The Dilemma Stated

Critics reply that the tahrif response collides with the Quran’s own wording. First, the corruption proof texts describe distortion “with their tongues” (Quran 3:78) — misreading, mispronouncing, concealing — and 3:78 explicitly says they do this “so that you may think it is from the Scripture, but it is not from the Scripture,” which presupposes an intact Scripture against which the distortion is measured. Second, Quran 5:43 says the Jews of Medina have the Torah “in which is the judgement of Allah” — present tense, about physical books in seventh-century Arabia. Third, Quran 10:94 tells Muhammad to resolve his own doubts by asking the People of the Book, which would be incoherent advice if their scriptures were corrupt. Fourth, the claim that the “real Injil” is lost is an article of faith with no manuscript, patristic, or historical evidence: no fragment, citation, or memory of any such book exists, whereas the four Gospels are attested within decades of Jesus.

Classical Muslim scholarship itself was divided. The thoroughgoing textual-corruption thesis is largely a development associated with Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), four centuries after Muhammad, formulated in polemical context. Earlier and later authorities — al-Tabari on several verses, al-Razi, and in the modern period Muhammad Abduh, who wrote that the charge of textual corruption “makes no sense at all,” since Jews and Christians scattered across the world could never have coordinated identical changes — located the corruption in interpretation, not text. The manuscript record settles the empirical question: the Bible Muhammad’s contemporaries possessed is the Bible we can read today in manuscripts that predate him. Whatever the Quran was confirming in 600s Arabia, we still have it — and the Quran contradicts it.