No music??

[Hawkeye]

so you havent even heard of the Seven Hanging Odes and you find yourself competent to discuss the literary value of the Quran?

No, I know about these pagan poems but you do realise that it was only in the latter half of the eighth century that they were put together and then known collectively as the Mu‘allaqat, or Hanging Odes. Legend tells that in the sixth century, some years before the rise of Islam, the poems were transcribed in letters of gold on the finest Egyptian linen and suspended from the Ka’ba in Mecca. But could these performances have been transcribed at such an early date? The notion has been contested by both medieval and modern scholars. Yet the legend lives on, bolstering the iconic status of the Mu‘allaqat in the collective imagination of the Arabic-speaking world. Its odd is it not that the image of pagan poetry hung from the holy shrine of the Ka’ba serves to bind the ancient world of desert lore to Islam.

[Hawkeye]

It is instructive to note how Muslims find a simple yes or no so difficult. They know the Gospel of Barnabus is a forgery but just cannot bring themselves to say so. The issue one supposes is the Quran regularly uses the apochrapyal new testament so to outright deny Barbabas is to deny the Quran itself. Consider

You claim superiority of scholarship yet when one looks in the Quran we find for example stories of Jesus which have no currency in the New Testament. Muhammad lived six hundred or so years after Mary and Jesus. Since the life of jesus was and historical event we must ask what were his sources for his references to their lives? Devout Muslims say that over time Allah sent Gabriel down to reveal the entire Quran to Muhammad. Muhammad even asserts in the Quran that he was not there during the events in the life of Mary (and in the life of Jesus, by extension and analogy), but he still has revelations from Allah, so who needs facts?

Q3:44 This is an account of things [about Mary's childhood] beyond your knowledge that We [Allah] revealed to you [Muhammad]: you were not present . . . . (MAS Abdel Haleem).This verse spells out the epistemological challenge to devout Muslims and to everyone else. In effect, Muhammad says, 'I wasn't there, so believe that I got these events in Mary's life from Allah, no matter what!' Thus, belief has been exalted, Revelation seems to trump all other kinds of knowledge, such as careful research. But what if the revelations are built on fictions?

Take the case where the young Mary receives provision and care in Sura 3:37 and 3:44. Muhammad tells the stories through the Quran but in his own special way. He adds and deletes details, compared to the original versions. He edits the Bible on Noah, Abraham, Lot, and Moses, for example, but most significantly he borrows and edits the birth and childhood of Mary. The canonical four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are completely silent about this legend. However, an apocryphal gospel invents fictions about Mary, from which Muhammad borrowed.

Q3:37 Her Lord graciously accepted her and made her grow in goodness, and entrusted her to the charge of Zachariah. Whenever Zachariah went to see her in her sanctuary, he found her supplied with provisions. He said, 'Mary how is it you have found these provisions?' and she said, 'They are from God: God provides limitlessly for whoever He wills.' (Haleem)

This passage says that young Mary was put under the charge of Zechariah, an old man. Mary is found in a sanctuary. She receives provisions miraculously. Where does Muhammad receive this fiction?*This passage says that young Mary was put under the charge of Zechariah, an old man. Mary is found in a sanctuary. She receives provisions miraculously. Where does Muhammad receive this fiction? The main ideas in this passage are clearly taken from the Protevangelium of James, also titled Birth of Mary. Revelation of James or Book of James, among other titles It is not part of the New Testament canon, coming late in history and conflicting so egregiously with the unadorned Four Gospels. The Book of James, in contrast, is a work of fiction and imagination.
The apocryphal gospel says: 5.1 And she [Anna, Mary's mother] made a sanctuary in her [Mary's] bedchamber . . . 8.1 And Mary was in the Temple nurtured like a dove and received food from the hand of an angel . . . . (New Testament Apocrypha)

This is Recurring theme in both the Quran and Hadith where the source is easily found yet Mohammed claim the knowledge came by revelation., even when the knowledge is well known by everyone, including himself, he still claim a revelation. I will return twosome of these points later but if the Quran is from God why is it using as its source materials texts that are obvious forgeries?

(extracted in part from The American Thinker)

[Hawkeye]

How does your gibberish prove stories like this

If one wants gibbersh go look in the Hadith, here is one example

Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah's Apostle said, "Angels come to you in succession by night and day and all of them get together at the time of the Fajr and 'Asr prayers. Those who have passed the night with you (or stayed with you) ascend (to the Heaven) and Allah asks them, though He knows everything about you, well, "In what state did you leave my slaves?" The angels reply: "When we left them they were praying and when we reached them, they were praying." *(Book #10, Hadith #530)

unknown matthew told unknown christian audience in an unknown place, 50 years after jesus' murder, that dead jews entered the holy city.

Well who wrote the Quran since a written copy cannot be found earlier that 70 years after your prophets death. But as I look in the Quran I don't see any authors name that I can go check on, you have just decided it was God because one man's said so - how dim is that?

The NT was in circulation and manuscripts have been dated, whether you believe what they say is someting only you can decide but don't peddle lies about the dating. If the Jews made such a fuss about getting Jesus Crusified it's easy to see they would be paranoid about everything else so as usual your rumblings have no foundation

[lumumba_s]

You claim superiority of scholarship yet when one looks in the Quran we find for example stories of Jesus which have no currency in the New Testament.

And it is instructive to note how people like you ignore the scholarship of the very people that they themselves cite. Remember what I said about you completely ignoring everything I had to say? I'll make this quick and I'm not wasting anymore of my time. Bart Ehrman... Remember him? The Biblical critic who commented on the state of oral history in Rome that you brought up as an attempt to undermine the oral history of a place over 2,000 miles away and 800 years later? Ehrman: "The Gospel According to Matthew"? Fabrication. "The Gospel According to Mark"? Fabrication. "The Gospel According to John"? Fabrication. "The Gospel According to Luke?" Fabrication. "The Book of Acts?" Fabrication. "The Book of Revelations?" Fabrication. The only books that is left are the Epistles of Paul. Professor Ehrman? A quarter of them are fabricated. What you have in the New Testament is a small sampling of publications chosen from a larger sample of publications, which were canonized purely based upon their content, without any consideration for their authenticity. As you clearly do not understand the implications of textual criticism, the fact that the four Gospels are FORGED in the names of others, means that their content is UNRELIABLE as scripture and thus have the same reliability as the "rejected" religious literature that ARBITRARILY was not considered canon. In our usul, not a single word of the New Testament is considered reliable enough to base one's Afterlife upon. And being that the Qur'an is the Divine word of God, takes priority. What do I think about the "Book of Barnabus"? I don't. The weakest hadith in the Jami` al-Sahih of al-Tirmidhi,. epistemologically speaking, is stronger than every single line of the New Testament. How I feel about the New Testament is another matter, but in the larger picture of what we were "discussing" (even though it cannot be called a discussion when one party completely ignores the core of what is being discussed), the tawatur nature of the Qur'anic transmission supercedes any other religious texts having anything more than an academic curiosity on my part. At the macro-level, Jesus is not my prophet. Muhammad is. And Jesus being a universal prophet to all of humanity is only established through a single-line in the entire New Testament; a single-line that Biblical scholars agree was not found in the earlier manuscripts of John, and thus is not considered authentic even by the more lax Biblical standards - to say nothing of our clearly more rigorous ones.

Since your obsession with Islam has put you in a situation where you seem unable to think and only regurgitate the wild speculations and outright lies of others, let me explain something to you. The idea that an unlettered Arab man, who was born and raised in Southern Arabia, a land which had been dominated by idol worship for centuries, who traveled to Syria two or three times during his teenage years, 30 years later plagiarised the Old Testament and New Testament, has been rejected long ago by Western scholars as ridiculous. The only way that this could have occurred is if Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), when he was a teenager, in the span of a few hours, heard the entire Old Testament and then memorized enough details that 30 to 40 years later, was able to readily recount them. This, most contemporary Western scholars say is so unlike that it is a preposterous notion and is evidence that previous Orientalists scholars grasped at whatever straws they could.

So upon this rejected absurdity, you are adding the notion that an unlettered Arab man, plagiarised not only the Bible as we know it, but also plagiarised an entire body of source material that was rejected as canon several centuries before. You aren't following me are you? Of course not. Let me put it another way. What you are alleging is that an man who never learned how to read or write Arabic, in the middle of the southwestern Arabian desert, in which only a handful of people rejected idol worship, somehow managed to plagiarize a series of GREEK, LATIN (and whatever other languages were in use at the time) letters that may or may not have been in circulation 1,500+ miles away from his home, somehow broke the language barrier and remembered enough detail to of the apocryphal literature to recall it 30 to 40 years later... Let me stop. "Apocryphal" means only that in classic Christianity, it means only that they were not canonized, but nonetheless were acknowledged as being written by "godly men". Many of them dealt with biographical information and because Christians were mostly unconcerned with the biographies, they were casually dismissed as canon. I.e., many of them were not dismissed because they conflict with some doctrine (a doctrine that took a full 300 years to develop mind you), but because they contained biographical information about the life of Jesus and his family, something that Trinitarian Christians simply were not interested it. The fact that they were considered apocryphal later does not mean anything about their authenticity. And in the larger picture when you add the conclusions of Biblical criticism into the fray, given the conclusions stated above that are agreed upon by practically all Biblical scholars, many of them are just as reliable as what became considered canon.... Let me stop again. Given the conclusions that that all of the Four Gospels, Revelations, Acts and many of "Paul's" Epistles at the very LEAST are actually anonymous documents and thus do not carry the historical authority that they would, had they been confirmed to be the historical accounts that they are falsely attributed to. But as they stand now, their authors are unknown, so dating them is pointless and their being valid scripture is a matter of faith. Going back to our "argument", what you are claiming is that an unlettered Arab man, as a teenager, listened not only to what is considered now to be the entire Old and New Testament during the course of a few trade expeditions, but also listened to a whole series of apocryhal pieces whose circulation in the areas he traveled to during his life is not established and which would have most likely been in Greek and/or Latin, recalled them with enough clarity and precision that 30 to 40 years later he was able to recount them so accurately that you can trace the information back to their "original sources" of Greek, Latin, and probably Germanic letters, an unlettered Arab sheepherder and trader, during a time where the majority of the populations of the world were illiterate in their OWN languages, recalled so fluidly from a few brief encounters as a teenager. Yeah... So that's that.

***

As for gibberish? Do you realize that you, a Christian, who believes in the existence of angels, who believes that the "arch-angel" Satan who waged war with God and lost, who reads a book in which angels are narrated to be ascending and descending, acting as messengers between God and man, prophets and non-prophets, waging wars, fighting dragons, looking over people, bringing down punishment and spiritual succor, referred to the belief that a procession of angels, descending and ascending, "informing" God (i.e., acting as witnesses on humanity's behalf), is gibberish for no other reason than it has come in a hadith? Shame on you!

Well who wrote the Quran since a written copy cannot be found earlier that 70 years after your prophets death. But as I look in the Quran I don't see any authors name that I can go check on, you have just decided it was God because one man's said so - how dim is that?

The NT was in circulation and manuscripts have been dated, whether you believe what they say is someting only you can decide but don't peddle lies about the dating. If the Jews made such a fuss about getting Jesus Crusified it's easy to see they would be paranoid about everything else so as usual your rumblings have no foundation

See everything that I've written which you have intentionally been ignoring. Repeating the same debunked arguments does not qualify as "debate".

*Qur'an is authentic in its transmission
*Hadith were in circulation with rigorous modes of transmission
*Oral transmission in early Islamic history as a collective community effort is MORE reliable than written documentation of single individuals
*Islamic textual criticism is much more rigorous than Western
*Written documentation does not automatically guarantee preservation
*The proliferation of narration in early Islamic history is demonstrable to be verifiable
*The New Testament is not traceable to any of the disciples

Those are the major issues (and I probably left out a few). I look forward to you both ignoring the essentials, trying to argue over secondary, unimportant matters and bringing up a few ready made new ones whenever you have no readily made answer to the now three posts I have made that you have simply ignored in your reference material - which I assume is probably just a handful of websites that was set up to help you in your mission to save the Muslim world from itself. I can predict now, for everything you have to say from here-on-out: "See page 11-14 of my replies." Have a nice day.

[theman09]

unknown matthew told unknown christian audience in an unknown place, 50 years after jesus' murder, that dead jews entered the holy city.

The NT was in circulation and manuscripts have been dated,

READ the gospel of john, mark and luke without knowledge of matthews gospel. CAN you find the guards in the 3?


matthew is the only christian who told his unknown christian audience in an unknown location that the jews gave cash to the pagan romans to spread lies.you can't TELL me anything because you DON'T have jewish or roman REACTION to the christian CLAIMS. the best you can do is "probably their was a sympathetic jew IN the gang"

or "secret info leaked out" notice you don't have proof but ASSUMPTION? when the UNKNown writer of matthew wrote to his UNKNOWN christian audience how many witnesses were alive to verify matthews claim?


matthew wrote his STORY 50 years after jesus' MURDER. can you tell me who told matthew that the jews paid the romans to spread lies? i'm sure matthew was writing in an unknown location, how many jews would have allowed him to spread claims that jewish holy people, respected by the people, PAID romans to spread LIES? lol


how does the BS "nt was in circulation..." prove that matthews STORY was in circulation 50 years BEFORE IN Oral form? how many times did the jews ARREST peter? they COOKED up a charge (which u think is FALSE) 2 PIN your god. jews were looking for a crime to charge peter , they COULD HAVE cooked up crime/charge, like they did for jesus, but these jews totally forgot about the claim that they paid the guards cash to spread the story that pete and his pals STOLE jesus body ? lol

If the Jews made such a fuss about getting Jesus Crusified it's easy to see they would be paranoid about everything else so as usual your rumblings have no foundation

neither the jews, the romans or the deciples believed that jesus was going to come back to life. the 2 maries come to the tomb to cover your god with medication. if the jews made a fuss, they would not pay pagans, they would send thier own to keep an eye on the deciples and the tomb.you really think the jews would have believed the pagan roman claim that an angel came down ,removed the stone and zapped them? these same pagan romans who would spread lie for cash? your witnesses are close to crap.


jews would be paranoid of dead meat lol? they were screwing, blueing and tatooing christians BEFORE and after your gods alleged ressurection. after they had proved to themselves that they finnished off a blasphemer , and that the ot says:


"[This is what you must do] if your blood brother, your son, your daughter, your bosom wife, or your closest friend secretly tries to act as a missionary among you, and says, 'Let us go worship a new god. LET US HAVE A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN BY YOU OR YOUR FATHER.' 13:8 [He may be enticing you with] the gods of the nations around you, far or near, or those that are found at one end of the world or another. 13:9 Do not agree with him, and do not listen to him."

they were really going to be paranoid?" we need to guard his body because his deciples are going to steal his dead body and venerate it even though they don't believe that he is going to come back to life"

"no problem let them venerator his dead body and claim ressurection, we'll beat the sh it out of another beareded jew, kill him and place him in the tomb. after few weeks all bearded dead bodies , cooking in the tomb , would look the same"

[lumumba_s]

theman: Hawkeye has already quoted Forged and most of the arguments that you have been expressing are contained in it. Bart Ehrman demonstrates why the attribution of the Four Gospels is a forgery, including proving that there are references in the New Testament (in its current form) to things that only occurred AFTER the particular gospels or letters were allegedly written and hence could not have been written by the people they are customarily attributed to. So either he hasn't read Forged and just quoted it from some random site, not realizing what it contains or he has read Forged, and like Shaad pointed out in the past, is selective in his quoting and completely ignores the conclusions of his own sources whenever they disagree with him - hoping that we won't be familiar with the source.

[ProphetofTolerance]

No, there was no persecution by Muslims in Spain (at least not any state-sponsored one) unlike the Inquisition that followed. Your nick on the forum is antithetical to what you display here - continue living in your fantasy land...

You are so clueless it's funny.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Dha...ersion&f=false

[shaad_lko]

You are so clueless it's funny.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Dha...ersion&f=false

Relative to the Inquisition, there still isnt any trace of persecution.. Al-Andalus is widely acknowledged to be the golden period of Jewish life in the medieval ages - and the same Maimonedes goes on later to become physician to Salahuddin.

You're not even funny while conjuring up your fantasies.

[shaad_lko]

No, I know about these pagan poems but you do realise that it was only in the latter half of the eighth century that they were put together and then known collectively as the Mu‘allaqat, or Hanging Odes. Legend tells that in the sixth century, some years before the rise of Islam, the poems were transcribed in letters of gold on the finest Egyptian linen and suspended from the Ka’ba in Mecca. But could these performances have been transcribed at such an early date? The notion has been contested by both medieval and modern scholars. Yet the legend lives on, bolstering the iconic status of the Mu‘allaqat in the collective imagination of the Arabic-speaking world.

sure, all that the Arabs say about themselves is just legend..

Its odd is it not that the image of pagan poetry hung from the holy shrine of the Ka’ba serves to bind the ancient world of desert lore to Islam.

how poetic except that you failed to demonstrate how does Islam have anything to do with the Mu'allaqat? One is an eternal faith (the faith of Abraham and Noah) and the other is a historical literature.

[lumumba_s]

I was staying out of this one, but for the sake of providing additional insight...

The persecution that occurred in Muslim lands, which was very infrequent, was tied to the political circumstances of the time. So while there was some persecution which did happen in al-Andalus, as Shaad_lko admitted, it occurred outside of the bounds of the shari`ah, was connected to the rival regimes which were fighting for power at the time and was nothing compared to the Reconquista, let alone the Inquisition. Not only where Jews and Christians persecuted, so was anyone who happened to have sided with the losing party which included Muslims who were politically connected to the Murabitun (Almoravid dynasty), fled south to Morocco when the Muwahiddun (Almohad dynasty), which was known for its puritanism, eventually took over. This is why great scholars like Qadi Iyad wound up in Fez, fleeing from retaliation, despite their rank among scholars in that part of the world (NOTE: For the Muslims reading this, this is why Qadi Iyad is on record for his harsh criticisms against the Ihya Ulum al-Din, Imam al-Ghazali taking the blame for Ibn Tumart's beliefs and political aspirations). It has been proven subsequently that the story of Spain crafted for itself was a fabrication and under Muslim rule, economics and politics ruled the day, not religion. The very man whom the Spanish have been celebrating for centuries as the liberator of Christian Spain from Muslim rule, was in fact a Muslim Moor himself who sided with his economic interests and acted as a mercenary for both Christian royalty and Muslim rulers. The political backlash, that took the form of religious persecution, was largely limited to particular noble families, not entire religious communities. Hence, your own reference contains the peculiar sentence,

"This results in a paradoxical situation, where, according to Jewish sources, the Maghrebi community as a whole suffered from shemad, forced conversions, while hardly anyone among its members seems to have converted, even if only outwardly."

So the more appropriate word is actually retaliation, not persecution, as it was limited in its scope. The part of the story that you are leaving out (and seems to be equally left out of your reference), is that the Jews who were persecuted, a very large percentage of them fled south with their equally persecuted Muslim companions - ironically, closer to the center of the Almohad's power base - or east to Ottoman Turkey and got their conversions overturned in the courts which were not run by the Almohads. The forced conversion of the Jewish elite in Spain at the hands of the Almohads is one of only two or three incidents of that nature in the history of Jewish citizenship in Islamic lands - one being at the hands of the an extreme Shi`a sect who forced the conversion of everyone and the other likewise being linked to political instability. This was admitted by none other than a visiting Israeli Zionist historian who gave a presentation at Virginia Wesleyan College that I had attended in my university days. Even though the conversions were forced, the Almohad's were aware that they were insincere and were content as long as their political authority was not challenged. They largely left the Jewish community alone. Hence, your reference admitting that Mamoinides lamented over the deplorable state of Jewish learning the "in the Islamic West", where the Almohad's had taken over and displayed a level of intolerance previously unseen. How many Muslims and Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity, were later able to write about their situation and be acknowledged by history as who they actually were?

The second part of the equation, that Shaad_Lko has been alluding to, but which you have consistently ignored, is the behavior of the Christians once Spain was reconquered. And by Christians, we are referring to the entire population, not simply a political entity like the Almohads. After Spain was reconquered, a massacre took place that is only rivaled by the Crusades. An edict was declare expelling the entire Muslim and Jewish populations from the country and the remaining Muslims and Jews in the city were forced to convert or were killed on the spot. Women and children were slaughtered, including "infidel" babies, whose heads were burst against their walls. Nearly the entire Christian population of Spain gleefully become spies and both Islam and Judaism were outlawed. Anyone caught performing wudu, fasting or anything else that signifies even a nominal attachment to Islam was either tortured into repentance, killed as a heretic, forced into galley slavery for the Spanish and Portuguese navy or expelled from Spain. After this, the Inquisition followed as Shaad_Lko and what happened there was too famous to warrant repeating. Incidently, Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah has a fascinating essay on the Moriscos and the relationships that existed between the vying superpowers at the time: Turks, Moors and Moriscos in Early America. It is a good read for anyone interested in authentic history and a glossed over reality that isn't discussed much outside of academic circles. It demonstrates a little known fact that part of the British anti-slavery activity was in freeing Moriscos (forced Christian converts from Spain) from Portugese and Spanish ships, sending them back to Morocco or to Turkey so they can live their lives as free Muslims once again.

In the larger scheme of things, are you really comparing the actions of a single regime, known for its intolerance towards everyone else, whose decisions were overturned by other Islamic courts and which did not reach anywhere near the level of persecution and bloodshed to what happened by royal and papal decree at the hands of your brethren in faith for over 800 years? It is also quite interesting, that one of the most celebrated Jewish scholars of the pre-modern era, only became so after having received an Islamic education at the famous Qarawiyyin and Timbuktu. But you know how us Muslim fabricate our influence upon others...

[ProphetofTolerance]

So, in the larger scheme of things, are you really comparing the actions of a single regime, known for its general intolerance, whose decisions were overturned by other Islamic courts and which did not reach anywhere near the level of persecution and bloodshed to what happened by royal and papal decree at the hands of your brethren in faith for over 800 years?

No, you should try reading posts and skaad_lko should get a better education.

Relative to the Inquisition, there still isnt any trace of persecution..

Wow. What kind of argument is this, now? "Relative"? Suddenly you've backpedaled from your earlier claims.

What happened to no persecution by the Muslim state?

Al-Andalus is widely acknowledged to be the golden period of Jewish life in the medieval ages - and the same Maimonedes goes on later to become physician to Salahuddin.

Yes, this same Maimonides who fled Muslim Spain and later North Africa due to persecution. But we've already been over this when you embarrassed yourself the time before.

After Spain was reconquered, a massacre took place that is only rivaled by the Crusades.

I assume you're referring to the Muslim massacre of Christians during the crusades - particularly one nasty massacre in which the Christian civilian population opened the gates of their city to the Muslims which the Muslims promptly sealed behind them and slaughtered every last Christian in the city. The slaughter was particularly disturbing because killing the inhabitants of a town or city was completely out of the norm if it was not taken by force.

[theman09]

if you have read ehrmans book forged check out page 98 -99

quoting the main bits:

One of his most cited set of numbers is that there are 848 DIFFERENT words used in the pastoral letters. Of that number 306 ... DO NOT OCCUR IN ANY of the pauline letters of the new testament...

THAT'S AN INORDINATELY HIGH NUMBER; ESPECIALLY given the fact that about two thirds of these 306 words are USED BY christians AUTHOURS LIVING IN THE SECOND CENTURY.THAT suggests that the authour is using vocabulary that WAS BECOMING more common after the days of paul, and that he too therefore lived after paul.


PAGE 99
FOR one thing, sometimes this authour uses the same words as paul, but MEANS something different by them.


CONSISTENCY MAY NOT ALWAYS BE A GOOD ARGUMENT TO PROVE AUTHENTICITY

is consistency really a good argument to prove that a book goes back to the authour it is attributed to?according to scholars , isaiah has 3 authours living at different times.in forged, it says that reactualizing of TRADITIOn by the different authours using the name Isaiah helped decieve ppl into thinking that the book of isaiah was WRITTEN by the isaiah from jerusalem

EXAMPLE Of Reactualization of tradition

A tradition is "reactualized" when it is made actively relevant (reactuated) to a new situation. Suppose a highly influential authour in 1917 condemned Christians who drank alcohol, on the grounds that doing so made them leave thier senses and behave irresponsibly. Fifty years later, a different problem has arisen people have started using hallucinogenic drugs. A new authour wants to tell Christians that they are not to do any such thing. The new authour living in 1967, writes an essay claiming to be the famous and respected authour from 1917, condemning not just alcohol consumption, but also the use of drugs. This new authour stands in the tradition of the older authour and makes the tradition applicable to the "actual" situation he is addressing. In other words, he has "reactualized" the tradition


page 126. Writing in the Name of God
why the Bible's authours are not who we think they are
FORGED Bart D Ehrman


hawkeye, remember that in ehrmans book the PRACTICE of the nt writers TO PRETEND to be SOMEONE else would have been CONSIDERED

"FALSELY INSCRIBED WRITINGS"

"LIES"

"BASTARDS"

PAGE 120.

SO TO evaluate your nt ACCORDING TO ANCIENT standards would mean that ancients THOUGHT that the writings in your nt was "BASTARDS" "LIES" "FALSELY INSCRIBED WRITINGS"

[Hawkeye]

sure, all that the Arabs say about themselves is just legend.. how poetic except that you failed to demonstrate how does Islam have anything to do with the Mu'allaqat? One is an eternal faith (the faith of Abraham and Noah) and the other is a historical literature.

Not sure why you say this, I asked for reference to this huge cashe of Arabic literature that you seem to be claiming existed prior to Islam and shows the golden age of Arabic and so all I have seen is a ref to the Mu'allaqat. I am not demonstrating anything as far as I can see and neither are you.

[Hawkeye]

And it is instructive to note how people like you ignore the scholarship of the very people that they themselves cite. Remember what I said about you completely ignoring everything I had to say? I'll make this quick and I'm not wasting anymore of my time. Bart Ehrman... Remember him? The Biblical critic who commented on the state of oral history in Rome that you brought up as an attempt to undermine the oral history of a place over 2,000 miles away and 800 years later? Ehrman: "The Gospel According to Matthew"? Fabrication. "The Gospel According to Mark"? Fabrication. "The Gospel According to John"? Fabrication. "The Gospel According to Luke?" Fabrication. "The Book of Acts?" Fabrication. "The Book of Revelations?" Fabrication. The only books that is left are the Epistles of Paul. Professor Ehrman? A quarter of them are fabricated. What you have in the New Testament is a small sampling of publications chosen from a larger sample of publications, which were canonized purely based upon their content, without any consideration for their authenticity. As you clearly do not understand the implications of......

Are you avoiding the discussion by obfuscation, thinking the more you say the more you can avoid dealing with the issue. You mention Erhman and give a list of some NT books he regards as forgeries. Well, if we consider the book I mentioned earlier, mostly called the proto-Gospel of James which there is little doubt the Quran uses as a source. Well Erhman*dates it about 150AD so far too late to bean eyewitness account and in his words is contains 'legendary accounts'. Ehrman also says it was popular and was translated into several languages, one of which was Arabic plus the stories it contained by all accounts were in wide circulation so in one form or another easily known by Mohammed and his followers

The question is why is this (plus many other examples) legendary or we can be stronger, forged material, in the Quran if it was God who supplied the details?

[Hawkeye]

A tradition is "reactualized" when it is made actively relevant (reactuated) to a new situation. Suppose a highly influential authour in 1917 condemned Christians who drank alcohol, on the grounds that doing so made them leave thier senses and behave irresponsibly. Fifty years later, a different problem has arisen people have started using hallucinogenic drugs. A new authour wants to tell Christians that they are not to do any such thing. The new authour living in 1967, writes an essay claiming to be the ...

have you read any other author but Erhman? Even here you have not paid much attention to what he says. To you appreciate the distinction he make between wrong attribution of author and authenticity of a book? No, don't suppose you have becuase you are only interested in propping up what you want to believe. May I ask you why you regard the Quran as authentic when it contains materials sourced from the same NT writing that he claims are forged?