Hamza Andreas Tzortzis. Version 1.0, September 2014.

A Common Word

• Say, ‘People of the Book, let us arrive at a

statement that is common to us all: we

worship God alone, we ascribe no partner to

Him, and none of us takes others beside

God as lords.’ If they turn away, say,

‘Witness our devotion to Him.’ Qur’an 3:64

Biblical Christianity

• The word Christian comes from the Greek

word christianos Χριστιανός which is derived from

the word christos or Christ, which means “anointed

one”.

• A Christian, then, is someone who is a follower of

Christ. The first use of the word “Christian” in

the Bible is found in Acts 11:26, “And the disciples

were called Christians first in Antioch.” It is found

only twice more in Acts 26:28 and 1 Pet. 4:16.

Christian Beliefs

Discussion theological

matters related to

scripture concerning the

statements of the authors

can be counter-

productive.

Most theological positions

come from the Bible therefore

going straight to the source

(foundations) is far more

productive. If the foundations

are weak or false, then what

emanates from the foundations

is also false.

The Argument

1. For revelation to be Divine, it must have historical

integrity. Its authenticity must be established.

2. The Bible we have today is not authentic, it

cannot be traced back to its origins.

3. Therefore the Bible is not from the Divine.

The Muslim View on the Bible

The Qur’anic View

• “So woe to those who write something down with their own hands and then claim, ‘This is from God,’ in order to make some small gain. Woe to them for what their hands have written! Woe to them for all that they have earned!” Qur’an 2:79

• “…and said, ‘We have killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the Messenger of God.’ They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, though it was made to appear like that to them; those that disagreed about him are full of doubt, with no knowledge to follow, only supposition: they certainly did not kill him.” Qur’an 4:157

The Prophetic Traditions • Ibn ‘Abbaas said, “How can you ask the people of the

Scriptures about their Books while you have Allah’s Book (the Qur’an) which is the most recent of the Books revealed by Allah, and you read it in its pure undistorted form?” Bukhari,Volume 9, Book 93, Number 613

• Abdullah bin ‘Abbaas said, “O the group of Muslims! How can you ask the people of the Scriptures about anything while your Book which Allah has revealed to your Prophet contains the most recent news from Allah and is pure and not distorted? Allah has told you that the people of the Scriptures have changed some of Allah's Books and distorted it and wrote something with their own hands...” Bukhari,Volume 9, Book 93, Number 614

The View of al-Tabari • “What is meant by this: It is referring to those

who distorted the book of Allah from the Jews of Bani Israel, and they wrote a book on which they put their interpretations in opposition to that which was revealed by Allah to his Prophet Moses peace be upon him, then they sold it to a people who have no knowledge of what is in it nor what is in the Torah and are ignorant of what is in the books of Allah in order to gain worthless materialistic benefits.” Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Jami' al-

bayan fi ta'wil al-Qur'an, Commentary on Surah 2:79

Al-Tabari on Surah 5: 13 • “They distort the speech of their Lord, which

He sent down to their Prophet Moses peace be

upon him, and that is the Torah, they substitute

it and write from their own hands other than

what Allah has revealed to their Prophet and

they say to the ignorant ones of their people

‘This is the speech of Allah that He sent down to

His Prophet Moses peace be upon him and the

Torah that He revealed to him.’” Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Jami' al-

bayan fi ta'wil al-Qur'an, Commentary on Surah 5:13

The View of Ibn Hazm • “We do not need to try hard to prove that the Gospels and

all the books of the Christians did not come from God or

from the Messiah (peace be upon him), as we needed to

do with regard to the Torah and the books attributed to

the Prophets that the Jews have, because the Jews claim

that the Torah that they have was revealed from God to

Musa, so we needed to establish proof that this claim of

theirs is false. With regard to the Christians, they have

taken care of the issue themselves, because they do not

believe that the Gospels were revealed from God to the

Messiah, or that the Messiah brought them...” Ibn Hazm, Al-

Fasl fi'l Milal, Volume 2, p. 2

The View of Ibn Taymiyyah • “With regard to the Gospels that the Christians have,

there are four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and

John. They are agreed that Luke and Mark did not see

the Messiah; rather he was seen by Matthew and John.

These four accounts that they call the Gospel, and they

call each one of them a Gospel, were written by these

men after the Messiah had been taken up into heaven.

They did not say that they are the word of God or that

the Messiah conveyed them from God, rather they

narrated some of the words of the Messiah and some

of his deeds and miracles.” Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Jawaab al-Saheeh,

3:21

Views of Ibn Kathir • Ibn Kathir’s commentary on Surah Al

Ma’ida: “Now has come to you Our Messenger

explaining to you much of that which you used to

hide from the Scripture and passing over much

[5:15]. So the Prophet explained where they

altered, distorted, changed and lied about

Allah. He also ignored much of what they

changed, since it would not bring about any

benefit if it was explained.”Tafsir Ibn Kathir

Ibn Kathir on Previous Scriptures

• “In reference to the previously revealed

Divine Books, by which this Qur’an

testifies to the true parts that remain in

them and denies and refutes the forged

parts that were added, changed and

falsified by people. The Qur'an accepts or

abrogates whatever Allah wills of these

Books.”Tafsir Ibn Kathir

Ibn Kathir & Adam in the Bible

“This story in the Old

Testament is a falsification and

deception.”

Ibn Kathir, The Stories of the Prophets,

Chapter on Prophet Adam

Ibn Kathir on Torah & Gospels

• “As for the Arabic Torah in their hands, no sane person doubts its

alteration, textual corruption, change of stories and words,

additions and obvious clear omissions. Glaring lies and extreme

errors are so abundant in it. As regards what they recite with their

tongues and write with their pens, we have no access to, but it is

assumed they are dishonest liars who frequently invent forgeries

against Allah, His Messengers and Books.”

• “As for Christians, their four Gospels on authority of Marks, Luke,

Matthew and John are much more divergent and different by

addition and omission than the Torah. They disobeyed the rulings

of the Torah and the Injil in so many things they legalized for

themselves.” Ibn Kathir, Al-Bidayah wa Al-Nihayah, Volume 2, pages 152-153

The Canonisation of the Bible

Early Church Fathers

None of the

following Early

Church Fathers

referred to the

books of the

New Testament

as scriptures.

Ignatius of Antioch

Hermas of Rome

Clement of Rome

Polycarp of Smyrna

Papias of Heirapolis

Barnabas

Clement of Rome • “By way of summary, we see that Clement’s Bible is the Old Testament,

to which he refers repeated as Scripture, quoting it with more or less

exactness. Clement also makes occasional reference to certain words of

Jesus; though they are authoritative to him, he does not appear to

enquire how their authenticity is ensured. In two of the three instances

that he speaks of remembering ‘the words’ of Christ or of the Lord

Jesus, it seems that he has a written record in mind, but he does not call

it a ‘gospel’. He knows several of Paul's epistles, and values them highly

for their content; the same can be said of the Epistle of the Hebrews

with which he is well acquainted. Although these writings obviously

possess for Clement considerable significance, he never refers to

them as authoritative ‘Scripture’.” Bruce Metzger, The Canon Of The New

Testament: Its Origin, Significance & Development, p. 49

Ignatius Of Antioch

• “The upshot of all this is that the primary authority for Ignatius

was the apostolic preaching about the life, death, and

resurrection of Jesus Christ, though it made little difference to

him whether it was oral or written. He certainly knew a

collection of Paul's epistles, including (in the order of

frequency of his use of them) 1 Corinthians, Ephesians,

Romans, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1

Thessalonians. It is probable that he knew the Gospels

according to Matthew and John, and perhaps also Luke. There

is no evidence that he regarded any of these Gospels or

Epistles as ‘Scripture’.” Bruce Metzger, The Canon Of The New Testament: Its

Origin, Significance & Development, p. 49

Later Church Fathers

• The Canons of the Later Church Fathers:

– Irenaeus:

• Omits: 2 & 3 John, James, Jude, 2 Peter, Acts

• Contains: Hermas

– Clement of Alexandria:

• Omits: 1, 2 & 3 John, 1 & 2 Peter, Revelation, James

• Contains: Barnabas, Apocalypse of Peter

– Origen:

• Omits: James, Jude, Acts

Different Canons in the

Early Church • The notion of a closed NT canon was not a 2nd

century development in the early church.

• There were still considerable differences of opinion

about what should comprise that canon even in the 4th

or 5th centuries.

• There was never a time in the 4th or 5th centuries,

however, when the whole church adopted as

Scripture all of the 27 books of the NT and those

books alone.

Different Canons Today • “Only during the Reformation did the Catholics achieve

unity on the NT canon with the decree by the Council of Trent, but by that time Luther had already denied full canonical status of James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, not to mention the deuterocanonical books (the Apocrypha). The Protestants have affirmed, with Luther, the shorter OT canon, while the Eastern Orthodox has a larger canon than the Roman Catholics. Quite apart from these traditional church communions, the Ethiopian church, which traces its roots to the fourth-century church, claims a canon of some eighty-one books. At no time in history has the whole church agreed completely on what literature should make up its canon of Scriptures.”Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon, 2007, p. 383

Protestant Church • “Historically, Protestant churches have recognized the

Hebrew canon as their Old Testament, although differently ordered, and with some books divided so that the total number of books is thirty-nine. These books, as arranged in the traditional English Bible, fall into three types of literature: seventeen historical books (Genesis to Esther), five poetical books ( Job to Song of Solomon), and seventeen prophetical books. With the addition of another twenty-seven books (the four Gospels, Acts, twenty-one letters, and the book of Revelation), called the New Testament, the Christian scriptures are complete.” Bruce M Metzger & Michael D Coogan (Ed.), Oxford Companion To The Bible, 1993, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, pp. 79 (Under “Bible”).

Roman Catholic Church • “The Protestant canon took shape by rejecting a number of books

and parts of books that had for centuries been part of the Old

Testament in the Greek Septuagint and in the Latin Vulgate, and had

gained wide acceptance within the Roman Catholic church. In

response to the Protestant Reformation, at the Council of Trent (1546)

the Catholic church accepted, as deuterocanonical, Tobit, Judith, the

Greek additions to Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch,

the Letter of Jeremiah, three Greek additions to Daniel (the Prayer of

Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, and Bel and the

Dragon), and I and 2 Maccabees. These books, together with those in

the Jewish canon and the New Testament, constitute the total of

seventy three books accepted by the Roman Catholic church.” Bruce M

Metzger & Michael D Coogan (Ed.), Oxford Companion To The Bible, 1993, Oxford

University Press, Oxford & New York, pp. 79 (Under “Bible”).

Greek Orthodox Church • “The Bible of the Greek

Orthodox church comprises all of the books accepted by the Roman Catholic church, plus I Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and 3 Maccabees. The Slavonic canon adds 2 Esdras, but designates I and 2 Esdras as 2 and 3 Esdras. Other Eastern churches have 4 Maccabees as well.” Bruce M Metzger & Michael D Coogan (Ed.), Oxford Companion To The Bible, 1993, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, pp. 79 (Under “Bible”).

Anglican Church • “The Anglican church falls between the

Catholic church and many Protestant denominations by accepting only the Jewish canon and the New Testament as authoritative, but also by accepting segments of the apocryphal writings in the lectionary and liturgy. At one time all copies of the Authorized or King James Version of 1611 included the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments.”Bruce M Metzger & Michael D Coogan (Ed.), Oxford Companion To The Bible, 1993, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, pp. 79 (Under “Bible”).

The Criteria of Canonicity • “A basic prerequisite for canonicity was conformity

to what was called the rule of faith, that is the congruity of a given document with the basic Christian tradition recognised as normative by the Church. Just as under the Old Testament the message of a prophet was to be tested not merely by the success of the predictions but by the agreement of the substance of the prophecy with the fundamentals of Israel’s religion, so also under the new covenant it is clear that writings which came with any claim to be authoritative were judged by the nature of their content.” Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 1987, p. 251-2

Fallacious Reasoning

• The Church attempted to establish the basis

of its worldview by reference to an agreed

upon text, the Bible.

• However, the key criterion to establish the

Bible was that its contents had to agree with

what as recognised as normative in the

Church tradition.

• But this exposes a vicious circle…

Vicious Circle

• The Church’s teachings and traditions are true

because the come from the Bible. The Bible is

true because it agrees with the Church’s

teachings and traditions.

Disputes During the Reformation

• Zwingli, was a leader of the Reformation in Switzerland, at

the Berne disputation of 1528, denied that Revelation was a

book of the New Testament.

• Martin Luther condemned the Epistle of James as

worthless; an ‘epistle of straw’. Furthermore, he denigrated

Jude, Hebrews, and the Apocalypse (Revelation). He did

not omit them from his German Bible, but drew a line in

the table of contents, putting them on a lower level than the

rest of the New Testament. In Prefaces to each of these

books, Luther explains his doubts as to their apostolic as

well as canonical authority.

Refo

rmers

• The reformer known as Andreas Bodenstein of Karlstadt (1480-1541)

divided the New Testament into three ranks of differing dignity. On

the lowest level are the seven disputed books of James, 2 Peter, 2 and

3 John, Jude, Hebrews, and the Apocalypse (Revelation).

• Oecolampadius in 1531 under Wurttemberg Confession declared that

while all 27 books should be received, the Apocalypse (Revelation),

James, Jude, 2 Peter 2 and 3 John should not be compared to the rest

of the books.

• Early in his career, Erasmus (d. 1536) doubted that Paul was the

author of Hebrews, and James of the epistle bearing the name. He

also questioned the authorship of 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude. The

style of Revelation precludes it from being written by the author of

the Fourth Gospel.

• The same four books are labelled ‘Apocrypha’ in a Bible from

Hamburg in 1596. In Sweden, beginning in 1618, the Gustavus

Adolphus Bible labels the four dubious books as ‘Apocryphal New

Testament.’ This arrangement lasted for more than a century.

The Corruption of the Gospel

How Accurate? BOOK TOTAL # OF

VERSES

VARIANT

FREE VERSES

PERCENTAGE

MATTHEW 1071 642 59.9%

MARK 678 306 45.1%

LUKE 1151 658 57.2%

JOHN 869 450 51.8%

TOTAL 3769 2056 54.5%

Table showing the total number of variant free verses in the four Gospels when Nestle-Aland

edition is compared with the other critical editions such as that of Tischendorf, Westcott-

Hort, von Soden, Vogels, Merk, and Bover.

Earliest Manuscripts

Book

Earliest

Manuscript Date (CE) Condition

Matthew P64, P67, P104 c. 200 Fragments

Mark P45 3rd century

Large

Fragments

Luke P4 c. 200 Fragment

John P52 c. 125-150 Fragment

1 John P9 3rd century Fragment

2 John 232 3rd / 4th century Fragment

A complete listing of the first appearance of New Testament books in

manuscripts, along with their condition and dates.

Manuscript Evidence • “The autographs may well have perished before the 2nd

century. In any event, none of them now survive. What do

survive are the copies made over the course of centuries, or

more accurately, copies of the copies of the copies, some

5,366 of them in the Greek language alone that date from

the 2nd century down to the 16th. Strikingly, with the

exception of the smallest fragments, no two of these

copies are exactly alike in all their particulars. No one

knows how many differences, or variant readings, occur

among the surviving witnesses, but they must number in

the hundreds of thousands.” Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption

of the Scriptures, 1993, p. 27

The New Testament Changed • “It is not simply a matter of scholarly speculation to say that the words

of the New Testament were changed in the process of copying. We

know they were changed because we can compare all 5,400 copies

with one another. What is striking is that when we do so we find

that no two of these copies (except the smallest fragments) agree in

all of their wording. There can be only one reason for this: the scribes

who copied the texts changed them. No body knows for certain how

often they changed them, because no one has yet been able to count all

of the differences among the surviving manuscripts. Some estimates put

the number at around 200,000, others at around 300,000. Perhaps it is

simplest to express the figure in comparative terms: there are more

differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New

Testament.”Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction

to the Early Christian Writings, 2004, p. 480-1

Mark

16

:9-2

0 • Virtually every translation, since the King James Version, has

separated Mark 16:9-20 from the rest of the text of Mark. This is

primarily because it does not appear in the two major manuscripts

of the New Testament: the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.

• One of the strongest arguments against the authenticity of Mark

16:9-20 is in a comparison of Mark 16:12-13 with Luke 24:33-35:

– Mark says that when the two unidentified disciples returned to

Jerusalem after seeing Jesus in the country, they told the rest what

they had seen, “but they did not believe them either” – just as they

had not believed what the women told them they had found at the

tomb. Luke, though, says that when the two came to Jerusalem, the

disciples there greeted the two with the news that Jesus had risen.

He adds that the two then told the others about having seen Jesus

themselves “on the way.” It is hard to see how those two statements

are harmonious. One way of eliminating the apparent contradiction

would be to say that Mark 16:9-20 is not genuine and that it is

therefore not a part of Scripture.

No Two Exactly Agree

• “Of the approximately five thousand Greek manuscripts of all or part

of the New Testament that are known today, no two agree exactly in

all particulars. Confronted by a mass of conflicting readings, editors

must decide which variants deserve to be included in the text and which

should be relegated to the apparatus. Although at first it may seem to be

a hopeless task amid so many thousands of variant readings to sort out

those that should be regarded as original, textual scholars have

developed certain generally acknowledged criteria of evaluation. These

considerations depend, it will be seen, upon probabilities, and

sometimes the textual critics must weigh one set of probabilities against

another...” Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd

Edition, p. 11 of introduction

A hadith (pl. ahadith) is composed of two parts: the matn (text) and the

isnad (chain of reporters). A text may seem to be logical and reasonable

but it needs an authentic isnad with reliable reporters to be

acceptable; cAbdullah b. al-Mubarak (d. 181 AH), one of the illustrious

teachers of Imâm al-Bukhari, said:

“The isnad is part of the religion:

had it not been for the isnad,

whoever wished to would have

said whatever he liked.”

Questions?