Eusebius also said about the ‘apocryphal’ writings, “Find that most of it is of the right teaching of the Saviour, but some things are adventitious” (Hist. Eccl.)
So we Muslims don’t totally reject the NT, but treat it the same as the other ‘apocrypha’, ie. we don’t know for certain which verses are the real teaching of Jesus and which ones are not.
I congratulate you, sir, on dishonest apologetics! For I know what that quote is, and if you go to that original source, it is Eusebius quoting
what a heretic said, not his own opinion. He is discussing Serapion, whom he credits with writing the Gnostic Gospel of Peter. If you are going to begin quote-mining, please at least get the person you’re quoting right.
In any case, the Muslim rejection of the New Testament is the purest form of circular logic. We are supposed to believe the words of a prophet who came 600 years after the time of Christ, who never knew Christ, who didn’t belong to the Christian Church and who had no ties to Judaism, became a prophet of God. His followers are told (as I showed before) to simply ignore what came before, even though the Koran itself states that the
Torat and
Injil were revealed by God, and accept without reason or excuse what this later revelation said. They are then told to see everything that came before through the lens of this revelation - something that only cults do. This has never been done before, nor did God ever give revelation like this. When the apostles went out to fulfill the Great Commission, they never once accused the Jews of changing their scripture - in fact, they extensively quoted older scripture to confirm whom Christ was. The Koran, by contrast, does not do this. There is not one single quote from the
Torat or
Injil in the entire Koran, only name-dropping and vague references to certain stories. Again, we are told to accept this on nothing more than the words of a prophet.
Using your own Scripture to prove your doctrine is not very convincing to other people.
This is a very odd statement. Where else are we to define our doctrine if not scripture? Perhaps we should ignore the Koran to understand the doctrine of Islam - of course, if we did that, Muslims would change their tune and demand we let the Koran speak for itself.
So according to your logic, anybody (Muslim, Jew etc.) who doesn’t believe this one human being to be God, has actually degraded God Himself? On the contrary, even a pagan like Celsus saw the early Christianity of his time as degrading God’s very nature…
Celcus shows he has no understanding of the Incarnation. God did not change His deity, but took on a human form with that deity. This is known as the hypostatic union: Christ was fully man and fully God. God did not change from good to evil, or from virtue to vice, unless one believes in the Gnostic concept of a good spiritual world and an evil flesh world, somewhat similar to the Greek philosophical concept of the afterlife - both of which are concepts that are incompatible to both Christianity and Islam.
If you arrange the NT manuscripts in chronological order, you’ll notice the general trend was the addition of new verses or phrases with time, a proof of tampering of the TRUE WORD. Two examples out of hundreds; the ‘pericope adulterae’ (John 7:53-8:11) and Mark’s ending (16:9-20) first appeared in 5th century manuscripts, and not in the much earlier ones, not even in the 4th century Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. One particular manuscript, Codex Washingtonianus, went so far as to insert this long passage in between Mark 16:14-15,
Your conclusion is one of presupposition, because you essentially prepare how you will interpret textual variants and then seek proof to verify it while ignoring the larger picture. The majority of textual variants in the manuscripts are by and large grammatical, while others include spelling errors or adding minor words such as “now” or “then” within the sentence - all of which hold no bearing on theological matters.
As for Mark’s longer ending, there has been much discussion on this. It is true that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus do not include the longer ending, but these two manuscripts are not the sole basis for our understanding of scripture. For Irenaeus, in his 2nd century work
Against Heresies, wrote:
Also, towards the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: “So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God” [III, 10:5]
This is a direct quotation from Mark 16:19. Likewise Justin Martyr, again from the 2nd century, wrote in his
First Apology:
That which he says, “He shall send to You the rod of power out of Jerusalem,” is predictive of the mighty word,
which His apostles, going forth from Jerusalem, preached everywhere [Chapter 45]
The part in bold is very similar to the words in Mark 16:20, even down to the original Greek grammar.
Whether one alteration, or a hundred alterations, either shows that the early Christian scribes had no qualms about changing their Scripture. No big deal to them.
There is no reason for your conclusion, and citing one author (especially a pagan, whom Mohammad would himself condemn) not only proves nothing but falls into the category of the
appealing to authority logical fallacy. The early Church Fathers quoted scripture extensively, so much so that if were to have lost every manuscript of scripture, we would be able to rebuild much of it on their writings alone. They also identified all four gospels and their authors, showing signs as early as the 2nd century that they identified them with apostolic sources.
Furthermore, if even one alteration is a sign of scribes changing scripture, then even the Koran is guilty of this, for there exists such textual variants as one sourced to Ubayy ibn Ka’b in S. 33:6 which adds the phrase “and he is a father to them” after “their own selves” - something not found in most Korans. There are many other variants, all grammatical, but nonetheless signs of supposed “alteration” - using that word with the mindset of remaining consistent in our argumentation. This is why the Muslim argumentation that a holy scripture must have a spotless textual history only shoots themselves in the foot: because the history of the textual Koran and of the Bible have similar issues. I’ve discussed this with Muslims on the forum before, and some have backtracked and have had to play a double standard of, “Well, the inconsequential variants in the Bible matter, but not in the Koran.” Double standards, however, are the greatest sign of intellectual dishonesty, and if your religion is in essence forcing you to lie, then you must question your faith.
In fact if you read the records of the ecumenical councils, the heretical group was allowed to state it’s case - Nestorius being one such example. You’ll also notice that many times the heretics nearly won the day; after the Council of Nicea, for example, there was a resurgence of Arianism to the point where St. Athanasius was removed from his post as Bishop of Alexandria five times, St. Ambrose became Bishop of Milan when it was split down the middle between Arians and Orthodox, and St. Jerome lamented that the world was surprised to wake up and find itself Arian (Constantine, incidentally, was baptized by an Arian bishop).
