Strategically, this debate may well be the most significant debate of the century for Christians. It can be declared with some confidence that the greatest challenge confronting the Church today is the challenge of Islam. The sheer size and influence of Islam on a global scale should be sufficient to establish this to be the case. If this is true, then the Church should be directing more of its efforts to reach Muslims with the Gospel. On this front Islam presents the Church with a formidable apologetic challenge. Over the years, Christian apologists have spent a considerable amount of time debating the historical veracity of the Bible. Muslims have been delighted to engage Christians in their own backyard. Few Christians have, following a defense of the veracity of the Bible, sought to ask Muslims why anyone should think that the Quran is historically reliable. This is a fair question, and for 300 years the Bible has been subjected to the scrutiny of scholarly criticism. The same cannot be said of Islam. Indeed, to date a critical text of the Quran has yet to be published (one with the textual apparatus at the bottom of the text letting the reader know which manuscripts have been employed in the process of textual criticism). The claim from Muslims concerning the Quran is that there are no variants in their texts. This is a foundational claim, to which millions of Muslims have assented without any rational basis. This issue is not to be taken lightly, given that Muslims have argued that the Quran has been preserved without error. Can this significant claim be defended? Do the early Quranic manuscripts cohere with the current Quran, which was only canonized in 1924? In my estimation, this debate is perhaps some of the most important work for Christians to consider. In short, Muslim scholars have for centuries overstated their case. All thoughtful Christians should be able to ask why a person should think that the Quran that we have today is a historically reliable document that has been faithfully handed down to us over 1400 years. #Quran #IslamAndTheCross
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 16:56:28 +0000
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