Hey everybody, tonight we're debating Jesus of the Quran or Jesus of the Gospels, and we're starting right now with Dr. Shabir Ali's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us, Dr. Ali. The floor is all yours. Thank you James and ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in the faith, everyone out there. I'd like to say thank you to you all for joining us. I begin by praising our creator and fashioner, the creator of the heavens and the earth, and I ask him to send peace and blessings upon all of his prophets, his messengers, and all the righteous people of all time. I pray that God will bless our meeting tonight and make it fruitful as a way of building understanding between Muslims and Christians and a way of him guiding us and everyone else to that truth that he wants us to accept for our everlasting salvation. So our topic is something that we have in common between Muslims and Christians. We believe in Jesus. We believe that Jesus was a messenger of God, the God's Messiah, who was born in a special way and he performed many miraculous deeds. In the end, God raised him to himself and many Muslims believed that Jesus will come back for a second time. Now with dialogues of this nature, naturally Muslims will appeal to the Quran as a book from God and our Christian friends will appeal to the New Testament in particular. The gospel is more specifically in the Bible generally as the word of God. And so it is important, I believe, that we look at the Quran's claim to be the word of God and what Muslims might say to help our non-Muslim friends to see the Quran as the word of God. I'd like to share with you a screen in which I will make a presentation just dealing with that particular aspect of the Quran and then I'll go on to other aspects of our debate. For example, what specifically do we believe regarding Jesus and how did Jesus appear in the Quran? So I'll start my slideshow from the beginning and here I will show that perhaps I've gone down here too soon. Let me go down here. I want to start, let me see, page down. Do I have this properly aligned? Yes. Okay. So you know, in the New Testament, there is, let me hide this screen for a moment so I can focus on what I want to say. The values are attached to names of individuals. In the New Testament in the Book of Revelation, you have a certain individual who is not named but it's said that his name is the number 666 in most manuscripts or perhaps not the most reliable but in many manuscripts. So scholars have tried to find out what is the meaning of this number and they realize that the author of Revelation is attaching numerical values to the letters of the alphabet and someone's name is such that when we add up the numerical values of the individual letters that spell that person's name, it'll come up to 666. Of course, that's a mystery as to who that person is. Some people think the Emperor Nero or maybe the Emperor Domiton or something of this nature. Now that's in Greek but it's done in Hebrew as well and we know this from Matthew's Gospel where Matthew presents the genealogy of Jesus and says that there are 14 generations plus 14 generations leading up to Jesus, three sets of 14. Now why 14? Bible commentator has explained that the name Dawud, the name for David in Hebrew and in Arabic adds up to 14. The number of his name is 14. And so Matthew with this play on the words and numbers is packaging the ancestry of Jesus in three sets of 14. Now in the Arabic as well, this is done. And using the similar system, which is known as a system of gematria or abjadiyah in Arabic, we can come up with the value of the name Moses for of 116, the value of the name Aaron as 377. Sorry, as 261 and the total is 377. I'd like you to please try to remember that number 377 because it'll come up again and again in what I want to present and it'll be good if you remember that number. Just keep it in your mind. So it's just the number three and the seven repeated and they're both prime numbers, the three and the seven. So that should be easy to remember, 377. Now if you look at the places where Aaron is mentioned in the Quran, we see that there are 20 different references to Aaron in the Quran. And if we look at the chapter numbers where Aaron is mentioned 20 times, this is the list of the chapter numbers. Now if we take a sum of all of the chapter numbers, look what happens. The sum is actually 377. Now this is a rare result because if the name Aaron occurred only in the first 20 chapters, we'll get the smallest total possible. And if it occurs in the last 20 chapters, we will get the largest total possible. And the difference between those two totals is something like 1861. So the 1861 possibilities for the total of the chapter numbers in which the name Aaron occurs. And for it to be 377 precisely, this is just one possibility out of the 1891. So what accounts for this? This is a rare event. And if this was the only event, we would say, well, that's a rare, it's rare and interesting, but it's just a matter of chance. But when we will see now that there are four instances where this number 377 will pop up, this is one and another three to come. Then we realize that this is a complex phenomenon in the Quran. And the probability of it is hard to calculate, but we can see how remote it is. Because even if you said that, you know, let's not go with one out of 1891 because there are some selectivity involved and so on, we're homing in on those chapters. We're doing some work to find this number. So it's not pure probability. So but even if we said that the probability is not one out of 1891 or not even one out of 1000, let's say the probability is one out of 100. Now, if we have four of these phenomena, and that is the repeated probability of each one, then the combined probability of all of these is one out of 100 times one out of 100 times one out of 100 times one out of 100, one out of 100 times to the power of four. And the result of that is one out of 10 million. It is one followed by eight zeros. So we're dealing here with a very complex phenomenon that points to the Quran as the word of God. Now, we go to the 28th chapter of the Quran, which is one of those that we listed previously where the name Aaron occurs. And we notice that the 28th chapter of the Quran is saturated with the story of Moses and Aaron. And we can see the verse numbers where the names Moses and Aaron are mentioned, and the verse numbers are listed on the left. On the right, I list the number of words that occur in those verses. And when that column is totaled up, that turns out to be 377 also. So who counts the words and what you're writing in a particular verse? You might have word due for you, the count for the entire essay that you're writing. But if we ask you how many words were in a particular paragraph, you can find that too using word. But mentally, you probably would not have that information in your mind. So what accounts for this? Who's keeping count of all of this? Muslims say this is of divine origin. It is God that is doing this. And my next slide, I look at the name Aaron, not only in chapter 28, but I look at four chapters together, which are related by the fact that each one of them begins with what we call a mysterious letter. And in this case, the letter is Ta. So we have Surah 20 beginning with Taha, Surah 26 beginning with Ta, Seem, Meem, Surah 27 beginning with Ta, Seem, and Surah 28 beginning with Ta, Seem, Meem. And then we look at the verse numbers where Aaron is mentioned in these four chapters. And the tally of those verses, the total of the verses in which Aaron is mentioned comes out to be 377 again. So that's our third example. And the fourth example is a little bit more complex. And I'd like you to bear with me here for a moment. So here we have on this slide Musa and Harun. I've started to call them by their Arabic names now, so Moses and Aaron. So I've listed the four Suras in this, in this set of four Suras that begin with the mysterious letter Ta. They're Surah 26, 27, 28. And the frequency of Musa, how many times does the name Musa occur in that Surah? I've logged the frequencies there. And Harun, how many times does Harun occur in these chapters? I've logged the frequencies there. And because Harun occurs zero times in Surah 27, that zero is logged there as well. Now, the time for the tally. When we look at the sums of those two columns, we see that Musa occurs 46 times and Harun seven times. Now, nothing is proven yet with regards to our 377, but we're getting there. So let's go to the next slide to remind you that these are the numbers we're dealing with. The total for Moses and Harun is 377. And we have also the individual letter values, the numerical values for each name, 116 for Moses, 261 for Harun. Now, all of these numbers will now play out in the finale here. We'll find that there is an elegant formula emerging showing that Musa plus the frequency of Musa plus Harun plus the times the frequency of Harun equals 19 times Musa plus Harun. So that's an elegant formula. And for this to occur, the probability of this is rather remote. And now, if I put that in numerical terms on the right, we see 116, which is the numerical value of Musa, times 46, the frequency plus 261, which is the numerical value of Harun, times the frequency, which is 7, that equals to 19 times 116 plus 261. And if we analyze that further, we see that the total of that is 7163. And 7163 turns out to be 19 times 377. So our 377 occurs again now for the fourth time. The probability of all of these occurring by mere chance is rather remote. And I would say that all of this points to the Quran as the word of God. No human being counted this to make it come out like this. In fact, this information was not known until it was discovered about 50 years ago, less than 50 years ago. And for more information on this, you can go to two websites that are very good with dealing with this. But one particular website on which I've, it's more pertinent to this information is islamnoon.com, Islam and noon, like the high noon of day, islamnoon.com. And you can download, go to the English version of that site, most things are in Arabic, but you can download some English studies. And this, one of them will give you this detail. So that brings me to the end of that slide show. I'll just take stock of how much time I have remaining. Looks like I have just about two minutes remaining for the rest of what I want to say. Finally, I want to say then that Jesus and whom be peace is important to Muslims. And when we get into dialogue with our Christian friends, naturally, our Christian friends will want to know on what basis do you say that you believe in Jesus? So we say on the basis of the Quran, our Christian friends might say, but wait a minute, some aspects of the Quran, the Quran's presentation of Jesus, do not comport well with historical studies. And we would say that, in fact, if we analyze the matter, we will find that the Muslim presentation of Jesus, though it is a theological one, the Quran is, it gives us a theological insight into Jesus, though that is a theological insight, nonetheless, to Muslims. I hope that I'll be able to show later. This theological insight actually comports better with history than a Christian Trinitarian perspective. But not to be contentious. I want to say for the moment that a Muslim is confident and satisfied that because the Quran is the word of God, the theological insight it gives us into Jesus is a proper theological insight. That is the one we wish to go by. And we will reject things which are contrary to what is there in the Quran. Or we might find ways of syncretism, ways just to show the confluence of ideas. Sometimes things look very different from one perspective or the other. But perhaps there is a way of looking at them together. So all together, though our topic is framed as an economy, it's either Jesus of the Quran or Jesus of the Bible, we will find that in many things we have much in common. And Muslims and Christians believe equally in Jesus, though in different ways. And we will look, listen to what my friend Kabin has to say about this. And I'll be taking notes and I'll be glad to offer my comments on his presentation. So I think that's all the time that I have. I want to thank you all for your patient listening and I'll speak with you again. You bet. Thank you very much, Dr. Ali for that opening statement. And we will kick it over to Kabin for his opening statement. Want to let you know folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Databate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics. And we hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from. With that, Kabin, thanks so much. The floor is all yours for your opening statement as well. Thank you. I want to thank Shabir for coming to this debate and I want to thank James for providing this forum because time is limited. We're going to get right into the substance of the matter. I want to talk to you about the historical credibility of the gospel's portrait of Jesus. We'll get into the numerical stuff and the relevance of that in the rebuttal section. But I want to consider first the nature of our principle sources. When we evaluate a question like the origin of the gospels, the issue that we should consistently have in mind is the simplicity of our explanatory model relative to the shape of the historical data, whether that data is the internal evidence of the gospel text or the external evidence of early witnesses to their origins. Whether or not we can construct an historically possible scenario where the gospels are anonymously produced by non-i-witnesses, the real question, especially in inductive disciplines like history, is whether the evidence we have takes the shape we would expect if the four biblical gospels were produced anonymously by non-i-witnesses. As M.B. Thompson points out in his article, The Holy Internet, the evidence from the first two centuries suggests a degree of integration and cheap safe travel across the Roman Empire and across the network of churches that was not matched again for centuries, possibly not until the late Middle Ages and Renaissance era. Contrary to the imagined world of form and source critics, the actual textual data from early Christian texts undermines powerfully the idea that the Jesus tradition was transmitted orally and anonymously over generations before it came into the textual world of the canonical gospels. Moreover, as Larry Hurtado was shown in recent scholarship, the actual character of the early Christian manuscript tradition reveals a powerful and striking unity of distinctive qualities. Though the vast majority of our second century texts are written in scrolls, over 70 percent of second century codices, that is what we basically would call a modern book, are of Christian origin. It appears that across the entire network of Christian churches, Christian scribes pioneered the use of the codex. Moreover, the first three centuries reveal the widespread and now universal use of what its scholars call the nomenacacra, where names associated with God and Jesus would be specially abbreviated and underlined in order to accentuate the sacred character of the divine name, which also has implications for the divinity of Jews. Subscribable treatment of divine names has its closest parallel, not in Hellenistic culture, but in Judaism. And this suggests an integrated culture of manuscript transmission, where a certain family of texts, that is the biblical texts, were treated as especially sacred from a very early period. As Michael Kruger has argued, this indicates a striking unity of the Christian world and an extremely early concept of canonical normativity. In the world where the four canonical Gospels circulate anonymously and are given their titles later to buttress their divine authority, would one expect them to be attached to these authors? The first and the most popular of the Gospels is attributed by tradition to Matthew. The association of a Gospel with Matthew in our extant sources is first explicitly made in Papias. Matthew's claim to fame as an apostle, however, is the very fact of his being associated with a written Gospel. Similarly, early Christian scribes whose goal was to link their anonymous Gospels with a normative authority would have virtually no reason to select Mark as the author of the second Gospel. Now Papias identifies the Gospel of Mark as connected with the preaching of the apostle Peter. And Papias himself was intimately connected within the early apostolic circle and was a disciple of John the Apostle. Latinisms in the text corroborate the early association of the Mark's Gospel with the city of Rome and Peter's preaching therein. Now the third Gospel was traditionally written by an author who again status is linked to his tradition of being linked with the authorship of the Gospel himself. He's not remembered as a disciple of the historical Jesus and his principal association with an apostle is Paul who of course was not a disciple of Jesus during his earthly ministry. While Irenaeus is the first to list the four Gospels explicitly by their traditional authors there exists no competing tradition either in our external evidence or in the manuscripts themselves. Despite the common claim that the Gospels are internally anonymous these manuscripts which have the beginning of the text all associate the four Gospels with these traditional authors. If they are anonymous they are only anonymous in the sense that any writing which does not begin with hello I'm John Doe the author of this text is anonymous most of my writing would be anonymous by the standard. It's easy to claim that the texts are anonymous if we decide that the very portion of the manuscript identifying our authors doesn't count. Relative to the data in hand by far the most simple and parsimonious explanation identifies the four Gospels as written by their traditional authors and if this is the case these four Gospels represent extremely early tradition coming from the most intimate acquaintances of the historical Jesus. Moreover the closely integrated network character of the earliest Christianity and its universal veneration of the apostles is strongly at odds with any model claiming that these Gospels would have been contested by the historical apostles of the historical Jesus if they were acquainted with their content that they are taken to be normative as such an early date across the Christian world is best explained if they represent historical information of the highest value. Now let's look at what's inside these four texts. The four Gospels are consistent with each other in remarkable and non-ostentatious ways indicating that the portrait being presented is rooted in the actual historical Jesus. A detail in one Gospel explains in subtle ways details in the other Gospels things that appear to be contradictory actually come into sharp focus as intelligible only in light of very specific information about the local geography of the region. Moreover the Gospels get things right that would be nearly impossible to fake indeed these tests can only be made because of contemporary historical tools allowing us to collate and analyze data from a wide variety of contemporary texts. Imagine living 2000 years ago and producing an invented narrative from 38 years prior. Frequency of personal names fluctuates consistently in both time and place and the world of the narrative is not the production context of the actual authorship of the Gospels that is where the history happened is not where the texts were written. Compiling data from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other contemporary sources Richard Balkam notes that the relative frequency of names even when considering only Jews differs vastly from place to place. The most common names in Palestine were not the most common names in Egypt or in Libya and yet despite being produced outside Palestine the four Gospels represent very exactly the appropriate proportion of names relative to its purported geographical and chronological setting. When one considers that this question can only be meaningfully asked because of modern scholarly tools the idea that the evangelists would have been able to produce this correlation artificially is revealed as absurd. Similarly their knowledge of the topography is extremely accurate. John chapter two for example describes a journey down to Capernaum from Cana reflecting the actual higher elevation of Capernaum relative to Cana. The same language is used accurately in describing the relationship of Jerusalem to Jericho and when Jesus prophetically condemns Corazine, Bethsaida and Capernaum he condemns three obscure communities which are actual first century Palestinian towns. Corazine is archaeologically known as being on the road to Bethsaida and existing two miles north of Capernaum. This contrasts with later non-canonical Gospels which name only the largest and most well known cities and the canonical Gospels mention about 70 to 80 place names each. They consistently reflect accurate knowledge of the topography. Other connections among the Gospels reflect a home that is larger than the minds of the authors and is rooted in historical reality. For example only John's gospel provides information permitting us to see the length of Jesus's ministry as three years through its three pass-overs. Yet in Luke's gospel Jesus tells a riddle of a man who had been seeking fruit on the tree of Israel for three years to explain his own action. These texts are unified in terms of an external world transcending literary creativity. Mark's gospel identifies the grass in the Feeding of the Five Thousand as green, a distinctive feature of the region only in the springtime around Passover. Yet it's only John's gospel which specifies the Passover context of the miracle. In Luke 9 the Feeding of the Five Thousand took place near Bethsaida and according to John 12 a passage unrelated to the Feeding Philip is from Bethsaida and that explains why in John 6 Philip or Jesus asks Philip where they might go to buy bread. The way in which the Gospels explain each other underscores the reality that they transcribe very precisely actual history in both the synoptics and John's gospel. Jesus identifies himself with the vine in John alone and we know from archaeological data that there was in fact a vineyard that they would have been passing on the path they were traveling to Gethsemane. Mark's gospel tells the story of Herod's execution John the Baptist in some detail reflecting either intimate awareness of his death or an inventive mind but it's in Luke's gospel in 8 verse 3 that Joanna the Rife of Cusa was a disciple of Jesus and we're told that she was Herod's household manager thus explaining how this information was available to Mark. In Jesus' trial narrated in the synoptics he's accused of saying that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days yet it's only in John that we learn of Jesus saying that he would rebuild the temple in three days if it were destroyed at the beginning of his ministry. The garbled memory of an authentic saying of Jesus that is misquoted in his trial provides explanatory context unifying the stories of the four gospels and John together. Observe how these undesigned coincidences exist in both the natural and the miraculous aspects of Jesus' ministry and hold true both before and after his resurrection from the dead. For example when Jesus asked Peter do you love me more than these others do we're given an explanation for why he asked that only in the synoptic gospels where Peter says even if the others fall away I will not. Third and finally I want to consider the portrait of Jesus that emerges from the gospels in the terms of what anti-right calls the criterion of double dissimilarity and similarity. Jesus carried out his ministry in the historical world of 1st century Judaism and must make sense in that context. He also gave birth to an early Christianity which had specific characteristics. He has to make sense as someone in the 1st century Jewish world without being identical to it and he has to make sense as the explanation for why early Christianity took the specific form that it did. The Jesus of the gospels acts specifically in ways which only make sense against his historical context and likewise explains why early Christianity believed the things that they do without speaking in the language of the earliest Christianity. Consider the fact that in early Christianity we know from the book of Acts from the writings of Paul that the principal controversy in the earliest period was about circumcision of Gentiles. Now if the evangelists felt free to invent material in order to give them a leg up in their theological controversies, why does Jesus never once address this controversy? But he addresses all sorts of things which were not in fact controversial in the early church. That they all knew the New Testament emerges out of the teaching of Jesus and makes sense in the context of his historical ministry and yet it also explains why early Christianity spoke the language that it did without merely being a retrojection of 1st century Christianity. In both the synoptics in John Jesus teaching about his own redemptive work is couched in the language of 1st century Jewish expectation. He organizes his followers around 12 apostles representing the focal point of the reintegrated 12th tribe kingdom with himself as its lord. His miracles constitute enacted riddles about the nature of his work which coheres with the substance of Christian teaching but the parts in its mode of elucidation. Like the cursing of the fig tree and enacted parable with the judgment of his realm, Jesus's healing of lepers, cripples, and the woman with an outflow of blood are more than demonstrations of power. Indeed they instead they specifically identified Jesus as the focal point of divine presence and the one who ritually purifies those associated with death and ritually purifies them so that they might have access to the temple which is what purity is all about. He enacts parabolically the reality of his divine identity but he does so in a way which only makes sense in the world of 1st century Judaism. With the public exultation of Jesus the right hand of God there was no more reason to be cryptic and so the New Testament proclaims divinity openly but in the Gospels Jesus teaches his parable so that only those with open ears and soaked in his real scriptures will understand. Controversies about healing on the Jewish Sabbath are present in both the synopsis of John and they only make sense in the setting of Jesus's ministry. Not only would this debate have been foreign to the earliest Gentile Christian communities but it represents an earlier period in Jewish locket discussion than that found in post-7080s texts. The Jerusalem Talmud, for example, describes how there were multiple parties' Pharisees and indeed the Jerusalem Talmud condemns most of these Phariseic parties as a curse because of their legalism. The use of parables is pervasive in the synoptic Gospels and yet as a teaching style it is essentially absent from the Gentile Christian literature but present in a wide variety of Jewish literature. The epistles and the apocalypse speak openly about Jesus' atoning death. He's the new birth and the consequent presence of the Holy Spirit among them. They consistently identify Jesus as courious or Lord translating the tetragrammaton the divine name from the Old Testament and yet when Jesus speaks about his coming death he does so in riddles like in the parable of the tenants where the guardians of the field kill the son of the master who owns the field. In this parable Jesus' death is presented essentially as that like a martyr like the Israelite prophets. It doesn't openly elucidate a detailed theology of atonement. It makes sense as something that historical Jesus would have said not as something which the Gentile Christians would make up. Likewise when Jesus is accused of blasphemy at his trial he's accused in the context of his combination of Daniel 7 and Psalm 110. Daniel 7 he is the son of man and yet according to Psalm 110 he is seated. He thereby identifies himself with the seated figure of Daniel 7 and in combining these two texts he uses a well-known Jewish method of exegesis. It's cryptic relative to the later Christian literature but it makes sense in Jesus' own context. In a variety of ways from a multitude of perspectives the simplest way of explaining the actual data of the Gospels is by identifying them as accurate historical records, memoirs of the apostles which record things that happen in first century Judaism. The real Jesus is the Jesus of the Gospels. Thank you very much for that opening Cabane as well and folks we will jump into the rebuttals now. These are going to be 10 minutes for the first set and then eight minutes for the second set before open dialogue. So we'll kick it over to Dr. Ali. 10 minutes the floor is all yours. Thanks so much. Thank you very much gentlemen.  Okay so Cabane thank you for that delightful presentation and I learned a lot by listening to it. You quoted some conservative scholars whom I read from time to time and it was good to hear you present their thoughts as well like Hortado and Richard Malcolm and NT Wright as examples. And you mentioned a lot of the historical accuracy of a lot of the information that is there in the Gospels that are known to be historically accurate from the point of view of these conservative scholars and I appreciate all of that. Muslims are taught in the Quran to respect the Gospels, to respect the Bible and we do not want to go overboard in our critical assessment of the Bible but in a debate like this naturally we have to look at another angle as well. So the other angle I would like to present Cabane if you will allow me is that there are indications that the Gospels do not present just the real Jesus as you have pointed out. I refer to a book by John Bowden. His book is entitled Jesus the unanswered questions and he has shown that in fact the Gospels want to another modify the information regarding Jesus especially information regarding the theology. So what was Jesus' own view of himself? What did he preach over theological nature? We can see a development as we go from Mark to John. Now Bruce Metzger who is also a fairly conservative scholar in his book, The New Testament, its background, growth, and content has given many examples to show that if we go from Mark to Matthew and Luke there is a development and then other scholars have shown even Baukemin in his book Jesus, A Shorten Production has pointed out that sometimes the information in the Gospel according to John is not to be taken exactly as precise history especially when we're dealing with things like the speech of Jesus and so on. So there's definitely a development as we go from Mark to Matthew and Luke and then eventually to John's Gospel. Let's highlight some of the ways in which Matthew and Luke have modified the information as they got it from Mark because most scholars believe that Mark was the first of the four Gospels to be written. You mentioned the bleeding of this woman who came to be healed by Jesus. Now in Mark's Gospel Jesus felt the power going out of him and he kept looking around to see who touched him but in Matthew's Gospel by comparison Jesus knew immediately who it was. In the Gospel according to Mark we have similarly Jesus cursing the fig tree because as Mark says it was not the season for figs but in Matthew's Gospel that statement about it not being the season for figs is not there and so in Mark's Gospel we get the impression that it was a good tree. Had it been the season for figs it might have grown fruit but Jesus apparently didn't know that it was not the season for figs and so he cursed it not realizing that it was no fault of the tree that it had got fruit for Jesus to eat when he was hungry at that time. So we see in instances like this one after another that the Gospels modified the information to heighten the divinity of Jesus to heighten his knowledge and his power and so on. Now when we go from Mark to John we see even a larger jump. I have with me here a book somewhere within reach yes by Adela and Yarbrough Collins in which they point out the book is entitled King and Messiah as Son of God. Now they point out that in the Synoptic Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is not a pre-existent figure and yet in the Gospel according to John he's a pre-existent figure. So in the first Synoptic Gospels Jesus might be exalted into heaven but in John's Gospel by contrast he comes down from heaven and he is going back to where he came from. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus naturally prays to be saved from the cross in the Garden of Gethsemane saying, Father let this hour pass from me yet not my will but yours be done. So he finally concedes to the yields to the will of the Father. But in John's Gospel this was Jesus's will from the start to where he you know he enters Jerusalem and he says, now what shall I pray? Father save me from this hour. No it is for this reason that I came to this hour.  In fact he came into the world resolutely to do exactly this so that his crucifixion is more his exaltation. He is going up like ironically John wants to present that Jesus going up unto the cross is actually on his way to heaven so it's all good news here. The story has changed as we go from Mark to Matthew and Luke and then to John. In John's Gospel one of the most major changes is presenting Jesus as the Word of God that Jesus is the longest of God is unheard of in the first three Gospels. But John's Gospel has it in the Prologue that Jesus is the Word of God who existed from the beginning and in some sense it looks like he's God or a begotten God that needs some further elaboration but this whole discussion does not come out of the Gospels but out of the Gospel according to John. Then we notice that in the Gospel according to John there is more of a heightening of the proofs for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Previously Cobain you spoke about the reliability of the manuscripts and how the information was passed on and so on and widely known but that's not the impression we get especially when we go to the narratives regarding the discovery of the empty tomb and the post to resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples. We find here a wide divergence between all of the Gospels among all of the Gospels. So in Mark's Gospel we have the surprising ending in chapter 16 verse 8 in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts with the women fleeing from the scene telling no one what they saw because they were afraid. But that leaves lacking any description of an actual appearance of Jesus to his disciples. There is a promise that he will appear in Galilee but not the actual description of that in manifestation. But then in Matthew and Luke we have this delivered in Matthew the disciples go to Galilee and they see Jesus on a mountain and they worship him but they doubt it. In Luke's Gospel they are told not to not to leave the city so the appearances are in Jerusalem not in Galilee and we know it cannot have been both at the same time especially given the distance between Galilee and Jerusalem and you spoke about the geography so this is a problem. And then in John's Gospel we have a two-part narrative where in Luke's Gospel Jesus appeared to the 11 on the evening of Easter day. And John's Gospel by contrast says that at that time Thomas was missing. So it looks as if John has deliberately removed Thomas in order to have another narrative in which Thomas after having doubted for a while will now get the proof from Jesus and be able to say my Lord and my God. So John has truncated that or split it into two narratives in order to create this drama. And we have the beloved disciple that appears in John's Gospel. So if we talk about the people who were there witnessing Jesus and telling us what he was about, John wants to emphasize that there was an eyewitness that was there, the one that John is referring to as the one whom Jesus loved. But this disciple it does not seem to appear at crucial points in the Synoptic Gospels where we would expect him to appear. So it looks like John may have invented this figure perhaps as a literary device to show what an ideal disciple of Jesus would do and how this ideal disciple of Jesus would behave. So that when Peter and this beloved disciple run to the tomb, it is the beloved disciple that believed. But notice the oddity in John's narrative here that till this time they did not know the scriptures that Jesus was to rise from the dead. Now why wouldn't they know the scriptures in the Synoptic Gospels by contrast Jesus was predicting time and time again three large predictions that he will rise from the dead after three days of his crucifixion. So that is not in John's Gospel and John's Gospel doesn't seem to agree that that is what has in fact happened. The dating of the crucifixion is also different in John's Gospel. So we find that in many different ways the Gospels are not really presenting the real Jesus. They are presenting the Jesus that has been interpreted by these various writers over time. Thank you. Thank you very much Dr. Ali. We will kick it over to Cabain for his 10-minute rebuttal as well. Cabain the Floor is all yours. You might be on mute. Can you hear me? Yep. Okay. Thanks Shabir for that engagement. I want to begin by talking a little bit about his opening statement. I want you to notice that in the opening statement almost all freight was placed number one on the Quran status as the word of God and the case for the Quran status as the word of God was based on Gematria. Now what I want you to understand about this is that the idea of a book which is from the mouth of God and whom we know is from the mouth of God because it has characteristics that we can't explain in terms of normal human psychology, this is something that you will find across a wide range of religious traditions. Take for example the Arantia book. The Arantia book is very sophisticated and yet its sophistication seems totally unknown to the person who actually dictated the Arantia book. The Book of Mormon likewise has similar characteristics. It has a remarkably internally consistent geography. You can actually create a map of its inner geography. It even has numerological features which recent LDS scholars have attempted to make the case for and yet it was dictated in the very short period of time. Now what I want to suggest to you today is that number one biblical numerical features have similar qualities as those suggested in the Quran and number two the case for the divine origin of the Quran based on numerical figures is entirely predicated on considering those numerical features relative to chance and that is the big problem. We know that early Islam was engaged with the Jewish world. It reflects Jewish features, considered circumcision, considered some of the dietary laws. We know that Muhammad interacted with Jewish communities. We know that in the 10th, 11th century Islam continued to be engaged with Judaism. Maimonides had a very positive view of Islam and the thing is that if you study Jewish literature in the Middle Ages and before, Gematria is not just a feature of the Tanakh. It's not just a feature of the biblical texts but it's actually a feature that is in their rabbinic literature. This was a literary device which was used to craft sophisticated designs. If you look at some of the poetry of C.S. Lewis scholars are still studying that poetry to look at its remarkable features, its craftsmanship, its chiasatic patterns and so on and so forth. The chronology that Lewis provides for the history of Narnia is also very sophisticated. It has 49 or 7 times 7 years in terrestrial time and in Narnian time. It is 365 times 7 which of course is the length of a year times 7. And what I'm suggesting to you is even if we grant everything that Shabir has said about the craftsmanship of the Qur'an, its Gematria, its numerical features, these are features that we know exist in literature which we don't consider to be divinely inspired to be the Word of God. In fact, it is a problem to assume that the range of possible literary productions is basically captured by what we're familiar with today where we have very sophisticated equipment, we can type things up, we can edit it like that, and we write quite a bit. But in antiquity, lengthy texts could be memorized. Lengthy texts were enunciated entirely from memory and these devices were, among other things, devices to help the speaker remember. So I'm not granting that everything should be or said about the craftsmanship of the Qur'an is in fact true. But the big problem is that his case connecting it to the Word of God, which is the essential character of his case that if it has these devices then it is the Word of God. There are several more steps in between. Now I want you to consider some of the features that are in the Bible. In the five-book Pentateuch, the tetragrammaton yad evadhe, it has a numerical value of 26. And in the Danak, there are 70 times 26 references to the divine name to the tetragrammaton. In the first four chapters of Genesis, God is referred to by various names, again exactly 70 times. In the first chapter of Genesis, you have the first verse has a gematria of 2,701, which is 73 times 37, which are the standard and ordinal values of chakma or wisdom respectively. And 73 and 37 are mirrors. If you invert 37, you'll get 73 and vice versa. And these two are actually primes as well. It's the 21st prime and the 12th prime respectively, one of the only numbers which is a mirror both in its prime value and in its standard value. God speaks 35 times in Genesis chapter 1. And interestingly, God's speech in Genesis and God said to them is used exactly seven times. And in every one of the four Gospels, Jesus said to them is used the same number of times. And there are multiple variations of Jesus said to them. Each one of those are used seven times. If you look at a book by a guy named Cassio, Numerical Features of Scripture, if you look at his book, Repetition in the Bible, or you look at C. J. Labushan, you will find these devices used across the Scriptures. Genesis 1,1,2,3, the first section of the book has a gematria of exactly 110,601. That's 110,000 plus 601, which is the 110th prime number. And then the last verse of Genesis names Joseph's age of death as 110. The gematria, the numerical value of Joseph's name is 156, I recall correctly, and it's used exactly 156 times in the book of Genesis. My point being that human literary craftsmanship has produced texts with these features across history. And one doesn't need to suggest that they, in the Quran, it's chance in order to explain their presence if they are indeed present. Now let's talk a little bit about what Shabir said about the Gospels. He said that Jesus in the Gospel of John, he knows he's going to death. Yet in the synoptics he prays to be saved from death. And yet in the synoptics Jesus repeatedly prophesies his death and resurrection. Indeed this constituted another argument Shabir used, which is that the disciples should have known the resurrection was going to come because he prophesied his death and resurrection. But these two points are in tension with each other. If John's contrast in the synoptics is that Jesus always intended to go to death in the Gospel of John, yet the synoptics he didn't, then one can't base an argument on his prophecies of his death and resurrection. Indeed in the Gospel of Luke we're told that he set his face to go to Jerusalem. He prophesied to Peter that he was going to die in Jerusalem. He says that John has Jesus as the Word of God but in the synoptics Jesus is not presented as divine in this sense. If you look at Richard Hayes' work you will see that repeatedly in the synoptic Gospels Jesus's words and his actions are couched in terms of the prophetic portrait of the God of Israel. In Luke's Gospel Jesus's words are described as coming from the wisdom of God, which is a way of talking about the Logos, talking about the Word of God. At the end of Luke's Gospel the resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus where they didn't know who it was until the very end when they ate with him. That is actually based on the story found in Judges chapter 6 and 13 where the angel of the Lord who has the name of the Lord in him who was called sometimes the Word of the Lord. The angel of the Lord came he made an announcement and then they discovered that it was the angel Lord only when they had a sacrificial meal with him. He says that in Mark's Gospel we have these tensions with the other two synoptics in terms of Christology, in terms of Jesus' knowledge. Let me say two things. First of all there is no evidence that Mark's Gospel is the earliest. The case for it being the earliest Gospel is predicated essentially entirely on its being shorter, which is not a really substantive argument. If you look at Mark chapter 6 and Matthew chapter 13 and then Matthew chapter 23 and then Mark chapter 13, you will find in both cases where Matthew and Mark are parallel, Mark begins within his teaching. In other words, Mark is telling us that he is being selective with a pre-existing source. In his teaching Jesus said X, Y, and Z and we know that there are other teachings of Jesus because they are found in Matthew's Gospel on which Mark is depending. And likewise, in the beginning of Mark, Jesus's special knowledge, he knew what was in their hearts, is cited explicitly. In the Gospel of Luke, Shabir suggests that Jesus appears in Jerusalem and not in Galilee. I will point out to you that in Mark's Gospel at the ending of Mark, Jesus is prophesied to appear in Galilee and yet we have narrated appearances in Jerusalem. Now, Shabir would undoubtedly say, well, that's because Mark 16, 19, 20 is not in the earliest manuscripts. Well, if you look at the actual manuscript families, the only anomalies that we find are in the Alexandrian manuscript tradition. And while the earliest manuscripts themselves, the physical manuscripts, don't have Mark 16, 9 to 20. That's just because those are Alexandrian manuscripts. And Mark 16, 9 to 20 is quoted by church fathers writing decades or even centuries prior to the date of those manuscripts. Likewise, in the Gospel of John, Jesus appears both in Jerusalem and in Galilee. Yet the Galilee appearance, which we have narrated, is not the one that we have in the Gospel of Matthew. John was not intending to harmonize and yet we have evidence that Jesus appeared in both places, underscoring the essential unity of these texts. And we'll switch it over into the next set of rebuttals before we go into open dialogue. These are going to be eight minutes each. And want to let you know, folks, if you haven't already hit that subscribe button, as we have many more juicy, controversial debates coming up that we're very excited about. And with that, Dr. Ali, thanks so much. The floor is all yours for that e-minute rebuttal. Thank you, James. Thank you, Ben, for that engagement with the points that I raised. You mentioned a number of interesting points about the Bible's features that are numeric in design. And I would like to look into that some more. You mentioned the name of an author, maybe Cassian or something like this. I'd like to get his precise name. If not now, then later in our correspondence, because I'd like to read what he has written about this. I would like to say, in short, that from my brief survey of what has transpired in the world of the Bible and numerical patterns, what some people have called thematics, this has been widely rejected by biblical scholars. Now, it may be that biblical scholars know something that I don't know, and that is so general that it applies also to the Qur'an. But what I would say is that the patterns that I've shown existing in the Qur'an, and I've only shown some today, I've shown some in my debate with Jay Smith, with Richard Lucas, and more recently with Anthony Rogers. So I can't cover everything at once, because there are so many. I would like to see such a detailed and consistent comprehensive presentation regarding the Bible or some other book to show that the patterns we're talking about can easily appear in others. You have mentioned some points, but they went back by so quickly that I could hardly take the notes regarding them. But I would like to study that some more. I do know in some that the scholars generally do not accept that the Bible is divine on this basis. As for the other books which you mentioned, which we all would agree are not divine, like for example Chronicles of Narnia and so on, you mentioned some interesting tidbits, but a few interesting tidbits is not the whole case. In the case of the Qur'an, I've mentioned something of such complexity that spans so many chapters. In fact, one has to think of the whole Qur'an comprehensively. And you say that this may have served as a nomanic device, but nobody seems to have known this. It was only discovered in the case of the Qur'an within the last 50 years. And it comes as a surprise and to think of how the Prophet Muhammad, if he wanted to do this, to compose a book that he was spontaneously reciting bits and portions of as occasions demanded. And then it comes out to have this remarkable pattern. This is much different from somebody using, as you said, the ancient Jewish writers used dramatria and the composed sophisticated works using such patterns. Well, that's deliberate. But in the case of the Qur'an, it does not seem that this was deliberate on the part of any human being or collection of human beings. It is just discovered in hindsight. And the best explanation for this is that this is a revelation from the Almighty God. Now, turning to the matters regarding the Gospels, it is indeed clear that in John's Gospel, Jesus is a much more powerful individual. It's not only in degree, but also in kind. Then Jesus appears in the Synoptic Gospels. So, yes, in the Synoptic Gospels, he prays to be saved. But in the Gospel, according to John, he's saying, I won't pray like that when he enters Jerusalem and he says now the hour is here. As for him being the Word of God, no, in the Synoptic Gospels, it is not clearly stated that Jesus is the Word of God. You can follow Richard Hayes and other conservative scholars who want to see some indication that maybe there is a hint there. Okay, maybe in Luke's Gospel, he looks like the angel of the Lord, or maybe in Luke's Gospel, it looks like his words are coming from the wisdom of God and so on. But those are all inferences. And there is no direct statement to this regard as we find in the Gospel, according to John. So definitely there is a development there. And as for Jesus's knowledge, clearly in John's Gospel, he has more knowledge than in the others. In the Synoptic Gospels, you mentioned the trial scene where Mark speaks about the Son of Man. In that scene, and in some other things in Mark's Gospels, for example, chapter 8 verse 38, Jesus differentiates himself from that coming Son of Man. But in John's Gospel, he quickly identifies himself as that Son of Man. So no question remains in John's Gospel, whereas some modern scholars will say it looks like Jesus was speaking about someone else other than himself when he on occasion referred to the futuristic, eschatological Son of Man. Now you say that the priority of Mark is based on just simply the idea that Mark is shorter. No, my friend Cobain. There are several lines of evidence which go to show that Mark is the more primitive of the Synoptic Gospels. The most telling feature is that when we go episode by episode, we compare across Mark to Matthew and Luke. We can see that Matthew and Luke have the improved version. Sometimes, if we go backwards, we will have to say that Mark was corrupting the good grammar of Matthew and Luke. But rather we would say that Matthew and Luke improved the grammar. Matthew and Luke improved the status of Jesus, improved the knowledge of Jesus, improved the power of Jesus, so that if in Mark's Gospel, Jesus in his hometown couldn't do any mighty work because of the unbelief of the people, in Matthew, by contrast, Jesus did not do any work. So he removed the idea of the inability of Jesus and made it seem like this is the will of Jesus that he did not. So definitely, there is good evidence that Mark is not only shorter in some episodes, but it is more primitive in the presentation of Jesus. Now, coming to Mark chapter 16 verses 9 to 20, this is widely regarded by modern scholarship as a later addition into Mark's Gospel. And you say, well, okay, well, this bridges the gap and shows that Jesus appeared in both places. Well, that's one of the reasons why people would add something. James White, who was already also debated with me several times and is well known as a conservative scholar, in his book, The King James Only Controversy, has pointed out that this appendix to Mark's Gospel is a later one. It does not belong in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts. And one of the telling reasons for thinking that this is an appendix is that some manuscripts have this ending. Some have a shorter ending and then some have both the shorter and the longer ending. So why would people be appending endings of a variety if they had the original ending? If Mark chapter 16 verses 9 to 20 was always there, why would somebody add the shorter ending? Rather, it is clear that this is an insertion, a later insertion into Mark's Gospel. Looking then at Mark Gospel ending in chapter 16, verse number 8, we can also see how Matthew and Luke have improved the story and why they went their separate ways. In Mark, the women say nothing to anyone because they were afraid. And in both Matthew and Luke, they run and go to tell everyone. And then, of course, what we would like to know as Christians become clear that Jesus appears to his disciples in Galilee, in Matthew, and in Jerusalem in Luke's Gospel, they go their separate ways. When they are with Mark, they are together. When they don't have Mark, they go their separate ways. You bet. Thank you very much, Dr. Ali, for that rebuttal. And then we'll go into our final rebuttal before the open dialogue. The floor is set for you at 8 Minutes, Kabine. Thanks so much. Could you let me pause for a second and take my dog to my brother because he's whining right now and I don't want that to... Yeah, thank you. While you do that, I'll get it from a different keyboard because I'm having a problem with mine. Thanks. No worries at all. Want to let you know, folks, our guests are linked in the description. So if you would like to hear more from our guests, those links are waiting already right now in the description box below. And that includes if you're listening to this debate via the podcast, because all of our debates are uploaded to the podcast, usually within about 24 hours of the debate being live. And so if you're listening via podcast, you can find our guests' links there as well. And very excited to let you know a lot of controversial, juicy upcoming debates. If you are sick like us and you like those types of debates, have to let you know. Hit that subscribe button as an example of the bottom right of your screen. Khalid, an apostate prophet debate, whether or not ex-Muslims should be punished, as you can see at the bottom right of your screen. And not only that, but we are very excited. We haven't had, we had Hunter Avalon was on in a panel before. However, we have not had him on a one-on-one debate before. But this Saturday, we will, as Hunter Avalon takes on James Hake of the Hake report on whether or not systemic racism is real. So you don't want to miss that one as well.  We are glad that you are here. And we want to let you know that our vision is to provide a neutral platform so that everybody can make their case on a level playing field. And so we do appreciate you being with us no matter what walk of life you are from. And also want to let you know we're excited to get people from different walks, different walks of life continuing in their conversations. And so we're excited to have our guests who make that possible in tonight's debate or discussion. And they once again are linked in the description in case you'd like to hear more. And then Cobain, if you're ready for us, we can kick it right over to you for that eight minute rebuttal before we go into open dialogue. And then I'll give you a heads up, folks. We have the open dialogue following this last rebuttal, then closings and then the Q&A. If you happen to have any questions, tag me in the live chat, or you can do a super chat that puts the question at the top of the list. And so with that Cobain, thanks so much. The floor is all yours. Thank you very much. I want to begin just by saying a couple of words on the ending of Mark. Certainly most scholars do agree that the ending of Mark is added later. But to be quite frank with you, that means nothing to me. In order for that to constitute an argument for it being a later edition, one has to demonstrate a second premise, which is that the conclusions of most scholars correlates with a high degree of probability with the truth of the matter. Apart from that, it's just an interesting fact that most scholars dismiss it. And in reality, most scholars dismiss it not because they've studied the matter for themselves, but just because that is what they're instructed on. It's a very complicated subject. Everybody has to study their own subtopics. And if you look at a new book on the long ending of Mark by Nicholas Lund, Craig Evans, who certainly no fundamentalist reviewing that book says that this book has led him to dramatically reconsider his view of Mark's gospel. So for those who actually study the evidence, as has been reassessed, they acknowledge the evidence is much stronger than it seems at first. Shabir asks, well, if the ending of Mark is indeed original, then why are these strange features? Why is there a short ending that is sometimes dependent alone or sometimes dependent together with the long ending? Well, the reason that there are those strange features is because it is an anomaly in the Alexandrian manuscript tradition. In fact, every single one of those anomalies exists only in the Alexandrian manuscript tradition. And if you look at the two earliest Alexandrian manuscripts, while the text is not present there, there is a significant gap in the text indicating that both scribes were aware of the existence of the long ending of Mark. But the key point here is that even though our earliest manuscripts, two of them, Codex Sanedicus and Codex Vanacantus, don't have the long ending of Mark, the long ending of Mark is quoted by a wide range of fathers across a wide geographical span centuries prior to the existence of those manuscripts. And that's really the key point. We know that it existed centuries before it is an anomaly only in the Alexandrian manuscript tradition. And the question is, how did this long ending get appended universally in all of these other manuscript traditions? It's much easier to explain how it was cut out of one Alexandrian or one manuscript tradition. I have a two hour interview with a textual critic on this subject on my channel. I just don't think the case is very strong. Shabir suggested that one of the reasons that we know that it is a later edition is because Mark has the Jerusalem appearances, even though he narrates Galilee appearances. However, as I noted, John's Gospel as well has Jerusalem and Galilee appearances. And yet the Galilee appearance in John is not the Galilee appearance of Matthew. He wasn't intending to harmonize. He simply gives us another piece of evidence that Jesus appeared in both locations. So the evangelists themselves did not see a conflict between these two sets of appearances. That case has made even stronger by the fact that it is in Mark as well, when one looks at the evidence of the manuscripts themselves. Shabir suggested that while in John, the status of Jesus as the word of God is explicit in this, not to get best, it is only implicit. I will point out that the evidence for Jesus as being the logos of the word of God in the Gospel of John, the explicit testimony to that Jesus is the logos of God, is the prologue of the Gospel. In other words, we're not talking about the words that are put in Jesus's mouth itself. It's in the prologue to John's Gospel. So if that evidence is going to count as worth something, which it should, we should also look at the fact that Matthew's Gospel begins with Jesus being identified as Emmanuel, God with us. And it ends with Jesus saying, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age. This is part of a major theme in Matthew's Gospel, where the personal presence of Jesus with his disciples is the embodied presence of Israel's God. So when the Magi coming from the east bring their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, that is an allusion to Isaiah chapter 60, where the Gentiles stream to the God of Israel, and they offer him gifts on the altar of his sanctuary. And so is this evidence indirect? Well, perhaps you could call it indirect, but I don't think that makes it worth anything fundamentally less. The question is, is the case for interpreting it in this way strong? Now concerning the numerical devices in the Bible, Shabir said that most scholars do not accept the divine authorship of the Bible on this basis. And it's true, most scholars don't accept the divine authorship of the Bible on this basis. But my whole argument is that it's not a proof of the divine authorship of the Bible. In fact, these numerical and compositional devices were a feature of literary craftsmanship across a wide variety of cultures. It does not indicate or demonstrate divine authorship. This is one of the elements of literary beauty, which is just found in the scriptures. And in fact, the numerical devices that are found in the Pentateuch are very significant because they cohere with the thematic theme, the thematic content of the Pentateuch as well. In other words, in Exodus chapter three and six, where God discloses his name to Moses, the content of that disclosure makes up 26 words, which is the numerical value of the tetragrammaton. The pontora is a revelation of the name of the Lord. And so it's 70 times 26. And we already know on independent grounds that 70 and 26 are meaningful. So the question is, if the evidence for the Qur'an's divine authorship is to be based to such a large degree on these numerical features, one cannot simply calculate its probability relative to chance. Shabir's, the heart of his case for the divine authorship of the Qur'an, depends on these probabilistic calculations entirely relative to chance. But that is something which cannot be taken for granted, because we know that these numerical features are not just in the Bible, not just in the Qur'an. They're in Hellenistic texts. They are in Jewish texts from the middle ages onwards. They are still a major feature. And if you look at the theology of the Lubavitcher, Chabad movement, Gamatria is a major theme. So it is not a demonstration of divine authorship. And it's not the same thing as the Bible code, by the way. This is a literary device, which is used across a wide variety of sources. John's prologue, for example, has 496 syllables. Its epilogue has 496 words. These themes are absolutely pervasive throughout both Old and New Testament. So they may well be present in the Qur'an. But we know that early Islam was connected with the Jewish community. And so that is actually not all that extraordinary. Now Shabir says this has only been documented in recent times. But if you look at Qur'anic scholarship, there has been a great argument over whether the view of the classical commentators really displays firsthand knowledge of the compositional situation of the Sura. So that is not all that significant in itself, because that is a feature of chronic exegesis in general, that it's a question whether the classical commentators really have a, we should wait their view on all that significantly. He says that in the synoptics, Jesus just standing as the wisdom or word of God is only implicit. Whereas in John, it's explicit. But in fact, Jesus himself says with his own lips in the Gospel of Luke, therefore the wisdom of God said, and John, it is the prologue, not Jesus's voice himself. But in Luke, he says himself that he is the wisdom of God speaking in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus says, I would have gathered you, I would have gathered Israel to myself throughout the period of the Old Testament. This is on the lips of Jesus, and thus is arguably more explicit. He says, well, the angel of the Lord connection with Luke 24 and the book of Judges that is implicit. Well, you could call it implicit. The question is, is there a substantial case for it being present? And I would argue that yes, there is a substantial case. There's no reason to dismiss intertextuality as being relevant because it is so important to the various devices that are found in the scriptures. He says that in John's Gospel, the ascension of Jesus is said to happen on the cross. But if you look at John's Gospel, Jesus says the spirit will not come until he goes to his father. But in fact, after the resurrection, Jesus says, I have not yet ascended to my father. This shows that the resurrection Jesus in the Gospel of John is not a literary figment. He displays awareness that there is still an ascension to happen and that the outpouring of the spirit in full is going to happen after the Gospel of John. So I want to thank Shabir for the robust engagement and I look forward to doing so more in the future. You bet. We will jump into that open conversation which will be about 20 minutes starting in the timer. And thank you very much gentlemen on the floor. It's all yours for open dialogue. Okay, so thank you Cobain for that excellent final rebuttal there. So if you have a question you want to jump right into for me, feel free. But I have a few for you because I was taking notes based on what you last said. So I'll let you start. Okay, sure. So I want to start towards the end of what you were saying. So you're saying that I said that the ascension of Jesus was from the cross in John's Gospel. Actually, I wasn't saying that. I'm just saying that John is presenting a different idea of the cross where the cross itself is Jesus's exaltation. But the actual ascension in John's Gospel, I agree coincides with that of the synoptics. But when John speaks about the cross, like Jesus going to the cross, he's going up. That's the way in which John puts it. Yeah, I agree with that. That is a particular theme of John's. I think my point is that that really is not a problem as to its historicity. Because number one, the question is John's interpretation of the cross. It's not actually the historical content of Jesus' ministry itself. But number two, it's not mutually exclusive. Because even in Mark, when Jesus dies on the cross, it says he breathed his last. And then it's the centurion who says, truly, this was the Son of God, the outbreath of Jesus is itself a miniature outpouring of the Spirit. And so the interplay between the themes of exaltation and crucifixion, we see that in John, there's still a future exaltation to happen after the crucifixion. And in Mark, the death of Jesus is itself a kind of victory. So I don't think it's a contradiction or a problem for historicity. Just a quick point about what you just said. Come in. I'm just curious. The word that Mark has used there, because I remember Raymond Brown saying that the term used in Mark's Gospel literally means he expired. Is that the same term that you have in mind that you're translating as breathed his last? Yeah, he exhaled, expired. Expired? Yeah, I mean. In Greek, does that happen that the idea he breathed his last? Or are you conflating that with another Gospel? No, no, no. I mean, expired even in English, you can see, spire, spiration. Do you know of a Gospel, of a version of the Bible that translates Mark in that way? Expired? Yeah, no, breathed his last. The ESV, I think. I mean, but I don't see, maybe I'm not following exactly what you're saying, expired. I just want to know the precise terminology. It may not be very important, but still, I'm curious. So I'm looking into Mark right now in Bible Hub. I'm going to Mark chapter 15. Mark chapter 15 not the Borean literal Bible. And so death of Jesus as the topic here. It says he breathed his last. Yes. Okay, so let me go to the Greek of that, because I'm pretty curious about this. It's Eponaeon. Okay, I don't know the Greek that very well, but I want to see how they translate the Greek. It's from Pinaeon. Breathe his last. Okay, except Nusen. Okay, so does it mean expired? Because expired and breathed his last are not the same thing, because breathed his last, that gives us the impression that that's his last breath, like at all, like finally. Oh, I mean, the essential point that I was making was not so much about the last bit, but it was about the breathing bit. You know, okay, okay, good spirit. Sure. Okay, so yeah, we don't have to be contentious about that point. I don't have to be contentious about that point. You're not being contentious. Okay, so now, yeah, you mentioned Nicholas Lund, and I would like to get the correct spelling of his name so I can look for his book as well. And perhaps the title of his of his book, you don't have to give it to me now, you can give it to me later. But if you want to give it to me now, that's fine as well. Okay, it's Nicholas P. Lund, the original ending of Mark. Nicholas P. Lund, and it's called the original ending. Yeah, Lund without a D, L-U-N-N. Oh, L-U-N-N, okay. And the original ending. Okay, I'll look for that. I'm curious, because recently I've read a book on the before views on that, so I'm aware that Christian scholars have different views upon it on that issue. But I'd like to ask your opinion after everything that you have read. Why do you think that Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus have both omitted this? Okay. What was going on in the minds of the scribes, do you think? Obviously, it's very hard to reconstruct what happened when a person deleted a passage. What I would say, first of all, is one can be warranted in saying that a passage was removed without necessarily having an explanation for why it was moved. But second of all, I would say probably the best explanation would be that in Alexandria you have debates among Gnostic groups as to the nature of the resurrection. And so if a scribe with this particular question or point of view was transmitting Mark's Gospel relatively early on, and if he was transmitting it simply as Mark's Gospel, not part of the collection, then the removal of that would leave ambiguity as to what exactly resurrection means in that text. But I would say we're warranted in saying that it is present in the original manuscript simply because it is far more explanatorily simple to explain how it was removed than to explain how in every other manuscript tradition it's universal and how Church Fathers across the Roman world and beyond are quoting that text very early on. So let's look at it the other way then and say let us suppose that originally this ending was not there. And I'd be wondering now, is there a possible explanation for why it would appear in all of the manuscripts more widely? Can you think of an explanation? If it wasn't there in the first place, why people would want to put that in? Well, sure. I mean, one can explain why they would want to put it in. But the question is, is there evidence that it was inserted? I mean, I think the question of motivation, that is a deeper level question, a second-order question, and it's just by its very nature a more difficult question. So as to the Yes. But of course, you know, the textual critics are asking this all of the time, right? As they go line by line. Is it more likely that somebody decided to omit this? Or is it more likely that somebody decided to insert this? Yeah, I mean, as far as that methodology goes, I just have a fundamental problem with the way the textual critical methodology proceeds in that respect. I don't think it's a good way to end this. So you hesitated to say what might have been the motivation of those who may want to add it, but let's imagine the scenario where it was not there and somebody added it in. Do you think it would be far fetched for me to suggest that, as scholars do suggest, that perhaps because it ended in such a truncated manner in Marx's rendering with the women fleeing from the tomb saying nothing to anyone because they were afraid, and Christians are reading this and saying, but what happened? Surely he must have appeared to his disciples like he said he would. Where is the apparent narrative? Like what happened? People want to know. And you can, is it understandable that if it was not there, some people would want to append a sort of summary narrative drawing together information from the other gospels and from Christian tradition more generally. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, one can create a plausible story for a whole variety of things. I mean, if we can imagine that if the Gospel of Matthew lacked a resurrection narrative, I can understand why people would append one to the Gospel of Matthew. The question is simply does the manuscript evidence warrant that conclusion? And only once we've derived that conclusion, do we look at the second order question? Why did this happen? Because I just think that if you just look at the manuscript evidence itself, it's very difficult to justify saying that this was not part of the original manuscript. But I mean, there are all sorts of plausible stories, one can tell about how things could be. The question is just what does the concrete evidence suggest as to how it actually was? So one of the arguments for Markin priority, as I'm sure you're aware Cobain, is that when Matthew and Luke have something in common with each other, usually they have it in common with Mark as well, unless they're dealing with the sayings content which comes from the Kew Gospel. In terms of the narrative sequence of events, it looks like the common element is Mark. And when Mark is absent, it looks like Luke and Matthew go their separate ways. So we see that Mark begins with the baptism scene. So from the baptism scene onwards, we see quite a remarkable consistency in the sequence of events between Matthew and Luke. But prior to the baptism scene, we see that Mark, Matthew and Luke, have come from two separate directions. The nativity stories in Matthew and Luke about the birth and early childhood of Jesus, they're very, very different. And some say even irreconcilable. And then we see the same phenomenon happening at the end where, up to where the women flee from the scene, we can see Matthew and Luke improving that one line. But they were following neck and neck line by line from Mark, basically, with some remarkable and important changes. And then after Mark chapter 16 verse 8, Matthew and Luke go their separate ways. Matthew goes towards Jerusalem, towards Galilee, and Luke has the disciples stay in Jerusalem where they get this visitation from Jesus. So can you see how this is also an argument that Mark chapter 16 initially lacked that longer ending? Because that longer ending seems to be conflated with bits of information from Matthew and Luke and other sources. And if Mark had continued the narrative, then it could be expected that Matthew and Luke would also continue in the same vein. And it would not be so widely divergent. Okay. So a couple of things here. I think, first of all, those arguments, while they're often presented as arguments for Mark in priority, all they establish is that Mark is the mediating point for Matthew and Luke. So if one says that Mark uses Matthew as a source for the order of his pericope, and then Luke uses Mark in turn, Mark is established as the mediating point between the two Gospels. But that doesn't mean that Mark was written prior to the two. And I would say that when we look at the structure of the early church, when we look at the way that it was networked together, and we look at the way that our early patristic witnesses are intimately connected with the first hand acquaintances of Jesus, we need to privilege the concrete data as to what they say as to the production of the Gospels. And there's not a single witness who argues, or who says that Mark is written first. The only possible witness for an order other than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, though this itself is disputed, is Clement of Alexandria. And if we took that to be the case, it would be the Grisbach hypothesis, which is that Mark postates Matthew and Luke. But second of all, I don't think the reason that that works as an argument against long-ending music is, first of all, in any of these situations, we always have to privilege the concrete data because one can invent stories as to how a text was produced all the time. As C.S. Lewis once said, however the biblical critics might be as critics, my problem is with them as readers of literature in general, having been an author, he says, and looked at very plausible speculations as to how I produced my books, I know how inaccurate those would be. So that methodology, I mean, the fact that a methodology is widespread, that it's taken as normative, it doesn't hold much epistemic weight for me. But second of all, we already know that in Mark relative to Matthew and Luke, that that principle doesn't always hold true. For example, in Mark chapter six, which is related to Matthew chapter 13, there is a parable which is actually unique to Mark's Gospel. And I would argue the only other place that parable appears in the Testament is actually the book of Revelation, where Jesus put the sickle in the earth. But I think, again, when we look at the concrete evidence, when we look at, okay, how exactly is Mark related to the Gospel of Matthew? We see that in the closest texts, that is Mark six to Matthew 13, Mark chapter 13, to Matthew chapter 23 and following, in both cases, Mark says in his teaching, Jesus says, and then he puts a similar appendage at the end of the percopey. So Mark is telling us that this is selected from a broader body of teaching. And I think we have to very strongly privilege the textual data, the things which are concrete, the things we can look at directly to stories that may or may not be intuitively plausible to one or another person. So you mentioned John 21 as having also a reference to Jesus appearing in Galilee. And so whereas John 20 has appearances in Jerusalem, now we have appearances in Galilee as well in chapter 21. And so John has it both ways. Are you aware that some scholars think that John chapter 21 is also an appendix that this was not the original? Yeah, yeah. So the problem with that, actually, I alluded to this in my presentation, though it wasn't in the context of this argument, is that the prologue and the epilogue of John correspond to each other in a literary sense. The prologue is 496 syllables, the epilogue is 496 words. And I'm not arguing that that proves divine origin, but I think it demonstrates that there's a literary relationship which is intentional and it demonstrates a literary integrity of the text as a whole. I also think that if you look at the Gospel of John in the Apocalypse, I know that some people argue that they're not written by the same author. I think they clearly are written by the same author. The literary correspondences between the two demonstrate that John chapter 21 is clearly a part of the integral Gospel of John. For example, John chapter 21, when Jesus gathers the 153 fish, the gematria of 153 is an eggling, which in Ezekiel 47, there is a river which goes out from the temple and it gives life to the fish. And then we have the 153 fish there in John 21. And then in the book of Revelation, we actually have the city of God which comes down from heaven and it's clearly based on the temple vision of Ezekiel. But there are many, many links between John and Revelation, which I think show that John chapter 21 has to be taken as an integral part of the text. And again, it's about the manuscript evidence, as far as I'm concerned. People can read a text, they say, well, I don't see a reason why this literary feature would be here. But I think it's just jumping the gun to say, well, therefore it originally wasn't, even though we don't have any manuscript evidence for that. And here's the reason it was later added in. I think we have to take the text as it stands. Okay. So are there any questions you want to ask me? Because I don't want it to all go one way. I wanted to ask one or two things about the actual kind of content of the Quranic portrait of Jesus. In the Quran, Jesus is presented as not having claimed to be the Son of God. And one of the problems that I would have with that is it seems to reflect an pure identification of the Christian idea of Son of God, meaning only the gotten Son of God, which I take to be in the New Testament, but it is derived from the Jewish meaning Son of God as the messianic king who was anointed. Do you think that this fits well with the kind of language that Jesus would have used in his first century Jewish context? Meaning that was it possible that Jesus in his historical context spoke of himself as Son of God, meaning Messiah or king? Yeah. So it's an interesting question. As I said, my belief in Jesus comes from the Quran and not from the historical reconstructions about who Jesus was. And I admit that the Quran presents a theological understanding of Jesus. The Quran is not a book about history, but how to conceive of history on theological lines. If Jesus and some Muslim scholars may give credence to this, that it is possible that when Jesus spoke of God as Father, maybe it fit with that historical situation. And in that case, maybe he meant it in a metaphorical sense. In the Old Testament, we know that a person might be called Son of God in a metaphorical sense. Would Jesus have meant it ontologically? This is where it seems that the Quran draws a line. And might it be that the writers of the New Testament style some of the sayings of Jesus in such a way as to give the impression that he was claiming ontological sonship with God? And of course, we see that more so in the Gospel according to John. And in the Synoptic Gospels, it might be more the case that the sayings of Jesus can be interpreted as him being the Son of God in a metaphorical sense. Yeah, I mean, as to the latter part, I think one of the interesting things is, you know what, but I'm sure you're aware that the so-called Yeohannine Thunderbolt, you know, no one knows the Father except the Son, and no one knows the Son except the Father and the one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. That sounds like, I mean, if you just heard that you'd think, oh, that's John, but it's actually Matthew and Luke.  The other question that I had, I mean, this is, we haven't really got into the, you know, what does the Quran actually say about Jesus? Is that is that historically plausible? The way that the Quran speaks of Jesus, it seems to me that the language he uses bears witness to a production context, which is clearly, you know, engaged with Christianity rather than, you know, being told what Jesus actually said. For example, the Quran speaks of Jesus as Messiah. But if I was engaging with a, and there's a question at the end of this, if I was engaging with a Jewish interlocutor, for example, it says, why do you think Jesus is the Messiah? I would say, well, because, you know, Isaiah 52 or 53, he's exalted to the right hand of God. He's subjecting all things to his feet because the Hebrew Bible prophesies he's making atonement. And yet the Quran condemns the children of Israel for not believing Jesus as Messianic identity. What would you say? Maybe this is, this is a strange question, but I think it's an interesting one. How would you make the case to a Jewish interlocutor that Jesus is the Messiah? I can give you a chance to respond, Dr. Ali, and then we have to actually move on to the closings right after we give you a chance to respond. Yeah. So I'm not sure that the Quran condemns them because they refuse to believe that he was the Messiah. The Quran does refer to Jesus as the Messiah, but the Quran refers to their boasting that they killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of God. So it was their recalcitrance in a broader way and the rejection of the message that is coming from God through Jesus to them that the Quran seems to be condemning. But that will jump into the five-minute closing statements, folks. Q&A will follow. So if you haven't have a question, fire it into the old live chat. I'm keeping an eye on the chats, whether you be on Twitch, YouTube, D-Live, etc. And with that, thanks so much. Cabain, the floor is all yours. Oh, you want Cabain to go for? I mean, it's fine. Oh, that's right. So I should have mentioned this because this comes up more and more is that I know that a more formal standard way is that the person who would start would also be the person who ends. So we can do that. But it could also be where it alternates all the way through. Because if I remember right, we had Dr. I'll go with what you suggest, James. Yeah. It's a I'm yeah, I'm sorry about that. What I meant to say is Dr. Ali, you would be going first because usually that's our like our typical way of doing it is that we just alternate all the way through. And sorry about that. I just had a mental error. So Dr. Ali, the floor is all yours. Okay, sure. So ladies and gentlemen, sorry for that little exchange there. Not that I want to go first, but whatever, I'm flexible and I'm happy to present first and let Cabain have the last word here. But you know, what matters at the end is that after everything that we have discussed and we have seen our similarities and our differences and all of that, we need to emerge from this dialogue as friends. And we need to work together as Muslims and Christians hand in hand for the betterment of our world. There's much in common that we have in our belief system, we believe in God, the same one God, though Christians and Muslims have two different understandings of him. We believe in the scriptural revelations that came from God, though we have two different approaches to those scriptures. We believe in the prophets and messengers of God, including Jesus, though Muslims have an understanding of Jesus that does not allow Muslims to proclaim him as God and that he died for the sins of the world. But nonetheless, we believe that he was a messenger of God, a prophet, a man of God. And we believe that he was born in a special way and that God aided him to perform many miraculous deeds, including healing the blind, raising the dead back to life, curing the leper and so on. And many Muslims believe based on the Qur'an, an interpretation of the Qur'an that Jesus will come back for a second time. So we have much in common and we need to celebrate what we have in common. At the same time, we need to understand that Muslims believe in Jesus by virtue of the Qur'an. It's because Muslims believe that the Qur'an is the Word of God that they're able to believe in Jesus in this way. And I'm not sure that if we take away the Qur'an, whether Muslims would still be able to believe in Jesus, because then we would have the Bible to go with and the Gospels in particular. And we have seen in this dialogue how difficult it is to believe the actual content of the Gospels. Yes, Cobain has given us a lot of reasons to believe that there are certain historical details and geographical details and names of persons and places which must be accurate. But historical fiction is like this, where you have a historical setting that is accurate and then you have a fictional story imposed upon that historical setting. So how much of the Gospels are actually later fiction imposed upon that historical setting? This is the real issue at hand. Did Jesus really claim to be God in an ontological sense? Did he claim to be a son of God in an ontological sense? Did he claim to be the Word of God? We see that there are a lot of developments as we go from Mark's Gospel, which most scholars believe today that this is the first of the four Gospels to be written. If we go from Mark to Matthew and Luke, we see important developments, pericope for pericope. We can see Matthew and Luke improving the grammar of Mark, improving even some historical details, and especially theological issues. They try to make Jesus appear bigger, greater, more knowledgeable, more powerful, and more the Son of God than he was in Mark. And then in John's Gospel, we see a greater degree of development where John's Gospel proclaims Jesus to be the Word of God who was there with God at the very beginning, and it's hard to translate Mark chapter 1 verse 1 and chapter 1 verse 18, but it looks like John is saying that Jesus is a lesser sort of God, but he is the God through which God created everything else. So he is a begotten God. We find this only in the Gospel according to John. Sure, you can go back to the synoptics with the hindsight of John in mind, and you can say, oh, it looks like in the synoptics, it's there and there as well. Like for example, what people call the Johannine Thunderbolt. But if you didn't have John that clearly and explicitly identified Jesus as the Son of Man, then we don't know which Son Jesus is talking about there in Matthew's Gospel. And one can give that a figurative meaning or interpret it in the sense that Jesus, as a prophet from God, he knows God, and he knows God. He has intimate knowledge of God that is not available to people on the ground, and he's bringing them that intimate knowledge. We see that John's Gospel has modified the story, placing the death of Jesus on a different day, showing that Jesus appeared to his disciples in such an incontrovertible way to guarantee the idea that he resurrected from the dead. We see this development, even in the synoptic Gospels, where Mark ends the chapter 16 verse 8 in two very important codices of the Bible, and later people try to append and appendix to that, and Matthew and Luke did it in their own way by going their separate ways, giving us narratives, showing that Jesus appeared to his disciples. Thank you all very much. You bet. Thank you very much. Dr. I'll leave for that closing statement, and we'll kick it over to you for your closing statement as well, Cobain. The floor is all yours for five minutes. Okay, so I want to begin actually by responding to something I meant to respond to earlier as to the alleged changing of the date of Jesus' death in the Gospel of John. So it's alleged that in the Gospel of John, Jesus' death date is changed so that he is killed as the Passover Lamb is being killed. However, the case for this is actually extremely weak. The case is made on the basis of John saying that Jesus is killed on the preparation of the Passover. Now, this is taken by many to mean that it's the preparation day for the Passover the next day, but the day of preparation is actually simply the ancient name for Friday and of the Passover. Remember that Passover was a week-long celebration, and in ancient Jewish literature, the Passover often refers to the whole week-long celebration. So preparation day of Passover week. When we read about Judas is going to betray Jesus, some of the disciples think that he's rushing out to get something for the Passover meal. This doesn't make sense if there's a whole day to go before Passover is to come. And likewise, the dipping of the bread in the bowl with Jesus. This is a ritual which happens in the Passover celebration. The Passover meal or the meal in the Gospel of John, it's a Passover meal just like it is in synoptics. I recommend those interested in this check out Brant Petrie's book, Jesus and the Last Supper. I think the case that he makes is really actually quite decisive that there's really no tension at all here. It is suggested that John modifies the death of Jesus in order to make the appearances more concrete. Now the problem that I have with this is that the alleged changes that are made are also reflected in the Gospel of Luke. For example, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus, he eats with the disciples the same kind of concrete evidence is given in Luke as it is in John. And there's interesting connections between Luke and John showing that the beloved disciple is present with Peter on the road when they rushed to find the tomb empty. For example, when the disciples on the road to Emmaus recount to the person who they don't know yet is Jesus. When they recount what has happened, they say some of those who were with us rushed to the tomb. So there were more than one people there. These subtle correspondences which indicate that the world being described is not invented by the author. It is a world external to the text. Likewise, when Mary Magdalene encounters Peter and the beloved disciple in the Gospel of John, when she describes what was found at the tomb, even though some people say only Mary Magdalene is said to go to the tomb of the Gospel of John, she uses the first person plural. So John reflects knowledge that there was more than Mary Magdalene who was going to the tomb. But it is knowledge that is presented in this subtle way so that we're not being given an artificial harmonization. We're simply being given the words of the text which reflect a history which is external to the text. Now, it's suggested that Matthew and Luke improve the grammar of Mark. Now, the problem I have with this is actually the reason that Mark's grammar is sometimes supposed to be sloppy is actually a device which Richard Balkum describes in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. And the device where Mark goes from the plural to the singular, it's often taken to be very sloppy, but it actually makes a great deal of sense. If Mark is writing on the basis of Peter's preaching, Peter articulates these various pericapy, Mark is writing them down, and the device accentuates the Petrion origin of these pericapy. But the actual concrete evidence that we have, we don't have a single witness which says that Mark proceeds Matthew and Luke, not one. And we know that the churches were networked together. We know that the earliest witnesses were acquainted with the disciples of Jesus himself. And we know that Mark 6 and Mark 13, and referring to the bodies of teaching which correspond to bodies in the Gospel of Matthew, Mark tells us that it is part of a larger body of teaching. So the concrete evidence that we have all suggests that Matthew was written first as the tradition uniformly says. We can invent, and I don't mean this in a polemical or contentious way, we can invent stories as to what sounds possible to us, but the question is always, what does the concrete evidence indicate? One of the things that Shabir said is that it's ambiguous in the Gosp, or in the Sancti Gospels who the Son of Man is, and I don't think that that's the case at all. For example, in Mark chapter 2, when Jesus explains to the Pharisees why the disciples can pluck grain, he explains it to them on the basis of his own authority and says, so the Son of Man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. Like what Shabir said that it's in John where we have this very high Christology and the synoptics, it's not as clear, but in John's Gospel, Jesus' identity of the Word of God is in the Prologue. This is something which John is writing down. It's in Luke's Gospel where it's in the mouth of Jesus himself. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus says, quoting himself, therefore the wisdom of God said, and it's the wisdom of God who in Proverbs 8.1 is described as begotten. The wisdom of God is very closely connected to the Word of God. So this is something in Jesus' mouth himself. So I want to thank Shabir for engaging in this debate and I think the historical evidence demonstrates the real Jesus is the Jesus of the Gospels. We're going to jump into Q&A, folks. I want to say thanks so much for your questions as well as don't forget that our guests are linked in the description. So if you'd like to hear more from our guests, whether you be listening via YouTube or if you are listening via the podcast, you can find our guest links down in the description box below. Starting off with David P. Neff, thanks for your question, said, for Dr. Ali, the oldest copies of the Torah state Abraham sacrificed Isaac, not Ishmael. Why did Allah wait over a thousand years to fix that mistake in the text? Well, what I would say about that, my friends, is that the Quran does not actually name the person specifically who was to be sacrificed, that son of Abraham. But it is an inference that Muslim scholars make. I think it's a good inference that the child to be sacrificed was Ishmael, but the Quran does not state so explicitly. The Quran, in its context, had two pickets, battles. The Quran wanted to reform many ideas and the question of who precisely was the son to be sacrificed was not high on that scale of what needs to be fixed. The Quran needed to call Christians to believe that there is only one God and not to add anyone as partner along with God, whether this be Jesus or whether it might involve the worship of Mary. The Quran wanted to emphasize the personal responsibility of every individual as opposed to relying on someone to die for our sins and so on. So there were very important issues for the Quran to address. And then as for more broadly, the Quran wanted to emphasize monotheism to the pagan meccans and others in the area. So all of this constituted the continuous Quranic call to believe in God, the one God, believe in the life hereafter and so on. You got it, Anne. Thanks very much for your question. XXWLZXX says, according to Dr. Barberman, the Islamic narrative of Jesus was based on the fabricated infancy gospel and the fabricated Gnostic gospel of Thomas. Not sure they didn't really mention who it's addressed for. Both of you can respond who you'd like. So sorry, are we, is there, is this like the person to whom the question is asked will respond and then the other person will comment or is it just the person? If you'd like to, we could do that. I think we, maybe if we don't do it every time just because we want to fit in as many questions from the audience as possible, but in some cases that we can do that. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sure. So do you want me to start and then and then Kavain can offer a re-bottle or a comment on that? Yeah. Sure. Okay. So my friend, I don't know what precisely Barberman said about this, but I would say that the Quran is a revelation from the Almighty God and we know this from many different lines of argument. And for me, more so from the line of argument that I presented today, showing the numerical correspondence of things in the Quran, which to me is hard to imagine how this came about knowing what I know about the history of how the Quran came to be compiled and then presented to us and handed down over the centuries. And these studies, which were recent studies to discover these patterns, which are very complex spanning many different chapters of the Quran. And so based on that, I would say that the Prophet Muhammad on whom be peace was an inspired man. He was inspired by God to teach us what is there in the Quran. And even if some aspects of that are present in other sources, whether it be the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or other, the Quran's position is that this is how the story of Jesus ought to be told. And these are the lessons that come from that story. Or to put it another way, the Quran could be saying, you know the story as it is being told like this, whether it's in the Gospel of Thomas or Infancy Gospel of Thomas or elsewhere. So what is the implication of that story? So the Quran is causing people to think. The Quran starts many of its stories with the particle Id, which a Muslim scholar say is short for Uthkura, which means remember, just think about this or bring this to mind. So bring to mind that story. As you know it, these are the implications of that story. So what's the implication of Jesus doing all of these miracles? The implication is that he's doing it with the help and support from God. That means that he's not God, but God is his God. If you did have a response, I can give you one otherwise. I think the fundamental question that we have to ask you, because Shabir, in terms of this debate, who is the real Jesus? Shabir has laid a very heavy weight on the witness of the Quran and it's the sensible divine origin. I think the question is what makes most sense as an explanatory context? My argument has been that the external and internal evidence of the Gospels makes very good sense in terms of an explanatory context, production by the first generation, by witnesses of Jesus. The authorship question hasn't really been contested. So I think that point really stands. Now the question is how do we explain the phenomena of the text when we get to the Quran? Well, we have these numerical devices. I think some of them are probably here. I think there are probably numerical devices in the Quran. The problem is we know that in early Islam there are connections with Judaism. We know there are aspects of Judaism which influence Islam. And we know that Gamatria numerical devices, they're not just in the Tanakh. They're not just in the Quran. They're also in Jewish literature. So I don't think we need to appeal to supernatural influence to even get numerical devices there. So the question is if we're making a probabilistic argument relative to chance as the known hypothesis, if chance is not the known hypothesis, then the probabilistic argument fundamentally doesn't work at all. And the question as to the explanatory context, the production context of the Quran, why does the Quran look the way it does? My question would simply be, why is it that the stories of Jesus that the Quran gives to us seem to be non-randomly correlated with the stories that we're circulating in the context of the world of early Islam? Indeed, some stories about the historical Jesus may well have been present in apocryphal literature, but if this is indeed a revelation from God and not something that is written by human beings in a particular place and time, one would expect stories from all across the non-canonical and canonical literature. But it seems that the stories that the Quran selects are ones that are available to Muhammad in the early Muslims. And that very strongly indicates, I think, a human production context, human authorship by fallible men who were looking at texts written generations and generations after the life of Jesus and simply taking them to be reliable, even though they don't seem to give us reason to believe that. You got it. And I want to remind you folks, for the Q&A, we definitely want serious questions, as I know that sometimes people like to put bizarre things in the chat, but we are looking for serious questions and we are not going to read things that are just silly. So, Dragon of Chaos, thanks for your question, said the New Testament doesn't have eyewitness writers and they are also anonymous and they had changed each other's narratives and therefore it's not reliable. I think this is for you, Cobain, if you want a chance to respond. But again, if both of you want to respond, you can. Yeah, here's the fundamental point. Are they anonymous? Well, I would say in any significant sense of that word, no, they're not anonymous. The annals of Tacitus. The annals of Tacitus within the body of texts itself never names the author. Yet it's taken to be by Tacitus because that's what the manuscripts say, that's what external witnesses say. The Gospels, we do not have any manuscript of the Gospel, which has the beginning of the text intact, where it's anonymous. Every manuscript we have has the author with whom it has traditionally been associated. And I want to emphasize, this is across a very wide geographical range. Moreover, it's very difficult to explain if they began as anonymous, how they came to be associated with the people that they were. Now, if you're dealing with anonymous Gospels, you want to give it extra authority. Mark, why Mark?  In the New Testament, he's known as someone who caused a fight between Paul and Barnabas, and that's about it. He's mentioned once in the letter of Peter. Why Mark? Why Luke? Why not just associated directly with Peter? And in the Gnostic Gospels, we find a proliferation of Gospels associated with an apostle. And yet, in the biblical Gospels, the names are very plausible and all of our external evidence and all of our manuscript evidence identifies it with these authors. Do they change each other? Well, they definitely have different perspectives, but I would argue that they cohere in ways which are really remarkable and do not suggest an intentional effort to harmonize. For example, when you know that Bethsaida is two miles out from Jerusalem, well, then it makes a great deal of sense how the appearance narratives in all four Gospels work because the apostles are staying at this house in Bethsaida. John has a house in Jerusalem because he's known the family of high priests. He's from there. Mary Magdalene goes and she sees Peter and John. And if you read them all together, it all rolls together very, very nicely. Look at John Wentham's book, the Easter Enigma on this point. And so they become more coherent the more you know about their setting, not less coherent. And the actual concrete evidence indicates these are written by witnesses and those known to them. Gotcha. And then this one coming in from Dragon of Chaos says, so what if the Synoptic Gospels contain similar contents to the Quran? They contain truth even though they aren't reliable, same as the New Testament. I'm not sure who that's for or even what they're getting at if either of you know. Yeah, I don't quite grasp the question. So yeah, if Kabin would like to take a stab at it, sure. I think maybe the goal of the question is like Muslims can acknowledge there's some reliable material and synoptics, even though they're not inspired. I think the real point here is if these are texts which are produced much later, if they're historical fiction, as Shabir has suggested, what should they look like? Well, we have examples of this. Look at, for example, the biography of Bifillistratus of Apollonius of Tyana. Look, for example, at the later Gnostic Gospels, which name very few locations and whose personal names do not correlate in any realistic way with the personal names in First Century Palestine. You look at the canonical Gospels, they got lots of opportunities to miss badly. As I mentioned, there's like 80 to 90 personal in place names here, but they hit again and again and again. The proportion of personal names that are given to us in the synoptic Gospels and in John are the names which were common in First Century Palestine at that place in time, even though the Gospels weren't written there. The only reasonable explanation for this is that we're dealing with texts which are very substantially reliable because these are real people and they didn't need to try to get this right. There wouldn't have even been a way for them to try to get this right if it was invented narrative, but they do get it right because it's real history. Yeah, I think in that answer, Cobain, if you allow me, you're dealing with the historical setting, which as I said, we're not disputing because the work of historical fiction can start with the historically plausible scenario with names and dates and places and so on, but can present its characters out of sync with the actual reality. For example, they can make a man look better than he was actually in fact. And we have shown several examples where Matthew, Luke and John improved the story so that Jesus does look better as we go from Mark to Matthew and Luke and then to John. So unless you can deal with these instances, it doesn't really help to just tell us that the historical situation is the accurate one. We want to know about the character of Jesus. What was, did he really claim to be the Son of God in a nontological sense? And did he really claim that he would die for the sins of the world and so on? This one coming in, I think this one is for you, Dr. Ali, from Oliver Catwell. Thanks so much. He says, does the biblical form of multiple collected stories argue against the authenticity of the Koran? That is, why change styles so dramatically? Well, I think Oliver that the fact that you have the multiple authors is actually an embarrassment of riches in the Bible because they do not all tell us the same story. And often we do not know who these authors are. Cabean is saying, well, you know, why fix a name like Mark who was not known to be a disciple of Jesus? Well, when people are looking back at this sometime later, they are trying to, you know, affix it to a certain name, which they can find plausible at the time. But that does not mean that this is what it is. In fact, today, most biblical scholars and, you know, Cabean is citing a lot of conservative scholars like Richard Burk, Malcolm, and T. Wright and so on. But even N.T. Wright, you will find saying in one of his books that, you know, when we come to the Gospel according to John, we don't know who wrote it, if he was John, and if John, which John. So these are questions that still remain to this day. When we look at the theological presentation of Jesus as John Bowden has pointed out, the Gospels are all theological and they have all improved the story of Jesus. And when we see that Matthew and Luke have improved Mark the way they did, then we have, we only know that because we can see by comparison how Matthew and Luke have improved the story from Mark. And John Bowden's point is that if we had Mark's predecessors, we would see how Mark himself has improved the story as well. Scholars know that what we have in Mark is Mark's own composition of, you know, taking disparate stories, pericope, and stringing them along certain lines like he wants to put the miracles together and so on. And when we come to the Son of Man sayings, modern scholars can categorize the sayings into three categories. One, those sayings where Jesus is talking about himself, going about some of the passages that Cobain cited. And then passages talking about his impending suffering and death. And then finally, the third category of sayings would comprise those in which he's speaking about a futuristic Son of Man. Some scholars think that he was speaking about someone other than himself in that third category. So we can see that the Gospel writers are styling the stories to bring out the points they want to bring out so that in John's Gospel, there is no doubt about whom Jesus is speaking about as the Son of Man. Jesus identifies himself clearly as the Son of Man. So there definitely is an improvement as we go from one Gospel to another. And then talking about the rest of the New Testament writings, we see that Paul has gone his own separate ways on things as well. And Paul's writings came before the Gospels and to a certain extent has influenced the Gospels. So whereas Paul says that all foods are clean in Romans chapter 14 verse 20, Mark has Jesus declared that all foods are clean as well. But this could hardly have been the declaration of Jesus because we know from Acts of the Apostles that this was still a question among the disciples, still in Acts chapter 15, they rolled that even the Gentile followers of Jesus would have to abide by certain food laws, at least three of them. You got it. This is what's coming in from SC. And SC, let me know I'm doing my best here. And if I don't say this question correctly, I am doing my best. They say, my question is for Dr. Ali, whether or not you believe Paul and John or are messengers or prophets of God, and then asked, they had said the Quran says that God sent three messengers, which would be Paul and John. And I think that's what they're asking. So it might make more sense to you than it does to me. So there was what the Quran actually says, and then there is commentary on the Quran. So the Quran speaks about two messengers in the 36th chapter of the Quran, who were then supported by a third. But the Quran does not give the names of these messengers, but Muslim commentators can speculate and they get information from the Jewish and Christian friends, who might have these been. And some might identify Paul and other early Christians as disciples of Jesus, who might have been meant by this Quranic narrative. But the Quran does not say anything directly about Paul or about John by name, except that the Quran names John the Baptist, but here we're talking about a different John. And as for Paul, when we study his life and teachings, we see that some of it is in variance with what Muslims are led to believe on the basis of the Quran. And I would tend to think that when the Quran is speaking indirectly about people who have misled Christians, the Quran may have had Paul in mind, but I don't know the mind of God, and that's just my humble observation. Could I say a couple of things? So I just want to comment on some of the things that Shabir said about the nature of the Gospels. So Shabir has suggested that, well, just because the Gospels present a historically plausible setting that doesn't mean that they're history, but the problem is not that they prevent certain historical information, therefore it means that it's all history. The problem is that the kind of historical information it presents is abundant. It pertains to very specific details, which requires the authors to have had firsthand access to not just the general shape of Jesus' life, but very specific witnesses. That's why when we deal with something like 80 or 90 personal and place names, that's a lot of chances to get things wrong, but it's a lot of details that actually are verified when we look at the kind of data that we had. And one can always say, well, he gets those details right, but all the other details, the details that we don't have explicit verification for those could still be wrong. And technically that's true, but that's not the simplest and most parsimonious explanation. And as to the anonymity of the Gospels, I would just say by any standard that we judge anonymity in terms of textual antiquity, they are not anonymous. They are only anonymous in the sense that almost every single one of my posts on the internet is anonymous because almost none of my posts do I identify myself by name. But the manuscripts that we have, which have the beginning of the text, they all have the text, the authors with whom they're associated. All of our ancient witnesses give us the authors with whom they're traditionally associated. And if they were anonymous, we would expect to see them being attributed to different authors depending on the place in which we find the manuscripts. We don't find that. We have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John associated with these four Gospels. Every piece of evidence which comments on it cites them as to that point. And I would just say as to most scholars, I mean, I don't mean to be crude and or contentious, but fundamentally from an epistemic point of view, I don't care what most scholars say. I do not think that the consensus of scholarship has any meaningful correlation with the truth of things. I think there's all sorts of reason that consensus is developed. And I think it's as likely to be true as it is to be false. The only reason I cite scholars is not because they're scholars, but because I think that they make a good point that I want to give appropriate attribution. Finally, on the son of man point, if you look at the son of man references in the gospel of John, while it might be acknowledged that in the gospel of John, the son of man is Jesus, there's no more reason in John to say that every reference in the son of man is Jesus than there is in the synoptics. And both I would say it's equally clear. In the gospel of John, Jesus refers to the son of man and the third person again and again. In the gospel of John, it says no one has ascended to heaven except he was ascended from heaven. The son of man, one could say, well, that son of man is maybe a different son of man. But just as in the synoptics, Jesus refers to the son of man to explain his own actions in every place that we can identify the son of man, it's Jesus. And that means that just by the normal rules of interpretation, it's far more personal to say, okay, this is a way that Jesus talked about himself than to say otherwise, regardless of what scholars say or do not say. You got this one coming in from the noon. It says, Dr Ali, what is the purpose of Jesus being born of a virgin in the Quran? It makes sense in the Christian paradigm. But why did the second to last prophet need to be a miracle himself from his birth in the Quran? We cannot know the mind of God to know why God does certain things or allows certain things to play out the way it does. But Muslim scholars have said that, you know, if you look at the history, we see that Adam was created without any parent and Eve was created from a man, but not from a woman. And the rest of us are all created from both men and women. And no one had been created from a woman, but not from a man. And they said that this explains why it happened in the case of Jesus. So it rounds up picture and shows that God can create human beings in so many diverse ways. I don't necessarily hold to that interpretation. The Quran in fact does not say explicitly that Mary was a virgin at the time of conceiving of Jesus. The Quran does present her story in such a way that we know that this is a special birth, the way in which God is speaking about it. But the birth of John the Baptist was also a special birth, the way the Quran is speaking about it. And what exactly was so special about the birth of Jesus is not clearly and explicitly stated in the Quran, though it is the most common interpretation among Muslims that Mary was a virgin at the time of conceiving of Jesus. As to why she might have been surprised, well, we know from a biblical tradition that Mary might have been about 12 years old at the time. And if you go to a 12-year-old girl in a traditional setting and you say to her, well, you know, you're going to have a baby, she's going to say, you know, how can I have a baby? Perhaps blushing. She would say, I'm not even married. And the Quranic narrative gives her the assurance that God is going to make this happen. But when we say that God is going to make something happen, it does not negate the natural causes by which to think what happened. So perhaps at the time, when she, not perhaps, but definitely at the time when she got the annunciation, she was a virgin. But events could follow a natural order after that leading to the conception and delivery of a birth of Jesus in a normal marriage. And God knows best about that. You got it. This one coming in from Daniel Zachariah says, Dr. Ali, how would you prove to a Jewish interlocutor that Jesus is the Messiah? Cabein mentioned using Isaiah to show Jesus is the savior of mankind. What would you say? So from the Quranic perspective, the term Messiah is used, but it is not explained. And Muslim scholars have had to think about what Messiah may mean. And they tried to analyze it from the point of view of Arabic etymology. But something needs to be said here that is very important. If we didn't have the Quran, which I said before, then Muslims may not believe that Jesus is the Messiah at all, because like those who do not believe, either in the Quran or the Bible, you go ask somebody, they heard about Jesus, they may think that Jesus is a good man, but why would they call him Messiah? Because this term we know comes from a Jewish context, HaMashiach the Messiah from the Hebrew. But then Muslims would have to now believe in the Bible in order to believe that he is the Messiah. And then to believe in the Bible from a Muslim point of view, like for myself, I have to be honest with you. Knowing everything we've been discussing here, I would find it very difficult if I put the Quran aside, I would find it difficult to believe in Jesus at all. Because the presentation would still continue to believe that he was a good man. But to think that he was the Messiah, that he was the messenger of God, a prophet and so on, all of this would go along with the Quran. One of the most telling features is that in the Gospels, Jesus is presented as the Davidic Messiah. And Davidic Messiah by definition would be one who would take over from the Romans, he would rule temporarily on this earth. He would institute the kingdom of God. But everyone agrees that Jesus did not do that. So the Gospels tried to make it seem that it was not imperative at the time. He will come back and do it when he returns. So acts of the apostles as Jesus coming back to institute it. The Gospel according to John says, my kingdom is not of this world. So he's not even going to bother with that. He has a different idea of what is kingdom. But when we go back and we realize that the Gospel writers are presenting Jesus as the Davidic Messiah, and he failed to be that, it means that his life ended in ignominy, without fulfilling what he said he was going to do. If from Luke's opening, he was proclaimed already to be the king Messiah who would come. And then he did not sit and rule. The moment he declared to be himself the Messiah or a king, instead of sitting on a throne, he ended up hanging on a cross. Well, Christians would say, but you know, he resurrected from the dead. But then we would see that the proof that he resurrected from the dead is weak. And the proof that he was on the cross is strong. And then we would have strong reasons for believing that Jesus died an ignominious death, failing to fulfill his own prophecy, especially the one that says that he will be coming again soon. So altogether, if I leave the Quran aside, I wouldn't even be able to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, much less trying to prove that he was. But if I believe the Quran to be the word of God as I do, then I can say to our Jewish friends that the Quran is here as the word of God, and this word of God proclaims Jesus to be al-Masifah is-am-numarim, the Messiah, Jesus' son of Mary. So I know that the Quran as the word of God proclaims him to be the Messiah, and that is why I proclaim it to you. Thank you very much. And this one coming in. Sorry, could I comment on that point? Maybe it's just a pithy one. We've got more questions, but we'll give you a let's see if it's a super pithy one just because we've got a number of questions more that we want to try to get in yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the messianic identity of Jesus really is verified by the fact that today billions of Gentiles from around the world worship the God of Abraham, something which was not true prior to the having of Jesus. When Jesus died 100 years later, Christianity was an obscure Near Eastern cult. Yet today, every year, there's a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from the nations to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the name of a Jew named Jesus. Isaiah chapter 2, Isaiah chapter 11 and following. They say that what the Messiah is going to do is he will establish a kingdom. Yes, how will he establish a kingdom? He will sit in the heavenly sanctuary. Isaiah chapter 65 is 66 Daniel chapter 2 and 7.  Isaiah 63 combines Genesis 49 about the Messiah and judges 5 about the God of Israel and show them the same figure. I'll give you the last word, Shabir, just because the question was originally for you and then we've got to move on to the next one. No, it's fine. We can move on. You've got this one coming in from Christian Daniel. Someone says, Dr. Ali, you mentioned Aaron in the debate, but the Aaron of the Quran is said to be the uncle of Jesus. Do we trust this author of the Quran to tell us who Jesus was if he got this fact wrong? Well, the Quran does not really say that Aaron is the uncle of Jesus. The Quran has a narrative where people address Mary and they say, yeah, sister of Aaron. Now, what does this mean? It doesn't mean that the Quran has confused this Aaron, the sister of Mary there in the time of Jesus, with the brother of Mary in this time of Jesus, in the time of Jesus, with the other Aaron, who is known as the brother of Moses. Actually, the Quran shows very clear and intimate knowledge of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. And this has been brought out very clearly in the study by Sidney Griffith in his book, The Bible in Arabic. So the old claim against the Quran that, oh, the Quran has got this all confused. The Prophet Muhammad must have heard these stories and he got them all mixed up and times and dates and so on. He got them all confused. This is not true. There is an interpretation that is quite reasonable that just as people today named themselves after the disciples of Jesus and after the Old Testament prophets in a similar way in Muslim tradition and also in the time of Jesus, people would have done that. So you can have in the same family, somebody named Aaron already, and then when they have a daughter, they say, oh, well, you know, let's name her Mary. That sounds nice because there was an Aaron and Mary who were brother and sister. So we can have another brother and sister who are Aaron and Mary here. So that's quite a reasonable explanation. The names recur. And even to this day, we will have among Muslims in families, people who have all of these names, Zechariah and Yahya and Mary and Aaron and Musa and so on. So that to me is a reasonable explanation. Another explanation may be that Mary was related to Elizabeth and Elizabeth is said to be from the Levitical line. So Mary probably was from the Levitical line. And maybe that's another way of referring to her as Uqta Harun, meaning that she is part of that. She's a sister in faith with Harun with Aaron because she's from the Levitical line. And I know the Gospel according to Luke has this genealogy and some people say that's a genealogy of Mary and that is traced back to David. So making her in the Levitical line. But literally the genealogy of Luke is tracing the line of succession through David, through Jesus' father, Joseph, not through Mary. You bet. And this one coming in from S.C., or forgive me, this is pineapple platypus says, and I think that they mean, this is my guess, I think they mean like why isn't it self-evident regarding these ideas? They say, why do good ideas need evidence? That's at least my best interpretation of what they're asking. Tobin, you speak to this one because I've been speaking a bit. Sure. Sure. Why, like something like Christianity or Islam, w