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Created November 2008 by Fizree Rashid.
The Acts 3, Verses 22: “For Moses truly said unto the fathers, a prophet shall the Lord your god raise unto
you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you.”
23: “And it shall come to pass that every soul which will not hear the Prophet shall be
destroyed from among the people.”
24: “Yea! And all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken,
have likewise foretold of these days.”
The Acts 7: Verses 37: “This is that Moses, who said unto the children of Israel, a Prophet shall the
Lord raise up unto you your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear.”
John 14: “Jesus says: 16: ‘I will pray the Father, and he shall give another comforter –
that he may abide with you forever.’”
26: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is expedient for you that I go away, for if I go not away, the comforter
will not come unto you, but if I depart I will send him unto you.”
16: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye can not bear them now.”
16: “Howbeit, when he the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you unto all truth for he shall
not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak; he will show you things to come.”
I read the passages which I had already gone through several times before, but this time the perfect confidence with which the
lecturer asked me to read the verse from my own sacred scriptures in suppot of his claim, threw a new light upon them for me
to understand the matter dispassionately. Yet I replied: “But the prophecy is about the advent of Jesus!” He smiled and said:
“Read the verse again! Does not the verse say that God will raise a Prophet like unto Moses i.e. he will be a man born of a father
and a mother as was born Moses; whereas Jesus was born only of a mother. Besides the Prophet promised by God must be a
man like Moses but you yourself call Jesus as the son of God! Moses was a lawgiving Prophet and the one like him must be a
lawgiver, whereas Jesus was only a lawabider, following the law of the Ten Commandments already introduced through Moses.
Besides one must betray his common sense as well as his learning to say that I and He the two different persons, i.e. the First
and the Third person mean the same, or the one who departs prophesying about the advent of some one else, to be one and
the same.”
The argument was quite reasonable. Then I asked the lecturer: “Do you not believe in Jesus as the son of God? Cannot Jesus be
God himself in the form of a man?” The lecturer smiled and very cheerfully replied: “Can there be a son to anyone without a wife,
my friend? Can anyone who believes in the sonship of Jesus, at the same time sensibly imagine Virgin Mary to have been used by
God as a wife? Let us seek protection of God against any such devilish straying of our minds. Sonship if used in the Bible can be
only to mean a creature or the one who has received life from God. Otherwise, what do you say about Jesus addressing himself
as a son of man…
“The son of man is come eating and drinking and ye say, behold a gluttonous man, and a wine bibber a friend of
publicans and sinners.”
(St. Luke 7:34)
“The son of man be ashamed.”
(Luke 9:26)
“Saying the son of the man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men.”
(Luke 24)
“The son of man shall give unto you.”
(John 6:27)
Jesus addressed God as his father and also as our father which means that God is taken as the father of Jesus as much as
He is he father (or the creator) of any of us, and hence Jesus’ sonship can mean in the sense of creature of god, the term
‘son of god’ used by Jesus can be only in sense of ‘servant of god’ – as Jesus refers to himself as god’s servant. This fact is
testified by the verses by which every prophet of God from Adam has been termed as the son of God in Luke 3rd chater in
verses from 23 to 30. Jesus is called as the son of Joseph and the genealogy of Jospeh is traced to Adam and Adam is called
the son of God. Read the 30th verse of the same chapter:
“Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.”
(Luke 3:30)
These ready answers from the Bible created a very deep impression upon my mind about the amount of comparative study the
Muslims do and how strong and reasonable they are in their faith about the Oneness of God.
I asked the lecturer: “Do you believe in the Holy Bible as a Heavenly Book or not?” In reply to my question the lecturer
requested me to answer the following questions:
His Questions:
|
My Answers:
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Is the Bible which is in your hands, the book which Jesus wrote as a scripture revealed by God?
|
"No"
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Did Jesus order or desire at any time in his life to write anything on his be?half?
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"No"
|
Was the Bible which is in your hands, written during the life time of Jesus?
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"No"
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Was the Bible which is in your hands today written immediately after the de?parture of Jesus?
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"No"
|
Then he said: “Please read p. 17 in the 'Founder of Christianity and his Religion' published by the Christian Literature Society,
Madras. It is said in the book:
“The whole Bible contains sixty six books written by forty different authors over a space of about fifteen centuries.”
It is clearly said in the book that: JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF WROTE NOTHING. Oral teachingwas for several years,
the only means employed in the spread of Christianity. It was for the guidance of those young converts that the
earliest writings of the New Testament were composed.”
The same book further discloses that:
“They were probably written about Twenty years after the death of Christ.”
On pg. 18 it is stated:
“The Gospels do not give a complete history of the life of Christ. They are rather memoirs.”
I said: “But the Bible is the word of god inspired and written by the disciples of Jesus!” He again smiled and said: “Mr. Thomas,
if the Bible is the Book of the Disciples and of Jesus, how would you account for the differences in the Book, if it is an inspired
word of God…does not the Catholic Bible contain some books which the Protestant version does not?”
Have you read what Mr. Wilson says about the Bible, in the introduction to the ‘Diaglot’ – published by the Watch Tower Society?
“If it has not been published by kingly authority it would not now be venerated by English and American Protestants,
although it had come direct from God. It has been convicted of containing over 20,000 errors! Nearly 700 Greek Mss
are not known and some of them are very ancient whereas the translator of the common version had only the
advantage of some 8 Mss none of which was earlier than the tenth century.”
Is not the Bible based upon 8 manuscripts…whereas there are 700 manuscripts now available? If what is contained in all such
manuscripts is also the inspired word of god, why were these manuscripts left away? In view of all these facts brought to your
light, if you still believe in the Bible as the inspired word of God, you may do so but you can’t expect the whole world to do it. If
you make a serious and an impartial study of the Old and the New Testaments you will find in them the amount of
blasphemies which the Jewish mind has fabricated against Lot, David, Noah, and Abraham who were the Holy Apostles of
God, viz:
“And Noah began to be a husbandman and he planted a vineyard.”
“And he drank of the vine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within this tent.”
“And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren about it.”
“And Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon their father, and their faces were backward,
and they saw not their father’s nakedness.”
(Gen: 10:123)
Lot committing adultery with his own two daughters
(Gen: 19:30-38)
David taking possession of his neighbor’s wife
(II Sam 11:4)
I asked, “What? Do you Muslims believe in the prophet’s of god other than Muhammad to be totally sinless and holy?”
He answered me by reciting to me the following verses from the Quran:
Say (O Muslims), We believe in Allah, and that which has been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael
and Isaac and Jacob and the Tribes and that which has been given to Moes and Jesus,
and that which has been given to the Prophets from their Lord.
We make no distinction between any of them. And we submit to Allah.
(2:136)
The Messenger of God believed in what had been revealed to him from his Lord, and so do the believers
(ie. Muslims) they all believe in Allah and His Angels, His Books (the different holy scriptures)
and His Messengers; we make no difference between any of His Messengers.
(2:285)
The above verses of the Holy Quran bear clear testimony to the fact that, as one of the fundamentals of his faith,
every Muslim has to believe not only in the Holy Prophet Muhammad, but in all the other Prophets and Messengers as
truthful and holy and should not make any distinction between them. The following verse of the Holy Quran informs us
of the fact that Prophets were raised by God, among all nations in all parts of the earth.
There is not a nation but a warner has gone among them.
(35:24)
It convinced me that Islam, alone, is an all comprehen‐sive faith which recognizes all other religions and
which contains in it a perfectly harmonious integration of all the good, found partly in the other religious orders of the
world. The sacred book of Islam i.e. the Holy Quran is the final exposition of the Divine Truth. The limitation of the human
mind of the different ages, did not allow even Prophet like Jesus to speak out the whole truth. Jesus had to depart with
many things yet to be told to his people. (John 16:14). Jesus had to tell his people to wait until the advent of the spirit
of truth to disclose the whole of the truth. (John 16:13)
I was further impressed by the universal aspect of the religion of Islam. Every answer from the lecturer was
with an unchallengeable authority and with an unbreakable argument. I was awakened to differentiate between genuine
truth and the fabrications of falsehood and to know many new factors to which was blind all those years. But I did not
know how to reconcile the dawn of true knowledge of truth with my original blind dogmatic belief and my belongin to the
Christian faith any longer. I wanted to find out some failure on the part of the lec‐turer to answer satisfactorily some
question or the other, so that I may have some excuse, be that even a false one, to maintain my position in the
Christian faith.
The lecturer continued after some time with the question: “Shall I ask you something if you do not mind
answering it for my information?” I said: “Yes.” He asked: “Do you think Jesus to be a son of God or God himself?”
I said: “Jesus is God himself in the form of His son.”
He said: “Can you ever conceive anyone to be the immortal god and at the same time be a mortal (man) to be caught in
the hands of other mortals to suffer death? Can anything be high and at the same time low, black, and at the same time
white? Can there be darkness and the same time light? What philosophy is this?”
The lecturer continued saying...
[Part 2 & 3 of 5]