The Bible

Many Chris­tians like the whale Sam Shamoun, Craig Winn and oth­ers sim­ply love going around bad-mouthing the Qur’an, say­ing that it con­tains ​“per­vert­ed, non­sen­si­cal teach­ings”. Let us have have a glimpse of their ​“sen­si­cal” Bible. Before I pro­ceed fur­ther I would like to state for the record that Mus­lims are utter­ly shocked and offend­ed that the Bible por­trays great mes­sen­gers of God as low-live drunk­ards. Com­ing back to the sto­ry, notice how the sto­ry says Ham, THE FATHER of Canaan. This is rather inter­est­ing. Seems like its try­ing to prove or lead to something.

It is well-known that the ​“Chris­tian­i­ty” of today has dubi­ous ori­gins, which iron­i­cal­ly does not come from Jesus, peace be upon him (although the whole struc­ture is attrib­uted to him), but from Paul of Tar­sus, who can be right­ly referred to as ​“that Satan­ic apos­tle”. For it was Paul who laid down the reli­gious foun­da­tions of today’s Chris­tian­i­ty, doc­trines based on the idol­a­try and philo­soph­i­cal thought of the Gre­co-Roman empire at the time.

Instead of writ­ing a full-scale biog­ra­phy of Jesus of Nazareth, I want to focus on some aspects of the life and teach­ing of Jesus of Nazareth that are com­mon­ly over­looked by most Chris­tians. Any attempt to recon­struct the his­tor­i­cal Jesus (as dis­tinct from the incar­nate deity of eccle­si­as­ti­cal faith) needs to take into account all the recov­er­able data about Jesus, much of which has been ignored by many Chris­tians because of its’ embar­rass­ment to Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy. Jesus’ report­ed say­ings in the Gospels are fre­quent­ly sub­ject­ed to tor­tu­ous exe­ge­sis by fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to make them fit lat­er church tra­di­tion. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, the data has been crit­i­cal­ly exam­ined by none oth­er than Chris­t­ian schol­ars themselves.

The Chris­tians are fond of cel­e­brat­ing the death of their man-god (whom they claim to be Jesus, peace be upon him) every year, although it does bog­gle the mind as to why would some­one accept the fact that their god can actu­al­ly ​“die”. How­ev­er as Mus­lims, we believe that the claim con­cern­ing Jesus (P) is false and full of con­jec­tures. A mighty Prophet of God (as we believe Jesus cer­tain­ly is) would nev­er had to bear the agony of being cru­ci­fied at the hands of his ene­mies. As it stands, we would also like to note that to sub­stan­ti­ate our claims, there are var­i­ous con­tra­dic­tions regard­ing the accounts on Jesus’ tri­als, death and res­ur­rec­tion which appear through­out the New Testament.

Was Sarah real­ly Abra­ham’s sis­ter ? Ibn Hazm ques­tions the sta­tus of Sarah as being Abra­ham’s sis­ter, as accept­ing that viz., from the Bib­li­cal per­spec­tive would result in var­i­ous dis­agree­ments with oth­er pas­sages in the Old Tes­ta­ment con­cern­ing moral and the­o­log­i­cal issues. This is in ref­er­ence to the sto­ries of Sarah’s seizure by Pharaoh and Abime’­elech which was nar­rat­ed in Gen­e­sis 12:10 – 18 and Gen­e­sis 20, Gen­e­sis 17:17 and Gen­e­sis 20:1 – 18. We cite the relat­ed pas­sages on the sto­ry of the seizure of Sarah as follows.

Does God change or does not change His mind ? Accord­ing to Ibn Hazm, Exo­dus 32:10 – 14 and 33:3 – 14 ascribes al-bada’ (chang­ing of mind) to God and hence this presents a prob­lem to the nature of God and His char­ac­ters with regard to His All-Know­ing attribute. When one com­pares the above pas­sages side by side, the inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions between espe­cial­ly Exo­dus 32:10, 32:14 and 33:2 – 3 on the one hand and Exo­dus 33:14 on the oth­er, clear­ly rais­es many prob­lems of the­o­log­i­cal and moral con­cern from the Bib­li­cal con­text. In this case that was quot­ed above, in spite of God’s deter­mi­na­tion to pun­ish the Israelites for their idol­a­trous con­duct, He did not exe­cute pun­ish­ment due to the inter­ces­sion of Moses who had ​“remind­ed” God of His promise made with Abra­ham and the patri­achs for their descen­dents. This Bib­li­cal pas­sage seems to implic­it­ly sug­gest that this ​“reminder” had made God realise his ​“wrong” deci­sion and have Him repent­ing for it. Such an obvi­ous ​“error” or even to imply such a thing is hard­ly befit­ting any per­son of integri­ty, let alone God, the Almighty.

“Ver­sions” are sim­ply the trans­la­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment into oth­er lan­guages. The New Tes­ta­ment writ­ers orig­i­nal­ly wrote their books and epis­tles in the Greek lan­guage where­as the ver­sions are trans­la­tions of their writ­ings into oth­er lan­guages. Nat­u­ral­ly, non-Greek speak­ing Chris­tians want­ed the text of the New Tes­ta­ment in their own local lan­guages and so the New Tes­ta­ment began to be trans­lat­ed into oth­er lan­guages some­time in the mid to late sec­ond cen­tu­ry. An impor­tant point to remem­ber is that no mat­ter how many thou­sands of trans­la­tions exist, it remains that they are in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage from the orig­i­nal lan­guage (Greek) of the New Tes­ta­ment, thus their use and val­ue will be limited. 

The authors of the New Tes­ta­ment have often quot­ed pas­sages from the Old Tes­ta­ment, claim­ing such state­ments to be prophe­cies ful­filled in the per­son of Jesus Christ. The num­ber of such quot­ed pas­sages is actu­al­ly very high. Among the evan­ge­lists, Matthew is the one hav­ing made this phe­nom­e­non char­ac­ter­is­tic to his Gospel. The prophe­cy car­ries a very impor­tant place in the Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy. Every Chris­t­ian knows about the prophe­cies of the books of Psalms, Isa­iah, and Daniel relat­ed to the child­hood, life, mis­sion, and death of Jesus. To every Chris­t­ian, these prophe­cies are the clear evi­dence of the truth of Gospels and mis­sion of Jesus in gen­er­al. The prob­lem is that accord­ing to the Bible, there exists true prophe­cies as well as false ones. Hence the ques­tion aris­es on the nec­es­sary cri­te­ria to dis­tin­guish a false prophe­cy from a true one.

The Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies tend to make the gen­er­al con­clu­sion that the Qur’an can­not be a text of divine ori­gin because of the unac­cept­able mean­ings includ­ed in it.Perhaps they are cor­rect in this con­clu­sion and we may be inclined to agree with them due to the fol­low­ing reasons.

Every Chris­t­ian believe that they should do good works, that they should fol­low the law of the Prophets. How­ev­er they do not believe that a man can be jus­ti­fied by the good works.

“For all who rely on doing the works of the law are under a curse, because it is writ­ten, ​“Cursed is every­one who does not keep on doing every­thing writ­ten in the book of the law.” Now it is clear no one is jus­ti­fied before God by the law, because the right­eous one will live by faith (On Jesus). But the law is not based on faith, but the one who does the works of the law will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becom­ing a curse for us.“Gala­tians 3 : 10 – 13

The above-men­tioned teach­ings and belief of the Chris­tians are based on Paul’s teach­ings and the New Tes­ta­ment, which are against the teach­ings of Old Testament.

In study­ing var­i­ous top­ics about Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam over the years I will nev­er for­get an arti­cle I came across on the top­ic of racism. It was called : ​“Chil­dren of a White God” and the author was Matthew C. Ogilvie. I remem­bered that the major­i­ty of slav­ery in the Unit­ed States had been jus­ti­fied by Chris­tians in the past, but cer­tain­ly, I thought, this was over. I thought this was just the igno­rance of poor­ly edu­cat­ed Chris­tians of old. But as I read the words in this mans essay, I began to real­ize that indeed, there were sev­er­al Chris­t­ian sects who taught racist the­olo­gies to this day, and such the­olo­gies result­ed in count­less acts of ter­ror­ism in the world.

The Bible endors­es homo­sex­u­al behav­iour and we shall pro­vide one such exam­ple which is exem­pli­fied in the sto­ry of the rela­tion­ship between Daniel and the prince of the eunuchs. The verse is :

“Vayiten ha-Elo­him et-Daniyel leKHesed u’ler­aKHamim lifnei sar hasarisim” (Daniel 1:9)

[i.e., ​“Now God had brought Daniel into favor and ten­der love with the prince of the eunuchs” (KJV).] The Hebrew words, which describe the rela­tion­ship between Daniel and the prince of the Eunuchs, are ​“KHesed” and ​“RaHamim”.

Was it on the sev­enth day or on the tenth day ? Accord­ing to 2 Kings 25:8 – 9, the ​“House of the Lord” was burnt down on the sev­enth day of the month :

“And in the fifth month, on the sev­enth day of the month … burned the house of the Lord.” 

Yet, we are informed in Jere­mi­ah 52:12 – 13 that the tem­ple burned on the tenth day :

“Now in the fifth month, in the tenth day of the month … burned the house of the Lord.” 

What do the dif­fer­ences between Bible man­u­scripts reveal ? This paper is divid­ed into the fol­low­ing sections : 

1. They require you to pro­duce evi­dence on : WHEN, HOW and WHY was the Bible cor­rupt­ed 2. Once upon a time, there was a myth about Bible man­u­scripts 3. Evi­dence : more than 50 vers­es either omit­ted or added, hun­dreds of oth­ers changed 4. Evi­dences from sec­ond and third cen­tu­ry about Bible cor­rup­tion 5. Do the changes and cor­rup­tions of man­u­scripts affect doc­trine ? 6. ​“For God so loved the world”? 

Accord­ing to the Bible, can a per­son get divorced and remar­ry with­out com­mit­ting adul­tery ? Remar­riage after divorce is pro­hib­it­ed because it is adul­tery. Jesus…