Minute with a Muslim #020 – Two Christian ladies said to me – We think Muhammad copied the Bible

The Bible is the inspired Word of God, not the literal word of God, it means that human beings wrote it down. And they even admit that there might be small mistakes. You know, way back when I was first a Muslim, I worked in a in a Muslim restaurant. And there were these two Christian ladies that would come in sometimes. And I'll never forget one time, they said to me that they couldn't resist, they said, you know, we think that Mohamed probably copied the Bible is a very, very common sort of accusation against Islam and against the Prophet Mohammed. So I said that we just really ripped off, plagiarized and copied the Bible in some sort of way. And that can't possibly be true for a number

of reasons. The first group of reasons centers around the Prophet Mohammed. So I said, I'm himself, first of all, he could neither read nor write, he was illiterate. And so even if there was a copy of the Bible laying around somewhere, would not have benefited him at all in that sort of way. The second within that group of reasons is because there was no copy of the Bible around in that particular place. In that particular time. Christianity was something that was very rare, particularly in in Mecca. Even though there were a couple people that were Christians, sort of knowledge of Christian scriptures was not something that was very common. And third, because of who

the Prophet Mohammed sights on on was that we have complete, unanimous sort of report and testimony from the people, both his enemies and his friends at the time that he was somebody who was of the highest moral character and completely trustworthy. And somebody who is completely trustworthy, does not plagiarize, and fabricate things and copy them from somewhere else and pass them off as their own. That's only the first group of reasons as to why it couldn't be possible that Islam has copied from Christianity. The second sort of main reason is the content of the Koran, the content of the Quran is distinct, very distinct from the Bible, and we could look at from in one dimension, that

theology is quite distinct. In fact, Allah subhanaw taala, in the Quran, obliterates the idea of the Trinity, criticizes the People of the Book, meaning the Christians and the Jews heavily for the mistakes that they made, the theological mistakes that they made, and the sort of the slip ups that they made when it came to following the law. And following the previous revelation that was sent down, you know, pages and pages and pages dedicated to you know, did Jesus really teach that He was God? Did Jesus really teach that there was a trinity? And the answer being completely not, but even if you go to some of the stories of that seem to have something in common such as the story of David

and the story of Solomon and some of these other stories, a story of Moses, there is significant differences, right, you find that in the Bible, there are a lot of sort of passages, or at least several passages that that downplay, and these are additions from later Christian scholars made to sort of make Jesus seem very fundamentally different head and shoulders above the rest, that these kind of criticize, or they indicate some sort of wrongdoing from the other sorts of prophets and messengers, you won't find this in the Koran. And then the third reason other than content is the style. Okay? The Bible is very, very obviously written by human beings. And this is something that

the Catholic Church admits this is not like some sort of new thing or controversial thing, the Catholic doctrine, the Catholic Church is that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, not the literal word of God, it means that human beings wrote it down. And they even admit that there might be small mistakes, but they do not acknowledge the fact that these are major mistakes, obviously, we have, we would say that those are made there are major mistakes, but it's not the word of God. And if you read the Bible, you know, you have pages of linear dedicated to lineage, so and so begat so and so and so on, so begat so and so you have a lot of irrelevant historical detail, you have a lot

of nonsensical things like there are some chapters like like, like Genesis that start twice, right? Or some chapters such as the Gospel of John that end twice, right? Or that it feels like it should have ended. And then actually, there's more, this is all human authorship, right. And the Quran doesn't have any of that the Quran is very clearly a non human author, there are no sort of mistakes, there's no irrelevant information, it doesn't move like a history book in a linear fashion telling you Well, this is the beginning. And then this happened. And then this happened, it is strictly communicated with a moral lens. So here's the story. And remember this and remember this

and this is why you should do this. And this is why you shouldn't do that. That is how the Quran moves. And if we were to think for a second, if our divine creator who loves us and cherishes us and wants us to be in paradise, or to communicate with us, how would he communicate with us? Would he communicate with us in the, in the sense of like a very, very sort of black and white dry historical narrative or what he have more of a, let's say, a work of rhetoric where he is trying to convince us or he's trying to plead with us or he's trying to, you know, invoke the things within us that's going to try to bring out our best moral selves, bring about our submissions, to divine guidance and

get us into paradise clearly the second so it's not possible. It's not possible that the Quran or anybody who knows even just a little bit about the Koran and the Bible, it's not possible that the Quran could have been copied from the Bible.