Corruption of sacred texts

Jakkass wrote: »

I've explained exactly why. Would you or another Muslim please answer my questions about the Qur'an? Or is this just bash the Bible thread? Hardly reasonable if you ask me :pac:

Perhaps, as a non-Muslim, I may be permitted to summarise what I think the Muslim position on the authenticity of the Bible is.

The key starting point is that the Qur'an is believed to be the actual Word of God, revealed through the Angel Jibril to Muhammad bit-by-bit over a period of about 21 years. As God is "al-Haqq", the Truth, this means that the Qur'an is a manifestation of the Truth, and anything stated in the Qur'an is necessarily true. The Qur'an is self-reflexive, in that it makes various statements about itself, for example that it is the last revelation from God, that it conveys basically the same message as previous revelations, in particular the Tawrah and the Injeel, that it is free from contradiction, that it is inimitable, and that God will work to preserve it.

The Qur'an, in various verses, refers to the "People of the Book" (basically, Jews and Christians) distorting the revelations that they had received. This isn't just the accidental distortion that could arise through mistakes in copying, but deliberate distortion to represent meanings that are not in the original revelations and indeed may be contradictory to the original revelations.

Although the Qur'an was not written down systematically at the time it was revealed, the large number of people who had memorised the Qur'an, in part or in whole, meant that the recitation was preserved. However, within a generation of Muhammad's death, recitations were beginning to deviate in different parts of the Muslim world, so the then Khalifa, Uthman, in consultation with Muhammad's secretaries and family members, and other Companions of the Prophet, prepared a definitive edition of the Qur'an. Any existing texts were destroyed, and several copies of the "Uthmanic recension" were distributed to major cities in the Muslim world. Since then, the existence of millions of Muslims who have memorised the whole text of the Qur'an has ensured that clerical transcription errors have not been allowed to creep into subsequent manuscripts, so the Qur'an as we know it today is completely unchanged from the "Uthmanic recension".

To a non-Muslim, this story has two key weaknesses. First, it relies on accepting the truth of the Qur'an. But as soon as we deny that the Qur'an is necessarily true in all particulars, we can no longer rely on verses of the Qur'an to support the argument against other scriptures. We can't even take for granted the existence of earlier revelations in the form suggested by the Qur'an, so in particular we can't assume that there was an "Injeel".

Secondly, the narrative of the "Uthmanic recension" itself depends on oral testimonies that were not collected in a surviving written form until several years (indeed, centuries) after the events that they narrate. Archaeologists and palaeographers differ over the reliability, and indeed the dating, of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Qur'an.

Muslim arguments for the "corruption" of the Tawrah and the Injeel depend on acceptance of the truth of the Qur'an. Given the premise that these revelations were basically the same as the Qur'an, then any differences between the existing scriptures and the Qur'an "must" be the result of corruption. The fact that there is evidence of clerical transcription errors and indeed of interpolations, such as the "Johannine comma" (1 John 5:7-8 - the inclusion of words testifying to the Trinity), provides support for the "corruption" argument. However, Christian scholars discuss these issues of transmission openly, and consider that the various manuscripts, taken as a whole, are sufficient to identify a "textus receptus" with a limited number of variant readings.

Another argument relates to "contradictions" in the Bible. Again, normatively, the Qur'an is taken to be free from contradictions (the convenient doctrine of "abrogation" is sometimes used to explain away apparent inconsistencies). There are many well-known differences in the Bible, for example between the four Gospels in the passion and resurrection narratives, but to most Christians differences of detail do not matter (indeed they can lend greater authenticity, as it is argued that, if the four Gospels agreed in every detail, this would be evidence of collusion in writing - on the other hand, Christian apologists often point to agreement among the evangelists as evidence for the truth of what is being narrated). One important reason for this is that scripture, at least to most Christians, has a somewhat different status from the Qur'an to Muslims. Whereas the Qur'an is regarded by Muslims as the Word of God, to most Christians, the Bible is inspired by God, working through the Holy Spirit, but is the work of human authors. Hence, to say that the New Testament is not the Injeel is really beside the point: the Gospels are, if anything, more like the various Lives of Muhammad that were compiled from oral transmission in the couple of centuries after Muhammad's death.

My overall conclusion is, I think, basically the same as Jakkass is arguing: Muslims giving da'wah cannot pick and choose which bits of the Bible are considered authentic and which are considered corrupted, as the criterion for whether a passage is corrupted is basically that it does not agree with the Qur'an. This means that the Bible cannot be an independent source of evidence for the truth of Islam.

Jakkass wrote: »

Edit: Post 15,000

Congratulations!

whydoc wrote: »

PLease Read this article.

Thanks for posting the link to this article on the preservation of the Qur'an. It sets out the Muslim case for the preservation of the Qur'an that I summarised in my earlier post in more detail, and supports my comment that the evidence for the narrative is indeed "oral testimonies that were not collected in a surviving written form until several years (indeed centuries) after the events that they narrate." Most of the references to primary sources are to Sahih al-Bukhari, which is dated to around 232AH/846CE, about two centuries after the events being discussed.

I should say, for the avoidance of doubt, that I believe that the traditional narrative of the Uthmanic recension is rather more plausible than the alternatives, suggested by academics such as John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone and Christoph Luxenburg, that the Qur'an was either a later compilation or was based on earlier Jewish and Christian sources. However, the evidence for the traditional narrative is only conclusive if you already accept the status of the Qur'an as divine revelation and the authenticity of oral tradition.