[D] The QUR'AN, a failed BOOK WRITTEN by MEN, just like you & me!

We now come to the final and 4th episode where Jay questions the Historical Problems with Islam's Origins. This episode looks at the historical problems with the Qur'an.
1) Jay began with the claims that the Muslims make about their Qur'an, which were four: That the Qur’an is uncreated and exists eternally on clay tablets in heaven (S.85:22), that it was sent down to
Muhammad between 610 - 632 AD, that it was completed by the 3rd Caliph Uthman in 652 AD, and that it is unchanged in the last 1400 years.
2) Jay began his critique by noting that of the 5 copies of the Qur'an which were created by Uthman in 652 AD and sent for preservation to Mecca, Medina, Basra, Kufa, and Damascus, that no one of them still exist today.
In fact by the end of the 7th century a Qur'an supposedly created by Ubai-Ibn-Ka'b in Damascus had 116 Surahs (today's Qur'an only has 114), while another Qur'an created by Ibn Mas'ud in Kufa had only 110 Surahs, and a third Qur'an written by Ibn Musa, though it had 114 Surahs had purportedly 15,000 differences from the official Medinan Qur'an written by Zaid Ibn Thabit.
3) When Jay looked at the 6 earliest Consonantal Manuscripts for the Qur'an, he noted that none of them are from the 7th century, none of them were complete, none of them completely agreed with each other, none of them completely agreed with the current 1924 ‘Hafs’ text, and that all of them had 100s and even 1000s of subsequent ‘manuscript variants’ when compared with today's official 'Hafs' text.
So, when, Jay asked can we find a complete Qur’an which agrees exactly with the one we have today?
4) Jay then debunked the 2015 Birmingham Folios proving that the 63 verses in these 2 folios were nothing more than borrowed stories which were all pre-Qur’anic, pre-Muhammad, and thus pre-Islamic; written by Christian, Jewish, and secular Arab writers, and then simply rewritten by the later Muslims for their own Qur'anic revelation in the 8th - 10th centuries.
5) Jay introduced the 4,000 consonantal variants discovered by Dr Dan Brubaker in the last 14 years, where he photographed Insertions, Erasures, Coverings and Patches, which suggest wholesale censorship during the 700-year Ottoman Empire, in order to standardize the text of these earliest Qur'anic manuscripts so that in each of them would support the 1924 ‘Hafs’ Rasm, he offical Qur'an used today.
6) The 30 late Diacritical Variant Qur'ans (i.e. the Qira'at and Ahruf Qur’ans) first made public by Jay's colleague Hatun Tash and shown to the world in 2016 destroyed any notion that the Qur'an had been preserved perfectly.
These 30 Different ‘Official’ Arabic Qur’ans prove that for over 1,000 years there have been a variety of Qur’ans; that not one of them is the same; with over 93,000 variants! What's more throwing 29 of them into the Nile did not get rid of them at all, and didn’t solve the problem.
Jay's final conclusions were:
•Whoever wrote the Qur’an did not know their history very well, as it is full of Historical Anachronisms.
•That which they wrote was mostly borrowed from erroneous Jewish Apocryphal writings and Christian Sectarian writings, the latter written in Syriac.
•The 6 earliest manuscripts prove that men created 6 different Qur’ans between the 7th - 9th centuries.
•The 2 Layers of the Sana’a manuscript prove that men created a nascent Qur’an in the 7th century, washed it, and then rewrote it, pointing to an evolved text between the 7th and the 8th centuries.
•The Birmingham Folios, coupled with the 4 Carbon dated Lab reports, prove that Muslims borrowed stories created long before the Qur’an, and simply incorporated them into the Qur’an.
•The 4,000 Consonantal Variants prove that Muslims have accreted, deleted and corrupted their text, before standardizing it in the last century.
•The 63 fragments employed to find just 96% of the Qur’an proves they still cannot find a complete Qur’an for over 100 years, as their fragments are tentative, or have no sources.
•The 29 Qira’at Variants dumped into the Nile in 1924 prove that when Muslims find problems with their Qur’an, they either burn them, wash them, erase them, cover them, or sink them to destroy the evidence!
•The Qur’an we have today is really only 39 years old, which makes me older than the official Qur'an. Boy do I feel old.
•The Qur’an was not from the 7th century, nor do we know when it was complete, proving that it is not eternal, but simply just another book written, changed and canonized by mere men like you and me.
•By using textual Criticism, we have found that the ‘Proto-Qur’an’ were made up of Christian Lectionaries, Hymns and Homilies, and all centred on Jesus!
© Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, August 31, 2024
(109,640)