In answer to the video "Muslims' Worst anti-Christian Polemics: Corruption of the New Testament"
The NT is supposed to be an account of Jesus' teachings. But his words constitute less than 10% of the whole book, written by people who werent even witnesses to the climactic events of his life and death. It would be impossible to find a single word from Jesus in his original language which was either Aramaic, Syriac or Hebrew according to scholarship, but certainly not Greek in which the NT was compiled. It is important to understand that the ancient Greek, besides being a totally different language than those potentially spoken by Jesus, was loaded with alien cultural and religious concepts of the pagan Graeco-Roman world. To discover the authentic teaching of Jesus, and what others believed about him, it is therefore necessary to be alert to any changes or developments in meaning arising from the transmission of ideas through the channel of Hellenistic culture. That is why it is crucial to have as reference, the language in which Jesus expressed his religious thoughts among his small group of followers. Then one can always resort to that original language whenever confusion arises in translations, which is bound to happen. In the Quran's case, one can easily refer to the language of the prophet himself, in which it was revealed, whenever there is a misunderstanding on the meaning of a translated word. Christians do not have that option and are entirely reliant on a translation of Jesus' language for reference. Of course Jews became helenized around Jesus' time. The pagan culture had infiltrated the language (with its theological baggage) culture and interpretation of scriptures. And that is the whole reason behind the messianic rebellions that tried warding off that influence. That is also why orthodox Jews never quoted or used the Septuagint, which Paul was fond of and repeatedly misused. The point is not whether Jews or Jesus could speak other languages than Hebrew or Aramaic. But whether Jesus was a helenized jew, as his anonymous biographers in the Gospels were, if not simply gentiles, or if he was a traditional Jew who would shun anything representing the pagan Greek culture. Especially the Septuagint. If he was a Pharisee, as is depicted in the NT, then he would not use Greek when quoting the HB (available in Hebrew in his time) nor speak a word of Greek when talking anything that had to do with religion. The people involved in every step of the compilation of the Quran, are all well known, together with their personal strengths and weaknesses. They were native speakers of the language of the primary source of revelation, the prophet Muhammad. Nothing could have been "lost in translation" in the process of compilation. One may grant that the Quran too quotes non-Arabian prophets like Jesus or Moses in a language other than their own. However the comparison here is misplaced as the Quranic message does not depend on the quotes of these prophets in Arabic, but on what the Arab compilers have preserved from the Arabian prophet. The New Testament message on the other hand depends on anonymous reporters whose language and culture are widely different than the semitic background of Jesus, whose marginal sayings are translated, interpreted, and expounded upon.
There are about 24000 manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek but hardly a fraction of this base is deemed important by textual critics for the reconstruction of the NT text, because they are themselves copies of lost documents. These MSS arent even identical nor self-consistent. The most important translations of the Greek New Testament are in Latin, Syriac and Coptic (after these come the Armenian, Ethiopic and the Georgian versions) but their original Greek are extremely difficult to reconstitute and are thus used on occasions with much caution, simply as indirect witnesses and in a secondary and supportive capacity. Defective translations from the Greek were because anyone judging himself capable of translating a Greek mss he would come across, would individually endeavor in doing so, thus explaining the widely different Latin renditions. This prompted the pope Damasus to commission Jerome in standardizing the Latin translation, called the Vulgate.
However the 1000s of copies lacked uniformity, either due to careless transcription or sometimes by deliberate conflation with copies of the Old Latin versions. Later medieval efforts to restore Jerome's version were met with further textual corruption through mixture of the several types of Vulgate. The other problem translators were confronted with was that certain features of Greek (conceptual or grammatical) cannot be translated directly into some other languages.
Christianity today is not even able to produce a single Greek New Testament Codex according to the limit and order as stated by Athanasius until the Mt. Athos manuscript dated 1116 CE. The word "bible" doesnt even exist in any bible canon. It is a compilation of books whose numbers vary between Christian sects, such as the Protestants and the Catholics. There are books that are believed by the Catholics to be inspired whereas the Protestants do not agree.
P52 (130 - 160 CE) is the oldest NT fragment, written on papyrus, size of a credit card written front and back. The front has John 18:31-33 and the back, John 18:37,38. Papyrus Bodmer II or P66 has been dated to about 200CE. It contains the first 14 chapters of John (but with 22 missing verses) and some parts of chapters 16 to 21. The earliest complete copies of John do not date back beyond the middle of the 4th century. What is also interesting is that early Christian writers made no reference to such a gospel, later writers of the 2nd half of the 2nd century did. At that time, Christianity was fighting an internal struggle between competing beliefs, and it is argued that John's gospel was written as a rebuttal against the Valentinians, Ebionites, the Nicolaites, and the followers of Cerinthus.
There are no full papyri of the NT dating earlier than about the 16th century CE. Out of 5366 fragments, in the Greek language alone ranging from the 2nd to the 16th century, 90% are from beyond the 9th century. Except for the smallest fragments, no two of these copies are exactly alike. What is further disturbing and unexpected for a well established Graeco-Roman written civilization is that none of the available manuscripts pre date the 2nd century. At that time, inter-Christian hatred was rampant and different groups accused one another of tampering with the text to fit their ideas. Even on the mainstream level, Jews and Christians accused one another of physical manipulation of scriptures especially in messianic passages. Among many contemporary writings attesting to the phenomenon is the dialogue between Justin Martyr and Trypho the Jew.
Another papyri known as P75 whose dating is disputed misses Luke 22:43-44.
This means that nothing dates to the time of Jesus, much less his apostles, nor do the first copies of those originals. Although most discrepancies fall in the category of careless scribal errors that are of little to no theological significance, the fact is that there are known and documented deliberate textual changes to advance a certain theological position.
The most glaring and consistent changes relate to the trinitarian inclination of the text. As technological advances were made, scholars were able to get fairly close to reconstructing the common original by sifting through the discrepancies of the 1000s of manuscripts. In the process, they have discarded the obvious scribal changes. This includes 100s of alterations the likes of Mk3:11 where
"You are the Son of God”was altered to read
“You are God, the Son of God”to help support the Trinitarian position.
This type of blatant corruption to the text could not be denied by modern biblical scholarship, even the most conservative trinitarian scholars. These trinitarian alterations have been discarded from the Greek text produced by the United Bible Society and the one produced by the Institute for New Testament Research in Germany. But since there is nothing remotely close to a complete original or first copy of the original NT text, it is impossible to know how much theological corruption of that type was successfully introduced into the later copies upon which scholars have based their comparisons to reconstruct something close to the original NT text.
The languages of the bible are effectively dead anyway, whether they are ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek or Aramaic. Contrast this with millions of people who have a very strong grasp of the Arabic of the Quran. Not only that, but very effective and strong and vast tools to help them understand it whether the vocabulary, usage, grammar and also secondary explanation through Hadeeth. The other particularity of Arabic is it became the centralizing force of the whole empire. People started to learn Arabic to communicate, both on the level of the common man, as well as the scholars. Kufa and Basra were part of the Persian Empire, but they became centers of learning as far as the nuances of Arabic were concerned. Many of the contributors to the development of Arabic grammar were Persians, meaning the Arabic language was the defining feature of this new civilization, irrespective of the cultural shift. Egyptians speak Arabic, the Syrians speak Arabic, the Jordanians, the Iraqis, besides the whole Gulf Region for a reason. Somalians and Sudanese and other cultures speak Arabic as a common language. There was no vaccum between now and then, as far as Arabic is concerned.
Even the intricacies of the language that were common to the poets have been preserved through the scholarship. All books of lexicons and linguistics on Arabic were produced while the language was alive and spread throughout contrary to other ancient languages whose lexicons were produced in a vacuum, when they essentially became dead, by an elite and only for that elite. The Catholic Church kept the language of the Bible locked for a 1000 year in a Latin language which was far beyond the comprehension fo the vast majority of the people, prohibiting its translation.
As said earlier, this Latin is itself translated from a dead Greek language that wasnt even the language of Jesus and his followers, and that was the vehicle of sophisticated pagan thought. In the case of the Quran, the blueprint of its ancient language, expressions and words used in pre-islamic and early post-islamic literature is available for anyone learning classical Arabic today. And this, despite the evolution of Arabic through the centuries and countries it spread to, or the changing conditions that burdened many words with new, sometimes introducing completely opposite meanings than originally intended.
All these linguistic tools however have been understood as secondary when approaching the Quranic. The primary approach by the great commentators in understanding the language of the Quran was to compare it by the way the Quran itself makes use of it. That is why it is humorous when people speak of grammatical errors of the Quran. Especially when such critics have no grasp of the Quranic language and much less the grammar of later classical Arabic which itself relies on the Quran. There isnt even a contemporaneous written text to the Quran that we know of from which the Quran could possibly deviate. The Quran in fact is the first ever Arabic book, the first writing that marked the transition of the Arabs from an oral to written culture. Therefore, from the onset, to assert grammatical errors in the Quran is untenable.
The Quran simply spoke in the dialect of the Quraish tribe with all their peculiarities and standards of language
"And We did not send any messenger but with the language of his people, so that he might explain to them clearly"
"Indeed, we have revealed this as an Arabic Quran so that you may understand".The only real standard of comparison would be another writing, form of literature, grammar rules from the Quraish tribe contemporaneous with the Quran. Also, many languages today provide exceptions to their standard grammatical usages. Today's classical grammar 'rules' can be at variance with the Quran on which it has heavily relied on as a source, but to suggest the Quran is at variance with the grammar known to us today is illogical.
The 400 years following Jesus' death produced numerous canons of the bible each combining different gospels, rejecting and adding things from the HB and adding to the NT. For example the Protestant, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Greek Orthodox, Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac churches boast their different bibles as God's Word.
According to some estimates, early Christians wrote at least twenty gospels that weren't included in the bible. The apocryphal Gospels were rejected because of many reasons including doubtful authorship yet the canonized scriptures arent that much more authentic. Some books are considered apocrypha by the western church and scripture by the eastern church. When comparing the canonical and apocryphal writings, it isnt a case of first-hand versus second-hand information. It is merely a choice between doctrinal points of view, with the choice being made by men with a doctrinal bias. Some have been partially preserved such as the Gospel of Thomas. It is different than the infancy gospel of Thomas, and lacks any mention of crucifixion or resurrection. It is considered by some scholars to be the or one of the initial documents out of which developed the other more elaborate gospels. This Gospel of Thomas was for the first 2 centuries considered holy scriptures. The same with the gospels of Matthaias or "The Twelve", Acts of Andrew or Acts of John, Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas. The last 2 books were still included in the codex sinaiticus, which is the earliest complete copy of the NT that is dated to around the year 350. There is also the Didache and the Apocalypse of Peter.
On the other hand rejected by the early church fathers were Paul’s letter to Philemon, the 2nd and 3rd letters of John, the 2nd letter of Peter and the General Epistle of Jude, all part of the canon after Christianity became the state religion. Nobody ever found the books from which the writers of the NT are sometimes quoting, as in Jn7:38,Lk11:49 or James4:5,Jude1:14-15.
The Book of Revelations was considered apocrypha for the first 200 years of the Christian Church until it became God-inspired. However even as late as the 4th-century, many Christians either rejected it in favor of the Apocalypse of Peter, or believed that they should both be included in the canon.
The Epistle of St James was ignored for centuries until the Council of Trent put it in the canon in 1563. That book received a cool reception, obviously as it appeals greatly to Jewish scriptures, rejects the Pauline concept of "faith alone".
In the 2nd century, Marcion who claimed to have known Paul, composed the first NT, calling it "Evangelicon" which he attributed to Paul himself, and appended ten of Paul's epistles to it. He rejected all of Jewish scriptures, based on YHWH's cruelty versus Paul's loving god. One can argue he was right in a sense, nothing could be further in terms of similarities than the Gods and their plan for creation than the Gods of the HB and the NT.
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