Apologetics: Flippin’ Fatwa Friday – An Interesting Conversation Chain with a Muslim: Is Christianity Blind Faith?

On Wednesday, I posted my response to a Muslim’s claims for the veracity of Islam, so today, I’ll be posting my response to his critique of Christianity. If you haven’t already, I highly suggest you read Wednesday’s article so you have more context.

MUSLIM:

Now we can go to Christianity. Please don’t say “It is inspired by Holy Spirit.” I am only doing internal critique.

Blind Faith 1: Bible is a word of God. No manuscript [until the] 4th [century].

[This] manuscript is in [Kione] Greek, which is not [the] language of Jesus. We have someone who translated it, but we don’t even know who he is and we cannot verify his reliability, because Aramaic is [a] dead [language].

500,000 textual [variants] among the manuscripts.

[Hundreds] of internal contradiction.

[Hundreds] of scientific errors, numerical errors and historical inaccuracies.

We don’t know the authors of [the] Bible.

Each [of the] gospels contradict each other.

We don’t know who [wrote] the New Testament, only [what they] claim is their name, which cannot be proven. Even if it is proven, [it’s] no use. We don’t know anything about them. They are anonymous.

There is a claim Paul wrote 14 books. [The disciples] who lived with Jesus all together did not write this [many books], but Paul who did not even met Jesus in life, wrote 14 books and disciples [disagree] with him. And Paul [was] a bounty hunter and [claimed] he [saw] Jesus [on the] way to Damascus which is not even logical. Why [was] Jesus going to visit Paul and not the disciples?

You can claim scribal errors, but it proves my point. Why do you believe in book of errors while you have perfect one?

We can see the corruption of texts. At end of Mark [chapter] 12 verses were not present in codex Sinaiticus and the story of adulterer is not mentioned in early scriptures. And we can see many verses [are] present in [the] Bible which [are] not in earlier scriptures and every secular textual [scholar] agrees [the] Bible is corrupted and Bible has more [updates] than [the] iPhone. Who updates the Book of God?

There are [hundreds] of [Bibles] which [do] not agree with each other.

Every [sect] agrees in different [number] of canonical books. Who decides which [are] canonical based on what?? Millions of people follow the canonical books decided by Greek pagans based on blind faith.

Blind Faith 2: [The] Trinity [-] We can’t understand God.

[The] Trinity is not logically possible. Everyone [is] different and everyone [is] God, but they are not three, but one, i.e., 1+1+1=1.

Trinity is not present even in the corrupted bible. There is no trinity [or] its definition mentioned in [the] corrupted bible.

[The] early [followers] of Jesus never followed [the] trinity, until the 4th century council [of Nicaea?] They did not believe [in] the Trinty. They worshipped One God and people who believed in [the] trinity believed in subordinate trinity which father is greater than Jesus.

[The] Bible says God is not Author of confusion, [but the] trinity is the most unsolvable riddle from 4th century. You can claim We can’t understand God. If you can’t understand God, why do you understand in this way, which is logically impossible and blind faith of 4th century pagans?

No one knows [the] Trinity from Adam to 4th century people. They only worshipped one God. Why [is there] no mention of [the] trinity explicitly in [the] Old Testament. And this [is] the reason why Jews and Muslims consider Christianity as paganism.

Blind faith 3: God died for your sins.

Why are you limiting God? God passes sin for people because of sin of Adam, and he [sends] himself as an innocent and he dies himself by creation of himself to forgive the sin of people from himself. Who in a right mind will believe this? Even corrupted Indian court is more just than your God. Where did Jesus [say] that he is going to die for your sins in bible? There is none.

Jesus is asking God, “Why are you forsaking me?” and “Take this cup away from [me]”, which means Jesus himself was not interested in dying.

It goes against your bible. Jesus says he will be […] God will save him by quoting psalms, and he says his sign and sign of Jonah are same. […] Jonah died in belly of the fish […] how can [do?] you claim Jesus died?

Early followers did not [believe] Jesus died for peoples’ sin, and Paul came and [taught that] Jesus died for sins and the pagans believed. It is easy to sin and to believe Jesus died for my sins [and] can give salvation where Jesus himself said he came to fulfill the old laws and [the] least in the people of heaven is one who changes even a dot in law.

Where is the justice here? If [a] Christian man rapes Hindu girl, [the] rapist will go to heaven and victim goes to hell.

Blind Faith 4: Jesus and holy spirit [are] divine.

There is no verse in [the] corrupted Bible [in] which Jesus himself says he is God worship me and you can claim gospel of john, but when I see context, it is clear He just claimed to prophet. Churches take verses from [the] bible without context and brainwash the people, even corrupted bible points more towards lenient belief to worship god alone.

Jesus did not know the hour.

Jesus will is father’s will.

Jesus performed miracles with help of God same as other prophets.

Jesus says only true god is father.

Jesus prayed to the father.

Blind Faith 5: Hypostatical union

Jesus never claimed he is 100% man and 100% God.

No one know this till the council in 5th century.

How can someone be both powerful and [weak], both knowledgeable and ignorant, both God at the same time?

This [is] impossible existence. Even God cannot do [it], and it is belief of Hindu and Greek pagans

I have every right to say Christianity is blind faith and people introduced pagan belief in the religion of one true God who sent Adam, Moses, Noah, Abraham, Jesus and Mohammad and created a whole religion and people like you follow it blindly. Alhamdulilah for Islam! It is the only religion of God.

And you can ask me why you don’t get salvation.

Because first command of God is to worship him alone. But you are associating a prophet and spirit with him which is the unforgivable sin by the true God of reality, and you believe in 3 gods and [claim] it [is] one with zero evidence.

ME:

So now that I’ve addressed your points for why Islam is true (or, rather, completely untrue), I will get to showing you how your view of Christianity as blind faith is built on major misconceptions and outright lies:

1). The idea that there are no Biblical manuscripts until the 4th century is demonstrably false. We have fragments of the Old Testament that go back as far as the 6th or 7th century BC, and the oldest complete collection of the Old Testament is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with some of the scrolls going back to the 3rd century.

As for the New Testament, while it’s true that the oldest complete manuscript is the Codex Sinaiticus from the 4th century, we have thousands of other fragments of the Bible that go back as early as the 2nd century. Over 5K manuscripts exist in Kione Greek alone. 9.3K exist in various other ancient languages, including Syriac, Coptic, Aramaic, and Latin. The reason why we haven’t found any original writings from the 1st century is because they likely fell apart over time from constant use. Further, from the fragments and manuscripts that we have, we can translate and compare them to the other complete manuscripts like the Codex Sinaiticus to see how well they line up. And surprise, surprise, they line up perfectly.

Further, even if the earliest example of the Bible went back to the 4th century, Muhammad affirmed in Surah 5:47-48 that the Injil was in the hands of the Christians. Thus, he clearly believed that the version they had was legit, as the Codex Sinaiticus precedes Muhammad by roughly 300 years. So, if the Quran is saying that it affirms that when, if you read the Bible, it contradicts the Quran, then the Quran is false. Thus, you’re just as guilty of blind faith as you accuse Christians of being.

On your argument that Jesus didn’t speak Kione Greek, this flies in the face of a historical reality. Thanks to Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle East and much of the ancient world, Kione Greek was like English is today. While Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin were regional languages, Kione Greek was the common language. Everybody (including Jesus) would have spoken it to some extent for trade or teaching. In much of the world, this is still the case, where many people speak English to some extent because it’s a trade language. Additionally, your argument that we can’t reliably know who translated for Jesus (like He even needed a translator) because Aramaic is a dead language is purely laughable. By that logic, we should throw out most historical accounts as many languages spoken throughout history are now dead.

On your point about the textual variants in the different manuscripts, that’s to be expected when you have tens thousands of copies copied by humans. The majority of these variants are typos. Now, I understand that you have made the point that the defeats the idea of God perfectly preserving the Bible, but it simply doesn’t. Unlike the teaching of the Quran, God worked through people instead of micromanaging them.

On that note, with the story of the adulterous woman and other differences, while it’s true that some manuscripts don’t contain them, it’s in the Bible because it agrees with the theology and teachings of Jesus everywhere else. Unlike the teaching of the Quran, God worked through people instead of micromanaging them. The differences ultimately mean nothing, not changing the message or theology in any meaningful way.

Moreover, at least we have the manuscripts that differ in certain ways so we can compare and contrast! The same cannot be said of the Quran, which, during its compilation, competing Qurans were burned by Uthman, entire verses and surahs were lost, destroyed, or forgotten, and today, there are several Qurans that differ from each other, such as the Warsh and Hafs Qurans which differ in some drastic ways. Even between existing Quranic manuscripts from the time of Muhammad, there are major differences (refer back to my previous comment about the Sanaa Palimpsest.)

As for internal contradictions and other errors, much of that can be chalked up to a lack of understanding or bad hermeneutics. Things like genre, history, and context need to be taken into account when examining these supposed errors. Alleged contradictions in the Gospels can also be explained away with the larger context and historical background. The Gospels also do not contradict each other on the overall theology and story of Jesus life, death, and resurrection.

On your point about Paul, you forget that the books written by Paul were letters to various churches. That’s why there are so many of them. Further, you ask why Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus and not to the disciples. I’m sure they wondered the same thing, too. The reason is because Paul was a very unique man. He was a scholar and was greatly familiar with the Old Testament as he was originally a Pharisee. He was also a Roman citizen, which got him out of some major scrapes. Last, he was a great orator, and his testimony won many to Christ. He had privileges that the disciples had that made him the most effective to reaching the Gentiles.

As for the alleged hundreds of Bibles that don’t agree with each other, and the idea that no one can agree what’s cannon, this is untrue. All Bibles, be it Protestant, Catholic, or Ethiopian, contain the same 66 books of the Bible that are considered the unequivocal Word of God, which all agree on the same theology. The other books in there are apocryphal and added in for various reasons but generally are not considered to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, or even to be reliable by scholars.

Further, what was considered reliable was also largely influenced by what the Jews considered to be cannon. And, once again, as much as you want to claim that the Bible was put together by “Greek Pagans” at I’m supposing the Council of Nicaea, I will remind you that that same Bible was considered by Muhammad himself to be Scripture in Surah 5:47-48.

2). You argue that the Trinity is illogical and use the common argument that the Trinity is like saying “1+1+1=1” However, you forget something crucial to this discussion: the concept of units. Let me explain.

With the Trinity, one way you could explain it is to think about the three members of the Trinity as units that make a whole. Each member of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – is co-equal, co-eternal, shares the same essence, and is divine. Put together and you get God. Each one has a different role. God the Father is the ultimate source/cause of things; the Son is the one who acts as His agent, doing the Father’s will; and the Holy Spirit the means by which the Father works. It’s not a perfect description, but we’re comparing the finite to the infinite. No description is going to be perfect.

Because of that, I will agree with you that it can be confusing and hard to explain, and that God is not the author of confusion, but to say that this means that the Christian idea of God can’t possibly be true is a faulty argument. It’s basically like saying, “God as a Trinity is confusing and hard to explain…anything that’s confusing and hard to explain can’t be true…so therefore, God as a Trinity can’t be true.” By that logic, I should write off math since I find it extremely confusing and hard to explain as false.

And as for where this is in the Bible, it’s everywhere. One example is God will refer to Himself in the plural in several verses in the Bible, and uses the name Elohim (which is plural but God uses it to refer to Himself)(Genesis 1:1, 26; 3:22; 11:7; Isaiah 6:8, 48:16, 61:1; Matthew 3:16–17, 28:19.) It can also be found heavily implied in Isaiah 48:16 and 61:1. It’s also found throughout Psalms and Proverbs. And, of course, Matthew 3:13-17 best shows the Trinity, as the Holy Spirit and God the Father make an appearance:

“¹³ Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. ¹⁴ But John tried to deter him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’¹⁵ Jesus replied, ‘Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then John consented.¹⁶ As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷ And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’”

But why isn’t it actually called the Trinity in the Bible? Why is that word never actually used in the Bible?

Well, the word Trinity comes from the Latin word “trius” meaning “threefold.” The reason why it started being used was to more easily articulate the oneness of God in three persons as found throughout the Bible. It wasn’t something arbitrarily invented at the First Council of Nicaea (which, by the way, was convened to defeat the heresy of Arianism.) It was only given a formal name there.

3). You ask why God would die to save us humans from sin and say that not only is it nonsensical, but limits God. Let me explain with this analogy:

Imagine that you’re in court for a major crime, such as murder. You have broken the law, and the price of your crime is the death penalty. You stand in court, ashamed by what you’ve done and listen to the verdict. Nothing you can do, now, will be able to save you from receiving the death penalty. But then, the judge does something you don’t expect. He steps down from his bench, takes off his robe, and says that he’ll take your place, and you get to go free if you accept him taking your place.

This is the essence of the Gospel. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they had a choice. They could continue to follow God and remain in perfection, or they could follow the serpent’s temptation of eating of the Tree of Good and Evil in the belief that they would become like God. They went with the latter choice, and in doing so, set the precedent for the rest of humanity. Ever since them, we have been trying to find ways to make ourselves like God, following our desires instead of His, trying to define and redefine our destinies. This tendency is ingrained in us from day one.

In so doing, we disobey God’s law and for all the good deeds we try to do, we still fail. We’re still bound for Hell. If you don’t believe me, think about the 10 Commandments, which, as they were the words of God given to Moses at Sinai, you should believe to be true as a Muslim. Ask yourself, honestly, if you have kept every one of them perfectly. You most likely haven’t, and all the good things you have done or think you’re doing as a Muslim will do nothing to atone for your sins. Why? Because like the criminal in the analogy, you’ve still broken the law, and the law demands justice that no amount of good works can save you from.

But God who loves us, provided us mercy by being that judge in the analogy from earlier. He offered Himself up as the eternal atonement, taking the punishment of death, giving us a choice between if we want to follow Him and accept his offering of atonement or continue trying to forge our own path and go to Hell (as C.S. Lewis said in his book The Great Divorce, “There are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”) He accomplished this act of unmerited grace through sending the second person of the Trinity, Jesus, to die for the sins of mankind. Jesus, then, was born of the virgin Mary, fulfilling prophecies about His birth, lived as a carpenter, and began his ministry around the age of 30, during which time, he accurately predicted his death. (Matt. 16:21-23, 17:22-23; Mark 8:31-33; Luke 9:21-22; John 12:7-8) In fact, in Matthew 20:28, Jesus explicitly says that He came “as a ransom for many,” which is also corroborated by Mark 10:45 and predicted by Isaiah 53.

Then, the time came for Jesus to be tried and crucified. Of course, He didn’t wish to die, and asked God the Father find a different way. After all, He knew what would happen. Google the effects of Roman flogging and crucifixion on the human body. It makes the electric chair look humane.

But it was God’s will for Him to be crucified, so He was arrested and hung on the cross before everyone. The Romans cast lots for his clothes (which was predicted in Psalm 22:14-18) and later, Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”

This is an important point as Hell isn’t just fire and brimstone. When Christians say that death is the price for sin in the context of Hell, we mean that the person in Hell experiences total separation from God, the ultimate giver of life. It is God turning His face away from you. So, when Jesus said, “Why have you forsaken me?!” He was experiencing that separation that’s meant for us.

Then, once He died, He was taken down and put in the tomb for three days (fulfilling even more prophecies.) This was the sign of Jonah. As Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days before being spit out, (which symbolized death and rebirth) Jesus was in the tomb for three days before being resurrected, proving Himself as God, as only God can raise people from the dead.

From this, we get the doctrine that if you believe that Jesus has died on the cross to cover the price of your sin, and you profess that He is Lord and have faith in that, then you are saved from going to Hell.

This view of God also doesn’t limit Him. I would argue that believing that God can’t or won’t step in for His creation is more limiting than believing that He, as our Sovereign Lord and Judge, could find a way to save us.

Now you ask how that works since sinning is easy. That’s a fair question. Basically, when you believe in Christ and are saved, you’re indwelt by the Holy Spirit and go through a process called “sanctification.” It’s not something that will be fully completed this side of eternity, as none of us will be perfected in life, but it does make you recognize sin in your life and convicts you of it.

At this point in your original comment, you asked how it’s fair that if a Christian man rapes a Hindu girl that he goes to Heaven and she still goes to Hell. Once again, this is a fair question, and the answer is that he will still be held to account for that sin. We all will be held to account for our sins, even if we have been saved.

And before you say, “But that’s not fair,” Islam hardly offers a better option. In fact, in Sahih Muslim, Sunan ibn Majah, and Sahih Bukhari, it says that Muslims who have “mountains of sin” will have that sin transferred to Christians and Jews in Hell, so they get to go to Heaven without giving an account for themselves solely based on being Muslim. Further, if you’re a Muslim waging jihad and you’re murdering, raping, pillaging, etc. and get killed, you still get the Disneyland fast pass to Heaven.

How is any of that fair? Not only does it contradict the Quran, but it also means that you’re dependent on other people who may have been better in life than you to carry your sins so you can go to Heaven. At least God paid for the sins of mankind voluntarily. According to those hadiths, I will be forced to carry your sin and be punished for it. Where is the justice in that?!

4-5). Most of your bonus points about how Christianity is reliant on blind faith I feel I’ve mostly answered already with my explanations of the Trinity and what the Gospel teaches. But for the bonus challenges, I’ll answer with some bullet points.

• This is done because while Jesus was fully God, also being fully man, He voluntarily restricted the use of His divine attributes, including total omniscience. In the times where He demonstrated His divinity, it was with God the Father’s permission.

• Jesus performed God’s will because He – as the second person of the Trinity – is God’s agent. This also addresses your other points about Him praying to God the Father (who’s the head of the Trinity) and doing miracles by His power.

• Jesus’ claim to 100% divinity and 100% humanity can be found in His claims to be God, and the descriptions of His life; His childhood, adulthood, and death. It was from this and doctrines reflected in the Epistles of Paul and other disciples that the Council of Chalcedon, in the 5th century, came up with the doctrine of the hypostatic union.

• Finally, you ask how someone can be powerful/weak, knowledgeable/ignorant, and man/God at the same time. This paradox has puzzled many people for millennia, and simply put, Jesus, as God, is not limited to human understanding. He never rejected His divinity, rather willingly restricting Himself to a human state, still divine, yet still man.

As in my response your points for why Islam is true, I apologize for the extremely long read. If you don’t get through this entire thing, I honestly can’t blame you. I just hope that what you do read of it and the other response has made you think more critically and ask more questions about your faith and the Christian faith. I also want to leave off by commending you for taking the time to write out an apologetic for what you believe and why you believe that Christianity is false. I may believe that you’re wrong and don’t have the facts straight, but it’s good to see you’re at least willing to take the time to explain why you believe the way you do.

Until next time,

M.J.