What this Muslim person did is so irresponsible and, really so hateful.  It makes me quite angry, to tell you the truth.  He takes his opponent out of context, and does not give him any opportunity to respond, and he does this with such disrespect.  He goes so far as to add a video clip which makes his opponent look sort of creepy.  What awful behavior by this hateful and disrespectful Muslim apologist.  Muslims should be embarrassed of their fellow Muslim for treating his opponent so poorly.  This is terrible.

As to the facts, what this person said is not true.  It is NOT true that there is any significant textual variant of Mark 10:18 among early texts.  Specifically, he says that Codex Alexandrinus has the variant reading.  This is false.  Is this Muslim man lying, or is he simply misinformed?  I am not sure, but, applying the Golden Rule, I would like to hope that he is simply misinformed, and did not bother to check to see if his statements were true.  Please, let us Christian believers do our own fact checking so that we do not follow this bad example of making clearly false statements because we were not responsible enough to check our facts.

Now, it is true, apparently, that when Justin and Origen quote Mark 10:18, they do interpret/paraphrase it rather than directly quoting the text.  Why they did so, I cannot say for sure, but the statement by this Muslim guy is true when he says that Justin Martyr adds the “only my Father” to the text.  Why Justin did this is not clear.  Was there an actual manuscript out there that Justin was quoting?  I cannot absolutely disprove this, but there is no evidence for this variant reading, unless, of  course, you use Justin.  However, the early church fathers often paraphrased, so this is extremely weak support for a different reading in Mark itself.

What if Jesus had said this (for which there is very little support, and which I do not believe is true)?  It would not significantly change what is happening in this situation.  Jesus often gave honor to his Father.  He told his hearers that he always did exactly what the Father told him to do.  It would not be a shock if Jesus, in responding to the Rich Young Ruler were to tell him that only the Father is good.  I do not think this is what he did, but even if he did, it would not be a good proof-text for the position of Muslims generally.  I fully agree with what the other gentleman–the Christian guy–said in his part of the discussion.  He said that in this situation, Jesus is asking a thought-provoking, enigmatic question in order to get the Rich Young Ruler and his hearers to think.  Jesus was cautious about publicly declaring his being God-in-the-flesh.  His expectation was that his hearers would go away asking the question:  Is Jesus indeed, good in the sense of being fully good?  If so, does that mean that Jesus is God?  Those who reflected on this question would come to the conclusion that, yes, Jesus truly is good.  He is fully and completely good.  Jesus is the only human being who ever lived who could claim to be truly good.  Jesus is God.  Rather than force this conclusion on the crowd, Jesus did something he did very often, which is to give them an enigmatic statement for them to chew on and to decide for themselves what they believe.  There are many examples of this in all four of the gospels.

In this story, Jesus is neither declaring himself good, nor is he not declaring himself good.  Arguably, he is not declaring himself to be God, or to not be God either.  An honest appraisal of this passage is than neither the Muslim not the Christian who believes that Jesus is God can use this passage to conclusively prove what Jesus said about himself.  This is what any fair-minded person, be he/she Muslim or Christian would say.

But, this brings me back to the problem, which is that this Muslim person is behaving VERY badly in this internet post. All Muslims should be embarrassed of this behavior and should certainly not applaud this disgraceful treatment.  Most Muslim cultures have a history of being very hospitable to outsiders.  This person is doing the exact opposite. He is being quite inhospitable, and he owes an apology to his opponent.  I doubt such an apology will be forthcoming.  All I can say is let us never behave this way.  I also suggest that when Christians interact with Muslims in public spaces they ought to do their research ahead of time to be sure that their opponent is not going to take them out of context and abuse them in this way.  It is a very unfortunate fact that the majority of so-called Muslim apologists behave in this way.

John Oakes