There’s nothing particularly unusual about the fact that Christian apologist David Wood, the head of Acts 17 Apologetic, traveled to Israel in February and visited the world-famous Dome of the Rock.
What made his visit a little less common — and unquestionably more dangerous for Wood — was that he stood outside the building and recorded an 8-minute video in which he debunked its importance to Islam.
Wood started by giving a bit of history regarding the building of the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine, explaining that what he admitted is an architectural “work of art” was largely copied from earlier examples of Byzantine, i.e., Christian, religious buildings.
The rock of the Dome of the Rock is a reference to the “foundation stone” that many believe was once the location of the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon’s temple and of the the Holy of Holies during the Second Temple era of Jesus’ time.
Wood then explained some of the history of the site — how it went from Jewish to Roman control, during which time it served as a temple to the Roman god Jupiter before Rome became a Christian nation and then finally coming under the control of Muslims when they captured Jerusalem in 638.
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“Several decades later,” Caliph Abd al-Malik began construction on the shrine. Wood said that Muslims in general believe that the shrine was constructed “to honor Muhammad’s ‘night journey,’ when the prophet of Islam was taken to the Temple Mount on a mythical flying donkey monster named Buraq.”
That may sound unbelievable to you, but that’s OK — since, as Wood said, there’s no reason to believe it.
“There’s no evidence that Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock to honor the night journey; the night journey was apparently a later legend,” he said.
Wood then looked at two verses of the Quran that he said Muslims rely on as evidence of the existence of the night journey and showed that they almost certainly do no such thing, and in fact probably don’t even refer to Muhammad, but to the Jewish prophet Moses.
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In other words, the legend of the night journey didn’t even exist when the Dome of the Rock was built, and therefore could not have been its inspiration.
In fact, the shrine’s builders included inscriptions from the Quran intended as rebukes of both Christianity and Judaism, indicating that, having been built on a site that had been traditionally held by both Christians and Jews, the shrine was meant as an “insult” to both religions, Wood argued.
“On a side note,” he added, “the quranic inscriptions contain textual variance from the Quran Muslims read today which means that we can also think of the Dome of the Rock as a reminder that the Quran has not been perfectly preserved.”
Wood concluded that the lies surrounding the history of the third-holiest site to Muslims make it the “perfect Shrine” for a religion built on lies and imitation.
“Now after being built and rebuilt after changing hands repeatedly, the Dome of the Rock stands as a perfect shrine for Islam,” he said. “The architecture was copied, like Muhammad copied almost everything in his religion. The location was chosen specifically because it was a holy site for other people — just like the Kaaba was once a center of pagan worship and as the Hagia Sophia was a center of Christian worship and as the Babri Masjid was built on what Hindus believe to be the birthplace of Rama.
“Islam is obsessed with controlling other people’s holy sites just as Muhammad was obsessed with controlling other people’s religious figures, turning Abraham and Moses and David and Jesus into devout Muslims,” he added.
“Toss in a bunch of later myths and legends and embellishments, and convince hundreds of millions of people that they absolutely must preserve this slap in the face to Jews and Christians everywhere, and you get the ultimate monument to everything history’s most obvious false prophet came to do.”
You can watch Wood’s entire video below.
Wood will be appearing with a number of other well-known Christian apologists next week at ApologeticCon in Sarasota, Florida. Interested readers can find more information about that event here.
