The reliability of Christian and Muslim texts compared

JoChris

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Which professional sources? And regarding what?
You can't even explain what your paradise is.
Last entry for you tonight - the bible gives the answers to your questions about Paradise. Like I said, keyword Heaven on biblegateway.com and take it from there.

Have you read the book? You brought it up, you should be the one giving the critical analysis.

Or Did you post about the book without reading it? Aw its not good to use things are "proof" or "sources" which you know nothing about.
I only discovered the book today, and this thread was the absolute perfect one to put it on. Both non Muslims and Muslims should find it MOST interesting....

You should be happy I found it for you Manama. It is a banned book. Amazon and several other bookstores are too scared to sell it- I wonder why? :)
 

JoChris

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Yes, Monty Python would see the humor in how narrow the worldview you are displaying is. Not only that, they would see the humor in how hypocritical you are towards us, and uncritical you are with your Bible, which you expect everybody to just accept as fact without even providing any logical reasons to accept anything written within it's pages.
I bet that was typed with your nose in the air, pursed lips, and wagging every finger simultaneously in sync with those sighs of exasperation...

Time to stop patronising others and start defending your position. Good night.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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Matthew 10 (RSRV)*

Sending Out the Twelve

5 These twelve Jesus sent out and commanded them, saying: “Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans. 6 But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7 And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ 8 Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. 9 Provide neither gold nor silver nor copper in your money belts, 10 nor bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor staffs; for a worker is worthy of his food.

11 “Now whatever city or town you enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and stay there till you go out. 12 And when you go into a household, greet it. 13 If the household is worthy, let your peace come upon it. But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. 14 And whoever will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, [keep on arguing with them* - or] shake off the dust from your feet. 15 Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city!

*RSRV - Red Sky Revised Version
 
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Good night.
Again, start defending your Bible:
https://vigilantcitizenforums.com/threads/the-reliability-of-christian-and-muslim-texts-compared.6196/post-232945

Surely you can do that, after having given me the royal treatment describing me as: "All your words are false. You are believing the lies of Satan being planted in your head. He is the accuser of Christians and you are being used like a pawn on a chessboard."

A defense of your Bible and a reply to that post (which I've posted three times now), would definitely make things easier for you.

You prove me wrong and I'll call myself Satan himself and beg for your mercy, accept Jesus as "lord" and become a Christian baptist preacher.
 

manama

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Last entry for you tonight - the bible gives the answers to your questions about Paradise. Like I said, keyword Heaven on biblegateway.com and take it from there
And I told you that all it says is that you get to meet God and like Haich said too what after that? Is it even a literal place? Do you just sit and talk? What about an afterlife?
Because you called islamic version of heaven to be material only while actually that "version" of Paradise offers more than just being with God.

I only discovered the book today, and this thread was the absolute perfect one to put it on. Both non Muslims and Muslims should find it MOST interesting....

You should be happy I found it for you Manama. It is a banned book. Amazon and several other bookstores are too scared to sell it- I wonder why? :)
You shouldn't post about thing without reading them first just like posting videos without watching them doesn't really work. Red always looks into stuff before he posts them.

Why should I be happy that you literally used something in an argument that you haven't actually read yourself. Unless you mean I should find it funny, which I do. Its hilarious when people embarrass themselves trying to prove points but actually know nothing about what they are saying.
 
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Matthew 10 (RSRV)
Yes, Ctrl + V is something I learnt very early on when I first used a computer. Tell me a chapter of the synoptics and I'll quote it for you.

Your lack of even providing commentary for it, proves either you are spamming the thread, or you missed this thread: https://vigilantcitizenforums.com/threads/favorite-bible-verses.51/


and I will once again bring this to mind, which you'll likely ignore again with a lame and dishonest excuse like "too busy, lol":
https://vigilantcitizenforums.com/threads/the-reliability-of-christian-and-muslim-texts-compared.6196/post-232934
 
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Red Sky at Morning

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Yes, Ctrl + V is something I learnt very early on when I first used a computer. Tell me a chapter of the synoptics and I'll quote it for you.

Your lack of even providing commentary for it, proves either you are spamming the thread, or you missed this thread: https://vigilantcitizenforums.com/threads/favorite-bible-verses.51/
I posted the thread up to consider the claims @friend made about the RSV being superior to other Bible versions and the claim that the Qur’an is 100% preserved from the words of Muhammad.

As neither of these questions are being attended to at present I see no real reason to stay to play “my religion is better than yours” and engage in scatter-gun polemics with people I don’t know.
 
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I posted the thread up to consider the claims @friend made about the RSV being superior to other Bible versions and the claim that the Qur’an is 100% preserved from the words of Muhammad.
The thread title is clearly not only about the Qur'an, it is about the Bible as well. "The reliability of Christian....text...".

This thread is open for any criticisms of the Bible. You can sling all the mud you want at the Qur'an but your Bible is in much more murkier water and you know this, and you continuously make it more and more clear (like your colleagues) by refusing to defend it in any way.
Considering you come down to simple notions like "just have faith" as your answer, you loose out in your very premise. See, you're not able to look at your own text critically (despite titling the thread what you have). This is a problem that you are clearly having problems recognizing. What we find is that your faith is entirely built up on an unstable house of cards, you have nothing but confidence in a cultural prop known as the Bible. You do not accept it on rational grounds, nor even spiritual grounds, your trap is emotional enticement. Purely emotional, nothing substantial. What you are doing will not find you truth.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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The thread title is clearly not only about the Qur'an, it is about the Bible as well. "The reliability of Christian....text...".

This thread is open for any criticisms of the Bible. You can sling all the mud you want at the Qur'an but your Bible is in much more murkier water and you know this, and you continuously make it more and more clear (like your colleagues) by refusing to defend it in any way.
Considering you come down to simple notions like "just have faith" as your answer, you loose out in your very premise. See, you're not able to look at your own text critically (despite titling the thread what you have). This is a problem that you are clearly having problems recognizing. What we find is that your faith is entirely built up on an unstable house of cards, you have nothing but confidence in a cultural prop known as the Bible. You do not accept it on rational grounds, nor even spiritual grounds, your trap is emotional enticement. Purely emotional, nothing substantial. What you are doing will not find you truth.
I have been reading your responses as well and I find it interesting that your basic style is “robust opposition”, strawman and ad-hominem. Why you believe I would wish to engage in an intelligent nuanced discussion of Christian theology with you is puzzling to me. Your sheer contempt for the Christian Faith makes meaningful exchanges difficult.

If you want to proceed by attending to the issues of textual integrity of the Bible and the Qur’an, I will be happy to converse providing the tone is respectful. I would ignore a rude person shouting at me in the street and so would you, do please let us try to avoid poor communication in this written forum.
 
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sheer contempt for the Christian Faith
This is your opinion, you can't know for sure whether it is true or not. Whether I like or dislike Christianity on the other hand, has no baring on whether the "Christian texts" are "reliable" or not, as the thread title states.

meaningful exchanges difficult.
Yes, the Christians of VC indeed make this difficult. Hence I tell it how it is. Your arrogance and spite is like yogurt to me.

If you want to proceed by attending to the issues of textual integrity of the Bible
I'm all ears.

There is this post you've yet to reply to: https://vigilantcitizenforums.com/t...an-and-muslim-texts-compared.6196/post-232934
 

Red Sky at Morning

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I'm all ears.
Continuing and concluding the overview of Dan’s Brubaker’s initial publication then:-

“These last two examples of corrections concern coverings, where someone at a later date covered over a portion of the text with a small piece of paper, or parchment, and either left it covered over and blank, or wrote something else over top of it. This, like the erasures, is one of the most obvious examples of correcting a text, proving intentional human intervention.

Correction Addendum 1: Here we have an example of 8 coverings in the Hussaini Cairo Mushaf (Cairo Mushaf al-Sharif, fol. 33v.) in Surah 2:191-193. Let’s go through each of the 8. These are coverings which were left blank. At first Daniel thought they were covered to patch up some damage to the manuscript, but there were no damages on the reverse side. So, it looks like they were intentionally censoring the text eight times.

In the first line all but the first three letters of wa-akhrijuhūm min ḥaythu “drive them out from wherever” of Q2:191 have been covered. In line 5 all but the first two and the last two letters of fa-in-qātalūhum “so if you fight to kill them” of Q2:191 have been covered. In line 6 all but the first five letters of faaqtulūkum kadhālika “then kill them (imper.), such” of Q2:191 have been covered. In line 7 all but the last five letters of fa-inintahaū “and if they desist” of Q2:192 have been covered. In line 8 the first three letters of ghafūr “forgiving”, and the last three letters of رحيم rahīm “merciful” of Q2:192 have been covered. In line 10 all but the first letter of al-dīn li-llah “the religion belongs to Allah” of Q2:193 has been covered. In line 11 all but the last letter of udwān “enmity” of Q2:193 has been covered. And finally, in line 12 the final two letters of bi-l-shahr “in the month” of Q2:193 have been covered.

Correction Addendum 1: In this final example of a correction we find 3 instances of coverings, which were then written over top, in Surah 13:11-12, found in the Hussaini Cairo Mushaf (Cairo Mushaf al-sharif, fol. 430r.).

On the first line pictured, all but the first two letters of بانفسهم bi-anfusihim “in themselves” of Q13:11 has been written over top of such a taping. One can easily see the covering, while the word written over top has a thicker nib, with darker ink, and uses a completely different script with an elongated style of writing.

On the second-to-last line pictured, all but the initial ʾalif of يركمالذى alladhi yurikum “he who shows you” of Q13:12 has similarly been written over top of a taping and is rather elongated. The stretching is not unusual in this manuscript, but it is more pronounced in this spot than is standard for the original scribe. Instead of an entire sentence a later scribe has simply written a few letters and elongated the letters in order to fill the resulting gap.

It is notable that one letter is missing when compared with the 1924 ‘Hafs’ Cairo edition, which has an additional yaʾ between the raʾ and the kaf, ىِذلآمُيكِرُي

On the final line, the وطمعا wa-ṭamaʿā “and hope” of Q13:12 has also been written over a taping, which covered a sentence, but then was replaced with just a few letters, elongated once again.

In all three cases we cannot know what was initially written, but we can see that the new corrections over top all correspond with the ’Hafs’ Caireen 1924 text. Al Fadi wonders whether these coverings were added after 1924, since this manuscript resides in Cairo itself, the very city where the Hafs text was chosen.

In conclusion we can say that these are not examples of Ahruf or Qira’at, which are simply different readings, because those require diacritical marks and vowels, which weren’t even invented when these manuscripts were written.

These corrections are all made with consonantal letters (the Rasm) which anyone can then add their own readings by reciting the text orally (i.e. adding their own vowels, depending on their dialect).

In these 9 episodes Jay and Al Fadi have pretty much destroyed all of the 4 claims Muslims make for their Qur’an. No longer can Muslims claim that the Qur’an is eternal, nor sent down to Muhammad, nor complete at the time of Uthman, nor unchanged in the last 1400 years. These episodes, following just 22 examples of over 4,000 now discovered by Dr Brubaker, clearly suggest that the Qur’an was written by men, corrected and changed by yet other men, and then finally canonized just 85 years ago by still other men.

When we compare the Qur’an with the Bible, we find that the Qur’an begins with thousands of differences, which need to be corrected to one final text in 1924. When we look at the Bible, we find that the differences in it are found much later, but by comparing all 24,000 manuscripts we can know what the original text was, which makes the Bible much better preserved, and much more credible historically than the Qur’an.”

 
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Continuing and concluding the overview of Dan’s Brubaker’s initial publication then:-
Nope, you're here to defend the "reliability of Christian texts" as we agreed to above. I don't care about your little emotions. If the Bible is reliable, then it's reliable, if it's not then it's not.

https://vigilantcitizenforums.com/t...an-and-muslim-texts-compared.6196/post-232934

You're really trying everything to avoid answering that aren't you :rolleyes:

The moral of the story is that Christians have an innate inability to defend their supposedly 'authoritative' texts, collectively known as the Bible.

See, your eers are on tiny guesses that you expect people to just accept the utter conjecture you posted without any actual examination (like your Qur'an copypasta above), whereas my eers are with the entirety of the Bible itself. I will accept the Bible, become a Christian and a minister myself if you can give me a rational argument, and textual proof of your Bible's supposed validity.
As I said, I'm all ears, give me your best.
 
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If your only defense of the Bible is to throw out a lazy attack on the Qur'an (taking Jay Smith as a source says a lot about you too), speaks volumes about how you have no defense for the Bible. Not surprised by now, not at all.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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If your only defense of the Bible is to throw out a lazy attack on the Qur'an (taking Jay Smith as a source says a lot about you too), speaks volumes about how you have no defense for the Bible. Not surprised by now, not at all.
It is not that your attacks on the Bible are too hard, it is simply that they are too wide. Answering one question at a time is fine, attempting to demand answers to ten reminds me of how nursery teachers must feel!

I posted up the final episode of Jay’s series on Dan’s book because it dealt with coverings over words to harmonise versions of the Qur’an. This is not to say they covered up entirely different meanings but it does seem to me that the “perfect, unchanged” claim is more of a modern narrative ascribed to the Qur’an than one that it might have originally claimed for itself.

Doubtless you will disagree which I why I posted up the material above for people to review.

As to the Bible, there are at least two likes of enquiry to take.

One is considering the technical integrity of the text which in leg light if recent findings diminishes the authority of the critical Alexandrian readings in favour of the majority text. Links have been posted earlier in this thread.

The second is on the question of how we got the Bible. An interesting study for anyone who prefers research to argument:-


The final issues indicated a desire to cross-examine Christian doctrines. Any one of these might make an interesting thread if discussed on their own, and may even represent genuine questions Muslims have of Christianity, but taken as a group and is evident from the context of this thread are more of an attempt to use them as a blunt rhetorical cudgel with which to attempt to attack.
 
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Haich

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Frustrations are clearly growing so guys let's keep it polite. I myself grew tired of JoChris' tone and snapped so I do apologise for my conduct in that regard.

I think the Christians need to understand that the muslim mind won't accept faith or sheer belief as an answer or response to some of the issues posed. We need clarity and when something doesn't make sense to us, it's not that we are playing religion wars or holding christianity in contempt, we are actually trying to make sense of what you believe. I'm sure Christians themselves would be the first to admit that there are challenging concepts (as in challenging our intellect and logic) to grapple with and a lot of ambiguous and abstract ideas which people are just expected to understand and accept.
You need to be able to explain your faith and apparent contradictions in the bible with clarity or else you wont have a leg to stand on when discussing.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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Frustrations are clearly growing so guys let's keep it polite. I myself grew tired of JoChris' tone and snapped so I do apologise for my conduct in that regard.

I think the Christians need to understand that the muslim mind won't accept faith or sheer belief as an answer or response to some of the issues posed. We need clarity and when something doesn't make sense to us, it's not that we are playing religion wars or holding christianity in contempt, we are actually trying to make sense of what you believe. I'm sure Christians themselves would be the first to admit that there are challenging concepts (as in challenging our intellect and logic) to grapple with and a lot of ambiguous and abstract ideas which people are just expected to understand and accept.
You need to be able to explain your faith and apparent contradictions in the bible with clarity or else you wont have a leg to stand on when discussing.
I agree Haich - I think if genuine issues are isolated and dealt with clearly we would have a more informed and interesting discussion.
 

Haich

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I agree Haich - I think if genuine issues are isolated and dealt with clearly we would have a more informed and interesting discussion.
It doesn't help when JoChris and Lisa post 'passionate' posts generalizing muslims and vehemently denying any explanation or evidence given!

But you're right we need to check ourselves and remember this is an attempt to learn from each other.
 
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