David Wood gives an overview of the 6 questions or challenges he suggests are the most common posed by Muslims to Christians. David then added another in a different video.
They are:
- The Bible has been corrupted
- The Trinity makes no sense
- Where did Jesus say, "I am God, worship me"?
- How can God die?
- How can God punish one person for the sins of another person?
- If Jesus died for your sins, can't you sin all you want?
- Why did Jesus pray to God if he is God?
Let's look at them.
But first, a question. As in any contentious discussion, you need information (see Koukl's 'Tactics' and 'Street Smarts') start with a question.
So when claims such as these are made, ask for more information with questions such as 'Why do you think that is the case?' or 'What do you understand or what do you mean by...?
Then I'll set out some notes that may be relevant to your response to the claim.
1. The Bible has been corrupted
Q: 'What do you mean 'corrupted'? OR 'Why do you think it has been corrupted, and by whom?'
Behind this is that Muslims claim the Bible foretold Mohammad as the last prophet, but no information can be found relating to this so the Bible must have been corrupted.
1. You mean like the Quran has been corrupted?
This will light a fuse because Islamic rhetoric is that the Quran has been preserved intact to the dot from all eternity. Of course it has not been with textual evidence of erasures and over-writing in early texts, there being no texts from before { }. The text was said to have been finalized by Uthman in {} who also burned the versions he didn't approve of. Uthman was not a prophet, so what gives? Pieces of the Quran have been eaten by a sheep, and lost. Many who had memorized sections of it were killed in battle. Jay Smith presented in London (Speakers' Corner) 27 different Qurans and Yasir Qadhi, an Islam scholar, is on video challenging the 'perfect preservation' trope.
2. How can you say that, the Quran tells us that God protects the integrity of the Torah and the Gospel; how could it be corrupted. He's the same one who tells us that he protects the integrity of the Quran.
Refer to this video by David Wood. and this more recent one.
2. Let's look at what we know of the text of the Bible:
Firstly, Yeshua endorsed the Jewish scriptures by using them without adverse comment, but with direct reference. Therefore we take these as reliable.
Secondly we have the New Testament events noted in secular historical and contemporaneous texts (e.g. Tacitus, Josephus). The texts were composed very soon after Yeshua's resurrection and we have a vast collection of very early copies (over 20,000 from the second century)
[Image from https://youtu.be/NLKh7ADD7bs , edited]
Compared to the Islamic tradition texts, of which we only have late records, much later than the claimed date of compilation of the quran.
[Image from https://youtu.be/2TDKgwXuX5g , edited]
3. This claim is not accepted by some of your scholars. The Jewish and Christian scriptures were extant at the time of the reciting of the Quran and we have those same texts today: no change! See Saeed, 2002 "The Charge of Distortion of Jewish and Christian Scriptures" in The Muslim World v.92.
Moreover, the Quran tells us that Allah 'preserved' the texts and they 'could not be corrupted' See Wood on this.
S. 3:3-4: "He [Allah] has revealed to you the book with truth, verifying that which is before it [that is, present before you] and he revealed the Torah and the Gospel aforetime, a guidance for mankind and he revealed the criterion"
...and its preservation:
S. 6:115-115: "Shall I then seek a judge other than Allah? And he it is who has revealed to you the book made plain; and those to whom we have given the book know that it is revealed by your Lord with truth, therefore you should not be of the disputers. And the word of your lord has been accomplished truly and justly; there is none who can change his words and he is the hearing, the knowing."
2. The Trinity makes no sense
Q: What to you understand by 'the Trinity'?
The typical Muslim view is that the 'trinity' is God, Mary and Jesus. This appears to be a collocation of misunderstandings, perhaps from a garbled report on the RC adoration of Mary from early or aberrant Christian sources or confused oral reports.
1. The Trinity makes the best sense of the information in the Bible. The Bible shows the Father, Son and Spirit equally as God in conduct, knowledge, power, and will. The NT shows Yeshua is creator.
2. The Trinity shows God eternally personal and in eternal fellowship of love. God has no need of mankind to be either personal or love or to complete him in his being. He made mankind rather than to serve him, to enjoy fellowship with him for ever.
3. The Trinity is not 'three gods'. But one God in substance or being, in three centres of consciousness, or of action, and of shared purpose and will. This is similar to our own experience of multiplexed electronic signals, of how a business partnership works at law, or indeed in a pale way as to how a family is: husband and wife of one flesh and the child proceeding from them together as one family of one nature (human) in three persons.
4. The Quran shows a multiplicity in Allah: it speaks of his....{}
3. Where did Jesus say, "I am God, worship me"?
Islam holds out Jesus to be a great prophet, but not divine in any way. Yet the Quran claims that he was sinless. It also claims that Jesus did not die on the cross but that Yahweh made someone else take his place and to look like him. Jesus was 'taken up' to heaven.
Q: Why does Jesus have to use your words to tell ancient Hebrews and 1st century Jews that he is the Creator?
Alternatively, this is an example of the informal fallacy of the 'false dilemma'. That is Jesus is only God if he uses the formula above, or if he doesn't use this formula (a formulation that would be foreign to the ancient Hebrews and the 1st century Jews) he is not 'god'.
But God is not constrained to use your made-up formula to say that he is God. He spoke and acted in first century AD Judaism, so he spoke in terms and lived a pattern that was signally meaningful to them. Islam wasn't even invented then, so how could it understand the Creator God?
Here's how Yeshua showed and said that he was God:
[walk on water/still the storm
I AM
He forgives sin
He commands demons
I lay down my life, I take it up again. He is in sovereign over life and death, even his own.]
4. How can God die?
Islam's basic problem is that it can't accommodate the Triune nature of God and that if Jesus is God, then there is no other person who is god.
They will say that we claimed God died when Jesus died on the cross. Here is an opportunity to reflect back on their misunderstanding of the Trinity, the nature of God and the nature of the Incarnation.
A related claim by Muslims is that 'anything that is in the creation cannot be God because it would be 'dependent' and that God doesn't enter into specific things within the creation'. However this amounts to 'made up' special pleading. Who says that God cannot do whatever he pleases? Now, God doesn't enter with his completeness into the bush or in the Incarnation, but, in the former, manifests himself thusly, and in the Incarnation, in the Son who sets aside his glory to be as a created man.
Yet the Quran contradicts this: S. 27:7-9 had Allah entering the burning bush before Moses. And the hadith Jami at-Tirmidhi 446 "Blessed and exalted is he descending to the earth's heaven every night" has Allah descending to the creation to hear prayers.
Q: What happens when a person dies?
1. The body and soul are separated. Remember that we are created to live for ever, either in the Kingdom of God, or cut off from God. We don't cease to exit! See Surah al Baqriah: s. 2 v. 154 where the shaheed are alive: those who were killed are still 'alive'! Even your Quran tells us that there is life after death.
2. The incarnate Son of God left his incarnate body in death. Thus in his resurrection he showed us that he is the Son of God, and he showed us in the resurrection his conquest of death and what awaits all those in him ('in Christ' as Paul often puts it) in the general resurrection at the end of time.
Refer to this video by David Wood.
And this one by Sam Shamoun.
1. The only begotten son of God entered human life, the life of his creature, to defeat death in his resurrection and rescue us from it and for his kingdom. Because he was begotten from all eternity, he is of the same nature as God: like your child is of the same nature as you. Only the relationship of Yeshua (Jesus) and God the father is eternal, because God is love.
Refer to John 1:1-5, 14; Philippians 2:6-11;
5. How can God punish one person for the sins of another person?
Because Muslims think that Jesus is 'just' a prophet, they think that we claim somehow his death pays for our sin, and that our sin was 'placed' on him, a mere mortal.
See David Wood's video on this topic.
No, Yeshua took our punishment, that is he suffered the death that is the wages of sin that we suffer, so that he would show his conquest of sin and death in his resurrection. So, in a way he did take the punishment due to us, but we are united with him in his kingdom not because we are sinless. It is because in our new birth, our regeneration by his Spirit we are made righteousness and our sin is removed from us by God. We are fully pardoned by the work of Christ.
6. If Jesus died for your sins, can't you sin all you want?
Islam has a very behavioural and legalistic view of sin, and much of what the Bible calls sin is avoided by Islam's escape clauses (e.g. sexual brutality being 'temporary marriage'). Allah, the fake god of Islam, will overlook your sin if you have done certain things in life: the 7 pillars and/or kissed the black stone or died as a martyr.
There is no concept of new life from the Spirit or repentance as part of our union with Christ.
Q: What do you think it means that Jesus died for our sins and what is the consequence of this for we his followers?
1. In a way yes! Once a person is re-born by the Spirit he or she can sin all they like. But we no longer like to sin, we like to follow our Lord whose Spirit has given us new life. We do sin, but live in the humility of repentance and seek to grow out of the habits of pride, selfishness and greed.
2. We not only have been forgiven our sins, but we are freed from them and from the death that is their wages. So we look forward to the second resurrection and life forever in the Kingdom of God in his New Creation. Sin is not just actions and thoughts, it is life that is turned away from and rejecting Yahweh our creator.
3. Paul in Romans 6 deals with this very question:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? Far from it! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be [c]in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; 7 for the one who has died is freed from sin...
7. Why did Jesus pray to God if he is God?
This is an attempt to show the incoherence of the trinity, it fails to understand what prayer is and that the trinity is inter-communicative, sharing one will. To adopt the language of partnership law: the members of the trinity are jointly and severally divine.
Q: What do you understand prayer is, and why is Yeshua praying to Yahweh an issue?
Jesus in his humanity showed us what it is to be truly human. This includes being in prayer to and therefore communion with the father in complete dependence on the father in all things. He shows his relationship to the father and that ours is intended to be similar. In his divine- (god-) nature he is in continuous communion with his father and shares the will of the father and the spirit. Not prayer as we know it, but as it is to turn out to us.
It is important to note that the Spirit of God prays for us (intercedes for us, Romans 8:26). That is, he prays to the father!
Prayer is not rote 'subjugation' to God, which Islamic prayer appears to be, but a true seeking to be in the presence of God and seeking to know him and have him active in one's life and thought.
And, if you meet a Muslim?
If you meet a Muslim, ask why one should be a Muslim. You might then ask why they would not be Christian and repent and follow Yahweh. They might use the questions above, or that Jesus was a Muslim, a great prophet, and submitted to God, but not the final prophet, who is Mohammad, the greatest man. You can then contrast Jesus and Mo, for instance.
You might use these questions:
What is the test of a prophet? (refer to Deuteronomy 18:22, also the public life of the prophet and his/her humility, not their war-likeness).
Why do you say 'peace be upon him' when you refer to your prophet? Is he still on earth? If he is in paradise, he has peace, if he is not, it won't happen; either way what is the point?
David Wood as a couple of helpful videos on talking to Muslims, firstly on talking to pleasant Muslims about unpleasant things and 10 questions for Muslims.
