First, this is an anachronistic standard as the Old Testament was not written to be kept in a single bound codex as one big book. Perhaps what Muslims like Khalil Meek mean to say is that the oldest complete copy of the Old Testament in one single volume is later. The oldest “complete copy” of the Old Testament Our oldest copies of the Old Testament books are from before the New Testament was even written, much less before its earliest surviving copy. 5 Larry Hurtado provides a list of pre-Christian Jewish manuscripts of the Old Testament in his book “The Earliest Christian Artifacts” on page 18, footnote 9 So the claim that our oldest copy of the Old Testament is later that our Oldest copy of the New is absurd. Still more, there are a number of Greek Old Testament manuscripts from the centuries before the New Testament era. There are also the lesser-known biblical scrolls found in the Judean desert at Nahal Hever 4 Martin Abegg Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (HarperCollins Books, 1999) 519 dating to about the first century AD, or around the time the events of the New Testament were taking place. These are frequently lumped in with the Dead Sea Scrolls in discussions of manuscripts, but they actually represent a different ancient collection. Likewise, we have the scrolls found in the Jewish stronghold at Masada. 3 For an entry-level translation of these documents, see Geza Vermes, “The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English: Revised Edition” (Penguin Books, 2004) Some of these surviving copies were written centuries before Jesus was born and all of them are from before our earliest copies of the New Testament. 2 James VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today: Second Edition (Eerdmans Publishing, 2010) 47-50 They also further preserve the text in commentaries, as well as in references in other legal and religious documents. The famous Dead Sea Scrolls contain manuscripts of nearly every book in the Old Testament in Hebrew and a few also in Greek and Aramaic translations. We actually have a surprising wealth of pre-Christian Old Testament manuscripts. The oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament If your conclusion doesn’t follow from your claim, and your claim is completely bogus anyway, you have the very definition of a bad argument. There are a host of things wrong with this, primarily that the claim is utterly untrue and, even if it were true, the conclusion would not necessarily follow from it.
2012: (Time Stamp 9:37, Accessed 12/18/17) and so deduces that the Bible cannot be trusted.
Khalil Meek, a popular American convert to Islam and the executive director of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, claims that the oldest versions of the Old Testament are later than the earliest versions of the New Testament, 1 Interview on “The Deen Show,” Dec. While it is most common among uninformed, “street-level” Muslim objectors, educated public figures have also been known to trot it out.
This assertion is used to say that the Old Testament is poorly preserved and cannot be trusted. One of these claims is that the earliest surviving copies of the Old Testament are newer than the earliest surviving copies of the New Testament. In their attempts to attack and undermine the Bible, Muslims sometimes make some strange claims.
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