Tim the Skeptic wrote:
I'm wondering why the NT can't be considered a work of fiction.
It can be. There are few historians who believe there was not a person called Jesus who suffered crucifixion, rather more who think there was no resurrection; but historians can be wrong. Everyone makes their own mind up, and that is the way it should be, surely; though micatala no doubt has a rationale for his statement.
Do any Christians here feel that the angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to Muhammed in a cave?
Does anyone educated
really think so? If one's next door neighbour claimed that an angel had spoken to him privately, in a cave, barn or whatever, without witnesses, what would our reaction be? Would we not check our calendars to see if it was the first of April? Would we not consider the possibility of medical assistance for our hapless neighbour?
Perhaps it would depend on what our neighbour told us the supposed angel passed on. Now what did
this alleged angel say? That the message that had been prefigured in the Jewish Tanach, ostensibly by many successive writers and believed for well over a thousand years, that the explicit original message of many Christians, that had been allowed to circulate very widely for over five hundred years, was in fact very seriously heretical. So the question arises, why did Allah allow such dangerous folly to be believed by so many for so long? And if this message was so important, why did he reveal it through a single angel hidden in a cave to a single person of no particularly oustanding attributes? Why did he not go direct to Christians and Jews and tell them that they had made many errors, and provide correction?
Then, if the new corrective message was indeed correct, why did it have to be transmitted via bloody battles at the mean rate of one every other year for well over a hundred years? Is Allah truly as merciful as he is claimed to be?
And did Muhammad get the idea of being spoken to by an angel by reading the Bible?
Of the writing of the Koran, we can say on Islam's own evidence that were no witnesses to it. This sort of work can have been written by anyone, like a novel, or other work of fiction. Any literate person with a copy of the Bible could do a re-write of it, and, I suggest, anyone competent could do it more convincingly than either Muhammad or Joseph Smith managed to do. (I have contemplated doing a re-write of the Koran, and making myself out as the
truly last prophet, but the latter bit is just not my style!)
The Koran can be analysed as follows:
a) it is never a contemporary account, but is retrospective, an uncheckable re-write of the Bible;
b) its predictive statements are vague, and uncheckable before the realisation of any putative
dies irae.
c) its moral statements are unoriginal, and could easily be plagiarisms of the Bible, with amendments to suit a different theology.
One fact in the Koran and Book of Mormon's favor is that both were recorded immediately as compared to the NT.
This is a common but misguided comment made by those who have not studied the history of language. It is only recently that the mass of people passed on lore by means of writing. The spoken word, passed by fathers to sons, by storytellers to courts and commoners, by medieval
jongleurs and
troubadors to audiences throughout Europe, was the principle means of cultural transmission even after the advent of printing, and even today there are not a few in the West, let alone the third world, whose main means of communication is by tongue and ear. Moreover, the memory capacities of people for whom there was no easy method of reference by book or computer file often puts most of us to shame. This type of transmission is also very difficult to corrupt, unlike today, when a newspaper editor can at a stroke 'decide' what half a nation thinks.
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