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Muslim apologist Ajijola asserts this position:
‘The first five books of the Old Testament do not constitute the original Torah, but parts of the Torah have been mingled up with other narratives written by human beings and the original guidance of the Lord is lost in that quagmire. Similarly the four Gospels of Christ are not the original Gospels as they came from the prophet Jesus...The original and the fictitious, the divine and human are so intermingled that the grain cannot be separated from the chaff. The fact is that the original Word of God is preserved neither with the Jews nor with the Christians.’
Muslims believe, then, that what used to be the Word of God in the Bible has been so adulterated by human hands that it is now hardly distinguishable from the word of man. ...
Muslims claim that they are the true and rightful heirs to the promises made to Abraham through Ishmael (who, they claim, gave rise to the Arab nations) and that the Jews, for personal gain, concocted a story that Isaac became Abraham's heir of the Palestinian land promises. In this Jewish version, Ishmael and his descendants became outcasts and thus have no right to the land. The original Old Testament, we are told, did not have this concocted story. Palestine, by divine right, thus belongs to the Muslims and not to the Jews.
The Folly of Muslim Reasoning
Arguing that the Bible became corrupted during or after Muhammad's time is unreasonable. By Muhammad's time, hundreds of thousands of copies of the Bible were dispersed over a large part of the world. To successfully corrupt the Bible, all these copies would have to be meticulously gathered (assuming people around the world would be willing to surrender them, an impossible scenario) and changed.
Another scenario is that hundreds of thousands of Bible-owning people from around the world met together and colluded to make the changes. But most of these people were true believers, so would they have been likely to tamper with a book upon which they were basing their eternal salvation? Would such collusion even be physically possible?
Moreover, hundreds of years before Muhammad was even born, the Bible had already been translated into a number of languages. Would Muslims have us believe these various translations were identically altered all over the world so they would have a uniform corruption? Of course, this would have been impossible.
Further, could both Jews and Christians have been involved in corrupting the Bible, as Muslims claim? Jews and Christians of that time were hostile to one another, and if either party tried to alter the biblical text, the other party would have cried "foul" and exposed the misdeed by producing the accurate manuscripts.'
Further, many dissenting Christian sects existed during this time. An alteration of the biblical text by any one of these sects would have brought immediate condemnation by the others. Still further, if the Jews had corrupted their Scriptures, wouldn't they have changed all the horrible things we read about them in the Torah-such as their total unfaithfulness during the wilderness sojourn and their participation in idolatry?
Likewise, if Christians corrupted the New Testament, wouldn't they have removed unflattering episodes about Christians, like Peter denying Christ three times and the disciples scattering like a bunch of faithless cowards when Christ was arrested?
The early Jews had meticulous rules to ensure that the scribes accurately copied the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. This text was then handed down to the Massoretes.
‘The Massoretes, in turn, numbered the verses, words, and letters of every book. ... The Massoretes were indeed anxious that not one jot or tittle--not one smallest letter nor one tiny part of a letter--of the Law should pass away or be lost.’
The previous is excerpted from Northern Storm Rising: Russia, Iran, and the Emerging End-Times Military Coalition against Israel by Ron Rhodes (2008).
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
The following is by David Cloud from the report “The Dead Sea Scrolls” at www.wayoflife.org -
The authenticity of the Hebrew Old Testament is clear from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves near the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, 13 miles southeast of Jerusalem. The first cave contained two Isaiah scrolls, including the nearly intact Great Isaiah Scroll.
The scrolls were preserved by the exceedingly dry climate of the caves, which are 1,300 feet below sea level.
Four-fifths of the scrolls are written in Hebrew, and 25% are books of the Bible. There are parts of every Old Testament book except Esther, thus confirming the traditional canon of Scripture. There are 15 copies of Genesis, 17 of Exodus, 13 of Leviticus, eight of Numbers, 29 of Deuteronomy, two of Joshua, three of Judges, 21 of Isaiah, six of Jeremiah, six of Ezekiel, 36 of Psalms, two of Proverbs, and four of Ruth.
Advanced dating tests in the early 1990s confirmed that the biblical scrolls date to the two centuries before Christ (George Bonani, “Carbon-14 Tests Substantiate Scroll Dates,” Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1991).
The Dead Sea Scrolls contain powerful evidence for the authenticity of the Masoretic Hebrew text that was the basis for the great Reformation Bibles such as the German Luther, the King James in English, and the Reina Valera in Spanish. The Masoretic text was preserved by the meticulous labor of Hebrew scribes prior to the invention of printing by moveable type in the 15th century. (The first printed Hebrew Bible appeared in 1488.)
The differences between the conservative Dead Sea scrolls and the Masoretic text are extremely minor, largely pertaining to spelling or grammar, the omission or addition of a word, or the mixing of Hebrew letters. For example in Isaiah 7:14, Immanuel is two words in the Masoretic text and one word in the Great Isaiah Scroll, but it is the same name.
The Great Isaiah Scroll’s (1QIsaa, meaning Cave 1 Isaiah a] agreement with the Masoretic text, is called “striking” by Dr. Ernst Wurthwein and “extraordinarily close” by Adolfo Roitman (Wurthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, 1979, p. 144; Roitman, The Bible in the Shrine of the Book, 2006, p. 43).
For more on this, see “The Dead Sea Scrolls” at www.wayoflife.org.
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