Have you looked into the, you know, the Quranic manuscripts and this, the claim of perfect preservation? And if so, like, what are, what are your thoughts on really the effect of that message for Muslims, the effect and how powerful it is for them to believe that there's only one Quran while everything else has been corrupted, while we have the holy book that God protected and then how, you know. How flimsy is that actually?
Is that clear? Yeah, so I did a talk at a university a number of years ago, and that recording is on my YouTube channel, of what I talk about the controlled transmission of the Quran versus the uncontrolled transmission of the New Testament text. I break down a little bit of that. You know, we have these manuscripts. In fact, one of the papers that I wrote in graduate college was just after the discovery of the Birmingham Quran.
And so I contacted some of the people at Birmingham University who are going into looking at that and the textual variants that existed there, particularly in comparison to some other early chronic manuscripts like the Top Copy manuscript and the Sa'ana Palimpsest that have textual variants among their kind of early transmissional texts. But to be totally honest with you, Avery, I don't know what your experience is, but getting into the weeds of that. I often find less effective as just going into the Quran and talking about how the Quran addresses the Torah and Injil, the Gospel and the Torah, and how the author of the Quran does not seem to have any semblance or kind of idea that there is a kind of level of corruption that's going on in the text. In fact, in Surah 5, verse 46 and 47, the Quran lays out a chain of custody. That God sent down the gospel to Jesus, confirming the Torah, which continued in the guidance and light that it possessed.
And it says that the people of the gospel, in other words, Avery, you and I, Christians, must judge by what God has revealed to us in the gospel. And if we don't do that, guess what? We're the defiantly disobedient.
So when I talk to Muslims, I simply say, hey, I don't want to be the defiantly disobedient before God. The problem is, though. If I look at the Quran and I obey what it's telling me to do there, and I judge the Quran by the gospel, I find the Quran false.
So if the Quran is true, it's false because it is not in conjunction and continuity or in agreement with anything, anything in the gospel. And so I think the Quran really has a problem because I don't think the author of the Quran had ever read. any of the biblical Old Testament or New Testament, but assumes they know what it's talking about. And then on that assumption says some very naive and foolish things.
Yeah. One, I would say that that's my favorite argument is the Islam and dilemma. It's what I say when people always ask me, what should I learn when it comes to Islam and what's the first step? I always tell them, learn what the Quran says about the Bible, because you'll be astonished and there's no escape from it. The Quran defends the Bible so that you don't have to against the Muslim.
The Quran has already done the work for you. You don't have to do anything. Just remember these few verses and you'll be just fine.
One of the verses that I've been using a lot lately, and then the topic that I run with this is the Quran says that the Bible is the authority over the Quran. And they're like, what? No, absolutely not.
The Quran is the criteria and it's the new book. It's the last revelation. I will, well, no.
According to the Quran, it tells Muhammad in 1094, if you're in doubt about that which we revealed to you, then go and ask the people who've been reading the scripture before you. Truly, the truth has come to you from your Lord. So what is this saying? This is saying, hey, Muhammad, if you're doubting this revelation, if you're doubting the Quran, go check the previous scriptures. It'll clear up your doubts because you'll see that it lines up with that.
But if it doesn't line up with it, then Muhammad would know that his revelation. is actually not really from God. And it's actually a lie.
So what's the authority here? The authority is the Bible, even in the Quran. So then what do we do here?
What do you do as Muslims? Because you have to admit this. Oh, well, what you have, it's corrupted.
It's corrupted. Okay. So is Allah telling Muhammad to go rely on corrupted scripture to clear up his doubts about the Quran?
That makes no sense. Help me understand that. And we have copies from the Arabian Peninsula of what the gospel and Torah look like in languages like Syriac. and in, you know, the Aramaic Peshitta that would have been there along with, you know, the Greek New Testament and Greek translation of the Old Testament.
We know exactly what the Torah and the Gospel looked like in Muhammad's day. And Christians and Jews cannot judge by what has been revealed to them if they no longer have it. If it's gone, if it's missing.
If the Torah and the Gospel are God's words and no one can change God's words, which the Quran also says, An accusation of corruption towards the Torah and the gospel is one that either makes God into a liar or unable to do what he says he can do, which is preserve his words. And so we know exactly what the Torah and the gospel look like. There's no issue with that. I just simply think the author of the Koran did not know what the gospel and the Torah actually were. He didn't know what was in there.
He didn't know. Okay. Okay.
So, yeah, what is the hypothesis that you guys roll with with respect to this question? So they didn't have access to the actual gospel, the actual New Testament scriptures and stuff, didn't have access to it. But then they referred to it throughout the Koran.
So they were just hoping that their audience wasn't informed or something. Well, so there's actually a substantial Christian and Jewish population in areas like the northern Arabian Peninsula and what's modern day Syria, Jordan, Israel. Like these were all Christian countries. Armenia had been the first official Christian country. And so there's a lot of Christians and Jews.
I mean, so the traditional Islamic sources say Muhammad was illiterate. So he wasn't supposed to have been able to read anyways. And the evidence for Arabic translations of the Bible in the, you know, 7th century, early 8th century, it's not as strong as it could be. So there's actually a lot of evidence that even if Muhammad could have read, assuming that Muhammad is the author, single author of the Quran. He probably wouldn't have had access to anything that he could have actually read.
But I think what's going on is you have these stories, which we find evidence of in the Quran, of Jewish and Christian folktales, apocryphal stories that are floating around the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. My friend Andy Bannister, his doctoral dissertation was on the subject. His book, The Oral Formulaic Construction of the Quran, that's a title that you have to say five times fast, is a good...
book because what it does is it tracks these oral sources that we can tie to folk tales of Jews and Christians in the Arabian Peninsula during this time frame. And so if you're hearing Christians and Jews tell these stories of, you know, the friends who are hiding in the cave, or of Jesus turning clay birds into real birds, or, you know, there are multiple stories that are folk tales, apocryphal stories that end up in the Quran. I just don't think that the author of the Quran had the ability to differentiate between what were actually the reliable stories found in the Gospels of who the historical Jesus was and stories that were floating around that were folk tales during his time of who Jesus and Mary and John the Baptist were. The author was just straight up bluffing when he said, like, just go read it and it's going to confirm all this.
I wouldn't necessarily say he was bluffing. I thought from my... what I see, I think he believed that.
I think the author believed, because he didn't know what was, like what Wes said, he doesn't know what is real in the previous scriptures or what isn't. He's familiar with stories that he's hearing. So with this stuff, and he puts an Islamic twist on it.
And so I genuinely believe that he probably believed that, yes, what I'm saying would confirm and line up to some degree of what you guys have. And it just so happens that it doesn't. Yeah, it just so happens that it does.
He doesn't know. He's ignorant of what's in there. But to Wes's point, you literally have Hadiths, Cam, that talk about Muhammad being like hearing the stories.
Like there's one Hadith that says that there were Jews who were reciting the Torah and then explaining it in Arabic to the Muslims. And so they're hearing them give their narrations of what they think the Torah is and explaining it. And then also there's a hadith that talks about Muhammad's closeness with this man named Waraka, who is supposed to be some type of Christian around that time.
I think a lot of people allude to him being a Gnostic Christian. But Muhammad is really close to him and learns a lot from him. So these traditions and stories, Muhammad, there's evidence in the Sunni hadiths that would show that Muhammad would have a familiarity with these traditions, with these folktales, as Wes said.
It's in their hadith. Yeah. Yeah.
There is a great book, if people are interested in this topic, by a guy named Gordon Nicol, and it's called The Gentle Answer to the Muslim Accusation of Biblical Falsification. It's less technical than actually the title of the book. Gordon Nicol is a legitimate scholar. He's a fellow Canadian, so I got to give him credit for that. He taught at the University of Calgary, I believe, for a number of years.
But then he left academia to go be a missionary in India for like, I think it was two decades, like a long time. But solid guy, very interesting book. lots of citations and references to things that were going on at the time to the hadith, to the Quran, and to the Tafsir.
So that's a good one if people are interested in kind of delving into it. Ava, you got any other questions? Otherwise, I was going to kind of shift and talk about the Trinity a little bit. Yeah. Well, not necessarily a question, but you sparked a topic that I would love to do, Wes, which is what exactly was around when it comes to the Bible?
in the seventh century that the Jews and Christians had access to. Like, I think that, you know, giving people a perspective of what actually was there would kind of, you know, you know, I don't know, give a good frame of what we're working with here. I would love to tackle that someday.
I would love to. Well, the Conex synonymic kiss was available, right? It was written in the...
Listen, we got to hurry up because I have to go to my chiropractor and get my synonymic kiss. Kiss realigned after this. Oh, okay.
Tough.