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| Q: | Islam and the Koran state that the Jews and Christians have over the years changed the Bible, and that the Koran is now God's word for all mankind. Could you please address this. | ||||||
| A: | There is abundant evidence in hundreds of ancient manuscripts that the Scriptures were faithfully copied. The many variants in the hundreds of handwritten copies are largely spelling variants and what we would call "typos." No doctrine is placed in question by the variants. The most dramatic evidence of this is the Great Isaiah Scroll found near Qumran by the Dead Sea. It dates from before the time of Christ and has essentially the same text as our present copies of Isaiah. Islam's attacks on the Bible are essentially an adaptation of the unbelieving claims of Christian practitioners of negative higher criticism, which claims that the books of the Bible as we have them now are not the real writings of the prophets and apostles but later forgeries. There is no objective evidence to support these claims, they flow from unbelief. The only way to address them is to preach God's Word and let the Holy Spirit work through it. When working with Muslims, we should use the law to show them their sin and the gospel to show them their Savior. This is the only way to overcome their unbelief. The Quran was not written down until after the lifetime of Muhammad so its textual history too is subject to much controversy. A study of this is The Textual History of the Quran and the Bible by John Gilchrist. Almost any book on evangelism with Muslims will deal with this topic, for example Ishmael, My Brother by Ann Cooper and "Understanding Some Muslim Misunderstandings" by Ernest Hahn. | ||||||
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