Occasionally, we come across Christians face-to-face and, more frequently, on the Internet, who, when informed that the text of the gospels underwent corruption during their transmission, often react with the following type of questions : “When ? Who did the corruption ? In what country ? Before or after Muhammad ? Why was it done ? How come no one noticed it?” These type of seemingly “innocent” questions merely reveal the incalculably colossal ignorance of the person in question.
We will take the most popular Bibles such as the King James Version (KJV), the Revised Standard Version (RSV), the New International Version (NIV), the Good News Bible (GNB), the Living Bible Version (LBV) as well as the Christian Community Bible (CCB) and contrast the same verses within these Bibles.
I have been reading with interest the last few exchanges regarding the reading of Jeremiah 8:8 — “How can you say ; ‘We are wise, and the Law of the Lord is with us’? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie’ ” Note : Whenever you see that term ‘Law of the Lord’, the Hebrew word is Torah To me with all due respect to my Christian brethren, I think what is stated is crystal clear. This will also hope to explain, insha’allah, why Jesus (P) was always so hard on the scribes. I think for those who don’t believe that the Torah was lost to posterity at one time would do good to read the following, insha’allah.
Before 1881, all translations of the New Testament (including, most importantly, the 1611 King James Version (KJV), also known as the Authorised Version (AV)), were based on copies of Greek manuscripts known as the Textus Receptus, which is Latin for Received Text. (Abbreviated to TR). But in the 19th and 20th centuries, older Greek manuscripts were discovered. These manuscripts have caused Bible scholars to revise what they believe is the correct text of the New Testament. The latest revision of this Greek Text is the United Bible Societies’ ‘The Greek New Testament’ (published by United Bible Societies, 4th Edition, 1993); (which I will abbreviate as UBS4). The successive revisions of the UBS New Testament are widely accepted in the field of Biblical Studies, and have been used for modern translations such as the Revised Standard Version (RSV), New International Version (NIV) and New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
From the standpoint of the ordinary theology of the day it is a psychological riddle how the Paul of the Four Letters can have followed the historical Jesus at so short an interval. Pierson opened the eyes of Loman to this fact. It seemed to him that the developed Christianity of the community and the activity of theological thought, which form the background of the Four Letters, justify the hypothesis that they possibly belong to a later time. Loman perceived that the work in this direction begun by Bruno Bauer must be done over again. A thorough study of Bauer’s work showed him that the letters of Paul do not fit into the period where it is usual to place them. True, attempts have been made to solve the difficulty by the suggestion that Paul was a very extraordinary man, and not bound by the laws which govern ordinary men. It is possible, it is true, to go a long way in the explanation of the letters with the help of this supposition ; but the duty of criticism, when seeking an explanation of historical facts, is to reject as much as possible all solutions which assume anything unusual and extraordinary.
In the first century of the Common Era, there appeared at the eastern end of the Mediterranean a remarkable religious leader who taught the worship of one true God and declared that religion meant not the sacrifice of beasts but the practice of charity and piety an the shunning of hatred and enmity. He was said to have worked miracles of goodness, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead. His exemplary life led some of his followers to claim he was a son of God, though he called himself the son of man a man. Accused of sedition against Rome, he was arrested. After his death, his disciples claimed he had risen from the dead, appeared to them alive, and then ascended to heaven. Who was this teacher and wonder-worker ? His name was Apollonius of Tyana ; he died about 98 A.D., and his story may be read in Flavius Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius.
CHAPTERIIITHECANONOFTHENEW TESTAMENTReproduced from F.F. Bruce, “New Testament Documents : Are They Reliable?” (2003) Even when we have come to…
Some Christian apologists and missionaries cite A. N. Sherwin-White, who declared Luke to be a marvelous historian. “For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming…Any…
The strongest “evidence” for the Trinity in the Bible is the verse 1 John 5:7 or otherwise known as the ‘Johannine Comma’. Unfortunately for…
The purpose of this rebuttal is only to prove that the content of the Diatessaron is not the same as the current content in the New Testament gospels.
For the early Christians before the late 2nd century C.E., there was no such thing as an “Old” or “New” Testament as found in the modern-day Christian Bible today. The writers of the New Testament were basically unaware that they were producing writings equivalent to the status of “scripture”.
Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi Three hundred years after the time of Jesus(P), there were many different versions of the Gospel story and the teachings of…
In this article, I have compared the accounts of one event as described in the first three Synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. The reader should realize after comparison that the gospels were originally transmitted through oral tradition. In the process of writing, the writers of the gospels had changed the tradition according to their whims and fancies.
Nabeel Qureshi died at the age of 34 years old in 2017 from a “rare and deadly form of stomach cancer” on 16th of September 2017 with mixed reactions.
But the first of the four gospels, i.e., the Gospel according to Mark, apparently did not receive Paul’s memo. And this is a very important point as we keep in mind that each of the gospels were initially divorced from each other and were written in different localities for different audiences.
So which is the correct Gospel account concerning the choice of Jesus’ first apostles ? The following Bible contradiction was extracted from an unpublished thesis entitled Ibn Hazm On The Doctrine of Tahrif which cites Kitab al-Fasl fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa’ wa al-Nihal and insha’allah this will be part of an ongoing series to reproduce extracts of Ibn Hazm’s criticisms of the Bible and Christianity.