The Bible is corrupted

Muslim scholars have long distinguished two charges. Tahrif al-ma’na is distortion of meaning: the words are intact, but people misread or misapply them. Tahrif al-nass is distortion of the text itself: the words were altered or replaced. They have argued for centuries about which the Qur’an means. The Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm, writing in the eleventh century in his al-Fisal, pressed the strong textual version. Many others held the softer one.

Read the verses closely and you will see why the question stayed open. Qur’an 3:78 speaks of “a party who alter the Scripture with their tongues so you may think it is from the Scripture.” 4:46 speaks of Jews in Medina who “distort words from their [proper] places,” and gives examples of spoken words. 2:75 speaks of some who heard God’s words “and then distort it.” These describe what particular people did with Scripture, in speech and interpretation. None of them says that the Gospel held by Christians everywhere had been replaced.

This page asks about the stronger charge, because that is the one that would mean the Bible Christians read is not the Gospel at all.

The Qur’an does not tell the Christians and Jews of Muhammad’s own time that their books are gone. It tells them to use them.

• “Let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allāh has revealed therein” (5:47).
• Of the Jews: “they have the Torah, in which is the judgement of Allāh” (5:43).
• “O People of the Scripture, you are [standing] on nothing until you uphold [the law of] the Torah, the Gospel, and what has been revealed to you from your Lord” (5:68).
• “If you are in doubt… then ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you” (10:94).
• It describes the Prophet as one “whom they find written in what they have of the Torah and the Gospel” (7:157), and itself as “confirming that which is with you” (4:47).

The Qur’an also says, “None can alter His words” (6:115).

Some commentators read 5:47 as addressed to Christians of Jesus’ own time. Even on that reading, 5:43, 5:68, 7:157, and 10:94 speak in the present tense to people in Muhammad’s day, about what they have and read.

These verses assume that seventh-century Christians held a Gospel they could read, judge by, and be held to. If that Gospel was already corrupted beyond use, the command in 5:47 would ask them to judge by a book that could no longer guide them. If it was usable, then the next question is what that Gospel said.

This part of the question can be checked. Muhammad received the Qur’an between about 610 and 632. Long before that, Christians had large copies of the Greek Bible. Two of the best known, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, were copied in the fourth century, about two and a half centuries before the Qur’an. Sinaiticus contains the whole New Testament, and both contain all four Gospels. By then the Gospels had also been translated into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, and were read by churches from Spain to Persia and beyond, most of which had no contact with each other.

Scholars have catalogued thousands of Greek manuscripts, and many of them come from before the seventh century or from the centuries around it (how the count is made). In every one of these traditions, the Gospel is the same four books: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In every one, Jesus is crucified under Pontius Pilate and his followers proclaim him raised.

So even if you suspect that something changed in the first centuries, the Gospel the Qur’an addressed is not lost. It is the Gospel in these manuscripts, and it teaches the crucifixion the Qur’an denies. Any change that removed an earlier Injil would have to have happened before the Qur’an spoke, in every language and region at once, and without leaving a trace.

Ehrman’s figure is accurate: there are more differences among the manuscripts than words in the New Testament. The reason is the number of manuscripts. Every time a scribe copied a page, small slips crept in, and every surviving copy is counted. Most of these differences are spelling, word order, or an obvious mistake that makes no difference to meaning (what a variant is).

That abundance is also what lets scholars find the original wording. When thousands of copies made in different places are compared, an error made in one place stands out against the rest. That is how scholars identified the late passages, and it is why ordinary Bibles print them in brackets.

Ehrman co-wrote the standard textbook on this subject with Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament. Metzger concluded that the New Testament text can be recovered with very high confidence. Ehrman, who is not a Christian, has said that his own findings do not contradict Metzger’s view that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by the variants. The crucifixion, for example, is not in a disputed verse. It is in all four Gospels, in Paul’s letters, and in every manuscript tradition.

The Qur’an is not on trial here. The aim is one standard for both books.

Sahih al-Bukhari records that after many reciters were killed at the battle of Yamama, Abu Bakr asked Zayd ibn Thabit to collect the Qur’an, and Zayd gathered it from what was written on palm stalks and thin white stones, and from the men who knew it by heart (Bukhari 4986). Later, Uthman had copies made and sent to the provinces, and “ordered that all the other Qur’anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt” (Bukhari 4987). Muslim scholars, such as the writers of the Yaqeen Institute’s account, explain this as careful preservation, and that is a reasonable case.

Islamic scholarship also recognizes several canonical readings of the Qur’an, the qira’at. Most differences are matters of pronunciation, but some change the sense enough that an English translation has to mark them, as the Bridges translation of the ten qira’at does.

None of this shows the Qur’an was lost. Collection by people, copying, and variant readings do not by themselves prove a scripture lost, and what does not count against the Qur’an cannot count against the Gospel either.

If the real Injil was a different book that the four Gospels replaced, then someone replaced it, somewhere, at some time. So far, no one has found evidence of who, where, or when.

No manuscript of an earlier Injil that teaches what the Qur’an teaches about Jesus has ever been found, in any language. No ancient writer, Christian or not, records such a book being suppressed. The churches that disagreed with each other bitterly over many questions all kept the same four Gospels. And the earliest summary of Christian belief, which Paul quotes in a letter from the AD 50s and which scholars date to within a few years of Jesus’ death, already says that he “died for our sins,” “was buried,” and “was raised on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).

This does not show that the Gospel is true. It shows that the Gospel Christians have today is the one they had when the Qur’an spoke to them, and the one they had generations before that.