Quote:
Original Posting By Hugo - I don't understand your last sentence as I am not aware that I said anything about anybody or everybody forgetting but if I did please point it out to me?
UNLIKE the New Testament which is mostly anonymous or pseudonymous, and therefore EXTREMELY questionable in authenticity, the Ayats of the Qur'an were collected during the life of the Prophet, contemporaneously and with witnesses. you are claiming mistakes in this process, i am asking when and where these mistakes were made. to answer the above attack on the veracity of the Qur'an:
So far in my post I have not brought up the question of authenticity and my posts on Dr Azami's book are about his qualities as a careful scholar.
if Dr Azami bothers you SO MUCH, why don't you just aks sister Skye which book you should use?
simple enough, eh?
ibn Abu Lahab - perhaps you should look at one of the most respected and widely used English translations of the Qu'ran, that by Yusuf Ali and see what he says in foot notes. One does not teach a lexicon and simply saying that betrays a lack of understanding of what such a tool is. If you are knowledgeable about Al Azhar then tell me what lexicons they use or recommend or if they have Lane's in their library? Go and ask them what their view of it is?
Yusuf Ali is one of the most criticized translations out there. it is more in the style of the King James Bible and is considered by some to be a literary masterpiece but full of mistakes
Quote:
ibn Abu Lahab - that is fine but does that mean the Sister Skye is Omniscient?
Here you are attacking Islam as well as Muslims. we don't assign the attributes of Allah to human beings. it is not correct in Islam, i understand the you Christians do it with various persons or entities, but it is unacceptable in Islam. furthermore, IF any Muslims do it, they are wrong and committing a form of shirk. but again if you've done any research, you already know that.
ibn Abu Lahab - I cannot follow your logic here from my quote and perhaps if you examined the Qu'ran you might notice that Allah can see. Is it wrong to say address God as 'father' or describe God as a might fortress a rock or that he stretches out his hand and so on. I don't think I have attacked Islam but simply asked questions about it and there is a big difference. If you see every criticism or question as an attack that sounds like paranoia - do you see it like that.
tough to tell when you are just being your usual spiteful contemptuous self or that you really might not understand something
the Qur'an states that Allah has hands, but i don't show you my hands to show you what Allah's hands look like. we don't know what Allah's hands look like. where Allah describes himself, we just accept what He says and we don't over analyze it. it's the same with the attributes of Allah, Allah is the Most Merciful; that doesn't mean that i can't be merciful, but one CANNOT claim to be the Most Merciful, for that is Allah. and where Muslims [or those claiming to be Muslim] do this, they are in error. that is different than wheat Christians do with Jesus and Melchizedek.
Answering your last question sis easy, I simply resort to the same fallacy you used "The Bible is from God and you ask "who is the author of the Bible?" Immediately after claiming the you have questioned it's authenticity, as well as asking if we can "authenticate God"!
there is a big difference between the Qur'an which was revealed DIRECTLY from Gibreel, Alayhe Salaam. to the Rasulullah, Salla Allahu Alayhe wa Salaam and what even Christian Scholars claim about the Bible. Christians claim the Bible WAS written by man! the claim is that they were inspired by God when they wrote it! based upon that, your repeated retorts of fallacy don't make any sense. the 2 aren't really comparable as you claim.
Why cannot Christians and Jews use the same argument, there are thousands upon thousands of manuscripts so getting them together would allow reconstruction?
the more manuscripts you use, the more variations you have.
Let me end by asking a question - do you think there is anything of value in the Bible, if so tell me which part or parts?
we aren't talking about value, we're talking about authenticty. i value [or used to] the short works of Feyodr Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, does that mean they are written by God? you are try to cloud the issues discussed here.
Why it is impossible? Do you mean by versions, translations?
if you truly do not understand the question, i suggest that you watch Professor Luke Timothy Johnson's, "The Story of the Bible" put out by the Teaching Company. it goes for $70 when on sale, i got my for under $40 on ebay. here's a description from the company:
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=6252
My quotes were obviously Biblical ones so this has zero relevance. If its about what we believe and a matter of swapping stories, do you believe that Prophet Mohammed's heart was extracted and washed with snow? Do you believe that someone could die for a 100 years and when he woke up he found this moth eared book etc etc. Is there a literal bridge one has to cross at the end of life, is heaven full of sofas etc?.
This is worthless discussion
again, just pointing out your contempt and insults which you claim you don't do.
Do you follow the Qu'ran to the 'T', if so why don't you use cotton threads to mark the end and beginning of a day during ramadan, why is it if the Qu'ran is complete do you need the Sunna et etc?
what an extremely odd thing for a Christian to write. do YOU base your life as a Christian on what Jesus said? or even the Bible EXCLUSIVELY? and the logical question would be that IF your Bible was SO DANG AUTHORITATIVE, why did id take half a millennium or more to decide just what the Bible is????
ibn Abu Lahab Why does Azami leave out the word "one" which in this context is critical to understanding, frankly it looks like he is misleading deliberately or unintentionally the reader into thinking that all NT text are 10th century or later.
while i recommend we just get past Azami's book, i think that you are either purposely trying hide an important issue here or you haven't done enough research on this issue to speak about it. let me quote:
Erasmus had been studying Greek New Testament manuscripts for many years, in the Netherlands, France, England and Switzerland, noting their many variants; but he only had six Greek manuscripts immediately accessible to him in Basel.[7] They all dated from the 12th Century or later, and only one came from outside the mainstream Byzantine trradition. Consequently, most modern scholars consider his text to be of dubious quality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textus_Receptus
the majority of English Bible translations, all that are based on the King James, are from the Greek text are of a later date than the 10th Century!
and:
FACTS about Manuscripts
A manuscript is a hand-copied document. This was the method used for writing and duplicating existing literature prior to the invention of printing. There are over 5,300 (5,309 to be exact) existing manuscripts of the Scriptures. Some of these manuscripts contain a large portion of scripture, while other are fragments.
Let us first consider certain Greek texts from which all New Testament translations are derived:
1. the Majority Texts (Textus Receptus), and
2. the Minority Texts (primarily the Westcott and Hort Greek Text, based primarily on the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus).
For obvious reasons, the Textus Receptus is also referred to as the "Majority Text" since the majority (95% or more) of existing manuscripts support this reading. These extant manuscripts were brought together by various editors such as Lucian (AD 250-312), Erasmus, Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevir brothers.
The most notable editor of all was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) one of the greatest scholars the world has ever known. When the early Protestant Reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries decided to translate the scriptures directly from Greek into the languages of Europe, they selected Textus Receptus as their foundation Greek document.
http://www.1611kingjamesbible.com/manuscripts.html/
this above clarifies and gives weight to my declaration.
Here you simply repeat the common Islamic view that the Bible was 'concocted' so you dismiss many 1000's of manuscripts, 100s of years of painstaking scholarship and research so ignore therefore any evidence because it does not fit in with you world-view. For you it has no value, even the greatest passages and books - why do that, even if it were not a religious book, what rational person would disregard what is plainly good?
You say you believe in a Bible, an uncorrupted one that no one now can see and where is there any rationality in that?
that statement is disputed with what i put above it.
and as i grow weary of this, you posted somewhere [and i really tried to locate it] that there were hundreds of manuscripts predating the 10th Century, presumably in order to discredit Dr Azami.
and thus i give you:
Of the more than seven thousand Greek manuscripts (or fragments thereof) that are known today, fewer than ten (all now defective) originally contained the entire Greek Bible. Of these, only four date from before the 10th century, and of these four, Codex Vaticanus is one of the two earliest-the other (written about the same time) being the famous Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Library
http://library.bethel.edu/about/friends/codex
and ALL are defective! and NONE contain the NT as it is known today! they either contain the Epistle of Barnabas, 1st Clement, BOTH or 1st and 2nd Clement as CANONICAL! so TECHNICALLY, NOT the Bible, just one "VERSION" of it! which partially answers a question you asked earlier.
good luck to Skye on others who continue down this seemingly futile road! i may [or may not] add a few things here and there. and Allah knows best!
:wa:
