Tough Questions of Priests! - Most Debated Issues of Muslims & Christians @MohammedHijab
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Christianity says that Jesus sacrificed himself and died for the sins of mankind. Why is this belief wrong? You say that the Bible and the Torah have been changed. This is not a simple claim for Christians. Can you prove it? As a Muslim, you also believe that Jesus was born without a father and that he brought dead people back to life. These are very extraordinary things. Aren't they enough reasons to call him a deity? So how do you know that the Quran also has not been changed? Centuries have passed since then, right? Assalamualaikum Brother Mohammad Hijab. Thank you for accepting our invitation.
Today in this cross-examination concept, we'll ask some frequently asked questions about Christianity. We are not Christians, of course, but we convey their difficult questions so that the truth can come out. But be careful, this is not Speaker's Corner. We ask more serious and difficult questions. If you're ready, let's begin. Yes, I am ready. Christians believe that Jesus is God, but Islam accepts him as a prophet. Is Jesus really mentioned in the Bible as God, or is he described as how Islam says about him? So we don't believe that the Bible is authoritative. We believe that there are remnants of truth in it, but that it has been corrupted and changed.
We don't believe that the Bible that we have today is something which is an authority from that perspective, and that can be seen by different scholarly authorities comparing and contrasting the different Gospels. The Gospel of John, for example, seems to have a higher Christology than other Gospels. There are some indications from other Gospel writers that Jesus might be divine, but Jesus himself doesn't come across as saying that at all, in fact, in the Gospels. But be that as it may, we don't really care. Even if he did come and say in the Gospels that he was God, because we don't believe in the authenticity of that document.
But we would say above and beyond all of that is the fact that Jesus Christ couldn't be God for logical necessity. I mean, it doesn't matter if the Bible said it or any other book said it because you can't have a man-God anyway. You can't have an unlimited-limited being. So it doesn't matter what book said this, it's false. And so I think anyone who knows the definition of God and the definition of Jesus Christ and human being cannot put these two things together, no matter what book said it. If Jesus didn't call himself a deity, as you say, then how could this belief arise? How could they turn a prophet into a God?
There was clear motivation from the initial Roman Empire when, you know, Christianity became a religion in the Roman Empire in the year, let's say 313, there was Constantine, actually made it legal to believe in Christianity, and afterwards he spread Christianity, and other people, other rulers spread Christianity, like Theodosius the Second and others. You can see a clear historical development and how, for example, the beliefs of the pagans and the polytheistic and pantheistic beliefs of the Romans from Greek mythology incorporated themselves into Christian frameworks.
And there was a political motivation for that, which is that Constantine and others wanted to make Christianity a more palatable religion for these people. And so how could it be that, you know, Jesus became co-equal and co-eternal as a God in a person? And how could it be that the Holy Spirit had the same status? You can see a clear historical development where that happened from what you call subordinationism, until you had the three co-equal, co-eternal Gods at the turn of the fourth century. And so how could it be?
Well, it could be when you have a strong political authority in the Roman Empire and clear political and sociological motivation, and then when you combine those factors with the evidence that we have from primary source materials, it's pretty clear how that can be. Christianity says that Jesus sacrificed himself and died for the sins of mankind. Why is this belief wrong? This belief is wrong on many different grounds on a very basic, logical grounds. If you think about the Christian belief, they're effectively telling us, you are born into sin, original sin, because Adam ate from the tree.
So you're born into sin because Adam ate from the tree, and then that sin is removed away from you because Jesus died on the cross. So effectively you're given sin and it's removed from you, from two people. All you have to do is believe in this story. Now, that seems to me to be an affront to individual responsibility. Because the religion of Islam doesn't have it this way. It has it in the way that you are responsible for your own actions. What the religion of Christianity is telling you is you have a sin for no action of your own, and you will have that sin removed for no action of your own. So we will say, this doesn't make sense, and how could it be that a God anyway dies on a cross?
This makes no sense. What does it mean for a God to die on the cross? So this, all these propositions, no matter how much one wants to say they're historical and they're attested to and there's testimony and whatever, the argument on the other side is, frankly, even if that was all the case, it's still logically incoherent. So it's unacceptable, frankly. As a Muslim, you also believe that Jesus was born without a father and that he brought dead people back to life. These are very extraordinary things, aren't they enough reasons to call him a deity? After all, Allah gives life and takes life. I mean, Allah answers that question very directly in chapter three, verse 52 of the Quran.
"That certainly the similitude of Jesus is like that of Adam. He created him from dust. And he said to him "Be," and he was." Because the argument is this, that if you're saying that Jesus is a God or the Son of God because he didn't have a father, then surely Adam should be a bigger God because he doesn't have a mother or a father. And so if this is the argument, then, the argument falls flat on its face on this basis. But he brings that people back to life. He cures the blind. All of that, with God's permission, of course. Allah says, And one could argue that, quite frankly, splitting the sea in the way that Moses did it is more impressive in many ways than curing the blind.
Because frankly, splitting the sea, everyone can attest to that. Curing the blind, there could be a degree of conspiracy that could be like, for example, we see now in many of the African countries, someone could say, "Pretend that you're blind and then I'll cure you." Splitting the sea, frankly, it undercuts that in a more meaningful way. So I would say, if you're using miracles to try and prove the deity of God, of Jesus Christ, then frankly, you can do the same thing with Moses on a higher level. You say that the Bible and the Torah have been changed. This is not a simple claim for Christians. Can you prove it?
I mean, to be honest with you, the proof of it is in what you call "textual criticism." Now, this has become a field of Biblical studies, or a subfield of Biblical studies, which now is being taught everywhere in the Western Academy, and there is almost consensus, or in fact, there is consensus among scholars of Christianity, not Islam, that there has been change, interpolation and corruption. In fact, this was the name of one of the books of Bruce Metzger, a very famous book that was talking about the corruption of the Bible. It's something which everyone attest to. And the question is, where is the chain of narration? Where is the link between Jesus and the Gospel writers?
Because there is a degree of anonymity and it's anonymous, these people are anonymous. We don't know who they are, and there is no link between them, and there's almost 100 years between them, so much so that it's interesting. E.P. Sanders, who wrote a book called "The Historical Figure of Jesus Christ." He said that if you remove the Gospels and you remove the Christian evidence, you're left with almost no evidence of his existence even, Jesus Christ. So you have a lacking of evidence of Jesus' existence, except for that which Tacitus and Josephus says.
And Josephus himself, who was a Jewish philosopher, or Jewish historian, was accused, or the interpolations of his works were accused of being put in there, anyway. The point is that, quite frankly, we have weak evidence of Christianity and the preservation mechanism of Christianity has failed, and there's no doubt about that. According to the consensus of all scholars. Can you also prove that these books have been corrupted from the books themselves, maybe through contradictions? Absolutely. And that's a very good point, because you'll find that especially, for example, let's take one of the deepest and most meaningful central tenets of Christianity, the crucifixion, the resurrection.
Just look at the accounts of crucifixion in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and compare them with each other. You'll find a shocking level of contradictions. And not just that, there's contradictions on many different fronts in the Gospels themselves. That's looking at the New Testament. The Old Testament is filled with contradictions. And I'll give you one example because I'm mentioning it, and I've read this actually from William Lane Craig, of all people. And he mentioned that, you know, and I'll quote him, in fact, or paraphrase him, he said that if you look at the Biblical story in Genesis, chapter one, the very first page of the Bible. You're looking at the very first page of the Bible.
And it said that, as you know, on the fourth day, God created the vegetation, or, the Sun. Sorry, God created the vegetation on the third day, and God created the Sun and the luminaries on the fourth day. So God created the Sun and the luminaries on the 4th day. That's in Genesis chapter one, verse number six. And God created the vegetation, the plants and stuff on the third day. But if you look at Genesis chapter two, verse number five, it says, "No plant had sprung up yet." But already we found it in Genesis chapter one, verse number six, that the plants had been there. So it was a contradiction, if you just turn the page of the Bible.
so much so that William Lane Craig said about this, that it's as if the author of the Bible didn't care if it was a contradiction in there. That's how embarrassing it was, that even one of the notorious preachers and scholars of Christianity of the 21st century had to admit there's a contradiction, and he said it's as if he doesn't care. Origen of Alexandria, who wrote on first principles, one of the biggest ecumenical church fathers said, "What man of education will believe in this kind of thing?" And this is one of their biggest scholars in the early days of Christianity. So contradictions are there in the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, everywhere else.
And that's very easy to see. Don't they see these contradictions as well? Why do they keep believing in it? They do see these contradictions. And I think the way they try and get around it nowadays is they what you call "spiritualize" the text. So they say it's all metaphor, because they cannot live with these contradictions anymore. They cannot endure them. So they have to say "This is just metaphoric language, you're a literalist," you know.
And of course, if you look at the early days of Christianity, apart from the what you call the Alexandrian school, where you have Origen of Alexandria, already mentioned, like Philo, his Jewish teacher, you do not find this kind of belief among the schools of Antioch and other places in early Christianity. When they were writing what you call the homilies and the exegesis, or the tafasir (interpretations) of their Bible, they weren't taking it like that. Even Augustine, who wrote a book called "Against the Literal Interpretation of Genesis" he doesn't have a metaphoric interpretation, the way in which they want us to have with these verses.
Some verses, for example, Origen of Alexandria, he even metaphorized verses to do with war and killing, because he found it was so abhorrent that he had to metaphorize it, you know. And so someone like... He's called Hanson. His name is Hanson. He refuted Origen in multiple works. But the point I'm making is that the way they get around that is by saying it's a metaphor. You say that the Bible and the Torah are originally sent by God, and then you claim that they have been changed. Why would God allow this? The reason why God would allow this is because these particular revelations were sent for a specific people and a specific time.
We don't believe that the Torah was sent for all humankind. Likewise, we don't believe that the Gospel that was originally sent to Jesus Christ was meant for all people in all times. We believe that the Quran was the only book really sent for all people, all times, accompanied with the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (saw). So there wasn't an impending need for all of humanity to have these revelations actually preserved. And that's why this is indicated in the meaning of the verse in the Quran, which basically means that they were entrusted with the preservation of these books, i.e. the rabbis and the clergy of the old. And they failed even though they were witness to it.
So in other words, comparing that with what Allah (swt) says in the Quran, about the Quran, in the "He will preserve it Himself." There's a clear difference, and the difference is justified due to the fact that these books were specified to their people in time, and the Quran was sent for all people in all times. What is the difference between the documentation and narration of the Gospel and the Quran? The major difference you will find is that there's a chain of narration with the Quran. In fact, the scholars of Islam, like, for example Ibn al-Jazari, his very famous work. He says that in order for something to be considered to be Quran, it has to fulfill three criteria.
Number one, it has to have a chain of narration which is mass-transmitted. Number two, it has to have, it has to be in line with the classical Arabic at the time of the Prophet Muhammad (saw). And number three, it has to be in line with the Uthmanic script. Okay, so these are three things that have to happen. This is triangulated method. So we have a chain of narration. We have the script of Uthman. These are all things that we have. The language of, the Arabic language of the fusha. The classical Arabic has been preserved. Okay. So these three things are there.
With the Gospel, you have 100 year gap, effectively, anything between 80 to 100 years, without attestation or any link between Jesus and these anonymous people who purportedly witnessed Jesus Christ. 80 year gap, no chain of narration, all kinds of manuscripts, contradictory manuscripts, variants which contradict each other. Not just that they vary, but they contradict each other and vary, and there's no such thing as script and didn't have even a memorization culture. And it was a hodgepodge of different languages. I mean, you had Greek and Aramaic and hodgepodge of different languages, and the Old Testament has Greek translations to Hebrew.
So you had the Septuagint, for example, is a translation in Greek. They use it to inform a Hebrew translation. So there's a translation element. All of that is completely absent and completely different to the Islamic preservation method. So how do you know that the Quran also has not been changed? Centuries have passed since then, right? Well, look, I mean, if you think about it, we have a chain of narration, okay? Going back to the Prophet Muhammad (saw). So, for a fact. And books like Ibn al-Jazari's book, gives us the names of the people who actually transmitted this information, one after the other, going back to the Prophet Muhammad (saw).
So that is something that Ummah has of Islam that does not exist in Judaism and Christianity, no doubt about it. A chain of narration which connects the Quran of the people today with the Prophet Muhammad (saw) directly. This is the main thing. But having said this, there's also corroborating evidence. I mean, now we've got many palimpsests and different folios and different manuscripts. I mean, recently there was a manuscript that was as a corroborating evidence, the Birmingham manuscript, which is dated between 568 to 665, or something like that, which is within the Prophet's (saw) life. The Prophet (saw) died, you know, 632 A.D. And so this was within the time of the Prophet's (saw) life.
Even some of the orientalists, scholars and stuff like that, they rely on the HCM, or the historical critical method. They accepted that. And so we have a range of different evidences. We have the chain of narration, we have the memorization of the people. We even have inscriptions, I mean. In the early days of Islam, Masjid Al Aqsa, for example, you have inscriptions of verses of the Quran on the walls in Masjid Al Aqsa and stuff like that. You have inscriptions. And then you have radio carbon-dated to a degree of 95.6% Manuscripts going back to the time of the Prophet and His life.
So all of that combined, I mean, I think it's really difficult for someone to make the case of a lack of preservation. You can try and make the case that some things have been changed and stuff like that. As a non-Muslim, you can make that case, but you have no proof to be definitive about such a claim. And they know that we can be definitive about believing in preservation to the full extent. They know that, whereas there's no case in the Biblical aspect of such a thing at all from believers and non-believers. So I think they they know that preservation of the Quran cannot be compared with the preservation of the Torah, which has only been codified 300 years after Jesus.
I mean, consider that, there is 1400 years between the codification of the Torah and Moses. That is the same distance between me and Prophet Muhammad (saw). So the first people that wrote it was a 1400 years gap. And they don't have chains of narration like Islam. So what is this? Compare the two? It's unbelievable that we're even having the conversation. So I think the preservation of the Quran is absolutely not in question. Some atheists ask that couldn't Muhammad (pbuh) have copied the Old and New Testaments and write the Quran? It's very interesting that He, if that was the case, that He corrected everything that needed to be corrected.
Because if you consider it on a theological level, the idea that God is one, that all of these false doctrines of the Trinity, and I'm not even saying that was in the Bible, but if those false doctrines of the Christians, is not present. In fact, there's a refutation of those things. Not just that there's a refutation of things which are explicitly in the Bible, for example, the resting of God and these kinds of theological misnomers. Allah refutes that, confutes such an ideology, but then you have a range of different new information which couldn't have been known to the Prophet (saw), or the probability of it would be very low, which corrects or adds information to a Biblical narrative.
And I'll give you a couple of examples. For example, very simple example. Pharaoh says, "I am your Lord, Most High." That's in the Quran. You'll be surprised to find that that's not even mentioned in the Old Testament. There was gods that were worshiped in Ancient Egypt. Now we know that for a fact because of the Rosetta Stone. And we've translated the hieroglyphics in Ancient Egypt, Egyptian language to the current language. That Rosetta Stone was discovered in the 1700s, in 18th century. The Prophet (saw) didn't have access to that culture and that civilization, that language. Yet we know for a fact that these people, they believed these people.
And then to go further than that, these corrections, for example in the Old Testament, you have Joseph referring to the leader of his time as a king - sorry, as a pharaoh. In the Quran it is referred to as a king. And according to Biblical scholars, you'll find that, for example, Joseph is located around the Hiscox dynasty. That particular dynasty didn't have pharaohs, it had kings. So these precise matters. If He copied them how could He fix all these issues? He's copying and fixing, that would mean that He's an editor, He's a historian. He went to Egypt, He excavated archaeological things.
And I have so many examples of corrections which are very clear, which fix, for example, contradictions or fix historical inaccuracies or theological belief systems. So the fact that the Quran acts as a muhaymin (final authority) in a manner that can be understood today is something which is a definitive evidence to the fact that this was not. Although it did have an original source. And certainly there are similarities in Quran and Bible and stuff like that. We believe because it came from the same source. It wasn't copied, because if it was copied, then how could it be corrected? If everything is so clear, as you say, why are 2.3 billion people still Christians?
Since they don't leave it, isn't it possible that they see something in this religion? Think from the point of a Christian. I feel good about myself. I have some good developments in my life, so why should I leave Christianity? I mean, look, I mean, the thing is, you can have a lot of people following the wrong thing. Falsehood. There was a time in history where people believed that the Earth is flat and people still do. I'm saying that just because a lot of people believe in something doesn't make it truth. So that's a false kind of assumption in a sense. But let's go with that, for the sake of argument. We believe that a lot of them haven't been exposed to the message of Islam anyway.
And when you do expose such people to Islam, a lot of them do convert, frankly. That's why we believe that they won't be punished until actually they receive the message. But to answer your question directly, there's a lot of people leaving Christianity because it hasn't stood the test of time. And especially in the West, it's becoming, I mean, now it's a minority religion in the UK. It's become a minority religion. I mean, for the first time in 2000 years, effectively, or 1500 years since Christianity spread in the United Kingdom, it's a minority religion below 50%.
So people are leaving that religion because it doesn't have the timeless feature, because on theology, on guidance, on key aspects, it doesn't offer anything more than liberalism. In fact, many people go into liberalism as a substitute for this religion. So to answer your question, I think that first and foremost, there's a misnomer, a false assumption, which is that if many people follow something that should be true or that it could be true or there's some truth in it. Now, we do believe there's some truth in it. Christianity has a lot of good stuff in it, we're not completely discounting it. But the truth is not fully there.
And in order for someone to believe in Christianity, they would have to make sacrifices to their logic. But also, many Christians spiritually say that "I feel more peaceful when I pray to Jesus. My prayer got accepted. My child was sick and he got cured." So how do you explain this? Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure that's... Look, at the end of the day, there's going to be people who say the same thing about devil worshipping and Judaism or Hinduism. There's going to be someone who jumps into the Ganges river, a Hindu, and he comes in and he goes out and he thinks that that's helped his life somehow. So this can never be an evidence because it's not demonstrative, it's personal experience.
You could be making a false inference. You could be making a false cause and effect relationship and all these kind of things. I would say this cannot be an evidence that you can use to prove that your religion is true, not least because how do I know you're even speaking the truth? Okay, we get that Christianity is wrong. So how do we know that Islam is right? What is the proof of that? There are many evidences to show that Islam is true. One of them is just a basic belief system, the theology, which is believing in worshipping one God.
Already when you believe in that, it saves all of the other major world religions, because the way in which there's a respectable monotheism, believing in one God, is the most consistent and best explanation with the highest explanatory and justifiable scope. That explains number one, our existence. Number two, the purpose of life. So the idea of tawhid is actually the strongest evidence. Number one. Number two, look at the character of the Prophet (saw). When you look at His life, you realize that the man was authentic through and through. And so when you start to realize that this was the receptacle of the message of Islam, the final message, that itself acts as an evidence.
But then you have so many different things. We talked about preservation, the lack of contradictions, the inimitability challenge that there was a challenge from Islam to other people to produce something like it, which is a falsification test, effectively, that Islam provides. And then you have predictions of Islam, things which we claim, and obviously we cannot cover this in a short space of time, that have been predicted of the future, like, for example, the state of economies of the future, the way the infrastructure will look like in the future, and so on and so forth, that no other religion or claimant to prophecy in the history of the world has ever been so precise about.
And so with such frequency and sophistication. Then we have the historical aspects of, kind of just mentioned it in the other question, where we're talking about how history is being described in a manner which is consistent with how historians find the new histories, which the Prophet (saw) didn't really have access to in that manner. And then you have, for example, the way in which Islam talks about naturalistic phenomena in a manner which can be conceived of the people of the past and also the people of the present in a very timeless way, unlike the way the Bible does it, talking about, for example the plants being created before the Sun, and how could it survive without photosynthesis?
I don't know, it looks like the author of the Bible in this particular passage needed to go back to school, sorry to say. So then you have things like that. And so we continue speaking in that manner until we realize that on all these grounds, the Quran really is ironclad. It's the gold standard. There's nothing that can beat it. And so how do we know Islam is true? If someone is sincere and they're really looking to find that truth with these kinds of evidences, there's nothing I would say with categorical confidence that can match that. You know, that many Christians have this loving relationship with Jesus and Mary (pbut). When they become Muslim, would they be abandoning these people?
When they become Muslim, they wouldn't be abandoning these people. They would be understanding and loving them in the appropriate and proper manner. They would know who they really are. Because you can't love someone you don't know. You have a false or deluded illusory understanding of who they are. If you think a man is God, then you don't know what they are about, what they actually were claiming to be. So we believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, and that he was one of the greatest men that lived on the Earth. But we don't believe that he was God or the Son of God.
Having this belief system and then knowing and following Jesus on those grounds and loving him because of it, that would reinvigorate and reestablish a relationship that someone can have with Jesus Christ that they couldn't otherwise have. If they have this deluded picture of him being a man-God. The same thing with Mary, which we actually believe is the top person, woman, in all of Islamic history, of all of history, in fact. So really, when you think about it like that, then how could you not have a relationship with these two figures that are in the New Testament, in which Christianity tells us to believe in.
The difference between Christianity and Islam in this regard, is that Islam doesn't tell you to disbelieve in the key protagonists of Christianity, the old prophets, Jesus, Mary. Christianity forces you to disbelieve in the Prophet Muhammad, so all you'll be doing is adding to your faith and completing it. Whereas with this one you have to disbelieve in something which is so clear for the eye to see. Some Christians ask that when we look at the life of Jesus, there is no war. There are only themes of peace. But when we look at the life of Prophet Muhammad, we see war and violence. How would you answer them?
I'd say that's a false notion, because, look, I mean, do not forget that Christian people believe that Jesus is part of the Trinity, and therefore he was the author of the Old Testament. So when there was a command given, in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 31, Verse 18, to go and kill the people and annihilate and take the young girls for yourself and so on, you know, as sexual property. That was actually a command according to this belief system that was commanded by Jesus Christ. Now you cannot say that he was separate from the Trinity because the Old Testament author is Jesus, is the Holy Spirit, is the father.
All three of them are authoring this because they're all coming together and authoring this thing. So he's commanding the people to kill the young ones or the villages and so on. And then when he comes in the Book of Revelation, in the Book of Revelation, he comes back, you'll find that he kills Jezebel, the prostitute, and he does that one. So this idea that he was some kind of peaceful figure, it's a false analysis. And the fact that they're comparing Jesus and Muhammad anyway ahows you their weakness and their submissiveness and their insecurity and their fragility, because why are they comparing someone they consider to be a God with someone we consider to be a prophet?
Why don't they compare Jesus with Allah? Remember, we believe Allah is a God, so it should be God for God. It shouldn't be God for prophet. Having said that, even if you go that far, the difference between Muhammad (saw) and Jesus Christ was that Muhammad (saw) had political authority. According to their testimonies, Jesus Christ didn't have political authority. In fact, he was whipped and crucified and humiliated, according to them. According to us, no, he wasn't, but according to them, he was whipped and humiliated. He wasn't tested with political authority. And when he is tested with political authority, when he comes back, he'll be killing the prostitutes and seeking vengeance.
So it's a false assessment. It's like comparing the actions of a prisoner with that of a king and saying, "Well this one is much more merciful than that one." "Well, this one's like," no, because, this person has a different analysis anyway to that one in the first instance. So on all these grounds and more, I think the question is entirely confused, totally muddled. And I think that those who make this claim can't actually live by the so-called principles of Christianity anyway. So slap your cheek and I'll give you my other cheek to slap. Those people when it comes to the religious debates are pacifists.
But when it comes to the pragmatics of political and social life are closer to us than they would like to admit. If all the Christians in the world were listening to you for 60 seconds, what would you say to them? I know you're a tough guy, but try to be emotional this time. I'd say to them, look, message to my Christian friends. I know and you know that ever since you were a child and you heard the idea that God is a man from your parents or from your Sunday school, or from whoever told you this belief system, you questioned it and you were right to question it. You are correct to question it. Why? Because it makes no sense.
God, who is infinite in wisdom and power and knowledge and strength, cannot be both infinite and finite at the same time. He cannot be both unlimited and limited at the same time. You had a right to, you are right to question that. When you were told as a youngster that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and you as a seven year old, put three fingers up and then you are told that this actually means one. And you raise your eyebrow to that notion. You are right to raise your eyebrow, because that is a ridiculous proposition. You don't need to believe in this anymore. You don't need to endure this contradiction anymore.
You can relieve yourself from enduring this contradiction and believe in God in His oneness. As the Quran says, Do not say three. That, just stop. It's better for you. And you know it's better for you, because then you won't have the cognitive dissonance. You won't have the anxiety, the depression, the frustration, the anger, actually. You have justifiable reason to have all these emotions, but the only way out is to believe in one God worthy of worship, one God worthy of worship. And then you ask yourself what religion in the world focuses on this, negates the Trinity in the way that it does.
Whatever religion is doing that in a manner which is commensurate with the Old Testament prophets, of what Abraham said, and Moses said, and Jesus said, then this is the religion that you should follow. Think about that. Peace, mercy, and the blessings of God be upon you
Today in this cross-examination concept, we'll ask some frequently asked questions about Christianity. We are not Christians, of course, but we convey their difficult questions so that the truth can come out. But be careful, this is not Speaker's Corner. We ask more serious and difficult questions. If you're ready, let's begin. Yes, I am ready. Christians believe that Jesus is God, but Islam accepts him as a prophet. Is Jesus really mentioned in the Bible as God, or is he described as how Islam says about him? So we don't believe that the Bible is authoritative. We believe that there are remnants of truth in it, but that it has been corrupted and changed.
We don't believe that the Bible that we have today is something which is an authority from that perspective, and that can be seen by different scholarly authorities comparing and contrasting the different Gospels. The Gospel of John, for example, seems to have a higher Christology than other Gospels. There are some indications from other Gospel writers that Jesus might be divine, but Jesus himself doesn't come across as saying that at all, in fact, in the Gospels. But be that as it may, we don't really care. Even if he did come and say in the Gospels that he was God, because we don't believe in the authenticity of that document.
But we would say above and beyond all of that is the fact that Jesus Christ couldn't be God for logical necessity. I mean, it doesn't matter if the Bible said it or any other book said it because you can't have a man-God anyway. You can't have an unlimited-limited being. So it doesn't matter what book said this, it's false. And so I think anyone who knows the definition of God and the definition of Jesus Christ and human being cannot put these two things together, no matter what book said it. If Jesus didn't call himself a deity, as you say, then how could this belief arise? How could they turn a prophet into a God?
There was clear motivation from the initial Roman Empire when, you know, Christianity became a religion in the Roman Empire in the year, let's say 313, there was Constantine, actually made it legal to believe in Christianity, and afterwards he spread Christianity, and other people, other rulers spread Christianity, like Theodosius the Second and others. You can see a clear historical development and how, for example, the beliefs of the pagans and the polytheistic and pantheistic beliefs of the Romans from Greek mythology incorporated themselves into Christian frameworks.
And there was a political motivation for that, which is that Constantine and others wanted to make Christianity a more palatable religion for these people. And so how could it be that, you know, Jesus became co-equal and co-eternal as a God in a person? And how could it be that the Holy Spirit had the same status? You can see a clear historical development where that happened from what you call subordinationism, until you had the three co-equal, co-eternal Gods at the turn of the fourth century. And so how could it be?
Well, it could be when you have a strong political authority in the Roman Empire and clear political and sociological motivation, and then when you combine those factors with the evidence that we have from primary source materials, it's pretty clear how that can be. Christianity says that Jesus sacrificed himself and died for the sins of mankind. Why is this belief wrong? This belief is wrong on many different grounds on a very basic, logical grounds. If you think about the Christian belief, they're effectively telling us, you are born into sin, original sin, because Adam ate from the tree.
So you're born into sin because Adam ate from the tree, and then that sin is removed away from you because Jesus died on the cross. So effectively you're given sin and it's removed from you, from two people. All you have to do is believe in this story. Now, that seems to me to be an affront to individual responsibility. Because the religion of Islam doesn't have it this way. It has it in the way that you are responsible for your own actions. What the religion of Christianity is telling you is you have a sin for no action of your own, and you will have that sin removed for no action of your own. So we will say, this doesn't make sense, and how could it be that a God anyway dies on a cross?
This makes no sense. What does it mean for a God to die on the cross? So this, all these propositions, no matter how much one wants to say they're historical and they're attested to and there's testimony and whatever, the argument on the other side is, frankly, even if that was all the case, it's still logically incoherent. So it's unacceptable, frankly. As a Muslim, you also believe that Jesus was born without a father and that he brought dead people back to life. These are very extraordinary things, aren't they enough reasons to call him a deity? After all, Allah gives life and takes life. I mean, Allah answers that question very directly in chapter three, verse 52 of the Quran.
"That certainly the similitude of Jesus is like that of Adam. He created him from dust. And he said to him "Be," and he was." Because the argument is this, that if you're saying that Jesus is a God or the Son of God because he didn't have a father, then surely Adam should be a bigger God because he doesn't have a mother or a father. And so if this is the argument, then, the argument falls flat on its face on this basis. But he brings that people back to life. He cures the blind. All of that, with God's permission, of course. Allah says, And one could argue that, quite frankly, splitting the sea in the way that Moses did it is more impressive in many ways than curing the blind.
Because frankly, splitting the sea, everyone can attest to that. Curing the blind, there could be a degree of conspiracy that could be like, for example, we see now in many of the African countries, someone could say, "Pretend that you're blind and then I'll cure you." Splitting the sea, frankly, it undercuts that in a more meaningful way. So I would say, if you're using miracles to try and prove the deity of God, of Jesus Christ, then frankly, you can do the same thing with Moses on a higher level. You say that the Bible and the Torah have been changed. This is not a simple claim for Christians. Can you prove it?
I mean, to be honest with you, the proof of it is in what you call "textual criticism." Now, this has become a field of Biblical studies, or a subfield of Biblical studies, which now is being taught everywhere in the Western Academy, and there is almost consensus, or in fact, there is consensus among scholars of Christianity, not Islam, that there has been change, interpolation and corruption. In fact, this was the name of one of the books of Bruce Metzger, a very famous book that was talking about the corruption of the Bible. It's something which everyone attest to. And the question is, where is the chain of narration? Where is the link between Jesus and the Gospel writers?
Because there is a degree of anonymity and it's anonymous, these people are anonymous. We don't know who they are, and there is no link between them, and there's almost 100 years between them, so much so that it's interesting. E.P. Sanders, who wrote a book called "The Historical Figure of Jesus Christ." He said that if you remove the Gospels and you remove the Christian evidence, you're left with almost no evidence of his existence even, Jesus Christ. So you have a lacking of evidence of Jesus' existence, except for that which Tacitus and Josephus says.
And Josephus himself, who was a Jewish philosopher, or Jewish historian, was accused, or the interpolations of his works were accused of being put in there, anyway. The point is that, quite frankly, we have weak evidence of Christianity and the preservation mechanism of Christianity has failed, and there's no doubt about that. According to the consensus of all scholars. Can you also prove that these books have been corrupted from the books themselves, maybe through contradictions? Absolutely. And that's a very good point, because you'll find that especially, for example, let's take one of the deepest and most meaningful central tenets of Christianity, the crucifixion, the resurrection.
Just look at the accounts of crucifixion in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and compare them with each other. You'll find a shocking level of contradictions. And not just that, there's contradictions on many different fronts in the Gospels themselves. That's looking at the New Testament. The Old Testament is filled with contradictions. And I'll give you one example because I'm mentioning it, and I've read this actually from William Lane Craig, of all people. And he mentioned that, you know, and I'll quote him, in fact, or paraphrase him, he said that if you look at the Biblical story in Genesis, chapter one, the very first page of the Bible. You're looking at the very first page of the Bible.
And it said that, as you know, on the fourth day, God created the vegetation, or, the Sun. Sorry, God created the vegetation on the third day, and God created the Sun and the luminaries on the fourth day. So God created the Sun and the luminaries on the 4th day. That's in Genesis chapter one, verse number six. And God created the vegetation, the plants and stuff on the third day. But if you look at Genesis chapter two, verse number five, it says, "No plant had sprung up yet." But already we found it in Genesis chapter one, verse number six, that the plants had been there. So it was a contradiction, if you just turn the page of the Bible.
so much so that William Lane Craig said about this, that it's as if the author of the Bible didn't care if it was a contradiction in there. That's how embarrassing it was, that even one of the notorious preachers and scholars of Christianity of the 21st century had to admit there's a contradiction, and he said it's as if he doesn't care. Origen of Alexandria, who wrote on first principles, one of the biggest ecumenical church fathers said, "What man of education will believe in this kind of thing?" And this is one of their biggest scholars in the early days of Christianity. So contradictions are there in the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, everywhere else.
And that's very easy to see. Don't they see these contradictions as well? Why do they keep believing in it? They do see these contradictions. And I think the way they try and get around it nowadays is they what you call "spiritualize" the text. So they say it's all metaphor, because they cannot live with these contradictions anymore. They cannot endure them. So they have to say "This is just metaphoric language, you're a literalist," you know.
And of course, if you look at the early days of Christianity, apart from the what you call the Alexandrian school, where you have Origen of Alexandria, already mentioned, like Philo, his Jewish teacher, you do not find this kind of belief among the schools of Antioch and other places in early Christianity. When they were writing what you call the homilies and the exegesis, or the tafasir (interpretations) of their Bible, they weren't taking it like that. Even Augustine, who wrote a book called "Against the Literal Interpretation of Genesis" he doesn't have a metaphoric interpretation, the way in which they want us to have with these verses.
Some verses, for example, Origen of Alexandria, he even metaphorized verses to do with war and killing, because he found it was so abhorrent that he had to metaphorize it, you know. And so someone like... He's called Hanson. His name is Hanson. He refuted Origen in multiple works. But the point I'm making is that the way they get around that is by saying it's a metaphor. You say that the Bible and the Torah are originally sent by God, and then you claim that they have been changed. Why would God allow this? The reason why God would allow this is because these particular revelations were sent for a specific people and a specific time.
We don't believe that the Torah was sent for all humankind. Likewise, we don't believe that the Gospel that was originally sent to Jesus Christ was meant for all people in all times. We believe that the Quran was the only book really sent for all people, all times, accompanied with the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (saw). So there wasn't an impending need for all of humanity to have these revelations actually preserved. And that's why this is indicated in the meaning of the verse in the Quran, which basically means that they were entrusted with the preservation of these books, i.e. the rabbis and the clergy of the old. And they failed even though they were witness to it.
So in other words, comparing that with what Allah (swt) says in the Quran, about the Quran, in the "He will preserve it Himself." There's a clear difference, and the difference is justified due to the fact that these books were specified to their people in time, and the Quran was sent for all people in all times. What is the difference between the documentation and narration of the Gospel and the Quran? The major difference you will find is that there's a chain of narration with the Quran. In fact, the scholars of Islam, like, for example Ibn al-Jazari, his very famous work. He says that in order for something to be considered to be Quran, it has to fulfill three criteria.
Number one, it has to have a chain of narration which is mass-transmitted. Number two, it has to have, it has to be in line with the classical Arabic at the time of the Prophet Muhammad (saw). And number three, it has to be in line with the Uthmanic script. Okay, so these are three things that have to happen. This is triangulated method. So we have a chain of narration. We have the script of Uthman. These are all things that we have. The language of, the Arabic language of the fusha. The classical Arabic has been preserved. Okay. So these three things are there.
With the Gospel, you have 100 year gap, effectively, anything between 80 to 100 years, without attestation or any link between Jesus and these anonymous people who purportedly witnessed Jesus Christ. 80 year gap, no chain of narration, all kinds of manuscripts, contradictory manuscripts, variants which contradict each other. Not just that they vary, but they contradict each other and vary, and there's no such thing as script and didn't have even a memorization culture. And it was a hodgepodge of different languages. I mean, you had Greek and Aramaic and hodgepodge of different languages, and the Old Testament has Greek translations to Hebrew.
So you had the Septuagint, for example, is a translation in Greek. They use it to inform a Hebrew translation. So there's a translation element. All of that is completely absent and completely different to the Islamic preservation method. So how do you know that the Quran also has not been changed? Centuries have passed since then, right? Well, look, I mean, if you think about it, we have a chain of narration, okay? Going back to the Prophet Muhammad (saw). So, for a fact. And books like Ibn al-Jazari's book, gives us the names of the people who actually transmitted this information, one after the other, going back to the Prophet Muhammad (saw).
So that is something that Ummah has of Islam that does not exist in Judaism and Christianity, no doubt about it. A chain of narration which connects the Quran of the people today with the Prophet Muhammad (saw) directly. This is the main thing. But having said this, there's also corroborating evidence. I mean, now we've got many palimpsests and different folios and different manuscripts. I mean, recently there was a manuscript that was as a corroborating evidence, the Birmingham manuscript, which is dated between 568 to 665, or something like that, which is within the Prophet's (saw) life. The Prophet (saw) died, you know, 632 A.D. And so this was within the time of the Prophet's (saw) life.
Even some of the orientalists, scholars and stuff like that, they rely on the HCM, or the historical critical method. They accepted that. And so we have a range of different evidences. We have the chain of narration, we have the memorization of the people. We even have inscriptions, I mean. In the early days of Islam, Masjid Al Aqsa, for example, you have inscriptions of verses of the Quran on the walls in Masjid Al Aqsa and stuff like that. You have inscriptions. And then you have radio carbon-dated to a degree of 95.6% Manuscripts going back to the time of the Prophet and His life.
So all of that combined, I mean, I think it's really difficult for someone to make the case of a lack of preservation. You can try and make the case that some things have been changed and stuff like that. As a non-Muslim, you can make that case, but you have no proof to be definitive about such a claim. And they know that we can be definitive about believing in preservation to the full extent. They know that, whereas there's no case in the Biblical aspect of such a thing at all from believers and non-believers. So I think they they know that preservation of the Quran cannot be compared with the preservation of the Torah, which has only been codified 300 years after Jesus.
I mean, consider that, there is 1400 years between the codification of the Torah and Moses. That is the same distance between me and Prophet Muhammad (saw). So the first people that wrote it was a 1400 years gap. And they don't have chains of narration like Islam. So what is this? Compare the two? It's unbelievable that we're even having the conversation. So I think the preservation of the Quran is absolutely not in question. Some atheists ask that couldn't Muhammad (pbuh) have copied the Old and New Testaments and write the Quran? It's very interesting that He, if that was the case, that He corrected everything that needed to be corrected.
Because if you consider it on a theological level, the idea that God is one, that all of these false doctrines of the Trinity, and I'm not even saying that was in the Bible, but if those false doctrines of the Christians, is not present. In fact, there's a refutation of those things. Not just that there's a refutation of things which are explicitly in the Bible, for example, the resting of God and these kinds of theological misnomers. Allah refutes that, confutes such an ideology, but then you have a range of different new information which couldn't have been known to the Prophet (saw), or the probability of it would be very low, which corrects or adds information to a Biblical narrative.
And I'll give you a couple of examples. For example, very simple example. Pharaoh says, "I am your Lord, Most High." That's in the Quran. You'll be surprised to find that that's not even mentioned in the Old Testament. There was gods that were worshiped in Ancient Egypt. Now we know that for a fact because of the Rosetta Stone. And we've translated the hieroglyphics in Ancient Egypt, Egyptian language to the current language. That Rosetta Stone was discovered in the 1700s, in 18th century. The Prophet (saw) didn't have access to that culture and that civilization, that language. Yet we know for a fact that these people, they believed these people.
And then to go further than that, these corrections, for example in the Old Testament, you have Joseph referring to the leader of his time as a king - sorry, as a pharaoh. In the Quran it is referred to as a king. And according to Biblical scholars, you'll find that, for example, Joseph is located around the Hiscox dynasty. That particular dynasty didn't have pharaohs, it had kings. So these precise matters. If He copied them how could He fix all these issues? He's copying and fixing, that would mean that He's an editor, He's a historian. He went to Egypt, He excavated archaeological things.
And I have so many examples of corrections which are very clear, which fix, for example, contradictions or fix historical inaccuracies or theological belief systems. So the fact that the Quran acts as a muhaymin (final authority) in a manner that can be understood today is something which is a definitive evidence to the fact that this was not. Although it did have an original source. And certainly there are similarities in Quran and Bible and stuff like that. We believe because it came from the same source. It wasn't copied, because if it was copied, then how could it be corrected? If everything is so clear, as you say, why are 2.3 billion people still Christians?
Since they don't leave it, isn't it possible that they see something in this religion? Think from the point of a Christian. I feel good about myself. I have some good developments in my life, so why should I leave Christianity? I mean, look, I mean, the thing is, you can have a lot of people following the wrong thing. Falsehood. There was a time in history where people believed that the Earth is flat and people still do. I'm saying that just because a lot of people believe in something doesn't make it truth. So that's a false kind of assumption in a sense. But let's go with that, for the sake of argument. We believe that a lot of them haven't been exposed to the message of Islam anyway.
And when you do expose such people to Islam, a lot of them do convert, frankly. That's why we believe that they won't be punished until actually they receive the message. But to answer your question directly, there's a lot of people leaving Christianity because it hasn't stood the test of time. And especially in the West, it's becoming, I mean, now it's a minority religion in the UK. It's become a minority religion. I mean, for the first time in 2000 years, effectively, or 1500 years since Christianity spread in the United Kingdom, it's a minority religion below 50%.
So people are leaving that religion because it doesn't have the timeless feature, because on theology, on guidance, on key aspects, it doesn't offer anything more than liberalism. In fact, many people go into liberalism as a substitute for this religion. So to answer your question, I think that first and foremost, there's a misnomer, a false assumption, which is that if many people follow something that should be true or that it could be true or there's some truth in it. Now, we do believe there's some truth in it. Christianity has a lot of good stuff in it, we're not completely discounting it. But the truth is not fully there.
And in order for someone to believe in Christianity, they would have to make sacrifices to their logic. But also, many Christians spiritually say that "I feel more peaceful when I pray to Jesus. My prayer got accepted. My child was sick and he got cured." So how do you explain this? Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure that's... Look, at the end of the day, there's going to be people who say the same thing about devil worshipping and Judaism or Hinduism. There's going to be someone who jumps into the Ganges river, a Hindu, and he comes in and he goes out and he thinks that that's helped his life somehow. So this can never be an evidence because it's not demonstrative, it's personal experience.
You could be making a false inference. You could be making a false cause and effect relationship and all these kind of things. I would say this cannot be an evidence that you can use to prove that your religion is true, not least because how do I know you're even speaking the truth? Okay, we get that Christianity is wrong. So how do we know that Islam is right? What is the proof of that? There are many evidences to show that Islam is true. One of them is just a basic belief system, the theology, which is believing in worshipping one God.
Already when you believe in that, it saves all of the other major world religions, because the way in which there's a respectable monotheism, believing in one God, is the most consistent and best explanation with the highest explanatory and justifiable scope. That explains number one, our existence. Number two, the purpose of life. So the idea of tawhid is actually the strongest evidence. Number one. Number two, look at the character of the Prophet (saw). When you look at His life, you realize that the man was authentic through and through. And so when you start to realize that this was the receptacle of the message of Islam, the final message, that itself acts as an evidence.
But then you have so many different things. We talked about preservation, the lack of contradictions, the inimitability challenge that there was a challenge from Islam to other people to produce something like it, which is a falsification test, effectively, that Islam provides. And then you have predictions of Islam, things which we claim, and obviously we cannot cover this in a short space of time, that have been predicted of the future, like, for example, the state of economies of the future, the way the infrastructure will look like in the future, and so on and so forth, that no other religion or claimant to prophecy in the history of the world has ever been so precise about.
And so with such frequency and sophistication. Then we have the historical aspects of, kind of just mentioned it in the other question, where we're talking about how history is being described in a manner which is consistent with how historians find the new histories, which the Prophet (saw) didn't really have access to in that manner. And then you have, for example, the way in which Islam talks about naturalistic phenomena in a manner which can be conceived of the people of the past and also the people of the present in a very timeless way, unlike the way the Bible does it, talking about, for example the plants being created before the Sun, and how could it survive without photosynthesis?
I don't know, it looks like the author of the Bible in this particular passage needed to go back to school, sorry to say. So then you have things like that. And so we continue speaking in that manner until we realize that on all these grounds, the Quran really is ironclad. It's the gold standard. There's nothing that can beat it. And so how do we know Islam is true? If someone is sincere and they're really looking to find that truth with these kinds of evidences, there's nothing I would say with categorical confidence that can match that. You know, that many Christians have this loving relationship with Jesus and Mary (pbut). When they become Muslim, would they be abandoning these people?
When they become Muslim, they wouldn't be abandoning these people. They would be understanding and loving them in the appropriate and proper manner. They would know who they really are. Because you can't love someone you don't know. You have a false or deluded illusory understanding of who they are. If you think a man is God, then you don't know what they are about, what they actually were claiming to be. So we believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, and that he was one of the greatest men that lived on the Earth. But we don't believe that he was God or the Son of God.
Having this belief system and then knowing and following Jesus on those grounds and loving him because of it, that would reinvigorate and reestablish a relationship that someone can have with Jesus Christ that they couldn't otherwise have. If they have this deluded picture of him being a man-God. The same thing with Mary, which we actually believe is the top person, woman, in all of Islamic history, of all of history, in fact. So really, when you think about it like that, then how could you not have a relationship with these two figures that are in the New Testament, in which Christianity tells us to believe in.
The difference between Christianity and Islam in this regard, is that Islam doesn't tell you to disbelieve in the key protagonists of Christianity, the old prophets, Jesus, Mary. Christianity forces you to disbelieve in the Prophet Muhammad, so all you'll be doing is adding to your faith and completing it. Whereas with this one you have to disbelieve in something which is so clear for the eye to see. Some Christians ask that when we look at the life of Jesus, there is no war. There are only themes of peace. But when we look at the life of Prophet Muhammad, we see war and violence. How would you answer them?
I'd say that's a false notion, because, look, I mean, do not forget that Christian people believe that Jesus is part of the Trinity, and therefore he was the author of the Old Testament. So when there was a command given, in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 31, Verse 18, to go and kill the people and annihilate and take the young girls for yourself and so on, you know, as sexual property. That was actually a command according to this belief system that was commanded by Jesus Christ. Now you cannot say that he was separate from the Trinity because the Old Testament author is Jesus, is the Holy Spirit, is the father.
All three of them are authoring this because they're all coming together and authoring this thing. So he's commanding the people to kill the young ones or the villages and so on. And then when he comes in the Book of Revelation, in the Book of Revelation, he comes back, you'll find that he kills Jezebel, the prostitute, and he does that one. So this idea that he was some kind of peaceful figure, it's a false analysis. And the fact that they're comparing Jesus and Muhammad anyway ahows you their weakness and their submissiveness and their insecurity and their fragility, because why are they comparing someone they consider to be a God with someone we consider to be a prophet?
Why don't they compare Jesus with Allah? Remember, we believe Allah is a God, so it should be God for God. It shouldn't be God for prophet. Having said that, even if you go that far, the difference between Muhammad (saw) and Jesus Christ was that Muhammad (saw) had political authority. According to their testimonies, Jesus Christ didn't have political authority. In fact, he was whipped and crucified and humiliated, according to them. According to us, no, he wasn't, but according to them, he was whipped and humiliated. He wasn't tested with political authority. And when he is tested with political authority, when he comes back, he'll be killing the prostitutes and seeking vengeance.
So it's a false assessment. It's like comparing the actions of a prisoner with that of a king and saying, "Well this one is much more merciful than that one." "Well, this one's like," no, because, this person has a different analysis anyway to that one in the first instance. So on all these grounds and more, I think the question is entirely confused, totally muddled. And I think that those who make this claim can't actually live by the so-called principles of Christianity anyway. So slap your cheek and I'll give you my other cheek to slap. Those people when it comes to the religious debates are pacifists.
But when it comes to the pragmatics of political and social life are closer to us than they would like to admit. If all the Christians in the world were listening to you for 60 seconds, what would you say to them? I know you're a tough guy, but try to be emotional this time. I'd say to them, look, message to my Christian friends. I know and you know that ever since you were a child and you heard the idea that God is a man from your parents or from your Sunday school, or from whoever told you this belief system, you questioned it and you were right to question it. You are correct to question it. Why? Because it makes no sense.
God, who is infinite in wisdom and power and knowledge and strength, cannot be both infinite and finite at the same time. He cannot be both unlimited and limited at the same time. You had a right to, you are right to question that. When you were told as a youngster that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and you as a seven year old, put three fingers up and then you are told that this actually means one. And you raise your eyebrow to that notion. You are right to raise your eyebrow, because that is a ridiculous proposition. You don't need to believe in this anymore. You don't need to endure this contradiction anymore.
You can relieve yourself from enduring this contradiction and believe in God in His oneness. As the Quran says, Do not say three. That, just stop. It's better for you. And you know it's better for you, because then you won't have the cognitive dissonance. You won't have the anxiety, the depression, the frustration, the anger, actually. You have justifiable reason to have all these emotions, but the only way out is to believe in one God worthy of worship, one God worthy of worship. And then you ask yourself what religion in the world focuses on this, negates the Trinity in the way that it does.
Whatever religion is doing that in a manner which is commensurate with the Old Testament prophets, of what Abraham said, and Moses said, and Jesus said, then this is the religion that you should follow. Think about that. Peace, mercy, and the blessings of God be upon you