My First Quran
As a Christian apologist, I’ve read the Quran numerous times. I’ve made a goal to know it better than most Muslims. I recently had a religious discussion with a friend of mine from Gaza. When we were done he said that I knew the Quran better than most Muslims. I also had the privilege of explaining to him where Rabbinic Judaism comes from as he’s a Palestinian and has felt the wrath of Israeli ethnic cleansing.
There was a recent debate between Adnan Rashid and Samuel Green on salvation in Christianity and Islam. Samuel Green was technically representing the Christian side, though Green isn’t a Catholic so his theology is somewhat off though obviously closer to my position than the position of Adnan Rashid.
Sacred Scripture
If you’ve ever had dialogue with a Muslim on religion, you’ll find out very quickly that he believes that the previous Scriptures are corrupted and unreliable. Sometime before the Quran was revealed the Scriptures got corrupted. Where and when did they get corrupted? If you ask five different Muslims, you’re likely to get five different answers, unless they tell you that they don’t know. The interesting thing is to look in the holy book and see what it says.
As a Catholic, I’m always open to investigating claims of prophethood. I talk a lot about Islam on this blog but Islam is not the only world religion with a false prophet. There is Mormonism as well. Mormonism is another religion that started with a false prophet who in many ways was similar to Muhammad. A political leader as well as a military leader, had multiple wives, and said the previous Scriptures were corrupted whenever they disagreed with him so his claims couldn’t be tested.
I’m a huge fan of Steve Ray. He’s a very good apologist, especially when it comes to the early Church fathers. I’ve read several of his books including his book on his conversion story and his evaluation of the Papacy. Here he is at Franciscan University of Steubenville talking about Islam. For those who don’t know FUS is one of the biggest Catholic education centres in America so this isn’t some minor audience. It’s a group of University students at a Catholic University. The talk is also recorded and put on the Steubenville YouTube channel so it’s a huge Catholic audience.
Jesus and Mary in Islamic art
According to Muslim tradition, when Muhammad was 40 years old, he was spoken to by an angel and this made him a prophet. For the next 23 years of his life, he would receive more of the Quran until he had received it all. If one were to talk to Muhammad when he was 30, he would not have claimed to be a prophet of God. What made him a prophet? The Quran.
Nazareth
And coming he dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was said by prophets: That he shall be called a Nazarene.
– Matthew 2:23
The first time I encountered Faiz online I thought he was an atheist. This is because of the double standards that he uses. For example, he keeps saying that we have no first century manuscripts of the NT. He’s correct, we don’t. No first century book or document has first century manuscripts.
Muslims and Christians both agree that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. Where we disagree is on the status of Muhammad in the Abraham tradition. Muslims believe that he was the seal of the prophets, and Christians claim that he was a pretender, no different than Joseph Smith or Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. One big problem for this claim was that he never confronted the religious authorities on this.
My Icon of St. Clement of Rome purchased at Kiev Perchersk Lavra
In my last post I talked about how Christianity was born in the Greek literate tradition and was able to record the beliefs of the earliest Christians in their sacred texts known as the New Testament. At the same time I contrasted this with Islam which with minimal exceptions has no documents until the 9th century. At this point the Muslims probably realized that they couldn’t compete with a literate tradition in the long run. Either that or some of the literate tradition of the areas that they conquered started to rub off on them. After all, just because they didn’t accept the Christian religion in areas they were occupying, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t accept other cultural practices and customs and wouldn’t contradict Islam.