The Qur’ān and the Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (Tahrif)

“What a mighty difference between the Prophet of Islam and his followers of the present time! He professed to make the Sacred Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments the foundation of his claims, and his pillar of support when attacked; they spend their days in the impious attempt to subvert the authority of those very Scriptures.”¹

— William Muir, 19th century scholar of Islam

Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic Theology at the University of Notre Dame, has a 2010 paper called “On the Qur’ānic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (taḥrīf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic.”
In this paper he argues that the Qur’an does not claim that the Christian and Jewish scriptures have been textually altered, but only misinterpreted, in a manner analogous to how the Church Fathers—particularly the Syriac Fathers—argued that the Jews misinterpreted the Old Testament.

In my judgement, Reynolds is correct. That the Qur’an does not teach that the Bible has been corrupted may be news to a lot of people. This is because Muslims today believe that the New Testament does not adequately preserve the message of Jesus of Nazareth—indeed, this is really the only view modern Muslims—qua Muslims—can maintain about the New Testament, for the New Testament teaches doctrines that are manifestly inimical to those taught in the Qur’an.

Of course, from a textual-critical perspective, the New Testament is the best-attested set of documents in ancient antiquity. So trying to impugn the New Testament from a textual-critical perspective is hopeless. No doctrines of Christianity are at stake in any of the textual variants that exist, as world-class textual critic and ardent skeptic of Christianity, Bart Ehrman, has even admitted.

So that leaves the modern Muslim with the view that while the New Testament is textually reliable, the New Testament authors—whether culpably or non-culpably—distorted the original Gospel (Injeel) of Jesus. Somewhere between Jesus’ proto-Muslim disciples and the New Testament authors, the message of Jesus was corrupted.

But from a historical perspective, to say that Jesus and his disciples believed not in what the New Testament authors believed in, but in what is consonant with Islam, makes no sense. You cannot adequately explain the higher-than-mere-prophet Christology that is sprinkled throughout the New Testament without positing that some of it originates with the disciples of Jesus and their master. For example, it is not probable that the early pre-Pauline kenotic hymn found in Philippians 2:6–11 would have arisen if Jesus only proclaimed himself to be a purely human messiah and prophet. So the modern Muslim accusation of scriptural falsification (taḥrīf) cannot get off the ground from a historical-critical perspective.

Let us set aside the improbability of the modern Muslim claim from a historical-critical perspective. The Qur’ān itself does not support the contemporary Muslim accusation that the Christian scriptures have been corrupted. Indeed, it seems to affirm the Christian scriptures; e.g., in Q 5:47 it states the following:

And let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allah has revealed therein. And whoever does not judge by what Allah has revealed—then it is those who are the defiantly disobedient.

As Reynolds says, the Qur’ān “speaks in support of the Gospel, and moreover assumes that the valid Christian revelation is still at hand in its day,”² and Q 5:47 “would hardly make sense if the Qur’an did not believe in the Bible’s authenticity.”³

Indeed, in Q 61:4, the Qur’ān states that God helped the disciples of Jesus become dominant:

“O you who have believed, be supporters of Allah, as when Jesus, the son of Mary, said to the disciples, ‘Who are my supporters for Allah?’ The disciples said, ‘We are supporters of Allah.’ And a faction of the Children of Israel believed and a faction disbelieved. So We supported those who believed against their enemy, and they became dominant.”

But this hardly makes sense if the disciples were proto-Muslims, for the proto-Muslims manifestly did not become dominant. So, it seems that the Qur’an here is stating that God made the disciples of Jesus—those who held views consonant with what we find in the New Testament—dominant (for those were the Christian views that became dominant).

So, both on historical-critical and Qur’anic grounds, a Muslim should not believe that the New Testament is textually corrupted. That hardly leaves much room for being a faithful Muslim though—so how could the Qur’an have affirmed the veracity of the Bible when the Bible so obviously contradicts the Qur’an?

The answer is simple: the Qur’anic author(s) were fairly ignorant of the contents of the Bible, and only had access to its contents through oral tradition. This is supported by the fact that during the time that the Qur’an was written down, there was no Arabic translation of the Bible. It is also supported by the presence of egregious biblical errors in the Qur’an: e.g., the Qur’an mixes up Mary the mother of Jesus with Miriam the sister of Moses and Aaron, daughter of Amram (Q 19:28; 66:12),⁴ and anachronistically places Haman of the book of Esther in the court of Pharaoh as one of Moses’ antagonists (Q 28:5–8). As Reynolds says, the “Qur’an was aware of oral traditions about biblical characters but not of the Bible itself.”⁵

After the Bible was translated into Arabic and Muslims began realizing what was in the Bible, they did not have any choice but to say that the Bible’s message has been corrupted.

Footnotes