Re: Continuing with the conversation
My friend,
Thank you so much for your response! It’s wonderful to talk with someone who is willing to discuss these issues and not merely dismiss them.
Just so that you know, I am grateful that the Quran has spread the knowledge of Jesus to many parts of the world which did not know him OR the one true God.
I also want you to know that I looked over each of your arguments carefully and gave them thought.
1.) I believe I understand that you believe certain things about Moses, Jesus, etc because of how they are revealed in the Quran. But even if there was no Quran, you would have to acknowledge that they exist - the OT and the NT still existed and spoke of them, even if you believe they did so falsely. But they still certainly existed.
2.) You are right when you say that the Gospels are the only documents which record in detail the events of the crucifixion. Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius - non-Christian historians - all mention Jesus as being a real person, and Josephus that he was crucified and died and that he has many followers. This is a secular source which agrees with the NT that Jesus did die on the cross.
Now, the accounts of the NT writers are still historical sources, even if you want to call them biased. But even so, something has to account for the fact that all of these people believed that Jesus died, was buried, and rose from the dead. They all claim to have seen him alive, with a resurrected body. How is that possible?
3.) The Gospels did not have the names on them as we do now, but the early Church knew who wrote which Gospel. All the early Christians (many of them saints who died for their faith) describe the four Gospels as coming from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and they affirm that very early on. Just because the scrolls that the Gospels were written on did not have names does not mean that people did not know who wrote which gospel. The early Church knew who wrote the gospels, and as time went by they put the names on the scrolls when copying just to be sure that the proper authors were remembered.
4.) All of the testimony of the early Church on this subject says that the gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew but was translated to Greek. Luke was written in Greek and so was John; Mark may or may not have been translated. Now, the reason the gospel writers did this is because Greek was the universal language of the world at that time, much like English is now. If they wanted to spread the message of Jesus Christ to the entire world, they would have written in Greek.
Now, to say that Paul would have ‘influenced’ the documents seems to say that Paul was very dishonest. But this doesn’t make sense - he converted to Christianity (which he originally hated) from Judaism because he claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. He was persecuted and executed for his beliefs and never once renounced them. That doesn’t sound like something a blasphemous liar would do.
I hope you will realize that a lot of the arguments you are making are presuming that the earliest Christians - the people that knew Jesus or his apostles personally - were blasphemers and liars. To say that they ‘changed’ the NT to make Jesus into God/Allah/YHWH and to speak of the Resurrection is to make them evil and blasphemous beyond compare. But I don’t think that can be done, since they knew Jesus and/or the twelve, and they died for their belief that Jesus was God and rose from the dead. I think those people would know who Jesus was a little better than us, living 2000 years in the future.
Please see response from paarsurrey in next post.
