Is the Quran or Bible the Word of God? Christianity or Islam?

What Most Muslims Don’t Know or Won’t Admit About the Quran

January 21st, 2012

Many Muslims argue that the Bible is unreliable because it has a textual tradition with textual variants.  But what most Muslims do not know or will not admit about the Quran is that it also has a textual tradition with variants.  The book they esteem as God’s Word is not identical to what Muhammad recited.  Comparing the textual tradition of the Bible with the textual tradition of the Quran, Keith Small wrote,

There was not one initial, original text from the period of Muhammad’s career which was preserved with this high degree of precision.  Instead, at best, one of the collections from among the versions available was chosen to be the one text everyone would use.  It was then edited heavily, and the others were forcible suppressed, not because they were less authentic per se, but because they presented rivals to the one chosen text and could provide a basis for political and religious competition.  This is in fact the role the collection of material attributed to Ibn Masud played in the first three Islamic centuries until it was finally suppressed in the wake of Ibn Mujahid’s reforms.  It was a competing official text to the Canonical text attributed to Uthman. (Holy Books Have a History: Textual Histories of the New Testament & the Qur’an, [Avant Ministries, 2010] 70-71)

To learn more, see the chapters in my book on the “Transmission of Scripture and the Qur’an“

 

Tags: christian scriptures, corruption

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