Arnoud Van Doorn a former aide to Holland's far-right leader Geert Wilders, participated in the making of the anti-Islamic film 'Fitna' which insulted Islam.
Van Doorn later started looking into Islam to get back at critics who had slammed the film, but was inspired by Islam's message and professed his faith shortly afterwards.
Having performed the Hajj pilgrimage, the repentant Dutch politician distanced himself from the Dutch far-right and expressed his regret over his role in distributing the movie, vowing to now work on a new film presenting the Prophet Muhammad in his true light.
Arnoud Van Doorn
Geert Wilders the leader the anti-Islam crusader
In Fall 2017, Arthur Wagner's political party, the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland, entered the Bundestag, becoming the first far-right party in the body since the 1950s.
Wagner, a leading AfD member in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, resigned his position on the party's national executive committee on Jan. 11, 2018 for personal reasons, AfD spokesman Daniel Friese said.
Before joining the anti-Islam, anti-immigration party, he was a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).
Wagner refused to answer questions from the German daily newspaper Tagesspiegel, who first reported his conversion to the Islamic faith.
"That's my private business," he told the newspaper. But he said there had been no attempt by the party to force him to resign.
The AfD entered Germany's national parliament, the Bundestag, for the first time following September's national election — becoming the third largest party. It argued that the country was under threat of "Islamization" and demanded stricter border controls to stem the number of newcomers arriving from war-torn and poverty-stricken countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Arthur Wagner,
Maxence Buttey, 22, a Front National local councillor has embarrassed France's far-Right party by announcing his recent conversion to Islam – and urging fellow members to join him. Buttey offended officials of the anti-immigration party by sending them a video in which he praised the "visionary" virtues of the Koran and urged them to become Muslims.
"Some of my voters will be disappointed by my choice," Mr Buttey admitted. "But I'm ready to explain to them that Islam has a mission to unite all men and women."
As a scientist Doctor Maurice Bucaille, who worked as chief of the Surgical Clinic, University of Paris, did not believed that religion and science are compatible. However, after a decade-long study, Dr. Bucaille addressed the French Academy of Medicine in 1976 concerning the existence in the Qur’an of certain statements on physiology and reproduction. He reasoned that:
"...our knowledge of these disciplines is such, that it is impossible to explain how a text produced at the time of the Qur’an could have contained ideas that have only been discovered in modern times…"
That year, Maurice Bucaille published La Bible, le Coran et la science. The book proved to be enormously popular and has been translated into several languages . In his own words:
I have studied the Book very carefully and have not come across one single instance of scientific fallacy any where in it. On the contrary, I have felt that the truths and realities inherent in Quranic Text have been, throughout the history of 1400 years, beyond the comprehension of ordinary human beings which in itself, is positive proof that the Quran is the Word of God and it is beyond intellectual potential of mortal man; be he an excellent scholar or philosopher of the highest caliber, who is not always able to explain the inherent realities of nature as revealed in the Quran.
The Oneness of God is the cornerstone Abrahamic religion. In the core of Jewish prayer, Shema calls the humanity to listen to and obey God alone, in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel:
Nothing in Jewish life is more hallowed than the saying of the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” All over the world “the people acclaim His Oneness evening and morning, twice every day, and with tender affection recite the
Shema”... The voice that calls: “Hear, He is One,” is recalled, revived. It is the climax of devotion at the close of the Day of Atonement. It is the last word to come from the lips of the dying Jew and from the lips of those who are present at that moment.1
In the early Christianity, before the takeover of the misleading doctrine trinity, the Shema was also the centerpiece of the New Testament. For instance, in Mark 12: 28-34, the earliest of gospels one reads:
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him.33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
This is, of course, a clear statement of the unity of God that should put any self-respecting trinitarian into shame. However, we see in the subsequent gospels although this message is watered down somewhat nevertheless is still markedly detectable. In Luke 10:25-27 we read:
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”. And He said to him, "What has been written in the Law? How do you read it?" He answered, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind;" and "your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
In Matthew, 22:36, we see that it is god the father who knows everything.
But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son,but the Father only.
Clearly, some manuscripts in later periods dropped "the son" in the above text, in order to render the forgery of trinity more realistic. However, Paul and other writers including John, who in his gospel tries to exaggerate the narrative of Jesus’ life, realize that the Shema is the main pillar of Christianity.
Triads of divinities, in many polytheistic religions, however, was part of the background information that was used as a filter to interpret the massage of Christianity. The Egyptian triad of Osiris. Isis and Horus, symbolizing father, mother and son,was one of the main influences, because of Egypt's geographical proximity, and the broad similarity of the narrative of god-the-father, Jesus, and Mary to that triad. Of course, the triad of Jesus ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection could also be mapped into the Hindu myth of Brahma's creation of the world, Vishnu's preservation of it, and Shiva's role is to destroy it in order to re-create. Beyond these triads, there has been the superstisus
. Gladstone found the Trinity in the Homeric mythology, the trident of Poseidon being its symbol. Hegel very naturally found it in the Hindu Trimurti, which indeed is very like his pantheizing notion of what the Trinity is. Others have perceived it in the Buddhist Triratna (Soderblom); or (despite their crass dualism) in some speculations of Parseeism; or, more frequently, in the notional triad of Platonism (e.g. Knapp); while Jules Martin is quite sure that it is present in Philo’s neo-Stoical doctrine of the “powers,” especially when applied to the explanation of Abraham’s three visitors. Of late years, eyes have been turned rather to Babylonia; and H. Zimmern finds a possible forerunner of the Trinity in a Father, Son, and Intercessor, which he discovers in its mythology. It should be needless to say that none of these triads has the slightest resemblance to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity embodies much more than the notion of “threeness,” and beyond their “threeness” these triads have nothing in common with it.
In a 1947 study, C. K. Barrett makes the intriguing suggestion that John takes the theme of God’s oneness, along with the command to love God and neighbor, and develops them into the movement at the very heart of the Fourth Gospel, weaving these themes throughout the narrative.5 Joel Marcus takes note of Barrett’s article and observes that in both Mark and John, tensions between Jesus and Jewish authorities seem to reflect late first-century conflicts in which Christians are accused of blasphemy for their claims about Jesus. 6 The present study combines the observations of both Marcus and Barrett in an effort to demonstrate that (1) themes of the Shema are presented in a novel way in John’s Gospel, and (2) these Johannine innovations have resulted from a bitter conflict
between believers in Jesus in the late first century and non-Christian Jews, a conflict over Jesus’ identity that is expressed through a novel interpretation of one of the most sacred Jewish texts. John’s use of the Shema provides a lens through which the reader is able to witness the painful process of self-definition and separation of two groups: the Johannine community and the larger community of Jews to which its members once belonged.
To support their claim that there are multiple persons within the godhead, evangelicals insist that the Hebrew word אֶחָד, (echad), meaning “one” at the end of Deuteronomy 6:4 does not mean an absolute one. Rather, they argue, this verse can only signify a “compound unity,” or many things in one. They will often cite two verses to support this assertion.
Then they came to the Valley of Eshcol, and there cut down a branch with one אֶחָד, (echad)cluster of grapes; they carried it between two of them on a pole. They also brought some of the pomegranates and figs. (Numbers 13:23)
And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one (אֶחָד, echad) day. (Genesis 1:5)
From these verses, they insist, it is clear that the Hebrew word אֶחָד (echad) can only mean a fusion of a number of things into one. Their sophistry is immediately clear for anybody who is familiar with the elementary rules of logic. It is well understood that the understanding of the grouping of nouns in noun class systems hints at a universal cognitive basis, which underlies such linguistic classifications. Typology in the sense of analyzing a variety of language structures is a source of establishing linguistic universals.
Some variation in noun classes has been ascribed cultural variation. Some linguists also prefer cultural explanations to cognitive theories that are set out to explain the semantic bases of noun class systems.Noun class systems are known to distinguish their inflectional classes according to semantic distinctions, e.g. along the lines of animacy (incl. human/non-human) vs. artifact, various shapes and spatial configurations. The semantic organization does not happen at random.
In classifier systems, ANIMACY can subdivide into human/non-human, person/non-person, and HUMAN can of course subdivide further into sex (masculine and feminine), but also be classified according to social status, function and age, and kinship relationship. In addition, the notion of animacy plays an important part in the syntax and morphology of many languages. Inanimate objects on the other hand, are classified according to (a non-exhaustive list of) nine different properties (which are again subdivided). These may be summarised into i. Other INHERENT NATURE or TIME-STABLE PROPERTIES: plants, houses, canoes, and ii. FUNCTION: what use an object is put to or what type of action is performed on them (cutting, piercing, harvesting). Example: can be eaten, drunk; can be planted, domesticated; transport, clothing, housing may have separate classifiers.
Animacy distinctions, distinctions between human and animal, and categories of food, plants, and tools are directly reflected in present-day human grammars. The evolutionary pressures in ancient human history made us respond to animal and plant life, and to relate to and use tools for our survival. It is easy to imagine that such categories were not only important to discern and understand the surroundings, but also essential in singling out these things for reference in communication with others. However, although such semantic fields lump together in noun class systems, it is more often the case that there is no one-to-one match between the categories of the mind not determined by language and the categories of grammar. First, grammars may draw both finer and coarser distinctions. For example, ‘human’ may be further subdivided into masculine and feminine, black and white, etc.
Evangelical Christians will never offer biblical examples where the word echad refers to non-classifiable “unity.” For example, the Torah states,
At the mouth of two witnesses or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one (אֶחָד) witness he shall not be put to death.
One (אֶחָד) witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity or sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or the mouth of three witnesses, shall a matter be established.
“Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people; send one (אֶחָד) man from each of their ancestral tribes, each one (אֶחָד) a leader among them.”
(Numbers 13:2)
In the above verses the exact same Hebrew wordאֶחָד is used, and clearly the word (echad) is referring to a non classifiable unity, not a one related to a noun class .
I wonder if you have seen any video of debates by Mr White. He has probably taken some communication course which he apples its techniques quite mechanistically. It is rather similar to the way Senator Marco Rubio delivered his artificial-sounding oratory, forged command of policy and flimsy unflappability in the presidential debates, which Governor Chris Christie so effectively confronted and destroyed by calling the senator nothing more than a programmed deliverer of polished-sounding lines. Mr White technique consists of making a disgusted face gesture, accusing his debaters of engaging in "scholarly game of semantics". He often mischaracterizes a legitimately posed argument as being “intellectually inconsistent” and lamenting that it is taken from liberal biblical scholars or atheists. Instead of focusing on a question he spends a lot of time trying to point out that it is inconsistent to try to use liberal scholarship like those of EP Sanders, Rudolf Bultmann, or Raymond Brown to try to make supernatural claims. Of course, in his own debate with Catholics like with Robert Sungenis, and Fr. Peter Stravinskas he freely quotes liberal scholars. He usually deceptively misrepresents the position of his opponent as Dave Hunt writes to him:
"The readers of your “open letter” would think that I had relied solely upon him (Ruckman) – a gross misrepresentation. I merely cited him as one of many who so labeled Augustine. In the very same sentence I quote Philip Schaff (...) I quote numerous others to the same effect – W.H.C. Frend (...) and Frederic W. Farrar (...) I quote from the Pope’s special remembrance of Augustine (...) I quote others, from Sir Robert Anderson to Warfield (...) And you say that “the source” of my information is Ruckman?! You even bring up Gail Riplinger, whom I don’t mention at all.(...)
Repeatedly you put words into my mouth, building a straw man easily knocked down, such as the following: “You conclude the section with a paragraph that basically says, ‘Hey, I’ve already refuted this stuff. Don’t sweat this. I know this passage sounds like Calvinism, but trust me, it isn’t.” Those are your words, James, not mine. Is that fair? Why don’t you quote me and let readers come to their own conclusions?
"
Virtually in all his debates White continually misrepresents the position of his debaters, and repeatedly falsely accusing them of ad hominem attacks upon himself. As Sonny Hernandez has written:
Several friends and colleagues have warned me not to respond to Mr. White because they feel he craves opportunities to: habitually post comments on his social media accounts to play either victim, mock, or accuse of wrong doing, so he can receive consolation likes, defend his pride, protect his popularity, or to incite his fan-base because he knows that they will bombast anyone that he decries on social media.
This is perhaps why Bart Ehrman writs
"I normally do not have an aversion to the people I debate. But James White is that kind of fundamentalist who gets under my skin."
White always dismisses the facts, like the the ones in the following video, arguing these people are not Calvinist Christians!
Notice the empty rhetoric of White against the clear logic of Tassi that argues human freewill (free moral agency) and divine election/predestination appear to be mutually exclusive. White cannot understand this and thus his whole argument is based on irrationally constructed categories such as "autonomous will," but humans do not have freedom of choice!!. To prove this idiotic theory White uses John 6:44, which says, ‘No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him!!’ White does not understand that this makes the mockery of Jesus Crucifixion to save Christians.
White's god is so stupid that calls people to come to Jesus and then condemn them for not doing that because he himself made it impossible for us to come to Jesus through predestination. White cannot see the logic of this argument, He sometimes states why he believes that human freewill is irreconcilable with sovereign election and divine predestination.and then uses his artificial categories to argue against it!!
It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
As the following debate shows White's god is a mentally disturbed god that although can save all the people he won't and in a bizarre and arbitrary way only choose a few! Those people who are saved have not done anything special, they are dead in their sins like those that are not being saved. This he calls "Irresistible Grace!". Surely, a voodoo god of shamanism is more intelligent and more graceful than his god. In short, White believes in
1. the Shamanistic concept god's sovereignty and decrees a la Calvin
2. the Calvin doctrine of the total depravity of man and his enslavement to sin, in which will, according to the New Testament, is now in bondage. We are enslaved to the evil impulses and desires of our hearts. The body, the mind, the will, the spirit—indeed, the whole person—have been infected by the power of sin.
3. the fascist god has, before the creation of the world, selected a portion of humanity to be saved. This election is irrespective of any foreseen merits or faith. It is only according to the good pleasure of His will.
4. Jesus on Calvary bore the full punishment due his elect, ensuring their final salvation. He did not die for the non-elect, who are excluded and hopelessly reprobated.
5. this primitive god moves upon the helpless sinner before he has a single thought of responding to the good news. Grace renews the spiritually dead will, imparts a new nature and infallibly draws the sinner to Christ. Regeneration, or the new birth, occurs before belief in Christ. Faith, in fact, is a gift imparted to the sinner, who is entirely passive in this act.
Here is David Hunt's logical rebuttal of Calvinists in two debates:
Notice that White does not understand the concept of "free will". For him human being always decides or choose a path against God!! For him this is the autonomous will!! He support his beliefs with verses from gospels without reflecting for a moment on the notion that since these ideas are so absurd then it may be the evidence that those biblical verses are forgery -- and we have so much facts at our disposals that show many of the of the verses in various bools of the bible are fake. This is why a sovereign God of perfect justice and love permits the entire human race to become totally depraved via original sin!! And this is why did a God of perfect love and justice does not make Jesus the Saviour of the entire human race, and makes him the saviour of only the elect few.
White does not understand that the Jesus of his corrupted bible is a construct of Romans. He alleges that the author of Qur'an was unaware the biblical Jesus, and is unaware of the fact that Qur'an is talking about the real historical Jesus of the Jesus Gospel, and not the mythical Jesus forged by Paul, and other Roman pseudo disciples. He is not aware of Ovid’s story of Perseus who was the son of god and conceived by a virgin, and this is why the second-century philosopher Celsius thought that the Christians unjustifiably mirrored this Greek hero, child of Zeus, in their depiction of Jesus.
White is unaware of the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus who tells the story of an empty tomb of Herakles, a Greek hero who also had a divine conception and an ascension to heaven. Zeus adopted him is god-the-son, which Roman writers of gospels modeled their fake stories based on his narrative.
White is also unaware of the story of Hercules’ divine conception and his adoption as child of god-the-father, Zeus narrated by the Roman writer Seneca, who was a contemporary of Paul of the New Testament. Paul expression of “adoption to become God’s child” is well known, and his metaphor “Son of God” which he attributed to Jesus was exactly the dictate of his Roman masters.
White uses all sorts of sophistry to explain why Jesus in the New Testament has never clearly claimed to be Yahweh. He refers to Mark 14:61.
Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Christ Χριστὸς, the Son of the Blessed ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Εὐλογητοῦ?" And Jesus said, "I am, Ἐγώ εἰμι , and you will see the Son of Man Υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου seated at the right hand of Power, δυνάμεωςa, and coming with the clouds of heaven." And the high priest tore his garments and said, "What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?" And they all condemned him as deserving death.
White, adopting a phony dramatized gesture, acts this part and cries why the high priest tears his garment? Apparently, he takes this as the evidence that Jesus was Yahweh!! He is totally unaware of how ridiculous this claim is.
White is unaware that in the old Prussian Empire, Martin Kähler (1835-1912) distinguished between the “historical Jesus,” “real Christ” (“der historische Jesus,” “der wirkliche Christus”) who is the Qur'an's Jesus and the “geschichtliche,” “biblical,” in other words, “proclaimed Christ” (“der biblische Christus,” “der gepredigte Christus”).
White does not understand that the first written record of the New Testament was written twenty-five years after Jesus’ death, by Paul who had never met him personally (according to Acts 9:11 [cf. Acts 11:25]. He was from the town Tarsus in the region of Cilicia in Asia Minor, today’s Turkey. The Gospel according to Mark, was written circa 70 AD., Luke used Mark as his source 15 years later and Matthew used it close to a century after the Jesus death . The Gospel of John originated independently of the three synoptic gospels, Mark, Luke and Matthew, about two centuries after the death of Jesus.
White does not understand that the original manuscripts of Jesus gospel is lost. Even the original manuscripts of the forged New Testament are perished. The surviving small fragments of the forged manuscripts date from the period after 125 AD. and the larger fragments from circa 200 AD. The earliest surviving complete manuscript of the forged New Testament dates from circa 300 AD. No two manuscripts of the forged New Testament dating from before circa 1454 AD. agree with each other . Numerous mistakes” crept in during the process of copying and translating the forged manuscripts. White wonders why the author of Qur'an does not use these forged documents!
Finally, white is utterly unaware of the fact that it was under the auspices of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century AD that the classical ontological Christology using a mixture of complicated Greco-philosophtical metaphysics and Roman legal terminology with terminologies such as “persona” and "substantia” that allowed a number of individuals to share some substance among themselves while retaining their personalities created the grotesque notion of the Triune God, or the Three-headed-Jesus . White goes into a lengthy and extremely funny explanation of the difference between a being and a person, according to which God like a chair is a being , but not a person. However sharing the same substance of being, three persons feature different aspects of God-head. It never occurs to him that why non of the three persons are a female god or a black, or Asiatic god?!! He never explains why this god is so stupid that cannot find a better way to save people other than violently sacrificing his ow son, which according to White is he himself.
In Islam one of God's 99 name "is al-Waddud, “the Loving.” God is called al-Waddud twice in the Qur’an. In 11:90, the prophet Shu’aib tells the people of Midian, “Ask pardon, then, from your Lord, then turn to Him; verily, my Lord is merciful, loving!” Likewise, in 85:12-16 we read:
Lo! the punishment of thy Lord is stern. Lo! He it is Who produceth, then reproduceth, and He is the Forgiving, the Loving, Lord of the Throne of Glory, Doer of what He will."
He then tries to show that the God of Islam who is "the most forgiving , the most merciful" as every surah of Qur'an atests, is not genuine in his love and writes other passages in the Qur’an qualify God’s love significantly. According to him while God "is said to love those who do good deeds (2:195), those who are pure (2:222), those who are righteous (9:7), and those who fight in his cause (61:4)," he maintains that the Qur’an is equally clear that God " has no love for transgressors (2:190), ungrateful sinners (2:276), the unjust (3:57), or the proud (4:36)." and adds that it is even more significant that, God "does not love non-Muslims":
He criticizes the Qur’an for claiming that God "will love people once they believe in him and obey his prophet. The god of Islam has no love for sinners and unbelievers." He adds that, the “Love me first and I’ll love you back” kind of love exhibited by God in the Qur’an is condemned by Jesus in Matthew 5:43-48":
Apparently David wood is unaware of these passages in bible.
In Deuteronomy 20 for instance we see Yahweh who according to David Wood and other evangelists is Jesus himself! instruct thus about war; If a city does not accept Israel’s offer of peace and open its gates, then “when the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it” (verse13). Matthew 10:34–36 Μὴ νομίσητε ὅτι ἦλθον βαλεῖν εἰρήνην ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν · οὐκ ἦλθον βαλεῖν εἰρήνην ἀλλὰ μάχαιραν. ἦλθον γὰρ διχάσαι ἄνθρωπον κατὰ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ καὶ θυγατέρα κατὰ τῆς μητρὸς αὐτῆς καὶ νύμφην κατὰ τῆς πενθερᾶς αὐτῆς, καὶ ἐχθροὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου οἱ οἰκιακοὶ αὐτοῦ. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Recall that when the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, the Israelites adhering to Jesus of Evangelists' command “destroyed with the sword every living thing in it – men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep, and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21). In fact according to Joshua 11:20, “For it was the Lord himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the Lord had commanded Moses.” Jesus commands capital punishments, i.e., the death sentences, for people who are sacrificing to a god other than Yahweh (Exodus 22:20), for persistent rebelliousness on the part of a child (Deuteronomy 21:18–21), to a child who hits or curses his or her parents (Exodus 21:15 and 17), working on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2), premarital sexual intercourse (Deuteronomy 22:13–21), and the requirement for a priest to burn his daughter alive if she became a prostitute (Leviticus 21:9). In John 8:44, Jesus calls “the Jews” the “children of the devil.” While Jews are commonly the target of such name-calling, polytheists are also attacked. For example, Titus 1:12 dismisses the entire population of Crete as “liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.” Matthew 7:23 καὶ τότε ὁμολογήσω αὐτοῖς ὅτι Οὐδέποτε ἔγνων ὑμᾶς: “ἀποχωρεῖτεἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ οἱ ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν.
Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Get away from me, you who practice evil!
Psalm 5:4-5
ότι ουχί θεός θέλων ανομίαν συ ει ουδέ παροικήσει σοι πονηρευόμενος ουδέ διαμενούσι παράνομοι κατέναντι των οφθαλμών σου εμίσησας πάντας τους εργαζομένου ς την ανομίαν
Indeed, you aren't a God who delights in wickedness; evil will never dwell with you. Boastful ones will not stand before you; you hate all those who practice wickedness. Psalm 11:5 κύριος εξετάζει τον δίκαιον και τον ασεβή ο δε αγαπών αδικίαν μισεί την εαυτού ψυχήν The LORD examines the righteous and the wicked. He hates the lover of violence.
The prophet Amos, who speaks on behalf of Jehovah, who according to David Wood is Jehovah!!", delivers a stinging rebuke to the citizens of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, because of their worship exercises and declares God (or Jesus) despised their worship facades (Am. 5:21ff; cf. Isa. 1:11ff)
Many scholars compare the way the Bible's accounts of Jesus were passed on with the children's telephone game, where children whisper a complicated message from one to another. In the process the message is corrupted, and at the end everyone has a good laugh. But how good is the comparison between this game and the way the Gospel stories were actually passed on?
In this video, professor Dan Wallace dissects the telephone game, to argue that the process of transmission of bible from the illiterate Hebrew speaking peasants, fishermen, the low-level local tax collectors of the Roman Empire, and other disciples of Jesus to the highly educated Greek writers of the scripture was not similar to the children telephone game! He, of course, does not mention that the anonymous writer of gospels were not the Hebrew speaking disciples of Jesus, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Matthew the tax collector, Mark the attendant of Peter, Luke the attendant of Paul, and John the son of Zebedee!
According to the Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (p. 1744):
Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus' life and teachings.
However, even assuming that these gentlemen are absolutely right about the solid structure of the bible transmission, one wonders how can they explain the glaring discrepancies among the same stories, such as the story of the empty tomb or the story of crucifixion, as narrated in the four gospels, without offering incredibly irrational and sometimes hilarious reasoning? In fact, the bible textual contradictions forced an imminent evangelist scholar, like Professor Ehrman to abandon Christianity altogether. He writes:
But it was not long before I started seeing that the "truth" about the Bible was not at all what I had once thought when I was a committed evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute. The more I saw that the New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament, where the problems are even more severe) was chock full of discrepancies, the more troubled I became. At Moody, I thought that all discrepancies could be objectively reconciled. But eventually I saw that in fact they could not be. I wrestled with these problems, I prayed about them, I studied them, I sought spiritual guidance, I read all I could. But as someone who be- lieved that truth was objective and who was unwilling to believe what was false, I came to think that the Bible could not be what I thought it was. The Bible contained errors. And if it contained er- rors, it was not completely true. This was a problem for me, be- cause I wanted to believe the truth, the divine truth, and I came to see that the Bible was not divine truth without remainder. The Bible was a very human book. But the problems didn't stop there. Eventually I came to real- ize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mis- takes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies. That is what this book is about.
Unfortunately, many pastors and evangelists deliberately try to confuse their congregations, by resorting to irrelevant evidence and statistics that appear to suggest that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus' disciples or their attendants. In other words, Christians are kept in the dark about the scholarly researches even by Christian scholars. Nevertheless, the mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions, in order to provide a narrative of Christianity's central figure —Jesus Christ— to confirm the faith of their communities.
In fact, researchers agree that the original author of Matthew was actually a Greek-speaking educated Jew, who was living in Antioch, and as someone who was more knowledgeable about Jewish traditions, intended to correct many of the erroneous assertions in the earlier gospel of Mark about those traditions. Thus Matthew who was the tax collector for the Romans, could not be the real author of that gospel, because being a collaborator with the occupiers would have ostracized him from the Jewish community. Even conservative New Testament scholars like professor Bruce Metzger have agreed that :
In the case of the first Gospel, the apostle Matthew can scarcely be the final author; for why should one who presumably had been an eyewitness of much that he records depend ... upon the account given by Mark, who had not been an eyewitness? --The New Testament, p. 97
Similarly, Raymond E. Brown, perhaps the foremost English-speaking Catholic biblical scholar, the author of some 40 books, who taught at Union Theological Seminary for two decades, states :
That the author of the Greek Gospel was John Mark, a (presumably Aramaic-speaking) Jew of Jerusalem who had early become a Christian, is hard to reconcile with the impression that it does not seem to be a translation from Aramaic, that it seems to depend on oral traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek,and that it seems confused about Palestinian geography. --An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 159-160
The Gospel of Luke, borrows from as much as 65% of the verses in Mark, thus scholars agree that Mark was his source. Thus it is obvious that John Mark, the attendant of Peter, could not be the author of Luke . Note that the author of Luke is also the author of Acts, in which John Mark, the attendant of Peter, is mentioned in Acts (12:12), which implies that the author of Luke-Acts knows him, and has even borrowed a substantial amount of his material. Yet, he never identifies Mark as one of his references! in the words of Randel McCraw Helms, an American professor of English literature:
So the author of Luke-Acts not only knew about a John Mark of Jerusalem, the personal associate of Peter and Paul, but also possessed a copy of what we call the Gospel of Mark, copying some three hundred of its verses into the Gospel of Luke, and never once thought to link the two—John Mark and the Gospel of Mark—together! The reason is simple: the connecting of the anonymous Gospel of Mark with John Mark of Jerusalem is a second-century guess, on that had not been made in Luke's time.-- Who Wrote the Gospels? (p. 2)
According to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, an influential theologian of the School of Antioch, a biblical commentator, and Christian bishop of Cyrrhus (393-~458CE), in the early centuries of Christianity, there were many Christian gospels in circulation, He wrote:
"Arius and Achillas, together with their fellow foes, have been expelled from the Church, because they have become aliens from our pious doctrine: according to the blessed Paul, who said, 'If any of you preach any, other gospel than that which you have received, let him be accursed, even though he should pretend to be an angel from heaven, and 'But if any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing' and so forth. (...)do you avoid it as you would a pest, mindful ever of the apostolic faith, that, I mean, which was set out in writing by the Fathers at Nicaea; do you remain on steady ground, firm and unmoved in the faith, and henceforward suffer neither your clergy nor laity to listen to vain words and futile questions, for we have already given a form, that he who professes himself a Christian may keep it, the form delivered by the Apostles, as says St. Paul, 'if any one preach to you another gospel than that you have received let him be Anathema.'
Among various gospels the church ratified just four of them. They picked the number four because "there were four winds, four points of the compass, four corners of the temple", mirroring the arguments of Irenaeus in the 2nd century. As professor Ehrman writes:
The anonymity of the Gospel writers was respected for dec- ades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never en- titled, never named. Even Justin Martyr, writing around 150-60 CE, quotes verses from the Gospels, but does not indicate what the Gospels were named. For Justin, these books are simply known, collectively, as the "Memoirs of the Apostles."
It was about a century after the Gospels had been originally put in cir- culation that they were definitively named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This comes, for the first time, in the writings of the church father and heresiologist Irenaeus, around 180-85 CE. Irenaeus wrote a five-volume work, typically known today as Against Heresies, directed against the false teachings rampant among Christians in his day. At one point in these writings he in- sists that "heretics" (i.e., false teachers) have gone astray either because they use Gospels that are not really Gospels or because they use only one or another of the four that are legitimately Gospels. Some heretical groups used only Matthew, some only Mark, and so on. For Irenaeus, just as the gospel of Christ has been spread by the four winds of heaven over the four corners of the earth, so there must be four and only four Gospels, and they are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."-- Forged: Writing In The Name Of God - Why The Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (p. 250)"
Scholars have shown that the specific wording of the Gospel titles also suggests that the portion bearing their names was a later addition. The κατα ("according to") preposition supplements the word ευαγγελιον ("gospel"). This word for "gospel" was implicitly connected with Jesus, meaning that the full title was το ευαγγελιον Ιησου Χριστου ("The Gospel of Jesus Christ"), with the additional preposition κατα ("according to") used to distinguish specific gospels by their individual names. Before there were multiple gospels written, however, this addition would have been unnecessary. In fact, many scholars argue that the opening line of the Gospel of Mark (1:1) probably functioned as the original title of the text:
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ...
Scholars like Norman Perrin and Barnabas Lindars also find Hebrews enigmatic because it does not appear to represent the views of any early Christian community. In fact, most scholars agree that the Book of Hebrews and 1 John, which are anonymous texts, have been erroneously attributed to the apostle Paul and John the son of Zebedee. According to the Oxford Annotated Bible (p. 2103)
Despite the traditional attribution (of Hebrews:to Paul) ... [t]here is not sufficient evidence to identify any person named in the New Testament as the author; thus it is held to be anonymous.
The Oxford Bible also maintaines that:
The anonymous voice of 1 John was identified with the author of the Fourth Gospel (i.e., John) by the end of the second century CE ... Since the Gospel was attributed to the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, early Christians concluded that he had composed 1 John near the end of his long life ...-- (p. 2137)
Some scholars argue that the opening verses of 1 John is probably composed by a leader of a circle the Johannine teachers who were faithful to the apostolic testimony of the Beloved Disciple, and this is why that opening employs the first person plural "we", referring to that circle.
The Patristic literary texts written by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, that were produced in the late second century, before the doctrine of orthodoxy became fixed, are more likely comparable to Hebrews. In fact, scholars agree that one cannot detect any unambiguous profile of these author's doctrinal ideology, the main characteristics of their congregations, or the historicity of text's occasion from the analysis of these early Patristic texts. Hence, it would be absolutely silly to consider Hebrews as a manifesto of Christianity. Furthermore, it is under this light that the view of professor Bart Ehrman, the eminent textual criticism expert's must be examined, who states that:
Because our surviving Greek manuscripts provide such a wide variety of (different) titles for the Gospels, textual scholars have long realized that their familiar names do not go back to a single 'original' title, but were added by later scribes. --Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, pp. 249-250
Moreover as professor Armin Daniel Baum, an evangelical theologian and the professor of New Testament at the Freien Theologischen Hochschule Gießen writes :
While most New Testament letters bear the names of their (purported) authors (James, Jude, Paul, Peter, or at least "the Elder") the authors of the historical books [the Gospels and Acts] do not reveal their names. The superscriptions that include personal names ("Gospel according to Matthew" etc.) are clearly secondary. --The Anonymity of the New Testament History Books," p. 121
They were not only the four gospels that were attributed to wrong authors in the words of Professor Ehrman:
Scholars are highly uni- fied in thinking that Paul did not write the book of Hebrews, even though it was included in the canon of the New Testament by church fathers who thought that it was. 9 The letters l, 2, and 3 John sound in many ways like the Gospel of John, but they are strikingly different as well, especially in the historical context they presuppose. They were probably not written by the same au- thor, who was not John the son of Zebedee in any event, but by a later Christian living in the same community, which had begun to experience a different range of problems from those presupposed in the Fourth Gospel. Later Christian writers who accepted the books as sacred authorities needed to assign them to an apostle, however, and so it made sense to claim that they, like the Fourth Gospel, had been written by John the son of Zebedee. Assigning anonymous books to known authorities did not stop with the writings of the New Testament. Just to give one ad- ditional example, I might mention one of the most interesting books not to make it into the canon of Scripture. For centuries there were Christians who thought the book should be included. I think we can all be glad that it was not. This book provides one of the most vitriolic attacks on Jews and Judaism from early Chris- tianity. Had it been included in Scripture, Jewish-Christian rela- tions may well have turned out even worse, if that can be ima- gined, than they did. This book was originally written anonym- ously, but it later came to be attributed to one of Paul's closest companions and co-workers and so is known as the Epistle of Barnabas.
On Wednesday January 21, Dr. James White and Dr. Bart D. Ehrman were engaged in a debate in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The resolution on the floor: “Does the New Testament Misquote Jesus?” After the debate the two men had a completely negative impression of each other. Dr Ehrman posted the video of the debate in his blog with with an introduction that in part read:
I normally do not have an aversion to the people I debate. But James White is that kind of fundamentalist who gets under my skin. To be fair, he would probably not call himself a fundamentalist. Then again, in my experience, very few fundamentalists *do* call themselves fundamentalists.
and Dr white wrote:
He did not prepare for the debate, had no idea who I am, and did not read anything I’ve ever written, hence, he was in a tough spot, given that I had studied his works so thoroughly. As a result, he made horrific blunders in misrepresenting me in his rebuttal. (...) I think those in attendance were a little surprised at Dr. Ehrman’s treatment of me, but I wasn’t overly surprised,
In the debate itself Ehrman , based on the facts that there are as many differences in the manuscripts as there are words in the New Testament, argued that those differences do matter, some of them are distorting the doctrinal principles of Christianity and some actually change the meaning of whole books of the bible, such as the book of Hebrews. White argued that the differences are inconsequential and didn't matter.
Dr. Ehrman argued that since the manuscripts of the Bible exist in multiple fragments which contain many discrepancies, therefore they in fact do not preserve God’s word. He asked if God inspired the texts then why didn't God also preserve the original texts? Dr. White retorted that Dr. Ehrman elsewhere in his writings and interviews denies "the orthodox doctrine of inspiration"! The problem with this line of argument is that, every other religion can easily utilize "the orthodox doctrine of inspiration", and sell any garbage they want to sell! As, indeed, many do so. The argument doesn't go anywhere, because I don't believe in the authenticity of your doctrine and you don't believe in mine
Ehrman and White also debated how old the manuscripts of the New Testament are. They agreed that the differences between the older manuscripts are more numerous, and more pronounced than the differences among the more recent manuscripts. For instance, the 2nd to 4th century manuscripts have many more corrupted texts than those written in the subsequent era of the 4th to 9th century. This, of course, would imply that finding an old manuscript is not going to be of much help for identifying the original text of the bible. Because the earliest uneducated, and untrained scribes have been less careful or less concerned about the authenticity and veracity of their texts. Accordingly, professor Ehrman argued that it is impossible to know what the original manuscripts contained. Dr. White maintained that the differences among some of the oldest manuscripts are not that significant, which is, of course, a bogus argument, because one needs to look at a larger sample than just two, in order to arrive at a valid inference.
White argued that Scripture manuscripts are more reliable than any other classical manuscripts, and he wanted that Ehrman to admit that based on the similar reliability criteria as those of classic manuscripts, scriptures would be more reliable. However, why use a probabilistic criteria for the words of God, or at least for words inspired by God?!
Dr white, like other evangelical textual critics, tried to argue that textual differences are inconsequential. He argued that most of the original bible can be reproduced from the existing manuscripts. Of course, as we have argued in the past, the original bible is the gospel of Jesus in Hebrew, and not 27 books written mostly by anonymous Greek writers pretending to be Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John! Ehrman response, however, was that "If these discrepancies are immaterial, then why is it that Dan Wallace is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars running around cataloging and photographing manuscripts? (...) What does he tell his sponsors, those funding him? I'm doing all of this because it doesn't matter?! Of course he doesn't tell them that, because they do matter! Why check for all the variants and look very carefully at all of them if they don't matter?"
In the above video Dr. White, tries to refute Ehrman's argument about the discrepancy of a story in Mark and Matthew in which Jesus “came into his own city” (probably Capernaum—Matthew 9:1). Soon thereafter, a man by the name of Jairus, one of the rulers of the synagogue, fell at Jesus’ feet and worshipped Him saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay Your hand on her and she will live” (Matthew 9:18).
Whereas in the in the gospel of Mark, the man says that his daughter was “at the point of death” (Mark 5:23) and in the gospel of Luke the man says that “she was dying” (Luke 8:42). Many evangelists try to whitewash such a difference in the "inspired words of god" by arguing that the alleged contradiction may be a simple misunderstanding of what Matthew actually wrote about the dying child. According to them the Greek word, rendered “ she has just died,” does not of necessity mean that she had actually died! It just means that she was “dying” or about to die! They argue that there is not as much difference between Matthew’s arti eteleutesn (“has just died”; cf. Hebrews 11:22) and eschates echer (“is dying,” NIV) in Mark 5:23 . This is a very interesting argument, we can say anything we want and then say that it could mean something else! It is quite amusing to read a number of other various explanations offered by various apologists who had let their imaginations running wild. Some, like the sixteenth-century Lutheran scholar Osiander, even tried to alleviate the tensions by claiming that Matthew and Mark–Luke were simply reporting different incidents!
Dr. white, on the other hand, argues that Matthew's version is just a summary of the events in comparison to Mark, and this is why Matthew just has cut the chase and moved from "dying" to "died". Of course the discrepancy among the three narratives is not just the question of dying versus died. While in Matthew the petitioner is an unnamed ruler (ἄρχων εἷς, Mt. 9.18), both Mark and Luke assert that his name was Jairus and that he served as a synagogue leader (εἷς τῶν ἀρχισυναγώγων ὀνόματι Ἰάϊρος, Mk 5.22; ἀνὴρ ᾧ ὄνομα Ἰάϊρος . . . ἄρχων τῆς συναγωγῆς, Lk. 8.41). According to Matthew, on the first meeting with Jesus, the father informed Jesus that his daughter had just died (ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν, Mt. 9.18) and made a request for him to come along to raise his daughter from the dead (ζήσεται, Mt. 9.18; cf. the similar translation,‘dann wird sie wieder lebendig’, Einheitsübersetzung).
According to Mark and Luke, the child was on the verge of death but still alive when the father came to Jesus (ἐσχάτως ἔχει, Mk 5.23; αὐτὴ ἀπέθνῃσκεν ‘she was dying’, Lk. 8.42): his request was for the healing of his daughter, not for her resuscitation. In comparison to Mark and Luke some features are strikingly absent from Matthew, such as the accompanying crowd (Mk 5.21, 24, 27, 30-31; Lk. 8.40, 42, 45; cf. 8.47). There is, in fact, a reference to ‘the crowd’ (ὁ ὄχλος) in Mt. 9.23, 25, but that crowd corresponds to the θόρυβος before the house of Jairus in Mk 5.38, not to the crowd that accompanied Jesus and Jairus from the start (cf. Cousland 2002: 40). Further points include the haemorrhaging woman’s address to Jesus (Mk 5.33; Lk. 8.47), the dramatic report of the messengers from the ruler’s house evoking Jesus’ words of comfort (Mk 5.35-36; Lk. 8.49-50), and the information about the girl’s age, which happens to correspond to the duration of the haemorrhaging woman’s illness (Mk 5.42; Lk. 8.42).
Furthermore, at the climax of the episode Matthew allows no bystanders to witness Jesus performing the resurrection miracle (Mt. 9.25), while in Mark and Luke the room where the miracle takes place tends to become somewhat overcrowded with Jesus, Jairus, his daughter, his wife and three of the disciples, Peter, James and John (Mk 5.37, 40; Lk. 8.51). In addition, the narrative context of the Matthaean version, notably its spatial setting, differs from Mark and Luke: Jesus and his disciples seem to be in a house in the company of ‘many tax collectors and sinners’ and visited by disciples of John the Baptist (Mt. 9.9-13, 14-17), while according to Mark and Luke Jesus had just disembarked from the boat that had brought him back from the country of the Gerasenes and was now by the lakeside surrounded by a large crowd, presumably in open space (Mk 5.21; Lk. 8.40). Further discrepancies can be added to these few examples, but those listed here are the most prominent and have been subjected to much painstaking research from an early period.
