Your friend’s statement about Arabic and Aramaic makes no sense whatever. Arabic was not used as a written language until the time of the Qur’an, as far as I know. Hebrew and Aramaic had been used for centuries before that. No one disputes that the Qur’an was written (or, in Muslim terms, revealed to Mohammed) in the seventh century–more than 500 years after the last sections of the Bible were written, and at least a couple of centuries after the earliest existing manuscripts of the complete New Testament. So even if your friend wants to take an extremely skeptical line about the possibility that the Biblical texts were corrupted, any such corruption would have to have taken place before the Qur’an.
It’s true that the texts of the New Testament do vary quite a bit. Most of the differences are minor, but there are several sections that don’t appear in some manuscripts, and a few significant readings that differ from one manuscript to another (“he who was manifest in the flesh” vs. “God was manifest in the flesh,” for instance). But the very fact that so many different readings have survived, and that most of the differences are so minor, gives us confidence that we can get a basic idea of what the original texts looked like, by comparing all the manuscripts that have come down to us. If all the texts were exactly the same, it would be more plausible to claim that maybe they had all been changed. But precisely because we have such a wide diversity of readings, it’s silly to suggest that perhaps “the Bible could have been fudged” and so we can’t know what the original manuscripts said. Clearly the copying of the Bible wasn’t something that was tightly controlled by one person or group, or we wouldn’t have all the different manuscript readings that we do. So when all the manuscripts do agree (as they do more than 90% of the time) we can be confident that they are accurate. If a big change had been made, it would have shown up just as all the relatively little ones have.
Now here’s the real kicker–there’s a textual criticism of the Qur’an as well. Muslims believe that the Qur’an was dictated word for word to Mohammed by Allah. But there are Christians and Jews who believe this about the Bible. Why does your friend believe the Muslims and not the Christians? Here’s the big difference–Muslims are a lot more conservative than Christians on these issues (many more Muslims have the attitude to their Scriptures that Christian “fundamentalists” do to theirs–this of course is different from what the media misleadingly calls “Islamic fundamentalism”!). So you will find far fewer Muslims who are honest about the critical problems with the text than you will Christians or Jews. But that doesn’t mean those problems aren’t there.
Certainly it’s true that the Qur’an was all written by (or revealed to) one person over a period of a few years rather than centuries like the Bible. If your friend prefers that, he’s welcome. To me the fact that the Bible grew over a long period of time, and that many people contributed to it, is evidence that it is divinely inspired. It’s a question of how we think God works, I guess. It seems to me that God usually works in long, roundabout, messy ways. But some people seem to find the Islamic notion of inspiration more convincing. You really can’t prove one or the other. You can only decide which one seems more like God.
The main thing I think you should emphasize is that your friend is uncritically believing everything Muslims tell him about the Qur’an. Yet he doesn’t uncritically believe everything Christians tell him about the Bible. Why this inconsistency? Has he read what secular scholars have to say about the Qur’an? Why would he believe the more skeptical view of the Bible but not even consider it with regards to the Qur’an? This makes no sense at all.
In Christ,
Edwin
