Historical Critique, Part III

Thirty-third in a series

The prior two articles covered the place and the person, within the context of the relevant time period. Today, we discuss the Qur’an—the thing. Like the previous two articles, much of this material comes from Jay Smith’s presentation.[1] The Qur’an is Islam’s book of revelations Muhammad received from Allah through the angel Gabriel. The word Qur’an literally means “the reading” or “the recital”. We’ll begin with the standard Islamic narrative concerning the Qur’an. It is:

Uncreated and exists eternally in heaven (S85.21-2)
Sent down to Muhammad from 610 to 632. (S10.15)
Complete with all 114 suras being collected by Uthman in 652.
Unchanged over the last 1,400 years. (S15.9)

As with the previous articles, we’ll look at the earliest available source documents. In this case the Qur’an’s manuscripts. But first, we’ll address some of Islam’s claims about the Bible mentioned in the prior article. Dr. Qadhi claimed the Bible was authored over centuries, redacted by later Christians, and “misinterpreted what Jesus said”.[2] We’ll address each of these claims first. The analysis serves as a baseline to compare the Qur’an manuscripts against. Again, this is not about people, but rather ideas. Ideas matter.

The Bible’s Source Material

We addressed the New Testament recorders of what Jesus said and did last time. They were either Jesus’ disciples (such as Matthew, John, and Peter) or people who obtained their information from his disciples (such as Mark and Luke). Paul, who wrote many of the New Testament letters, encountered the risen Jesus in his travel to Damascus. That is the “who” concerning the New Testament manuscript writers. For the Old Testament, today we have the Dead Sea scrolls, dated somewhere between the first and third century BC. These copies were written several centuries before Jesus was born. Jesus’s quotes from the Old Testament indicate they came from the Greek Septuagint rather than Hebrew sources.

Bible Manuscripts

Today we have about 5,800 Greek and 10,000 Latin manuscripts. There are also 9,300 other manuscripts in various languages. In total, there are about 24,000 manuscripts in 11 different languages, including translations and fragments, for the Bible. These documents all agree with each other. I’ll return to this in a bit, after finishing this point.

Two hundred and thirty manuscripts pre-date the seventh century. Most of these were written before 70 AD, and likely before 64 AD—when Rome burned under Nero, followed by a period of Christian persecution. If the New Testament books were written after 64 AD, it’s very likely the New Testament letters would have referenced those events. Also, neither are the deaths of James (62), Paul (64), or Peter (65) mentioned. Those events occurred a mere thirty years or so after Jesus’ death. It is hard to imagine those events not being mentioned if they had already occurred.

One of the most recent manuscript finds is the Magdalene Manuscript. These contain manuscripts of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Luke manuscript was written in the late first century or early second, before the John papyrus. The fragment from Mark was written sometime before 68 AD. The fragment from Matthew comes from Chapter 26 and was written no later than 65 or 66 AD. It could even be an original manuscript, but if not, it was written while the other disciples and eyewitnesses were still alive. The text within this manuscript even suggests the godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) was recognized centuries before it was accepted as official church doctrine.[3]

Early Church Father’s Writings

The above all excludes the work of the early Church Fathers. Their work contains 32,000 scripture quotations written before the council of Nicea in 325. Sir David Dalrymple examined the Bible quotations within the second and third century Church Fathers writings. He found, except for 11 verses, the entire New Testament could be constructed from these writings alone.[4] Even if all the manuscripts above did not exist, we still have almost all the New Testament’s contents from this source alone.

Manuscript Errors

The number of Biblical manuscripts is remarkable and unlike any other book from the ancient world. Few other works have even a dozen manuscripts, and most of those are copies from many hundreds of years or more after they were originally written.

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We also need to understand what an error represents within any ancient world manuscript. If there is any stray mark on a manuscript, it is an error. If a word is misspelled, it is an error. Grammatical errors such as differences in tense, or plural/singular usage are also errors. These are simple text variants. If a particular grammatical error, say a difference in past/present tense, was found in 1,000 manuscripts, then they would count as 1,000 errors rather than one. In essence, the Bible is penalized for the large number of existing manuscripts.

Analysis Results

So how do the Bible’s manuscripts compare? Philip Schaff, a nineteenth century Bible scholar, wrote the following:

“[O]nly about 400 of the 100,000 or 150,000 variations materially affect the sense. Of these, again, not more than about fifty are really important for some reason or another; and even of these fifty, not one affects an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching.”[5]

Finally, there are 40 verses in the Bible which appear to be added later. These are noted in most translations, so the reader is aware. If we have any doubt as to the content or meaning of a particular verse in any translation, we have an inter-linear Bible available in the original Hebrew and Greek as a reference. In summary, the Bible has thousands of manuscripts. The variants within these manuscripts do not affect the sense or substance of their content, and confirm they were written within a few decades of the events they chronicled. They did not evolve over centuries, nor have they changed over time. Dr. Qadhi’s claims about the Bible are without substance.

Qur’an Manuscripts

Today, Islam has six major Qur’an manuscripts. All contain text without the pointing or diacritical markings of modern Arabic. The six are; Topkapi (Turkey), Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Ma’il (England), Petropolitanus (France), Husseini (Egypt), and Sa’ana (Yemen). The Topkapi was written in the mid-eighth to ninth century, contains over 2,200 variants, and is incomplete. The Samarkand contains only 43 suras, and only one of those is complete. It also contains numerous errors. The Ma’il dates to the late eighth century, only contains 43 suras, and has 1,000 variants. The Petrpolitanus dates to the early eighth century, contains only 23 suras, and has 93 variants. The Husseini is from the ninth century. Finally, the Sa’ana dates to 705 and contains over 1,000 variants.

Not one of these manuscripts is complete. The text from one manuscript does not agree with any of the others. Finally, none of these texts agree with the Qur’ans used today.

Historical Context

The material covering the Qur’an’s compilation appeared in earlier articles. To summarize:

Muhammad died in 632. All 114 suras had been received, but not written down.
Uthman had the verses collected in 652. There were six codices at the time. Uthman selected the Medinan codex as it was written in Muhammad’s dialect. All others were ordered destroyed.
The Arabic language at this time did not contain the pointing or diacritical markings used in modern Arabic. Systems developed over time to add these to the unpointed text.
Clerics applied consensus during the Abbasid dynasty, forming rules limiting the number of variant readings created from the unpointed manuscript text. However, the number of variant readings continued to increase.
As a result, there were 700 Qur’ans in use by the 10^th century. In 936, seven were chosen by Ibn Mujahid. Two transmitters for each of the seven were selected in 1194 by Al-Shatibi. Later, in 1429, three more readers were selected, along with two transmitters for each, by al-Jazari. This brings the total number of Qur’ans to thirty.

There are over 93,000 differences between the thirty texts. Egypt selected the Hafs Qur’an for official use within Egypt in 1924. This Qur’an dates to 796. Saudi Arabia selected this same Qur’an for official use in 1985. It is used by 90% of Muslims today.

The Qur’an can only be written in Arabic, but only about 15% of Muslims speak or read modern Arabic today. The top five Muslim-populated countries are: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. These five countries contain about 967 million of Islam’s 1.6 billion followers (60%). Arabic is not the official language for any of these countries.

Manuscript Problems

The manuscript on which the Hafs is based was maintained by the Ottomans. It contains erasures, insertions, coverings, and tapings, bringing the original text into alignment with the current Qur’an. Daniel Brubaker analyzed just 22 of the 4,000 consonantal differences from these early manuscripts. The changes were employed to standardize the Qur’ans and bring them into alignment with the Hafs text, indicating the Qur’an has been altered thousands of times over the centuries. When Dr. Qadhi was asked which of the Qur’ans is the Qur’an in a July 2020 interview, he responded, “They are all the Qur’an.”

Textual Research

Gunther Luling and Christoph Luxenberg are two German historians, theologians, philologists, and Arabists. One quarter or more of the Qur’an contains what are referred to as the Dark Passages. They contain poetry and other writing for which there is no known basis. Luling recognized some of the text and set about discovering their source. By removing the pointing, and translating the text into Syriac (a form of Aramaic used by Christians), he discovered the writings he analyzed came from a 5^th or 6^th century Syriac Christian hymnal.

He found four text layers within the examined writing. The earliest was pre-Islamic. Islam pressed onto this first text and frames (reinterpretation) was the second layer. Additional Islamic text was added as commentaries and glosses. Finally, the fourth layer consisted of the remaining Islamic text. Luxenberg expanded this research and discovered all of this text came from Christian homilies, lectionaries, and hymns, written in Syro-Aramaic, and inserted into Arabic later on.

Some of the text from these Christian sources has been omitted, modified, or added to over the years, but 100% of these Dark Passages came from Christian source(s). These writings all pre-date Islam, and they all concern Jesus.

Final Thoughts

As Christians, we do not claim the Bible is eternal or unchanged. It was written by divinely inspired men. But we do have “The Word of God”. It is Jesus. The same Jesus is mentioned 93 times in the Qur’an, and possibly 4 times as the “blessed one.” The same Jesus who is the subject of the Christian source material mentioned above and found within the Qur’an. Also, the “blessed one” referred to on the early Umayyad coin, and inscriptions indicating the first two Umayyad caliphs were Christians. Jesus is eternal, sent down, complete, and unchanged. Muslims are our brothers and sisters. We have what they are searching for; a personal God who loves us and wants to have a relationship with each one of us. Isn’t it time to bring them home by giving them Jesus?

How do we do that? We’ll cover some thoughts about that before we end this series. But first, there remain a couple more topics yet to cover before we close.