Reply to Science channel's "Biblical Mysteries Explained"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Yes, the angel kept bringing tablets or perhaps paper manuscripts--I am not sure exactly if tradition is exact on this point.  But Muhammed was shown something with the sura of the day written on it and asked to recite it by the angel.

Muhammed can't be blamed for how the Quran is organized.  According to tradition, Muhamme recited the verses he had just recited in front of the angel to his followers, and they wrote them down on palm leaves.  At some poitn, these were collected together and a lost to the mists of time editor decided on the longest to shortest sura presentation.

Islamic scholars in the centuries following did a lot of work to figure out which were the oldest and which were the newest.  I am not terribly familiar with this work, but I believe there were lots of disputes.  However, there is some general agreement about which suras were from the early Mekkan period and which were from the Medinan period.

I think PPs point is that the verse about abrogation is in one of these suras, but unless one knows with absolute certainty the order in which the suras were revealed in time, it is very difficult to determine which verse is being abrogated (or whatever you want to call it--perhaps improved) by a later sura.  As far as I know, people have theories about the correct chronological order but there isn't any one order that is generally agreed to.[/quote]

No one's blaming Muhammad.  Let's just put it on the record.

Looking at the process that you just described, it takes a terrible leap of faith to believe that a book with such a genesis could be a direct-to-consumer, unaltered word of god. [/quote]

As I've written before, there are even more reasons to have some doubt that it is direct to the consumer word of God.  Not saying that how the New Testament was put together was cleaner, but the process certainly had amply room for error.

Followers wrote the verses down in a script that 1) lacked all short vowels and 2) lacked dots below and above the letter shape.  The latter is particularly important because many Arabic letters share the same shape and are distinguished among each other by the number (including zero) of dots above and below the letter.  For example, in handwriting the letters for b, t, th, and n all have the same shape, but b has a dot below, t has 2 above, th has three above, an n has one above.

There are many more example in the 28 letter Arabic alphabet.  Very few shapes are assigned to just one letter.[/quote]

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