Lesson 9, Which Comes First?
Is it a full-blown religion, or a Book, that comes first from God? Strange question, perhaps, but important, I think.
Possible answer one: In Israel, it was the religion. That is, the encounter. For many hundreds of years, there was no full book in Israel. But the teachings, the expectations for Israel, were real. Some great leaders came and went, with no official book. Over and over it is the encounter from Heaven that generates a people that eventually generates the great book of Judaism, what Christians know as the Old Covenant, that is, the Torah of Moses, the Psalms of David, the writings of the Prophets.
Moses in 1400 B.C. writes the stories of our origins 2,500 years after the fact! The truth passed on to Him and dictated to Him was real but it was encounter-driven, not book driven. God comes on the scene, He acts among His people, His people make the record.
When the book came it was revered but also disputed. Interpreted. By the time of Jesus, though the original words of Moses were intact, they had often been set aside for the traditions of men. A new encounter was needed. A new vision. A new agreement between God and man. A Person.
Which of course leads to possible answer two: The Book of the Christians also begins with God talking to men. One Man in particular. The new Adam. The new Moses. The final lawgiver. The new Elijah. The final Prophet. The son of David. The Son of God. The Person. The Encounter. The Miracle.
Only slowly, very slowly, was a book formed. The earliest Christians hung to the Old while the New was being superimposed on top of it. Here comes James. Paul to the Galatians. The Gospel stories. 100 years from the birth of the Founder to the last writings of the Book. Many years more before all those writings came together as one Book.
Books record movements of God, dispensations of God, encounters. Books record the very words of God. But in the case of Israel and Christianity, the books came second. The entire book of these people that we call the Bible took a full 1,600 years to complete. Over 40 men put it together. We estimate the number because some of the books are anonymous, including a host of Psalms.
We don't know all of our Biblical authors. We aren't sure about a lot of the dates. But collectively, as a body of people full of the ultimate author of the Book, the Holy Spirit, we believe that Book. We just believe it. God has worked in our hearts. The encounter has taken place. We have met the Man, and His Book is ours.
That's how it works in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That's not how it works in Islam. Not at all. When I first discovered this troubling fact I was a bit taken aback. It would seem to me that a ready-made religion, one like Mormonism that is dropped out of the sky to my waiting arms would be a better, safer way to go.
Yet take a look. Mormonism and Islam basically claim this instant revelation. But neither can convince the other or a whole host of earthlings that their pre-fabricated book is from God.
Revelation is tricky. If it comes all at once in book form, one has the problem of bibliolatry, worship of the book. And transmission, the passing on of the revelation, will be nearly impossible, since the perfect original will be held in such high esteem. Translations, moving the revelation to other people groups, will also cause trouble, as in Islam. Most Muslim scholars hold their breath when they see their holy book put in another language than the holy Arabic. How can their thoughts be expressed perfectly in an unholy medium?
And if this ready-made Book comes to and through one man, what sort of man must he be? How can one man handle such responsibility, to give all God's truth to all men of all times? Eventually stories are made of such a man that match the miracle, instead of matching the realities of his life and character.
No, God in His wisdom has decreed that the once-and-for-all book (we still call it simply "the Book", that is, "the Bible"), if it is to be formed, must be communicated to a variety of men, speakers then writers, all in agreement because of the One Spirit. It must lend itself to translation into any language. Though no one man must have a perfect memory, individuals will be guide by their memory into various portions of the task. No man is praised for it all, no man is given the credit for this book. When the book is disobeyed or ignored, it is God who is so treated, not some man.
So we have no apologies to Isaiah, or Paul, or John for our stubborn ways. But the Muslim feels forever bound to honor and defend and nearly praise this man Muhammad.
A Book is necessary of course, but without a Divine Person, it is all futile. "You search the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them," says Jesus. But you don't have eternal life in Them. It's in Me. It all goes back to encounter, after all. In Christ, the encounter precedes the writing about the encounter.
But in Islam, the book, or the revelation that would within a few years be the book, is right there at the beginning. Muhammad received his first revelations in 610, per the Muslim explanation. All gathered and approved by 654. Forty-four years and done! Ready-made, the book for all ages is here, defying all other books, on the authority of one man, an Arabian prophet.
In my judgment, this is not how revelation comes into our fallen world. If there is a Man to be honored above all men, it is Jesus the God-man, who to our knowledge wrote no book, even the supposed "Injil" of Islam. If there is a Prophet Who is to receive all revelation for all time and pass it on to His people, it is the Prophet Jesus. If there is a Perfect One Who is able to bear the responsibility of originalizing, transmitting, and translating a Message from God, it is the one who is God Himself, the One called Jesus.
Individual books of our Bible have come by encounters of God and one man. But God was gracious enough to let us hear many such voices from many such men, a group of sounds so strong as to be impossible to be ignored, as the revelation of one was in perfect harmony with all the others.
In my study, I will for the most part not quote the skeptics of Islam, but traditional Islamic belief itself. We Christians have our skeptics. The guns of academia have been turned on the Scriptures too. Never with any lasting effect, mind you, but guns nevertheless. No use getting involved in a fight that has no purpose but to show a man's talents at debating. Since mine are lacking a bit anyway, I doubly do not want to go there.
No, let's hear from Muslims about Islam. It is that fired-up bunch of souls that is in fact making the news these days. Many of them, like many of us, believe their book absolutely literally. So let us see what the "Prophet" has said, compare notes with what God has taught us, and thus be ready to discuss firmly and truthfully with those who are even now coming to us, prime and unwitting targets of the grace of God!
Also by way of introduction to my study of the Koran, I wish to state that I will be focusing on the book, and not the people, that is, the history of Islam. It is a fascinating history, even after we come into the period where all the facts can be verified. There is much blood, much power gained and lost along the way, a study if ever there was one, about the arm of mere human flesh. Yet, what is called Christian history has unfortunately much of the same. I leave that study to true historians. We may touch on historical matters from time to time, but always with a view to dealing with what was written, as compared to Christian thought.
And that Christian thought, may I summarize by saying, is most seriously acquired by an encounter with the Christ Who lives forever. Which brings us back to the beginning. Which comes first, an encounter with God, or a Manual of Truth? When a person comes to know our God, he knows the answer.
Lesson 10, Whence the Koran?
It was the early seventh century. There was this 40-year-old Arabian man sitting in a mountain cave outside the city of Mecca. He was meditating. On what we cannot imagine. Suddenly the man saw a flash of light. A voice then commanded him to read [or recite, read aloud] something. He replied that he was unable to read, for this was the truth. Twice more the voice, which materialized and identified itself as the angel Gabriel, encouraged him to do what seemed impossible, and then gave him the first of many such revelations.
So goes the traditional explanation of the beginnings of the Koran, Muslim's holiest book. The story continues that the frightened man, whom we know of today as Muhammad, ran home to his wife Khadijah, believing that he had heard from an evil spirit. He was shaken thoroughly, and even literally, by this angelic visit. Later visits would see him in even worse physical condition, we are told, as the Messenger from Heaven treats him pretty roughly at times.
(How different the writers and the writings of the Bible. Yes, Daniel and John, when they saw angels and perhaps Jesus Himself, were a bit shaken, but only because of Who they saw, not what their Visitors did to them!)
Khadijah comforted him and called in her cousin, an Ebionite priest, Waraka Ibn Nawfal.
Now, the Ebionites were only loosely - by our present standards - called Christians, for, though Jewish, they did believe in the Messiah, Jesus. They also believed it was absolutely necessary to keep Jewish laws and rites. They rejected the writings of Paul as heretical and against the law of God. They were of the sort that Paul preached against passionately in his letters to the Romans and Galatians. He would not have considered them saved brothers and sisters. I will follow his lead on this.
So, to hear that Waraka fully supported Muhammad in his visions, and he most assuredly did, is not the most comforting of thoughts, but it does take the true Christian church away from any guilt in having promoted this new religion.
Waraka was indeed convinced that Muhammad had heard from Heaven. Muhammad was convinced that he had heard from Hell. Strangely, though Muslims believe everything else Muhammad said, they draw the line here. You must be the judge as to what Muhammad heard, if anything. And you can judge his words by the fruit they have produced in the world and in the human heart.
Over a period of 20 plus years the revelations to the "Prophet" [and we cannot deny he was a prophet, though not of the sort the Bible praises] continued, and he slowly began to share them with whomever would listen. There were not too many listeners at first.
There were four ways these revelations came, says the tradition: 1. dreams, 2. revelations in his heart during the day, 3. a loud ringing in the ears, or some more dramatic manifestation, preceding a flow of revelation, and 4. the actual appearings of the one called Gabriel.
Muslims today teach that the book thus formed was a miracle in other ways than the method by which it came into the world. They claim that Muhammad was not only a non-reader, a non-literary sort of man, but that he was not even schooled at all. Yet the Koran is a book of poetic prose. "How could an unschooled man create such a thing?" they ask.
The story continues. Muhammad received and gave his readings here and there, and to many individuals and groups. But would it all be remembered? Abu Bakr, senior companion and father-in-law of Muhammad, and the first Caliph following Muhammad's death, was afraid that those who received these revelations would all be killed in the battles going on at that time, and thus the Koran would be lost forever.
He therefore, they say, authorized a collection of the sayings to be made. Designated servants gathered bits and pieces of Muhammad's readings from papyrus, stones, leaves, the shoulder blades and ribs of animals, pieces of leather, wooden boards, and people's memories. This entire collection was then passed on to one Umar, another companion, and to Umar's daughter Hafsa. Umar later became the second caliph.
Then came Caliph Uthman, 644-656. Now, Uthman knew that other versions than Hafsa's were out there, and in conflict with each other. In fact, early Muslims were killing one another over which version was best! Yes, even in its beginnings, violence marked the doings of this new religion.
Anyway, Uthman chose a man to prepare an official Koranic text. He revised it and compared it to Hafsa's. Satisfied that he now had the true Koran, he made copies of it, sending one to Mecca, and leaving one in Medina. All other "collections" were destroyed. All of this was completed by Uthman's death in 656.
What I have just shared is what Muslims all over the world are taught. It is official Islam. This, they say, is how the Koran came to us. Trouble is, there is absolutely no evidence that any of this happened. It is taken by faith. It is tradition.
Now, I believe in miracles. I believe in unusual things, things that come from the enemy and things that come from God and even things that come from me. I do not discount Islam on the basis of the strange and unexplainable, though many educated scholars among us and in the world have seen through Islam's origins. No, I discount it on the basis of the God of Israel and Jesus who has manifested Himself in my own life and Who has written a Book of His own that discounted Islam before the Koran came into being.
That's the faith approach. My faith in my book vs their faith in their book. But there is the academic approach. We'll talk about that in our next lesson.
Lesson 11, The Academic Approach
Yes, you can question the Koran intellectually, academically.
I mean, for example, how reliable are the memories of early Muslims, once they were given a "download" by Muhammad? Well, how long do you remember a sermon, even a good one, from Sunday morning? And is it possible you would ever remember it verbatim? How long did these Koran-carriers hold on to their piece of the revelation before the collectors came to retrieve it?
But, says the Muslim, that's all a part of the miracle. You do believe in miracles, don't you?
But, but, how did Muhammad remember every word the angel said? He could not write. He could only hear and recite. So many words, so many ideas. How get it all right?
Man, it's a miracle, don't you get it?
It's hard to impress a person who believes in miracles. I am confident, especially in the circles in which I travel these days, that if I were to announce that I had received a visitation from an angel, any angel, people would gather 'round to hear every word the angel said. And I'd be an instant star.
It happens...
Be ready for these arguments when you next talk to a Muslim. Koran, they say, is a miraculous book. You must take this miracle by faith, much as you, Christian, take so much of your own beliefs.
Anyway, Muhammad died in 632. But the earliest biographical material about him came forth in 750, and the original of that is lost. We have parts of it from a work in 834. In other words, two hundred years after his death! The Hadiths (collections of sayings and doings attributed to Muhammad) also have no sources available until well over 200 years after his death. And we know precious little about him before his appearance as the "Messenger of God."
We simply must accept him by faith. And one point five billion persons on the planet do just that!
Even so, it's fair to add the historical argument (isn't it?) that the originally corrected Koran was not accepted without question. Earlier scholars, even conservative Muslims, agreed that parts of the Koran were lost or perverted. This is the very same argument that modern Muslims, and the Koran itself, use against us. Perversion. Corruption. For the Koran it is a known fact. They finally had to level the accusation elsewhere, and Christians became the owners of this lie. More of this in another lesson.
But, yes, academically, evidentially, there was no definite form to the Koran before the ninth century. There is absolutely no documentary evidence from the seventh and eighth centuries. No Korans from that period. No hadiths either.
Academically speaking, the Koran was a product of multiple authors from different times and places. In fact, the sources of these writings have been well documented by scholars.
Academically (I know you tire of hearing this word, but I am making a point), one could say that the Koran and the Hadith were nothing more than Muhammad's tool used to force non-arabs to "submit" (the meaning of the word Islam) not to God, but to himself. By using an elevated Arabic language, one which he claimed was handed down from heaven itself, a copy of which was still in the heavenlies, and everything else about the religion that was also Arabic, he was able little by little to convince at least Arabia that they were the center not only of this world, but the other one too. When that nation had submitted, it would only be a matter of time, and much blood, before he would convince all the nations. That still seems to be the plan.
Islam. Submission!
Islam, the academics say, was born out of Arab cultural imperialism. Everything Arabic is good. Everything that is not Arabic is either bad or at least suspect. We shall now bow to Mecca, take pilgrimages to Mecca, believe that Mecca, not Rome, not Jerusalem, is the heart of all.
Yes, academically, you can say all of the above, and I suppose I would have to agree. But that is not the approach I take at present to deal with this issue. Believers in miracles and in an unlimited God can believe God for anything, can they not?
Let us take the Muslim at his own word, and approach him from it. Let us speak as people who believe in the supernatural, and visit every point of their story with light from heaven, not human reasoning. The fact is that God is visiting Muslims in these days. How often have you heard of late that Jesus Himself has appeared to Muslims and invited them to His heart? If it was a supernatural occurrence that brought all this upon the world, then in many cases it will take a supernatural occurrence to bring men out.
My personal plan for this book of lessons is to walk through the Koran, armed with the knowledge that God has already spoken to His people a clear and definite word, and shine the light of God's revelation on Koranic sayings. I invite you to walk with me, if you are so armed, and so intended. Any Muslim who walks with us must first pray through Jesus Christ, the Light of the world, for the illumination that only He can give. When the Light dawns, we will be faced with another miracle, the greatest of them all, the changing of the human heart.
Lesson 12, The Miraculous Transmission of the Biblical Text, 1
There is one battle Christians need to fight regarding the Muslim faith. Only one. A battle of words. Words of God. Once that battle has been fought and won in the Christian heart, the reading of the Koran becomes simply a viewing of light vs. darkness. For that person, the Koran and all Islam with it, will crumble into the sands of the Arabian desert. Failing that victory can mean eternal death to a casual visitor to Islam's holy book.
Oh take this warning seriously. Coming against Islam is not for the unprepared. The refutations of all that Christians hold dear are not subtle in the Koran, but are brutal, and at times even convincing. There's a logic to some of it, which those who trust only logic will buy.
You see, Muslims accuse Christians and Jews of inventing their own Scriptures and mixing them with authentic prophecies to create a sort of hybrid text that we call the Bible. Some scholars go so far as to say that the Bible was totally destroyed on two separate occasions. But if the Bible was totally destroyed once, how was it reconstructed to be destroyed again? Was it from memory? If so, the Muslim must agree that we now have a perfect Bible, for memory is in large part what gave us the Koran. If not by memory, how?
Muslims say that they are not negating the original Judeo-Christian message found in supposed "originals", all of which are lost except the Koran, of course, but that they are only denying the perversions that non-Muslims created and called "the Bible".
Two questions immediately surface, questions of life and death significance if the Muslim cannot answer them: First, where are these "originals" of which you speak? And second, if there are perverted Judeo-Christian texts, what documentation is there for any of this activity? We need an evolutionary history of some sort that traces the progress of a text that has been tampered with. In the first document there will be just a few "changes," then in a later one, many, and so forth, until you have a very different document. Where is evidence of such tampering, such evolution?
For example, perhaps Muslims could produce the "Injil" (good news, gospel) purportedly spoken to Jesus by Allah, and thence recited to His apostles. But did He ever write it? Where is it now? Without a sufficient answer (and there is none), we are left only with a circular argument that goes something like this:
The Koran is the true revelation from God.
How so?
Well, all the other revelations were tampered with.
But how do I know this?
The Koran says so. Believe it or perish!
But what of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Corrupted. Bits and pieces of the truth, mixed with pure fabrications.
Corrupted from what?
From the Injil. You know, the original.
But where is the Injil, so I can see the corruption for myself?
It's been lost.
How do I know about it?
The Koran says so. Believe it or perish!
Hmmm. How do I know which parts of the Injil have been faithfully transmitted to the Prophet in the Koran?
Easily. The Koran is the final message from the final prophet. Everything you need is faithfully transmitted to that one book.
How do I know that?
The Koran says so. Believe it...
OK, OK, obviously, I don't believe it.
Now just in case I have already said some disturbing things to you, let me follow with some wonderfully happy facts about the Holy Books of Christians and Jews.
First I must say, this study of "transmission" of the text, as it is called, is a fascinating and deeply involved one, and though it is not the reason for my writing, one should definitely be armed with a confidence that God has spoken, and spoken well, and spoken finally, in His Son, through all that He said, all that He did, and all that He caused to be written. And, especially, that what He caused to be written He caused also to be preserved and passed on.
The preservation of the biblical text truly is a miracle. For it was in fulfillment of Jesus' prophecies that we have the true "Injil", the apostolic word of God in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus clearly stated that He would bring all things to the remembrance of the disciples so that they could indeed live by, pass on, and record in writing forever His glorious deeds and sayings (John 14:26).
When those texts were recorded, they eventually had to be passed on. Today scholars are aware of 24,000 copies of ancient manuscripts of portions of New Testament writings. Over 5,000 of them are complete New Testaments! Some date as early as the second and third centuries. This record is greater than all other writings of antiquity. Nothing matches the veracity of the New Testament text. What we have is essentially what they wrote! You can disagree with it. You can interpret it many ways. But the words are intact!
Where is the corruption heralded by Islam? Show us the proof. We have not only that ancient-document evidence, but a record of the transmission of the text in its earliest years, just after the church had come above ground. The publishing of the New Testament actually came into the hands of commercial book manufacturers in the Empire, men who worked with Christians to ensure accuracy was a prime consideration.
As monasteries began to form, rules were made and enforced for the scribes of the New Testament that were as stringent as those for the Old, documented below. By the time Muhammad appeared on the scene, those original texts of which we have copies today were well on their way to being passed on in meticulous fashion to the next generations. Monks could be severely punished for becoming careless in their work. As the scribes of old, these men believed they were passing on the very words of the Holy Spirit. In this they were correct, and we are grateful for their diligence.
What about variant readings in manuscripts? What if one monastery did make a marginal error, or skip a word by accident? Scholars agree that taken as a whole they are of such minor significance that they affect no doctrine of the Christian church. No article of faith, not even any minor responsibility is in any way questioned by these variations. The "imperfection" of the text thus keeps His people from worshiping a book, while His hand of guidance on every major and minor teaching keeps us praising Him for His marvelous care for His Word.
Next time we will talk of the Old Testament text and how God so marvelously kept it in intact.
Lesson 13, The Miraculous Transmission of the Biblical Text, 2
What of the Jewish Scriptures, which Christians have readily adopted as their own salvation history? Are they the same today as the originals?
Manuscripts made by scores of men in various places and spread all over the Middle East are in remarkable agreement with each other! They also compare favorably to the Greek text created from the Hebrew in the 3rd century B.C. Then the miracle of all textual miracles, the Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947, but written from 200 B.C. to well into the first century, were in near perfect agreement with today's Bible! Every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, was found.
Then there were the scribes whose work goes back to 300 B.C. These were men who gave their life to preserving the text's accuracy, knowing that the words came from God. They counted every word, every letter of the text, and recorded the mid-point of their book, so as to be sure that they had missed nothing. If upon recounting the words, a mistake was found, that scroll was destroyed!
There was an entire system of rules for the copyists' painstaking work. The work had to be done by a Jew. It had to be written on the skins of only clean animals. The skins could contain only so many columns, and the columns could have only so many lines. Nothing could ever be written by memory, not even the smallest "jot" or "tittle". Between the consonants, all of them, there had to be at least a hair-thick space. Similar rules spelled out section and book divisions.
This process was picked up by later copyists, and New Testament scribes, a process which showed the great respect they had for the Scriptures. Never did Jesus accuse the scribes of having copied the Scriptures wrongly! Rather, their interpretation of their exact text and their failure to see Him in their exact text, and their dependence on their exact text to the exclusion of the life of God that breathed through it, that was the issue.
But, Muslims want to claim that your Bible was corrupted by translation! When it went from one language to another, then to another, then to another, it lost all its original meaning! Well, since we have the original texts, it would be easy to produce them and give the lie to this argument. But in fact, every major version of the Bible and every nation, translates the Bible into its own language from the original Hebrew and Greek.
People of God, saved by the shed blood of Jesus Christ His Son, we have the very God-breathed words of Almighty God in the Old and New Testaments. We proceed with this study armed with that fact alone. God's Word is a light to our path. And as we walk together through the Koran, we will need such light. Believing that God has already spoken, we will simply shed that light on passages that speak otherwise.
Knowing that God has spoken through the prophets and through His Son and His Son's apostles, we now freely quote His Words as further introduction to all that we are about to do:
First, the most severe warning imaginable, Galatians 1:8, "Though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed."
Second, for those who may wonder what gospel Paul preached: I Corinthians 15:1-8, "...For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures..."
Third, a warning from Moses (God) about tampering with the Torah, Deuteronomy 4:2, 12:32: "You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take anything from it..."
Fourth, a warning from John (God) in more severe terms (Revelation 22:18-19), "...If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."
It is no small matter to come against, change, pervert, distract from, add to, take away from, ridicule, minimize, marginalize, fictionalize, and generally corrupt the word of the living God. Islam levels that charge at Christians and Jews, but offers no proof except "The Prophet said..." We hurl the charge back, and offer the Koran itself as proof.
It is my intention to point out to believers who are in any way fascinated by or drawn to Islam that the object of your affection is a dangerous one. I will show you sura by sura, ayah by ayah, that such a move would be fatal.
One final note. This study is intended for Christians. I invite fellow-believers to examine their own faith and the faith of Islam, so as to be able to help them know with what they are dealing when talking to a Muslim.
I am aware that others may see or hear or read these comments. Even Muslims. I want you to know that you are very precious in the sight of God. What your prophet could not tell you is that the Jesus whose life history was altered by the Koran died for you because of His great love and the love of the Father, His Father. To this day, by His Spirit, He invites you to come to Him and be forgiven instantly of all your sin, so that you can know, even now, that you will live forever with Him.
