Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Hear, O Muslims!

Introduction

A number of Muslims point to the Shema – originally found in Deuteronomy 6:4 and quoted by Jesus in the New Testament accounts of the Gospel (Mark 12:29-30; and Lk. 10:27) – as evidence for the antiquity and universality of Islam as well as for its continuity with prior revelation.[1] In the view of these Muslims, the Shema corresponds to and confirms, even as it is thought to be confirmed by, their confession of faith, the Shahada, as well as other teachings of the Qur’an that are held to explicate this confession. No doubt the motivation for this stems in part from Muhammad’s claim that the Qur’an is a confirmation of what came before it in the Torah and the Gospel (e.g. S. 3:3).

Notwithstanding the above, the Shema found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible and the Shahada which Muslims splice together from contextually unrelated verses of the Qur’an (and/or from post-Quranic traditions), stand in total contrast to one another, putting those who look to the Shema as proof for their contentions on the horns of a dilemma.

To read the rest of this article, please go to the Answering Islam website found here. After reading it in full, come back and leave your comment.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great Article! Do you know that shema is Trinitarian?

“Hear, O Israel:

Yahweh (“the LORD” = God the Father),
our Elohim (“God” = God the Son),
Yahweh (“the LORD” = God the Spirit)
are Echad (a united One).”

http://oldtestamenttrinity.blogspot.com/

Anthony Rogers said...

Thanks for your comment.

I have a couple of other articles on the Trinity that are linked on this site. Their official home is on Answering-Islam.org.