Article #3 on the Law and the Gospel: More of the Same, And Yet MORE Proof

Introduction

I wrote an article listing six reasons why “the Law” (al-Taurat) and “the Gospel” (al-Injeel) are not the Old and New Testaments in the Koran. Sam Shamoun of Answering Islam responded to it, I responded in turn, and he has responded again. The title of the most recent article by Shamoun betrays the open-mindedness and civility you’ll find in the paper. That title is "Some Muslims Never Learn: A Follow Up Response to a Muslim’s Denial Regarding the Quran’s Confirmation of the Holy Bible", and this article can be found [here] .

In this article, after openly refusing to comment on my accounts of how he’s been behaving (take note of that—especially for later), he talks about how if I am “truly interested in God’s truth and learning facts” then I “shouldn’t care about the length of our response.” Apparently Shamoun has not learned the value of being concise. Take note, dear reader, that I’m doing my best to show you that value in this debate as well as on this site in general.

I pointed out in my last article how the Koran’s stated purpose is to confirm as well as correct the scriptures that came before it. The references I gave were Koran 10:37 and Koran 5:15. Rather than actually respond to this point, Shamoun simply left us five links. I am not here to respond to six articles; I am here to respond to one article. I offer links to support my arguments sometimes, but I never replace arguments with links to other entire articles. I suggest that Shamoun do the same. After all, it is arguments that make a debate. Instead, I will simply refer you to the verses in question again, and look at them with you, dear reader:

This Koran could not have been forged apart from God; but it is a confirmation of what is before it, and a distinguishing of the Book, wherein is no doubt, from the Lord of all Being.

(- 5:15 -)
Noble Quran

People of the Book, now there has come to you Our Messenger, making clear to you many things you have been concealing of the Book, and effacing many things. There has come to you from God a light, and a Book Manifest whereby God guides whosoever follows His good pleasure in the ways of peace, and brings them forth from the shadows into a light by His leave; and He guides them to a straight path.

(- 10:37 -)
Noble Quran

As for the first verse, as you can see, it speaks of “the Book”. We’ve been over how that phrase, in the Koran, can variously mean itself or the Bible. Quite obviously the Koran does not distinguish itself! So of course it’s the Bible being referred to. (Some translations of the Koran replace the phrase “the Book” with the phrase “the scripture”, but in that case the same principle applies anyway.) Shamoun goes on at this point to talk about the circumstances of the Koranic text being officialized by Uthman to the corruption of the Bible, and then say:

Had this been said of the previous Scriptures, the Muslim author would no doubt have used this to prove that the Quran doesn’t confirm the entire Bible. Since this is said of the Muslim scripture, we wonder if the author will be consistent and argue that the Quran has been corrupted as well. We won’t be holding our breath to find out.

The two things can’t compare, since the Koran is a single book, a single writing, whereas the Bible is a volume of different writings bound together in the form of one book. Uthman’s purpose was to have the Koran gathered and deviant variants removed, and so the different parts were put together into one book, all of the parts having been from the same man. (Think of it as something vaguely like a serial.) The differing manuscripts of the Bible have been differing all along (as far as we know), ranging throughout centuries and centuries and centuries, and kept on even after the Bible was compiled (c.f. the medieval 1 John 5:7 interpolation).

Shamoun next points out references to make the case that since the Koran speaks of “the Book” being corrupted, that somehow means that the Koran is corrupted as well as the Bible just because they are referred to sometimes by the same title of “the Book”. As I’ve already said, the context of 2:75-79, where the corruption of the Bible is spoken of, occurs right after verses talking about the Jews, and so the “they” in 2:75 (the passage going on to speak of “them” corrupting their scriptures), if any grammatical sense is to be read into the verse, could be no one else but the Jews. Ergo, the Bible (or at least the Tanakh, but the phrase “the Book” can also be translated “the Bible”) is the Book that has been corrupted. As for 5:15 and 10:37, they are addressed to the “People of the Bible” (or “People of the Book”—i.e. Christians and/or Jews) and speaking of what is before the Koran, and so obviously the Koran isn’t claiming to be a revision of itself. After all, the term “the Book” can’t mean two things at once.

Then Shamoun offers reference after reference after reference talking about the Koran confirming the previous scriptures, and simply making some bold declarations on the subject, Shamoun goes into the “belief in the previous scriptures” issue, quoting passages like this one:

Say you: 'We believe in God, and in that which has been sent down on us and sent down on Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, and the Tribes, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus and the Prophets, of their Lord; we make no division between any of them, and to Him we surrender.'

(- 2:136 -)
Noble Quran

Yes, this is part of the basic parts of our faith, found in the closest thing to a creed we have (and taken straight from the Sunnah)—and this creed of sorts is a great way of explaining the meaning of the above passage. It is that we believe in Allah, His prophets, His angels, His books and Judgment Day. Now think about this: believing in the other four things means having faith in their existence, so evidently it means the same thing to believe in the books in question. Similarly, the “believing in” of 2:136 begins with “believing in God”, which of course means believing in His existence. Remember that the phrase is “believing in” and not just “believing”.

The next paragraph is so flawed I have to go through it pretty much sentence by sentence.

The purpose of those “huge pile of links” was to present our readers with the historical data supporting both the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus and the legitimacy of Paul, issues which the author had called into question.

While I have called these things into question in the past, it was elsewhere on this site, except for that brief reference I made to “St. Paul the Innovator”, which was an expression of personal opinion as part of an offhand comment (probably a pointless offhand comment too, now that I think of it). And these articles here are about whether “the Law” and “the Gospel” mean “the Old Testament” and “the New Testament” in the Koran.

Secondly, the link I posted does more than simply appeal to authority, they provide both the biblical and historical evidence, as well as the views of Muhammad's followers and Muslim scholars, that the word Torah or Law can refer to the entire Old Testament canon.

There can be no biblical evidence for something in the Koran, and an appeal to a historical authority is still an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy. And the issue here (why must I keep reminding Shamoun of the issue??) is not whether the Torah or Law can refer to the entire Old Testament canon in the speech of non-Koranic sources, but whether it does in the Koran.

It is quite evident that the author didn’t bother even reading it, since if he did then he has no excuse for claiming that we only presented one Islamic citation to support our case.

As if things weren’t bad enough, now he’s putting words in my mouth. I never said that he “presented only one Islamic citation”. I spoke only of scriptural citations (meaning Islamic, scriptural citations).

Besides, even if we did appeal to a single Muslim citation, how would that make the point any less valid?

It doesn’t, and I never said it did. The point is invalid for the reasons I stated.

In the midst of more appeals to authority about “what Muslims say”, and after responding to a point I never made about the Torah being corrupted because of a passage from Sahih Bukhari not being found in it, Shamoun says:

The author somehow thinks that he can avoid my statement that the Salafis applied the word Torah for both Scriptures by arguing that they could have been referring to the Torah and the Gospel. The author failed to note that the reason why I mentioned this was to establish the fact that the word Torah can refer to more than the Law given to Moses, which means that even if the Salafis were referring to the Torah and the Gospel this still proves my point! It is rather unfortunate that the author didn’t see how his response only proved the point I was seeking to make.

I’m sorry, Shamoun, but pointing out a reference to “the people of the two scriptures” in no way establishes that the word “Torah” can refer to more than the Law given to Moses (on whom be peace). Next Shamoun follows his non-sequitur with:

Furthermore, the Salaf’s statements could not be limited to just these two Books since the Jews and Christians had more than the Torah and the Gospels in their possession. The Quran itself says that Allah sent down more than these two Books to them, such as the Psalms, and even quotes Psalm 37:29 to boot: “For We have written in the Psalms, after the Remembrance, ‘The earth shall be the inheritance of My righteous servants.’( S. 21:105). Therefore, the expression “the Books of the People of the Two Scriptures” must include ALL the Books which were in the possession of the Jews and Christians.

It must? Could it just be that the books of these people of the two scriptures (in Arabic there are no capital letters) are the two scriptures? After all, it doesn’t say “the only books”. Doesn’t this just make sense? The Koran refers to Christians as “People of the Injeel/Gospel” (5:47) and to Jews as those “charged with the Taurat/Law” (62:5).

Shamoun responds to my “inconsistent” pointing out of his own inconsistent claims of what the term “Gospel” means with the argument that the term “Gospel” itself has an inconsistent meaning, variably being “good news”, “the four Gospels of the Bible collectively” or “the New Testament”. The subject at hand, right from my original “Six Reasons” article, is whether it means “the New Testament” in the Koran, not whether it does mean that here but not there. If Shamoun is taking the side that the title of al-Injeel/The Gospel doesn’t necessarily refer to the New Testament as a whole, he may as well not be disputing my original argument in the first place, which was against Christians who claim that “the New Testament” was the meaning of the term “al-Injeel”.

But there is no way that the Koranic use of the term “the Gospel” can possibly mean anything except a single writing by Jesus (on whom be peace) himself, and this is yet another piece of proof for my position which I neglected in both preceding articles. (I guess there are just so many reasons for it being impossible for al-Injeel to be the New Testament that I just can’t keep track of them all! Maybe I should have spent more time and made my “Six Reasons” article into something more like a “Twelve Reasons” article in the first place.) The Koran tells us in 5:46 and 57:27 that al-Injeel was revealed or given to Jesus (on whom be peace), and al-Injeel is referred to unequivocally as a written scripture in many Koran passages such as 48:29 and 7:157—all of these passages talking about al-Injeel and al-Taurat in the same place, which is always in refererence to them as scriptures throughout the entire Koran. (As for the Koran referring to itself as a whole, which it does, by name, it cannot compare to the New Testament doing so or not doing so, since it is a fact that the New Testament is a volume of separate writings by separate articles whereas it is only a speculation, held by a minority of scholars of all manner of opinions of the Koran and its authenticity, that it is a “work of multiple hands”—a subject I’ve tackled elsewhere on the site anyway.)

If you’ll remember, dear reader, one of my six points used a quotation from an encyclopedia of religion, and rather than discuss the main point except in a could-have-might-have way, Shamoun simply showed other parts of the same entry of the encyclopedia which disagree with my Islamic views exegetically, as if leaving out something like that when verifying a specific point about when the Bible was translated into Arabic is somehow tantamount to taking a statement out of context. Now he claims that it is a fact that the Koran contains errors, simply because he and his comerades at Answering Islam says they do here and here, and that the fact that there are parallels between Islamic scripture and older traditions automatically means that the former “borrowed” from the latter—an allegation which means nothing to Muslims, who believe that the Koran contains the truth from all traditions, which one would hardly expect would just happen to be in the same arbitrarily put together canon or heading entirely. (See this site’s article “How the Koran’s Parallels in Various Traditions Actually Validates It” for more on this).

It is sadly in the nature of debates, especially religious ones, that when someone is losing they gradually let their debating lapse into accusations, insults and personal abuse. This is what Shamoun starts doing at this point; the readers must judge for themselves why the coincidence. He starts by responding to my leaving alone passages which do not have any bearing on my points or are at least of the same could-have-might-have-who-knows? variety by saying, “Basically, the author is showing that he hasn’t even carefully read the rebuttal which he claims to be responding to, and decided to simply piece together a short paper in order to give his readers the impression that he is actually addressing the issues.” From this he more or less immediately moves on to: “In the previous paragraph, the author appealed to these same fallible hadiths to show that Muhammad was illiterate, and yet he now calls into question the reliability of these same narrations when they don’t serve his purpose or when they throw a monkey wrench in his agenda.” Guess what, Shamoun: (a) you can’t read my mind, and (b) I did not make any attempt to show that the Prophet (on whom be peace) was illiterate but only said that we have no traditions from the time which disagreed with this. Is it not fair to consider a general tradition that’s considered common knowledge and spoken of in many ahadith more likely to be accurate than one, single hadith pointed out (a specific one about Waraqa) which I have dismissed for a stated reason, regardless of Shamoun’s cynical mudslinging?

More could-have’s about the fallibility of the Sunnah and the general traditions about Muhammad (on whom be peace). A claim that the only Gospels that the compilers of ahadith and sunnah would have access to were the four ones of the Bible. We already know from the previous articles in this debate that there were at least two others, The Infancy of Thomas and The Gospel of the Nazarenes, and those are just the two we’ve pointed out. Next Shamoun lapses immediately back into insults and accusations in place of argument, this time adding blatant misrepresentation of my argument. I mentioned the eyebrow-raising fluke of how it is only to be expected that in a book written after 100-200 years after the events it chronicles through word-of-mouth oral tradition, only a couple of facts left would be true, and what do you know! The Koran has only a couple of parallels with the book. Shamoun replies with a stunningly, embarrassingly flawed response of, “Talk about circular argumentation! The author assumes that those portions of the Apocrypha which the Quran quotes are historically authentic. And how does he know this? Well, because the Quran quotes them, that’s how!”

After irrelevant remarks of why Christians accept certain miracle stories over others, Shamoun does something I have never seen any Christian do in all my life, and this includes when I was steeped in Christians and Christianity of countless denominations at school almost all through high school: he claims that the term “the gospel” means anything other than “the good news of Christianity” in the Bible. I find it odd how he finds it odd that Romans 1:16-17 and 2 Thessalonians 2:13-15 would carry this meaning. I don’t see why it puzzles him. As for Mark 1:14-15, it doesn’t look strange at all in the translation I always use, the RSV. Does anyone reading this who is Christian think that “the gospel” as a biblical term ever refers to the New Testament, especially since each book of it existed before the New Testament itself existed? The same goes for the Four Gospels collectively (the capital “G” changing the meaning for reasons unnecessary to explain).

As for the Koranic passages referring to prophets being sent and being given “the Psalms” and “the Book Illuminating” and what not, it is as simple as, “I sent mail carriers out to my friends’ houses with letters and boxed items.” This statement does not necessarily mean that each neighbor got both a letter and a boxed item, now does it? In the same way, the Psalms, for example, being listed as something that existed among the prophets does not mean that more than one of them had the psalms of God revealed to him. Then Shamoun goes into “the Torah and the Bible” issue and his continuing misunderstanding of the concept of confirmation of scriptures in the Koran, and once again I have to refer you back to the earlier parts of the article and Koran 2:75-79 and its clearly Jewish-based context, and around we go again.

Shamoun had argued that “Muhammad (on whom be peace) was not a genuine prophet, since according to Shamoun, he failed the Bible’s tests for prophethood,” as I put it before, and all the reader has to do is go back and check to see how accurate an assessment of one of his arguments this was. He accuses me of attacking straw men because he does not “simply reject Muhammad on the basis that I assume the Bible is true, and since Muhammad contradicts the Bible he is therefore a false prophet.” Well, whatever. Muhammad (on whom be peace) did indeed claim to be inspired like some of—some of, mind you—the prophets in the Bible, as well as some not in the Bible. But whether these prophets were represented accurately in the Bible is a different matter, which would require at least one article all its own (and has been discussed in various aspects of the issue in many articles already on this site, especially in the “Bible and Koran” section), and then there is the matter of the corruption of the Bible, which I have already proven both above, in the previous articles, and pretty much all over this entire website.

After making the claim that some scattered alleged prophecies of piecemeal events in the four Gospels means that “the Gospel”, in Shamoun’s sense, did not come entirely from oral tradition (which I didn’t say that it did), Shamoun once again lapses into offensive accusatory talk, this time saying that “I have not been entirely forthcoming”, a phrase which in terms of meaning is a softer way of saying that I am being deliberately dishonest. Then, somehow managing once again to overlook that my brief reference to the Gospel of the Nazarenes as a possible candidate for al-Injeel, which as I’ve said could very well not be the case, he goes off into a very long argument to show that “the Gospel of the Nazerenes is anything but Islamic, and their Gospel’s portrait of Jesus is contrary to the Muslim one, which means that the Quran is wrong.” Once again, if I were Shamoun, I would be very embarrassed. And what on earth does the Trinity or Shamoun’s allegations of our depiction of God being “dry” and “monadic” have to do with anything here?? It is as if Shamoun were psychologically incapable of arguing about anything for long enough before going off into other topics coming out of nowhere, in the form of a mountain of links and/or a pages-long tangent.

The same goes for accusing me of contradicting myself in the most absurd ways, now taking the form of the Gospel being something that was preached (as I said it was in the biblical, Christian sense of the term) and also something written (as I said it was in the Koranic sense of the term, also the capitalizated biblical sense, the upper or lower cased G being all it takes to make the difference). And since the Koran undeniably refers to the Gospel (upper-cased G, “al-Injeel”) as being from the blessed Jesus’s own point of view, there’s nothing “anecdotal” about it either. As for God teaching it to him, we believe that God taught the Koran to the blessed Muhammad, but it also contains biographical material about him. So what of it? Shamoun then says:

Furthermore, the author again assumes that since the Quran quotes a passage not found in the New Testament, this therefore proves that it cannot be confirming the NT Books. On the contrary, all this proves is that the author of the Quran was confused since he confirmed the authority and inspiration of the NT Books but then quoted a passage not found in the New Testament.

So because Shamoun’s position in this debate is right and the Koran considers the New Testament to the al-Injeel and also infallible, which is what Shamoun is supposed to be establishing in this debate, therefore he is right? He even recognizes that the Koran quotes a verse from al-Injeel which is not in the New Testament, and the import of this doesn’t seem to reach him at all. Next, Shamoun is correct about the blessed Moses not being spoken of in the Koran as being given “The Torah/al-Taurat” by name, but what else would the “scripture of Moses” (Koran 11:17, 87:19) be, especially when its material is consistently spoken of in the Koran as being from or paralleled in the Torah?? Next, Shamoun can offer no actual direct response to my pointing out of the overwhelming amount of parallels between the Koran and the Torah except to point out that there are differences between them—which I myself have pointed out repeatedly in the “Bible and Koran” section of this site, in arguments that are not against, but in favor of, the Koran, given the Book’s partial purpose of revision, which I have established many times now.

As for Shamoun’s addendum, his e-mails to me were indeed very, very, very much of a hateful attitude. In fact, just a couple of days ago he sent me one (even though I’ve made it clear to him that because of the hateful and extremely redundant nature of his e-mails to me, I am now deleting them on sight without opening them) with the title, “Looking forward to refuting your stupid trash!” Yes, Shamoun, very Christlike. Shamoun makes it obvious how tipped the hate scale is against him in these articles by having to list various quotes that I’ve made on the Understanding Islam message board instead—and why he was prying around there in the first place I don’t know. But for the moment I’ll just pretend that this is relevant, not contradictory to Shamoun’s stated attitude against making “emotional appeal” to the readers when I point out how hateful were his e-mails to me, or that the quotes from me that he offers do not tend to be more disdainful rather than venomous, accusatory and spiteful like Shamoun’s e-mails (or even the title of the article under discussion).

I try to make it a habit to apologize on that board (and elsewhere—c.f. this site’s response to Denis Giron’s “Qur’an: A Work of Multiple Hands?”) when I make deeply personal comments. Shamoun also leaves out the more recent posts I made even in the same thread he quotes in his list, in which I stopped trying to match his venom with disdain and equally confrontational talk, speaking of trying to establish respect, trying to talk Shamoun into being peaceful, even by showing him (in vain) passages from his own scripture on the subject, and reminding everyone how the Koran tells us to argue with disbelievers in the fairer manner ([here] and the following page). And hey! It’s not like I ever claimed to be perfect myself in the first place anyway.

Finally, although I suppose that since showing him how badly his attitude (which, unlike me, he extremely stubbornly persisted in) reflects his religion with the teachings of his own prophet didn’t work the first time, it probably won’t work again, but I’m sure that other Christians reading this will be more reasonable and willing to understand when I respond to his claim that his attitude was only in retaliation with my own with the words of his own prophet in his own scripture:

Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.” (Matthew 18:21-22)

May God bless us all and guide us on the right path.

--the very non-anonymous Yahya Sulaiman, a.k.a. Ziggy Zag