Was the Bible Corrupted?

Talk with a Muslim friend about Jesus for long, and you will reach a quiet wall: “But your Bible has been changed.” It is not usually said in anger. Most Muslims were simply taught it from childhood, and it settles every question in advance. If the Bible was corrupted, then nothing it says about the cross, the Son, or salvation needs an answer. This study looks at that wall carefully: what the Qur’an itself says about the Torah and the Gospel, what the oldest copies of the Bible show, and when such a change could ever have happened.

The question under every question

The Arabic word is tahrif, distortion. Many Muslims believe that the Jews and Christians altered their Scriptures, so that the Torah given to Moses and the Gospel given to Jesus no longer survive as they were. The Qur’an, on this view, is the only revelation that has come down untouched.

If you are a Muslim reading this, we want to say first that we understand why the question matters to you. You love God and want His true word, not a human imitation. So do we. We are not asking you to accept anything on our say-so. We are asking you to weigh two witnesses that you can check for yourself: your own Book, and the manuscripts.

The Qur’an verses below are quoted from the Sahih International translation, which many English-speaking Muslims use. Words in square brackets are the translators’ own additions. Bible verses are from the King James Version.

What the Qur’an says about the Torah and the Gospel

Begin with the Qur’an’s own words. It does not speak of the earlier Scriptures as lost or ruined. It speaks of them as God’s revelation, present and in the hands of the Jews and Christians of Muhammad’s own day.

And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus, the son of Mary, confirming that which came before him in the Torah; and We gave him the Gospel, in which was guidance and light and confirming that which preceded it of the Torah as guidance and instruction for the righteous.

The very next verse gives a command to the Christians living in Arabia at that time:

And let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allāh has revealed therein.

Think about what that command assumes. You cannot tell people to judge by a book they no longer have, or by a book that has been ruined. The verse treats the Gospel in Christian hands as something that still contains “what Allāh has revealed.” Just before it, the Qur’an says the same about the Torah in Jewish hands:

But how is it that they come to you for judgement while they have the Torah, in which is the judgement of Allāh?

“They have the Torah, in which is the judgement of Allāh.” Present tense. And a few verses later:

Say, “O People of the Scripture, you are [standing] on nothing until you uphold [the law of] the Torah, the Gospel, and what has been revealed to you from your Lord …”

Jews and Christians are told to uphold the Torah and the Gospel. Elsewhere the Qur’an describes the Messenger as one “whom they find written [i.e., described] in what they have of the Torah and the Gospel” (Sura 7:157). Again: what they have. The Qur’an points to the Scriptures that were actually in their hands.

Then comes the most striking verse of all. It speaks to the Prophet himself:

So if you are in doubt, [O Muḥammad], about that which We have revealed to you, then ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you. The truth has certainly come to you from your Lord, so never be among the doubters.

If there is doubt, the Qur’an sends the doubter to the people reading the earlier Scripture. It would make no sense to settle doubt by consulting a corrupted book.

The Qur’an never calls the Torah and Gospel of Muhammad’s day corrupted. It tells Jews and Christians to judge by them and uphold them, and sends the doubter to them.

Some Muslims answer from Sura 5:48, which says the Qur’an came “confirming that which preceded it of the Scripture and as a criterion over it.” But notice what the verse actually does. It calls the earlier books “the Scripture” and says the Qur’an confirms them. A judge who confirms a document does not declare it forged.

“None can alter His words”

The Qur’an also teaches that God’s words cannot be changed:

And the word of your Lord has been fulfilled in truth and in justice. None can alter His words, and He is the Hearing, the Knowing.

And recite, [O Muḥammad], what has been revealed to you of the Book of your Lord. There is no changer of His words, and never will you find in other than Him a refuge.

Two similar verses (6:34 and 10:64) say there is no change in “the words of Allāh,” and to be fair, Sahih International adds the note “[i.e., decrees]” there, reading them as God’s decisions rather than His books. But 6:115 and 18:27 carry no such note.

Put this beside the verses above. The Qur’an calls the Torah and the Gospel revelations God sent down (Sura 3:3; 5:44–46). It also says no one can alter God’s words. If both are true, the claim that men altered the Torah and the Gospel runs against the Qur’an itself. Christians and Jews believe the same thing about God’s word, and the Bible says it first:

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.

The verses about distortion

A fair study has to look at the verses Muslims quote for corruption, too. There are several, and we quote them in full:

Do you covet [the hope, O believers], that they would believe for you while a party of them used to hear the words of Allāh and then distort it [i.e., the Torah] after they had understood it while they were knowing?

So woe to those who write the “scripture” with their own hands, then say, “This is from Allāh,” in order to exchange it for a small price. Woe to them for what their hands have written and woe to them for what they earn.

And indeed, there is among them a party who alter the Scripture with their tongues so you may think it is from the Scripture, but it is not from the Scripture. And they say, “This is from Allāh,” but it is not from Allāh. And they speak untruth about Allāh while they know.

Sura 4:46 and 5:13 say some “distort words from their [proper] places [i.e., usages].” In 4:46 the examples given are spoken words, people “twisting their tongues” to mock while appearing to agree.

Read carefully, these verses describe people doing wrong: “a party of them,” “a party who alter the Scripture with their tongues,” men who write something of their own and sell it as God’s. That is twisting the meaning of a text, misreporting it aloud, or passing off a counterfeit. None of these verses says the Torah and Gospel themselves, copied across the world, were rewritten. And they were given in the very same years as 5:43, which says the Jews “have the Torah, in which is the judgement of Allāh.” If the Torah had already been destroyed, that verse could not be true.

The Bible itself warns against exactly this sin. Moses wrote, “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it” (Deuteronomy 4:2), and the last chapter of the Bible warns anyone who would add to or take away from its words (Revelation 22:18–19). Peter warned of people who “wrest” the Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16). Twisting God’s word is an old sin. That is different from the word itself being lost.

When could it have happened?

Here is the simplest question to ask, and it is worth asking gently: when was the Bible changed?

Not before Muhammad. Muhammad began receiving revelation around AD 610 and died in 632. Throughout those years the Qur’an spoke of the Torah and Gospel as present, as guidance and light, and as the standard Jews and Christians must judge by. So, by the Qur’an’s own witness, the Scriptures in Arabia during Muhammad’s life were still trustworthy.

Not after Muhammad. We still have copies of the Bible written centuries before he was born. If the Bibles we read today match those earlier copies, then nothing was changed after his time either. We can check this, and the next section does.

And think about what such a change would have required. By the seventh century the Bible had been copied by hand for hundreds of years, in Hebrew and Greek, and translated into Syriac, Latin, Coptic, Armenian and other languages. Copies were spread from Spain to Persia and from Ethiopia to Britain. They were kept by Jews and by Christians, who disagreed bitterly, and by Christian churches that had split from one another and accused each other of error. To change the Bible, someone would have had to gather every copy in every language from every rival community and alter them all the same way, without anyone noticing or leaving a record.

The Qur’an vouches for the Scriptures in Muhammad’s day, and the manuscripts show the text has not changed since. That leaves no time when the corruption could have happened.

The manuscripts

Until 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew copies of the Old Testament dated from around the tenth century AD. Then shepherds near the Dead Sea found clay jars of scrolls in a cave at Qumran. Among them was a complete scroll of the prophet Isaiah, the Great Isaiah Scroll, copied around 150–100 BC. That is about a thousand years older than the copies scholars had before, and more than seven hundred years before Muhammad.

When the two were compared, they told the same book. The differences are overwhelmingly matters of spelling and small details of wording. Isaiah 53, the chapter of the Servant who is “wounded for our transgressions,” was there, as it is in your Bible today.

Altogether the Dead Sea caves held about 230 manuscripts of biblical books, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, covering every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. Some are only fragments. But the books Jesus called “the law of Moses, and … the prophets, and … the psalms” (Luke 24:44) were there, centuries before Christ, saying what they say now.

The New Testament is better attested than any other book from the ancient world:

• More than 5,800 Greek manuscripts have been catalogued, from small fragments to complete New Testaments, besides thousands more in early translations.
• Papyrus copies from around AD 200, such as those known as P66 and P75, preserve large parts of the Gospels of Luke and John. Their dates are estimated from the handwriting.
• Two great Bibles from the 300s, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, contain all four Gospels, copied about 250 years before Muhammad.
• A harmony of the four Gospels, the Diatessaron, was made around AD 170. So the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were already together in Christian hands by the second century.
• Early translations into Syriac, Latin, Coptic and Armenian were made before Islam began, carrying the same Gospels into other languages and other lands.

That last point answers a common reply: that the true Injil was a single book given to Jesus, and the four Gospels are something else. The Christians of Muhammad’s day were reading the four Gospels. Those are the Scriptures the Qur’an refers to as “what they have of the Torah and the Gospel” (Sura 7:157). There was no other Gospel in their hands for the Qur’an to mean.

And what do these early copies say? That Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31). That He was crucified, died and rose again. These are not late additions. They run through every Gospel, in every early manuscript, in every language.

What the copyists got wrong

We do not claim that every copyist was perfect. Hand-copying produces mistakes, and the Bible’s copyists made them: a letter dropped, a line skipped, a word spelled differently. Most of the differences between manuscripts are of this kind.

What Muslim scholars said

Honesty means showing the Muslim sources that go against our case as well as those that support it.

Ibn Abbas, a cousin of Muhammad who died around AD 687, told Muslims not to ask the People of the Scripture about religious matters, because God had told them the Jews and Christians “changed their scripture and distorted it” (Sahih al-Bukhari 7363). That is a real statement, and many Muslims rely on it.

But consider three things. First, it is the opinion of a companion, given after Muhammad’s death, not a verse of the Qur’an. The Qur’an itself, as we have seen, tells Christians to judge by the Gospel and sends the doubter to them. Second, his words echo Sura 2:79, which speaks of men writing something of their own and selling it as God’s. That describes particular people, not the worldwide text. Third, the manuscripts answer the question regardless of anyone’s opinion. The Bible copied long before Ibn Abbas was born is the Bible we read now.

Other reports point the other way. In Sunan Abi Dawud (4449), when a group of Jews asked Muhammad to judge a case, he called for the Torah, took the cushion from beneath himself, placed the Torah on it, and said, “I believed in thee and in Him Who revealed thee.” To be fair, scholars of hadith disagree about this report: al-Albani graded it good, while al-Arna’ut judged it weak in this wording. We do not build on it. But it shows that Muslim tradition does not speak with one voice.

Muslim scholars have long debated whether the “distortion” in the Qur’an means a change of meaning or a change of text. Some early commentators held that the problem was false interpretation. The full argument that the text itself was rewritten was set out most systematically by Ibn Hazm of Córdoba in the eleventh century, about four hundred years after Muhammad.

The strongest form of the corruption claim came centuries after the Qur’an, and the manuscripts from before the Qur’an do not support it.

One standard for both books

Why do Muslims trust that the Qur’an has been preserved? Usually for good reasons: it was recited and memorized by many, written down early, copied carefully and spread widely, so that no one person could change it.

Those are fair reasons. But they apply to the Bible at least as strongly. Its books were read aloud every Sabbath in synagogues and every week in churches, copied for centuries with great care, translated into many languages, and spread across three continents among communities that watched one another closely. If those reasons are enough to trust one book, they are enough to trust the other. We ask only that the same standard be used for both.

What Jesus said about the Scriptures

Muslims honor Jesus, ‘Isa al-Masih, as a true prophet. So it matters what He said about the Scriptures of His own day. He did not call them corrupted. He said they could not fail:

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

He sent people to them: “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me” (John 5:39). He named them, “the law of Moses, and … the prophets, and … the psalms” (Luke 24:44), the same Hebrew Scriptures that Jewish people still hold today, and the same books found in the Dead Sea caves. And of His own words He said:

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

If Jesus is a true prophet, His promise is true. His words have not passed away. We can read them still.

Read it for yourself

The claim that the Bible was corrupted is often accepted without anyone ever opening one. We would ask you to do what the Qur’an itself suggests and read it. The Qur’an tells Muslims to speak with the People of the Scripture “in a way that is best” and to say, “our God and your God is one” (Sura 29:46). That is a good place to begin a conversation.

Start with one of the Gospels, perhaps the Gospel of John, and read it as a seeker, not as an opponent. Weigh it as the people of Berea did, who “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). John tells us why he wrote:

But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.

The same Gospel that the Qur’an calls guidance and light is in your hands today. For a fuller word to our Muslim friends on the one true God and His Son, see A Letter to Our Muslim Friends. And if you have heard the related claim that Paul changed the message of Jesus, see Jesus or Paul?

The Bible has not been lost. The word of our God stands, and it still points to the Son.

Further reading