Restless Pilgrim

I’ve just had a few short exchanges with Mormons on Twitter and was asked about how I view Mormonism. Personally, I find even the Mormon sources themselves a source of incredulity as well as the complete absence of archeological evidence for its claims. However, the real issue for me is the Book of Abraham. How can one look into this and still conclude that Joseph Smith was a prophet?

There’s a quotation from Ibn Abbas I’ve seen passed around in an attempt to say that he thought the Torah and the Injil were corrupted. However, the tafsir for 3:78 which speaks about by Ibn Kathir says the following:

Al-Bukhari reported that Ibn `Abbas said that the Ayah means they alter and add although none among Allah’s creation can remove the Words of Allah from His Books, they alter and distort their apparent meanings. Wahb bin Munabbih said, “The Tawrah and the Injil remain as Allah revealed them, and no letter in them was removed. However, the people misguide others by addition and false interpretation, relying on books that they wrote themselves.

There’s a question I ask whenever I meet a Muslim who claims that the Qur’an has been perfectly preserved by Allah…

If the Qur’an was always perfectly preserved, then why were perfectly preserved Qur’ans burned?

If the Qur’an had been perfectly memorized, why does the hadith describe its compilation as it does? If the Qur’an was already committed to memory then the production of a manuscript would have been the easiest thing in the world – just assemble a few who had memorized it, put them in separate houses with a scribe for a few days. Then just confirm that the texts are identical and the job is done! But this isn’t what we see in the hadith… we see the hunting for scraps, collections with a different number of chapters, memories of missing chapters, …

The first time I read the Qu’ran and noticed that Allah sweared by lots and lots of things in creation. This struck me as odd. All I could think of was Hebrews 6:16 where it says “People swear by someone GREATER than themselves…”

However, David Wood points out that this problem actually shows an inconsistency between the Qur’an and the claims of the hadith:

Ibn Umar heard a man swearing: No, I swear by the Ka’bah. Ibn Umar said to him: I heard the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) say: He who swears by anyone but Allah is polytheist [he has committed an act of shirk]. – Sunan Abi Dawud 3251

Obviously I’m a huge fan of the East, but Cameron Riecker presents here three key problems. The first point he makes is particularly important to me, it’s part of the you-lose-I-win mentality I’ve noticed among Orthodox Christians. Orthodox Ecclesiology needs to be able to justify itself.