Sufi, consider the teaching in this way:
I guess people here will accept your wrong explanation, simply because it agrees with their belief system.
TheSufi, quoting that verse (Num 23:19) dismantles nothing of Christian doctrine, what it does dismantle and highlight is your shallow understanding of Christian doctrine. Numbers 23:19 God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good? is believed by all Christians and in no way contradicts The Christian’s understanding of God or Jesus’s divinity and the reason for that is our point of reference, for a Christian their point of reference is GOD and NOT Man and this verse’s point of reference is Man becoming GOD. Also the verse does not say GOD cannot take upon a human nature, and that is specially what happened in the Incarnation when Second Person of the Blessed Trinity (The Son, The Word) took upon a human nature (in its fullness) and became Man in the Person of Jesus Christ.
:yup:
Indeed MJ.:yup:
Christians still keep the “God is not Man” and are very happy to continue the full verse without having to say this is corrupted and that is corrupted.
MJ
Indeed MJ.
But I think this particular verse has been flogged to death. I suggest non-Christians to just google Numbers 23:19 Commentary, and there are more than enough commentaries on it.
Perhaps thing to note, Jesus is human in any ways except for sin. That makes him unique which is an attribute of God. So both God and man is fine for Jesus.
I have been saying this. Who else can be more original Muslim than Mohammad himself? And he died believing through his source, those heretic Jews who believed that Jesus was just a prophet and therefore mere man, that he was right all along on this. Of course this same source also told him that the Trinity was God in three parts, the Father, Jesus and Mary. No wonder he thought that some ‘deviationist Christians’ worshipped Mary.
I’d like to add that the “modern Christian doctrine” allegation is unfounded. On the contrary it is modern Muslims who try to accommodate this excuse. Unless someone can find “original” Muslim writings that use this verse then perhaps we have something to talk about if at all.
MJ
It makes sense that the realization of the contradiction between the Bible and the Quran came very late, some four centuries later. By this time communication was much better but more so, Islamic empire was quite established in former Christian nations that there must be inter-change of ideas among scholars. Muslims realized that contrary to the information provided by Mohammad/Quran, Christian belief was very different from what was known by them, especially since they took the heretics and gnostics as the real representatives of Christians.
And the Torah, who do you think compiled the Torah? Except for Abraham’s son, do you think that the Torah is also corrupt?
eddie your argument hinges on one key point that is easily refuted: that the only way the world can be saved is through Jesus Christ.
eddie, I agree with you that Jesus is the way. My point was simply that Jesus was not necessary for salvation for any reason other than God wanting it to be that way. He wanted us to be reconciled to Him, and He understands better than any the power of dramatic symbols. What could be a more powerful symbol than an innocent man dying a horrible and painful death on behalf of the guilty who deserved that punishment?
That really isn’t a very good argument to use.
This may be a reference to the Sana’a manuscript found some decades ago in Yemen. It offers variant spellings, words and order of the surahs. There are some articles on the web and apparently extensive scholarship.
You realise we believe God as in the essence of divinity of God, is not man right? That we believe in the hypostatic union? That there is a distinction to be made between the flesh which God took up and his ever existing eternity. Such verses would be good against the mormon who believes God has been a man of flesh and bone forever, but not the Christian who has always believed God is transcendant.
What do we mean by corruption? The wholesale degradation of a text into something which at all cannot be trusted? Why then do scholars continue to produce critical editions of the bible in which these variances (which exist in every text, including the quran) are noted and then commented on? Yes there are verses which are not found in manuscripts, like the trinity verses in 1st John (one might expect these to be in the early editions but this was a late latin adition to the text), but what does that imply beyond that there are textual differences which can be examined and observed and we can get as close as possible to the original? Can we really believe that a text like the new testmanet which we never controlled by any one single authority, but instead was spread out all accross the world, from Rome, to Anitoch, to Alexandria, to Jeruselum, which manuscripts more or less agree with each other, be this totally unrealiable and corrupt document? Take in mind one of the reasons these textual issues come to fruit is because we have so many copies of the biblical works as opposed to other works, if we were to apply the same standards that muslims and critical atheist scholars place on the gospels we would find ourselves not trusting the majority of any ancient work handed down to us and these undoubtably would all bare differences from their original, either minor or major.