Response to Answering Islam's Article, "The Muslim who-when-where-how-what-why-multi-problem"

by

Bassam Zawadi

Their article can be read here.

This is what they said:

Many Muslims claim that the Bible has been tampered with and corrupted.

Any event in real life reality with human agents has certain characteristics and conditions attached to it. Any such act is done by one or more particular persons, at one or more specific times, in a certain fashion, in certain places, and for a reason. I hope everybody can agree with that.

So, to make your claim of tampering credible you will have to answer these questions:

·  When happened this tampering? [Before or after Muhammad]?

·  Who did the tampering?

·  Where was it done? [city, country, ...?]

·  What parts of the text were changed?

·  How was it done [i.e. without leaving traces of it]?

·  Why would anybody do this incredibly difficult thing?

No Muslim could ever answer these questions. I wonder why?? Maybe because it is such an incredible feat that would require more than a miracle do get done? Believing in the tampering needs a lot of faith. Blind faith, against the manuscript evidence we have.

The reason why I am writing this brief response is to show Muslims how ignorant many Christians are regarding Islam's stance towards the Christian and Jewish scriptures.

Based on the statements made above, you can see that some (if not many or all) Christians think that Islam teaches that there was once an originally inspired Bible and then that the Bible, over time, became corrupted.

So, that would imply that Muslims believe that there was once an originally inspired Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, or the Book of Corinthians, Ephesians, etc., and then these books became corrupted over time.

This is absolutely false. Islam states that there originally were inspired revelations sent down to Prophets David, Moses, Jesus, etc. (peace be upon them all) (Surah 2:136-137) and that these revelations were distorted over time either by misinterpretation or by textual corruption by mixing the true inspired words with false ones. (see here)

Thus, we believe that true parts of the word of God are in the Bible because they found their way there to be present in it. To distinguish what is true and false, we use the Qur'an and authentic Prophetic traditions as our criterion.

So Muslims do not believe that there originally were inspired Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and that they then became corrupted over time.

We believe in the original Gospel revealed to Jesus (peace be upon him). However, some of his true teachings found their way into these Gospels written by people after him. The same applies to Moses (peace be upon him).

Thus, the definition of Gospel or Torah in the Islamic perspective is different from the Christian perspective. Many Christian scholars believe that parts of the Pentateuch (a.k.a. Torah) were authored by Moses' scribes. Also, no Christian believes the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John were revealed to Jesus but only written after his death. Therefore, Muslims are clearly speaking about other revelations than what Christians have in mind.

Christians have to stop coming up to Muslims, telling them that since we believe in the inspiration of the Gospel, then we must accept statements of Jesus that we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Because this is not the Gospel that Muslims believe is inspired.

Christians also need to stop thinking that they are somehow 'scoring points' when Muslims don't present to them earlier Biblical manuscript evidence that shows that the 'true Bible' is different than theirs. We don't even believe that most Biblical authors are inspired to begin with.

Muslims won't even care if Christians have the original manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. We don't even know who these people are in the first place (in the sense that we are not sure of the reliability of the authorship of these Gospels)

For more on Islam's perspective on the Bible, please visit this section of my site.

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