DCCI – Defend Christ, Critique Islam is a Christian missionary group that engages in interfaith debates primarily with Muslims (if its name wasn’t a giveaway in the first place!). One of the more notable trends seems to be a lack of basic knowledge about the Bible and what it teaches. Of all their videos online, there seems to be an abject lack of teaching or thought on the Bible itself. They are representatives of St. Tooting’s Church in London, so one must ask if this ignorance about the Bible stems from the Church’s inability to teach their congregants faithfully or if this is more a consequence of the ministry’s (DCCI) lack of expertise on the Bible. Roughly 6 months ago, Elizabeth Schofield and a colleague approached Muslims outside a London mosque. During one of their conversations (uploaded and recorded by DCCI), was a claim that the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus was unchanged in comparison with the Bibles of today.

In the video above, I address such a claim and demonstrate that this was in fact, an error. Codex Sinaiticus has changes going into the 11th and possibly 12th centuries (I’ve explained this in the video) CE. Given that they don’t seem to have much usable Biblical knowledge, 6 months later after I’ve inquired about their claim, an admission of error was made in a Facebook comment by the ministry:

Now, Elizabeth (writing as DCCI Ministries) does concede that it’s “not exactly the same”, here she’s trying to minimize exactly what was said in the video that her ministry published online. As noted, she thankfully quoted my question to her, in that question to her it explains the reason why her generalization was false. To her credit, she admits that she was making a generalized point, but a false generalization is nothing short of a lie. So the question is, has the ministry chosen as its policy to mislead or misinform the public as to what the Bible’s history is? If they can’t be trusted to get the basics about the Bible correct, how then can anything else they say about other religions be correct, how do we know they aren’t making other false generalizations in haste to save face? In this vein of thought, again they posted about the Qur’an on their social media pages, so I engaged with the ministry again with questions about the Bible and was met with abject silence.

It’s been about 4 days since my questions to them and nothing, no reply. Perhaps instead of ranting about the Qur’an, a class on the Bible should take place? With that said, I do want to thank them for the polite conversation, and I want DCCI to know that we pray and hope that they can continue to engage with us on a civil level, despite some anti-Arab and anti-Muslim comments on their social media pages as of late. I’ve partially censored the first word in the comment posted below on their Facebook page:

Disgusting, the comment has remained for some odd reason but if anything was said like this about Jesus, Paul, Mary, the Disciples, anyone really, I would have removed it and banned the person.

and God knows best.

Categories: Bible, Biblical scholarship, Christianity, dcci, Speakers Corner

Tags: Bible, bible mistakes, codex sinaiticus, dcci, defend christ critique islam, elizabeth schofield, errors, hyde park, lizzie, manuscripts, preservation, Speakers Corner