Sometimes I wish that I lived in London so I could go to Speakers’ Corner and field test my arguments against Muslims. I know what I’m about to tell you has worked against Jehovah’s Witness’ who used to camp outside my apartment building when I lived downtown.
The JW is used to debating a handful of points and essentially doesn’t know how to debate anything else. What I did when debating a missionary is that I used a very esoteric topic. For example, Catholics and Protestants disagree on which books are in the Old Testament. Catholics have an additional seven books. Now, I know a sharp Protestant will be able to give me answers on this. However, when I asked this JW missionary why his “church” had taken seven books out of the OT he had absolutely nothing. He wanted to debate his few key subjects but I threw him something out of left field.
Catholics and Protestants have been debating certain issues for centuries and we each quote sets of verses on to support our side. The next time a Muslim engages us, we should throw these arguments at them.
We should ask the Muslim if Matthew 16:18 and Luke 22:32 teach the papacy. We should show these to the Muslim and ask them to interpret them. Then we should ask them if 1 Corinthians 3 and Luke 16 teach the doctrine of Purgatory. Take an afternoon, and research some of these key arguments between Catholics and Protestants that Muslims don’t really care for.
The truth is that Muslims don’t care about the Bible save for the odd verse that they can torture into supporting Muhammad or Islam. Since these aren’t super controversial in the eyes of Ehrman who simply tries to debunk Christianity all together, Catholic or Protestant, he doesn’t really focus on these verses, hence the Muslims will have no ammunition from their golden boy.
The point of this exercise is to show Muslims that they don’t care about the Bible save for their shallow nitpicking of several verses to support Muhammad or Islam. This exercise will hopefully show them. It will show them that when Muslims open the Bible, they don’t study it to know what it actually says. They don’t open the Gospel of Matthew eager to learn what this gospel actually teaches. I think this will help expose that fraudulent enterprise. Again, I don’t have any dialoguing partners readily available so hopefully someone from Speakers’ corner sees this and tries it out. Now it would be best to do this with a cradle Muslim. If the Muslim is a former Catholic or Protestant they’d be familiar. So, ask the cradle Muslim to interpret Matthew 16 or Luke 22 and watch the confusion begin.
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