Countering 3 Muslim Attacks On The Bible

Pew Research Center reports that Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing religious group. In North America, Islam is growing not only by immigration and high birth rates but also by evangelism and strategic expansion.

As Florida imam Muhammad Musri states in a recent sermon, “We [Muslims] are jumping on the opportunities that as these churches empty out . . . we are buying these churches. We bought three churches so far and converted them into masjids.” Unfortunately, this story is all too common. The last mosque I visited in Kansas City was also a former church that had been converted by Muslims.

The need to evangelize Muslims in America has never been greater. However, one of the biggest barriers to sharing the good news of Jesus with Muslims is their belief that the biblical text is corrupt. That’s why, they argue, the Bible’s account of Isa al-Masih (“Jesus the Messiah”) isn’t enough. Nevertheless, Christians sharing the gospel with them need to learn to respond graciously to the three most common Muslim objections to the Bible’s accuracy.

Religious Envy

According to Muslim tradition, Jews purposefully erased the descriptions of Muhammad from the Torah out of jealousy about his success. This accusation was most clearly stated by Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d. AD 767), the author of the earliest extant commentary (tafsir) on the Qur’an, in his remarks about Sura 2:79.

While the testimony of the Qur’an concerning the Bible is overwhelmingly positive (see Q2:4; 5:66; 10:94; 12:111), Muqatil narrows the application of these verses that affirm the Bible’s truthfulness to texts we no longer have. The argument is that the texts the Qur’an celebrates have been lost or intentionally corrupted. Thus, Jews and Christians, who are also considered “People of the Book,” are deemed untrustworthy.

This argument is perhaps the most straightforward to refute because manuscript evidence shows the consistency of the current text of the Torah with manuscripts that predate Muhammad. For example, the fifth-century manuscript Codex Alexandrinus contains the majority of the Old Testament in Greek. Other examples include the Latin Vulgate (completed in the fifth century) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (225 BC to AD 50), which contain partial or complete copies of every book in the Old Testament except Esther. If the Torah was corrupted at the time of Muhammad, we should find evidence of corruption (i.e., prophecies naming Muhammad) in those early manuscripts, but we don’t.

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Another common argument among Muslims against the Bible’s truthfulness is that Ezra the scribe rewrote and corrupted the Torah after the Babylonian exile (see Neh. 8:1). Ibn Hazm (d. AD 1064) claimed it was impossible for the Jews to preserve a reliable copy of the Torah during their persecution and exile in Babylon in the sixth century BC; therefore, Ezra must have modified existing fragments to create a coherent text. Furthermore, Ibn Hazm accuses the four Gospel authors as the chief corrupters of the Gospel (a literal book Allah gave to Jesus), calling Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John “the most deceitful people of creation.”

The major problem with this argument is that it directly contradicts the Qur’an. Ezra lived in the fifth century BC, more than a thousand years before the time of Muhammad (d. AD 632). Yet numerous verses in the Qur’an indicate that in Muhammad’s time, the Torah and Gospel were intact and in the hands of the Jews and Christians (e.g., Q7:157).

For example, Allah tells the Jews in Sura 2:41, “Believe in what I have sent down [Qur’an] confirming that which is already with you [Torah].” Even further, Sura 10:94 says, “So if you are in doubt, [O Muhammad], about that which We have revealed to you, then ask those who have been reading the Scripture [Torah and Gospel] before you.” The Qur’an’s testimony about the Bible undermines accusations of the Bible’s corruption.

Perhaps more significantly, it’s hard to imagine why the four evangelists would want to corrupt the Gospel. If Jesus’s Gospel simply contained the message to submit to one God, as Muslims claim, then Jewish religious leaders would’ve been unlikely to kill him or persecute his disciples. Instead, Jesus’s disciples faced bitter persecution for their message that Jesus is the divine Son of God who rose from the grave. There’s neither textual evidence nor psychological warrant for believing Muslim accusations about the disciples corrupting a preexisting Gospel text.

Broken Transmission

The third argument is perhaps the most common. Many Muslims argue that early Christians couldn’t have preserved Scripture under the fierce persecution of the Romans and Jews. They assert that Allah sent Jesus the Gospel as a physical book for the disciples to proclaim. However, over the decades after Jesus’s ascension, this Gospel was distorted into four Gospels. Furthermore, they say, the chain of transmission for these Gospels was broken when the disciples were scattered and persecuted from the moment of Jesus’s arrest until the time of Constantine (d. AD 337). This theory is flawed.

There’s neither textual evidence nor psychological warrant for believing Muslim accusations about the disciples corrupting a preexisting Gospel text.

This theory of textual corruption relies on the belief that an authoritative council created the biblical canon at Nicaea. However, there’s no historical basis for the idea that the Council of Nicaea discussed and established the biblical canon. According to John Meade, this myth originated in a late ninth-century Greek manuscript called Synodicon Vetus, which purports that a miracle occurred at the Council: God caused the canonical books to stay on a table while moving the noncanonical books underneath. But the Council was convened to settle the Arian controversy, not to sort out which books should be in the canon.

Moreover, Muslims tend to emphasize the necessity of having an unbroken chain of transmission (tawātur) to verify oral traditions. However, deciphering the soundness of transmission is unnecessary if the account was written by eyewitnesses or their close companions.

While it’s true that the early Christians had no overarching authority to supervise and authenticate the written Gospels, the uncontrolled and free transmission of the canonical Gospels makes the Bible’s accuracy more historically compelling. Apologist Wesley Huff points out that the rapid, free transmission of the New Testament resulted in multifocality, as it was written by multiple authors to multiple audiences and transmitted by multiple copyists across multiple locations.

The uncontrolled and free transmission of the canonical Gospels makes the Bible’s accuracy more historically compelling.

In fact, the four Gospels have remarkable textual tenacity. Christians have a solid historical basis for asserting that the Gospels as known today are consistent with those known to the original audiences.

In contrast, the transmission of the Qur’an was controlled from the top down, which makes the Qur’an less historically reliable. Significantly, Sahih al-Bukhari 4987 recounts the story that the third caliph, Uthman, ordered a scribe named Zayd ibn Thabit to rewrite the Qur’an manuscripts in perfect copies out of fear of disagreement among Muslims concerning the Qur’an. After Uthman sent out these rewritten manuscripts to each Muslim province, he ordered that all other Qur’anic materials be burned. Therefore, the question of textual corruption is more difficult for Muslims to answer than for Christians.

Though the fruit of evangelism will only come through the Holy Spirit’s work, we should long for Muslims to read the Bible and discover the power of the gospel for salvation. Understanding these three key accusations against Scripture will help Christians as we point our Muslim neighbors toward Christ.