THEOLOGY & APOLOGETICS

Are Muslims correct that the Bible has been corrupted?

How the Qur'an actually affirms the Bible.

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Yet many revered Muslims leaders, before and after Ibn-Khazem, opposed that position, and accepted the unaltered integrity of our present Bible, including:

1. Ali al-Tabari (838-870?), Persian scholar and physician who produced one the world's first encyclopedias of medicine

2. Bukhari (810-870), who gathered some of the earliest traditions of Islam, quoting the Quran itself to support his belief in the text of the Bible (Sura 3:72, 78)

3. Al-Mas'udi (893-956), historian and traveler; known as the "Herodotus of the Arabs," he was the first Arab to combine history and scientific geography in a large-scale work to produce a world history.

4. Abu Ali Husain Bin Sina (980-1037), also known as Avicenna, a brilliant Persian scholar whose hundreds of written works included what became a standard medical text at European universities well into the 1600s.

5. Al-Ghazzali (1058-1111), considered to be among the greatest Muslim scholars, for whom was named the Al-Ghazzali Centre for Islamic Sciences and Human Development, "a Learning Centre for Sacred Islamic Knowledge .... committed to the dissemination of the true Traditional Islamic Principles and Knowledge from the Prophetic Traditions, and as understood by the rightly-guided scholars of Islam."

6. Fakhruddin Razi (1149-1209), author of the The Great Commentary, an eight-volume exegesis of the Qur'an. He wrote: "The Jews and early Christians were suspected of altering the text of the Taurat and Injil (Torah and Gospel); but in the opinion of eminent doctors and theologians it was not practicable thus to corrupt the text, because those Scriptures were generally known and widely circulated, having been handed down from generation to generation."

7. Ibn-Khaldun (1332-1406), who, according to one Muslim website, is "the most important figure in the field of History and Sociology in Muslim History." British historian Arnold Toynbee praised some of his writing as "the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place."

8. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), a distinguished scholar, social reformer and political leader of India who founded the Aligarh College, who said of the Bible: "In the opinion of us Mohammedans it is not proved that corruption (tahrif-i-lafzi)...was practiced."

9. Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), Egyptian scholar and mufti (Islamic legal counselor) for Egypt who led the late 19th-century movement in several Muslim countries to revitalize Islamic teaching and institutions for the modern world. He said, "As far as the text of the Bible is concerned, it has not been altered ... No attempt was made to present a diverging text as the authentic one."

III. CHRISTIAN VIEW OF THE BIBLE AS GOD'S UNCORRUPTED WORD

The Bible was written not by fallible man, but by the Holy Spirit (1 Peter 1:20-21; 2 Timothy 3:16) through men and women using their own language and idioms, all without error or contradiction (though there are paradoxes, often revealing much deeper spiritual truth). Jesus cited Scripture passages, proving their error-free authority (Mark 12:24), and spoke of the eternal reliability of God's Word (Matthew 24:35; John 10:34-35). The long, failed history of ancient man attempting to physically destroy all Bibles, and modern man trying to intellectually destroy it, serves only to reveal man's impotence against God's miraculous power to uphold and preserve his eternal Word (Psalm 119:89).

Islamic scholars disputing the Bible's reliability have yet to produce a single verifiable instance of the Scripture tampering they claim. The thousands of extant ancient Scripture passages do not add to confusion and mistranslations, like the child's game of "Gossip," but rather serve as a Rosetta Stone for research and confirmation through the science of textual criticism, as well as other scholarly disciplines for cross-checking claims of fact. If the original texts were corrupted, it should be easy enough to come up with many examples of deliberately altered text. Yet not one has been presented by any scholar, Muslim or otherwise.

Reliability of the Scriptures is a problem for Muslims, not Christians. They, like all people, must ultimately have a reliable answer for the one question that matters above all others in this life: "Who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8:29)

A final point: The Bible was written by some 40 people — male and female, rich and poor, old and young, king and shepherd, priest and layman — over a period of about 1,500 years, covering the world's most controversial topics, yet without a single disagreement! Can anyone imagine 40 professors — all living today, all experts in the same field, all working at the same college — writing about even one controversial issue without any disagreement? There never was, nor ever will be, any book on earth like the Bible.

Image credit: F.R.L., Some rights reserved

Tags: Current-Issues | Other-Religions

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Published 1-6-14