Friday 6 October 2017

A Reality for Christians on Quran and Bible Preservation

The claim that there are numerous Qurans is a result of a foundational misunderstanding on the Muslim view of the Quran and its preservation. Muslims know what constitutes the Quran as the Readings of the Quran with a Tawatur tradition are all accepted Readings (and thus considered the Quran). Any one of these Readings is sufficient and is considered to be the Quran. The problem here is, many critics don’t understand this point and think Muslims have a load of different Qurans. The take home point here is that the Muslims know for certainty the contents of each Reading of the Quran and these are considered to be the Quran while the Christians have long admitted defeat on this front vis-a-vis the Bible.

Christians actually have variants whilst Muslims have Multiple Readings. Muslims are meant to have multiple Readings of the Quran as per the way the Quran was Revealed. Christians are not meant to have variants. Because they have variants they need Textual Criticism (to speculate which MS reading is the original) and continuous archeology (to continually look for new MSS to help them find new variants or to find evidence which helps them speculate the strength and veracity of various readings already in the NT MS tradition). In addition, the Bible is a text still in flux, in that any verse could be relegated to a the status of a later addition (i.e. forgery) upon a new manuscript find – the historical precedent was set quite spectacularly for this in the 19th Century with Dr Von Tischendorf’s find (or theft :)) of Codex Sinaiticus (relegating the PA and the ending of Mark to the status of later additions). In fact the Christians have given up the keys to the Bible to the academy now.

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