It is really interesting to listen to distinguished Bible
scholars debate the New Testament, whether the original is lost or not. I wish
Muslims who are reading this among my FB contacts have read the bible, which I believe are very few, if at all, because then you will understand the
significance of it. Muslims are a minority in a sea of Catholics. It is inevitable
that Muslims will, at some point in time, come to argue with their friends, classmates, and neighbors about Islam and Christianity. You can only argue about
something if you know what you are talking about.
I tend to agree with many Bible scholars nowadays that it
is nonsense to talk about the original New Testament bible. I realized recently
that, yeah, the disciples of Jesus were ordinary people who, at the time, most
probably didn’t know how to read and write. The teaching of Jesus was handed
down to subsequent generations through oral tradition. Few educated people at
the time who understood Aramaic and Greek wrote in Greek bits and pieces about what they heard Jesus say and did. The earliest manuscript discovered so far
is the size of a credit card, which is obviously part of a papyrus scroll
dated 150 years after the facts.
It was not until about 350 years later that the New Testament book took shape out of what manuscripts were available, choosing some and
rejecting others to constitute a New Testament. Most of the 5,560 manuscripts (copies of older manuscripts scribed by monks) now archived were written 800 years after Jesus, and of these manuscripts, no two are alike, although referring to
the same events. Very significant among these is the crucifixion because Gospel
writers heard very differently what Jesus is supposed to have said while
hanging on the cross. There are more differences among these manuscripts than
all of the words of the New Testament put together.
You are probably puzzled: if there is no copy of the New
Testament from the days of Jesus, then where did the New Testament now in the Bible come from? Early Christians wrote the New Testament from existing oral
narratives, which now constitute the massive 5,560 manuscripts, most of which were written in the 8th and 9th centuries, meaning it is not
based on textual evidence. It is like sitting down and writing from memory the
bedtime stories that your grandmother used to tell you that your grandmother likewise heard from her grandmother, and so on and so forth.
P-Noy will deliver
his State of the Nation address tomorrow. Listen to it intently and then try to
recall what he said afterward. See how much you can remember.
There is a red-letter Bible, with all that Jesus said in red. If you remove those in red as the Gospel of Jesus, it will only fill about
2-3 pages.
If you are a Christian friend, don’t listen to what I say.
Listen to what your scholars are saying because they are the truly learned.
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