Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the True Book

September 27, 2017 • 11:00 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “await,” came with the following email:

If it wasn’t for the Koran, we wouldn’t know how important it was to believe in the Koran.

Even if the Qur’an says somewhere “this book is true,” which it doesn’t, that wouldn’t make it any truer than the Bible, which avows its own truth precisely as much as does the Qur’an. And although the Qur’an contains a lot from the Old and New Testaments, they can’t both be true as they differ in fundamental assertions, like whether Jesus was the Son of God and whether he was crucified.

10 thoughts on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the True Book”

  1. Doesn’t the Koran (or maybe it is in the Hadith) contain the line that Islamic apologists often use – namely to compare it to other works to “see how perfect it is” and hence conclude it is divine, and so on?

    1. Yes. There’s a line about “try to write a Koran like this, you cannot”.
      I think it actually does kinda say it’s true.

  3. If you can get a billion people to believe in a book with no evidence to support it and fork over their own money to this garbage, why is a Donald Trump so surprising?

  4. I have minimal expertise in the Koran, but I can state that all the Bible says about itself is that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:”
    (2nd Timothy 3:16)

    Now this bit is a super-duper favorite among evangelicals, but to me there is a gap between inspired and literally true.

    Further, there was no fixed canon of official Scripture at the time this was written, neither Old nor New Testament!!
    No one had said yet that the book of Esther is the real deal, but the (much-controverted) book of Judith is fake news. A few centuries later, the Book of Revelation would get into the New Testament canon by only a very narrow vote, and even then Judith was very obviously viewed as pseudo-history, a kind of historical novel. (As Jerry Coyne says about college campus speakers, who is the decider? 🙂 )

    Evangelicals seem to implicitly believe that belief in an inerrant Scripture is virtually necessary for salvation, as if one’s soul were in jeopardy for believing in evolution. They don’t quite phrase it that way, but it seems to be implied.

    As evangelicals seem especially fond of both John 3:16 and 2nd Timothy 3:16, I offer for consideration 2nd Peter 3:16 “There are some things in them [Paul’s letters] hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.”

    Since Judith is arguably the very first book of the Bible to be recognized as blatantly fictional (due to anachronisms detectable even in the early Common Era), I post here Gustav Klimt’s magnificent painting of her.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Judith#/media/File:Gustav_Klimt_039.jpg

  6. Mo would not have said “In the Koran”. He would have said “In God”.

    And when Jesus says “Yeah – God as revealed in the Koran” he’s saying no more than could be said about many other books. Euclid’s “Elements” is about geometry as revealed in Euclid’s “Elements”.

  7. While I would be far from disagreeing with the OP (see, for example this cartoon), I’m under the fairly uneducated (I’ve just started reading the Koran) opinion that it does in fact make reference to itself. While the context isn’t completely clear (it had been addressed to Jews and Christians earlier in the chapter), it appears that by the time you reach 2.151, it is a reference to itself:

    “Just as We have sent among you a messenger from yourselves reciting to you Our verses and purifying you and teaching you the Book and wisdom and teaching you that which you did not know.”

    There’s some more in the context that seems to me as if it’s referring to the Koran, and not to previous scriptures.

    Of course, this is the same chapter in which it is said that Jews were turned into “detestable apes,” so it’s more than apparent that “revelation” is no guarantee of accuracy; after all the old testament god thought that bats were birds!

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