God promises Paradise to those who follow Torah and Gospel who are killed or who kill in war. This is found in the Koran, but was removed from the Old and New Testaments. Response?
Question:
God promised paradise to those in the Torah and the Gospel who are killed in a holy war, or who kill others in a holy war as stated by the Koran (9:111), but paradise is missing from the OT (including the Torah) and holy wars are missing from the NT (including the Gospels). Have some portions been taken away from the Old and New Testaments, as the Koran states: “they forgot a good part of the Message that was sent them” (5:13)? And the Jews perverted all the promises made by God in return for man’s obedience and applied those only to the land of Palestine. What are your thoughts?
Response;
My thoughts are that it is absolutely absurd to propose that either the New Testament would ever have offered Paradise to anyone who killed in war or was killed in war. This teaching is found in the Qur’an, as you mention, but, from what we know of Jesus, that he would have said this is simply not a tenable position. Jesus told us to love our enemies, not to kill them. Jesus foreswore war. Jesus was a pacifist. Muhammad was a soldier. He fought in wars and he led caravan raids. He was involved in warfare and in a number of kinds of killings. Jesus would never have done anything like this.
Of course, it is true that David, like Muhammad, was a leader in warfare. In the Old Testament, the Jews were allowed to defend the land of Israel from its enemies, but there are two massive distinctions between the Old Testament and the Quran. First of all, the Jews were never allowed to go on offensive wars to conquer enemies. They were only to defend the Promised Land, which was given to them by God. On the contrary, Muslims are told to make holy war, to attack their enemies, and to make offensive warfare in the name of Allah. The Qur’an, in this sense, is hugely different from the Bible. This is why I am extremely confident that mention of being given Paradise for killing or dying in war was never in any part of the Jewish Scripture. Also, the idea that those who kill in the name of God are accepted into Paradise is not even conceived of in the Bible. In fact, because David was involved in violence for the sake of Israel, God did not allow him to build the temple. God has always abhored violence in his name, although He allowed it for a specific limited purpose for Israel.
This idea that you quote from, which is the idea that the Bible originally also contained the idea of going to Paradise because of dying in warfare is crazy. This evil doctrine is the invention of the violent man Muhammad. It did not come from the God of the Bible, and to propose that it was originally in the Bible is completely unfounded. If anything was “forgotten” from the message, it certainly was not the idea that killing for God would earn us a place in heaven. I say, heaven forbid!
By the way, of course, there is no evidence for this proposal. Muslims who make this claim are inventing it our of thin air. This is an ad hoc hypothesis, invented to make it appear that the Qur’an is consistent with the Bible, which is, of course, is not true.
One more thing, which is your claim that Paradise is not found in Old Testament. This is not a crazy idea, as the word “Paradise” is not found in most translations of the Hebrew Bible. However, the Old Testament equivalent of the New Testament place called “Paradise” is the Hebrew word Sheol. The word Sheol is found numerous places in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms. It is the place of waiting of the dead before the return of Christ at the end of time. So, the word Paradise is not found in most English translations of the Old Testament, but Paradise is there, only with a different name for the waiting place before God returns. By the way, the New Testament idea of Paradise is different from that of the Qur’an. In the Qur’an, Paradise is the word for the final place of reward. That is not the New Testament idea. The New Testament word equivalent to the Qur’an’s word Paradise is heaven. Believe it or not, heaven in the Bible is not the same as Paradise in the Christian Scripture. Heaven is the place of final reward in the New Testament, but Paradise is a place of waiting before the return of Christ. A sample scripture for this is Luke 23:43.
John Oakes
