Monday, October 7, 2013

Bible Corrupt: Some responses

When I first read the Quran, I immediately saw that it is very different from the Bible, both in form and in content.
Muslims often say this is because the Bible has been changed. With Muslims, the Bible gets no "benefit of the doubt", while the Quran is assumed to be true without question.

Some responses:

1) If you read the footnotes of most modern translations of the Bible, you will sometimes see mention that a verse has alternate readings in other manuscripts. However, the number of such verses in question make up just a small fraction of the Bible, and it is not enough to change the meaning.In particular not able to account for the large difference between the two books.

2)  Since the footnotes in modern translations show what verses are under dispute, then everything that does not have a footnote is not disputed.  So, it is easy to show that the text of  most of the Bible is not disputed. For the rest of the Bible (when there is no footnote), the burden of proof to to show that the text is corrupt is on the Muslim.

3) The King James Version of the Bible is 400 years old, and was based on about a dozen manuscripts.  Since that time there has been a huge amount of scholarship.  The "Nestle Aland" critical Greek text is in its 28th revision as of  2015. Yet all the scholarship that has been devoted to the study of  manuscripts has shown very few changes compared to the King James version of 400 years ago, and it is still very much in use today.

4) You can look up The Writings of The Early Church Fathers (38 Vols.)  22896 pages (twenty-two thousand pages).  If we had no New Testament manuscripts at all, we could find all but eleven verses in this set of ancient works.  The Early Church Fathers are were within two generations of the original 12 Disciples.

5) The manuscript of the "Codex Sinaiticus" is available online in digital form. It is typical for manuscripts to be accessible to scholars.

6) The Bible was translated into many languages such as Syriac, Latin, and Coptic. Jerome's Latin Vulgate is from around the year 400.

7) There was never a time when all the Bible manuscripts were in the hands of one person or group.

Question for Muslims:
If the New Testament was corrupted, then Who? How? When? where? Why?  What insight does the Quran give on these four questions?


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