Authenticity of the Bible

Authenticity of the Bible

According to Muhammad, the Bible is a scripture from God. He knew that the Jews were the keepers of the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament. He knew that the followers of Jesus, Christians, were the keepers of the Greek scriptures, New Testament. He knew that the Christians honored and claimed the Hebrew scriptures also.

He never spoke anything against either scripture and only once maybe twice accused Jews in his land only of speaking bad interpretations of their scriptures.

This is amazing since he was ‘unlettered’ and since He spoke Arabic and neither the Greek or the Hebrew scriptures had been translated into Arabic during his life.

Muhammad is commanded in Sura 10:95:

…”upon doubt concerning what we revealed to you, then ask those who read the Scriptures that were before you.”

The guidance was that Muhammad should consult Christians and Jews about what is in their scriptures. There is evidence that he did that. In fact, we know he did that according to Ibn Ishaq, One of his closest consultants and relative was Warqa bin Naufal who remained Christian throughout his life.

Yet, we have those out there, mainly in Islam, who claim for some reason that the Bible, the Hebrew, kept by the Jews and the Greek scriptures, kept by so many different groups who were early believers in Jesus, have been corrupted. I have seen in all my research on this topic, not one example of how it happened or a specific example of what was corrupted. It is strange that both sets of scriptures, each set having a unique history and yet both were corrupted?

I am a follower of Jesus but I am interested in the history of all religions and because of that I recently took a tour of Temple Mickve in Savannah, Georgia in the USA. This Temple was populated by a group of Jews from England which sailed over in 17 hundreds. They were given by the Jews in England a scroll of the Towrah as they departed (1733). That same scroll rests in the Temple in Savannah and in probably as good a condition as it left England. Jews are dedicated to preserving their scripture like no other group on earth.

By the 2 hundreds, the Greek scriptures were in several languages. Today we have 24,000+ manuscript of the Greek NT. Five-thousand of those are Greek manuscripts and the remainder in early languages other than Greek such as Syriac and Coptic.

The point of all this is there is tremendeous manuscript evidence of both sets of scriptures and to the point that it would have been very difficult in any point in time to corrupt either or both. And what would be the point? What value/advancement happens by corrupting, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, atheist or other? There is no reasonable logic that would bring any group to the conclusion that they could even pull such a stunt off.

You see, how could all available manuscipts of the Bible (scattered all over the world) have been corrupted so completely that not a single authentic copy survived? See how illogical that theory is? If anyone had attempted such a heist, they would have been detected and exposed.

Let me summarize what I am implying above with all the facts.

Though today, many Muslims “say” that the Bible is corrupted there is no proof.

The Qur’an makes no hint that any scriptures were corrupted. There is an accusation of the Jews in Arabia that they were mishandling their scriptures but nothing that implies that any corrupting of the written scriptures had taken place.

One, If they were corrupted at that time and God was forsaking former Scriptures, that would have been revealed to Muhammad and included in the Qur’an. And it was not.

Two, manuscripts dating from the 2 and 3 hundreds all agree with each other with some minor variations. Those manuscripts line up and agree with the codices which were created in the 4 hundreds or late 3 hundreds. Since all these manuscripts and translations agree with one another excepting minor variations, this lends strong credence to the belief that these manuscripts do agree with the original manuscripts.

Thirdly, we are confident that the translations we have today in many, many languages aline and agree closely with the original manuscripts.

So, there is no defense of a claim that the Bible has been corrupted—either set of scriptures, Hebrew or Greek, have come down to us well preserved and in tact.

If you have any questions about these wonderful scriptures, please be in touch by email.