The Integrity of the Bible and the Quran

The link to the video of the Ahmad Deedat, Jimmy Swaggart debate I posted yesterday was entitled "Is the Bible God's Word?" Eventually, I might cover more topics but here are my comments on just one.

First, I want to address the textual authenticity of the Bible. The part where Mr. Deedat mentions the parts of Mark contained in the King James version that were left out of and later replaced in the original printing of the Revised Standard Version are an obvious problem and show direct evidence of human tampering. I don't deny that there are certain factions of Christianity who are willing to turn their head and deny obvious truths such as those additions. However, most modern Bibles that include those verses have a note that those verses are not found in the oldest known manuscripts.

As said, there are many translations of the Bible, just as there are of the Quran. The versions of the Bible continue to improve as Bible scholars conduct more research and as additional evidence, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered. However, as was mentioned by Reverend Swaggart in the debate and in Chawkat Moucarry's book, The Prophet and the Messiah, the Bible has actually remained very error-free considering the generations and generations of hand copying. Rev. Swaggart says that there are 24,000 manuscripts of the oldest Biblical documents, which is a testament to its coherency. Mr. Deedat then argues that of those 24,000 manuscripts, no two are identical. Looking at the problem from a strictly information theoretical point of view, even if each of those manuscripts contains twenty errors, the amount of redundant information contained in that huge number of manuscripts can easily be used to reconstruct the original, untampered documents (for a computer example of redundant information, look at how RAID storage maintains data integrity even through loss of a disk. Now imagine the amount of data loss/tampering that 24,000 disks could tolerate).

Although, I'm not going to go into too much detail about the integrity of the Quran, I did want to mention it briefly. Rev. Swaggart mentioned how during the caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan, an official version of the Quran was compiled and distributed to the extants of the Islamic empire and all prior copies of the Quran were ordered destroyed. This event was also detailed in Moucarry's book. Additionally, if God is capable of preserving the Quran, why isn't he capable of preserving the Bible? The Quranic verses describing the corruption of the Bible have been interpreted by Islamic scholars in various ways including simply the intentional misinterpretation (or flat-out ignoring the correctly interpreted) of God's uncorrupted Word. Had I not already returned the book, I could tell you which well-known Islamic scholars argued this (it might have been Razi).

In any case, I'm not at any point to make any conclusions. The Bible definitely does contain some contradictions but all historical and literary evidence shows that the Bible was textually very-well preserved.

That's enough for tonight so peace.