The Bible and Islamic Objections

The Bible is the basis of belief for both Judaism and Christianity. Though it is not the basis for Islam, it makes accusations against the Bible. This lecture compares the Bible and the Quran and evaluates the objections that Islam raises against the Bible.
https://www.anushjohn.com/post/the-bible-and-islamic-objections

02:53 1. Comparison of the Bible and the Quran
09:47 2. Islamic Objections to the Bible
09:57 2.1 Corruption of the Bible
18:12 2.2 New Testament Language
22:00 2.3 Contradictions in the Bible
27:12 2.4 Authorship of the Bible
30:01 2.5 Prophecy about Muhammad
33:11 2.6 Biblical Canon
36:20 2.7 No Original Manuscripts

anushjohn.com

Transcript

Anush 0:00

I wanna thank Mark and Russ again for this opportunity, for this privilege. Back when I was in, back when I was in medical school, there were two ways of studying. The conditions, the medical conditions. One is in the early part we would do, let's say for example, cardiology. We can study cardiology, everything about the heart. So you study the anatomy of the heart, the physiology of the heart, the pathologies, the diseases of the heart, the pharmacology, the drugs that are related to the heart. And then you can study management, which includes using medicines or surgeries of the heart. So there's, you can study it by systems. So you would do that for the heart, for the lung, for the brain, for the kidney, for the liver, for whatever. But the other way of studying it is by diseases. So for example, if a patient came to me with diabetes, then I can't just focus on one system. I've gotta see the whole thing. Because diabetes is from the pancreas, but it affects the eyes, it affects the blood vessels. It affects the heart, it affects the kidneys, it affects the healing, it affects the skin, and so on. So I've got to know how everything, how all the systems interconnect. And that's pretty much what we are doing here. We study one system at a time. We studied about the Trinity. We looked at the deity of Jesus. We looked at the death of Jesus. We are looking at the Bible as separate systems, but it's unlikely that in a conversation somebody's gonna come to you and tell you, okay, tell me all the objections and all the responses to the doctrine of the Trinity. In a, in an Islamic context, that's not how it's gonna happen. You're gonna have a conversation and you're going to go from Trinity to the Bible, to the death, to the deity and back and forth, multiple. So we need to know, yes, we do study it in systems but at the end, we combine everything together as we interact with with Muslims. Lemme just go through the outline that I have for today. First we will look at comparison of the Bible and the Quran. This is something that you probably all know. In fact, at certain points I'll ask if you know this so that I don't need to describe it or talk about it, and we can move along. And then the major part of this lecture will be in looking at Islamic objections to the Bible. As I was preparing to this, I also wanted to do the Quran's claims about itself, but that became its own lecture, so I'm not gonna do that. There are seven things underneath that I can't do in one lecture. So that's its own lecture. There's another lecture I have on the comparison between Christ and Muhammad, the direct comparison between what the Bible says about Jesus and what the Quran says or the Hadid say about Muhammad. But that's all for later if needed. But today we are gonna do comparison of the Bible and the Quran, and we are gonna look at Islamic objections to the Bible. All right. First, let's look at comparison of the Bible and the Quran. I've got five things to say here, and this is all stuff you know about. So I'm gonna breeze through this section. And this section is essentially for completeness of the topic. Five ways that we can compare the Bible and the Quran. First is in the nature of revelation and inspiration. Now the most fundamental difference between the two texts lies in the model of revelation. For Christianity, the Bible represents plenary verbal inspiration, and this is God working through human others. As we know for Islam, the Quran represents war. He, which is a direct verbal dictation from the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, who is understood as a passive recipient. And so Muhammad's own personality and style of writing does not come into the picture as it does in the biblical context. The biblical authors writing personalities, languages, historical context, all come into the writing of the Bible. Okay, so last year in 2025 in Chiang Mai, I gave a lecture on inspiration which was part of the authority of the Bible. If you're interested, you can look at it, and that's where it would be Amish john.com. You can look for authority of the Bible. And there is also a part on inspiration of scripture. Second, let's look at authorship, composition, and structure. And for this, I, it was easier for me to just make a chart, and that's what I did. The Bible has 40 plus others. The Quran has one. It's 1500 years of composition of the Bible. 23 years of the Quran. The Bible was in three languages, Hebrew, Greek mainly, and aic. A few a few verses here and there. And the Quran is in classical Arabic. The structure 66 books with multiple genres. The Koran is 114 Surahs arranged by length, longest to the shortest. The organization, as we mentioned, is chronological and thematic in the Bible and organized by length in the Koran and the compilation of the Bible. The books were recognized over time by communities and the Koran, it was compiled under the third kif Uthman in approximately 86 50. Okay, so that's the, a quick chart to show the that part of the difference between the Quran and the Bible. Next difference is the content and the central theme. The Bible and the Quran defer profoundly in what they reveal. The content of the Bible is God's redemptive acts and history that culminates in the person and work of Jesus Christ so it shows the character of God, the attributes of God, his relational love, and how he plans to reconcile humanity. The Quran has nothing to do with a personal relationship with God. It's about God's will and guidance for human submission. The fourth difference between the Koran and the Bible is in the manuscript tradition in preservation. I know Keith Small was a was an expert in the early manuscripts of the Koran. So for this, I made a chart as well, just to make it easy, the Old Testament evidence. For the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls has a 95% agreement with them as a red text. The Quran has no comparable pre compilation manuscript tradition. The New Testament count there's a single textual tradition from the Earthman Codex while the new Testament has 5,800 Greek manuscripts. The earliest New Testament fragment is the John Rylands. P 52 is in London. It is within one generation from the writing. It's John chapter 18, a few verses of John Chapter 18. And so if John wrote it in the nineties it's about one generation away from when he wrote it. The earliest Quran fragment is the Birmingham Quran dated in 5 5 68 to 6 45. The variant readings, there are thousands of minor variants. And we will look at it here in a minute, and we will also look at the Koran, the Ana Plym est, which shows pre onic variance, and that's very interesting as we come towards the end of this lecture. The transmission method is organic, multi community, multi-language transmission. While the Quran is a centralized state in force, especially with the monic and the variant copies were burned during the canonization of the Quran and the approach to the variance it's transparent. Christians, we want to know the truth. And so we want to know what is the closest manuscript to the original documents, which we don't have, but we wanna know what is the closest one. But that's not true. In the Quran, the non-standard readings was suppressed or destroyed. One of the variants was chosen as the one and everything else was destroyed. And fifth, the purpose and the function in context. In Christianity, the Bible is the inspired, authoritative word. It points to the person of Jesus Christ. In Quran, it is not pointing to God. It is God's most direct, eternal presence that's accessible to humanity according to the Quran itself. Okay. So as we know, as the true parallel of the Quran in Christian thought is not the Bible, but Jesus Christ himself. So just as Jesus is the eternal uncreated word of God that entered history in human form, the Quran is the eternal uncreated word of God that entered history in the form of a book in Arabic form. So the true comparison is between the Quran and Jesus, not the Quran and the Bible. And that is why when somebody burns the Bible, you don't, it's. Yes, it's important, but it doesn't hold as much value as Jesus himself. But when somebody in South Florida burns a copy of the Quran, there is rioting that goes on in Pakistan and they burn the American flag because the Quran is equivalent to Jesus in Islam. Alright, so that's a very quick comparison of the two of the Quran in the Bible. But a major portion of today is gonna be looking at the Islamic objections to the Bible. I've got seven of them, and I want to give responses to each one. The first main objection to the Islamic objection to the Bible is that the Bible has been corrupted. So here the objection is that the Bible is about the doctrine of tarif or corruption. And Muslims argue that God originally revealed the pure scripture, the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel. But Jews and Christians, they corrupted it, altered it over time. And so now the Quran is here to correct this corruption. Muslim theologians distinguish between two kinds of corruption. One is alteration of the actual text itself, and the second one is distortion of the meaning without changing the text. And these are from two Surahs. One is from Surah 2 75, which says, do you then hope that they would believe in you and a party from among them indeed used to hear the word of Allah, then altered it after they had understood it. Okay, so this is alteration of the actual text. And then the second one is Surah 3 78, which says, most surely there is a party amongst those who distort the book with their tongue that you may consider it to be a part of the book. this is distortion of the meaning without changing the text itself. Now, so to this doctrine of corruption. Or this accusation of tariff or corruption. I wanna give five responses that we can give to this accusation. First is that the Quran itself affirms the Bible's reliability. Now, this may be one of the most decisive internal rebuttals that we can give. The Quran repeatedly upholds the divine authority and the trustworthiness of the Torah and the gospels. So I made a little chart to show where in the Quran it affirms this in 3 34, it affirms the Torah and the gospel. In 5 44, it affirms the Torah in 5 46, the gospel in 5 47, the gospel in 10 and 94. It points to, it tells Muhammad to look at the earlier scriptures, if you have a doubt. So it's affirming all the earlier scriptures, which is the Bible. So the Quran itself affirms the reliability of the Bible. But if these, if those scriptures were corrupted already, such a command would make no sense. So it contradicts what it's saying about the corruption of the Bible. A second response that we can have. Is that the corruption doctrine was a later development. The charge that the Bible text was corrupted was not seriously considered until Ibin Hasim in the 11th century, Spain, when they were having public dialogues. That made it clear that the Bible clearly contradicts the Quran. Before this time, Muslim, Muslim writers were actively engaging with the Bible because actually when you look at it, if you ask a person who is a Muslim, they talk about Adam and Eve and Mary and so on, and you ask them where do they know some of the information? They need the Bible to complete their knowledge of the Quran. So at that time, they were engaging with the Bible to even understand the Koran fully. But it was in the 11th century, Spain when there was public dialogues about the Koran in the Bible, they found out that the Bible plainly contradicts the Quran. And so this is an important point that Tarif doctrine evolved as a theological response to an apologetic crisis, not as an original Quranic teaching. A third response that we can give is that the Quran claims that God's words are inable, but then it goes and says that the Bible was altered. Let me give you two verses to show where it says that God's words are inable in Surah 6 1 15. It says None can change his words. In Surah 1827, it says, there is no changer of his words. If this is true and the Torah and the gospel cannot have been corrupted by human hands, then the doctrine of tarif directly contradicts the Quran's own theology of divine preservation, isn't it? So it the Quran says something and then this doctrine contradicts what the Quran says about the Bible. A fourth response that we can give is that manuscript evidence contradicts the corruption claim. Now the Old Testament, as we know, was based on the Retic text, which is from the sixth to the 10th century ad. And which is 1400 years after the completion of the Old Testament canon. Now you can say that's a long period of time, and it is, and we can say you are depending on it by faith. And we were. Until 1947 when the Dead Sea Scrolls are recovered, dated from two 50 BC to 68 ad and we found, and when we say we, scholars, actual scholars found that the Masoretic text was 95% accurate with the Dead Sea Scrolls. So we have manuscript evidence to show that even a thousand years before the retic text the manuscript has been largely unchanged, 95% accurate. The other easy response. And this is one of the first things you can ask before you get into a long discussion is to ask, how could this have happened? When somebody says there is corruption of the Bible, how could this have happened? Who could have orchestrated a global corruption? Now if they say they removed all the mentions of Muhammad in the Bible and they corrupted it, and so on, we can ask, how did this happen? Because, 600 years passed from the Bible's writing to the coming of Muhammad and the Quran. And meanwhile, there are thousands of manuscripts that were written by Copyists and spread over the whole world. At that time, the Egyptian Coptics, the Ethiopian Christians, the Syriac churches, the Greek communities, the Armenian, and the Latin communities, all of them had copies of the biblical manuscripts. How did somebody orchestrate such a great global corruption, even if somebody did go to all these communities spread around and collect all these manuscripts, it's possible. Isn't it possible that at least one of the original manuscripts were left behind? But the fact is that not one manuscript has been found with the unaltered text, and so the historical evidence does not support such a global operation. The second objection that I want to look at is that the New Testament was not written in Jesus' language. And the objection here is Jesus spoke Arabic, yet the gospels were written in Greek. And this linguistic gap undermines the authenticity and shows human mediation and potential corruption of the original text. Now, let me give you three responses to this objection. The first is that the language of composition does not negate inspiration. The biblical model is of God speaking through human vessels, including their languages and their historical context. This is the nature of biblical inspiration, and the God who created all languages is not constrained by any one of them. The second response is that the same objection applies to the Quran. The Quran is in classical Arabic. yet, most people in the world don't speak classical Arabic. They speak contemporary Arabic. Of course, the difference between Coe, Greek and contemporary Greek is more than the difference between classical Arabic and contemporary Arabic. Yet there's still a difference. And most people don't know classical Arabic. And so they are dependent on their Muslim scholars to decipher classical Arabic to them. Most of them don't read the Quran. They are dependent on their scholars. And so the same objection applies if there is a human person between the classical Quran written in classical Arabic, and what they understand there is still the same objection. But Muslims do not consider this as a source of corruption. So the standard applied to the Bible or the accusation applied to the Bible is not applied to the rah. A third response is that Greek was a lingua franca of the first century. The use of coin a Greek was strategic. It's like using English today. If you wanna make it public to reach as many people as possible you release a book in English or you really something in English where there's widespread acceptance. Greek was that language in the first century, and that is why even though Jesus spoke ama, the New Testament was written in Greek, and yet the gospels do preserve some ama, sayings of the Bible to show that it was it was connected to the culture at that time. Does anybody remember some of the Arabic sayings or words that are mentioned in the New Testament? It says Ani. Yep. Rabbi's teacher. He uses the word Abba when he talks to God. He uses the word, which means open to the blind man. He uses the word raha to say fool. He used the word mammon to talk about money. And then there is a mention of Rami that on resurrection Sunday, I think it was Mary Magdalene that called Jesus that. So there is mention of some of the um, AIC sayings, but predominantly it is in Greek because it is a lingo, Frank. All right. The third objection is that the Bible contains contradictions. The Bible contains contradictions. And here the main objection is that people like Shair Ali have cataloged 101 alleged contradictions of the Bible, and others have claimed 119 contradictions of the Bible. And the underlying premise is that if it is from God, then it must be free of discrepancies. And the surah that mentions this is 4 82, which says, do they not reflect then on the Quran? Had it been from anyone other than Allah? They would have certainly found in it many inconsistencies to show that because the Quran is from Allah, it has no inconsistencies. All right, so there are three responses that we can give to the accusation that the Bible contains contradictions. The first one is that rival interpretations are not the same as contradictions. Now, a contradiction requires that the same statement be asserted and denied simultaneously, but the vast majority of alleged contradictions in the Bible is simply a case of a deferring perspective or an emphasis. One other is emphasizing one part more than the other, or it's a, an issue of genres and it's not really logical contradiction. For example, there are two genealogies of Jesus and they differ from each other, from Jesus all the way to David, and then they unite in the family of David. One son is one genealogy the second, another son is the other genealogy. But how do we reconcile this? Now, this was reconciled as early as the third century where I think it was, Julius Afri. Julius Afri, who reconciled us and said, one is the Matthew Genealogy is the legal genealogy of Jesus through Joseph. And the one in Luke is the biological genealogy of Jesus through Mary. And so there are ways of reconciling it because they are of different perspectives and different emphasis. Uh, And Matthew had his own reason for giving the legal account, and Luke had his own reason for giving the biological account. And it's just it's easy to reconcile these. The second response to this is that the non-contradiction criteria can be turned against the Quran. Well, How does the Koran hold up to this issue of contradictions? How does the Koran resolve internal tensions? They do it through the doctrine of abrogation, through the doctrine. I mean, That's so convenient to, to have a later scripture abrogate the previous one. And so the surah that we read earlier that there should not be inconsistencies now becomes a double-edged sword for Muslims because now there are inconsistencies and how do they explain it That the later surah abrogates or negates the previous surah where there's an inconsistency, that's not how the Bible is the, even though it's been written over 1500 years, there is no abrogation. what was written 1500 years ago is the basis, and then everything else builds on it. Nothing is negated. That's why Jesus said in Matthew chapter five, I have not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them. So this, this approach where abrogation is a thing, is a easy way out to avoid the non-contradiction. The the third response is that challenges are consistently refuted. Now, I watched some videos online and you probably know all these videos. There are plenty of, videos that are there online that show case by case the 101 contradictions case by case being dismantled and shown to be not a contradiction. Like for example, J Smith has refuted shabi, IES 101 contradictions by showing that it's a case of misreading the context or genre or whatever other harmonizing details. So, um, Later on if you all have links to these videos, you are welcome to share it uh, amongst the others. Alright, the fourth objection. Is that the Bible was written by men, not directly by God. The Bible was written by men unlike the Quran which had one order, the Bible had 40 plus others. And so it is a collection of human writing, subject to human error and bias and editing. Lemme give you three responses to this. First is that the Christian model of inspiration was never dictation. It was plenary verbal inspiration where the Holy Spirit worked through human personalities uh, and emotions and styles, and did not override them. And the verse for that, as you know, is two Peter one, verse 21. So the Christian model of inspiration, this model is not a weakness, it is the original design. That's how it was meant to be. It is a human element that makes the Bible accessible, historically rooted. A second response is that the unity across 40 author is itself evidence, as we said, it was written by 40 others, 1500 uh, years in three languages in three continents, and addresses hundreds of topics. Yet there is an internal coherence across such diversity where there is the creation, fall, redemption and restoration through Jesus. And this internal coherence makes a very powerful argument for divine authorship that the Quran doesn't have. Which leads us to our third response. The dictation model of the Quran has its own problem. Now the Qurans claim to be a direct dictation from God without any human input whatsoever has problems when the text contains grammatical irregularities and historical errors and internal tensions that require abrogation. Why does it even require abrogation when it was directly dictated by God? Didn't God know the end from the beginning? Why is there a need for the later surah to abrogate the previous one? So this accusation is more troubling for Islam than it is for the Christian system that acknowledges human mediation for the Bible. The fifth, objection. It's not an objection, but this is one of the reasons why they say that the Bible is corrupted. It says that the Bible the corruption took away the Muhammad mentions in scripture. And so the claim is that the Bible prophesied Muhammad's coming and the Koran says Muhammad is mentioned in the Torah and the gospel in Surah 7 1 57. And Jesus foretold Muhammad's coming by name in surah 61 6, where it said a messenger will come after me, whose name shall be Ahmed. And also Muslims. Point to, as you know, Deuteronomy 18, 15 to 18 and John 1416 as primary evidence. And lemme give you three quick responses to this. The first one is that Deuteronomy 18 specifies and Israelite prophet, the text says, I will raise up for them. A prophet like you from among their brothers and from among their brothers, refers to Israel, not Arabia. And the New Testament explicitly says that this was fulfilled. In Acts three, verse 22, it says that this was fulfilled through Jesus who was Jewish. Muhammad was not from Israel, he was from Arabian, specifically from the tribe of Koreh. So he is not from Israel. A second. The second response is from John chapter 1416. The Paraclete mentioned in John 1416 is not Muhammad. So the argument that's made is that the Paraclete in which means comforter or helper, is a corruption or a corrupted form of peric CTOs, which means the praised one and the praised one. Peric CTOs is Muhammad in Arabic, but all the existing Greek manuscripts, and there are thousands of them, as we said, they all read it as parato, which means comforter and not peric, Pluto which is the praised one. And more than that, the context makes it clear. Jesus says, A Paraclete will be with you forever and the world cannot receive him and he lives in you. None of which applies to Mohamed itself. And the third response is that it's a self contradiction. Why is it a self contradiction? How can Muslim apologists cite the Bible as containing prophecies uh, of Muhammad, and then argue that the Bible is corrupted and unreliable? They are completely opposite. You cannot cite it and then say it's unreliable. If the Bible is corrupted to the point of being unreliable, then you cannot use it as evidence for anything. And as we said earlier the, the uh, Muslims do need the Bible to complete their knowledge of the Quran. The sixth objection is that the Bible's cannon was decided by church councils. And so this is the objection that the books of the Bible or the canon of the Bible was chosen by human council, such as a council at naia which means that the canon of the Bible itself was based on a human agenda and not theologically grounded. Now, I wanna give you three responses to this. First is that the Council of Nsea did not determine the cannon. Does anybody know? I'm sure you do. Does anybody know when the Council of Nsea was and what it was for? It had nothing to do with the can of scripture. The 3 25 NAIA Council was um, called together by Emperor Constantine because of the Aryan controversy, which said that Jesus was not divine. And so they wanted to establish the divinity of Jesus, and it was not to produce a vote on the biblical canon. So when you look at the Ene Creed, the original 3 25 version, it talks about God, the Father, Jesus Christ. Then the 3 81 edition talks about the Holy Spirit and the church. So the Council of Naci had nothing to do with the canon of scripture. The second is that the canon was recognized, not invented. The books that were formalized as a canon was already widely circulated and used by churches decades before before it was made into a canon. So the councils, recognized what was already being accepted based on criteria of apostolic origin and doctrinal consistency and some other criteria for the biblical canon. And the third response is that early circulation of these texts, they predate the council decisions before any council met the texts were being circulated. In fact, Peter calls Paul's writing as scripture in two Peter, chapter three, verse 16. He calls Paul's writing as scripture, thereby equating it with the Old Testament scripture. So it was the early church communities that established the practical canon rather than the later institutional bodies. Now, as I was studying about this, I, took a tangent and studied a little more of the canon. I'd studied about it before, but I ended up writing a blog about it. So if you're interested, it's on my website. It's called the Canon of Scripture, and then I talk about the Old Testament, the New Testament, the history of the canon, the criteria for each of them, and so on. If you wanted to study on my website. Alright so finally, let's look at. The accusation that there are no original manuscripts that exist and that there are too many textual variants. Okay. Here the accusation is that there is no autograph available. No original manuscript available. Yes. The John Ryland's P 52, that is probably the first or second copy of John chapter 18. That is in the, that is in the library in England, but we don't have the original John chapter 18. And so this accusation says that there are hundreds of thousands of textual variants across numerous manuscript copies. In fact, this is one of the accusations that scholars like Bar Erman bring about and claim that this proves that the text is unreliable. Lemme give you three responses to this accusation. The first one is that most variants are trivial. Most variants are trivial. The vast majority of textile variance involve spelling differences, word order, and minor scribal errors and meaningful, doctrinal variants are very, very rare now. The most famous textual critic is Bruce Bruce Metzker, and he says that the essential message of the New Testament is not jeopardized by any variant. Now there are, there can be four kinds of variants, and lemme just very quickly go through them to show you how how the variants don't affect the main meaning of the Bible. There are four kinds of variants. First is a variant that is neither meaningful nor viable. Now, meaningful means that it doesn't, the meaning doesn't change. Viable means that it is not from the earliest manuscript. Okay. If it's from the earliest manuscript or an earlier manuscript, it'll be a viable variant. If it's from a later manuscript, it'll be a non-viable variant. So the first group of variance is that there are neither meaningful nor viable. It does not affect the meaning, and it is from a later manuscript. The second group is they're viable. That means they're from one of the earlier manuscripts, but they are not meaningful. It doesn't change the meaning. A third manuscript is that they're meaningful. It does change the meaning if it were true, but it happens to be from a later manuscript, and so it's not from an earlier manuscript. So we can reject that variant. Because what we really want is the earliest manuscripts. And then the fourth one, this is the key one where these are the important variants where it is both meaningful, it affects the meaning of the scripture, and it is viable, meaning that it is from one of the earlier manuscripts. So this fourth category is what we are concerned about. The fourth category is what we are concerned about. And if there are variance in this, if there are a lot of variants in this, then we have a problem because they both change the meaning of the scripture and they are from earlier manuscripts. So we have to, we have to recognize them. But when you look at the number of variants that are there, how many of them fall under the fourth category? And the number that falls under the fourth category is one fourth of 1%. So 99.75% of the 400,000 variants fall in the other three categories, and so they don't matter. So what I did is I made a chart actually. If you go to, if you search a lecture I did about three, four years ago on Bible translations. Uh, It's on my website. It's on bible translations. But what I did is I gave a complete list of all the variance between the Alexandrian manuscript and the Byzantine manuscript, and you can see how it is different. I'll give some of those here, but for a complete listing of all the variants that are meaningful and viable, you can look at that lecture. It's on Bible translation. Okay I've made a chart there, but let me give you a smaller chart here that shows some of these meaningful and viable variance. And if you notice it, that all of these variants are still in the King James version. So if you look if you wanna compare it, you can look at the King James version, and then you can look at any other contemporary version you have, and you'll find that the contemporary version does not have any of these meaningful and viable variants. They have been taken out. Okay, so the woman caught in adultery. If somebody asked me to preach on this, I refuse to preach on it because it's not part of the original manuscript. It may have been a true story, but it's not part of the original manuscript. If somebody asked me to preach on any one of these I would refuse because it's not part of the original manuscript. It's part of later corruption additions by other scribes. Okay? So the meaningful and viable variance are 0.25%, and so it does not affect the main meaning of scripture. Lemme give you two other responses. To this accusation. The second one is that the abundance of manuscripts is a strength, not a weakness. The large number of variants, 400,000 variants exist precisely because there are so many manuscripts. The more manuscripts, the more people the more scribes writing it down, there are gonna be variants. There are 5,800 New Testament Greek manuscripts. The more copies there are, the more likelihood for some minor variant, but also because the more copies there are, the more scholars can accurately determine what the original document was. So it is a strength, not a weakness. As you know, Julius Caesar's, Gallic Wars, the entire thing rests on just 10 manuscripts. Yes, there is way less variance. That's because there are only 10 manuscripts and one can have a major error that we don't know about. So it is a strength, not a weakness. And finally, the Quran has its own variant problem. The Quran has its own variant problem and we will look at two of the earliest manuscripts of the Quran. So the first one is the Sana manuscript, which is the oldest ex extent chronic manuscript. And when they examined it under UV light they found another underlying text that was faded. And so this is the upper text. This is the lower text that was underneath the upper text. So according to Sunni Muslim tradition, it is Abba, the first kif who compiled the Quran, and the third Kaif Uthman who canonize the standard version. So what they accuse the biblical canon is what really happened to the Quranic canon where Uthman took, found one of the variants and said, okay, this is it. From now on, let's burn everything. Let's burn everything else. From now on, copies are gonna be made only of this, except that one of the scribes. Disregarded what he said. He didn't burn it. Instead he scrubbed it. He scrubbed the old manuscript and wrote on top of it. And so this is the Sana manuscript, which has an upper text and a lower text. And the sequence of the lower text does not correspond to any onic order. So you have this very early onic manuscript where it's completely different and which one is true. If the lower text predates the upper text, then it invalidates the upper text because that's later. And that is what every Quran today is based on the upper text. So the Quran has its own variant problem. The other manuscript is the Birmingham Koran manuscript which has parts of Surah 18, 19, and 20. And this is carbonated to be between 5 68 and 6 45 ad. Now this is very interesting. That date is very interesting because, and I made a little chart to show you why that date is very interesting because the Birmingham Quran manuscript is 5 68 80. Muhammad died in 6 32 ad the onic canonization is 6 44 ad. So prior to the onic canonization, probably during the lifetime of Muhammad, there is a manuscript. That is different than the onic. Canonization. And so the doctrine of the perfectly preserved Koran is affected. That narrative is affected by the presence of these two manuscripts. In contrast, the biblical greatness is seen in its formation over 1500 years, more than 40 others, three languages, many genres. And it speaks with one unified voice about God's redemptive plan that was fulfilled through Jesus Christ. Its historical rootedness, its internal coherence. Its transparent manuscript tradition gives us the credibility that it was uh, authored by God himself. And it is this eternal word that we hold in our hands. Lemme just end with the story of a Muslim girl. about 25 years ago I was back in India and I had uh, my hometown is Bangalore. That's where I grew up. I had gone away for two years to this, city in South India called, where I worked as humongous Mission Hospital for about two years. I came back and I found that two of my friends had a partnership clinic. And so after I came back, I needed a partnership and we talked about it and I bought one share, one half of one partner. So my friend and I became partners and the other guy went and started his own clinic. And so the first year that I got there, we had two surgical assistants. One was one of them was a Muslim convert, a young female early twenties Muslim convert. She had become a convert before I got there because the other two friends of mine had evangelized. So I got there, this Muslim girl was there, very committed, very eager to study God's word, eager to know about the Bible, and she was the only Christian from her Muslim family. In the first year we got there, I wanted to do some renovation of the office, and so we did some renovation and we told our two assistants, okay, you don't need to come for this week. It was the last week of December. And we said don't come this week. You can stay home. And my partner and I, we came as we did the renovation, which was supposed to last a week. So my partner and I came every day and we watched the renovation going on sometime in the middle of the week but three days after we started the renovation, this Muslim girl. Who comes to the office and usually she's very bubbly and excited and talkative. So we asked her, we told her, Rema, you don't need to be here. You can stay home. You don't need to come and watch the renovation. We are here watching it. She hardly talked to us. Instead, she went straight into between the renovation, she went to the corner of a room where we had put all our stuff together to protect it from the dust of the renovation. She went into her corner, picked the Bible, and she started to read it. For three days she could not read the Bible, and she was starving. She was starving for God's word. She was starving for the life giving breath that is there in the Bible. Home and she wanted to fill herself with the words of life. There are many people in our churches that because we have access to the Bible at any time, we are not thirsting for God's word. We don't feel starved when we don't read the Bible for two days. We don't feel thirsty when we don't read the Bible for two days. I pray that we would continue to lean in to study these eternal words of truth that is given to us through the Bible. Thank you.