Ali Ataie – Defending the Quran The Quran and the Apocryphal gospels Dr
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AI: Transcript ©
Hello, everyone, and welcome to blogging theology. Today,
I'm very happy to welcome back doctor Ali
Atai from Zaytuna College
in California. Assalamu alaykum, sir. Walaikum Assalam, brother
Paul. How are you? I'm doing well. Very,
very good to have you back on the
channel.
Good to be back on Vlogging Theology.
Best, podcast
on YouTube.
You have no idea how much money I
have to pay to use. You get you
say that every time. But,
for those who don't know, doctor Ali Attai
is a scholar of biblical hermeneutics,
specializing in sacred languages,
comparative theology, and comparative literature at Tsuyta College.
CUNA College.
Today, he will be giving a presentation
titled
defending the Quran,
the Quran, and the apocryphal
gospels.
Inshallah.
This will be, part 2 of the Quran
series. We started last year with the preservation
of the Quran. Today,
doctor Ali Atay will answer the question.
Did the prophet plagiarize certain apocryphal Christian writings
that contain heretical christological
views?
And there will be, an examination
of what the Christian canon and apocryphal are,
who determined them, and when. So
over to you, sir.
Thank you so much.
Alright.
Yes.
So as you said, Paul, this is,
part 2,
of 2 of our Quran series, but section
1 of 2.
So part 1,
you said, was on the preservation of the
Quran. We did that about a year ago
or so. Yeah. Today, we start, part 2,
but we'll only cover section 1. So section
1 is called defending the Quran, as you
said, the Quran and the apocryphal gospels.
So in section 2, our next podcast, Insha'Allah,
we'll examine the Quran's engagement with Jewish texts
and traditions. So like the Tanaf, the Tanmud,
the Midrash,
as well as other traditions, like the Gurul
Qurnayn, things like that, etcetera.
So, yeah, so here is the,
the Christian polemicist and modern atheist claims, simply
put,
the prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, they don't
say sallallahu alaihi wasallam, but I'll say it,
plagiarized certain apocryphal Christian writings that heretical Christological
views when he composed the Quran,
which he claimed was a revelation from God.
So let's take a small step back.
1st of all, broadly speaking,
what is the Quran actually doing with the
Christian tradition?
Well, as I said in the last podcast,
the Quran,
tells us what it's doing. The Quran is
transparent.
We don't have to to guess.
The Quran acknowledges explicitly that it is confirming,
rejecting, and refining
major aspects of the Christian tradition.
The Quran refers it
refers to itself as a Muhammed. And Paul,
you asked me about this term way back,
I think, during our first podcast.
Muhammed is also one of the names of
God in the Quran, al Muhammed.
Muhammed means,
an overseer, a supervisor,
or master,
a final authority, right?
So the Quran says, we revealed the scripture
to you, O Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, in
truth as a confirmer
of what came before it from the previous
scriptures
and as a supreme authority over them.
So,
judge between them by what God has revealed.
And there are many other verses that explain
what the Quran is doing with Jewish and
Christian texts. So
there is confirmation,
there's correction,
and there's rejection
of Christian texts and tradition.
For example, after telling us about Jesus, peace
be upon him, after giving us
his status,
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says,
such was Jesus, the son of Mary.
The aforementioned
is the statement of truth about which they,
Jews and Christians, we can add atheists, are
disputing.
In other words, the aforementioned the aforementioned is
who Jesus really is.
A prophet of God, a servant of God,
etcetera. So the Quran engages in critical rewritings
of Judeo Christian tradition, specifically in this case,
a Christological
revision
or correction
of incarnationalist
Christianity.
In another verse, the Quran
says, right? Don't say 3.
You know, so here the Quran is
broad in its condemnation.
So don't say 3,
fill in the blank. 3 persons,
father, son, holy spirit,
like the the Catholics
and the later Eastern Orthodox and Protestants.
Father, son, mother, like the Coloridians.
Don't say 3 beings,
like many influential pre Islamic
Christian theologians, like John Philoponus
and many others.
Of course, modern Mormons are tritheistic.
The Godhead for them consists of 3 distinct
deities.
Don't say 3 modes like the modalist, the
Patri Pasyanists.
Don't say 3. Right? So,
of course,
critical scholars eventually
complied with the Quran.
The Johann and coma, right Yeah. From the
critical Greek text in 19
52, revised standard version. 1st John 5:7, that's
the that's the only verse, as you know,
in the in the New Testament that described
God as 3.
But, you know, better late than never, I
guess.
So this is this is a tweet from
doctor Khalil Andani that I wanted to share.
And, Paul, you actually shared it with this
with me a while back. I thought it
was a brilliant, response on his part. I
hope he doesn't mind.
Now obviously, I don't agree with doctor Andani
in many issues,
but I just love his response here to
a, a Christian critic
of the Quran
who accuses the author of the Quran of
basically doing a copy and paste job Mhmm.
Various
Christian texts and traditions, both canonical and apocryphal.
So I'll just read this. He said, I
concluded the opposite
Native and coherent in incorporation of biblical and
post biblical material
into an original
and critical theological narrative
indicates its author has a very deep and
sophisticated
knowledge
of biblical slash late antique religion and sources
akin to a library.
And and I have a hunch that John
Wansborough, right, the famous orientalist at SOAS, I
think he also noticed that it was basically
impossible for one unlettered man in the Arabian
Peninsula
to produce the text of the Quran in
the 7th century.
He proposed that there must have been, a,
I don't know, a council of some sort
of different editors in Iraq during the Abbasid
caliphate in the 8th century
that basically stitched
the Quran together using various different writings,
kind of like what the redactor did with
the Pentateuch,
according to Wellhausen,
according to the documentary
Hyper For me, so I'd interrupt your your
marvelous flow. But, I mean, at this point,
it's such a good one. I think that,
it is literally, in my view, for what
it's worth, impossible
for a man to have produced the Quran.
It has such nuance, such sophistication,
in its engagement with the biblical material,
in in a way that when we're beginning
to appreciate, it makes no sense historically at
all to attribute this to a man in
7th century Arabia.
It's it's it's it's beggars belief that it's
possible. It's not possible. And I think the
only thing stopping a certain scholars from acknowledging
that is is simply well, other reasons, shall
we say, but not the the technical point
is well made, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what that's
the conclusion Wandsborough came to. But then, of
course, with the recent discoveries of 7th century
Quran manuscripts that we talked about last time,
where the entire Quran is attested many times
over.
Yeah. Wansbrough was
definitively falsified after that point.
So so here's a question.
How is this different than literary mimesis? In
other words,
how is what the Quran is doing,
to Christian texts and traditions different than literary
mimesis? So just as a reminder,
during our last podcast about the crucifixion,
we said that the gospel writers such as
Mark are highly Hellenized, highly educated
Greek novelists and biographers. And they wrote according
to a well known flexible genre
of Greco Roman literature where textual menses was
standard. In other words, quite often,
the gospel writers borrowed
Jewish and Greek stories about other people like
Joseph or Odysseus or Dionysseus.
They tweaked these stories a bit, then replaced
the protagonist
with Jesus
or Paul in some cases.
So that is very different than what the
Quran is doing. The Quran says explicitly in
the
these are the true accounts.
The Quran isn't replacing people. It's correcting narrative.
Right? For example, the Quran is not saying,
you know, Jesus, peace be upon him, never
healed
the blind and lepers.
That was the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him. No. What the Quran is saying is
that Jesus never claimed to be divine.
Right? Now, to be fair, there are three
instances
where critical historians
do in fact contend that both the Bible
and Quran,
in their presentation of specific events,
replace antecedent figures with new protagonists.
These involve events in the lives of prophets
Noah, Moses, and Jesus.
So I'm only going to look at the
last one today, the miraculous birth of Jesus,
peace be upon him. The former 2, we'll
look,
at probably next time. But definitely next time
insha'Allah in section 2 of this course. Along
with some alleged
historical errors in the Quran that are repeated
ad nauseam by critics of the Quran.
But here's another question. What's the difference between
a critical rewriting and plagiarism?
So in the Quran, we have an Exodus
narrative. Right? The protagonist is Moses. Did the
author of the Quran plagiarize the story from
the Torah, from Exodus?
The answer is no. According to many critical
scholars of the Quran like Angelica Neuwirth or
the Corpus Coronica Project,
and I agree with this, the author of
the Quran
already assumes that you know the received biblical
tradition.
Okay. The Quran does not give us
the flood or exodus thinking that none of
its audience knows these stories.
The Quran assumes
what some scholars refer to as the full
knowing reader. So this is not plagiarism. This
is called a critical
rewriting.
And by the way, there is not a
single verse in the Quran that is identical
to a verse
in the Bible.
The Quran is restating relevant aspects of these
stories in its own words,
along with an unsurpassable
eloquence,
while also revising these stories for the sake
of correction
and in order to
draw out various ebar, which are, like, sort
of instructive
and transhistorical
lessons from the narrative. So I'll give you
a quick example of a Quranic
critical rewriting.
So when Mary, peace be upon her, asks
the angel how she can possibly have a
son,
the gospel of Luke and the Quran give
us 2 very different answers.
This is not because, know, the author of
the Quran just couldn't remember the right answer.
Right? Oh, what did Luke say?
Something up.
Right? No. This this difference is deliberate
and instructive.
The Quran purports to give us the true
answer
of of the angel to Mary's question. And
and we'll see that the angels answer in
the Quran
is much more contextually
coherent
than what Luke tells us. So more on
the virgin birth, later inshallah.
So plagiarism,
with all due respect, okay,
is most likely what Joseph Smith did with
the King James
version of the Bible.
So there are numerous quotes from Isaiah
in the Book of Mormon,
that are identical to the 17 69 King
James version.
This is just a fact. Now Mormons believe
that Joseph dictated the Book of Mormon by
putting a stone into his hat and then
burying his face,
into his hat. So in in the darkness
of his hat,
magical seer stone,
as they refer to it, would reveal the
translation of the golden plates in English.
The golden plates were written in a language
called reformed
Egyptian according to Smith by 2 Nephite prophet
historians named Mormon
and his son Moroni around 400 of the
common era, again, according to Smith.
So apparently,
it's just a big coincidence that dozens of
times,
dozens of times,
Smith's translation of Isaiah while peering into his
hat was verbatim identical
to the translation of Isaiah in the 17/69
King James version.
So this fact for me raises serious
doubts about Joseph's claim of prophecy.
Plagiarism,
with all due respect, is what Matthew and
Luke
did with respect to Mark and q.
Okay? Matthew and Luke copied extensively
from Mark and q verbatim, and both Matthew
and Luke did not expect that their gospels
would be read alongside Mark, their main source,
thus exposing
their plagiarism.
While the Quran expects you to know
how it is revising
the biblical stories. You know, if Matthew was
a college student in 2023,
you'd be expelled.
I mean, maybe maybe this type of copying
was accepted in the ancient Greco Roman world.
I doubt it. But even if it were
even if this was the case, it's still
plagiarism.
Now
sometimes Matthew does revise Mark,
but this doesn't help the confessional Christian who
believes that everything in these four gospels
is inspired by God, the Holy Spirit, the
3rd person of the trinity.
Matthew
revised Mark because he disagreed with Mark.
In other words, it certainly seems like Matthew,
think that Mark's gospel was inspired by God,
at least not all of it. Matthew was
confirming, rejecting, and refining,
just like the Quran is confirming, rejecting,
and refining. Matt although Matthew was also plagiarizing
at times, unlike the Quran. Right? So so
just as the Quran revises
the 4 gospels,
in a manner to establish its own Christological
voice, Matthew and Luke revised Mark to establish
their own Christological voices. The problem, however, is
that Christians believe that it's all canon.
So that's a problem. Right?
Now in a previous podcast,
we spoke about the preservation of the Quran.
Right? How the Quran came together as it
were starting with the 7 recitational variations,
the companion codices, the Uthmanic
codex committee, the 10 authorized reading traditions, the
manuscript evidence, etcetera, etcetera.
Now over the past year or so,
I've received multiple requests to do something similar
with the New Testament.
How did the New Testament come together?
And it just so happens that today's topic,
the Quran and the Apocryphal Gospels,
is directly related to the history of the
New Testament canon. So we can kill 2
birds with 1 stone. Okay? So so this
is not me taking pot shots at Christianity.
Right? The history of the New Testament canon
is directly related
to our topic. This is something we have
to cover.
So so here are some crucial
questions that we must at least attempt to
answer
before we can talk about the Quran's engagement
with apocryphal Christian text. What is the Christian
canon?
Who determined it and how? When was it
determined?
What is the Christian apocrypha? Who determined it
and how?
Is the author of the Quran
beholden to the judge judgments of the Catholic
church?
So, let's start with a seemingly simple question.
What is a Christian?
Now if I were to ask a Protestant
or a Catholic in 2023,
he might say that a Christian is someone
who believes
in the New Testament as being the inspired
word of God.
You know, that's that's not a sufficient condition
of Christian faith, would say, but it's a
good start. It's not sufficient because a Trinitarian
would argue that Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons also
affirm that the New Testament is the word
of God, yet they are not Christians
because their theology is heretical at least from
the perspective of a Trinitarian.
But even with this said, I think they
would say that a necessary condition of becoming
a Christian
is belief in the New Testament, excuse me,
New Testament canon of scripture.
And here it is, okay? So here are
the books of the New Testament canon and
their authors
according to the Christian faith tradition.
So
Matthew
wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark,
Luke wrote Luke, etcetera.
Now sometimes the book itself is named after
its author,
but most times not. So Acts was written
by Luke, Romans by Paul,
etcetera.
So these are the traditional
attributions.
Okay? As you can see, all books are
considered
apostolic, and I'll I'll define this term a
bit later,
inshallah.
Okay.
Now here
are the books of the New Testament canon
and their authorship according to the general consensus
of critical scholars.
So only 7 out of 27, barely 25
percent are correctly attributed to their authors. The
remaining books are either pseudepigraphal,
which literally means false writings, that is to
say forgeries,
or sued anonymous,
that is to say anonymous, but later attributed
to an early authority.
So look at the difference here. If we
just toggle back and forth, it's
quite
interesting.
According to the general consensus of critical scholars,
none of the 27 books of the New
Testament
were written by the 3 pillars, James, Peter,
or John. I mean, Paul calls them the
so called pillars. I mean, Paul obviously had
major issues with them.
The genuine Pauline corpus was written by self
proclaimed apostle of Jesus. Okay? Everyone agrees that
Paul never met Jesus of Nazareth. And I
would argue that there are good reasons to
doubt whether
Paul was ever commissioned by James,
to teach the gospel. So I recommend viewers
to watch our podcast that we did on
Paul versus James for more information.
So indeed, look at the difference. Right? It
it's a big difference.
So it's one of my teachers
in a short rhymed couple couplet, he said,
it's all Paul and Paul is all.
Alright. Moving on here. So so here's a
fact,
that may come as shocking.
The present 27 book New Testament was not
officially
and universally universally
declared
a closed canon
until the 16th century.
Okay. So this was after and in response
to the Protestant Reformation.
So that was a 1000 years after the
life of the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam,
a 1000 years.
In the 16th century, the Latin Vulgate of
Jerome was declared absolutely
definitively authentic
by the Council of Trent.
The Council of Trent was the 19th
ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic church. Some
of the Protestant leaders
like, Martin Luther
were talking about forming a canon within a
canon.
So the Catholic church responded
by calling for this council. Okay. Ultimately, the
Protestants adopted
the New Testament canon, the Roman Catholic church.
You know, it's very interesting,
and a bit ironic
if you ask protestants at random
about the pope,
of the Catholic church, many of them will
say highly derogatory things,
even to the point
of calling the Catholic church,
the whore of Babylon and the the pope
is the antichrist. And it's crazy. I've heard
this many, many times personally.
And yet it was the Roman Catholic church
that determined the New Testament canon
that all Protestants read and revere
as the word of God.
So let me say it another way. Most
anti Muslim polemicists,
right, are not Catholic, but but some of
them are but most are not. And many
of these polemicists vehemently condemn
the Catholic
church. So not only are they anti Muslim,
they're anti Catholic. Yet if you ask a
non Catholic,
Christian,
why are there 27 books in the New
Testament?
They'll be forced to admit
if if they're honest because of the Catholic
church.
It's amazing.
Now the 1st Christian in history,
to suggest,
that is, recommend that Christians only read our
present 27 book canon
was Athanasius.
Okay. The Bishop of Alexandria
in 367
of the common era.
So so let me be clear here. Athanasius
was not the very first Christian
to propose a canon. As far as we
know, that was Marciones Sinope
who died in 160
common era, who only proposed 11 books. Right?
So some version of Luke and then 10
Pauline
epistles, including a Pauline epistle called,
Laodiceans.
Marcion's list is apparently not extent.
The oldest extent New Testament canon list is
called the moratorium canon,
which is probably mid second century.
The author or authors
reject Hebrews,
James,
1st and second Peter, and third John.
They accepted the wisdom of Solomon and the
apocalypse of Peter. So the moratorium canon was
very different than what Athanasius would later suggest.
Athanasius in the 4th century was the first
to propose our present
27 books, Matthew to Revelation,
20 of which, as we saw, were either
forged or far off or falsely attributed to
their authors by ecclesiastical,
authorities.
So Athanasius said, in these alone, the teaching
of godliness is proclaimed.
So that's one man's opinion. Athanasius was also
famous, or maybe we should say infamous for
his support of Hamausian
Christology,
that won the day at the Council of
Nicaea in 325 CE. So that was the
first ecumenical
church council. In other words, he championed the
belief that the Son of God was literally
the same being,
as the father. Right? So hamausios
means same essence.
So this is same essence Christology. The father
and the son are ontologically
equal. In fact, they're one and the same
being.
So not quite yet the Trinity, but we're
getting there. Now contrary to popular perception,
the Council of Nicaea
had nothing to do with the New Testament
canon.
Okay, this is the claim of Dan Brown.
His fiction book kind of popularized this claim.
You know, actually,
Voltaire
made this claim in the 18th century
in his
dictionary philosophique.
Right? He said that the council,
the council stacked,
you know, these these books
on an altar and the books that fell
to the ground
rejected. Right? So this is a legend. Nicea
did not touch the issue of the canon.
Constantine did not touch the issue
of the canon.
There were around 30 to 40 gospels of
Jesus written during the early Christian period,
but Nicea had nothing to do with them,
whatsoever.
Now in 393
CE, okay, about 30 years after Athanasius
wrote his recommended reading list, a small council,
a a small local council called the Synod
at Hippo was held in North Africa,
which ratified Athanasius' choices.
And none other than Augustine of Hippo pushed
hard for its acceptance as well. Of course,
Augustine
was the author of the famous De Trinitate,
the Trinity. So he's considered
probably the greatest
theologian in the Latin tradition until Aquinas.
But the Synod at Hippo was not an
ecumenical council.
Right? It was not a universal council.
So there was still major difference of opinion
among Christians the world over
with respect to the canon of scripture.
The synod at Hippo was in no way
universally
binding.
The Council of Trent
held about 1200 years later was universally binding.
Well, at least it was
supposed to be. So the point is Athanasius
did not settle the canon.
Right? This is another misconception
about the New Testament canon.
Neither Nicea nor Athanasius nor Hippo settled the
canon. Now Bart Ehrman, who is currently actually
contemplating a book on this very topic,
because he gets so many questions about the
canon,
he actually wrote his doctoral dissertation
on someone called Didymus the blind. So So
Didymus the blind was a theologian
in Alexandria,
where he taught for about 50 years.
He died in like 398 of the common
era.
And the canon of dynamis the blind was
different than the canon of Athanasius.
So he and Athanasius were living at the
same time and in the same city,
same time, same city, different canons.
Okay? Didymus is similar
to Arius in this regard, like Arius and
Athanasius
were living at the same time, same city,
but espoused vastly different Christologies, right?
But back to Didymus. So Didymus included in
his canon,
the shepherd of Hermes
and the epistle of Barnabas,
and also said that 2nd Peter was a
forgery.
So did was right about that. But as
it turned out, a lot more than second
Peter,
was forged.
Now
there is a popular claim among Christian apologists
that the New Testament canon was actually settled
and agreed upon
before Athanasius,
in fact, in the 2nd century. So this
is what we often are told by Krishna.
So forget about Athanasius or the sin out
of Hippo. It happened in the 2nd century.
So this is absolutely false. This is demonstrably
not true.
This claim is even worse than Dan Brown's
claim about Nicaea. And of course, Dan Brown's
claim is fiction.
In the 2nd century, the early church fathers
and heresiologists
like the authors of the moratorium canon,
certainly had their preferences. Okay. And there was
much debate,
but nothing was settled.
Okay. Nothing. Again, nothing was officially
and universally
settled until about 500 years ago,
1000 years after Islam, 1000 years after
Islam until we get official
Canon and Apocrypha.
Okay. So for the early proto orthodox authorities,
in order for a particular book to be
considered true and authentic,
okay, it had to be basically three things.
Some say 4, but 2 of them can
be collapsed into 1. So
apostolic,
Catholic and Orthodox.
So what does apostolic mean?
Apostolic means that it was written by an
apostle of Jesus, either a direct disciple
or a disciple of a disciple. Right? So
it needed to be connected
to one of Jesus's closest, followers.
What does Catholic mean? So Catholic doesn't mean
Roman Catholic
in this context. Okay? It means, you know,
general or popular, well read by many Christians.
And finally, what does Orthodox mean?
Orthodox means
in agreement with their theology, the theology of
the proto orthodox. In other words, in line
with the Pauline Christianity
that would eventually
crystallize as full blown Trinitarianism.
Now, the majority of Christians in the 2nd
3rd centuries,
the majority of those who believe that Jesus
was a messianic figure
were proto Orthodox
because of Paul of Tarsus
relentless and unauthorized
evangelizing in the Greco Roman world.
And of course, there was not universal agreement
even among the proto orthodox
about which books were in and which books
were out. As I said earlier,
Didymus the blind was proto orthodox. Eusebius of
Caesarea,
who was present at Nicaea with Athanasius.
He disputed James and second Peter
and second and third John and Jude and
Revelation.
And he accepted the shepherd of Hermas.
There there was another local council in 3/64,
of the common era called the Council of
Laodicea. This was in Turkey. This is before
Hippo that completely rejected the book of Revelation.
They thought it was a total forgery.
So Jesus saying on the alpha and the
omega, that's apparently a total forgery according to
the bishops that were present at that local
council in Turkey. But here's the weird thing
about how the proto orthodox authenticated their books.
So generally, if they deemed a certain book
to be orthodox,
right, that is an agreement with their theology,
then it was declared apostolic.
So the gospel of Matthew agreed with their
theology,
and it was quite popular. Therefore, it must
have been written by an apostle.
So Matthew.
Yes, Matthew.
Now this is a bit tangential,
but, I wanna say a few things about
Matthew's gospel just to clarify something.
Muslim apologists are quick to point out that
the Methian Jesus was a practicing rabbi who
said that as long as heaven and earth
endure, not a jot or a tittle shall
pass by the law until all is fulfilled.
He said that the disciples'
adherence to the law
must be greater,
than even that of the scribes and the
Pharisees.
He said that he was only sent to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
How do these things agree with Paul's teaching?
And the answer is they don't. Right? They
don't agree.
There are indeed individual teachings of Jesus
recorded in Matthew,
recorded by Matthew, the evangelist,
that conflict with Paul.
Matthew chapter 7 verses 21 to 23
is probably the best example when Jesus clearly
condemns antinomian
Christians or Christians who reject
the nomos, the Torah.
So this begs a question, why then did
the proto orthodox canonize this gospel? Good question.
Yeah. Well, if you look at the gospel
holistically,
by gospel's end, it actually comes to agree
with Paul.
Okay. The gospel of Matthew ends up vindicating
Paul. So Christian apologists appeal to what's known
as the continuity argument.
Okay? That there is direct continuity
between
the Methian Jesus and Paul, that before his
death, Jesus was teaching one soteriology,
one way of salvation. But then after his
death, he was teaching another soteriology
through Paul, his chosen apostle.
But this shift is actually announced at the
Last Supper, when the Methion Jesus establishes a
new covenant or New Testament in his flesh
and blood
So Matthew presents Jesus as speaking out of
both sides of his mouth.
However, I agree with with Ehrman here, who
does not affirm continuity between Paul and the
methean Jesus prior to the last supper scene.
In other words, Paul and Jesus are actually
irreconcilable.
For example, in Matthew 19, Jesus defines salvation
in very clear terms.
Okay. He says, he defines it as following
the commandments.
But if you want to be perfect,
then sell what you own and give it
to the poor, and you will be given
treasures in heaven. Okay. So the essence of
the gospel,
the key to salvation according to Jesus is
obeying God's commandments and taking care of people,
serving people who need help. This is not
how Paul defines salvation.
So this is how Ehrman puts it.
If if the Jesus of Matthew is right
and salvation is through adherence to the commandments
and giving charity,
exactly what the Quran says about Jesus, I
might add. If Jesus is right, then there
is no need whatsoever
for Jesus to die.
If Jesus is right, there is no need
whatsoever for him to die.
So in my view, Paul believed a rumor
that Jesus had died by crucifixion,
and then was seen after his supposed death.
And I think Jesus was seen, but that
was because he never died. But in Paul's
mind, Jesus died as a divine savior. So
Paul reasoned that
it must then be impossible
to keep the law.
Therefore, we need a human sacrifice
and that forgiveness is only achieved if blood
is shed. So these are just, you know,
just compounded mistakes
that Paul made. This is partly why I
don't believe
Paul when he claimed to be a Pharisee.
So
here on the slide, you know, can someone
be put to death for someone else's sin?
The answer is no, according to the Torah.
Is it impossible to keep the law?
No. According to Deuteronomy chapter 30.
Is is blood necessary for forgiveness?
No. Look at Psalm 51. Look at 2nd
Chronicles. So so, essentially, what Matthew wanted to
do at the end of his gospel
was try to reconcile Jesus' teachings with Paul.
Okay. So Matthew at times recorded what likely
seemed to be authentic teachings of Jesus.
But Matthew was ultimately a Pauline Christian. So
Matthew had to harmonize
Jesus with Paul.
Therefore, for Matthew, the Last Supper is the
seminal event
during which there is an essential switch in
soteriology.
But it doesn't work. But but one is
one is why for Matthew, Jesus bothers to
go around
for 1, 2, 3 years preaching the the
gospel,
this detailed teaching, simply to
render it null and void at the last
supper. I mean, why did he he should
just parachute it down straight onto the cross
perhaps. It would have been slightly more efficient
way of doing it.
Yeah. Exactly. If again, if Jesus has very
clear definition of salvation in Matthew 19 is
true, if he's telling us the truth here,
then then there is no reason for him
to die. And so Paul's entire theology collapses.
It falls to the ground. So I want
people to imagine this. Okay? So I wanna
demonstrate how Paul how different Paul and Jesus
really were.
So imagine this. So Jesus, peace be upon
him, as you said, was, you know, walking
around Palestine,
for 1 to 3 years teaching Jews that
their salvation lies
in adherence to the commandments
and being charitable.
Serve God, serve humanity, and God will save
your soul. This is salvation. This is the
gospel. Yep. Right? It's conceivable that 1,000 of
Jews
heard this teaching directly from Jesus in Galilee
and Judea.
Now the majority of Jews,
did not live in Palestine at the time
of Jesus.
So let's imagine that in the year 32
or something,
a 100 Jews, specifically from Corinth, let's say,
met
Rabbi Jesus and his disciples in Jerusalem
during the pilgrimage.
And they were told by Jesus himself that
if they wanted to attain salvation,
they needed to follow the commandments
and give charity.
Okay?
These Jews then returned to Corinth
and transmitted
what they had heard directly from Jesus to
other Jews in Corinth.
Now fast forward 10 to 20 years.
One day, an amateur philosopher and traveling tent
maker
named Paul of Tarsus shows up in Corinth
and tells the Corinthians,
Jews and pagans,
that Jesus died on a Roman cross
as a human sacrifice
and that their salvation depended upon believing
that Jesus was a divine son of God
who vicariously atoned for their sins.
Okay?
Now imagine
that 50 of those,
Corinthian Jews,
who had met the historical Jesus and his
disciples
came out and debated Paul. I mean, can
you imagine that someone should make a movie
about that? They would have asked Paul,
where did he get his teaching from? And
Paul would have said that, you know, he
had a vision of the resurrected Jesus and
that Jesus himself revealed these things to him.
His Jewish opponents who would have
believed in visions and theophanies, that was part
of their worldview.
Right? They would have said, okay, but that's
a little strange,
because we met Jesus in person.
And he said nothing like that. We met
him in person. We knew him. Besides, everyone
knows that James is now the leader of
the movement in Jerusalem. Do you have a
letter of authorization from James? Something that proves
that you've been authorized
to preach the gospel?
And Paul's response would have been, no. My
vision of Jesus is all I need. James,
Peter, and John, these so called pillars mean
nothing to me.
Now
would those Jews be justified in rejecting Paul's
gospel?
Yes. They were absolutely right to reject him.
Unfortunately,
many pagans believed Paul because
I think it's because they they knew very
little about the historical Jesus,
and their knowledge of Judaism was very limited.
And they trusted Paul's claims because he was
probably very
likely,
very charismatic.
But Paul and Jesus were preaching 2 different
gospels.
Okay. Now back to Matthew, does Matthew identify
himself in Matthew? The answer is
no. You know, when the Matthean Jesus commands
Matthew to follow him, does the author say
something like, so I followed Jesus? No, he
writes in the 3rd person.
So today, we know that the book of
Matthew was not called Matthew until 180
of the Common Era by Irenaeus.
Okay. The heresy hunter extraordinaire.
But here's where it gets even weirder.
If a book was explicitly claimed by its
author to be apostolic,
but did not reflect proto orthodoxy,
then the proto orthodox would not consider it
apostolic,
despite its explicit claim
of being apostolic. For example, the gospel of
Peter.
Right? The the author of
the gospel of Peter explicitly claims to be
Peter, and it was widely read. It was
a popular gospel. In fact, Sarapion,
of Antioch,
initially
accepted as authentic.
He was proto orthodox. Eventually, some of his
colleagues convinced him to condemn it.
So so let me say it like this.
So anonymous
books, anonymous books
that would eventually be canonized like Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John
were included and deemed authentic.
But books,
that were written during the same general time
frame,
like the gospel of Thomas or the gospel
of Peter, that explicitly claim apostolic authorship were
excluded.
Because one group of Christian theologians, the pro
Pauline proto orthodox,
whose teachings were at odds with the historical
Jesus,
found the Christologies
of those books problematic.
So for example, the gospel of Mark, which
is anonymous,
was accepted because it agreed with proto orthodoxy.
And due to this
agreement, it was attributed
by proto orthodox authorities to Mark, a student
of Peter, but the gospel of Mark's teacher,
Peter,
the gospel of Peter himself,
which is explicitly attributed to Peter
by its very author was excluded
because its theology clashes with Pauline.
That is to say, proto orthodox
Christianity. So how does it clash? Well, just
give one example.
If in the gospel of Peter,
Peter wrote that when Jesus was crucified,
he was silent as if he felt no
pain.
Right? So that's not good. Right? As they
say, his pain is our gain.
So what happened? Was his soul removed from
his body so that they were crucifying
an empty shell of a body? Maybe Jesus
was just being stoic.
If you read the gospel of Peter closely,
Peter actually avoids saying that Jesus died.
He avoids saying that Jesus experienced death.
He said that Jesus was taken up. That's
how he puts it.
Maybe because Peter thought Jesus was God and
that God can't really die. Of course, this
makes no historical sense. The historical Peter most
likely did not worship
another man as God. Whatever the case may
be, the gospel of Peter was eventually condemned.
But here's a question.
Why was the gospel of Mark eventually
attributed to Mark?
Right? The first gospel in the canon.
Did the New Testament character known as Mark
actually write the gospel of Mark?
So who was Mark? Okay. So according to
the book of Acts, Mark was the son
of a certain Mary whose Jewish name was
John.
He was a student of Peter. He was
a traveling companion of Paul and Barnabas.
The first Christian to mention that someone named
Mark wrote anything
about Jesus was Papias,
who died around 1:30
of the common era. He was the Bishop
of,
Hierapolis.
And he mentions this and is no longer
extent
5 volume,
exposition of the sayings of the Lord. So
this was sometime during the Q1 of 2nd
century.
Okay. We only know of this passage because
it was quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea
in his famous ecclesiastical
history written around 325, something like that. So
this is what Eusebius wrote quoting Papias.
He says, this also the presbyter said, Mark
having become the interpreter
of Peter wrote down accurately,
though not in order whatsoever
he remembered of the things said or done
by Christ.
For he neither heard the lord nor followed
him, but afterward, as I said, he followed
Peter who adapted his teachings to the needs
of his hearers,
but with no intention of giving a connected
account of the Lord's discourses.
So that Mark committed no error while he
thus wrote some things that as he remembered
them. For he was careful of one thing,
not to omit any of the things which
he had heard and not to state any
of them falsely.
These things are related by Papias concerning Mark.
But concerning Matthew, he writes as follows. So
then Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew
language,
and and everyone
interpreted them as he was able.
So so the Christian position can be summed
up in a nutshell as follows.
The same Mark who was described in the
book of Acts
wrote the gospel that we now know as
the gospel of Mark
and that this is attested to by Papias
in the early 2nd century,
some 40 to 60 years after Mark was
composed. In other words,
the institution that Mark wrote Mark did not
begin with Irenaeus in 1 AD CE.
It predates Irenaeus by at least 50 years.
Now unfortunately for the Christians who maintain this
position, most historians do not believe
that Papias was describing
describing what came to be called the gospel
of Mark.
The main reason is precisely because the gospel
of Mark does not match
what Papias is describing
as being Mark's writing.
Papias was clearly describing a writing that was
narratively
disjointed
like the sayings gospel,
like something like Q or Thomas, and yet
also very comprehensive
in its presentation
of Jesus' sayings and deeds.
The the gospel of Mark is the very
antithesis of this. I mean, Mark's narrative is
chronologically ordered
yet also very concise.
Right? In fact, it's the shortest of the
canonical
gospels by far having only 16 chapters.
Historians feel the same way about what Papias
said concerning Matthew's writing.
That is, you know, Papias, was most likely
not describing
what we know today to be the gospel
of Matthew
because the gospel of Matthew was most certainly
written in Greek,
not Hebrew,
and does not contain does not simply contain
the, you know, oracles,
I e sayings of Jesus, but rather contains
a very long well structured narrative
of Jesus's ministry and death. So, yes, Irenaeus
was the first to refer to Mark's gospel,
as Mark's gospel.
But why did Irenaeus call it Mark?
Why not call it the gospel of Peter
or even Timothy or Barnabas?
Why did he attribute proto Mark to Mark,
a little known character in the New Testament,
if he didn't need to. The Christian answer
is that Irenaeus must have simply been relating
an older tradition,
that already
attributed protomark to Mark. He was simply reaffirming,
that tradition. Historically, however, this seems unlikely.
The simple answer is that Irenaeus knew that
the figures Mark and Matthew, for that matter,
had allegedly authored something
due to a prevalent oral tradition that was
articulated
in writing at one point by Papias around
120 to 130. But again, the writings of
Mark and Matthew
that Papias
was describing in his exposition of the sayings
was clearly different than what Irenaeus would eventually
refer to
as the gospel of Mark and the gospel
of Matthew.
Nonetheless, it was a stroke of genius on
the part of Irenaeus.
By calling proto Mark, Mark, he was able
to establish for this gospel
an apostolic chain of transmission, you know, from
Jesus to Peter to Mark on the authority
of someone called the presbyter.
So where are the writings of Mark and
Matthew
that Papias was actually describing?
Where are the writings of Mark and Matthew
that Papias was actually describing their loss?
Maybe Q is Papias's mark. Papias was describing
something that resembled Q,
a long
sayings gospel.
God knows. I mean, the bottom line is
what we know today as being the gospel
of Mark and the gospel of Matthew
was likely not what Papias was describing
as being the writings of Mark and Matthew.
Right? It was Irenaeus who called the gospel
of Mark, the gospel of Mark,
and the Gospel of Matthew the Gospel of
Matthew because he wanted to connect those gospels
to Papias before him who described something
called Mark and Matthew.
Okay,
a Christian apologist might say but Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John were written by 2 eyewitnesses
to Jesus and 2 students of eyewitnesses.
While the gospels of Peter and Thomas and
Mary and Philip, etcetera, etcetera, these were falsely
attributed to their authors.
So this argument doesn't quite work anymore.
Almost all historians and critical scholars of the
gospels maintained that, in fact,
all of these books are anonymous. So Peter
did not write Peter any more than Matthew
wrote Matthew.
It's all Apocrypha,
that is to say it's all of dubious
origin.
There is no strong isnaan,
right, or chain of transmission for any of
these writings. This this is just
reality.
Does the Quran
we read today go back to the prophet
Muhammad peace be upon him? Yes. If viewers
haven't done so, please watch the podcast on
the preservation of the Quran.
Whether you agree with the content of the
Quran or not,
all of the reading traditions we read today
can be traced back to the prophetic archetype.
But here's what I'll do, you know, just
for argument sake.
Let's just for argument sake,
say that
Athanasius settled the canon. Okay? He didn't, but
just for the sake of argument.
Now now certainly there were millions of Christians
who lived and died
before the 4th century,
right, before the so called canonization of the
New Testament.
So what canon did they believe in?
You know, whenever I make the plausible historical
claim that Jesus was not crucified, I'm told
invariably by Christian apologists
to just read the New Testament. Right? Read
the 4 gospels. Read Paul. Jesus was crucified.
Right? But what about the authors of,
the the acts of John or the so
called second treatise of Seth or the gospel
of Thomas
or the author or authors of q.
So these are Christian writings that either ignore
the crucifixion altogether or outright deny
the crucifixion? Why didn't their authors just read
the new testament?
Of course, the answer is there was no
new testament.
These books, like the act the acts of
John, these predate the canon.
Or they'll say, oh, those books are anonymous.
So are the gospels.
Those books are late. Well, q likely predated
Paul and did not contain a passion narrative.
They'll say the acts of John is late.
Well, the gospel of John is also late,
probably
early 2nd century.
Acts is most likely 2nd century. 2nd Peter
is probably 120, 130, something like that.
Some historians actually date Thomas's gospel
to sometime before the synoptic gospels,
because of its method of presenting
the sayings of Jesus.
Some historians even call it the 5th gospel.
But forget about the second, 3rd, or 4th
centuries. Christianity was extremely diverse even in Paul's
day.
There was a plurality of Christianity in Paul's
day even in the fifties.
According to 1st Corinthians, there was major he
calls it strife or disunity among believers
believers in Jesus
living in Corinth, major
disunity
in the same city
at the same time. I think the reason
was because Paul of Tarsus brought a different
gospel. Jesus and Paul were preaching 2 different
gospels.
I think Paul actually referred to Jesus's gospel
as a different gospel
in Galatians. Of course, Paul refers to his
own teachings as my gospel.
So back to our question, what is a
Christian?
Okay. What is a Christian according to the
earliest possible understanding? Is it someone who believes
in the New Testament?
No.
There were generations of believers in Jesus who
lived and died before the New Testament.
None of the Christians living in Corinth or
Galatia or Thesalonica
or Philippi,
congregations founded by Paul in the 15 60s,
none of those Christians had even heard of
the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
Paul never heard of the gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John, at least not when
he found that those congregations.
But here's the kicker, Jesus, peace be upon
him, never heard of the gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, or John.
What was the Christian
canon of Jesus himself?
Of course, the question doesn't make any sense.
Now I mentioned this in the previous podcast,
but I'll say it again. It demonstrates my
point. If I were to somehow travel back
in time to Medina
in the year 6 30 of the common
era, of course, Paul, you just returned from,
the holy city of Medina.
If I were to ask the prophet Muhammad
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
to recite
Al Fatiha or Ayatul Kursi or Surah Yaseen,
He would know exactly what I was referring
to.
Now imagine that I traveled back to the
year 32,
you know, to Galilee in Northern Palestine.
Imagine that I asked Jesus, peace be upon
him, to recite
chapter 5 of the book of Matthew.
You know, what?
Matthew has a book?
Matthew, do you have a book?
No.
Or recite,
the famous creed of 1st Corinthians 15.
What? Never heard of it. It's written by
Paul.
Who?
So Christians today have nothing with respect to
Jesus
that is comparable to what Muslims have with
the Quran.
Okay?
So again, what makes a Christian belief in
the trinity?
No. Even the New Testament writers were not
Trinitarians,
let alone the Nazarenes under James or the
so called Ebionites
who followed them. And when I say that
the New Testament writers were not Trinitarians,
almost all historians agree with me.
And Tertullian
was the first proto orthodox writer to even
use the term trinity, trinitas.
He died in the first half of the
third century.
So we don't get the trinity. It is
1 essence in 3 persons. We don't get
that until 3/81
of the common era. Okay? So the Cappadocians
were the first true Trinitarian
theologians.
So again, what is a Christian?
Is it someone who believes in the creed
of 1st Corinthians 15?
Well, Paul wrote this in the mid fifties.
And as we saw in our last podcast
on historicity of the crucifixion, Paul is very
adamant that he did not receive any teaching
from any human teachers,
but rather through a direct revelation of what
he perceived to be the resurrected
Christ. And I believe in revelation,
all right, as a Muslim. But Paul's revelation
put him
into direct conflict
with Jerusalem based apostles,
right? A revelation that put him
in conflict with James. So that is a
major red flag.
Paul says that if Christ was not raised,
your faith is in vain. Why? Why did
he say that? Presumably because plausibly because
there were Christians who did not believe that
Jesus was raised from the dead.
Paul says, remember Jesus Christ of the seed
of David was raised from the dead, according
to my gospel, right? The gospel of Paul.
Paul said, didn't I portray Jesus as crucified?
Why did he say that? Plausibly because there
were Christians who did not believe that Jesus
was crucified.
These Christians believed in a different gospel. A
gospel that had nothing to do with some
crucifixion.
So the question, what is a Christian remains
unanswered.
I would submit that the most accurate answer
we can come up with from the earliest
of times
is that a a quote Christian is anyone
who believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a
messianic figure. I mean, that's it. That's sort
of the bare bones. That's all we can
really say. Jesus of Nazareth was a messiah
of some sort. So here's my point. The
New Testament canon
that we all know today, that we all
read today,
has a very minimal and restricted relationship
with the earliest stages of the messianic movement,
led by Jesus of Nazareth.
These books obviously did not exist. Even even
the term Christian
did not exist.
So what existed?
Well, oral tradition,
individual sayings of Jesus,
some of which I think ended up in
the canonical gospels,
albeit in a Greek
translation.
Now I mentioned that if we went back
in time to speak to Jesus, peace be
upon him, he would not understand
the reference,
John 316, for example.
A Christian apologist
might respond here and say, sure, the book
of John did not exist at that time.
But if you were to actually quote John
316 to Jesus,
Jesus would say, oh, yeah, that's what I
said to Nicodemus.
Right? This is what a Christian apologist would
say. He would also say similarly, if we
went back to Medina in 6:30,
the book called Sahih al Bukhari did not
exist,
but the prophet would recognize individual statements that
he made
that would later be compiled by Imam al
Bukhari.
But just as the Prophet Muhammad, peace be
upon him, never saw the various books of
Hadith, Jesus, peace be upon him, never saw
the various books of the Gospels. So this
is a fair point.
The Gospels are more like hadith
than like the Quran.
Yes, I agree with this. And we know
that Hadith
are at different grades of authenticity.
Right, unlike the Quran,
most hadith are not mass transmitted. So Muslim
scholars develop a robust methodology
of hadith criticism.
It's called Usuru Nakdil Hadith.
So they examine the Hadith individually
and determine their authenticity by considering several factors
like attestation,
social coherence, chain of transmission, etcetera.
So our classical scholars did this. And so
the book of Imam Abu Hari has the
highest grade of authenticity.
When Christian historical critics apply their method
to the 4 gospels,
John 3 16 rarely makes the cut,
if ever.
So if we quoted the
text of John 316,
the words of John 316
directly to Jesus, to directly to Jesus, peace
be upon him, it's more likely that he
would not recognize it. In fact, he would
probably repudiate it.
Now
Jesus, peace be upon him, was on this
earth for 31 to 33 years.
And immediately after his departure, many, many stories
were related about him. And many, many statements
were attributed to him. Right? And I think
we can all agree with this, Muslim, Christian,
and secular historian.
Only the Jesus, you know, mythicist will disagree
here. But by and large, historians agree that
Jesus existed.
But even the mythicist
will agree that people were talking about Jesus
even if he never existed. Right? Many people
were relating stories about him and attributing statements
to him. Everyone agrees with this. Okay? Now
the last verse of the gospel of John,
the very last verse of the gospel
says something very interesting. Okay? And this is
the appended epilogue.
And Paul, I know you quoted this verse,
as well on a segment you did on
the proto gospel of James, which was fantastic.
If viewers haven't seen it, they should.
So here's what it says.
Jesus did many other things as well.
If every one of them were written down,
I suppose that even the whole cosmos,
the whole
world would not have room for the book,
the biblia
that would be written, John 21/25. I mean,
the author is being a bit hyperbolic,
but the point is well taken.
Now here's something interesting. The full title of
Sahih al Bukhari,
its full title is Al Jami al Musnat
As Sahih al Muqtasar.
Imam al Bukhari is saying
that of course there are Hadith outside of
his book that are authentic.
Okay? His book is a mukta,
which is a concise or abridged collection of
hadith.
Okay?
So there were many, many stories, many, many
statements floating around the ancient world about Jesus.
Some of the stories and statements were true.
Some of them were sort of half true
or partially true, and some were false or
fabricated.
After several decades of oral transmission,
some of these stories and state as were
written down by various Christians.
Okay? Various people who believed in Jesus' messiahship
in some way.
Some of these traditions ended up in books,
in biblia,
books that were eventually called the gospels of
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Other traditions ended
up in books called the gospel of Thomas.
The infancy gospel of Thomas, the proto gospel
of James, the gospel of Peter, the Didache,
just to name a few.
Luke tells us in his preamble,
this is a very important point and I
made this point several times in the past.
But it's very important people understand this. Luke
says in his preamble to his gospel that
poloi,
many people wrote,
okay. Many people wrote,
the ages,
narratives
of Jesus.
What does Luke mean by many? We I
mean, we know that Luke knew Mark and
q, so that's 2 narratives,
but that's not
many. Right? So how is how does Luke
use this word, paloy,
elsewhere in his own gospel? Where in in
Luke chapter 5 verse 6, Luke says that
when Jesus went fishing with Peter,
there were there
were many fish in the net, same word.
So what does he mean? 2 or 3
or 10
fish? No. He means that there were so
many fish in the net. He says, the
nets were about to tear.
So according to Luke, there were presumably dozens
of narratives,
dozens and dozens of gospels about Jesus that
were written before he wrote his.
Okay?
It is logical
that there is truth, partial truth, and falsehood
in many of these books.
This is only logical. This is reasonable. It
is historically unreasonable
to claim that only Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John are absolutely 100%
entirely true. And that all other texts that
contain Jesus' purported statements or describe events during
his life are all absolutely 100% entirely false.
That is unreasonable.
Okay? Now if Christians want to believe that
on faith, okay, fine. Okay. They can believe
whatever they want on faith. But don't tell
me that I have to take that on
faith, I don't.
I'm going to use reason.
Evidence demonstrates that the entire Quran has a
Muhammadan provenance.
The text of the Quran goes back to
the Prophet according to the vast majority of
secular
historians. They do not say the same thing
about the Gospels,
when it comes to Jesus. Now Clement of
Alexandria,
one of the most celebrated
proto orthodox
church fathers,
Clement cited apocryphal, quote apocryphal gospels
in his writings along with quote canonical gospels.
Because he believed that the former contained truth.
This is reasonable.
He was reasonable in this regard.
Of course, there is gospel truth outside the
New Testament.
Even Ehrman said that there are statements of
Jesus in the gospel of Thomas
that are in direct continuity
with Jesus.
There are statements attributed to Jesus found in
the gospel of Thomas that are more continuous
with the teachings of the historical Jesus
than what Paul was teaching in the 50s,
in the 1st century.
And he specifically mentions the gospel of Thomas
and the gospel of Peter
as being historically valuable.
So to summarize this section,
the New Testament canon was not officially
and definitively closed until after Islam.
Secondly,
there were Christians even of the proto orthodox
persuade them that differed greatly
as to which books were in and which
books were out. So let me give you
an example. The oldest complete manuscript of the
New Testament in existence
is called the Codex Sinaiticus.
Okay? It's dated to about 350, 375.
It was discovered at Saint Catherine's Monastery
at the base of Mount Sinai by a
professor and explorer named Konstantin von Tischendorf,
who was the inspiration for Indiana Jones, by
the way.
Right. I didn't know
that. Oh, yeah. Indiana Jones, another franchise That's
a good idea. By the way by the
woke mob.
Now
that's a different issue. Now let me give
you a hypothetical
scenario here.
Okay? Hypothetical scenario. Imagine
that I gave a lecture at a university
called, what is Christianity?
Okay? That's the name of my lecture. And
there are many Christians in the audience. Now
imagine I said to the Christians,
and imagine now imagine I said that Christians
believe
that the Jews completely misunderstood
the dietary laws of the Torah.
That the dietary laws were never meant to
be taken literal, but always rather
figurative.
So don't eat pigs
means don't associate with people who are like
pigs.
Don't eat hyenas means not to be a
pervert because the hyena changes its its nature
every year. At one time, it's male. The
next time, it's female. Gender fluid. Don't be
like that. Okay. And don't even get me
started on the weasel.
Okay? So imagine I imagine I said those
things,
just like that. I would probably get confronted
by Christian or 2 who would say,
what what on earth are you talking about?
That's not true. You're misrepresenting
Christianity.
Where are you getting this from?
And I would
say from Christian
scripture,
the epistle of Barnabas.
Then he would probably flip through his NIV
or his RSV or his KJV
and say, that's not in my bible. That's
apocryphal.
And then I would say, according to whom?
According to the Council of Trent in the
16th century,
yes, it's apocryphal. But not according to the
compilers of the Codex Sinaiticus
in the 4th century.
It is in their canon
and it's the oldest complete New Testament.
In other words, the actual claim of the
modern Christian
is that our understanding
of Jesus improved
as we move forward in time. Right? The
New Testament of 16th century onward, is more
accurate of its depiction
of Jesus's teachings
than the Codex Sinaiticus
written in the 4th century. This is the
Christian claim. Okay, fine. So something can actually
improve in its accuracy with the passage of
time. The New Testament did. Okay, fine. Then
so did our understanding of Jesus with the
Quran.
The Quran is more accurate than the gospel
authors, than what the gospel authors
is depicting as the teachings of Jesus. So
don't give me the 600 years later business
that they usually do. Right?
Now I agree
that the historical Jesus of Nazareth
probably did not teach what the epistle of
Barnabas was teaching.
Okay, but I also don't think that Jesus
was teaching the Trinity,
or his own divinity.
So my point is, there were early Christians,
even among the proto orthodox,
who believed in teachings
that are found outside
what would become
the New Testament canon.
Okay.
So let's look at our next questions.
Does quoting, paraphrasing, or partially agreeing
with a story or a statement in an
apocryphal text
necessarily mean that that story or statement
cannot be true?
That's the first question. Next question. Does this
necessitate
that the apocryphal
text in its entirety
is true?
In other words, is every single statement or
hadith
of Jesus quoted in the gospel of Thomas
necessarily false
because the church
declared the gospel of Thomas to be heresy.
And if I quote an individual statement from
Thomas
and believe that it is accurate, does that
mean that I have to accept or I
do accept the entire gospel
as being accurate?
So in the Quran, we're told that Mary
gave birth under a palm tree,
that Jesus spoke as an infant,
that Jesus fashioned clay into the figure of
bird and gave life to them by God's
permission.
That God provided food for Mary, presumably through
angels.
And that Jesus was not crucified. Now, the
latter we dealt with already. So we won't
look at that today.
So here the Christian polemicist and orientalist will
claim that the prophet lifted these stories directly
from the gospel of pseudo Matthew.
The Syriac Infancy Gospel, also known as the
Arabic Infancy Gospel,
the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the proto
gospel of James respectively. And I'll deal with
these in turn, insha'Allah.
But let me repeat our questions. Does quoting,
paraphrasing or partially agreeing
with a story or statement
in an apocryphal text necessarily mean that that
story or statement cannot be true? Does this
necessitate
that the apocryphal text in its entirety is
true?
Okay. Now,
the author of the book of Jude
in the New Testament
quoted directly
from 1st Enoch 1/9
in Jude 1/14.
1st Enoch was not written by Enoch,
according to all biblical scholars. 1st Enoch is
not canonical.
In fact, 1st Enoch is heresy.
Yet patristic authorities such as Justin, Irenaeus,
Tertullian,
they cited First Enoch in their writings. Actually,
Tertullian explicitly called it scripture.
These were proto orthodox authorities, the salaf of
the Trinitarian.
In 1st Enoch,
Enoch is unequivocally told,
you are the son of man. So according
to first Enoch,
Enoch was a messianic figure who preexisted
as an angel before coming to earth as
a man. He was raptured into heaven by
God, and finally
exalted the chief angel and the throne enthroned
as a divine judge. So you have his
translation of the heaven, his exaltation, eventual apotheosis.
So despite the book of Enoch explicitly identifying
Enoch
as the son of man of Daniel 7
and not Jesus,
many early Christians viewed it as an authority
and
quote from its passages.
So here's a question. If 1st Enoch is
heresy according to Christians,
why did the author of Jude, whom Christians
believed to be inspired by God,
quote, a heretical book. Did God inspire Jude
to quote heresy?
The Christian response is,
no, because not all of first Enoch
is heresy.
Ah, okay.
So now we're getting somewhere.
Jude also confirmed a story found in an
apocryphal text known as the Assumption of Moses.
Most people know the Enoch reference in Jude,
but not this one.
Now I want to tell you a story.
Several years ago, I was dialoguing with a
Christian man who was trying to convince me
that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
borrowed, as he put it, a story
from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, right? The
incident of the clay birds, etcetera.
And again, I'll deal with that text later.
But anyway, he said, my Christian interlocutor,
he said that, Oh, that story was late.
It was pseudepigraphal.
And it was a fable.
And yet the Prophet mentioned
it in the Quran and said that the
Quran was divinely inspired.
So I said to him, and I knew
that he most likely, Jude very closely. Most
Christians probably don't. The the focus is on
the Pauline epistles and the gospels. So I
said to him
I said, did you know that when Moses
died,
the devil and the archangel Michael had a
dispute about his body?
And Michael ended up rebuking the devil? Did
you know that? And I remember
he looked at me with a puzzled expression.
And then I said, well, that's what the
assumption of Moses says.
He said, what's that?
When was that? And I said, it was
probably written in the 1st century BCE or
the 1st century CE.
So he looked even more puzzled.
So I said to him, would you consider
that text
late and pseudepigraphal?
And would you consider that story to be
probably a fable? And And he said, yes.
So I said, well, Jude did not.
Jude
confirmed it in Jude chapter 1 verse 9.
And the book of Jude is a canonized
book of scripture
in the New Testament, which according to you
is inspired by God.
So many of these Christian polemicists employed, you
know, a double standard. Double standard. Yeah. A
little hypocrisy. You know, this group of polemicists
is like this brood of vipers that just
never learns. They don't see the plank in
their own eyes. You know, it's this hermeneutic
of suspicion and hermeneutic of acceptance all over
again, you know, even today. In other words,
whatever the prophet Mohammed does is base and
vile and deceitful. But whatever their religious figures
do is noble and inspired and truthful.
You know? You know, at least the Infancy
Gospel of Thomas was written within a 100
years or so of Jesus. The assumption of
Moses was written about 1500 years
after Moses,
and Jude quotes it as an authority.
Here's another example.
The the author of the book of 2nd
Timothy,
right, claims to be Paul. However, most historians
believe the author is pretending to be Paul.
In other words, he's forging a letter in
Paul's name. This is according to the vast
majority of critical scholars. But let's grant, okay,
Paul wrote it. No problem. Paul wrote, you
know, 2nd Timothy.
Now listen to what Paul says in 2nd
Timothy,
chapter 3, verse 8. He says,
and I quote, and Janus and Jambres
oppose Moses.
So these people of corrupt mind and counterfeit
faith also oppose the truth. So one more
time. And Janus and Jambres
oppose Moses.
So these people of corrupt mind and counterfeit
faith also oppose the truth. Who in the
world
are Janus and Jambres?
Now, you can go to any Bible concordance
and type in Janus and Chambras.
And I promise you that they are not
mentioned anywhere in the whole of the Hebrew
Bible,
nowhere in the canonical Tanakh.
So where did Paul get these names?
Maybe he was given these names by the
Holy Spirit,
and they were previously unknown.
A Christian might make this claim.
Okay, that's his faith conviction. If he thinks
that there are good reasons for believing Paul's
claim of receiving divine revelation. I don't, but
maybe he does. But that would be a
different discussion. But just looking at the context
of 2nd Timothy chapter 3, I think it's
abundantly clear that Paul believed that his readers
were already familiar with these names, Jannes and
Jambres.
And as it turns out,
there was a text written in the 1st
century,
Apocryphon
of Janus and Jambres. Origin of Alexandria
in the 3rd century,
okay, referenced it,
as the source of 2nd Timothy 3:8. Of
course, Origen, who is an extremely influential church
father, would later be anathematized
by the Catholic church in 553,
Constantinople 2. So Janus and Jambres
were the names of 2 of the magicians
in the court of pharaoh who opposed Moses.
Now according to this text, the Apocryphon of
Janus and Jambres,
when Janus died, his brother Jambres
was able to, summon his soul from Hades,
from Shaul,
by using a spell he had found in
one of his books of magic. So so
Jambres was a necromancer, basically.
And then the soul of Janes from beyond
the grave while experiencing
burning torment,
warned his brother, Jambrace,
not to contend with Moses
and Aaron.
So here's my question. Should I immediately consider
Paul of Tarsus to be a fraud
simply because he mentions the names Janus and
Jambres,
names found in an apocryphal text written in
the 1st century, some 1500 years removed from
Moses? Should I consider him a plagiarist and
a fableist?
Based on this alone, I would not jump
to that conclusion.
Why? Because it's possible
that the apocryphon of Janus and Jambres was
not Paul's directly direct literary source.
But even if it was, that that does
not immediately invalidate Paul.
Okay. Alternatively, it's still it's still possible,
although unlikely,
that these two names were passed down orally
for 15 centuries
among the Jews. And Paul was just kind
of drawing from that popular
oral tradition.
Mhmm. Right? That Paul never even heard of
the Apocryphon of Janus and Jambres.
But here comes the here comes the hypocrisy.
When the Quran seems to confirm a story
about Jesus or Mary found in an apocryphal
Christian text, The prophet Muhammad is often called
a fraud, a forger, a fableist,
a plagiarist,
okay, etcetera. But there's a difference. The Christian
apocryphal texts and the word apocryphal is in
quotes, because again, there was no definitive and
official apocrypha in Christianity until after Islam.
So the Christian so called apocryphal texts that
mentioned these stories that are seemingly also found
in the Quran are only a 100 to
a 130 years removed from Jesus.
While Paul's apparent source, the Apocryphon of Janus
and Jambres
was 1500
years removed
from Moses.
Now again, somebody might say, but it doesn't
come from direct literary dependence
upon a specific text, but from an oral
tradition.
Okay, so which scenario is more plausible historically?
That an authentic oral tradition about Janus and
Jambres was passed down for 15 centuries,
from the time of Moses to the author
of the Apocryphon,
okay. Or that an authentic oral tradition about
Jesus or Mary was passed down for 1
century
from Jesus and his disciples to let's say
the author of the proto gospel of James.
Which is more plausible
historically?
Let's take one example.
Angels feeding Mary in the temple. So this
is mentioned in the proto gospel of James
and seemingly in the Quran. And we'll examine
this text in detail a bit later, insha'Allah.
But here's what I think happened. And this
is absolutely
plausible, reasonable, and logical.
Okay? So at the end of Jesus' life,
okay,
of course, you know, Muslims and Christians maintain
that he ascended.
Most secular historians maintain that he was probably
buried in a common grave somewhere outside the
city, and that was the end of Jesus.
Whatever your position is, at the end of
his life,
several people who believed in Jesus' messiahship in
some way
told a story about Mary being attended to
by angels
prior to the birth of Jesus leading up
to the annunciation.
Is this plausible? Is it plausible that this
story was being told? Of course. Several decades
then go by.
Several decades of oral tradition.
The story is told and retold and most
likely modified a little bit from mouth to
mouth, decade after decade.
Then this story, for some reason,
did not end up in what would eventually
be called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Why?
Well, there are a number of tenable reasons.
Perhaps their authors had not heard of it,
because they lived in different geographical locations.
Perhaps they knew of it, but they did
not agree with it for theological reasons.
Perhaps they knew of it, but did not
want to place the focus on Mary, but
rather on Jesus. Of course, in the Quran,
Mary, peace be upon her, is a highly
respected and revered figure.
So there is focus on Mary in the
Quran.
Now from a Christian perspective, what I just
explained is totally plausible.
Why?
Well,
first of all, Christians must believe
that there are many true stories about Jesus
that are not found in the gospel.
They have to believe this, why? Because the
author of the gospel of John, whom Christians
believe was inspired by the Holy Spirit,
says so. Jesus did many other things as
well. If every one of them were written
down, I suppose that even the whole cosmos
will not have room for the books that
would be written. There is potential truth outside
of the 4 gospels by admission of the
Holy Spirit, if you believe that the gospel
of John was inspired by the Holy Spirit.
But But here, we don't need the Holy
Spirit to tell us. This is true according
to reason
and common sense.
From a more historical perspective,
we know that even the q source
document
predated Mark.
And Mark did not use it according to
the dominant position. Why didn't Mark use q?
Well, the same possible reasons that I just
mentioned. Maybe Mark had not known of q
because he was in a different place. Maybe
he knew of Q, but did not agree
with its content for theological reasons.
We know that many of the Luke and
Jesus's most celebrated stories and parables
in the travel narrative of Luke. So this
is Luke
chapter 9 to 19.
Many of these
stories and parables
were not recorded by Mark, Matthew, or John.
The good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the tax
collector, Abraham and Lazarus, The prodigal son. None
of these are in Mark, Matthew or John.
My point is, just because a certain story
about Jesus
or statement of Jesus is found in one
gospel,
that does not mean that it is necessarily
false
historically. So by false here, I mean something
that was not passed down from the 1st
believers in Jesus. Like obviously, a secular historian
would not agree with the content of the
story
that Mary was fed by angels simply because
secular historians do not consider the supernatural
in their method of doing history. And I
don't expect a modern historian
working within the paradigm
of modern naturalistic historiography
to conclude that Mary was fed by angels.
I believe that because I'm not strictly a
naturalist.
And I trust the source of the Quran.
What I am saying is that it is
plausible historically
that this story originated
with the earliest of believers
in the Jesus Messianic movement
with people who knew Jesus and learned directly
from him. Now an atheist skeptic could say,
okay, fine.
But Jesus was probably lying.
Okay. I mean, I disagree. I mean, but
that's a discussion for another time. That's a
separate debate. Can the historical
Jesus, be trusted?
Now the story of Mary being fed by
angels
is not multiply attested. Right? Like the cleansing
of the temple. And I I can explain
why. First of all, the cleansing of the
temple
was done in public during a very busy
time in Jerusalem.
Right? It would have been hard to not
include this event in the gospel. So something
like that probably happened.
Secondly, it's conceivable that this story of Mary
was related by multiple Christian writers
in the 1st 2nd centuries,
but their writings are simply not extent. There
were dozens of gospels.
Why is it that the only Christian writer
that we know of,
who wrote between the years 50 65 was
Paul Tarsus? Are we really to believe that
Paul was the only Christian writing letters during
this time? James was the leader of the
Jerusalem based Nazarenes
for 30 years, yet we have zero from
him. Where are his letters? Where are the
authentic letters
and writings of Peter and John or any
other apostle?
In my view, the story that, that Mary
was fed by angels was probably related by
Mary herself to Jesus, who told some of
his disciples.
These disciples told others, including some Pauline Christians,
until eventually the story appeared in some form
in the proto gospel of James, which got
some things right and some things wrong, just
like the 4 canonical gospels.
They got some things right and they got
some things wrong.
Not everything that the historical Jesus said appears
in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Every reasonable
person has to agree with
this. Not everything that the historical Jesus said
appears
in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus lived
for over 30 years. If someone claims
that there cannot possibly be any authentic sayings
of Jesus recorded outside of Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John, then that's just being delusional.
But here's the thing, even with multiple attestation,
we have to be careful when it comes
to the gospels. Because very often Matthew and
Luke simply copy from Mark. Right? So so
they are not necessarily
independent.
Right? Sometimes these criteria of modern historiography
have to be sort of weighed against each
other.
For example,
and I mentioned this in the past, according
to Dale Martin at Yale, who's a Trinitarian
Christian, Mark 10:18
is the most historical verse in the New
Testament. Why are you calling me good? There's
no one good but one that is God.
This exact wording is also found basically in
Matthew 19 17 and Luke 18 18. Now
Matthew and Luke took this from Mark. So
it is not exactly multiply attested.
But Jesus' statement is certainly socially and theologically,
you know, coherent and appropriate.
So Jesus probably said something like this. But
when Jesus quoted the Shema of Deuteronomy 64
and 1229
of Mark,
both Matthew and Luke eliminate
the Shema from Jesus's lips.
Here, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the
Lord is 1. So Jesus quoting the Shema
is definitely not multiply attested. However, it makes
sense why Matthew and Luke would eliminate those
words from Jesus's lips. They were embarrassed
that their divine son of God
had been so explicitly monotheistic.
Therefore, Jesus most likely did quote the Shema,
even though it is only found in one
gospel.
And of course, it makes total contextual sense
that a rabbi
would quote the Shema.
Okay, so a Christian in good faith cannot
say
that the story
of angels feeding Mary is definitely false or
obviously
invented by the author of the proto gospel
of James. Because then, if we're being consistent,
the prodigal son story
that is only found in the travel narrative
of Luke
must also be false. Because Luke just made
it up, right?
So then all of the special Lukan material,
material unique only to Luke is 1.
In
which
is 30 to 50 years after Mark and
15 to 20 years after Matthew and Luke.
John,
we'll call him John. John tells us that
Jesus spoke at length about someone called the
Paraclete.
Since no one before John, not Paul and
none of the synoptic authors even mentioned the
word Paraclete,
are Christians prepared to say that John just
made it up? That is definitely false.
Are they prepared to say that the Christians
who produced Matthew, Mark and Luke did not
even know about the Paraclete?
Now maybe John was given special revelation by
God.
And it was God who directly informed John
about the paraclete. If Christians wanna make this
argument, that's fine. But that is not a
historical argument. It's a theological argument.
It's the same with the Johann and I
am statements.
Now now a Christian might say to me,
okay, okay then. Even though the I am
statements of Jesus
are only found in one gospel, the gospel
of John,
they could still be plausibly historical. Because I
said earlier that just because a statement of
Jesus is found in one gospel, that does
not mean that it is necessarily false
historically. So the Christian argument is, if the
particle sun pericope
is plausibly historical, then so is before Abraham
was, I am.
So I would disagree.
And I think there's a major difference between
these two statements.
Okay? The prodigal son, Pericope, is all about
teshuva.
It's about repentance. It is completely appropriate contextually.
However,
if Christians are taking before Abraham was, I
am to be a divine claim
of a Jewish rabbi,
which most do,
then it is totally inappropriate
and thus highly unlikely to be the words
of the historical Jesus of Nazareth.
Furthermore,
I mean, I can understand how many early
believers in Jesus could have missed or forgotten
1, 2, or 3 of Jesus's parables.
And the Quran actually says this. It says
that the early Christians,
they forgot or disregarded
some of what they were given. So I
can understand how a parables or stories were
missed.
But it is very difficult for me to
wrap my head around how if Jesus made
explicit
divine claims,
they were only recorded by John. How did
almost everybody
miss all of them?
In other words, if I You just do
you make a very, very excellent point. Just
to say that
the point you're making has often been made
by very senior biblical scholars like Jimmy Dunn,
in Durham, England. Bart Erman, of course, mentions
the same. This is a common place. If
he walked around, Jesus walked around saying before
Abraham was I am and all the other
I am statements, I am. Why does no
one ever record this until the very last
cosmiter written towards the end of the first
or beginning of the 2nd century. Why does
Mark admit it? Ignore it. Why does Luke,
who sought to, you know, give everything from
the beginning an account? Why does he fail
to mention this? Ditto math, ditto q, etcetera.
And Paul, ditto Paul. No one mentioned that.
It was extraordinary. A mission, really.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So to to use the
time travel analogy again, if I travel back
in time and ask Matthew
if I asked him, why didn't you include
the parable of the good Samaritan?
He might say, well, oh, I missed that.
I forgot about that.
Or he might say,
I never heard that one. Maybe I wasn't
there that day.
But could he really say this about the
I am statements? No. Did he really forget
to mention that Jesus claimed to be God
on multiple occasions?
Did he not hear Jesus ever make one
of these numerous I am statements that John
apparently heard numerous times.
Interestingly, according to doctor James Taber, and he
mentioned this on blogging theology,
the pericope of the Pharisee and the tax
collector,
which is only found in Luke's travel narrative,
the Pharisee and the tax collector, in which
the tax collector was justified, I e forgiven
by God due to his humility of his
repentance. That story is historically more likely
to represent the utterance of a 1st century
Galilean rabbi
than what Paul of Tarsus was teaching in
1st Corinthians and Romans chapter 10, about eating
and drinking the flesh and blood of a
God,
Right? I mean, this is called theophagy. It
was very common in pagan mystery religions.
Luke was writing in 80 to 85, Paul
in the 50. So Paul is writing earlier,
but his claims about Jesus's teachings
make less sense historically.
Yeah. And the Didache,
written around 100 of the common era. So
plausibly before the gospel of John and the
book of Acts, but after Paul, of course,
the Didache
claims
claims to be a record
of the actual teachings of the 12 apostles,
which they inherited from Jesus. So in the
Didache, the the Eucharist is simply
a Thanksgiving meal without any reference
to eating or drinking the flesh and blood
of a God. So the Eucharist celebration and
the Didache is more plausible historically
than what Paul, Mark, Matthew, and John wrote.
In the Quran, Jesus celebrates a feast with
his disciples.
And it is more and it more closely
parallels the Didache
than the canonical gospels. It's quite amazing. So
which is more historical? Which was more likely
historically? That a 1st century rabbi from the
Galilee
taught his Jewish followers to humble themselves before
God and to repent with all sincerity
or that a 1st century rabbi from the
Galilee taught his Jewish
followers
to masticate his flesh and drink his blood
and worship him as a god.
Now, according to the editors of the New
Oxford Annotated Bible,
there are quote literary echoes from the wisdom
of Solomon
present in Paul's epistle to the Romans in
2nd Corinthians.
The wisdom of Solomon is a book found
in the Old Testament Apocrypha.
And this isn't some, you know, fringe opinion
that nobody else agrees with. These editors are
bonafide
academics. You know, these aren't, you know, quacks
like this guy who wrote this critical Quran.
These are mainstream historians of the Bible
whose Bible is read and studied in universities
all around the world. In fact, Paul's engagement
with and allusions to the wisdom of Solomon
is so obvious.
The authors of the moratorium canon in the
2nd century
felt compelled to conclude
that it must be canonical, the wisdom of
Solomon.
Paul alluded to it up and down in
his letters.
But with Paul, things get even more interesting.
According to the New Testament, Paul quoted pagan
poets
to support his Christology. And I mentioned this
in the past as well. According to Acts
chapter 17 verse 28,
when Paul was at the arapagus, right, he
quoted something from the hymn to Zeus by
a stoic philosopher named Eratitis of Soli.
Paul in his letter, 1st Corinthians
1533,
he quoted the poet Menander.
So how do Christians explain this? How do
they defend Paul here? How do they defend
their belief that God inspired Paul to quote
a pagan poet? Well, here's their defense.
Not everything a heretic or
pagan says is wrong.
Okay, in principle, I agree.
A Christian once told me that in a
sermon,
the preacher may quote Plato or Shakespeare or
Nietzsche.
And that doesn't mean that the preacher agrees
with everything Plato
or Shakespeare or Nietzsche ever said.
I agree. So this is the method for
the Paul and his school. Paul and his
school, his followers, that is to say Paul,
and the New Testament writers who followed him,
and the proto orthodox
fathers who followed them, this was their method.
Namely,
they would quote, paraphrase,
and incorporate
diverse texts and traditions
into
their writings
as long as those texts and traditions complemented
their overall message.
And those texts and traditions were both Jewish
and gentile.
Right? This does not imply that everything those
texts and traditions said was considered true and
accurate by Paul and his school. And again,
by school, I mean the gospel writers and
the proto orthodox fathers.
I don't necessarily have a problem with their
method. You know, the prophet Muhammad, peace be
upon him, he said wisdom is the lost
property of the believer.
Wherever he finds it, it is his.
He said
that in in some in some poetry, there
is wisdom.
Right?
Now given that this was the method of
the gospel writers, it follows them that this
was the method of the New Testament Jesus
because the gospel writers wrote the gospels.
So we will look specifically at the words
of the New Testament Jesus shortly, inshallah.
But first, let me say this. Do all
of the statements of Jesus recorded in the
4 gospels plausibly go back to the historical
Jesus of Nazareth
or his immediate disciples?
According to most historians, the answer is no.
For example, the famous Jesus seminar,
in particular, and I don't totally agree with
them, but that's a good example.
The Jesus seminar concluded after a 6 year
study of the gospels, that only 18%,
1 8%
of the words attributed to Jesus in the
New Testament and the 5th gospel, Thomas, are
likely authentic. So 82% are likely inauthentic.
They came to an absolute consensus,
and I agree here totally.
They came to an absolute consensus that the
historical Jesus
never claimed to be a divine being.
He never claimed to be the Davidic Messiah
or King Messiah.
And he never claimed that he was going
to die as a sacrifice for the sins
of the world.
They said that these were claims that others
made for Jesus,
not claims that Jesus made about himself.
Now by contrast,
do all of the Quran, does all of
the Quran
plausibly go back to historical Prophet Muhammad, peace
be upon him? According to the general consensus,
the answer is yes. But for this podcast,
here's the more important question.
Do all of the statements of Jesus recorded
in the Quran?
And all of the events recorded about him
in the Quran
plausibly go back to Jesus of Nazareth
and his disciples?
I would argue tentatively, yes.
Although some sayings and events are more plausible
than others.
But are we as Muslims
beholden to the method of
modern Western historiography?
No, of course not. So our epistemology
is 3 pronged generally
speaking.
So it's based on our senses, reason, and
revelation.
And as much as possible,
we try to, you know, bring these into
harmony
because God gave us our senses. He created
our intellects and he revealed the revelation.
So based upon our worldview,
we maintain that there are things God mentions
in scripture,
either in the Quran
or upon the speech of the prophet,
that are from the unseen. Like, you know,
things about angels and demons, day of judgment,
but also events from the past. So the
past
is also unseen. So the Quran might mention
a past event, something that happened in this
world that
no one prior
to the Quran had mentioned.
The skeptic might say that the prophet just
made it up. Right? But at the same
time, if the Quran confirms a story
or revises a tradition that was known before
the prophet, the skeptic says the prophet was
a plagiarist. Right? It's called the hermeneutic of
suspicion. They're just prejudiced
against the prophet. However, I will say this.
Unlike the New Testament, it is my contention
that the Quran that could be nothing to
Jesus that is historically implausible.
The Quran attributes nothing to Jesus
that is historically
implausible, outside of miracles, of course, which are
meant to be implausible.
Even it's denial of the crucifixion.
Watch our last podcast if people don't believe
me on that.
Okay, so here's what we can gather from
the Quran as to what Jesus, peace be
upon him, said and what he did.
Number 1, Jesus claimed that he was born
miraculously from a virgin.
So this is the question. Is it plausible
that he made this claim?
Now some modern critics, be they Christians or
atheists,
attack the Christology of the Quran by claiming
that the Quran,
is sort of a mishmash
of various Christian opinions about Jesus with no
real consistency.
For example, they'll say that even though the
Quran denies
the divinity
of Jesus, it insists upon the virgin birth,
but the Christians who believed in the virgin
birth did so precisely because they thought Jesus
was divine.
Right? So their claim is the Quran denies
Jesus's divinity
but accepts the virgin birth not realizing
that the latter only indicated his divinity.
This is the claim. In other words, only
Christians who worship Jesus believe that he was
born miraculously. So this claim is false and
I'll show you why.
But first, let me clarify something. This is
very important.
I'm not saying that it is historical according
to the standards of modern
secular historiography
that Jesus' birth was miraculous. Again, modern historians
do not consider miracles
in their method because miracles are the least
probable occurrences
by definition.
Okay?
So modern historians, they don't touch the supernatural.
What I am saying
is that it is plausible historically
that Jesus said that he was born miraculously.
Okay. In other words, this was not something
that was invented later.
It likely has its origin in the very
first generation of believers in Jesus.
Now again, an atheist might say, fine. So
what?
Why would you believe him? Why would you
believe Jesus? That's a different question. I'll get
to that a little bit later, inshallah.
Now I mentioned at the beginning of my
lecture that
that the miraculous birth of Jesus is one
example where critical historians contend
that the Bible and the Quran by extension,
engage in literary mimesis of Hellenistic tradition. In
other words, when it comes specifically
to the birth of Jesus, the early Christians
basically replaced
the names Perseus, Hercules, and Romulus
with
Jesus, and the Quran followed suit.
Okay. So so now there are some modern
Muslims who claim that the Quran does not
actually say that Jesus was born miraculously. This
is what some modern Muslims have resorted to.
I obviously disagree. I think the Quran is
clear on this issue. And I want to
spend a few moments talking about this because
like I said, this is really important.
And and I think Christians will agree with
me here up until a certain point, and
then we're going to have a parting of
the ways. So here's the issue.
Neither Paul nor Mark
mentioned the virgin birth of Jesus.
Matthew and Luke mentioned it, but they came
after Paul and Mark.
So here the skeptic claims that Matthew and
Luke probably just made it up. Alright? Otherwise,
Paul and Mark would have mentioned it. Why
did Matthew and Luke make it up? Because
they wanted to appeal to their Gentile audiences
and miraculous births of Greek heroes
was very common. So this is the argument.
And if we look at Justin Martyr in
his first apology,
it's very telling what he says. So he
says, addressing pagans
I'll just quote this. I didn't write it
on the slide, but I'll just read it
here. And when this is Justin Martyr
addressing pagans. And when we say also that
the word, who was the firstborn of God,
was produced without sexual union, and that he,
Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died
and rose again and ascended into heaven,
we propound nothing different
than what you believe
regarding those whom you esteem,
sons of Jupiter.
We propound nothing different. Mhmm. And then he
mentions Asclepius and Bacchus and Heracles and Perseus.
So Justin admits that his Jesus, the Jesus
of his Christian faith, the Jesus of early
proto orthodoxy,
this Jesus
mirrors very closely the sons of Jupiter. That
is the sons of Zeus in Greek mythology.
So did Matthew and Luke invent the virgin
birth of Jesus in order to appeal to
the deep audiences?
Well, at first glance, this seems plausible But
when we examine a bit more closely, this
becomes highly unlikely.
So why didn't Paul or Mark mention the
virgin birth? Okay, so the first issue is
we don't have all of Paul's letters. According
to most scholars, Paul wrote a lot more
than 7 genuine letters.
So it's possible that he did mention the
virgin birth and other letters that are not
excellent. Secondly, we don't have any authentic letters
from James, Peter, or John, or any other
Michael
who may have mentioned the virgin birth. I
mean, these are arguments from silence, but they're
still arguments.
Thirdly, many Christian apologists contend
that Paul does at least allude
to the virgin birth in Galatians 44
when he says that Christ was, quote, born
of a woman.
Right? So their argument is, why would he
say that? Aren't we all born of women?
Maybe he means that Christ was only born
of a woman and not of a man.
And maybe,
but then again, he says in woman's womb,
that Christ was, quote, born of a descendant
of David
according to the flesh.
Right? Christian apologists may say, well, maybe here
Paul meant that Mary was a descendant of
David. The other thing is we don't have
access
to a copy of Mark's
complete gospel
until about 370 of the common era. So
that's almost 300 years after Mark wrote the
original. Maybe the original of Mark mentioned the
virgin birth.
There was something called the secret gospel of
Mark, which may have actually been in a
different version of Mark's gospel. Some say it's
a forgery.
Now personally, I don't find these arguments very,
convincing. So it seems to me,
that, yeah, Paul and Mark probably did not
know of the virgin birth.
New
Testament textual critics
point out that
Mark tells us
that Jesus's family, his own family, presumably including
Mary,
thought Jesus was mentally beside himself at one
point. So Mark 3 21. Now, certainly Mary
would have remembered
that Jesus was born from her miraculously.
For Mark, Jesus became became the son of
God at his baptism. That's adoption as Christology.
In Paul, Jesus became the son of God
at his resurrection, although Paul believed that Christ
preexisted his body in some sense as some
sort of lesser divine being or angel perhaps.
But both Paul and Mark seem to have
accepted
that Jesus had a human father
who was a descendant of David. This was
the prevalent Jewish expectation at that time that
God would send a Davidic King Messiah. So
for Paul and Mark, it is very important
that Jesus is the Davidic King Messiah.
Now just to push back a little bit
against the critics,
in Mark 3:21,
Mark does not actually say explicitly
that Jesus' family thought he was beside himself.
Okay. That's one interpretation.
Yes.
The verse says, and having heard this, the
ones near to him came, probably his family,
to seize him for they were saying he
is beside himself.
Okay. So who is saying he is beside
himself? The ones near to him
or the akhlas,
the crowd mentioned in the previous verse? So
not his family. In other words, his family
came to rescue him from the crowd
because they were saying that he's crazy. So
it's a bit ambiguous.
Okay? But let's assume that, Paul and Mark
did not know the virgin birth.
If that is true, does that mean that
nobody knew of it?
In my opinion, it's highly unlikely that Matthew
and Luke invented the virgin birth, and I'll
tell you why.
First of all, was the virgin birth mentioned
in q? So like remember, according to many
scholars, Kyw likely predated not only Mark but
also the Pauline epistles.
It was not contaminated with Pauline Christology.
Usually when Mark sorry sorry, usually when Matthew
and Luke have material in common that is
missing from Mark, scholars conclude that it likely
came from Hugh.
Now Matthew and Luke both tell us that
Jesus was born miraculously.
So doesn't that mean that it was mentioned
in q? Well, the answer
is most likely no, however. There are simply
not enough word for word agreements between Matthew
and Luke to suggest that they had a
common written source
when it came to the birth of Jesus.
However, Matthew and Luke knew the broad strokes.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem to Mary when
she was a virgin. This is what they
know.
Where they differ is on almost all of
the details
in their birth narratives.
Okay? But here's the key. Matthew and Luke
wrote independently
of each other.
Okay? So what are the chances that they
suddenly decided independently
that Jesus was born from a virgin?
I would say not very high. In other
words, Matthew and Luke must have inherited this
belief about Jesus from those before them. They
received the virgin birth as factual,
but then constructed their own unique narratives
around this event.
Okay. This is similar to how they dealt
with the Nazareth Bethlehem problem.
Right? Both Matthew and Luke knew from received
tradition
that Jesus was raised in Nazareth. He was
called Jesus of Nazareth, Yeshua Nutri,
but was somehow born in Bethlehem,
Bethlehem.
So each evangelist constructed his own unique narrative
and plot devices
in order to get Jesus born in Bethlehem,
but raised in Nazareth. So the virgin birth
was not in queue, but it was no
doubt a received tradition
that Matthew and Luke incorporated into their gospels,
in their own unique ways.
Here's another thing. Why would Pauline Christians invent
the virgin birth
if their claim was that Jesus was the
Davidic King Messiah.
The virgin birth completely destroys this claim. Tribal
identity is taken from the father. If Jesus
had no father, then he's not from David.
It's as simple as that.
Perhaps Paul and Mark knew of the idea
of Jesus' virgin birth that was sort of
in the ether,
but chose not to mention it because it
clearly flies into the face of their belief
that Jesus was the Davidic King Messiah.
Paul and Mark perhaps could not reconcile this.
Now Matthew and Luke, however,
just could not ignore it. Why? Because the
virgin birth was so popular to ignore, was
too popular to ignore by the time they
wrote their gospels.
So both of them felt compelled
to offer some sort of explanation. So as
we know, both evangelists gave us
gave Jesus a genealogy.
Right? Which shows that Jesus' adopted father, Joseph,
was a descendant of David. Of course, their
genealogies of Jesus are extremely
contradictory.
So the sort of
ad hoc solution of Matthew and Luke was
that Jesus' adopted father Joseph
was a descendant of David. And so Jesus
somehow magically
inherited his adopted father's lineage. So I don't
think it's a good solution.
Now remember what James Taber said.
He said, if we want to understand who
Jesus was, we need to understand who James
was. Yep. He's the inspiration.
So here's a good question. Did the Ebionites
believe in the virgin birth? Remember, the Ebionites
were the spiritual successors of James the just.
The Jamesonian
Nazarenes who vehemently opposed
Paul.
Okay? The Ebionites were Torah observant Jewish Christians
who denied
that Jesus was God
and considered Paul to be an apostate and
a charlatan. According to Irenaeus,
the Ebionites denied the virgin birth. But according
to Origen and Eusebius, they accepted the virgin
birth. So it seems like there was a
difference of opinion among them.
But here's the thing, if if the virgin
birth was invented by later Pauline Christians like
Matthew and Luke or even Pauline Christians who
lived sort of in the interim between Mark
and Matthew, so between 1785,
it seems highly unlikely
that many Ebionites would have taken that belief
from them. The Ebionites hated Paul and his
adherence.
It makes more sense that the Ebionites took
their belief in the virgin birth from James
and his adherence, the ones who opposed Paul.
Now a skeptic might say, fine, the virgin
birth was a belief of the first Christians,
the Jamesonian Nazarenes. But they still took the
idea from the pagans.
Okay. It was mimetic of Greek mythology.
So let's go back to what Justin said.
Justin Martyr. So it is true that many
pre Christian pagan gods were 4 things.
Okay. There were 4 things. And, again, I
didn't put this on the slide, but people
can maybe, note this,
that these pre Christian pagan gods were number
1, born miraculously.
Number 2, they died for the sins of
their people.
Number 3, they were somehow resurrected.
And number 4, they ascended into heaven.
I would contend that only numbers 23,
that is to say, died for the sins
of the people and were somehow resurrected,
these 2 are strictly pagan.
The idea of a dying and rising savior
man god
is pagan. Yes. That is to say not
Jewish.
Paul borrowed this motif
because he was highly Hellenized, ethnically Jewish, but
highly Hellenized 1st century amateur philosopher from Tarsus.
So here's my challenge. Name me one Jew
in all of Jewish tradition
that predates the Hellenistic period
that died for the sins of others and
was resurrected.
You know, just one.
Now looking at number 1 and number number
14,
born miraculously
and ascended into heaven.
Okay? So, yes, the Greeks believe that many
of their heroes
were born miraculously and ascended into heaven.
But this was also a prevalent pre Hellenistic
Jewish belief.
Okay? These were ancient Israelite motifs.
Miraculous births and ascensions are found in the
Tanakh,
like Isaac and Elijah or Enoch.
Okay? So to conclude this section, it is
plausible, it is plausible that the belief in
the miraculous birth of Jesus goes back to
the first, quote, Christian, is led by James,
the brother of Jesus. Matthew and Luke had
access to q. Q was very Jewish in
his teachings. Matthew and Luke also had access
to the tradition of Jesus' virgin birth.
And although the virgin birth was not mentioned
in q, it was still likely representative of
the teachings of the first Christians like James.
And where did James get this from? I
think likely from Jesus. It was not mimetic
of Greek mythology,
but rather a continuation
of the established
Jewish miracle birth tradition.
Okay? Now according to modern secular historians,
there are, really two main explanations
for why the early Christians
claimed that the virgin that the birth of
Jesus was a miracle. The virgin birth of
Jesus was a miracle.
Because obviously for them, the virgin birth is
not history. Right? They don't acknowledge miracles. For
them, it is historical that the claim was
made. But who first made the claim? So
one is obviously the mimesis argument. Right? The
early Hellenistic Christians
first claimed it in order to model Jesus
after the sons of Zeus.
So the claim was made after the time
of Jesus to deify Jesus. But other historians
and and Ehrman mentions this.
Other historians say that there is evidence
that the virgin birth claim goes back to
the time of Mary herself,
That it was known
that she became pregnant while unmarried.
This was simply known about her during her
whole life.
In fact, Mark tells us that Jews in
Galilee
refer to Jesus as the son of Mary,
not the son of Joseph. He's the only
gospel writer to do so. Possibly revealing
that Jesus' father's
identity was in dispute
during Jesus' own lifetime.
So then, you know, maybe Mary or her
family or someone had to invent a story
about a miraculous birth according to historians, whatever
historians say.
Now the Quran defends Mary and calls her
sadiqa, which means truthful.
Right? The important thing for us is that
many
secular historians admit that the virgin birth explanation
plausibly goes back to Mary herself.
So here's something interesting. I mean, this is,
you know, circumstantial,
but something for historians and skeptics who take
this position to think about.
And this is related to the question I
mentioned earlier,
that is raised by skeptics. Why would you
even believe Jesus if he claimed his birth
was miraculous?
So Jesus of Nazareth, peace be upon him,
is easily
top
3 of the most influential human beings to
ever walk the planet,
right? Is it just a big coincidence
that Jesus' mother was claiming
a miraculous birth?
And that her son would become
someone very special? And then her son just
happens to become
this absolute giant of human history. I mean,
top three most influential human beings. A 30
year old rabbi from Nazareth who lived 2
1000 years ago. And just something to think
about. And then there was an unlettered Arab
man in the Hejaz in the 7th century,
who said that his religion, Islam,
would eventually become the dominant religion in the
world at a time when there were a
handful of Muslims.
So that man, the prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi
wasallam, the number one most influential human being
in history,
also said that Jesus was born miraculously.
Right? So just something to think about. I
mean, just I I tried to give an
analogy here, something people can sort of compare.
It's it's not very, adequate. But imagine a
video surfaced,
from 1960,
in which Michael Jordan's mother,
said that she had a dream. Okay? And
in this dream, a voice told her that
she was going to give birth to the
greatest basketball player ever
in 1960,
before Michael Jordan was even born.
Okay? That would be something to think about.
Right? I don't think we can just ignore
that.
Right? In my view, Jesus was born the
way he was
in order to be a sign to the
Israelites
that he was something special. And the most
special thing a man could be in Judaism
was a prophet.
Right? So Islam also solves this messiah virgin
birth dilemma.
Jesus was the messiah, but he wasn't the
king messiah, at least not a Davidic king
messiah. He was a prophet messiah.
He was a spiritual master, not a political
leader. So I agree with the Jesus seminar
here that the historical Jesus never claimed to
be the Davidic messiah. Now one last thing
I'll mention about this,
and then we'll move on here.
So I said, as I said, Matthew and
Luke did not invent the virgin birth. The
virgin birth tradition of Jesus predates
their gospels.
Okay. Luke, however, in his unique telling of
the story
does give it a Greek spin.
Okay? So did Luke invent the virgin birth?
No. But he did give it a Greek
flavoring,
okay, in his telling of the story.
Right? So this idea, the Holy Spirit shall
come upon thee and the power of the
Most High shall overshadow thee. And for this
reason,
right, the thing born shall be called the
Son of God. So the Luke and Jesus
is this demigod.
This this half man, half god like Perseus,
Hercules or Dionysus.
Okay, so there is an element of Hellenistic
mimesis
in Luke's telling of the story.
What did Matthew do? Matthew also gave it
a Greek spin,
but he couched his Greek interpretation
in Jewish language.
Okay. So Matthew knew that miraculous births were
indicative within Jewish tradition
of the emergence of great figures. But for
Matthew, finding a specific Tanafi
proof text was very important.
Okay? But Matthew chose a text that probably
has that probably has nothing to do with
Jesus. So in Isaiah 7,
right, Isaiah tells Ahaz, he says,
the young woman
will conceive a son,
the Korath Shmuel,
and she shall call his name Emmanuel.
Now Matthew was looking at the Greek of
this verse. And the Greek word for the
woman, is
And I know some critics of the New
Testament make a big big deal out of
this. They say that Alma means young woman
and Parthenos means virgin. But in fact, Alma
could also mean virgin. You can call a
virgin an Alma. There's no problem with that.
Matthew's
real error is in his interpretation of Immanuel.
Okay? First of all,
Jesus' name was not Immanuel. It was Jesus.
Secondly, by pointing out that Emmanuel means God
with us, Matt, Matthew wants to say that
Jesus was a divine being,
a god, son of the god. So this
is his Greek spin, his Greco Roman spin.
By doing so, Matthew breaks a fundamental law
of Jewish exegesis.
His Midrash, right, violates the pishat. In other
words, his subtle interpretation
violates the plain sense
of the Tanakh's overall theology.
And I mentioned this in the past that
the Christian exegetes were notorious for doing this,
with Isaiah chapter 53.
So in in my view, this verse, Isaiah
714, that has nothing to do with Jesus
or Mary. Matthew just wanted to find something.
This text, Isaiah 714, did not produce the
virgin birth of Jesus. I wanna make this
clear. Matthew did not read this in Isaiah
and decide that Jesus was born from a
virgin.
How do we know? Luke was also familiar
with the virgin birth and he did not
quote this verse and Luke did not know
Matthew.
So no, Matthew already knew of the virgin
birth.
But he went back into the Tanakh
to find a specific prophecy of it. This
is also how Matthew constructed his crucifixion narrative.
Matthew believed that Jesus was crucified. He was
a Pauline Christian. But how did he write
his crucifixion narrative? He scoured the Tanakh for
things he could use.
The dogs have encircled me. They divide up
my garments. I can use that.
So let me say it again. Matthew believed
that Jesus was born when Mary was unmarried.
She was yet to be married. In other
words, she was virgin.
Matthew wanted to find a prophecy of this
in the Tanakh.
So he read the Greek translation of the
Old Testament, and his eyes settled upon the
words Parfenas and Emmanuel
in, Isaiah 714. But the virgin birth of
Jesus does not hinge
on Isaiah 714.
Luke who also Luke who wrote independently
in Matthew also believed that Jesus was born
from a virgin. And Luke did not cite
Isaiah 714.
Clearly, both Matthew and Luke were drawing from
an antecedent tradition that Jesus was born from
a virgin. It is in the way that
they try to explain this event
that is problematic.
So Luke tried to appeal to his Greek
audience
by explicitly modeling Jesus like a son of
Zeus, while Matthew was more subtle in his
Greek appeal by interpreting a Tanakh verse through
a Greek lens.
Okay, what else do we gather about Jesus
from the Quran?
Jesus claimed that his mother was fed by
angels.
Now given her claim
that the birth of her son was miraculous,
this is not implausible that she would make
this claim.
And we'll talk about this. This is related
to Christian apocrypha. That's why it's in red.
Jesus claimed that he spoke as an infant.
Given his claim of miraculous birth, this is
not implausible. We'll also talk about this. It's
related to the Christian apocrypha.
Jesus claimed that he formed birds from clay
and gave them life by God's leave.
Again, given his previous claims, this is not
implausible. We'll also talk about this. It's related
to the Christian apocrypha.
Jesus claimed to be a servant of God.
Makes total sense. Jesus was only sent to
the Israelites, the Jews. Makes total sense. Jesus
claimed to be a prophet, a healer, a
prophet
messiah. Makes total sense. Jesus claimed to be
a word from God. Okay. So
let's pause here for a minute. This is
also related to the
mishmash
theory I mentioned earlier,
that the prophet Muhammad denied the divinity of
Jesus, but also called Jesus the Lagos.
And in John's gospel, the Lagos is God.
In the beginning was the word, the word
was with God,
and the word was God. Most historians would
say that it is highly implausible that Jesus
believed himself to be the Logos.
Therefore, the Quran is also saying something implausible
here about Jesus. This is the claim. So
what's my response to this?
Okay. When the Quran says that Jesus is
a word from God,
kadimatun min Allah,
okay? Who says this? It is the angel
who announces this to Mary.
So Jesus' title, a word from God
or word of God is related to his
birth.
It has nothing to do with his supposed
pre eternality.
Okay? And this is significant because again, the
Quran here is not borrowing a middle platonic
term or concept like the gospel of John
does, But rather the Quran is continuing
the established Jewish
miracle birth tradition.
How so? Well, in Genesis 18/14,
Sarah laughs and says, shall I bear a
child and I am old?
What did the angel say to her? Is
anything too hard from the Lord?
Okay, but in Hebrew
it says,
literally,
is any word
too hard for the Lord?
Dvar means word.
In Greek, this is translated
as Khrayma
not Lagos.
What does davar mean in the context of
Genesis?
It means an edict,
a matter,
an affair or a decree.
Is anything that God decrees,
is any affair that God wills too hard
for him to do? This is the meaning
of what the angels
says to Sarah.
Okay, so in the Quran, when the angel
says to Mary,
God gives you glad tidings of a word
from Him.
In the Jewish context, the 1st century Jerusalem,
Mary would have understood this as God decreeing
some
affair for
her. Okay? In fact, Jasonius
says that the Arabic equivalent in meaning to
davar is amr.
When Mary says to the angel that she's
a virgin,
the angel says,
Whenever God decrees a matter,
an amr, an affair, a davar, a khayma,
He only says be and it is. Okay,
so Jesus is that davar, that khramah, that
amr, that kalima.
Right? So amr and kalima are basically in
the context of Jesus in the Quran synonymous.
Or in Surat Maryam,
right? The angel says to Mary, Wakana Amram
Maqaddiyyah, it is a matter
decreed.
In other words, a word
decreed. So the Quran tells us how it's
using the word kalimah,
okay, with respect to Jesus, not in the
Greek polytheistic,
Johanan sense,
but in the proper monotheistic
Jewish sense.
So tavar means something that God decreed. And
this is all over the Tanakh, even outside
of the birth narrative tradition.
Like in Genesis 2450,
Laban
and Bethuel
said about Rebekah marrying Isaac.
They say, this is from the Lord. We
have no say in the matter. But that's
a translation. In the Hebrew, what does it
say?
Literally,
this word,
this matter, this affair, this decree is from
God. We can't do anything to stop it.
So I would conclude that the Quran's epithet
for Jesus, a word of God or a
word from God, is not at all equivalent
to the Juhannan Lagos,
but rather the Tanakhidavar
translated
khayma in the Septuagint.
What's interesting is that even Luke, when speaking
of Elizabeth giving birth to John the Baptist
in her old age, even Luke uses this
Jewish language.
Right? In Luke 137,
right?
He says, for no word from God,
for no word from God, karimatummin
Allah, shall be devoid of power. That's literally
what the Greek says. Right?
And so the Quran confirms that indeed, Jesus
is the Word of God,
but not in the Christian sense, but rather
in the sense that Mary would have understood
it, that Jesus was a decreed thing, alakaha
ila Maryam, that he thrust upon Mary. Mary's,
sorry, Jesus's birth was a sign of God's
greatness
and power.
Okay.
And next, we have Jesus broadly confirmed the
Torah, but also made certain amendments,
ameliorations
to it, makes sense. Jesus
constantly enjoyed prayer and charity, makes sense. Jesus
predicted the coming of a powerful figure to
come after him, Makes sense. The bar in
ash, the son of man, it's all over
the synoptic gospels. Check out the podcast we
did on the son of man. Jesus celebrated
a notable feast with his disciples. Makes sense.
Jesus told the Israelites to fear God and
follow him, makes sense. Jesus preached
the gospel, the Injil
to the Israelites, which emphasized having intimate knowledge
of God leading to a strong love of
God makes sense. Jesus taught the Israelites to
be reflections of the divine qualities,
to be lordly servants makes sense. Jesus was
aided with the Holy Spirit. Okay, here,
pause here real quick. Christian polemicists claim that
the Quran is again affirming a Trinitarian idea,
while also denying the divinity of Jesus. The
Quran is confused again.
But the truth is the Quran is not
confused. The critics are confused.
If Yeshua Hanusdi, if Jesus of Nazareth, peace
be upon him,
said in the 1st century, that he was
being aided by Ruach Kadosh,
what did he mean? Did he mean the
3rd person of a triune deity?
Of course not, that's a total anachronism.
The phrase Ruach Khadosh is mentioned 3 times
in the Tanakh.
Once in the Psalms and twice in Isaiah.
So here's Psalm 5111.
Do not cast me away from your presence
and do not take away from me,
your Holy Spirit.
So this is called a by member segment
in synonymic parallelism. This is very common in
Hebrew
lyrical poetry. And the Psalms
is Hebrew lyrical poetry. In other words, the
second line is just a restatement of the
first line.
Do not cast me away from your presence.
Meaning do not take away from me your
holy spirit.
So the Ruach HaDosh is an expression
that denotes the presence of God's power.
It denotes the presence of God's power by
which he accomplishes his divine will.
So again,
just as we saw with Jesus being a
word from God, a davar
mii Adonai,
the Quran restores
and re instates the true meaning
of the Hebrew phrase, Ru'akhadosh.
Continuing, Jesus made the Jewish establishment angry.
Makes sense. Jesus was not crucified,
although there was some crucifixion event. Those who
made the claim that Jesus was crucified did
so based on conjecture. This is plausible. There
were no eyewitnesses. We talked about this last
time, just mistaken identity.
Jesus was claimed by his Jewish followers to
have ascended into heaven. Makes sense, like Elijah
or Enoch. This was the claim of his
Jewish followers.
And finally, shortly after Jesus's departure,
2 factions of Nazarenes emerged. 1 of them
went astray. Makes sense, that's what happened.
Okay,
continuing then. Now
let's look at the words of the New
Testament Jesus. Okay. So there's a lot of
difference of opinion as to when the 39
books of the Tanakh were declared in official
closed canon, whether it happened before or after
the common era. John Collins says that it
happened at the end of the 1st century
of the common era.
Okay?
For our present purposes, it really doesn't matter.
The the seven main books of the Old
Testament Apocrypha
were never considered totally authentic
by Jewish authorities
before or after Jesus. So these are 1st
and second Maccabees.
Judith, Tobit, Sirach, Baruch, and the Wisdom of
Solomon.
And these are also called the
Does this mean that these books have no
value whatsoever or that they don't contain any
truth? No. In fact, the New Testament Jesus
confirms
certain statements, analogies and themes in some of
these 7 books. And this can't be denied
in good faith. This can't be denied by
an intellectually honest person.
I mean, Catholics outright do not deny this.
In fact, the Roman Catholic church went so
far as to declare these books to be
absolutely canonical. Right? The Old Testament canon of
the Roman Catholic church is 46 books. So
the Roman Catholic church disagrees with Judaism. And
in Judaism, these books have value. They are
quote, instructional,
but they're not canon.
Generally,
Protestants as well consider these books to have
value and contain elements of truth, but they're
not totally authentic. But then there are other
Old Testament apocryphal texts.
Like 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Estrus.
Or 3rd and 4th Maccabees.
And so you'll find some of these books
in the Greek Orthodox and Slavonic canons,
right? Many, many books.
The irony about these, you know, anti Muslim
Christian polemicists
who accused the prophet Muhammad of forgery and
plagiarism
is that the New Testament Jesus engaged
with the Old Testament
Apocrypha
in the same way that the Quran at
times
engages with the New Testament
Apocrypha.
And I'll show you that. But let's look
at some examples from the New Testament Jesus.
Okay, so here's what the,
here's here's the book of Matthew and the
book of Sirach. Right? So Matthew was written
around, you know, 80, 85 CE.
Sirach was written around 180 BCE, something like
that. So they're separated by almost 300,
years.
So here's Matthew 6 19 and 20. Do
not store for yourselves treasures on earth where
moth and rust consume and where thieves break
in and steal, but store for yourself treasures
in heaven where neither moth nor rust consumes
and where thieves do not break in and
steal.
Here's Sirach 29, 1011.
Help the poor for the commandment sake and
then their need do not send them away
empty handed. Lose your silver for the sake
of a brother or a friend and do
not let it rust under a stone and
be lost. Store up your treasure according to
the commandments of the most high, and it
will profit you more than gold. So we
have this common theme of not allowing rust
to destroy our earthly treasure by getting rid
of it. And in doing so, we store
up treasures in heaven. In other words, we
must give our wealth to the poor and
less fortunate in order for it to benefit
us. I think it's clear that the Methian
Jesus is alluding to these verses in Sirach
as a way of making his point more
vivid by using language that his initial audience
is already familiar with. When we give charity
in this world,
that wealth that we lose, God will turn
into treasure in the next world. The Matthean
Jesus is just restating these verses from Sirach.
And Sirach is apocryphal.
Does this mean that what Jesus is saying
is false?
No, Jesus is simply confirming
that specific teaching in Sirach. That teaching is
true. It was likely popular during his day.
Does this mean that Jesus believed every word
of the book of Sirach? No, not necessarily.
This was just an effective way of making
his point.
Example number 2, John 63554.
Jesus said to them, so this is Joanne
and Jesus.
I am the bread of life. Whoever comes
to me will never be hungry. And whoever
believes in me will never be thirsty. Those
who eat my flesh and drink my blood
have eternal
life. Sirach 2421.
Those who eat of me
will hunger no for more for more. And
those who drink of me will thirst for
more.
I think there's a clear interplay here. So
the speaker in Sirach
is the personified wisdom,
Sophia
Hukma of God.
When we consume wisdom,
God's wisdom, the language is clearly metaphorical.
That is to say, when we wholeheartedly
dedicate ourselves totally to God's teachings,
we will only find ourselves eager to learn
more. So why the analogy of eating and
drinking? Well, in the ancient world, people often,
died because of something they ate or drink.
When you eat or drink something and take
it into your body, you're demonstrating total trust
That what you're eating or drinking will not
harm you. It demonstrates total trust.
Now the Johann and Jesus borrows this analogy
because his audience knows it well. So now,
the Johannan Jesus as the logos
claims to be that very wisdom of God.
But now,
by consuming his flesh and blood, he adds,
you will never again be hungry or thirsty.
So the Johann and Jesus revises this. You
will never again be hungry or thirsty
because you will have consumed the fullness of
God's wisdom in the person, the flesh and
blood of Jesus Christ, who is a divine
being. In other words, the Johannan Jesus confirms
this teaching from Sirach,
but he takes it a step further. So
like Matthew, he couches a Greek or pagan
concept
in Jewish language.
Example number 3,
John 1022. At the time the festival of
the dedication
took place in Jerusalem, it was winter. 1st
Maccabees
4 59,
then Judas and his brothers, Judas Maccabees
and his brothers and all the assembly of
Israel determined that every year
at that season of that season
The author should be observant joy and etcetera.
So the feast of the dedication is called
Hanukkah,
right? And Hanukkah does not appear even once
in any book of the canonical Tanakh.
It only appears in the apocryphal book of
1st Maccabees.
So John tells us that the Jews at
the time of Jesus were celebrating an event
that is not described in any canonical book
of scripture.
Hanukkah commemorated the Maccabean revolt led by Judas
Maccabees and his brothers, the dedication of the
temple. No, the oil burning for 8 days,
etcetera.
In John 7, Jesus goes to Jerusalem to
celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.
And on the day of the Feast of
the Dedication, he was walking along Solomon's porch.
It seems that John is telling us that
the Johann and Jesus confirmed the feast of
the dedication
as being true and historical. That Jesus celebrated
a feast that was only found in the
Apocrypha.
Example number 4. Matthew 2337.
And there's only 5 of these. Jerusalem, Jerusalem.
The city that kills the prophets.
Okay. And stones those who are sent to
it. How often
have I desired to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her
wings, and you are not willing. See your
house is left to you desolate.
2nd estrus, 1,
chapter 1 30 to 33. I gathered you
as a hen, gathers her chicks under her
wings. But now, what shall you what shall
I do to you? I will cast you
out from my presence.
I have sent you my servants, the prophets,
but you have taken them and killed them.
Your house is desolate.
So here we see a clear cut correspondence
between the Methian Jesus and the author of
second estrus.
Now neither Jews, Catholics or Protestants consider 2nd
Estrus
canonical.
Chapters 1 and 2 of 2nd Estrus
is also called
5th Ezra, by the way. It's a little
confusing.
So here's the interesting dilemma for the Christians
when it comes to 5th Ezra.
Obviously, most Christian confessionals believe that that 5th
Ezra was written by a Jewish author.
Not Ezra, but a Jewish author before the
Christian era.
If that's true, then clearly the Methian Jesus
is alluding to paraphrasing
and quoting
5th Ezra, also known as 2nd Esdras,
chapter 1 verses 30
to 33. So Jesus is quoting Apocrypha.
The majority of historical scholars, however,
placed the writing of 5th Ezra after the
Christian period.
I believe that it was written by a
Christian, a Pauline Christian, who tried to deceive
his Jewish audience by pretending to be the
ancient
scribe Ezra
of the 5th century BCE. I mean, talk
about a truly ambitious forgery.
Right? So in this case, the methean Jesus
is not quoting 5th Ezra, but the other
way around.
But why is this also problematic for the
confessional Christian? I think because
this vividly demonstrates how commonly and brazenly
and successfully
early Pauline Christians
would be able to create counterfeit writings in
order to win people to their side.
So not only were gospels and epistles forged
in the name of Jesus' apostles,
but Pauline Christians were even bold enough to
forge Old Testament
apocryphal books.
Really quite amazing.
Example number 5, Matthew 2743.
He trusted in God. Let him deliver him
from his enemies, for he said I am
the son of God. Wisdom,
2/18. If the righteous man is God's son,
he will help him and will deliver him
from the hand of his adversaries.
So clearly Matthew has the wisdom of Solomon
in mind here. Now Matthew may not have
believed that the wisdom of Solomon will inspire
scripture from beginning to end. But that did
not stop him from saying that the author
successfully predicted
something that supposedly happened to Jesus.
It's also plausible that Matthew did believe that
the wisdom of Solomon was inspired by God.
Catholics would agree with Matthew. Protestants would not.
Okay. So now I think we're ready to
look at the Quran's engagement with the Christian
apocrypha.
Okay?
As I mentioned, we'll look at 4 writings,
the proto gospel of James, the gospel of
pseudo Matthew, the infancy gospel of Thomas, and
the Syriac Infancy Gospel, also known as also
known as the Arabic Infancy Gospel.
Does it make sense that the prophet copied
these sources?
Okay. So let's start with the proto gospel
of James.
The proto gospel of James was most likely
written, in the first half of the second
century, not long after the composition of the
gospel of John in the book of Acts.
The author attempts to harmonize
elements found in both Matthew,
and Luke. Despite its attribution to James, the
gospel was definitely not written by James. So
we have nothing authentic from the real James,
the just, Yaquefatzadeq.
The so called proto gospel of James is
pseudepigraphal.
Now how does the Quran engage with the
proto gospel of James? Is there direct
literary dependence
or is something else happening? So I'll come
back to this in a minute, Insha'Allah. But
here's a quote from I like this quote
from New Advent. It's Catholic Encyclopedia.
And this is about the Old Testament pseudepigrapha.
Old Testament pseudepigrapha
is what they say. It should be born
in mine, however, that the apocryphal character of
these writings, that is to say, their rejection
from the canon and their ungenuineness
do not imply that no heed whatever should
be taken of some of their assertions side
by side indeed with unwarranted and legendary facts.
So I'll pause here. Now that's interesting. Today,
there are Christians today, Christian apologists today like
like Mike Lacona, and I mentioned this last
time, who now admit that there are legends
in the canonical gospel accounts,
like the zombie apocalypse of Matthew. Let's keep
reading.
They continue to say, they contain some historical
data borrowed from reliable traditions or documents. Okay?
So the Old Testament pseudepigrapha.
These books contain some historical data borrowed from
reliable traditions or documents. And difficult though it
is to distinguish in them, the weak from
the tares.
It would be unwise and uncritical indiscriminately to
reject the whole, end quote.
So certainly, we can approach the New Testament
pseudepigrapha
in the same way. There is wheat among
the tares in the New Testament pseudepigrapha.
Interestingly,
most Christians in the world celebrate a feast
every November
called the Feast of the Entrance Into the
Temple of Our Most Holy Lady,
also called the Presentation of Mary in the
Temple.
This is a Catholic and Eastern Orthodox feast
every November.
The only text that this feast is based
upon
is this text, the proto gospel of James.
According to Catholics and Eastern Orthodox
Christians,
the tradition of Mary serving in the temple
from age 3 to 12 is a firmly
established tradition with ancient roots. In other words,
the majority of Christians affirm
that this gospel contains truth.
Okay?
So here are some agreed upon similarities
between the Koran
and the proto gospel of James. So the
mother of Mary especially dedicates her child to
God, irrespective of the child *.
As a child, Mary resided in the temple
and was fed by angels,
and rods were cast in order to determine
her caretaker.
Okay. So historically,
we basically have 2
options. Option number 1 is at some point,
the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam heard this
text somehow,
the proto gospel of James in an Arabic
translation.
Now remember the prophet was a letter. Okay?
And even if he could read or write,
you know, the chances that he had a
nice Arabic translation of the proto gospel of
James
sitting on his bookshelf in his secret library
in Medina is virtually 0.
Unlike Matthew and Luke, who did have Greek
copies
of Mark and Q sitting on their desks
as it were when they wrote their gospels.
So the prophet must have heard this text
in
an Arabic translation.
Then he must have written or dictated what
he remembered
in the Quran,
while also adapting the text to fit in
with his own theology.
So this explains the similarities and differences. So
this option assumes that the prophet was directly
dependent upon the proto gospel of James. It
was direct literary dependence.
Option number
2, various traditions about marrying Jesus were transmitted
orally since the 1st century by various messianic
Jews,
Christians in quotes. Over time, these traditions were
modified and expanded by various Christian communities, including
the community which authored the proto gospel of
James in the 2nd century.
The versions of these traditions that were popular
in the Arabian Peninsula
made their way into the text of the
Quran.
Jerusalem, by the way, is only about 700
miles away from Medina.
It's 25 100 miles away from Rome where
Mark most likely wrote his gospel. Therefore, the
Quran is not directly dependent upon the proto
gospel of James, but drew its narratives from
a shared oral tradition
that was based upon an ancient Near Eastern
messianic
kirugma or proclamation.
So these are the two options historically, I
think. Okay? However, I would argue that these
options
fail to take into consideration
the method or the logic of the Quran's
unique
storytelling or retelling.
Miracles
aside,
the Quran seems to avoid
the historical implausibilities
of the Christian
narratives found in the proto gospel of James,
just as it did with the Exodus, flood
and Joseph narratives found in Genesis.
For example, the proto gospel of James mentions
both the Lucan census under Augustus,
as well as the Methian Herodian slaughter of
the innocents. Both of these events are highly
implausible historically.
And this is clearly a contradiction between Matthew
and Luke. Right? Harmonization here is just not
very convincing. There's no mention of these events
in the Quran. The Quran consistently
avoids the historical pitfalls
of the Christian
narratives.
What about Mary living in
or around the temple?
Is it historically plausible that girls were permitted
to live in the temple area? The answer
is yes. Young girls were sometimes dedicated by
their parents
for temple service.
And the priest, the kohanim, would ask these
young girls,
these young unmarried girls to weave the curtains
of the temple.
The proto gospel of James tells us that
Mary was one of these virgin weavers.
This was how she would specially serve God.
She was a servant of the temple.
There may be a reference to these girls
in 2nd Maccabees
3/19.
Right? When a Greek minister named, Heliodorus
tried to enter the temple, it says virgins
who were kept indoors ran together to the
gates.
These may have been the young girls who
were dedicated by their parents to serve, the
temple. The Quran implies this about Mary as
well. The Quran says that Mary set up
a hijab,
a barrier or curtain
in the east, presumably in the eastern part
of the temple,
in order to guard her privacy. So hijab
here in the Quran does not mean head
covering,
but rather like a barrier or curtain. In
this specific context, the head covering for women
is mentioned elsewhere in the Quran.
Presumably, the curtain that Mary was working on,
she would also sort of use as a
hijab or barrier when she wanted privacy.
The Quran tells us explicitly
that a priest named Zechariah was her caretaker
during this time. The proto gospel of James
implies that it was Zechariah as well from
age 3 to 12.
The proto gospel of James continues.
It says, when Mary turned 12,
she needed to leave the temple because she
could start her cycle at any time and
thus defile
the sanctuary, the mehreah. So Zechariah,
gathered a group of widowers
and was told by an angel according to
the proto gospel of James that they should
cast rods and that Mary, would become the
wife of the one to whom the Lord
God would give a sign and that man
was Joseph.
So here here's the historical question. Would the
priests engage in something like this? Right? That's
the question. Not did an angel actually order
this? The latter cannot be known through modern
historiography. And so historians, they don't touch it.
They don't touch the supernatural. They're naturalists. The
historical question is, is it plausible that the
priest cast lots?
And the answer is yes. In fact, casting
lots
was a common method
for determining the will of God. The assignment
of temple duties to be performed by priestly
families was determined by lot. This is mentioned
several times in 1st Chronicles and in Leviticus.
In fact, according to the book of Acts,
the apostles appointed 2 men to take the
place of Judas,
Justice and Matthias. So Acts 126.
It says, They cast lots and the lot
fell to Matthias. So he was added to
to the 11 apostles.
Furthermore, Luke says in 1:9 about Zacharias,
according to the custom of the priesthood, he
was chosen by lot
to enter the temple of the Lord to
burn incense.
So the priest casting lots to determine the
guardianship of Mary
is very plausible.
Now when the angel gave Mary the news
of her son,
the proto gospel of James basically quotes the
response of the angel in Luke. The power
of God will overshadow you.
Therefore, the one born shall be called the
son of the highest.
So again, we have this Greek idea of
a half divine, half mortal demigod.
Historically, this is not what the first Christians
who told this story likely would have
said. Okay, the first Christians, quote unquote Christians,
were Palestinian Jews, the Jamesonian Nazarenes,
the Nutsareem under Ya'akov,
probably did not tell the story like that.
More plausibly,
they said something like what the Quran says.
Even so, God creates whatever He wills. Whenever
He decrees a matter, He only says to
it be and it is. Or in Surah
Maryam,
Thus, it will be, your Lord says,
it is easy for me. This is a
much more Jewish response and thus more contextually
coherent.
Again,
like when Sarah was told of the birth
of Isaac
in Genesis 18, the angel said, is anything,
any davar, any affair
too hard for the Lord? In other words,
hu alayayayin, it is easy for me.
So did the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him, plagiarize the quoted gospel of James? No.
The Quran's engagement with the Christian traditions
recorded in the text of the proto gospel
of James is similar to its engagement
with the traditions found in the canonical gospels.
It is confessing,
revising,
and rejecting.
Let's move to the proto gospel sorry, the
gospel of pseudo Matthew.
So here's a passage from chapter 20
of pseudo Matthew. I'll read this quickly. And
it came to pass on the 3rd day
of their journey when they were walking that
the blessed Mary was fatigued by the excessive
heat of the sun in the desert. And
seeing a palm tree, she said to Joseph,
let me rest under let me rest a
little under the shade of this tree. Therefore,
Joseph made haste
and let and let her to the palm
and made her come down from her beast.
And as the blessed Mary was sitting there,
she looked up to to the foliage of
the palm and saw it full of fruit
and said to Joseph,
I wish it were possible to get some
of the fruit of this palm. Then the
child Jesus with a a joyful countenance, reposing
in the bosom of his mother, said to
the palm, oh, tree, bend your branches and
refresh my mother with your fruits. And immediately
at these words, the palm bent its top
down to the very blessed feet of the
blessed Mary. To the very feet of blessed
Mary. And they gathered from it fruit with
which they were all refreshed.
Then Jesus said to it, raise yourself, oh,
palm tree and be strong and be
and be the companion of my trees, which
are in the paradise of my father and
open from your roots a vein of water,
which has been hid in the earth and
let the waters flow so that we may
be satisfied from you. And it rose up
immediately and its root there began to come
forth a spring,
and at its root, there began to come
forth a spring of water exceedingly clear and
cool and sparkling.
So we have Mary sitting under a palm
tree, eating from its fruit and hearing the
voice of Jesus who spoke to her as
a very young child. She then refreshed herself
with the waters of the spring that came
up from the earth.
Okay? Now in surah 19 of the Quran,
we are told that the pain of childbirth
drove Mary to the trunk of a palm
tree. She hears a voice that tells her
not to grieve and to shake the trunk
of the tree for dates to fall and
to drink from a spring beneath her. The
speaker is not identified. But some mufasidin, some
exegetes, maintain
that it is the newborn Jesus who is
speaking to her. Others say it's an angel.
So there are similarities, but also differences. So
in pseudo Matthew, Jesus was already born. It
wasn't the pains of childbirth that drove Mary
under the tree, but rather fatigue from the
sun's heat. So Jesus was already born in
pseudo Matthew.
Joseph is not mentioned anywhere in the Quranic
narrative. In pseudo Matthew, the young Jesus orders
the tree to bend its branches while in
the Quran,
Jesus, if it is Jesus, told Mary to
shake the trunk and let the dates fall.
And then, of course, Jesus refers to God
as his father in pseudo Matthew, which we
never get in the Quran. Of course, by
father here, the author intends an orthodox Christian
understanding of the term.
Now Bart Ehrman and Slade Coppellisi
cowrote
a book called The Apocryphal Gospels.
Okay? And in this book, they say that
the earliest surviving
manuscript of pseudo Matthew are dated to the
early 9th century.
Some say 11th century.
When was Surah 19 of the Quran composed?
No later than 6 22 CE.
It's a Meccan Sura according to everybody, and
this is indisputable. The Birmingham manuscript contains sort
of 19. Okay? So historians date the original
composition
of pseudo Matthew to either the 8th or
9th centuries.
But according to some, it could have been
written early even as early as the mid
7th
century at the
earliest. So around 650 CE,
Terminus post quen. But this is just conjecture.
So, I mean, it seems to me that
there there are some historians
who really want this to be the source
of the Quran.
Okay? Most likely, pseudo Matthew
is an 8th century document. But even if
we humor 650 CE,
okay, that's 30 years after the story shows
up in the Quran.
And where was Islam in 650 CE?
Remember the famous Uthmanic codex committee was held
between 645
and 650 in Medina.
By 650, all of Arabia,
Yemen,
and the areas that would become Iran, Iraq,
Syria, Palestine, and parts of Egypt are Muslim.
Millions of Christians from all over these places
were hearing the Quran
for the first time. So it seems to
me that pseudo Matthew is a response to
and critical rewriting
of the Quranic narrative
rather than the other way around. It seems
to me and it's very plausible that the
author of Pseudo Matthew wants to convert Muslims
through the Quran's method of storytelling.
That is through confirmation, correction and rejection. In
other words, Pseudo Matthew is a Christian counter
narrative
to the Quran. The author of Pseudomathew was
trying to beat the Quran at its own
game.
Okay,
so here again, the Quran is not directly
dependent on Pseudomathew.
So where did the Quran get this information
from? Well historically one option is the prophet
made it up,
which does not fit his personality at all.
The prophet was known by the Arabs before
his claim of revelation
as being the most truthful and trustworthy of
all men. They called them Asadih ul Amin.
The Quran makes appeals to the prophet's
reputation among his people. That he was not
a poet, he was not a soothsayer or
insane or a liar.
Option number 2, the prophet heard certain oral
traditions about Mary and Jesus.
Kinda broadly speaking, Mary sitting under a tree,
Jesus
talking to her, Mary eating food and drinking
from a spring, and incorporated them into the
either way, he was not directly dependent upon
pseudo Matthew. Personally, I think the prophet received
these narrations from an angel.
This is a non historical claim according to
the modern secular naturalistic
paradigm, but I'm fine with that. I'm not
a strict naturalist.
I have confidence and trust in the claims
of the prophet because I have good reasons.
I have confidence and trust in him.
You know, I believe in him for good
reasons.
So let me give you another analogy. I'll
use the I'll use the Michael Jordan analogy
again. So imagine somebody said,
you you know, I always thought that, Wilt
Wilt Chamberlain was the greatest player of all
time. But when I saw what Jordan did
in his career,
he made a believer out of me.
He made a believer out of me. So
what is this person saying? Is he saying
that he changed his mind and now believes
something for no reason
because he uses the word belief?
No. He has reasons for his belief and
he can articulate them. Right? So we have
reasons why we trust
the prophet, reasons for our belief. But belief
doesn't mean believing without reason. There are other
reasons why we believe.
Okay?
Again, if if if the Quran happens to
say something that seems to have no precedent,
the atheist and many Christian polemicists, they say,
oh, Mohammed just made that up. But if
the Quran confirms the story or revise as
a tradition
that was known before the prophet, they say
Muhammad was a plagiarist.
Right? See, they're being intellectually dishonest. But here's
the bottom line. Does it stand to reason?
Does it make sense that the prophet plagiarized
this apocryphal gospel? No. This is not what
the evidence suggests at all.
Here's another example. This is also from pseudo
Matthew.
It's in chapter 9 of pseudo Matthew. This
is what it says. While she was working
on the purple with her fingers, So this
is Mary working in the temple, weaving the
curtain with with the color purple, which is
the color worn by kings. While she was
working on the purple with her fingers, there
entered a young man of ineffable beauty. And
when Mary saw him, she exceedingly feared and
trembled.
And the man who was really an angel
says, fear not, he shall bring forth a
king who fills not only the earth, but
the heaven and who reigns from generation to
generation.
Okay? So here again, the author of pseudo
Matthew
constructed a Christian counter narrative
to the Quranic story. So the Quran says
And remember in the scripture, Mary, when she
secluded herself from her people in an eastern
location, so presumably in the temple.
Screening herself from them.
Then we sent to her our angel appearing
before her as a man perfectly formed.
She appealed, I truly seek refuge in the
most compassionate from you. So leave me alone
if you are God fearing.
He responded, I'm only the messenger from your
Lord sent to bless you with a pure
son.
She said, how can I have a son
when no man has ever touched me, nor
nor am I unchaste?
He said, thus said your Lord, it is
easy for me and we will make Him
a sign for humanity
and a mercy from us. It has
been a matter already decreed.
A word, a davar, a khrima, a kalima,
a kalima.
So the author, pseudo Matthew, right, did not
like the Quran's low Christology here.
Jesus is pure,
a sign for humanity.
A mercy, that's it? That's not enough. No.
He is a king. But not just any
king, a king who rules the heaven and
earth for all time. In other words, he's
God.
So here I'll repeat, I'll somewhat repeat what
I said about the proto gospel of James.
Historically, this is not what the first Christians
likely would have said about Jesus.
The first Christians who were Palestinian Jews, the
Jamesonians,
Nazarenes, the Nutsunim,
most probably did not believe that Jesus was
God. More plausibly, they said something like what
the Quran says, That Jesus was pure, a
sign for humanity,
a manifestation of God's mercy. The Quran's Christology
here is much more contextually coherent.
The last thing I'll say about pseudo Matthew,
and just as we saw with the proto
gospel of James, miracles aside,
the Quran seems to avoid the historical implausibilities
of the Christian narratives found specifically
in pseudo Matthew.
Pseudo Matthew mentions the Lucan census in chapter
13.
Pseudo Matthew says that there was quote, an
edict of Caesar Augustus, that all the world
was to be enrolled.
Such an edict most likely did not happen.
There's no mention of this in the Quran.
Here's another thing. The story in chapter 20
of Surah Matthew, of Mary resting under the
palm tree, according to pseudo Matthew. This took
place while Mary and Jesus were traveling in
the desert to Egypt.
Why? Why were they going to Egypt? Well,
according to the book of Matthew, chapter 17,
it was because Herod spoke to the Magi
who somehow followed a star into Judea.
And Herod became angry. So he ordered all
of the boys of Bethlehem slaughtered
who are 2 years old or younger.
So the former, Christians can argue, was a
miracle how the magi followed a star. Okay,
fine. It's a miracle. So it's non historical.
But
the latter event is a naturalistic historical claim
and there's no evidence of this happening.
And maybe it happened, but historically, it's highly
unlikely.
Interestingly, in the Quran, Mary sits under the
palm tree to give birth.
Right? Everyone other than a few mythicists agree
that Jesus was born in Palestine.
But very few historians maintain that Jesus traveled
to Egypt because Herod was committing genocide
against male infants and toddlers in Bethlehem.
So here's what I think happened. The author
of pseudo Matthew, wanting to theologically rewrite the
Qur'anic story,
could not agree with the Quran, however, that
Jesus was born under a palm tree.
Why? Because Matthew and Luke said that he
was born in a manger and in a
cave, respectively.
He doesn't wanna contradict Matthew and Luke. So
pseudo Matthew moves the story to the desert
while Mary and an infant Jesus were traveling
to Egypt. But unfortunately, for pseudo Matthew, that
entire context is highly implausible.
Also, Jesus is called the divine son of
God and savior of the world by pseudo
Matthew. Two titles of Jesus that Jesus himself,
a rabbi and Torah observant Jew, would likely
have repudiated in the strongest of terms.
In other words, these titles don't make sense
historically.
So historians tell us that Jesus of Nazareth
most likely claimed to be a servant of
God
and a prophet. The Quran quotes Jesus, Ini
Abdullaaatani
al kitaba wajalani nabiya. I am the servant
of God. He gave me scripture and made
me a a prophet.
Now, let's move to the infancy gospel of
Thomas.
Here we have a passage from the infancy
gospel of Thomas.
This is in chapter 2, verses 1 to
4. When the child Jesus was 5 years
old, he then made some soft mud and
fashioned 12 sparrows.
It was a Sabbath when he did this.
When certain Jews saw what Jesus had done
while playing on the Sabbath,
he left right away and reported to his
father, Joseph.
When Joseph came to the place and saw
what had happened, he cried out to him,
why are you doing what is forbidden on
the Sabbath? But Jesus clapped His hands and
cried to the sparrows, be gone. And the
sparrows took flight and went off chirping. So
here's the Quran,
I have come to you with a sign
from your Lord. I make for you a
bird from a breathe into it and it
become a real bird by God's leaf.
In the Quran, no age of Jesus is
given and there is nothing about the Sabbath
or Joseph.
So
the claim here is that the prophet lifted
the story from the infancy gospel of Thomas.
So just some quick background.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
was one of the earliest so called Infancy
Gospels.
It was written in the first half of
the second century, not long after the composition
of the gospel of John and the
book of Acts, despite its attribution to Thomas
the Israelite, the gospel was definitely not written
by Thomas. The gospel is pseudepigraphal.
Now the Christian polemic's claim is not only
did the prophet plagiarize
the story of sparrows from the gospel, The
prophet didn't realize
that this gospel was written as fiction.
That this gospel was intended for entertainment purposes
only.
It's just satire.
Right? Why do these polemicists say this? Well,
because when we read, when we keep reading
the Infancy Gospel of Thomas,
Jesus as a youth goes around killing children
and his adult teachers, but also resurrects them
in some cases.
So many Christians conclude that the author intended
this gospel to be basically
fan fiction,
a humorous account of the lost years of
Jesus,
God as a child. And a made up
story from this gospel ended up in the
Quran.
So the first, problem for the Christian
is their assumption that the Infancy Gospel of
Thomas
was meant to be satire?
Now clearly the author of the Infancy Gospel
of Thomas, we'll just call him Pseudo Thomas.
Pseudo Thomas believes that Jesus is God. So
this is clear. The gospel ends by saying
to him, Jesus, be the glory forever and
ever.
I don't suspect that the author of this
gospel is making fun of his God when
the latter was a child. This is not
satire.
According to doctor Chris Frulingos,
who's a scholar of,
of ancient, Christianity,
Pseudo Thomas is actually making a point that
Jesus, even as a child, possesses knowledge
that no one can even begin to comprehend.
As a divine being, Jesus' actions are in
reality beyond our understandings.
Jesus had esoteric knowledge that even his teachers
lacked. This is a theme that's also found
in the gospel of John. This is not
a new idea. Nicodemus, an an old Pharisee
in John 3, is censured
by a comparatively
young Jesus for being a teacher in Israel
and yet not understanding what it means to
be born of the spirit.
Also in John, Jesus says, I am the
resurrection and the life. In the infinity gospel
of Thomas, as God, Jesus takes life and
gives it back.
He is the resurrection and the life. This
is the point that Pseudo Thomas is making.
Pseudo Thomas refers to the events in his
gospel as quote, the magnificent
childhood activities
of our Lord Jesus Christ. This isn't some
fan fiction comic book where the author and
his audience are laughing at their God.
A second major problem
for the Christian is their assumption that all
of its contents, all of the stories of
the infancy gospel of Thomas were intended to
be a fictional by its author. Now it's
true that according to the genre
of Greco Roman biographies and novels, the author
would invent stories as well as the dialogue.
And this also happens in the 4 canonical
gospels
and the book of Acts. I mean, we
talked about that in the last the last
podcast when we debunked the gospel passion narratives.
So there is fiction in the instant gospel
of Thomas. There's also fiction in Matthew, Mark,
Luke, John, and Acts.
However, we also know that there is some
historical truth in these gospels
in the sense that some of the purported
sayings or actions of Jesus in the gospels
likely go back to him and his immediate
disciples.
Now at the end of the Infancy Gospel
of Thomas chapter 19, Pseudo Thomas tells us
a story about Jesus. He says that when
Jesus was 12 years old, he and his
parents made a trip to Jerusalem to celebrate
Passover.
When they were returning to Galilee, his parents
thought that Jesus was in the caravan, but
he was actually sitting in the temple questioning
the elders and teachers, as well as explaining
the finer points of the law. When Mary
eventually finds him, Jesus says, don't you know
that I must be in my father's house?
Now I have a question for the Christian
polemicist.
Is this story fiction?
Of course, they will say no no no.
Why? Because that story is in the gospel
of Luke.
Okay. So Christian polemicist must admit
that not all of the contents of the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas
were intended to be fictional by its author.
Because if so, then they are admitting that
there is fiction in the gospel of Luke.
My position
is that there that is is that all
of these gospels contain truth and fiction. In
other words, authentic reports and fabricated reports. It's
a huge corpus of Hadith that must be
examined.
A Christian apologist may say here, but but,
Pseudo Thomas believed Jesus was God. And the
Quran relates a very similar miracle. Therefore, the
Quran teaches that Jesus is God, right? Again,
the double standard problem.
I can do the very same thing.
Jude quoted 1st Enoch. In 1st Enoch, Enoch
is called the son of man. Therefore, Jude
taught that Enoch and not Jesus was a
son of man. You see how this works.
Now,
the infinicy gospel of Thomas was very popular,
okay, among ancient Christians.
It influenced a lot of Christian art and
poetry.
Irenaeus knew of it and denounced it. I
mean, he felt compelled to explicitly
denounce it,
for his own reasons precisely because it was
so popular among Christians.
This story of Jesus fashioning clay into birds
and giving them life is the first miracle
mentioned by Pseudo Thomas. This is how he
starts his gospel. This miracle also shows up
in Pseudo Matthew
chapter 27
and the Arabic gospel of the infancy of
the savior, also known as the Syriac Infancy
Gospel chapter 36.
Now these latter 2 were likely influenced by
the Quran. I'll talk about the the Arabic
infancy gospel next. But regardless, my point is
that this particular story about Jesus
was very popular and many, many Christians both
before and after Islam
mentioned a version of it and had no
issues with it.
This story also shows up in the in
the Tola Dath Yeshu. Right? The book of
the history of Jesus. The first polemical Jewish
response
to Jesus of Nazareth. So this particular story
of Jesus is found in in Christian,
Jewish, and Muslim sources.
Yet all three groups use this story to
draw vastly different
conclusions about who Jesus was. It's quite interesting.
It's very fascinating. In Christian circles, it was
used to demonstrate that Jesus was God. In
Muslim circles, it demonstrate that Jesus was a
prophet. He performs the miracle
according to the Quran by God's permission. And
in Jewish circles, it demonstrates that Jesus was
a sorcerer and a false prophet. Same story.
So this brings us to the question, how
does the Quran engage with the
the gospel of Thomas? So same question as
before, is there direct literary dependence or is
something else happening? So historically, again,
we basically have 2 options. We saw these
2 options earlier when we looked at the
proto gospel of James.
Option number 1, at some point, the prophet
of Mohammed, peace be upon him, heard this
text somehow, the Infiniti gospel of Thomas,
in an Arabic translation. But again, remember the
prophet was a lettered. And even if you
could read or write, the chances that he
had a nice Arabic translation of the Infiniti
gospel of Thomas sitting on his bookshelf in
his secret library in Mecca or Medina is
virtually 0.
Unlike again, Matthew and Luke, who did have
Greek copies of Mark and Q.
So the prophet must have heard this text
somehow
in an Arabic translation.
Then he wrote or dictated what he remembered
in the Quran while also adapting the text
to fit in with his own theology. So
this explains the similarity similarities and differences.
This option assumes that the prophet was directly
dependent upon the prophecy of Thomas,
where,
so in other words, there was direct literary
dependence.
Option number 2, various traditions about Jesus as
a youth were transmitted orally since the 1st
century by various messianic Jews, quote, unquote, Christians.
Over time, these traditions were modified and expanded
by various Christian communities,
including the community which authored the Infosys gospel
of Thomas in the 2nd century. The versions
of these traditions that were popular in the
Arabian
Peninsula made their way into the text of
the Quran. Therefore, the Quran is not directly
dependent upon the Infincy Gospel of Thomas, but
drew its narratives from a shared oral tradition
that was based upon an ancient Near Eastern
Messianic
or proclamation.
So these are the two options historically.
Now again, strictly from a standpoint of secular
history,
did Jesus actually breathe on clay birds and
bring them to life? Well, the answer is
no comment because it's a miracle. It's non
historical. Secular historians,
they don't touch it. The relevant historical question
is, is it plausible that this story goes
back to Jesus himself?
Is it plausible that a memory of Jesus
breathing life in the clay had its origin
in Jesus himself? And that this story was
transmitted by his disciples until it reached the
ears of some Pauline Christians
like Pseudo Thomas who wrote it down. Well,
given the story's popularity in antiquity,
yes, it is plausible.
Is it plausible that the Jamesonian Christians recorded
the story in their own writings? Of course.
But alas,
don't have any authentic writings from 1st century
Jamesonian Christians.
Now, if this story goes back to Jesus
himself,
what is more likely? That Jesus claimed to
have performed this miracle because he wanted to
demonstrate that he was God or that he
was a prophet and performed the miracle by
God's permission. What makes the most
sense in Jesus' 1st century Jewish context?
Obviously, the latter.
Even in Matthew,
chapter 9 after Jesus heals
a paralytic,
Matthew says that when the crowd saw this,
they were filled with fear and glorified God
who had given such authority to men.
Jesus was a man given authority by God.
As the Quran says, God gave me the
scripture and made me a prophet.
Now the Told of Yeshu was likely written
in the late antique,
but it's stories about Jesus probably circulated for
centuries.
So much of the Told of Yeshu was
written in direct response to the New Testament
gospels. This is obviously true. The Told of
Yeshu contains clear counter narratives to the New
Testament accounts about Jesus. But as I said,
the Tole Adaf Yeshu, curiously enough,
also contains this story, of Jesus and the
clay birds.
Now, certainly, the Jews who reject
the Jesus
were talking about Jesus since the time of
Jesus.
This is evident.
They must have been responding to the claims
of Jesus and his immediate disciples.
It seems to me that one could make
the case that this particular story
of Jesus and the clay birds,
was circulating among not only Jamesonian and Paul
and Christians, but also among non Christian Jews,
even as early as the 1st century. In
other words, this story was also preserved in
some form among the memories
of non Christian Jews, like the rabbis, until
it was finally recorded in the Tullib of
Yeshu.
So then the Quran mentions it to make
a point to both communities.
Jesus did in fact perform this miracle, but
not because he was God and not because
he was a sorcerer. He was neither God
nor a fraud, as they say.
Let's move to the Arabic gospel
of the infancy of the savior, also known
as a Syriac Infancy gospel. This is the
last one we want to look at, so
we're very close to being done here just
a few more minutes.
So here is
a quote from
the Arabic gospel. We'll just call it the
Arabic gospel verse 2.
When he, Jesus, was lying in his cradle,
he said to his mother he said to
Mary his mother, I am Jesus, the son
of God, the logos,
through whom
hast thou
brought forth
as the angel Gabriel announced to thee, and
my father has sent me for the salvation
of the world.
Okay. So the Quran says,
So she pointed, Mary pointed to Jesus.
They said, her family said, how can we
speak to a child in the cradle?
Jesus said, I am the servant of God.
He has given me the scripture and made
me a Prophet.
And He made me blessed, wheresoever I am.
You know, Paul says Jesus became accursed, He's
Mal'oon.
The Quran says the opposite, that Jesus is
Mubarak. He's blessed.
And He commanded me prayer and charity as
long as I live.
And He commanded me to be kind to
my mother and not to be arrogant or
defiant.
So peace be upon me the day I
was born, the day that I die, and
the day that I embrace up to life.
And of course, Jesus will be resurrected on
the day of judgment.
Such was Jesus, the son of Mary. There's
a statement of truth about which they are
disputing. Maqhanalillahi
ayaatahidah
minwaladin
subhana idaqabaamranfa
inna mayyahu lahuqood vayukun. It is not for
God to take a son, glory be to
him. Whenever he decrees a matter, he only
says it will be it is.
And Jesus said, God is my Lord and
your Lord, so worship Him. This is the
straight path. Surat Manayam verses 29
to 36.
So the big similarity, and this is the
last slide,
the big similarity here is Jesus speaking as
an infant.
Now there is no manuscript of this gospel,
the Arabic gospel of the infancy that predates
the 13th century.
And the earliest mention of it is in
the 9th century.
When was Surah Maryam of the Quran composed?
No later than 6/22. It's a Meccan Surah
according to everyone. Again, this is indisputable. The
Birmingham manuscript contains Surah Maryam.
There's
There's no mention of the Arabic gospel before
the 9th century, yet the Arabic gospel was
the source of the Quran.
What? Did did the prophet, peace be upon
him, somehow plagiarize something that most likely was
written 200 years after his death? How did
he do that? Okay. So this is similar
to Surah Matthew.
Millions of Christians from all over the Middle
East, what what would later be called the
Middle East. Millions of Christians were hearing the
Quran for the first time, and the Quran
was making quite the splash.
So it seems to me that the
Arabic gospel was a response to and critical
rewriting of the Quranic narrative rather
than the other way around. It seems to
me that the author of the Arabic gospel
wanted to convert Muslims
through the Quran's method of storytelling. That is
through confirmation, correction, and rejection. In other words,
the Arabic gospel is a Christian counternarrative
to the Quran. The author of the Arabic
gospel was trying to beat the Quran at
its own game.
Here again, the Quran is not directly dependent
upon the Arabic gospel.
So where did the Quran get this information
from that Jesus spoke as an infant? Historically,
one option is, again, the prophet made it
up, which again does not fit his personality
at all. Or option number 2, the prophet
heard certain oral traditions about Jesus, broadly speaking,
that he spoke as an infant and identified
himself
somehow. And the prophet incorporated this tradition into
the Quran. Either way, he was not directly
dependent upon the Arabic gospel. And again, personally,
I think the prophet received these narratives,
directly from an angel. And I have good
reasons for trusting the prophet's claim. Here's the
bottom line. Does it stand to reason? Does
it make sense that the prophet plagiarized
this apocryphal gospel? No. This is not what
the evidence suggests
at all. And that is the end of
the presentation.
Oh, I do want to make one book
recommendation.
It's called the apocryphal gospels. It's by Ehrman
and Pliese,
p l e s e, the Apocryphal Gospels.
It's a fantastic book. They present about 40
ancient gospels that do not appear in the
New Testament. It's really important for us as
Muslims to have a broader understanding
of the Christian tradition and Christian history because
the Quran has something to say about that
tradition
in history.
Yep. And my, my recommendation is this one,
Sydney H. Griffith, an American professor, specialist in
the area. The violin in Arabic, the scriptures
of the people in the book in the
language of Islam. Now, there is
Qur'an critically engages in the biblical tradition. It's
not simply affirming
prophetology as he calls it, Sydney Griffith. So
if you want an academic
non Muslim
analysis of many of the themes that Doctor.
Elliot Tai has covered,
in a broad agreement, I would think of
what Al Attai said. I would recommend
this book by professor Sydney h Griffiths. He's
a leading specialist in the field, highly regarded
by other academic colleagues from Harvard and Yale
and so on.
Thank you so much, doctor Aleutai, for a
magisterial,
as always, a magisterial survey
of the subject that you have, chosen to
present.
There's so much I can begin to comment
on what you said. There's so much content
there,
which would be of inestimal value, I'm sure,
for many, many people, Muslim and non Muslim,
inshallah,
who can benefit from your analysis. So thank
you so much. Thank you, Paul. Thanks for
having me again. It's good to see you
again. Until next time.