Bible

The Bible is the name commonly given to the collection of scriptures used by Jews and Christians. From an Islamic perspective, the Bible must be distinguished from the original revelation that Allah gave to His prophets.

Islam acknowledges that scripture was given to Christians and Jews; they are called Ahl al-Kitāb — the People of the Book. However, the disagreement begins with the very understanding of what “the Bible” is.

To the Muslim, the Tawrat was given to Moses and the Injīl was given to the Messiah. This is as the Qur’an says:

“Indeed, We revealed the Torah, containing guidance and light…”

And:

“And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus, son of Mary, confirming that which came before him in the Torah. And We gave him the Gospel, in which was guidance and light…”

The Qur’an presents the Injīl as a scripture given to the Messiah from God, just as the Tawrat was given to Moses from God. No Christian today believes that the New Testament was given by the Messiah to his disciples. The New Testament is therefore not identical to the Injīl.

As Muslims, we believe that Christians and Jews today do not possess the original Torah or the original Gospel in their pure revealed form.

Qur'anic criticism of textual corruption

The Qur’an criticizes those who wrote scripture with their own hands and then claimed it was from God:

“So woe to those who write the Scripture with their own hands, then say, ‘This is from Allah,’ in order to exchange it for a small price…”

The Qur’an also states that some from the People of the Book altered words from their proper places:

“So for their breaking of the covenant We cursed them and made their hearts hard. They distort words from their proper usages…”

This is not merely a Muslim claim asserted without evidence. The textual history of the Old and New Testaments shows that “the Bible” is not one simple, unchanged text that all Jews and Christians have always possessed in a single stable form.

Which Bible?

One of the first problems is the question: which Old Testament and which New Testament is meant?

Examples of Old Testament textual traditions and sources include:

• the Greek Septuagint;
• the Hebrew Vorlage behind the Septuagint;
• the Masoretic Text;
• the Samaritan Pentateuch;
• the Dead Sea Scrolls / Qumran scrolls;
• the source or sources behind the Greek Septuagint.

Examples of New Testament canons, manuscripts, or printed critical editions include:

• Marcion’s canon;
• Tatian’s Diatessaron;
• Codex Sinaiticus;
• Codex Vaticanus;
• Codex Alexandrinus;
• Codex Bezae;
• Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus;
• Codex Washingtonianus;
• the Textus Receptus;
• Westcott and Hort’s Greek New Testament;
• Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament editions;
• United Bible Societies Greek New Testament editions.

The problem is that there is no one simple “Biblical text” that all Christians or Jews have agreed upon across history. What is called the Bible today is a collected and translated text based on multiple textual traditions, manuscript witnesses, canons, and scholarly editorial decisions.

The Old Testament text

The Old Testament text is not available today in its original autographs.

Ernst Würthwein notes that with ancient writings, including the writings of the Old and New Testaments, the original documents have been lost, and the available texts exist only in copies separated from the originals by centuries and by an unknown number of intermediate copies.

The copying process itself creates textual problems. A word may be missed or repeated; words may be transposed or replaced; and even scribal correction may introduce further corruption. Therefore, before interpretation, the text itself must first be established by comparing the available witnesses.

Those witnesses are not all equally reliable. Each has its own character and its own individual history, so a textual witness cannot simply be treated as a neutral copy of the original.

The Masoretic Text also should not be imagined as one perfect master copy of the original Old Testament. Roy E. Beacham argues that no such thing as “the Masoretic text” or one single Masoretic text actually exists, and that no single “master copy” of the entire Old Testament corpus exists today.

Beacham further argues that even if Jewish scribes had produced a master copy in the first century, there is no evidence that such a text was ever accepted, much less portrayed, as a perfect replica of the originals.

The Old Testament as possessed today is therefore mediated through later textual families, recensions, manuscript traditions, and scholarly reconstruction.

The New Testament and the Injīl

The New Testament is not the Injīl that Muslims believe was given to Jesus. The Qur’an describes the Injīl as revelation given to the Messiah. The New Testament, by contrast, is a later collection of writings about Jesus, his followers, and early Christian communities.

The New Testament did not exist during the lifetime of Jesus. The writings of Paul came after Jesus, and the canonical Gospels were written later still.

Bart D. Ehrman states that most scholars date Mark to around 65–70 CE, Matthew and Luke to around 80–85 CE, and John to around 90–95 CE.

This places the canonical Gospels decades after Jesus. They were not written as transcripts, meeting minutes, or stenographic records of his ministry. They were written after stories about Jesus had circulated through communities, languages, theological disputes, preaching contexts, and oral transmission.

Barrie Wilson likewise warns against treating the Gospel writings as if they were direct reports or “student notes” from the time of Jesus. They are later literary compositions written for later audiences.

Gospel development

A simplified roadmap of Gospel development can be summarized as follows:

individual sayings about Jesus and from Jesus → sayings collections and sayings Gospels → narrative miracle literature → canonical and non-canonical Gospels.

This means that Gospel literature developed through sayings, memories, traditions, narrative shaping, miracle stories, theological interpretation, and manuscript transmission before arriving in the later forms known today.

The earliest layers of Jesus tradition are often identified with sayings material. Sources such as the Gospel of Thomas and the hypothetical Q source do not center the crucifixion and resurrection in the way the later canonical Gospels do.

The first canonical Gospel is usually identified as Mark. Later Gospels such as Matthew and Luke are commonly understood to have used Mark as one of their sources.

The Gospel of Mark is not a strict biography in the modern sense. It is closer to a structured theological narrative built around miracle material, conflict material, and proclamation. Some summaries of Gospel development compare Mark’s miracle-oriented narrative to ancient miracle-story literature or aretalogy rather than to modern biography.

According to the same summary, Mark includes three miracle sets: water miracles, healing miracles, and feeding miracles. The other canonical Gospels build upon, reorder, expand, and theologically shape earlier material.

Unknown sources and oral transmission

The Gospel writers do not name the sources behind their narratives in the way modern historians normally cite sources. They do not identify named eyewitness chains for each episode, nor do they explain how each unit of tradition passed from the event to the written account.

Ehrman argues that the authors were not eyewitnesses, did not write in the same language as Jesus, and were not from the same Palestinian environment. The Gospel writers wrote in Greek, while Jesus and his earliest followers were Aramaic-speaking Jews in Palestine.

The Gospel traditions circulated orally before being written down. Stories told from person to person, community to community, and city to city naturally change as they are retold. Ehrman compares this to the normal process by which oral stories become altered, expanded, shortened, or reshaped in transmission.

Wilson makes a similar point: the Gospels were written decades after the events they narrate, in a different linguistic and cultural setting, and after major historical disruptions in Judea. This creates a historical gap between Jesus’ original Galilean ministry and the later Gospel portraits of Jesus.

This does not mean the Gospels contain no memory of Jesus. It means they must be read as late theological-literary works shaped by transmission, not as direct eyewitness transcripts.

Anonymous authorship and later attribution

The four canonical Gospels were originally published anonymously. That is, the texts themselves do not name their authors.

Dale B. Martin notes that the four Gospels were published anonymously, not pseudonymously: they were not written under false names, but rather with no authors’ names attached. Later titles were attached to them, but the titles themselves are not historical proof of authorship.

Martin also notes that Papias and other early Christians preserved traditions about Gospel authorship, but modern scholars doubt many of these traditions, including the claims that Mark wrote Peter’s version, Matthew compiled Matthew, Luke wrote as a disciple of Paul, and John son of Zebedee wrote John.

Ehrman argues that the later attributions are difficult because Jesus’ followers were lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews, whereas the Gospel authors were highly educated Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation, writing in a different language, in different parts of the world, and at a later time.

The traditional names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John therefore belong to later ecclesiastical attribution, not to authorial self-identification inside the Gospel texts themselves.

Did the Gospel authors validate one another?

There is no evidence that the claimed authors of the canonical Gospels personally validated one another’s Gospels. There is also no evidence that they exegeted or commented upon each other’s Gospel texts as a fixed four-Gospel canon during their own lifetimes.

Instead, the Gospels show literary dependence, reuse of material, differences in sequence, theological shaping, and later harmonizing activity by scribes and interpreters.

Origen, in his commentary on John, acknowledged that the Gospel writers sometimes changed place, time, or sequence in order to preserve a spiritual or theological aim, even where the material presentation differed.

The need for later harmonization itself shows that Christians inherited multiple Gospel narratives with tensions and differences. The problem was not solved by preserved authorial commentary from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, but by later interpretation, canon formation, and theological reading.

Canon formation

The New Testament canon did not appear all at once.

Dale B. Martin identifies Marcion, in the first half of the second century, as the first known Christian leader to produce something close to an authoritative list of accepted Christian writings.

Marcion selected a form of Luke and a collection of Pauline letters. He rejected the Old Testament and believed that other apostles had adulterated the pristine Gospel taught by Jesus by introducing “judaizing” tendencies.

Martin notes that this is the first known attempt in Christianity to identify particular writings as an authoritative list of accepted Christian scripture and to reject others as not belonging to that list.

The second century contained many different kinds of Christianity, and the later boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” were not yet fixed in the way they would be in later centuries.

Some second-century Christian writers argued that the Church should accept four Gospels because they believed those Gospels were connected to real apostles: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This was partly a response to Marcion’s selection of only Luke.

Tatian’s Diatessaron also shows another response to Gospel plurality: rather than preserving the four Gospels separately, it wove them into a single harmonized narrative.

The four-Gospel canon was therefore not simply handed down in complete form from Jesus. It emerged through later Christian disputes, preferences, exclusions, harmonizations, and attempts to identify which writings should count as Christian scripture.

Earliest Gospel manuscripts

There are no complete first-century manuscripts of the canonical Gospels. The earliest surviving fragments are small and fragmentary.

For Matthew, an early witness is 𝔓77, commonly dated to the 2nd–3rd century CE, containing Matthew 13:55–56 and 14:3–5.

For Mark, one possible early witness is 𝔓137, dated by some to the 2nd–3rd century CE, containing Mark 1:7–9; another important witness is 𝔓45, usually dated to the 3rd century CE, containing fragments of Mark.

For Luke, an early witness is 𝔓75, commonly dated to the 3rd–4th century CE, containing Luke 3:18–15:10.

For John, an early witness is 𝔓52, commonly dated to the 2nd–3rd century CE, containing John 18:31–33 and 18:37–38.

Even on optimistic dating, the manuscript evidence is fragmentary. The canonical Gospels are not supported by complete first-century manuscript copies. The manuscript trail begins with small fragments, while fuller witnesses come later.

Titles and names in the manuscript tradition

The names of the Gospel authors were not necessarily circulated with the earliest Gospel manuscripts.

One summary of the manuscript evidence notes that the earliest Gospel fragment with a title may be associated with Matthew and dates to the third century, while names of Gospel authors were added to Codex Sinaiticus by a corrector between the fourth and sixth centuries.

This supports the distinction between the Gospel texts themselves and later title traditions. The presence of familiar Gospel names in later manuscripts does not prove that those names were attached from the beginning.

The problem of the “original text”

Modern textual criticism does not simply print “the original New Testament.” It attempts to reconstruct an earlier attainable text by comparing surviving witnesses.

The issue is not whether the present New Testament contains any early material. The issue is whether the exact original wording of the New Testament books can be identified with certainty.

Michael W. Holmes argues that the traditional goal of restoring the “original text” needs reconsideration because the term “original text” is itself ambiguous and because the history of textual transmission deserves study in its own right.

Eldon J. Epp likewise argues that the phrase “original text” is multivalent and far more complex than earlier scholars assumed, since the problem includes canon, authority, language, oral tradition, pre-literary tradition, source criticism, compositional stages, and textual variants.

Because of this, some scholars speak more cautiously of the “initial text” or the “earliest attainable text,” rather than confidently claiming direct access to the autographs.

The obscure zone

A major issue in New Testament textual criticism is the dark early period between the writing of the texts and the earliest substantial manuscript witnesses.

This early period includes uncertainty about authorship, revision, early reception, circulation, and early translations.

Ernest C. Colwell stated that without knowledge of the history of the text, the original reading cannot be established.

Eberhard Nestle noted that the disappearance of the originals is understandable because much of the New Testament, especially the Epistles, consisted of occasional writings not originally intended for broad publication, while other writings had limited circulation.

This early obscurity matters because later manuscript agreement cannot automatically prove that the text was perfectly stable from the moment of composition.

Greek manuscripts and the numbers argument

Christian apologists often appeal to the large number of New Testament manuscripts. The number is important, but the raw number by itself can mislead.

Michael W. Holmes notes that the common appeal to thousands of manuscripts is misleading if it does not mention that approximately eighty-five percent of those manuscripts were copied in the eleventh century or later, over a millennium after the writing of the New Testament. He adds that as one gets closer to the origin of the New Testament, manuscript evidence becomes increasingly scarce.

The closer one moves toward the date of composition, the fewer and smaller the manuscript witnesses become. The earliest evidence often consists of scraps rather than full books.

The existence of many later manuscripts does not by itself identify the earliest reading. As textual critics often say, manuscripts must be weighed, not merely counted.

Early papyri and textual fluidity

The early papyri do not simply solve the problem of the original text. They provide valuable evidence, but they are incomplete, fragmentary, and textually varied.

Philip W. Comfort acknowledged that Mark, the earliest canonical Gospel and a major source for Matthew and Luke, is not preserved in many early manuscripts. He also stated that 𝔓45, the earliest copy of Mark, is “not a very faithful copy” and that the scribe took many liberties, reproducing more the thought of the exemplar than the exact words.

Kenneth W. Clark concluded that 𝔓75, an early third-century papyrus, portrays a fluid state of the text around 200 CE, and that such scribal freedom suggests the Gospel text was little more stable than oral tradition.

Colwell described the earliest period of the New Testament manuscript tradition as “wild,” “uncontrolled,” and “unedited.”

The early papyri therefore witness to an early textual situation that was fluid, varied, and difficult to reduce to a single unquestionably original form.

Versions and translations

Textual critics also use ancient versions — translations of the New Testament into languages such as Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. These are useful witnesses, but they do not solve the problem of the original text.

No version claims to be copied from the autograph. No version is identical to the modern critical text. The versions themselves witness to different text-types and divergent readings.

The Diatessaron of Tatian, an early Gospel harmony, combines Gospel material into a single narrative, but no original copy survives, its original language is disputed, and its method of harmonization prevents it from simply preserving the exact text of the four canonical Gospels.

The Old Latin versions show significant diversity. Jerome complained that there were almost as many forms of the text as manuscripts, and Metzger described the Old Latin as a living creation that was constantly growing.

The Coptic witnesses likewise appear late and varied, with early transmission remaining fluid and haphazard.

Ancient versions help textual critics compare forms of the text, but they cannot independently restore the original New Testament.

Patristic citations

Another common claim is that the New Testament could be reconstructed from quotations by the Church Fathers. These citations are useful, but they are not a simple path to the autograph.

The list of “Fathers” used in textual criticism extends across centuries and includes writers from different regions and theological camps. This makes their testimony useful but mixed, not a simple recovered copy of the original New Testament.

Larry W. Hurtado notes that only a few explicit citations of New Testament writings are found in second-century Christian authors, and even those often show curious differences from the dominant manuscript text.

William L. Petersen observed that second-century Gospel citations show widespread harmonization, extra-canonical material mixed with canonical material, altered sequences, many variants, and vaguer parallels as one moves earlier into the second century.

Patristic citations therefore confirm that the early Gospel tradition was living and textually complex. They do not provide a clean independent reconstruction of the original text.

Critical editions and reconstruction

The modern printed Greek New Testament is a critical reconstruction. Textual critics compare manuscript variants and choose readings according to scholarly criteria. This means that the printed Greek New Testament is not identical to any one surviving ancient manuscript.

William L. Petersen states that modern critical editions do not present the text current in 150, 120, or 100 CE, much less 80 CE.

The United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament apparatus also shows the extent of uncertainty in textual decisions. E. J. Edwards noted that in UBS3 and UBS4, 48.6% of rated variation units were marked “difficult” and 10.4% “extremely doubtful,” meaning that approximately 59% of rated variants were doubtful in some degree.

A new critical edition is therefore not a newly discovered original Bible. It is a scholarly reconstruction produced by comparing variant readings and selecting preferred readings according to critical criteria.

This is why the phrase “the Greek New Testament” can refer not to a single manuscript that existed in antiquity, but to an editorial reconstruction produced through comparison of many manuscript witnesses.

Theological variants

Some textual variants affect Christian theology and belief.

Examples include John 1:18, where manuscripts differ between readings such as “only Son,” “only God,” and related forms.

Another example is John 1:3–4, where punctuation and wording affect whether the text says that what came into being “in him was life.”

The Transfiguration accounts also show variation in the heavenly declaration: Matthew 17:5, Mark 9:7, and Luke 9:35 preserve related but distinct wording.

Luke 3:22 is also textually significant because some witnesses preserve a form of the heavenly voice saying, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” while other witnesses have the more familiar wording.

These examples show why textual criticism is not a minor issue. Variant readings can affect how passages are understood doctrinally.

The Gospels as shaped tradition

The Gospels should not be treated as stenographic transcripts of Jesus.

Ehrman states that the Gospels contain discrepancies, contradictions, embellishments, and historical problems, and that they cannot be taken at face value as straightforward historically reliable accounts in every detail.

Wilson likewise describes the Gospel narratives as highly creative works written for audiences far removed from Jesus’ original Galilean and Jewish setting. Each Gospel constructs its own portrait of Jesus for its own audience.

David C. Parker argues that what we have in the Gospel tradition is a collection of interpretive rewritings of a tradition. He states that the concept of a Gospel as fixed in shape, authoritative, and final as a piece of literature must be abandoned.

Parker’s point is not that the Gospels are useless. Rather, the Gospels must be understood as living textual traditions that were transmitted, interpreted, rewritten, and stabilized over time.

“Very words” and “voice” of Jesus

Daniel B. Wallace distinguishes between the very words of Jesus and the very voice of Jesus, using the terms ipsissima verba and ipsissima vox. He states that only rarely can scholars say that they possess the exact words of Jesus, though they may have confidence that some material reflects the “voice” of Jesus.

This distinction matters because even conservative Christian scholars may admit that the Gospels often preserve the message, gist, or theological presentation of Jesus rather than exact verbal transcripts.

Muslim evaluation

The Muslim position is not that Allah never revealed scripture to Jews and Christians. Rather, Islam affirms that Allah revealed the Tawrat and the Injīl, while denying that the present Bible is identical to those original revelations.

The Bible today is a collection of later textual traditions, translations, manuscript families, canon decisions, and critical reconstructions. The Old Testament is preserved through later witnesses such as the Masoretic tradition, Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch, and Dead Sea Scrolls. The New Testament is preserved through later manuscripts, ancient versions, patristic citations, variants, and critical editions.

The central issue is not merely whether some authentic material remains. The issue is whether the Bible available today is identical to the original revelation given by Allah to Moses and Jesus. From the Islamic perspective, it is not.

The Bible may contain truth, remnants of revelation, historical material, wisdom, and reports about prophets, but it is not the original Tawrat or the original Injīl in pure form.

In sum, there is a serious difference between believing that scripture was originally revealed by God and claiming that the present Biblical text is a perfectly preserved copy of that original revelation.