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May 22 - June 7, 2025
In the East, and for Islam in particular, what is accepted as true is generally what the authorities tell you — and you are expected to embrace what they teach. That is why I call this approach the Authoritarian Faith Path. In fact, the original meaning of the Arabic word Islam is “submission.”
the more typical approach in the West, which I refer to as the Evidential Faith Path. This approach decides what should be accepted as true based not on the word of authorities but rather on logic and experience, including experiences recorded in trustworthy historical records like the ones I cited in my interactions with the imam.
Too often, people in Western culture fall into an approach that limits possible causes to naturalistic ones, and they won’t even consider supernatural causes. This prejudices the outcome and, in fact, makes scientific and historical inquiry atheistic by definition.
Easterners who embrace an authoritarian mindset need to be reminded that religious authorities are not all created equal; some are worth following, and some are not. If the credentials of the leaders are not scrutinized and their messages not weighed, how can one know which should be followed? The Bible encourages us to “test everything; hold fast what is good”
“When authority is derived from position rather than reason, the act of questioning leadership is dangerous because it has the potential to upset the system. Dissension is reprimanded and obedience is rewarded.”
among New Testament manuscripts there are about four hundred thousand textual differences.
There is absolutely nothing in the ancient Greco-Roman world that compares to the New Testament in terms of the number of manuscript copies or their dates. The average Greco-Roman author has fewer than twenty copies of his writings still in existence.
The New Testament boasts more than fifty-eight hundred copies in Greek alone.
Altogether, there are more than twenty thousand manuscripts of the New Testament.
some of these are small scraps of papyrus, and most are not complete New Testaments.
the average-size manuscript is more than four hundred...
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church fathers, from the late first century to the thirteenth century, quoted from the New Testament in homilies, commentaries, and theological treatises. And they did not have the gift of brevity. More than a million quotations of the New Testament by the church fathers have been collected so far.
Only 15 percent of all New Testament manuscripts were produced before the year 1000. But that is still more than eight hundred manuscripts — more than forty times the amount of manuscripts from the average classical author in more than two thousand years of copying!
The New Testament has at least two hundred fifty manuscripts — in Greek alone — produced within five hundred years after the composition of the New Testament.
More than 70 percent of all textual variants are mere spelling differences that affect nothing.
Remarkably, less than 1 percent of all textual variants are both meaningful and viable.
An example of a meaningful and viable variant is “616” (instead of “666”) for the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18.
Only about two dozen variants are between one and two verses long. The consensus of New Testament scholars is that these verses were added to the New Testament later, since they are not found in the earliest and best manuscripts and they do not fit with the authors’ known syntax, vocabulary, or style. No doctrines are impacted by these variants. To be sure, they may involve favorite verses for many people, but they do not in the slightest jeopardize a cardinal tenet of the Christian faith.
“Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.”
Many atheists and Muslims who have followed in Ehrman’s path have exaggerated his claims way out of proportion to what he actually stated.
When the dust has settled, we can be assured that what we have today, in all essentials, and even in the overwhelming majority of particulars, is what they wrote then.
The scribes and Pharisees were repeatedly confronted with Jesus’ claims straight from His mouth, so they couldn’t simply dismiss those claims as later corruptions
Jesus is called God not only in John (1:1, 18; 20:28) and Paul (Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13) but also in Acts (20:28), Hebrews (1:8), and 2 Peter (1:1). He is revered as the LORD (Yahweh) not only in Paul but also in Acts (1:24; 2:21, 36) and 1 Peter (2:3; 3:13 – 16). Both Hebrews (1:6) and Revelation (5:12 – 13) teach that the angels in heaven worship Jesus Christ. The belief that Jesus is infinitely exalted permeates New Testament writings.
Throughout the gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks and acts in ways that are simply far too exalted even if He were a great prophet.
When Jesus healed people, cast out demons, or performed other miracles, He did so not by asking God in prayer to do these things; rather, He spoke the word, and it happened
These men wrote from thirty to sixty years after Jesus’ death; all of them except Luke were Jewish men who spent part of their lives in Judea and Galilee. They all either knew Jesus personally or knew people who had known Jesus personally. By contrast, Muhammad did not know Jesus and did not know anyone who had ever seen Jesus. He lived five hundred years later in a different culture and in a different country
From a strictly historical perspective, the multiple testimonies of the first-century New Testament authors must take precedence with regard to understanding who and what Jesus claimed to be.
The key to understanding this, for me, was to answer the question, Who is Jesus? If Jesus really is the Son who came from the Father, died and rose again for our salvation, ascended into heaven, and then sent the Holy Spirit to live within His people, then something along the lines of the doctrine of the Trinity is true.
I also came to appreciate how closely the doctrine of the Trinity is linked to the gospel of salvation. The gospel or “good news” is the message of God’s victory over the devil and over human rebellion, corruption, and death. It isn’t about what I do for God; it’s about what He has done and is doing for me.
Jesus did not pay the penalty for our misdeeds so we can continue disobeying God with abandon; rather, in dying on the cross, Jesus not only canceled our spiritual debt but also cured our spiritual disease.
When we put our trust in Christ, He forgives our sins and also begins the work of changing us from the inside to become holy and loving like Him, and like God our Father. Jesus does this through the Holy Spirit, whom He sent.
God forgives all our sins and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves by paying the penalty for our sins and workin...
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while we are mortal, the Holy Spirit changes our hearts so that we begin to live in a way that is more pleasing to God, even though we still commit sin; and then in the resurrection at the end of history, ...
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all three persons of the Trinity are involved in our salvation. The Father calls us into a relationship with Him through the Son, whom He sent; the Son creates that relationship by dying to break down the barrier of rebellion that has separated us from the Father; and the Holy Spirit works within us to ...
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Islam’s historical sources are far removed from the events they report, giving rise to a fair amount of skepticism concerning their reliability.
whether we doubt Islam’s sources or trust them, we never find the impeccable figure preached by Muslims.
written more than a century after Muhammad’s death.
Most Muslim scholars today, however, are convinced that Ibn Ishaq’s historical methodology was defective, which forces them to turn to even later works for information about their prophet.
the most important reason for compiling stories about Muhammad was because so many false or contradictory stories were being manufactured.
Modern quests for early Islamic historical data have uncovered almost nothing, and the general movement among scholars of Islamic studies over the past century has been toward greater skepticism.
After pondering the evidence more carefully (and resisting the Muslim tendency to automatically defend Muhammad from criticism), Nabeel was left with a dilemma: either we know next to nothing about Muhammad, or we know that he is not what Muslims claim him to be.
Studies of corrections in these manuscripts have also demonstrated that no one has changed the text to make it support a political or theological agenda — a hollow accusation often made, for example, against Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in the early 300s.
Instead of the Quran’s text being preserved perfectly from the time of Muhammad, it was shaped after his lifetime into a document that would command political and religious unity under the established and growing political power of the time.
Similar studies of the Quran are demonstrating that the Jesus it portrays is more a figure of the theological controversies of the sixth and seventh centuries than a figure of the first century.
