to the mid-first century of the Islamic calendar.  Saifullah and Damiel noted regarding this compilation:

"We can see that of the 138 narrations in the Sahifa, 98 of them are faithfully witnessed in the later collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim, both through narrations of Abu Hurrairah and witnessing narrations from other Companions." 

Other first century compilations include "The Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani" and "The Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas", among others (Ibid).  Therefore, your claim that the Sunnah was passed down orally for 100 years is incorrect.

Experiential wrote: Add this to the fact that Mohamad and the Quaran were written 600 years later than the eye witness accounts of the gospels of Jesus, plus now we add extra hundred years.  Added to the fact that Caliph Uthman ibn Affan as the first to urge Muslims to write the Qur'an in a fixed form, and to record the hadith with no sources surviving directly from this period and that we are dependent on what later writers tell us about this period, doesn�t do much to add historical credibility or reliability for Islams writings.  And then Uthman's labors were cut short by his assassination. and then of course there are the Shia and Sunni differences in terms of what is acceptable with the hadith. Not a good look for Islam.   The hadith comes in last regarding credibility of truth and historical reliability.

As shown from the above, it is only "not a good look for Islam" if you make blanket statements with absolutely no evidence at all and which are actually completely at odds with the established facts.  As you said, the "facts speak for themselves".  Open your eyes and your mind and don't let polemical bias interfere with your search for the truth. 

And Allah knows best.

Hi,

I see that you have progressed from the Injil, (which was the Message of the Gospel, and never in book form until it was recorded in the Gospels), --- to discussing the NT, and the Quran.

It is interesting how you say, "These are the facts" when you refer to the Quran, but you disagree with the revelations that Gavriel gave to, and through, Muhammad.

The 27 books of the NT were confirmed in 367 AD, and accepted by all the Churches in 393. Shortly there after, the scholar Jerome, finished translating the Latin Vulgate about 400.

Muhammad was called about 600 AD and the angel Gabriel, who spoke to both Zechariah and Mary in the Gospel of Luke, are recorded the same way in Surah 19 (which was revealed first), and repeated in Surah 3.

--- So, it is totally true and accurate in the Quran, but not true in the Gospel

However, it was Gabriel who said this in Surah 3:
3 It is He (God) Who sent down to thee (step by step), in truth, the Book, confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus)

So if Gabriel 'confirmed' in 615 AD that the former Scriptures were true, --- then the simple deduction is that you don't believe the revelations of Gabriel, therefore, you don't really believe the Quran, where it 'verifies' the former Scriptures.

I believe the revelations that Gabriel gave to Muhammad, and were recorded by human hands, --- even if you do not.

Jesus said more than once, that all that God revealed to Him, He gave to the disciples. So all of the Message of the Injil was repeated by Jesus, and recorded bu human hands.

The easy way to read the whole Gospel/Injil, is to get a 'Red Letter Edition' where all the words of Jesus are in RED. --- Just read the red parts, and don't miss what is in the Book of Revelation.

--- Remeber again, that this was 'confirmed' as true bu Gabriel about 615 AD, when Surah 3 was revealed.
--- (And there have been no changes since then either.)


Placid