The Textual History of the Qur'an and the Bible

Deedat begins his booklet with quotes from two Christian authors, Scroggie and Cragg, to the effect that there is a positive human element in the Bible. He then concludes:

Both these doctors of religion are telling us in the clearest language humanly possible that the Bible is the handiwork of man (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.2).

What he subtly omits to do, however, is to inform his readers, firstly, that the Christian Church has always held that the Word of God was written by men under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21), and, secondly, that these authors were not "letting the cat out of the bag" (as Deedat imagines) but were setting out to show how God has in fact revealed his Word.

Deedat's quote from Cragg's The Call of the Minaret is very astutely wrenched from its context. Cragg speaks of the human element in the Bible to demonstrate a decisive advantage that the Bible enjoys over the Qur'an. Whereas the Qur'an is alleged to be free of any human element, in the Bible God has deliberately chosen to reveal his Word through the writings of his inspired prophets and apostles so that his Word may not only be conveyed to man but may be communicated to his powers of comprehension as well. The apostle not only receives the Word of God but is able himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to convey its meaning to his readers. This the Qur'an cannot do if it has no human element as is generally alleged.

Deedat then divides the Bible into three different kinds of witnessing (Is the Bible God's Word? p.4), namely the Word of God, Words of a Prophet of God and Words of an Historian. He then quotes passages where God speaks, others where Jesus speaks, and lastly where things are said of Jesus, suggesting that Muslims are careful to separate these three. He states that the Qur'an alone has the Word of God, the Hadith has the Words of the Prophet, and other books have the writings of historians. He concludes:

The Muslim keeps the above three types of evidence jealously apart, in their proper gradations of authority. He never equates them (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.6).

We find it most astonishing that a man who poses as a scholar of Islam should make such a claim. Firstly the Qur'an contains many passages which record the words of the prophets of God. For example, we read that Zakariya, the prophet said:

How can I have a son when age hath overtaken me already and my wife is barren? (Sura Al Imran 3:40)

If, as Deedat suggests, the Qur'an only contains the Word of God while the words of prophets are only found in the Hadith, it is extremely difficult to see how these words can ever be attributed to God! Secondly there is a passage in the Qur'an which clearly contains the words of angels to Muhammad and not the Word of God to him as is alleged:

We come not down save by commandment of thy Lord. Unto him belongeth all that is before us and all that is behind us and all that is between these two, and thy Lord was never forgetful. (Sura Maryam 19:64)

There is no hint in the Qur'an as to who is speaking but these words are clearly addressed to Muhammad directly by their authors. From the text itself it is quite clear that these are the words of angels and not of God.

Furthermore we find in the Hadith many words which are not the words of any prophet but obviously of God himself. These sayings are known as Hadith-i-Qudsi (divine sayings) and here is an example:

Abu Huraira reported that Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: Allah, the Exalted and Glorious, said: I have prepared for my pious servants which eye has seen not, and the ear has heard not and no human heart has perceived such bounties leaving aside those about which Allah has informed you (Sahih Muslim, Vol. 4, p.1476).

The Hadith are full of such sayings. Furthermore, much of the Qur'an and Hadith read like the passages in the Bible which are alleged to be the words of an historian. The passage in the Qur'an which relates the birth of Jesus from his mother Mary reads precisely like the "third type" quoted in Deedat's booklet:

And she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a far place. And the pangs of childbirth drove her unto the trunk of a palm tree. (Sura Maryam 19:22-23)

What the Qur'an says here of Mary is no different in narrative form to what Mark 11:13 says of Jesus. Nevertheless Deedat, using this verse in Mark as an example, says such narratives are not found in the Qur'an!

Deedat's effort to distinguish between the Qur'an and the Bible is founded on totally false premises. The Qur'an has the words of prophets and historical narratives throughout its pages and no one can honestly say that it contains the alleged words of God alone. Furthermore the Hadith also contain alleged sayings of God as well as those of prophets. When Deedat says that these three types of evidence - words of God, prophets and historians - are kept "jealously apart" by the Muslims, he makes a blatantly false statement.

It is apparent right from the outset that Deedat's arguments against the Bible are unjustified and the trend continues right through his booklet.

Deedat begins his third chapter by denying that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures constituting the Holy Bible are those honoured by the Qur'an as the Taurat and Injil respectively (the Law and the Gospel - i.e., the Old and New Testaments). Instead, he suggests that the real Taurat and Injil were different books entirely which were allegedly revealed to Moses and Jesus respectively.

This attempt to distinguish between the books of the Bible and those referred to in the Qur'an is, to say the least, very difficult to consider with any seriousness. No matter how widely this view may be held in the Muslim world, there is no evidence of any nature whatsoever to support it.

At no time in history has there ever been any proof that books as such were "revealed" to Moses and Jesus, or that any other Taurat (Law) or Injil (Gospel) other than the books of the Old and New Testaments ever existed. Furthermore, the Qur'an itself does not distinguish these books from the Holy Scriptures of the Jews and the Christians but, on the contrary, openly admits that they are those books which the Jews and Christians themselves hold to be the Word of God.

Significantly, in trying to establish his theory that the Taurat and Injil were books other than those found in the Bible, Deedat has to resort to subjectivism. He chants We Muslims believe ... we believe ... we sincerely believe ... but is incapable of producing even the slightest degree of evidence in favour of these beliefs. Surprisingly he proves to be guilty of the very mulish mentality he attributes to Christians in his booklet (see p.3).

All we can say in response to these stated beliefs is that all the evidence of history weighs irreversibly against them and that they are accordingly purely speculative and devoid of any foundation whatsoever.

In passing, however, we must comment that, in the light of Deedat's claim that the Qur'an has been perfectly preserved and protected from human tampering by God himself for fourteen centuries (Is the Bible God's Word? p.7), it is rather astonishing to discover that the same God proved singularly incapable of preserving even a record of the fact that such a Taurat or an Injil ever even existed - let alone preserve the books themselves! We find such a paradox impossible to believe - for the Eternal Ruler of the universe will surely act consistently at all times. You cannot expect us to believe that God has miraculously preserved one of his books perfectly for centuries and yet proved absolutely powerless to preserve independently in human history even so much as a record that other such books ever existed. We find this too hard to swallow.

In any event, as we have seen already, the Qur'an itself confirms that the Taurat of the Jews was the book regarded as such by them at the time of Muhammad and that the Injil likewise was the book in the possession of the Christians at that time, which they themselves considered to be the Word of God. At no time in history have Jews and Christians ever regarded any books as the sacred Word of God other than those constituting the Old and New Testaments as we know them today. Useful Qur'anic texts proving the point are:

It is impossible to consider how the Christians of Muhammad's time could ever judge by the Gospel (Injil) if they were not in possession of it. In Sura al-Araf 7:157 the Qur'an again admits that the Taurat and Injil were in the possession of the Jews and Christians at the time of Muhammad and that they were those books which these two groups themselves accepted as the Law and the Gospel respectively. No one can honestly say that these two books were other than those of the Old and New Testaments as they are found in the Bible today.

Furthermore it is most significant to note that distinguished commentators like Baidawi and Zamakhshari openly admit that Injil is not an original Arabic word but is borrowed from the Syriac word used by the Christians themselves to describe the Gospel. Indeed, whereas some early Qur'anic scholars tried to find an Arabic origin for it, these two men of authority rejected the theory with undisguised contempt (Jeffery, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an, p.71). This substantiates all the more the conclusion that the Injil was not a phantom book revealed to Jesus, all trace of which has strangely disappeared, but rather the New Testament itself precisely as we know it today. The same can be said for the Taurat as the word is obviously of Hebrew origin and the title which the Jews themselves have always given to the books of the Old Testament as we know today.

Therefore the Qur'an unreservedly admits that the Bible itself is the true Word of God. Deedat knows this for a fact and therefore tries to circumvent the implications by suggesting that there are "multiple" Bible versions in circulation today. This is a very artful misrepresentation of the truth.

He fails to inform his readers that he is really referring to different English translations of the Bible which are widely distributed in the world today. He speaks of the King James Version (KJV), Revised Version (RV), and Revised Standard Version (RSV) but, in the name of honesty, he should have made it clear that these are not differing editions of the Bible itself but simply different English translations of it. All three are based on the original Hebrew and Greek texts of the Old and New Testaments respectively which have been preserved intact by the Christian Church since centuries before the time of Muhammad. We shall presently consider the differences between them but it will be useful to refer here to a furore which raged among the Muslim leaders of South Africa in 1978 over the distribution of an English translation of the Qur'an by Muhammad Asad. (As with the Bible, there are numerous different translations of the Qur'an in English).

Reaction against Asad's translation was so vehement that the Islamic Council of South Africa, in a public statement, openly discouraged distribution of this book among the Muslims of South Africa. At no time has any English translation of the Bible ever been treated so drastically. Therefore readers must not be duped by Deedat's suggestion that "multiple" versions of the Bible exist and should appreciate immediately that he is pulling the wool over his reader's eyes when he suggests that the Christian Church does not have just one Bible.

Deedat then proceeds to make another blatantly false charge when he suggests that the Protestants have bravely expunged seven whole Books from the Bible (Is the Bible God's Word? p.9), the books being those that constitute the Apocrypha. It seems that there is very poor information about the Bible at Deedat's disposal, for these books are of Jewish origin and the authors never intended to write Scripture, nor have they ever formed part of the Jewish Holy Scriptures, the Old Testament, which we Christians accept as the Word of God. Therefore they have not been expunged from the Bible as Deedat erroneously suggests. Only the Roman Catholics, for reasons best known to themselves, give them the authority of Scripture.

With his customary aggressiveness Deedat then challenges the believing Christian to steel himself for the unkindest blow of all as though what he was about to say was entirely unknown to us. He quotes these words from the preface to the RSV which are underlined in his booklet:

These "defects" are nothing but a number of variant readings which were generally unknown to the translators who composed the KJV early in the seventeenth century. The RSV of this century has identified these readings and they are noted as footnotes an the relevant pages of its text. Furthermore, where a verse like 1 John 5:7 appears in the KJV (because the translators took it from later manuscripts), the RSV has omitted it altogether (as it is not found in the oldest texts of the New Testament in the origin Greek).

Firstly, we must again point out that the KJV and RSV are English translations of the original Greek texts and that these texts, as they are preserved for us, have in no way been changed. (We have about 4000 Greek texts dating back to not less than two hundred years before Muhammad and Islam).

Secondly, there is no material alteration of any form in the structure, teaching or doctrine of the Bible in the revised translation referred to. Throughout the KJV, the RSV, and other English translations, the essence and substance of the Bible is totally unchanged.

Thirdly, these are not differing versions of the Bible. We have heard it said that there is only "one Qur'an" whereas Christians have different versions of the Bible. This is a totally false comparison for these "version" of the Bible are, it needs again be said, only English translations of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. There are many such English translations of the Qur'an as well but no one suggests that these are "different version" of the Qur'an. In the same way we have many English translations but, as a cursory comparison of these will show, we have just one Bible.

We freely admit that there are variant readings in the Bible. We believe, as Christians, in being entirely honest at all times and our consciences do not allow us to avoid the facts, nor do we believe anything can sincerely be achieved in pretending such variants do not exist.

On the contrary we do not consider that these variant readings prove that the Bible has been changed as such. The effect they have on the book is so slight and, indeed, so negligible that we know we can confidently assert that the Bible, as a whole, is intact and has never been changed in any way.

We have never ceased to be amazed, however, at the general Muslim claim that the Qur'an has never been changed whereas the Bible has allegedly been so corrupted that it is no longer what it was and therefore cannot be regarded as the Word of God. All the evidence history has bequeathed to us in respect of the textual history of the Qur'an and the Bible suggests, rather, that both books are remarkably intact in the form in which they were originally written but that neither has escaped the presence, here and there, of variant readings in the text. We can only presume that the fond illusion of Qur'anic inerrancy and Biblical corruption is a convenient way - indeed, as the evidence shows, a desperate and drastic way - of explaining away the fact that the Taurat and Injil are actually Christian rather than Islamic in content and teaching. Whatever the reason for this myth, we know we speak the truth when we say that the suggestion that the Qur'an is unchanged while the Bible has been changed on many occasions is the greatest lie ever proclaimed in the name of truth.

It is time the Muslim doctors of religion in the world told their pupils and students the truth. There is abundant evidence that, when the Qur'an was first collated by the Caliph Uthman into one standard text, there were numerous texts in existence which all contained a host of variant readings. During his reign reports were brought to him that, in various parts of Syria, Armenia and Iraq, Muslims were reciting the Qur'an in a way different to that in which those in Arabic were reciting it. Uthman immediately called for the manuscript of the Qur'an which was in the possession of Hafsah (one of the wives of Muhammad and the daughter of Umar) and ordered Zaid b. Thabit and three others to make copies of the text and to correct it wherever necessary. When these were complete we read that Uthman took drastic action regarding the other manuscripts of the Qur'an in existence:

At no time in Christian history has anyone attempted to standardise just one copy of the Bible as the true one while attempting to have all the others destroyed. Why did Uthman make such an order regarding the other Qur'ans in circulation? We can only presume that he believed that they contained grave defects - so many and so serious as to call not for revision but for wholesale destruction. In other words, if we assess the textual history of the Qur'an just at this point, we find that the Qur'an standardised as the correct one is that which a man (and not God), according to his own discretion (and not by revelation), decreed to be the true one. We fail to see on what grounds this copy was regarded as the only perfect one available and will shortly produce evidence that the codex of Ibn Mas'ud had a far greater claim to be the best one available. (Indeed none could seriously be regarded as perfect in the light of the many differences between them.)

It is practically certain that there was not one Qur'an in existence which agreed with Hafsah's copy in every detail, for all other copies were ordered to be burnt. This kind of evidence most certainly does not in any way back up the allegation that the Qur'an has never been changed in any way.

Firstly, there is incontrovertible evidence that even this one "revised standard version" of the Qur'an was anything but perfect. In the most accredited works of Islamic tradition we read that even after these copies were sent out the same Zaid recalled a verse which was missing. He testified:

The verse was Sura al-Ahzab 33:23. Therefore, if the evidence is to be believed (and there is none to the contrary), there was not one Qur'an at the time of Uthman's recension which was perfect.

Secondly, there is similar evidence that, to this day, whole passages are still omitted from the Qur'an. We are told that Umar in his reign as Caliph stated that certain verses prescribing stoning for adultery were recited by Muhammad as part of the Qur'an in his lifetime:

Here is clear evidence that the Qur'an, as it stands today, is still not "perfect", as the verse about stoning of adulterers remains absent from the text. Elsewhere in the Hadith we find further evidence that certain verses and passages once formed part of the Qur'an but are now omitted from its text. It is quite clear, therefore, that the textus receptus of the Qur'an in the world today is not the textus originalis.

Going back to the texts which were marked for the fire, however, we find that in every case there were considerable differences between these and the text which Uthman decided, according to his own discretion, to standardise as the best text of the Qur'an. Furthermore these differences were not purely dialectal, as is often suggested. In many cases we find that they were real textual variants and not mere dialectal peculiarities (Jeffery, The Qur'an as Scripture).

In some cases there were consonantal variants in certain words, in others the variants concerned whole clauses, and here and there words and sentences were found in some codices that were omitted in others. There were some fifteen different codices affected by these differences.

We shall now consider the text of Abdullah Ibn Mas'ud. (What can be said of his codex generally applies to the others destroyed by Uthman's command as well). His text was regarded by the local community at Kufa as their official recension of the Qur'an. When Uthman first sent out the order that all texts besides that in Hafsah's possession were to be burnt, Ibn Mas'ud refused to relinquish his codex and it rivalled the codex of Hafsah as the official text for some time.

Ibn Mas'ud was one of the very first Muslims and also one of the earliest teachers among those who taught the reading and recitation of the Qur'an. Indeed he was widely regarded as being one of the best authorities on its text. On one occasion he recited more than seventy suras of the Qur'an in Muhammad's presence and no one found fault with his recitation (Sahih Muslim, Vol. 4, p.1312). Indeed in the same highly respected collection of traditions of Imam Muslim we read:

According to another work of Hadith, this same Ibn Mas'ud was present when Muhammad allegedly reviewed the Qur'an with Gabriel each year (Ibn Sa'd, Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, Vol. 2, p.441). In a similar tradition we read that Muhammad said:

The words italicised are the comment of the reporter of the tradition, namely Masruq. They show that, of the Muslims at that time, Ibn Mas'ud was the foremost authority on the Qur'an.

Records of many variant readings in the codices of both Salim and Ubai bin Ka'b exist but, as Ibn Mas'ud was especially singled out before the others by Muhammad himself, it is astonishing to discover that his text varied from others (including Hafsah's) so often that the different readings involved are set out in no less than ninety pages of Arthur Jeffery's collection of variants in the various codices (Jeffery, Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur'an, pp. 24-114). The author has taken his evidence from numerous Islamic sources which are documented in his book. There are no less than 149 cases in Sura al-Baqara 2 alone where his text differed from the others in circulation, in particular the text of Hafsah.

Furthermore, one of the reasons he gave for refusing to abandon his codex in favour of Hafsah's was that the latter text was compiled by Zaid b. Thabit, who was still only in the loins of an unbeliever when he had already become one of the closest companions of Muhammad.

Two things emerge from all this. Firstly, it appears that the text of Ibn Mas'ud had far better grounds than of Hafsah for being the best text of the Qur'an available - in particular as Muhammad had considered him to be the first of the four best authorities on the Qur'an. Secondly, there were voluminous textual variants between the two texts - literally thousands which are all, without exception, documented in Jeffery's book.

Allowing further for the fact that there were about a dozen other primary codices of prominent men like Salim and Ubai bin Ka'b and that these differed radically from Hafsah's text as well (often agreeing with the text of Ibn Mas'ud instead!), we must conclude that the evidence available totally negates the fond illusion that there is no proof that the Qur'an has never been changed. Jeffery's book contains 362 pages of incontrovertible evidence that the foremost codices of the Qur'an in those all-important early days differed widely from another one in many respects. Therefore the Qur'an, too, has variant readings and in no way can any man with an honest conscience before God suggest that the Qur'an is free from the grave defects found in the textual history of the Bible. This is a fallacy propagated in defiance of the cold facts to the contrary.

The truth is that the textual history of the Qur'an is very similar to that of the Bible (Guillaume, Islam, p.58). Both books have been preserved remarkably well. Each is, in its basic structure and content, a very fair record of what was originally there. Both have suffered here and there from variant readings in the early codices known to us but neither has in any way been corrupted. Sincere Christians and Muslims will honestly acknowledge these facts.

The only difference between the Qur'an and the Bible today is that the Christian Church has, in the interests of truth, carefully preserved the variant readings that exist in the Biblical text whereas the Muslims at the time of Uthman deemed it expedient to destroy, as far as possible, all evidences of different readings of the Qur'an in the cause of standardising one text for the whole of the Muslim world. There may well be only one text of the Qur'an in circulation today, but no one can honestly claim that it is exactly that which Muhammad handed down to his companions. No one has ever shown why Hafsah's text deserved to be regarded as infallible and the evidence, on the contrary, suggests that Ibn Mas'ud's text had a far grater right to be regarded as the best available. These facts must always be considered against the background of further evidence in the Hadith that the Qur'an today is still not complete.

It does not help to say that all Qur'ans in the world today are the same. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link - and the weak link in the chain of the textual history of the Qur'an is found right at the point where, in those crucial early days, different and differing codices of the Qur'an existed. Other evidence was given that the text finally standardised as the best one was still far from being complete or in any way perfect.

Only those who have neither love for truth nor respect for valid evidence will claim that the Bible has been corrupted while the Qur'an is allegedly unchanged. Such men may fondly imagine that the cause of their faith is being greatly served with such distortions of truth. But God, who is true and who loves the truth, will assuredly set his face against their questionable propaganda.

Deedat then produces a reproduction of a page from a magazine entitled Awake dating back some twenty-three years published by the Jehovah's Witnesses (a non-Christian cult) which quotes a secular magazine Look to the effect that there are some modern students who say that there are probably 50,000 errors in the Bible.

No mention is made of the identity of these so-called modern students, nor is even the slightest evidence given of just a sample of this alleged abundance of errors. We can only presume that this allegation is purely rhetorical and stems from excessive prejudice against the Bible and all that it teaches.

Unfortunately those who share this prejudice swallow anything they read against the Bible, not matter how far-fetched or absurd it may be. In the same way, Deedat takes as established fact any charge he reads against the Bible without the slightest effort to verify it. We find it hard to take him seriously when he says:

What he means is that he does not know of tens of thousands of errors in the Bible. Of these alleged fifty thousand defects he produces just four for our consideration. Now we must presume that a man with such an alleged wealth of errors at his disposal will be able to provide, in just four cases, very substantial evidence of total corruption in the Bible. We are also surely entitled to presuppose that these four examples will be the very best he can produce. Let us examine them.

On page 22 of his booklet Is the Bible God's Word? Deedat reproduces a pamphlet allegedly showing that the Arabic word for God, Allah, is found in the Scofield translation of the Bible. Fortunately the evidence, in this case, is set before us to consider. A copy of a page from a Scofield Bible is reproduced and in a footnote we find that the Hebrew word for God, Elohim, is derived from two words, El (strength) and Alah (to swear). This last word is supposed to be proof that the Arabic word Allah is found in the Bible!

The word in Hebrew is alah, a common word meaning "to swear". How this is supposed to be proof that the word Allah in Arabic, meaning God, is found in the Bible is altogether unclear to us. Deedat's effort to twist the facts further in suggesting that Elah in Hebrew (meaning God) has been spelt by the editors of the Scofield translation alternatively as Alah (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.21) taxes our credulity to an unbearable extreme. These editors clearly identify the latter word as another one entirely meaning "to swear".

As if this was not enough, we are obliged to swallow even more of his illogic when he suggests that the omission of the word Alah in the latest Scofield edition is proof that the word has been blotted out ... in the Bible of the orthodox! (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.21). What is quite clear is that it has been omitted from a footnote in a commentary and we cannot possibly see how this can be regarded as a change in the text of the Bible itself! Elsewhere Deedat claims that Christians may not consider any footnote as part of the Word of God itself (Is the Bible God's Word? p.17). It is a great pity that this man cannot apply to himself the standards he demands from others.

It will be useful to point out here, however, that there is nothing unique about the word Allah, nor must it be regarded as coming originally from the pages of the Qur'an. On the contrary it is quite clearly derived from the Syriac word Alaha (meaning "God") in common use among Christians in pre-Islamic times (cf. the authorities cited by Jeffery in The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an, p.66). It was also in common use among the Arabs before Islam, as appears from the name of Muhammad's own father, Abdullah (i.e., "servant of God" from abd, meaning "servant", and Allah, meaning "God"). It is also certain that Allah was the name used for God in pre-Islamic poetry (Bell, The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment, p.53). Accordingly there is nothing unique about the name at all. In the circumstances we really fail to see what Deedat is trying to prove or what his excitement is all about.

We need not deal extensively with Deedat's chapter entitled Damning Confessions as these are nothing but honest admissions that the Bible has textual variants such as those we have considered already. As we have also seen that the Qur'an has also been beset with the same problems, we do not believe that there is any further obligation on us to treat the red herring seriously.

We do marvel, however, at a grossly inaccurate statement by Deedat to the effect that out of over four thousand differing manuscripts the Christians boast about, the church fathers just selected four which tallied with their prejudices and called them Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.24). Once again Deedat has exposed his appalling ignorance of his subject for these four thousand scripts are copies of the 27 books which constitute the New Testament. Hundreds of these are copies of the four Gospels referred to. Statements like these force us to conclude that the booklet written by Deedat cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as a scholarly critique of the Bible but rather a tirade against it by a man whose ignorance is matched only by his extreme prejudice against it.

Such prejudice is openly exposed on the next page where he claims that the five books of Moses cannot be regarded as being the Word of God or of Moses because statements like The Lord said unto Moses..., in the third person, appear quite frequently. Because Deedat cannot consider even for a moment that Moses might well have chosen to describe himself in the third person, he claims that these words come from a third person writing from hearsay (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.25).

If so, then the Qur'an too must fall away as being neither the Word of God nor that of a prophet but of a third person writing from hearsay for similar statements are found in its pages:

We cannot see any difference between the sayings where the Lord spoke to Moses in the Bible and where Allah spoke to Jesus in the Qur'an. Surely any criticism of the Biblical expression must rebound against the Qur'an as well.

Finally Moses obviously did not write his own obituary as Deedat implies. The 34th chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy was written by his successor, Joshua the prophet, who also wrote the book of the same name which immediately follows it.

Deedat's sixth chapter deals with the authenticity of the four Gospels. He begins by suggesting that internal evidence proves that Matthew was not the author of the first Gospel (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.26) purely because Matthew describes himself in his Gospel in the third person. We have already seen how feeble this line of reasoning is. God is alleged to be the author of the Qur'an yet he is described in it on numerous occasions in the third person. Once again we cannot see how a Muslim can seriously question the authorship of any book of the Bible purely because the author describes himself in the third person.

Furthermore a brief analysis of the reproduction of the introduction to the Gospel of Matthew by J.B. Phillips in Deedat's booklet proves very enlightening. Phillips says:

Anyone who knows the meaning of the expression "sweet reason" will give thoughtful consideration to the following facts:

Finally we find it hard to give serious consideration to Deedat's complaints about the fact that Matthew copied Mark and that a chapter in Isaiah 37 is repeated in 2 Kings 19. The reasoning behind his suggestion that such wholesale cribbing (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.29) rules out the possibility that the Bible is the Word of God is extremely hard to follow.

One only needs to know the background of the Gospel of Mark to see through the folly of Deedat's line of argument. The Church Father Papias has recorded for us the fact that the Apostle Peter was the source of information for Mark's Gospel.

Peter had far more first-hand information about the life of Jesus than Matthew. The former's conversion is described in chapter 4 of Matthew's Gospel whereas the conversion of the latter appears only in chapter 9 - long after many events witnessed by the Apostle Peter had already taken place.

Furthermore Peter was often with Jesus when Matthew was not. The former witnessed the transfiguration (Mark 9:2) and was present in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:33) while Matthew was absent on both occasions.

Matthew could hardly have found a more reliable source for his Gospel and, as he copied from a Biblical text, we cannot see how his Gospel can lose the stamp of authority or genuineness.

If Deedat could show that Biblical narratives such as those he produces had parallels in "extra-Biblical" works predating the Gospels, where such works were known to be collections of fables and fairy-stories, we would treat his points more seriously. On the contrary, while such parallels are obviously lacking in Biblical cases, there are many stories in the Qur'an, set forth as true to history, which have awkward parallels in pre-Islamic Jewish books of fables and fairy-tales. We shall consider just one example.

The Qur'an records the murder of Abel by his brother Cain (Sura al-Maida 5:27-32) which is also found in the Bible in the Book of Genesis. At one point, however, we find an unusual statement which has no parallel in the Bible:

In a Jewish book of fables and folklore, however, we read that Adam wept for Abel and did not know what to do with his body until he saw a raven scratch in the ground and bury its dead companion. At this Adam decided to do as the raven had done. (Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, Chapter 21).

In the Qur'an it is Cain who sees the raven and in the Jewish book it is Adam but, apart from this minor difference, the similarity between the stories is unmistakable. As the Jewish book predates the Qur'an it appears that Muhammad plagiarised the story and, with convenient adjustments, wrote it down in the Qur'an as part of the divine revelation! If this conclusion is to be resisted, we would like to be given sound reasons why it should be - especially when we consider the verse in the Qur'an which reads:

At first sight this verse appears to have no connection with the preceding narrative. Why the life or death of one should be as the salvation or destruction of all mankind is not at all clear. When we turn to another Jewish tradition, however, we find the link between the story and what follows. We turn to the Mishnah as translated by H. Danby and there we read these words:

According to the Jewish rabbi who wrote these words the use of the plural "bloods" in the Bible implies not only the blood of one man but that of his whole progeny. We consider his interpretation to be highly speculative but, be that as it may, we are constrained to ask how it is that the alleged revelation of Allah in the Qur'an is a patent repetition of the rabbi's beliefs! We can only conclude that Muhammad plagiarised the dictum about the whole nation from a Jewish source without showing (or even knowing!) where the link originates.

The extraordinary sequel between the story of the raven in both the Qur'an and Jewish folklore and the subsequent philosophy about the implications of the murder of one man together with his seed clearly suggests that Muhammad was depending on certain informants for his information and that these verses could not possibly have come from God. This conclusion can hardly be resisted:

Instead of trying to make capital out of the passages in the Bible which have parallels elsewhere in the Bible, Deedat should rather give us an alternative explanation as to why Qur'anic passages are embarrassingly similar to and patently reliant on Jewish books of fables and folklore.

He closes his chapter by describing those who believe that every word, comma and full stop of the Bible is God's Word as Bible-thumpers (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.33). Certainly we have no sympathy with fanatics who make such extreme claims for the Bible but, in the light of the evidence we have studied thusfar, we can only retort that those equally fanatical Muslims who in the same manner vainly make similar extremist claims for the Qur'an against all the evidence to the contrary must be viewed with the same disdain and deserve to be ridiculed as Qur'an-thumpers!

Deedat begins his seventh chapter The Acid Test with a claim that there is a contradiction between 2 Samuel 24:1, where we read that the Lord moved David to number Israel, and 1 Chronicles 21:1, which says it was Satan who provoked him to do so. Anyone who has a reasonable knowledge of both the Bible and the Qur'an will immediately perceive that Deedat is exposing nothing but his hopelessly inadequate understanding of a distinctive feature of the theology of both books. In the Qur'an itself we find a similar passage which sheds much light on this subject:

Here we read that Allah sets devils on unbelievers. Therefore, whereas it is God who moves them to confusion, he uses the devils to provoke them towards it. In precisely the same way it was God who moved against David and used Satan to provoke him to number Israel. Likewise in the Book of Job in the Bible we read that Satan was given power over Job (Ayub in the Qur'an) to afflict him (Job 1:12) but that God later spoke as if it was he who was moved against him (Job 2:3). Whenever Satan provokes men the action can also indirectly be described as the movement of God for without his permission Satan could achieve nothing. Zamakhshari's comment on Sura al-Baqara 2:7 (Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts) should suffice as the final word on this matter:

It appears that Deedat should take a lesson in Qur'anic theology from Zamakhshari before exposing themselves to ridicule through unsubstantiated attacks on the Bible.

Deedat's further points about the three or seven years of plagues in 2 Samuel 24:13 and 1 Chronicles 21:11 and other similar discrepancies, are all accounted for as minor copyist errors where scribes mistook one figure for another. For example in Hebrew one very small word is used for 2000 in 1 Kings 7:26 and it is remarkably similar to the figure for 3000 found in 2 Chronicles 4:5 (see Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.42). To any objective enquirer it is clear that a scribe in the latter case mistook 2000 for 3000. In all the cases set out by Deedat we have minor copyist errors easily identifiable as such and not contradictions in the normal sense of the word as he suggests. No one has ever shown us what effect these negligible errors have on the contents of the Bible as a whole.

We can just as easily allege that there is a palpable contradiction in the Qur'an where a day with God is described as a "thousand years" in our reckoning (Sura al-Sajda 32:5) whereas in an earlier Sura such a day is described as "fifty thousand years" (Sura al-Maarij 70:4). Instead of haranguing about the fact that 2 Chronicles 9:25 speaks of four thousand stalls while 1 Kings 4:26 speaks of forty thousand, which he describes as a staggering discrepancy (sic) of 36000 (Is the Bible God's Word? p.44), Deedat should rather explain an even more staggering discrepancy of 49000 whole years which have summarily disappeared from the reckoning of a day with God in the Qur'an.

In his next chapter Deedat makes much of the story of Judah's incest with Tamar (Genesis 38) and of similar stories in the Bible (such as Lot's incest with his daughters) and suggests that the Bible cannot be the Word of God because such stories are found in it.

We find this line of reasoning extremely hard to follow. Surely a book claiming to be the Word of God cannot be rejected as such because it shows up men - even the best of them - at their worst. All the stories Deedat refers to have to do with the wickedness of men and how the frank disclosure of the sins of men can affect the Bible's claim to be the Word of God is beyond comprehension. Throughout the Bible God is shown to be absolutely holy, perfectly righteous, and wonderfully loving. Very significantly Deedat nowhere suggests that the character of God in the Bible is worthy of reproach and surely this is all we really are concerned about when it comes to determining whether a book is the Word of God. If it unreservedly exposes the sins of men for what they are and refuses to cover up the excesses of even the best of them, it surely has a very fair claim to be God's Word - for it is concerned about his praise and not the praise of men. It is the glory of God that the Bible is concerned about - not the vainglory of men!

What is also significant is that Deedat conveniently overlooked a story in the Bible which reveals far greater wickedness than those he chooses to deal with. In 2 Samuel 11 we read that David saw Bathsheba bathing and had her brought in to him and he committed adultery with her. After this, when she conceived a child, David had her husband Uriah killed and took her as his own wife.

This story is at least the equal of all those referred to by Deedat in its wickedness but he carefully chooses to omit it. Why? Because the Qur'an also refers to it. We read in the 38th Sura (Sad) that two men appeared before David and one who had 99 ewes demanded the only ewe that the other had for himself. David retorted that he who had the 99 had wronged the other in demanding his lone ewe. After this, however, we read that David realised that the parable was against himself and the Qur'an quotes Allah as saying of him:

As with the story of Cain and Abel we have a vague sequence of events which have no apparent connection with what precedes. How did God try David and what had he done that he repented of for which he received God's forgiveness? We have to turn to the Bible to find the answer. In 2 Samuel 12 we read that the prophet Nathan came to David and told him of a rich man who had flocks of lambs but, when he needed one for a meal, took the one precious lamb of one of his servants instead. David was angry at the rich man but Nathan said to him:

It is now clear how God had tried David. He had more than he could wish for and a host of wives but had taken the one wife of his servant for himself. When David responded, I have sinned against the LORD Nathan replied, The LORD has taken away your sin (2 Samuel 12:13). The stories in the Qur'an and the Bible are so similar that they clearly refer to the same cause - David's adultery with Bathsheba. We need only say two things in the circumstances. Firstly, Deedat obviously chose to ignore this story of David's wickedness because he knew that it had a sequel in the Qur'an. Secondly, the fact that the Qur'an upholds the Biblical narrative shows that there can be no genuine objection to similar stories where the misdemeanours of other prophets are set out in the Christian Bible.

All the prophets were men of flesh and blood and were as likely to fall into gross wickedness as any lesser mortal might, and the Bible cannot fairly be criticised for sparing them no mercy in exposing their deeds. Even Muhammad was a man of passions similar to those of any other man and, although he had up to nine wives at one time, he could not restrain his desire to cohabit with whichever one he chose rather than share the company of each in turn. When Sura al-Ahzab 33:51 was "revealed", which gave him divine sanction to defer and receive whomever he wished of his wives at his own whim and discretion, his favourite wife Ayesha was constrained to comment:

Jesus Christ was the only man who lived who was not subject to the whims, desires and failings of other men. Deedat asks, in the light of 2 Timothy 3:16, under what headings we can classify the stories he mentions. I will kindly oblige with an answer:

Sinners can obtain the righteousness of God by repenting of their sins, seeking God's forgiveness, and trusting to him for their salvation. The Apostle Peter put it so well:

Deedat begins his last chapter with a suggestion that there is a contradiction between the genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke simply because there is a vast difference in the names listed by the two writers. To Deedat this distinction between these lists immediately proves that both there authors are confounded liars (Deedat, Is the Bible God's Word? p.54). It taxes our credulity to believe that men who painstakingly recorded the most holy and truthful teaching ever given to mankind should turn out to be "confounded liars" to Deedat claims.

Fortunately we do not share Deedat's prejudice against the Bible and can afford to approach this question objectively. At the outset it is obviously true to say that every man has two genealogies -- one through his father and one through his mother. Joseph was not the physical father of Jesus but he had to be regarded as his father for the sake of his genealogy, as all Jews reckoned their genealogies through their fathers.

Therefore Matthew, without further ado, records the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph's line and, in his succeeding narrative about the birth of Jesus, concentrates on Joseph's role as his natural guardian and as the husband of Mary, his mother.

Deedat mentions that, according to Luke 3:23, Joseph was the supposed father of Jesus (Is the Bible God's Word? p.52) without further comment. Here, in this one word, lies the key to the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Throughout the list of ancestors he names we find no mention of a woman. Although he concentrates on Mary's role in the birth of Jesus, when he comes to her genealogy he does not describe Jesus as the son of Mary but as the supposed son of Joseph, meaning that, for the sake of sustaining a masculine genealogy, Joseph was being named in her place. Luke has very carefully included the word "supposed" in his genealogy so that there could be no confusion about it and so that his readers would know that it was not the actual genealogy of Joseph that was being recorded. This very simple explanation does away immediately with alleged contradictions or problems.

Deedat, while endeavouring to sustain his claim that there is a contradiction between the Gospel-writers, also accuses Matthew of giving Jesus an ignoble ancestry by naming certain adulterers and offspring of incest (Is the Bible God's Word? p.52) as his forefathers, as if this affected his total purity and holiness.

If we examine the Gospel of Matthew we will find four women named in the genealogy of Jesus. They are Tamar, who committed incest with Judah; Rahab, who was a prostitute and a Gentile; Ruth, who was a Gentile as well; and Bathsheba, who was an adulteress. Very significantly Matthew has named the four women in the ancestry of Jesus who had moral or ethnic defects. He has obviously done so deliberately and clearly did not think he was dishonouring Jesus by naming such women. If there was any stigma attached to such an ancestry he would surely have named some of the more holy women he was descended from, like Sarah and Rebecca. Why did he choose to specifically name the very four women who disturbed the "purity" of his ancestry? Matthew very quickly gives us his own answer. When the angel came to Joseph he said of the child to be born:

It was precisely for people such as Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba that Jesus came into the world. He came to save such people from their sins and to make his salvation available to all men, both Jew and Gentile alike. As he himself said to the Jews and to his disciples on one occasion:

If you, the reader, imagine that the religious efforts you have made over the years count for some sort of righteousness before God and that your sins will be glossed over by a God who cares little for the manner in which they affront his holiness, then pursue your futile quest for self-righteousness. You need not look to Jesus for he cannot help you. There is no one who can help you.

But if you know that your sins are many and if you have discovered your true self, and have found that there is no righteousness in you but only gross wickedness; if you have been so honest with yourself as to admit these facts, then turn to Jesus for he came to save men like you and he is able to cleanse you and deliver you from all your sins.

We do not propose to deal at any length with Deedat's queries about the authors of the books of the Bible. Jesus confirmed that all the books of the Old Testament as received by the Jews were the inspired and authoritative Word of God. He quoted from them and declared that the Scriptures could not be broken (John 10:35); and the Holy Spirit has uniformly testified through all quarters of the Christian Church to the equal authority of the books of the New Testament.

The Qur'an too, as we have seen, likewise gives full support to the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians at the time of Muhammad as being the genuine Taurat and Injil, the very Word of God. Those books were the Old and New Testaments as we know them. No one can sincerely doubt these facts.

We can only draw one conclusion from all that has been said. Deedat has failed so discredit the Bible as the Word of God. Like Joommal before him, he has only exposed himself as an unworthy critic of the Christian scriptures.

Furthermore it is sad to see the negative spirit and attitude that pervades every page of his booklet. Nowhere is there any effort to treat the contents of the Bible objectively. Not once is a good word said for it and it amazes us that any one could read through the Bible and write a treatise on it that is purely critical. From first page to last the reader is confronted with a spirit of excessive prejudice, one truly unworthy of a self-acclaimed "scholar of the Bible".

On page 41 of his booklet he urges his readers to obtain a free Bible from our fellowship. I decided one day to visit one of the many Muslims who had, in consequence, written to us for a Bible and found that this young man had followed Deedat's advice on the same page to mark all the alleged contradictions and pornographic passages in coloured ink. He wasted no time in finding the texts he was looking for, which Deedat had vainly promised him would confute and confuse any missionary or Bible scholar (Is the Bible God's Word? p.41) who happened to come his way. Apart from these texts the young man, however, had made no effort to read the Bible or find out what it actually taught.

We had hoped that the spirit of the Crusades was buried by now but it appears that certain Muslim authors are determined to revive it in the hearts of the Muslim youth of today. Surely any sincere Muslim will agree that such an approach to the Bible is thoroughly questionable. What profit can be gained by perusing a book with no other purpose than to find fault with it? What sort of mentality is this that motivates men to seek nothing but supposed errors in a book before they have even read a word of it? Well did a Christian author say of the Bible:

I have often been heartened to receive letters from Muslims requesting Bibles which show a very deep measure of respect for it and have also been encouraged to discover that there are other Muslim authors in the world who take a different approach to our Holy Book. The Islamic Foundation, a well-known Muslim organisation which has published many books on Islam, has adopted a far more mature and respectable attitude to the Bible. It encourages all Muslims to do likewise and has this to say of the Christian faith in one of its publications:

What sound words of wisdom these are! Unfortunately, as we have seen, it is not only some Muslim writers of the past who have indulged in cheap harangue against the Bible. It is still going on today through the likes of Deedat and Joommal. We can only endorse the sentiments in the quotation we have given and must say to our Muslim readers that they will obtain nothing but a thoroughly distorted view of Christianity from booklets such as the one we have refuted in this publication.

As the wiser Muslim has said, the best way for Muslims to gain a true understanding of the Christian faith is to obtain books written by Christians who truly believe in it. This quote is well worthy of the consideration of all sincere Muslims:

We shall willingly supply a free Bible to any Muslim who will read it openly with a genuine desire to discover what it really teaches, who will not deface it in any way as Deedat recommends by colouring in its texts (Is the Bible God's Word? p.41) and who will show it the same respect that he would like Christians to show to the Qur'an. Those who share Deedat's prejudices, however, should not bother to open a Bible until they have changed their attitude towards it. They are like those of whom the Qur'an speaks when it says their likeness is as the likeness of the ass carrying books (Sura al-Jum'a 62:5). As the donkey is unaware of the value of the load on its back, so such men are ignorant of the spiritual treasure they have taken into their unwashed hands.

May God Almighty, in his great mercy and love, grant that we may all come to the knowledge of his holy truth -- and that we may be willing to seek it wherever it may be found. May all Muslims who have the immense privilege of possessing a Bible discover its glorious truths and radiant beauty by reading it openly with a sincere desire to know and understand its teachings and guidance.