Deeper than we think
Gordon Robertson
Date posted: 1 Jul 2020
Dear Sir,
Thank
you
for
the
review
of Tom
Holland’s latest book. By coincidence I was
reading his book In the Shadow of the Sword.
Tom Holland is one of the very few popular
historians brave enough
to be
forthright
about the virtually total lack of contempor-ary evidence for Mohammed, the origins of
Islam, and the Qur’an. This book is worth
getting for Chapter 1 alone. There is ‘not a
single Arab account of his life, nor of his fol-lowers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his
religion, from the whole of the near two cen-turies that followed his death’. Biographical
details start to occur after 800AD, written by
fervent believers. ‘Whole centuries’ worth of
scholarship have been founded on the pre-sumption that the sources for early Islam can
be trusted’, and this includes stories about
the creation of the Qur’an. The chapter goes
on to look at the ideas floating about at that
time, and the book traces in historical detail
how the world came to be dominated by
three religions with one God. His Channel 4 documentary ‘Islam: the untold story’ is still
available on YouTube.
Leeds: moving forward
even under lockdown
Roundhay Evangelical Church
(REC)
in
Leeds appointed their first pastor, despite
the restrictions of
lockdown, with Adam
Robertson taking up the post on 1 July.
Identified as an area of Leeds without a
clear evangelical witness, REC was planted
in 2007
from City Evangelical
in South
Leeds, as an elder-led church. By God’s grace
it has grown slowly, and it was felt the time
was right to appoint a younger man to lead
the church into the future. Adam Robertson
responded to an advert in January, and was
able to visit for a weekend before lockdown.
The wonders of the Internet, online sermons,
and lots of phone calls meant that the church was happy at a (Zoom) church meeting to
call Adam, unanimously, to be the pastor.
