An Examination of "Many Allegations from a Christian"

Ironically enough, discoverislamaustralia.com has a section entitled "Allegations and Lies". In this post we will deal with the reasoning (or lack thereof) and dishonesty of the composer.

I do not endeavour to address every question and answer but will comment on the significant ones.

1) Why do most Islamic countries (90%) oppress minority religions in their own countries?

The response provided to this question avoids the issue and claims that those who oppress non-Muslims are not truly Islamic countries. I will examine this in combination to question 2.

2) Why are Muslims so aggressive against Christians in their own and outside their countries? The Christians are looked upon as 2nd-rate citizens.

Once again, the author refuses to answer the question. The response is fallacious and illogical. They begin with some loaded rhetoric, "Who invaded Iraq? Who invaded Afghanistan?... Which countries support the racist and genocidal policies of the Zionist Israeli regime in occupied Palestine for more than 60 years?"

In this way, they not just avoid the question but attempt to justify Islamic hate crimes and abuse against non-Muslims.

It is to be recognised, that non-Muslims are held to be 2nd grade citizens according to Islamic legal principles, the Qur'an and the edicts of Muhammad found within the sunnah. So, here we identify both the source and authority for the gross crimes against non-Muslim minorities in Islamic lands.

It is to be noted that Muslims are not to befriend Christians and Jews

O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them. God guides not the people of the evildoers.
Surah 5:51

In fact, Muslims are obligated to make Jews and Christians (people of the book) feel humiliated and subdued. They are forced to pay a head tax for simply not being Muslim:

Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden -- such men as practise not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book -- until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled.
Surah 9:29

However, the Christians and Jews have it easier than the pagans and polytheists. They are to be slayed until they convert to Islam:

Then, when the sacred months are drawn away, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way; God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.
Surah 9:5

O believers, fight the unbelievers who are near to you; and let them find in you a harshness; and know that God is with the godfearing.
Surah 9:123

"And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers]...and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah."
Surah 2:191-193

As is evident, the vile actions of Muslims towards non-Muslims has its basis in the religion of Islam. The author refused to answer the question but instead attacked the United States and state of Israel.

7) Does your God love you? And hate the sin you commit daily? Or does he love you only if you hate and kill others who don't adhere to Islam?

The author answers, "Nowhere in Islam does it tell us to kill or hate anyone who is not a Muslim for that fact that he /she is not a Muslim." As has been clearly demonstrated above, this is simply a lie. The Quran repeatedly orders Muslims to fight and kill non-Muslims.

16) Why did he instruct Muslims to only have 4 wives yet he changed it for himself to have more than 20?

The author answers, "This is yet another lie against Prophet Muhammad as he never married more than 20 wives."

The author intentionally avoids answering the question. It is a fact that the Qur'an stated that a man should have only up to four wives (Surah 4:3). Muhammad even forced men to divorce wives so they had less than four:

Narrated Al-Harith ibn Qays al-Asadi
I embraced Islam while I had eight wives. So I mentioned it to the Prophet (peace be upon him). The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: Select four of them.
(Sunan Abu Dawud, Book 12, Number 2233)

However, Muhammad, who is exhorted as being the perfect example for human kind took more than four wives. This is attested to by mulitiple authentic hadith and accepted by Muslims:

Narrated Qatada:
Anas bin Malik said, "The Prophet used to visit all his wives in a round, during the day and night and they were eleven in number." I asked Anas, "Had the Prophet the strength for it?" Anas replied, "We used to say that the Prophet was given the strength of thirty (men)." And Sa'id said on the authority of Qatada that Anas had told him about nine wives only (not eleven).

Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 5, Number 268

Narrated 'Ata:
We presented ourselves along with Ibn 'Abbas at the funeral procession of Maimuna at a place called Sarif. Ibn 'Abbas said, "This is the wife of the Prophet so when you lift her bier, do not Jerk it or shake it much, but walk smoothly because the Prophet had nine wives and he used to observe the night turns with eight of them, and for one of them there was no night turn."

Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 62, Number 5

Narrated Anas bin Malik:
The Prophet used to pass by (have sexual relation with) all his wives in one night, and at that time he had nine wives.

Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 62, Number 142

Once again, we find the author employing deception to hide the hypocrisy of Muhammad.

A Critique of Why Follow Muhammad? (DiscoverIslamAustralia)

A Critique of Why Follow Muhammad?

A short booklet titled Why Follow Muhammad? appears on the page. It makes a number of outstanding and dishonest claims, specifically towards Christianity.


The New Testament

The authors state:

None of these [New Testament] writings is dated prior to the year 70CE.

The claim that none of the writings of the New Testament are dated to prior 70CE is simply false. Scholars, including the liberal John A.T. Robinson, have dated the composition of the entire New Testament corpus prior to 70AD (see John A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament p.352 for an overview). Some of the dates by Robinson's hypothesis include the Epistle of James in 45-46 AD; the Gospel of Mark in c. 45-60; the Gospel of John c. -40-65+.

More mainstream dates among sceptical scholars still generally place the Pauline corpus of texts to before 70 AD with texts such as Galatians from around 45-55 AD.

In short, such a statement has no genuine scholarly support and for that reason it remains unreferenced.

Thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament were collected, but none of them is older than the fourth century CE;...Some scattered papyrus fragments found in Egypt can lay claim to no greater antiquity than the third century.

Here we find a claim more alarming than that of above. The author claims that from the thousands of Greek manuscripts we possess, "none of them is older than the fourth century CE" and that we have "some" fragments that are no earlier than the third century.

There is no truth to the claim that we have no Greek manuscripts of the New Testament until the 3rd-4th century and those strained to be dated to the 3rd are fragmentary.

First thing to note, we do contain a substantial amount of the New Testament from before the 4th century AD. One of our oldest manuscripts (generally held to be the oldest by many) is a fragment of the gospel of John known as Papyrus 52. This text has been dated to as early as the first quarter of the 2nd century. In fact, from the second century alone there are 10-13 manuscripts.[1] According to the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung ten of these manuscripts from within the second century alone include:

P⁵² (100-150), P^{90, 104} (2^nd century), P⁶⁶ (c. AD 175-225), P^{46, 64+67} (c. AD 200), P⁷⁷, P¹⁰³, 0189 (2^nd or 3^rd century), P⁹⁸ (2^nd century?). [2]

From these manuscripts (which according to our Muslim friend do not exist) we find that, "over 43% of all the verses in the NT are already found in MSS within 100 years of the completion of the NT"[3]

Once again we find the claim to be unfounded conjecture.

The author then goes on to make some false claims with regard to the Bible and translations. For example, he asserts that the Greek was a 3rd century translation from Syriac. However, as is demonstrated above we have Greek manuscripts from the beginning of the 2nd century.

It is curious that some seventy different versions of the Gospel were prepared, four of which were approved by the leaders of the Christian religion

First, it is evident to note that the claim is unreferenced and the citation only links to their own false assertions.

With regard to the crux (that appeared within the text and not footnoted), the claim is made that Christian leaders chose four of seventy different versions of the Gospels. This is simply not true. The only case that is remotely similar to this is the following event: "About the year 332 the Emperor Constantine, wishing to promote and organize Christian worship in the growing number of churches in the capital city, directed Eusebius to have fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures made by practised scribes and written legibly on parchment."[4] First thing to note is this event, which took place 7 years after the Council of Nicaea, was with regard to distributing copies of the Scriptures. They were not many different versions. It is also important to note that the Council of Nicaea, which the author links to the council where the alleged events occured, did not deal with the issue of canon.

For the development of the canon in clear English see my previous post, Canon, Textual Criticism and More with Bruce Metzger.

These were the main objections made against the New Testament. As is evident, they have all been false. However, let us look at how they approach the Qur'an.


The Qur'an

Although the author took the time to criticise the New Testament manuscript record, this is avoided in their evaluation of the critique. However, it is to be noted that the Qur'an has issues in this regard, unlike the New Testament, which puts it to the authors advantage to ignore:

"There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century, and the tradition which places this rather opaque revelation in its historical context is not attested before the middle of the eighth. The historicity of the Islamic tradition is thus to some degree problematic: while there are no cogent internal grounds for rejecting it, there are equally no cogent external grounds for accepting it…the only way out of this dilemma is thus to step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again.”

P. Crone, M. Cook (1977) Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World, p. 3

That is a convenient point to avoid after making such false claims about the manuscript witness of the New Testament.

The Quran is the pure Word of God not one word in it is not divine. Not a single word has been deleted from its text. The Book has been handed down to our age in its complete and original form since the time of Muhammad.

First of all, we know that the Qur'an is not perfectly preserved. Earlier this year I posted a blog with regard to my careful exmination of a few lines of texts as found in one of our oldest Quran manuscripts and compared it to those in use by Muslims tooday. Not only were there many variants in so few lines, the meaning of the text was actually contradictory depending on which text was used. This post can be found here.

This is another false claim propagated by the Muslim apologist. Unlike the New Testament, the Qur'an suffers from primitive corruption. That is, the entire Qur'an suffered so much editing and the remnants of such were lost that it is impossible to reconstruct the text prior to this. The great debates over the variant and evolving contents of the Quran can be found in this exert of the scholarly article, Early Debates on the Integrity of the Qur'ān: A Brief Survey.


If we turn to the Islamic traditions, which the author defends as reliable, we find that there were in fact differences amongst the Quran verses delivered by Muhammad. As this narrative demosntrates, the differences were so great that the followers would physically fight:

"Umar bin Khattab [the second Caliph] said, 'I heard Hisham bin Hakim bin Hizam reciting Surat Al-Furqan ["Al-Furqan," the title of the 25th surah, has no meaning in any language.] during the lifetime of Allah's Apostle. I listened to his recitation and noticed that he recited it in several ways which Allah's Apostle had not taught me. So I was on the point of attacking him in the prayer, but I waited till he finished, and then I seized him by the collar. "Who taught you this Surah which I have heard you reciting?" He replied, "Allah's Apostle taught it to me." I said, "You are lying. Allah's Apostle taught me in a different way this very Surah which I have heard you reciting." So I led him to Muhammad. "O Allah's Apostle! I heard this person reciting Surat-al-Furqan in a way that you did not teach me." The Prophet said, "Hisham, recite!" So he recited in the same way as I heard him recite it before. On that Allah's Apostle said, "It was revealed to be recited in this way." Then the Prophet said, "Recite, Umar!" So I recited it as he had taught me. Allah's Apostle said, "It was revealed to be recited in this way, too." He added, "The Qur'an has been revealed to be recited in several different ways, so recite of it that which is easier for you." (Bukhari:V6B61N561)

Conclusion

The deception of this text is clear. The author maliciously lies with regard to the textual integrity of the New Testament to slander the texts reliability whilst on the other hand they lie about the perfect preservation of the Qur'an to increase the claims of its reliability.


1. Daniel B. Wallace, Second Century Papyri: "This means that there are at least ten and as many as thirteen NT MSS"
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origins, Development, and Significance p.206

A Critique of "We Love Jesus Too" (DiscoverIslamAustralia)

In an attempt to appeal to the Christian culture of Australia, Discover Islam Australia makes much use of Jesus. They attempt to propagate a similarity between the Jesus of the historical New Testament and the Jesus of Muhammad, the Qur'an and the spurious traditions.

They have taken the liberty to launch the blog "We Love Jesus Too". Here is a brief evaluation of some of the points:

His name is Esa in Arabic as well as in the Aramaic which is the language Jesus spoke.

This point is actually incorrect, and being such causes many problems for Islam.

Jesus' name in Aramaic was Yeshua from the Hebrew Yehoshua. Similarly, his Arabic name would not be Esa ('Isa) but Yasu.

With regard to the origins of Isa, scholars have this to say:

“The fact that Isa has no satisfactory derivation and no pre-Koranic history should have alerted scholars to the possibility that the word is a mistake”.
Professor James A. Bellamy, 'Textual Criticism of the Koran', Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol 121 No 1 (Jan-Mar).

Hence, there is no reason to suggest that Jesus' name was Isa. In fact, Professor Bellamy sees its origins in the Qur'an as a mistake.

"We do not believe that he was crucified but that God raised him to the heavens"

Regarding the claim that "We do not believe that he was crucified but that God raised him to the heavens" one is going against historical facts. Even the most anti-Christian historians agree that Jesus was crucified (which, ironically is in fulfilment of the scriptures). Some of these non-Christian scholars:

“One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Ponitus Pilate.”
-Bart D. Ehrman

“Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.”
- Gert Lüdemann

“That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”
- John D. Crossan

“The passion of Jesus is part of history.”
- Geza Vermes

“The single most solid fact about Jesus’ life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion.”
- Paula Fredriksen

“The support for the mode of his death, its agents, and perhaps its co-agents, is overwhelming: Jesus faced a trial before his death, was condemned, and was executed by crucifixion”
-L.T. Johnson

(I thank the team of answeringmuslims.com for providing these references.)

Regarding the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, see an earlier post, A three part video series by Dr John Dickson of the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX).

Conclusion

I do not understand how you can believe in Jesus but not believe what he had to say about himself. You state, "We do not believe that Jesus is God or the son of God."

Jesus identified himself as the only "Son of God" (John 3:18); he stated "I and the Father are one." (John 10:30); he was worshipped by his disciples and called Lord and God, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28); He claimed to exist in the beginning, "And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.” (John 17:5); the list goes on.

See also:

• The Myth: The Early Church did not Believe Christ to be Divine
• Jesus said, "I and the Father are ONE"
• The Deity of Christ - R.C. Sproul

Purpose of this Blog

The purpose of this blog is to document and providing meaningful responses to the deception of the Muslim 'evangelism' site DiscoverIslamAustralia.com. The site provides a number of resources riddled with lies with regard to Christianity, its history and the New Testament to deceptively slander belief in its authenticity. Conversely, the resources lie with regard to Islam and the Qur'an propagating deceptive claims such as perfect preservation.

With such lies being publicly propagated one must provide a reasonable and meaningful response. I hope this site is useful to you.
www.discoverislamaustrali.com discover islam australia "Discover Islam Australia"