A Counter-Chal­lenge to Sam Shamoun and the Chris­t­ian Missionaries

Pro-Pas

Recent­ly Sam Shamoun, a well-known bel­liger­ent and provoca­tive Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ary at Answer­ing Islam, issued a chal­lenge” to Mus­lims to prove that Jesus (peace be upon him) did not claim to be God, as per the Qur’an­ic state­ment. His chal­lenge is two-fold :

    (1) Chal­leng­ing Mus­lims to show where in the Qur’an Jesus says he is not God or not the Son of God.

and :

    (2) to bring the Ara­ma­ic phrase where Jesus dis­avows his claim to divinity.

It is obvi­ous, how­ev­er, that his demands are as pre­pos­ter­ous as they are stu­pid. The Qur’an cer­tain­ly quotes or para­phras­es Jesus as say­ing that he is not God.See Qur’an, 5:116 – 117 where Jesus is explic­it­ly quot­ed as fol­lows : And behold ! Allah will say O Jesus the son of Mary ! didst thou say unto men worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of Allah"? <u>He will say: "Glory to Thee! never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing Thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart though I know not what is in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden. "Never said I to them aught except what Thou didst command me to say to witWor­ship Allah my Lord and your Lord’; and I was a wit­ness over them whilst I dwelt amongst them ; when Thou didst take me up thou wast the Watch­er over them and Thou art a Wit­ness to all things.”. So basi­cal­ly the mis­sion­ary has no case since we have here the state­ment of Jesus(P) who denies being God. Whether the mis­sion­ary wants to believe that this is a fic­ti­tious account”, that is not our prob­lem. Our belief is that the por­tray­al of Jesus(P) in the New Tes­ta­ment is most­ly fic­ti­tious, but it is not us mak­ing sil­ly chal­lenges as the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ary is fond of mak­ing ! and the Qur’an denies that he is a Son of GodSuch (was) Jesus the son of Mary : (it is) a state­ment of truth about which they (vain­ly) dis­pute. It is not befit­ting to (the majesty of) Allah that He should beget a son. Glo­ry be to Him ! When He deter­mines a mat­ter He only says to it Be” and it is.” (Qur’an, 19 : 34 – 35), but in Ara­bic. This is because the Qur’an has affirmed itself to be revealed in Ara­bic textA Book, where­of the vers­es are explained in detail ; a Qur’an in Ara­bic for peo­ple who under­stand.” (Qur’an 41:3), sent down to an Arab prophet, lest its audi­ence uses the excuse that they will not be able to under­stand the Qur’an if were brought down in a for­eign tongue.

Fur­ther­more, unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is not a his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment writ­ten over the cen­turies by numer­ous scribes who were inspired” and was lat­er com­piled into a book. The Qur’an is an Ara­bic text in nature and has always been in Ara­bic, there­fore there is no need to bring an actu­al state­ment. To demand that the words of Jesus(P) be quot­ed in its orig­i­nal lan­guage would be akin to ask­ing an Eng­lish philoso­pher to quote the words of Con­fu­cius in his orig­i­nal Chi­nese lan­guage to a total­ly Amer­i­can audi­ence who does not under­stand Chinese !

How­ev­er, since Sam Shamoun has brought this need­less issue up, we would like to issue a counter-chal­lenge to the verac­i­ty of his claims. Per­haps we might be inclined to accept his premise, and even acknowl­edge that Jesus is indeed God in the flesh”, as per the Chris­t­ian belief, if he and his mis­sion­ary brethren are able to answer the fol­low­ing question :

    Show us where pre­cise­ly, in Ara­ma­ic, does Jesus say that he is God or the Son of God as in more than a man”?

We are not inter­est­ed in quo­ta­tions found in Greek, as it is gen­er­al­ly accept­ed that the lan­guage Jesus, peace be upon him, spoke was Ara­ma­ic. There­fore, it is not unrea­son­able to demand the exact Ara­ma­ic state­ments from Jesus, peace be upon him, and word-for-word, in invert­ed commas.

Fur­ther­more, we demand that this Ara­ma­ic quote, assum­ing if one exists, is one which all New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars deem authen­tic and agree upon with­out ques­tion, includ­ing all the crit­i­cal schol­ars. More­over, there should be absolute­ly no con­tro­ver­sy whatsover over the inter­pre­ta­tion and, of course, the authen­tic­i­ty of this ver­ba­tim Ara­ma­ic statement.

If the mis­sion­ary decides to quote some­thing in Greek, or any­thing the inter­pre­ta­tion of which is dis­put­ed or the authen­tic­i­ty of which is dis­put­ed, he would fail to meet our chal­lenge. We want, we repeat, a ver­ba­tim Ara­ma­ic quote, the authen­tic­i­ty and inter­pre­ta­tion of which is not at all dis­put­ed, where Jesus says cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly I am God” and where he claims to be the the Son of God”, as in more than a man”.

And only God knows best. A Counter-Challenge to Sam Shamoun and the Christian Missionaries 1

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