Hadith vs New Testament

[Mehdi]

Assalamu alaykom,

My wife asked me an interesting question today, and I must admit that I couldn't answer.

The logic is the follwing :

The  New Testament did not even begin being written down until decades after Jesus was gone. The earliest not before 70 A.D.

Also there are various editions of the Bible. The Orthodox, Catholic , Coptic and Protestant Bibles all have different amounts of books.

Equally the hadith itself is not a revelation but has been written after the death of Prophet Mohammad also with different versions.

So what is the value of the New Testament in light of its similarity to the hadith literature and vice versa ?

Meaning that if someone where in the time after prophet Jesus was gone, would he think that New Testament is not a revelation but only "Hadith" with different versions, that do not have support compared to the Old Testament ?

Many thanks for sharing your thoughts,

Salam,
Mehdi

[Sardar Miyan]

Hadith has got only story value no any real religious one and it's authenticity is if it does not differ with Quran. In the same manner the books written by people long after the death of Prophet Jesus are
just stories and not Bible or Injeel.

[8pider]

According to....= Narrated by......

Same thing

[Wakas]

A question that has no doubt been pondered over many times, e.g.

http://mypercept.co.uk/articles/Rethinking_Tradition_Modern_Islamic_Thought.htm

Quote:
The first major challenge to sunna in the modern period came from the great Indian modernist Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan (SAK), who lived from 1817 to 1898. He eventually came to reject all hadith as unreliable, however he never fully rejected the authority of sunna. He severely curtailed its scope, and called for new methods of evaluating it and insisted on its subordinate (lower) position with respect to The Quran. SAK worked on the following: a commentary on the bible, it was an attempt to establish an Islamic framework within which The Bible could be understood and accepted as a product of divine revelation. In the course of this venture, he was confronted with Western methods of Biblical criticism about questions of inspiration and revelation which caused him to examine his attitudes on corresponding Islamic questions. By accepting the Christian scriptures as revealed he was faced directly with the problem of recording the form of the Biblical text with Muslim preconceptions about what a revealed book should look like.
The Bible he concluded is indeed a form of revelation (wahy) but it is not the same kind of wahy as The Quran. Jewish and Christian scriptures differ from Quranic revelation in just the same way as does the sunna, both contain the meaning and the general sense of the divine message but they cannot be considered to be the very Words of God. He invoked the classical distinction between recited revelation found only in The Quran and unrecited revelation found in the sunna. He reinforced this analogy between the Christian scripture and the sunna by an unusual application of the terminology of "hadith criticism" to the Biblical text. Inconsistancies and corruption of the Biblical text can be explained and reconciled with the general revealed character of The Bible, by distinguishing within the text between revelation itself and explanatory notes of those who transmitted the text. By implication then, both pre-Quranic revelation and the sunna are less trustworthy than The Quran and unlike The Quran were liable to corruption.
In the course of subtly undermining The Bible, in relation to The Quran, he also widened the gap between Quran and sunna.

Quote:
By the time the traditions were gathered into the collections during the 3rd century, the corpus of hadith was damaged beyond any reasonable hope of restoration. Parwez draws parallels between this situation and the alledged corruption of the Gospels. If Muslims distrust the Gospels which were recorded within a 100 years of Jesus' death, how much more should they distrust hadith?