Description

The Quran is allegedly the last scripture given by Allah, preceded by the Torah and the Gospel (Quran 3:3). My argument against Islam will have three parts. First, I will demonstrate that the Quran and the Gospel radically oppose each other’s teachings. Second, I will demonstrate that the Quran claims continuity with its contemporary Gospel, and that hadith and early Islamic scholarship affirm this interpretation. Third, I will demonstrate that the lack of this confirmation from the Torah and Gospel leaves the Quran not only with this glaring contradiction, but with no meaningful evidence for its own authenticity.

Note: sometimes, the site I use for Quran citations glitches and does not show the cited text. If this happens, please click the site’s “reading” button and then click back to “translation.” It will fix the error.

The Islamic Dilemma

The argument which follows is called the Islamic dilemma. It appeared as early as the 8th century and became popular in the 11th. The basic syllogism is as follows:

(1) The Quran contradicts the 7th century Gospel.

(2) The Quran claims the 7th century Gospel agrees with it (Quran 3:3).

(C) If the Gospel is true, the Quran is false (contradiction). If the Gospel is false, the Quran is false (for affirming a false book).

The Contradiction

Proving the first premise is a very simple task. The Quran claims Jesus was neither killed nor crucified, but that it was only made to appear so (Quran 4:157). But in the Gospel, Jesus explicitly says ten times that He will be killed or crucified and rise from the dead, even harshly rebuking those who protested this teaching (Mark 8:31-33, 9:30-32, 10:32-34, Matt. 16:21-28, 17:21-23, 20:17-19, Luke 9:21-22, 18:31-34, John 2:19-22, 10:17-18). Each of the four Gospel accounts presents the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as the climax of the story. They are absolutely essential to the Gospel’s message, and the crucifixion is among the best-attested facts of ancient history. And we can be certain that the Gospels of the seventh century were, in substance, the Gospels we have today: we have complete Gospel manuscripts from the fourth century, namely the Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. They differ from later copies in minor details, but the crucifixion and resurrection stand at the heart of every one.

With that settled, we can move on to the next premise: that the Quran claims continuity with this Gospel. The issue here is rather obvious. Muslims will typically try to solve the problem in a few ways. Most argue that the Quran claims continuity with a long-lost Gospel – the Injil given to Jesus – not the four Gospels of the 7th century, which were corrupted over time. Others will argue that “Gospel” does not refer to every detail of the books, but only to the parts the Quran confirms, since the Quran calls itself a “guardian” (muhaymin) over earlier scripture (5:48). Unfortunately for them, there are dozens of verses in the Quran which don’t make sense when interpreted in these ways. Whatever the Injil was, the Quran repeatedly tells the Christians of Muhammad’s own day to judge by the scripture they actually had – and the only Gospels they had were the four we have now. There are so many Ayat (verses) about this that I’ve organized them into categories instead of quoting most of them outright. I invite you to read every hyperlink if you want the verbatim:

The Quran

(1) Quran 3:78 strongly implies that the contemporary Bible was not corrupt. It says: “There are some among [the Jews and Christians] who distort the Book with their tongues to make you think this distortion is from the Book – but it is not what the Book says. They say, ‘It is from Allah’ – but it is not from Allah. And so they attribute lies to Allah knowingly.” The distortion here is done with their tongues – spoken misrepresentation – and the verse says plainly that what they say is not what the Book says. It says they lied knowingly, meaning they willfully misrepresented a known Biblical truth. But how could they know the truth if the Bible they had was corrupt beyond recognition? The Quran claims to make all things clear in Quran 16:89. If you were hearing this in the seventh century, would you think the Bible was corrupt?

(2) In the following six Ayat, the Quran claims to confirm the Torah and the Gospel: Quran 2:97, 3:3, 4:136, 6:92, 20:133, 35:31. But what sense does this make if the text is corrupt? To validate the Quran using a corrupt Bible, you would first need to extract the authentic Bible… using the Quran. Calling the Quran a “guardian” over earlier scripture doesn’t help: a guardian that confirms a text and also contradicts its central claim has left the reader no way to know which parts to trust. And in Quran 2:85, 2:140, 3:69, 5:15, 5:66, and 5:68, Allah disparages the Jews and Christians for only selectively obeying scripture. But if the scripture is corrupt, they should only be obeying it selectively.

(3) These eight Ayat instruct the Jews and Christians (sometimes called “people of the book”) to verify or “judge” by “their” scripture – that is, the scripture they had at the time – reprimand them for refusing to do so, or direct the Prophet himself to consult those who read the earlier scripture: Quran 2:91, 2:101, 2:40-41, 4:47, 5:47, 7:157, 10:94, 21:7. These three Ayat speak of the scripture they “already have” or that “is in their hands“: Quran 2:89, 3:81, 5:43. The clearest is 5:47: “let the people of the Gospel judge by what Allah has revealed in it.” But this command is incoherent if the Gospel they had was corrupt beyond recognition. There’s no guidance as to which parts validate the Quran, nor even a warning that some would contradict it.

(4) Quran 61:14 and 3:55 say Allah gave Jesus’ followers victory over His opponents and made them superior until the Day of Judgement. But if the Gospel of the seventh century was corrupt, His followers were complete and utter failures. They lost Jesus’ true teachings so quickly that history has never recovered any of them, and allowed a religion which preached the crucifixion and resurrection to become the dominant belief in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Either that, or the crucifixion illusion was so good that it fooled all of Jesus’ disciples and His mother, making Allah Himself the author of the error.

(5) Quran 5:48 says Allah made the Jews, Christians, and Muslims into different communities with different codes and ways of life for the purpose of “testing [them] with what He has given each of [them],” and commands them to “compete with one another in doing good.” But Allah’s intent and command make no sense if the contemporary Bible was corrupt. If a good-faith reading of the plain words of the Gospel leads one to conclude that Jesus died and rose from the dead, why does Allah seem to claim responsibility for giving them the Gospel? Why does He sanction each community when the Quran obligates Christians to reject the central belief of their community? If the only way to validate Biblical texts is to use the Quran, wouldn’t this mean Allah failed in His goal to establish distinct, competing communities?

(6) The Quran does include several passages about Jews and Christians misrepresenting or misunderstanding scripture. Some speak of them “distorting words from their places” (4:46, 5:13, 5:41) or of Christians having “forgotten a portion” of what they were reminded of (5:14). The early commentators generally read the “distorting” verses as twisting the meaning of scripture, not rewriting its text (see Ibn Abbas, below), and forgetting a portion is not the same as possessing a corrupted book. Only one passage clearly describes writing false scripture. Quran 2:75-2:79 speaks of a group who “knowingly corrupt [the word] after understanding it… with their own hands” for “fleeting gain.” Islam’s own great exegetes – Al-Jalalayn, Ibn Abbas, Al-Wahidi – taught that this passage was about contemporary Jewish scholars who knowingly altered real prophecies describing Mohammad and published the fabrications for money. The word knowingly requires that real scripture existed at the time. Further, the Quran contrasts this group with people of the book who “truly believe… what was revealed to them” and do not alter revelation for fleeting gain (3:199), implying that many pious Jews and Christians had real revelation in their possession – again contradicting any notion of ubiquitous corruption.

The concept of widespread Biblical corruption does not appear in the Quran. In fact, it seems to suggest the opposite: Ayat 6:115 and 18:27 claim the word of Allah is unalterable. 3:78 says the distortion was in what people said, not in the Book. The Ayat which do allude to corruption refer to misinterpretation, oral misinformation, or, at worst, local fabrications. This is not just my interpretation, but the reading of the hadith and early Muslim scholarship:

Sahih Hadith

Moving on to the hadith – the recorded sayings and deeds of Mohammad, the most authoritative Muslim texts beside the Quran itself. In Sahih Muslim 8a, Mohammad says that belief in Allah’s books (plural) is an article of faith. In Sunan Ibn Majah 2558 and Sunan Abi Dawud 3626, Mohammad uses the Torah of his time, and reminds the listeners it came from Allah. In Sunan Abi Dawud 4310, Abd Allah – a Jew who converted to Islam because he found Mohammad prefigured in the Torah – uses his knowledge of it to corroborate a claim of Mohammad’s. When a man laughs at the Gospel in Sunan Abi Dawud 4736, Mohammad rebukes him because it is “the word of Allah.” In Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 2875, Mohammad speaks of the Torah, Gospel, Psalms, and Quran together as revelations of the same kind. In Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 2653, Mohammad laments that the Torah and Gospel are with the Jews and Christians, but they ignore them. (Only the first of these is from the two most authoritative collections, al-Bukhari and Muslim; the rest come from the other major collections, though each is graded as reliable.)

The silence is deafening. In the first hadith, Mohammad teaches belief in the divine books alongside belief in Allah Himself, and says nothing about corruption. Wouldn’t this caveat have been extremely important? The sole clear reference to textual corruption across Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim is Sahih al-Bukhari 7363, a saying of Ibn Abbas. But it uses the same language as Quran 2:75-2:79, describing people who “changed their scripture with their own hands” for “fleeting gain” – and the same Ibn Abbas, as we’ll see, insisted that no one could change a word of a Book of Allah. To be consistent with the Quran, the exegetes, and the previous examples, we must take this to refer to contemporaries making up new writings to sell, not widespread corruption of the Bible. Elsewhere, al-Bukhari records Mohammad telling Muslims neither to believe nor to disbelieve what the People of the Book tell them (Sahih al-Bukhari 4485) – advice about unverified oral reports, not a verdict that their scriptures were lost.

Early Scholarship

Finally, how did early Muslim scholars interpret all this? Abdullah ibn ‘Abbas (d. ~687), Mohammad’s cousin, one of his companions, and Islam’s premier early commentator, is recorded by al-Bukhari as saying: “‘They corrupt the word‘ means ‘they alter or change its meaning,’ for no one is able to change even a single word from any Book of Allah. The meaning is that they interpret the word wrongly.” Ali ibn Rabban al-Tabari (~850), a Christian convert to Islam, quoted the Bible at length as an authority in his defense of Islam, The Book of Religion and Empire.

Many other early Muslim scholars did likewise. They regularly used the Bible as an authority. Caliphal epistles addressed to the Byzantine Emperors Leo III and Constantine VI contain quotations from Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Habakkuk, and Isaiah interpreted as predictions of the Prophet Mohammad. Ibn Qutayba (notably, Signs of Prophecy), Al-Qasim al-Rassi (notably, Refutation of Christians), Al-Yaʿqūbī (notably, Tarikh), and many others likewise cited large tracts of the New Testament, and even drew from multiple popular Biblical translations as authoritative sources for apologetics, history, literature, jurisprudence, and tradition.

This view remained widespread until Ibn Hazm wrote Al-Fasl (~1030), which argued at length for widespread textual corruption. Even after this, many still defended the Bible against the corruption claim, following the earlier scholars. The Sunni theologian Fakhruddin Razi (~1200) said, for example: “The Jews and early Christians were suspected of altering the text of the Torah and Gospel; but in the opinion of eminent doctors and theologians it was not practicable thus to corrupt the text, because those Scriptures were generally known and widely circulated, having been handed down from generation to generation.” The textual corruption theory did not gain broad acceptance until later centuries, and some Muslim scholars reject it to this day.

Now you may be thinking – to this day? Yes, there are living Muslims who believe the Gospel is authentic, see that the Gospel apparently contradicts the Quran, and believe in it anyway. Their position is that the Quran contains the “real meaning” of the Gospel, so the apparent differences are actually immaterial. The obvious problem is that this would mean Allah Himself handcrafted Jesus’ message to be so mind-bogglingly confusing that not one single Christian figured out its real meaning prior to Islam, nearly every Muslim and Christian who has read it since thinks it contradicts the Quran, and He gave no warning that He had done this when He instructed Christians, over and over, to judge by it.

Quranic Miracles

So the Quran affirms the authority of a Gospel which simultaneously refutes it. But even if we set this critical issue aside, Islam has another problem: deprived of the witness of previous scripture, Muslims need to justify belief in the Quran on some other basis. How do they do this? Mohammad didn’t prove it by miracles in the traditional sense, since the Quran itself answers demands for signs by saying he is only a warner (13:7, 29:50). Rather, he says the Quran itself is the miracle, challenging doubters to produce something like it (2:23, 17:88, 11:13). Modern Muslim apologists likewise argue for the Quran’s authenticity by claiming it contains multiple miraculous signs of divine origin in itself. Let’s explore these claims.

Perfect Textual Preservation

First, the most popular apologetic: miraculously perfect textual preservation. A little Quranic history first: traditionally, Muslims believe Mohammad recited the Quran in seven modes (ahruf). After his death, his revelations underwent two rounds of standardization, under Abu Bakr and Uthman. These codices were written in a script without dots or vowels, which had to be “filled in” by trained reciters – allowing some variation in reading while ensuring a uniform written skeleton. Upon completion of the second codex, Uthman had all competing versions burned. Today, there are ten canonical Quran recitations, or Qira’at, all sharing the Uthmanic skeleton. Muslim pop apologists and laymen, often unaware of this, claim that the Quran is perfectly preserved down to word, letter, and punctuation, but this is plainly false: the ten Qira’at differ in words, letters, and vowels.

More learned Muslims will instead argue that the Qira’at are divinely revealed alternatives. Their differences are real, but never contradict, only add depth. But this isn’t true either. For example, Quran 11:81 reads, “Lot… travel with your family in the dark of night, and do not let any of you look back, except your wife. She will certainly suffer [Sodom’s fate].” In the standard reading (Hafs), “except your wife” is accusative, meaning it attaches to “travel with your family”: Lot is to leave his wife behind in the city. But in the readings of Ibn Kathir and Abu Amr, “except your wife” is nominative, meaning it attaches to “let none of you look back”: she leaves with the family, but looks back and dies. One reading says she stayed; the other says she left. Al-Jalalayn and Ibn Kathir acknowledge both readings and the difference between them.

Given this, only one option remains. Muslims can take the truly traditional approach and say the Qira’at are not all divine, equal alternatives. I call this “truly traditional” because Shady Hekmat Nasser, a leading scholar on the history of the reading traditions and their canonization, argues that this was the view in early Islam. Ibn Mujahid, the scholar who established the canonical system of readings, treated the variants more like scholarly judgments than verbatim divine speech. He and his contemporaries regularly argued about which variants were better than others, and denounced variants considered canonical today. It was only later that scholars “back-projected” divine certainty onto the Qira’at. But this undermines any narrative of miraculous preservation. At most, a Muslim could claim the Uthmanic codex was divinely preserved, but this is unprovable, since nearly every text we could compare it to was burned. Hardly useful for apologetics.

A related claim is that the Quran is miraculous because millions of Muslims have memorized it word for word, so that it could never be lost even if every copy were destroyed. This is a genuinely impressive devotion, but it is not a miracle. First, mass memorization of sacred texts is a human practice found in other traditions too: Hindu priests have transmitted the Vedas orally, with extraordinary precision, for some three thousand years, and Jewish scholars long preserved vast bodies of law and commentary by memory. No one concludes from this that the Vedas are divine. Second, memorization preserves a text from the point it is memorized; it says nothing about where the text came from, and nothing about what was lost before the Uthmanic standard was fixed and the competing copies burned. Third, memorizers learn a particular reading – usually Hafs – so memorization faithfully preserves the very differences between the Qira’at discussed above, rather than erasing them. A carefully kept tradition is evidence of careful keepers, not of a divine author.

Miraculous Beauty

Second, the miraculous beauty of the poetry. First, obviously, this is subjective. One might consider Paradise Lost to be of divine origin by this standard. Second, the Quran itself recounts people receiving it with indifference, calling it “ancient fables,” plagiarism, and “of human origin” (Quran 6:25, 8:31, 9:61, 16:24, 16:103, 17:94, 23:83, 25:4, 27:68, 46:17, 68:15, 83:13). Some will claim that Islam spread because of the beauty of the Quran, but this ignores the Quran’s own record that many people weren’t impressed by it, as well as the fact that Islam’s early expansion came largely through military conquest.

Some will qualify the claim, saying the poetry is miraculously beautiful given Mohammad’s illiteracy. First, the claim that Mohammad was illiterate comes from Islamic tradition, and it is open to question, given that he was a successful merchant in a major trading hub for years. Second, even if he was illiterate, he didn’t write down the Quran; he recited it, and others wrote it down. A merchant – and a skilled speaker – recited his revelations over some twenty years; others collected them, and the text was standardized after his death. Even if the Quran is too beautiful to come from an illiterate man, the text as we have it did not come from him alone.

Miraculous Purity

Third, Muslims argue that the Quran is a miraculous return to Abraham’s pure monotheism. They show this by contrasting Islam with Judaism’s legalism and Christianity’s Trinitarian theology. Now, this claim assumes Abraham’s monotheism was true divine revelation. The two sources for this would be the Quran (circular), or the Torah. But on what basis would we accept Abraham’s role in the Torah, which constitutes only 13 chapters, while rejecting the vast majority of the text, which pertains to the law of Moses? Regarding Trinitarianism: Christians believe in one divine essence (one “what”) which is three persons (three “who’s”). Muslims claim this is a logical contradiction, that three cannot be one. But this argument relies on an understanding of physical objects, while Muslims themselves teach that Allah is nothing like creatures (42:11) – and, as the previous page showed, the doctrine involves no contradiction at all. Finally, there’s no independent evidence of any Abrahamic worship in Arabia that looked anything like Islam, before Islam.

Miraculous Knowledge

Fourth, the miraculous knowledge of Allah’s transcendent nature, as expressed by the divine names. Islamic tradition lists 99 names for Allah, drawn from the Quran; examples include Ar-Rahman (The Most Compassionate), Ar-Rahim (The Most Merciful), Al-Malik (The King), Al-Quddus (The Pure One), and Al-Khaliq (The Creator). But again, this isn’t proof of anything. The Zoroastrians likewise had a list of 101 names for God, including Khwafar (Compassionate), Avakhshiaea (Merciful Giver), Harvesp-khoda (Lord of all), Tum-afik (The Purest), and Mino-satihgar (The Creator). Does this prove Zoroastrianism is divine? What empirically differentiates this list from the Quran’s?

Prophetic and Scientific Miracles

Fifth, prophetic miracles. Let’s look at some of the common examples used by Muslim apologists. “Their skins will bear witness against them as to what they have been doing” (41:21). This is allegedly fulfilled by fingerprint technology. “Corruption has spread on land and sea because of what men’s hands have wrought” (30:42). This is allegedly fulfilled by pollution. “And when the wild beasts are gathered together” (81:6). This is allegedly fulfilled by zoos. I don’t feel the need to argue these at length. If the Quran were really prophetic, one should be able to use it to identify events before they happen. No classical commentator ever used these Ayat to predict any of these modern realities. Ambiguous application to vaguely comparable events after the fact proves nothing.

Sixth, scientific miracles. Again, let’s look at a few popular examples. “We built the universe with great might, and We are certainly expanding it” (51:47). This is allegedly proven by the expansion of the universe. “We made every living thing from water, will they not believe?” (21:30). This is allegedly proven by the fact that organisms are largely composed of water. These claims have the same issue as the previous examples. If the Quran holds divine scientific knowledge, one should be able to use it to make scientific discoveries. Again, no classical commentator used these Ayat to predict these scientific facts. And Muslim apologists take advantage of the flexibility of Arabic to stretch their interpretations: classical commentators generally read 51:47 as describing the vastness of the heavens, not an ever-expanding universe.

Errors and Contradictions

Seventh, the miracle of no errors and no contradictions. First, there are many apparent Quranic errors – the claim that Jews called Ezra the son of God (9:30), that bones develop before muscles (23:14), or that the Pharaoh of Moses’ day punished by crucifixion (20:71). As to contradictions, the Quran teaches that Allah is nothing like creatures (42:11), yet describes Him with a shin (68:42) and hands (38:75). The Bible also speaks of God’s hands, of course, but Christians have near-universally read such passages as metaphors, and have had no trouble doing so. Not so in Islam. A major strand of Sunni Islam – the Athari or Hanbali school, championed by Ibn Taymiyya and followed by today’s Salafis – insists that these are Allah’s real attributes, to be affirmed “without asking how,” because the words of the Quran must be taken as they stand. Other Sunnis accused them of making God like a creature; they accused their opponents of denying the Quran. That dispute has run for over a thousand years. So the Quran, which claims to make all things clear (16:89), has left its most devoted readers unable to agree on whether Allah has hands – and one side of that dispute can hold its view only in tension with the Quran’s own insistence that nothing is like Him. But even if the Quran were entirely error-free, it would prove little. Many decidedly man-made first-grade math textbooks are free of error.

Miraculous Prophet

Eighth, Muslims argue that Mohammad must have been a true prophet. This is an uphill battle, since, as we discussed, Mohammad did not offer miracles as signs. Their evidence for this claim is that the scriptures foretold him, and that he could not have been deluded or lying. We will discuss each of these.

The claim that the scriptures foretold him is a clear after-the-fact justification. There is no mention of Mohammad in any pre-Islamic Jewish or Christian interpretation. Muslims often appeal to Jesus’ promise to send a “Comforter” as such a prophecy, but Jesus promises the Comforter to the Apostles and says He will live invisibly within them (John 14:15-17). Hardly a description of a visible Arabian man born six centuries later. Others appeal to God’s promise to make Ishmael’s descendants a great nation (Gen. 17:20). But the same passage says the covenant belongs to Isaac (Gen. 17:15-22), and Ishmael is described as a “wild donkey of a man,” at odds with everyone (Gen. 16:12). John of Damascus saw in this a sign that Islam was a religion established outside the covenant.

A few points bear on delusion or deception. Mohammad, as we’ve said, was a merchant in a multicultural center. There were no Arabic translations of the Bible in his time, but he would have heard much of its content. If the Quran is largely him retelling the things he heard with his own embellishments – whether sincerely mistaken, deceptive, or both – that would explain its contents well. Much of the Quran retells Biblical stories. Some of its theology echoes ideas found in heretical sects of the early centuries – for example, the claim that Jesus only appeared to be crucified, which the second-century teacher Basilides taught (as recorded by St. Irenaeus) and which appears in the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter (ironically, their reasoning was that a divine being could not die). Other passages reflect misunderstandings, like identifying the Trinity as Allah, Jesus, and Mary (4:171; this is how Islam’s own exegetes Ibn Abbas, Al-Jalalayn, and Ibn Kathir interpreted it).

As for deception specifically, several revelations are, at the very least, suspiciously convenient. The Quran grants Mohammad privileges you probably wouldn’t expect in divine revelation. Allah allows him to exceed the four-wife limit (33:50), tells him he may choose which of his wives to spend time with (33:51), tells Muslims not to linger in his house because he is too shy to ask them to leave, and forbids his wives to remarry after his death (33:53), and permits him to marry his adopted son’s ex-wife, a marriage Arab custom had forbidden until this revelation (33:37). Muslims appeal to the fact that Mohammad was known for his trustworthiness, but that information comes from Islamic tradition – not particularly compelling.

Perfect Moral Teaching

Ninth, perfect understanding of human social and personal needs, and timeless moral teaching. Let’s examine this claim through the teaching and example of Mohammad. The Quran describes Heaven as a garden where the faithful are given beautiful, wide-eyed companions (44:51-54, 38:52, 52:17-20, 55:56, 56:22, 56:35, 78:33). It sets a waiting period for divorced wives “who have not yet menstruated” (65:4), which classical jurists took to permit marriage to girls before puberty. It permits sexual relations with female slaves (33:50, 23:6-7, 70:29-30, 8:69), including captive women whose husbands are still living (4:24), and allows polygamy with up to four wives (4:3). And Mohammad, presented as the model of moral conduct for all time (33:21), married his adopted son’s former wife on the authority of a revelation (33:37), married more than the four-wife limit, and kept concubines (33:50).

These teachings require Muslims to believe not only that there is nothing wrong with sexual slavery, but that it was fitting behavior for humanity’s moral exemplar. Many Muslims today answer that these practices were moral for their time and place, but not for ours. But that answer abandons the very claim at hand: that the Quran’s moral teaching is miraculously timeless. And it is not the classical position. Classical Islamic law affirmed slavery outright. Reliance of the Traveller, a standard manual of Sunni jurisprudence, translated into English in 1991, says, “when a child or woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately null” (link, p. 622); Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious institution of Sunni learning, certified the translation for its “[conformity] to the faith and practice of the orthodox Sunni Community.” Many modern Muslim scholars rightly condemn slavery – but to do so, they must set aside what their own tradition long held, and what their Prophet practiced.

And even if one takes the route of affirming this, it creates yet another contradiction with the Gospel. Jesus forbids divorce and remarriage, restores marriage to one man and one woman, and prohibits even looking at a woman with lust (Matt. 19, Matt. 5:28). If Islam is true, Allah changed His mind about morality: tightening sexual ethics from Moses to Jesus, and then reversing them with Mohammad. First, one may not even look at a woman with lust; then, Heaven is a reward of beautiful companions. First, humanity’s moral exemplar is a celibate carpenter; then, a military leader with many wives and concubines. If Islam is true, it seems God could not settle what is moral. But if that is the case, how could we claim the Quran is morally timeless?

Summary

The Quran contradicts the Gospel’s central message: that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. Yet the Quran contains more than twenty Ayat claiming continuity with the scriptures of its day, and repeatedly tells Jews and Christians to judge by the books in their hands. Only one passage clearly speaks of writing false scripture, and it describes 7th-century individuals “knowingly” fabricating texts – so even this exception assumes the true scripture existed at the time. The hadith speak of the Torah and Gospel in the hands of Jews and Christians as the word of Allah; the one clear reference to textual corruption in the most authoritative collections has the same limited, contemporary context as the Quran. And the early Islamic scholarly consensus was that the corruption was of interpretation, not of the text. This alone should be sufficient to show that the Quran is not authentic scripture.

Nor does the Quran have meaningful evidence of its own divine origin to fall back on. The claims made for it are circular, self-contradicting, subjective, or some combination of the three; and the claim of timeless moral teaching contradicts the very Gospel the Quran claims to confirm. The Quran’s own words, more than any argument of its critics, are the strongest case against it.

All that said – if the Quran fails to overturn the Gospel, Christ’s claims stand. What remains, then, is to ensure we are following Him well. This is the subject of the next section.