15 April 2005

oldest known Bible

Note the date for this: "The 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, arguably the world’s most important Christian manuscript." Got that? Note also "Written in Greek on vellum around the time of Constantine the Great" and "Contained the entire Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, but half of the Old Testament has been lost"
The reason I mention it is because some Muslims claim that the Bible has been altered. Mainly because when they read it they find things in it that do not tally with the Qur'an. Understandably, being Muslim, they would rather believe the Qur'an than the Bible so they assume that the Bible has been changed. The difficulty here is then that the Qur'an actually supports the Bible as trustworthy in the time of Mohammed [lots of passages which are mentioned here but Surah 5:65-69 should suffic for now]. So the question is when did the Bible become corrupted? It can't have been before Muhammed's time or it would have been part of the argument of the Qur'an and it isn't. It can't be after, because we have manuscripts like the one referred to in the article referenced which date back to before the Islamic period and which we can show to be the Bible we use today in every way that relates to the issues between Christian faith and Qur'anic faith today.
I hope by mentioning this to alert my readers to one of the issues between the faiths and to point up documentation to access the arguments about them. You never know when you might need them.

Britain may have to give up oldest known Bible - Britain - Times Online

2 comments:

Paul Fromont said...

Hi Andii. My comment isn't related to this post. I did however want to say a very big thankyou for the two links that you left on my latest blogpost. I really appreciate it and will look forward to reading the fruits of your "labour." Thanks. Have a wonderful weekend.

Andii said...

Thanks Paul. You might want to check out my comment on the article at
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2005/04/pastor-as-corporate-spiritual-director.html
And for bemused readers the link to my comment on Paul's blog
http://prodigal.typepad.com/prodigal_kiwi/2005/04/pastor_as_spiri.html#comments

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