Audio only:
Joe breaks down the “Islamic Dilemma,” a catch 22 where the Quran says to obey the Gospel and the Torah, but also contradicts both of these books on several major theological and historical points.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and as you probably know, Muslims believe the Quran is divinely revealed scripture and non-Muslims don’t believe this. So how can we know and show which side is right? Well, there’s a simple argument called the Islamic dilemma that seems to settle the question once and for all. It doesn’t prove Christianity true, but it does prove Islam false. Now you can find a variation of this argument being made everybody from West Huff to Sam Shamo to David Wood, countless others. For a simple reason, the argument appears to be a pretty airtight refutation of Islam. Now, the Islamic dilemma is simple. The Quran says that the gospel is true and the gospel disagrees with the Quran. If the Quran is right, we should listen to the gospel and therefore reject the Quran. On the other hand, if the Quran is wrong, well then obviously we should reject the Quran.
Let’s look at the Quranic verses that you should know and also look at some of the ways that Muslim apologists have tried to get out of this dilemma. But first, I want to thank those of you that have accepted and not rejected supporting Shameless popery over@shamelessjoe.com. For as little as $5 a month, you can get access to the sources that we use in the episodes to exclusive q and a live streams and to a community of Christians who also want to go deeper in their faith, and we don’t take sponsors on this channel. So your direct support really is what keeps the quality high and what keeps the channel alive. Thank you for all that you do and I hope to see you over@mjo.com. Now, the translation of the Quran I’m going to be quoting from is the Clear Quran by Dr. Mustafa Kata because I’ve seen Muslims recommended as the best English translation of the Quran. Now you might have a different translation. You might find some slight textile variations, but you’ll see the main argument. The second thing you know is that unlike the Bible, which is a collection of dozens of books revealed over centuries, the Quran is just one book, the single book containing 114 chapters called Surah. And the one passage that you need to know to present the argument well is the one that West Hof recited on Pi Morgan’s show. Surah 5 46 to 47
CLIP:
Verse 47 of chapter five of the Quran actually addresses me as a Christian. It says, let the people of the gospel judge by what God has revealed therein being the gospel. And whoever it is not judged by what God has revealed, then it is he who’s the defiant, disobedient.
Joe:
But I think it’s important to put that verse in context, understand what’s going on. If you go back to verse 41, Allah accuses the Jews of distorting the scriptures and taking rulings out of context, and he gives Muhammad permission either to judge disputes between the Jews or else to turn them away. But then Allah asks, but why do they come to you for judgment when they already have the Torah containing allah’s judgment? Then they turn away. After all, they’re not true believers. So the important things to note there are twofold. Number one, the Torah was revealed by God, and number two, they still have the Torah in Muhammad’s day. That is God has not presented as saying, I revealed the Torah to them, but they lost it or they corrupted it, they got rid of it. He instead is presented as saying they have the Torah present tense.
They just refuse to abide by it. Allah is then going to say something similar about Christians in the gospel. Now, this is a critical passage that West quotes in verse 46, Allah says, then in the footsteps of the prophets, we sent Jesus, son of Mary confirming the Torah revealed before him and we gave him the gospel, the Inge containing guidance and light and confirming what was revealed in the Torah, a guide and a lesson to the God fearing, okay, so Jesus is sent by God to give us a gospel, and the gospel confirms the Torah. And as Wes points out in Sur 5 47, Allah then says, so let the people of the gospel judge by what Allah has revealed in it well revealed in what in the gospel. So according to the Quran, Christian, at least in Muhammad’s Day, is given instructions by God to obey the gospel.
In fact, the verse ends by saying that those who do not judge by what Allah has revealed are truly the rebellious. So the Quran’s claim is clear God gave not only the Quran, but also the Torah and the gospel. So far so good. The problem is both the Torah and the gospel repeatedly contradict claims that the Quran will later make. For instance, a critical moment in the Torah is when Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son Isaac and God stops him. But the Quran rewrites this with Isaac being replaced with Ishmael and the entire event happening before Isaac is born or considered the Exodus and the Torah, Moses’ brother Aaron is the one who in a moment of weakness creates the golden calf. But in the Quran, it’s a random guy called Al Samir, the Samaritan who creates a golden calf and Aaron actually tries to stop him.
Now, that’s not just a contradiction, it actually raises a baffling historical anachronism since there were no Samaritans at the time of Moses and Aaron. But it’s not just that the Quran and the Torah don’t match, the Quran contradicts the very heart of the gospel. For instance, when St. Paul speaks of the gospel in one Corinthians 15, he connects it with what’s been called the Corinthian creed, which proclaimed that Christ died for our sins in accordance of the scriptures that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance of the scriptures. Even skeptics like Richard Kerry admit, Paul is treating this creed as a teaching that predates him as something he was taught, and Paul himself converted only a few years after Good Friday. So long before you have the New Testament text, you actually have this proclamation of the death and resurrection of Christ as central to the gospel.
In comparison, nearly 600 years later, you’ve got the Quran which claims that actually Jesus wasn’t crucified at all. Well, similarly, court of Jesus’s teaching in the gospel is that he’s the son of God and he speaks and acts in a way that leads people to believe that he’s claiming to be divine. But the Quran denies all this saying that Allah has never had any offspring, nor is there any God besides him and asking how could he have children when he has no mate in the Bible, Jesus is called God and he’s worshiped. But in sur of five, Allah ask Jesus, oh Jesus, son of Mary, did you ever ask the people to worship you and your mother is Gods besides Allah? He of course says no. Now this seems to be based on Muhammad’s misunderstanding of the Trinity thinking that it was father son in marry.
But whatever the case, it’s clear that while the Bible presents Jesus is worthy of worship, this is denied to him pretty explicitly as idolatrous in the Quran. So you can see the dilemma. If the Quran is right that the Torah and gospel are from God, then we should listen to the Torah and the gospel and recognize Quran as erroneous and manmade. On the other hand, if the Torah and gospel aren’t from God, it also seems to disprove the Quran since the Quran wrongly claimed that they were. So either way, we can see the Quran is not an errant and it is not. God breeds scripture as our friend James White likes to say, we have not been shown anything that is truly the, so how do Muslim apologists respond to this problem? Well, a common way is to claim when the Quran describes the Torah, it doesn’t really mean the first five books of the Bible, or at least not as we have them today. And then when it speaks of the gospel, the in Jill, it doesn’t really mean the New Testament or the four Gospels. It instead refers to either an oral or written revelation given to Jesus that’s now been lost
CLIP:
In jail. If you translate, the closest to in jail would be gospel. So when the Quran mentions the word in Jill, it is talking about the wahi given to Alala. The present Bible is not the Wahi given to Issam. The present Bible is a book of books. It is many books. What the Quran says in the Wahi given to Issam, what they have, even the first four books of the New Testament is not the in it is in gospel according to Matthew Gospel, according to Mark Gospel, according to Luke Gospel, according to John, what we want is there is Noa in the Bible. So the in which is mentioned in the Quran is the wahi given to prophet Jesus, peace upon him, and we believe that’s the word of God, but that has not been maintained in his pure form.
We believe that what was given was from Allah, the in the is the revelation, the that Allah gave to isah Jesus Christ. So whatever he preached was from Allah, we acknowledge it was the truth, but where is now the Torah that the in the where are they, we believe, what did we say? We said we believe in jail. When we say in jail, it is a revelation. The wahi given to hazard is that is what we believe. Not one given, if at all, if given to Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, who are they? Who’s Paul, Peter and James? Who are they? We are made to accept is the wahi Allah gave to hazard? Isam bring it and we’ll give it a sympathetic
Consideration. Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him. What was revealed to him is the we believe in a 100% what you have today from the writings of Paul and Peter and John and X, y, and Z and unknown authors of Hebrews and this and that, this is not the Ji.
Joe:
This is often paired with the claim that sends the Quran claims itself to be the supreme authority over all prior revelation that this means that whenever the Quran makes a claim that is seemingly disproved by the Bible, we should instead not take that as a proof that the Quran is false, but one of those areas where the Quran is showing us which parts of the Bible we can’t trust. Now, let’s assume all that’s true for a moment. Let’s assume that the gospels we have today can’t be trusted, that when the Quran refers to the gospel, it doesn’t mean the four gospels of the New Testament. It refers to some kind of lost gospel, an oral gospel by Jesus, or a written gospel by Jesus. Where would that leave us? Well, first, if you understand the in angel, the gospel as a written lost gospel, there’s an obvious credibility problem.
Is it really plausible that Jesus wrote a gospel given by God and nobody bothered to keep it or even to quote it in any of the early controversies amongst Christians, it didn’t make it into any Bible. No wicked men even tried to tamper with the text to try to get it to say something else. Jesus writes it and everybody just shrugs and ignores it and forgets about it all while declaring Jesus to be God. Second, even if you can wave away, the Quran’s references to the gospel as misunderstood. What about the Torah? That seems to obviously refer to the first five books of the Old Testament books, which contradict the Quran on several important points. The best that I’ve seen Muslim apologists like Shair Ali say is that, well, since Moses didn’t write the chapter concerning his own death, maybe there’s some vagueness about which parts really count as a Torah and which ones don’t.
CLIP:
So when the Quran mentions Torah, and this is somehow associated with Moses on home bps, because the Quran does not define precisely what the Torah is, we cannot say that it is exactly the first five books of the Bible, which are called Torah today from Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy. And in fact, even looking at from Genesis to Deuteronomy, you realize that all of this could not have been written in Moses’ lifetime because the book of Deuteronomy in the 34th chapter describes the death of mu sala, the prophet Moses. And so this was obviously written by somebody after his death. And when faced with this, some fundamentalists will say, well, oh, maybe Joshua wrote this, the prophet who came after Moses. But then if there’s a maybe that Joshua wrote, this is maybe that somebody else wrote it and somebody else wrote some other sections too. So that leaves some
Joe:
Vagueness there. Third, this idea that the Torah and gospel were originally God’s word but have been changed and corrupted seems to create another problem for Muslims. INS six verse 115, Allah says The word of your Lord has been perfected in truth and justice. None can change his words. Now it’s clear that God’s word originally included the Torah and the gospel. So either the Torah and gospel are still perfect in truth and justice and we should follow them. And thus not the Quran or else God’s word was changed and the Quran’s apparent promise otherwise is false. But perhaps the most obvious problem with this reading that it’s a lost gospel and a corrupted Torah is simply that the idea that the Torah was corrupted and the gospel was lost completely undermines the whole argument of sur five of the Quran. Remember, Allah has just told Muhammad that the Jews of Muhammad’s own day in the seventh century already have the Torah containing allah’s judgment.
He doesn’t say they used to have it, but their ancestors corrupted it years ago. If that was the case, we’d make no sense to tell them that they have to find the truth by looking to the Torah because they wouldn’t be able to do that. Similarly, Allah says of Christians, but the people of the gospel judged by what a law has revealed in it. In fact, we are required to do so since those who do not judge by what God has revealed are truly the rebellious. So the Christians of the seventh century still had the gospel and could look to it for the judgment of God that is clearly what the crown is claiming, which proves definitively that whatever the Quran means by the NAL is clearly not some lost gospel from the first century or an oral teaching that Jesus had given six centuries prior that seventh century Christians had never heard.
It simply doesn’t work as an explanation of the text. So that leaves two possibilities for the Muslim apologist. Either you’re claiming that a law is teaching heresy, he’s telling Jews and Christians to look to a Torah and gospel that are filled with false teachings and corruptions or else concede that the Quran is treating the Torah and gospel as still trustworthy even in the seventh century. And since we have physical copies of the Torah and the gospels from the seventh century and before we can say with certainty what they didn’t didn’t say, and that they do in fact disprove the Quran. So where does this leave Muslim apologists? Well, I think Shabi Ali is right.
CLIP:
Our Christian friends seizing the opportunity for dialogue with Muslims would say, okay, so your Quran says that God revealed the Torah and God revealed the gospel, and here we have it here, the Torah here is the gospel. And by the way, the gospel especially says some things that you, Muslims do not accept. So you are in a kind of a catch 22. If you deny the Torah and the in jail, you deny the Quran, and if you accept the Torah in jail, well then you must accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
Joe:
Those were the options. Either reject this teaching of the Quran or accept it and become a Christian. Since Christians are the only people who follow both the Torah and the gospel as a Christian, I certainly hope you’ll choose the latter. But either way, the argument really does appear fatal to Islam. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.