FAQ in dawah: Christianity

What is the Bible?

• It's a collection of books written by different people
• Bible means 'the books' or 'scroll'
• It's made up of Hebrew Bible (known as 'Tanakh' or 'Old Testament') and New Testament
• Tanakh made up of Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim. TaNaKh is an acronym of the 3
• Torah, also known as 'Five Books of Moses' or 'Pentateuch', revealed to Moses (born over 3,300 years ago in c.1393 BCE and died aged 120)
• New Testament revealed to Jesus (born circa 6 to 4 BCE and died in his 30s)
• Jews do not accept New Testament as part of their scripture or as divinely inspired
• We Muslims consider both Old and New Testament to be corrupted and not the original revelation sent to Moses and Jesus respectively

Preservation of Bible

• Bible revealed in Aramaic (which Jesus spoke), but there's no manuscript in Aramaic only in Koine Greek
• Oldest extant manuscript fragments of the New Testament are a business-card-sized fragment of the Gospel of John, Rylands Library Papyrus P52, which dates to the first half of 2nd century
• Earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus, is from 4th century and written in Koine Greek by anonymous authors. Some of the chapters from Codex Sinaiticus are not even in the Protestant version of the Bible
• Gospels are considered anonymous 2nd generation texts, not written by eye witnesses. We don't even know who wrote the gospels
• Paul had vision of Jesus but never met him in person
• Mark, Matthew, John, Luke were not written by those specific people, but are just names of those gospels. There's no author mentioned for any of them
• Mark written 70-90 years after Jesus. But who wrote Mark? Mark himself references Mark in the chapter in the third person

Contradictions

• Different versions of Bible: King James Version (KJV), Jehovah Witness, Mormon, Orthodox, etc.
• Which one is authentic?
• Some versions contain books which others don't have, and some have verses which contradicts other Bibles or even themselves
• Protestant Bibles contain 66 books, Catholic 73, (Eastern and Oriental, or Greek and Russian) Orthodox 76 or more, and Ethiopian Orthodox 81
• Account of crucifixion in Matthew, Mark and Luke differ
• On Noah's Ark should he bring two of every animal (Genesis 6:19) or seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean animals (Genesis 7:2)?
• In KJV, was Ahaziah 42 years old (2 Chronicles 22:2) or 22 (2 Kings 8:26)? Christian claim it's a scribal / copying error
• Judas died buying land and falling headlong with guts spilling out (Acts 1:18-19) or threw money into temple and hanged himself (Matthew 27:5)
• Did David's chief kill 800 (2 Samuel 23:8) or 300 (1 Chronicles 11:11)?