What does the Q'uran say about the Bible being Corrupted?

The Quran says that the Scriptures were not corrupted because Muhammad instructed Christians to judge the Quran by the Gospel! Why would Muhammad instruct Christians to judge by a corrupted Gospel?

Sura 5:47 Let the people of the Gospel judge by what Allah hath revealed therein.

Sura 5:68 Say: "O People of the Book! ye have no ground to stand upon unless ye stand fast by the Law, the Gospel, and all the revelation that has come to you from your Lord."

Many say that our Bible that we Christians have in our possession is corrupted and the original scriptures that they were based upon are lost. Therefore, many also state that what we Christians have is a product of men’s interpretation and implication of what Christians believe.   According to the Quran they are wrong because Muhammad said 400 years after the Bible was completely complied, copied accurately and distributed by the millions throughout the known world in the 7^th century:

Sura 80:13-16 (It is) in Books held (greatly) in honour, Exalted (in dignity), kept pure and holy, (Written) by the hands of scribes- Honourable and Pious and Just.

(There were no Islamic books at the time of this Sura 80 "revelation" from Mohammed's early Mecca days.)

By Muhammad saying these ayats in Sura 80, he completely exonerates the producers of the Bible as well as the Bible itself. It clears them of tampering with the original texts. Who did he clear of any tampering? The Jews and the Christians who are the producers of the Holy books of God. So what does the Quran say about those who turn people away from God’s holy books?

Sura 4:136 O ye who believe! Believe in Allah and His Messenger, and the scripture which He hath sent to His Messenger and the scripture which He sent to those before (him). Any who denieth Allah, His angels, His Books, His Messengers, and the Day of Judgment, hath gone far, far astray.

At the time Muhammad said this Ayat in Sura 4, there was no Quran written.  So he was not speaking about the Quran or else he would have said “His Book ” not “His Books”.  In saying “His” denotes that the books were personally designated to Allah.  Allah is the Arabic word for God.  The only books that were in existence in Muhammad’s day that were considered God’s Holy Books was the Bible, both Old Testament (Torah in Hebrew or Tuarat in Arabic) and New Testament (Injil in Arabic).  Funny, the very same books that many people today cause many other people to turn from believing in, under the unprovable claim of corruption, is acting contrary to the instruction of the Quran!  According to Muhammad and the Quran, They that practice such activity have strayed very far away from God.

Now, someone will say that all those ayats were abrogated.  Really? Then how can anyone believe that which was abrogated?  The word “abrogated” is defined as completely wiping something completely out of existence or has no legal authority anymore.  The question is can you believe in something that no longer exists or has no legal power over you? No you cannot, for that which has been eliminated cannot be any longer believed upon.  For once it is removed from the recognition and memory of mankind it is impossible to ever retrieve it. It no longer exists. So the question is, what were those abrogated ayats superseded by? Furthermore, why recite it and commit to the memory of it if it is abrogated?  It appears that the Islam that is here in America, is a religion that produces unbelief in the words of the very book they believe in as well as the Bible.

By my observations and in my experience, the Quran abrogated ayats are superseded by the adherent’s level of understanding of the life of Muhammad in the 7^th century and Islamic Law as it relates to his life today, centuries later. The reason I state this is because many adherents of Islam state that you cannot effectively interpret the Quran without studying the life of Muhammad. Ok, Many have done so and have found, in the studying the life of Muhammad through the testimony of his companions many disturbing things. Such offensive things which are not the point of this article and out of respect for our Muslim friends will not be addressed here.  Just suffice it to say that in the view of many who has honestly researched the  life of Muhammad have found that he falls woefully short of his own standards, much less the standards of the great prophets of scripture which in the Quran, he associates himself with. The point is Muhammad is not a good example for Muslims or anyone to use to prove the inspiration or validity of the Quran.  I remember reading about the curse of death Muhammad placed upon himself in order to prove what he was saying was true from one the hadiths.   It was not that he predicted that he would live, he predicted rather that those who opposed him would die, if he was speaking the truth or he would die, if he was not speaking the truth.  He said in so many words, let their curse of death be his my head if  he is not speaking the truth or something to that effect.  Consequently Muhammad died thereafter in 632 AD.

It also has been said that the Quran only appeared because some error that needed to be corrected that was being made concerning the scriptures. Really?  Since we have read that the Quran proclaimed that the Bible is pure and holy, what needed to be corrected?  What Muslims deemed the part of the scriptures that needed correction is not the Holy Books in particular, but rather the interpretation of the scriptures that leads people to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for their sins and rose from the dead.  The problem with this argument is that if anyone reads the pure and holy books of God (the Bible), that is exactly you come away believing about Jesus and his ministerial work on the earth.  However, many Muslims insist that Christians in the 4^th Century, in 325 AD, at the Council of Nicea inserted the interpretation that Jesus is the Son of God into the original scriptures. That before that, many believers did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God.   The truth of the matter is that at the Council of Nicea there were two camps of believers.  One influenced by the Marcionites of the second century, who believed that Jesus could not be God, or the son of God and be Jesus of Nazareth at the same time and the other camp was influenced by the Syrian Christian Church which believed that Jesus was the Son of God, thus making him fully God at the same time as he was fully a man.  There were also two Bibles at that Council, each supporting the beliefs of each camp. After much debate and consideration to the pre-existing written testimonies of the Apostles and their disciples, a vote was taken and the camp influenced by the Marcionite theology and bible they used to support their view of Jesus lost by a land side.  Now the important point here is that the Council of Nicea did not make up the idea that Jesus is the Son of God, rather they used existing written and oral testimonies of the church fathers as well as the pre-existing written testimony of the Apostles which were the Gospels and associated letters to make their decision.  The Council of Nicea was convened to confirm what already was believed by Christians concerning Jesus, the Christ, expose heretical teachings thereby and to unify the church.  It was not the council’s intent or will to insert, change anything that was already establish by verifiable written and oral testimony. So the Muslim suggestion that council was responsible for the corruption of the scriptures through the interpretation that Jesus is the Son of God is wrong.  Also as I have pointed out that the Quran agrees that the original scriptures were not corrupted, 300 years after the Council of Nicea.  If the Bible was not corrupted before Islam came into existence and was not corrupted during Muhammad’s life, then what does that make the Muslim argument of scriptural corruption in the first 3 centuries of the church?  It makes it a lie and a false accusation.  
If it be true that the Bible was not corrupted in the first 3 centuries of the church existence, then the Bible could not be lost, now could it?  This  argument that the original scriptures of  the Bible are  lost is also a joint claim that many Muslims make about the original scriptures being corrupted which is only partly true.  Which part you ask?  The part of that the original scriptures were lost. They just don’t know how they were lost or when they were lost.  The original scriptures were lost to decay, not from scriptural tampering as they have suggested. Decay is normal for written texts to experience when exposed to air for a long time.  It is known quite well that written texts turn to dust over time, which is why it is needed to make accurate written copies to replace them.  This means that  the original scriptures were lost to decay, but it also means that they were replaced by accurate copies of them.  So the original scriptures that were written on the earliest forms of paper vanished because of decay, but before they disappeared millions of  accurate copies were reproduced and sent all over the world.  Ah ha! Some Muslims state that is when the bible was corrupted and the idea that Jesus is the son of God was inserted into the Biblical text.  Wait now, see how hard it is for Muslims to admit that they were wrong:  First they said that the council of Nicea did the corruption of the original scriptures, that did not prove to be true.  They now run to the scribes who have copied the scriptures and accused them of proliferating the idea that Jesus is the Son of God in the replicas of the original scriptures.  That is also impossible as well as an insult.  Here is the reason why.  Back then they did not have printers, copiers and any other modern device to reproduce an accurate copy of a manuscript.  They had though was a pen and paper and a strict adherence to accuracy, particularly when it came to the Holy scriptures which we now know that Muhammad cleared them of doing any tampering of the scriptures.   If a book or a letter of the Gospel was not written correctly, it was destroyed and a new copy was made to take its place. This process of preservation of the Holy Books of God was adopted from the Jews.  The first Christians were Jews, remember?  So it is an insult to imply that the Christians and Jews who has dedicated themselves to the preservation of the Holy Books of God were the ones who inserted the interpretation that Jesus is the Son of God.  They not only insult Christians and Jews but they insult Muhammad who proclaimed that the Holy books of God are pure and holy and those who produce them as honest and pious. Now the Bible since that time has survived because believers took great care in its preservation, accurately making copies of it so its message would not be lost.  So yes, the original scriptures were lost, but not the copies of the original scriptures.  Since then, we have discovered so many old copies suffering the same fate as the original scriptures, they were also vanishing due to decay.  Therefore, many of the copies of the original scriptures were discovered with missing portions in different places, but believers dedicated to the restoration and preservation of the scriptures have complied and blended the relative pieces of  the copies of the original scriptures together to form an accurate replica of the original scriptures. So accurate was the replica they created that when another very old Bible was discovered, its contents matched that of the replica, what many believers have today in their hands is based upon that accurate  replica of the original scriptures.  Another reason that it was impossible to create a fraudulent copy of the scriptures is because if one was created, and many have been created and exposed as fraudulent copies, it would stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the scriptures.  I can name you a few Bible translations that are not the genuine scriptural copies of the original scriptures, but that would take a whole lot of time.  I have wrote another article entitled “New Testament corrupted?” that covers why it is impossible for the New Testament to be corrupted.  Besides, there is a simpler way to tell the difference between a fake Bible version and the True Bible version that based upon the original scriptures. I share that later in this article.

So what Muslims do believing that the Bible is lost, which it isn’t; believing that the bible has been tampered with, which it hasn’t? They go about interjecting concepts into the pure and holy text of the Bible in order to prove to people to how they believe the scriptures is correct.  Now,  I have in every instance where a Muslim has insisted that a word was rendered incorrectly or translated incorrectly in the Bible, after I have investigated their “proof”, I found that every one of them was incorrect time after time.  In fact, in my investigations of their "proofs", I have discovered that what the Muslims accuse of Christians of doing to their sacred texts, Muslims were guilty of the very same thing. I found that they did the same sort of thing to their own sacred text, the Quran. It is a recorded fact that Muslims long ago destroyed the original texts of the Quran and produced another based upon what people remembered Muhammad saying 100 years after his death.  Muslims today are divided over the Uthman Quran and thereby produced 20 different versions of the Uthman Quran of which only 3 are allowed into the United States. (So there is no such thing as one authoritative Arabic Quran) They also have divided into several different groups (So there is no such thing as an universal Islamic brotherhood) that constantly fight with each other. The kicker about this issue is that Muhammad’s appointed top 4 teachers and reciters did not approve of the Uthman Quran, citing missing Ayats and whole Suras.  They were also not asked  to assist in the written compilation of it, 100 years after Muhammad died, in fact they took offense to not being asked to assist in its compilation.  Those 4 famed reciters and teachers of the Quran died or was killed because they would not surrender the words of the Quran that they learned from the lips of Muhammad. Their written versions of the Quran were confiscated and destroyed.  Think of it, the original words of Muhammad lost forever and in its place, words that people remembered that they heard or believed that they heard from the lips of  Muhammad 100 years later than when he actually said it. That is either the most amazing feat ever accomplished or the most impossible feat ever accomplished, to have accurately remembered what one man has said for 100 years without the aid of modern recording devices.  Muslims claimed that this feat was accomplished and proves that the Quran is Muhammad’s standing miracle, which verifies him to be a prophet of God.  The problem is that Muhammad told  his followers that the Quran can be recited ( remember during Muhammad’s lifetime there were no written Qurans) 7 different ways.   This has become problematic for Islamic translators as they wrestle about what is meant by an archaic Islamic word that only appears in one version of all the Arabic Qurans that exist in the world.  One Arabic word in the Quran expressed 7 different ways can and has changed the meaning of the text within it in all the Arabic versions in the world, forcing many Muslims to embrace the Uthman Quran which makes it one of the most popular Qurans today, a book whose words of origin are questionable at best. What is worst is that the Oldest Quran that was discovered in Yehmen, a country on the southeastern tip of the Arabian peninsula, and instead of the contents of that Old Quran verifying the accuracy of the Uthman and the other 20 Arabic Qurans, it reads completely different from all of them! What a mess! Conversely, the New Testament was compiled and completed by AD 90, Jesus died in AD 33, a difference of only 57 years!  Of the Gospel portion of the New Testament, the first Gospel written, Mark, was dated as being composed 25 years or earlier, after the death and resurrection of Jesus, that means the earliest copy we know of was composed in AD 58 but remember it is a copy of the original version, so this means that the original, the first one written, was really composed earlier than AD 58  and the last Gospel written, the earliest copy we have in our possession dates back to AD 70, but it is clear that it was written before the death of John, the Apostle which was a few years before that year bringing the actual year of composition closer to AD 58.  The point is, the Gospels were composed more closer to the death of Christ in comparison to the written compilation of the Quran after the death of Muhammad. Also the resources from which the Gospel was composed are of a better quality than those who submitted the ayats for the compilation of the Quran. No one who lived 100 years after Muhammad died who submitted an Ayat (verse) to be included into the Quran ever seen Muhammad say those words.  They were only repeating what they were told that Muhammad said from someone else’s memory. Their source of information is from someone else who claimed that is what Muhammad said.  Thus these words we read in the written versions of the Quran can not be authenticated. Conversely the Gospels were written by first and second hand eyewitnesses. What is meant by first hand witnesses is that they actually saw Jesus say the words he spoke. What is meant by second hand witnesses, even though they did not see Jesus say the words they recorded in their Gospel record themselves, they documented the words of another eyewitness that actually saw the words Jesus spoke. You cannot get any better idea of what Jesus actually said from these eyewitnesses, than that except for being there yourself. The Apostle John states in the Gospel that bears his name:

“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.” –John 20:31

So let’s review:

1.      The claim that the Bible was corrupted by the Council of Nicea, by inserting the  interpretation that Jesus is the Son of God is not correct because:

a.        The Church council of Nicea convened to confirm EXISTING testimony about the status of Jesus, the Christ, repudiate FALSE teachings about Jesus, the Christ and unify the Church.

b.      Muhammad himself said 500 years after the Bible was compiled, accurately copied and widely distributed in the known world, in the Quran, that the Bible, representing God’s Holy Books, were keep pure and Holy by the scribes who produced them, which were the Christian and the Jews who dedicated themselves to the preservation of the holy scriptures. 

Now for some this is not enough proof of the Bible being tampered with, for they point to the many and various versions of English Bible Translations, claiming that it where the corruption is.  Now what I have say about that is this:  It is not surprising to find phony and fake bibles being circulated around as though they were legit copies of the scriptures.  Remember the Christian Church have been fighting against heresies from false doctrines and false Bibles ever since the first Church council was formed.  Even back then there were false bibles like the Nestorian Bible  which was the Bible with the first harmonized  Gospel record.  The problem with it was that the Gospel record within it denied the deity of Jesus, the Christ.  The church attempted to correct the problem by confiscating as many of these false bibles and replacing them with the true bibles, but some believers hid those false bibles, believing them to be the truth and circulated them throughout the Arabian peninsula all the way to western China.  It is believed that Muhammad befriended a Nestorian Christian monk and had him read his false Bible to him.  This is why possibly that Muhammad incorrectly proclaimed that Jesus was not the son of God, but rather the Son of  Mary who did not really die on the cross, but was raised to God in heaven.  Imagine what would have happened if Muhammad had gotten a hold of the true bible?  Looking at this issue another way, consider that if fake bibles are being circulated, what are they based upon?  The true one, of course, for you cannot have a fake if you don’t have the real thing to make a fake one from.   This means a true Bible version has to embrace what has been established by the church councils concerning Jesus, the Christ, meaning that any Bible version that does not embrace the interpretation that Jesus is the Son of God is a fake bible.

What separates Muslims from Christians is the view of who and what Jesus, the Christ is.  The Quran states many things about Jesus that is truly amazing. Then again we are looking at a testimony built on questionable resources.  Some of the things one finds in the Quran about Jesus is that he was born of the virgin Mary, but not as God’s son, that he performed miracles empowered by God and made a bird out of clay, that as an infant, he spoke from the cradle and prophesied about his own death.  In the Quran he was acknowledged as Christ and was a part of the line of the prophets of God, who was joined and assisted in the ministry by the disciples (who produced the Gospel records), who themselves testified that they were Muslims. That he taught people to adhere to the Law and supplied believers with the Gospel message.  That he did not die on the cross, but was taken back alive by God to heaven.  Now Christians have no problem with most of these representations of Jesus in the Quran, except for Jesus not dying on the cross and he not being born the Son of God.  Again we must consider that the quality of the sources of this Islamic testimony of Christ to be questionable because of the quality of the witnesses of what Muhammad said. It is not that Muslims are lying about Jesus, it is just the view of Christ they received from the Quran is the only Jesus they know about.  They are just speaking about what they know, even though the quality of their information is poor.  

Now the Quran also says that it comes as a guardian over the Holy Books which God has sent down to men confirming that which was said before.  The Quran certainly confirms as far as Christianity is concerned that Jesus was born of a virgin, but it also does not confirm that Jesus is the son of God.   But we know now that if the original scriptures was not lost and testifies to the fact that Jesus is the son of God. Therefore, the Quran is disqualified as a confirmer of the scriptures that came before it.  To confirm something is to support and verify it, but doing so also disconfirms whatever is not supported and verified.  The problem here is that the Quran complied by questionable testimony and the Bible is verified by eyewitnesses and authentic copies.  Which one would you believe? Furthermore, does the Bible need confirmation from the Quran? If the Bible is pure and holy as Muhammad said it was, then the answer is no.  The Bible does not need the Quran to give validity to it. The Bible can and has stood on its own, because of God’s design and will.  The Quran however needs the Bible and by claiming to be its guardian implies that its purpose is to protect the Bible from people who wants to corrupt it to their own means, but the Quran is guilty of the very thing it is supposed to protect the Bible from.  How does the Quran need the Bible?  There are many Quran passages that refer back to many biblical events, but they are revised, or changed.  Isn’t this the corruption of the pure and holy books of God by the Quran? Of  course it is, now consider the idea that the Bible is corrupted and the origin Bible is lost, what you have left is the Quran which made of the questionable testimony of men as the lone record of God’s dealing with mankind.  But without the Bible how would anyone know what the Quran says is true?  No one would know for sure what the Quran says is true. They would have to believe the Quran blindly that it is true without any collaborating evidence.  Or tear out every biblical reference mentioned in it, because if the Bible is corrupted the Quran is also corrupted.  The Bible has no reference implying the coming of the Quran, not one prophecy. Also the Bible does not need the Quran to prove what it says is true, it is the true and pure word of God. One only has to read its contents and its divine nature and character comes shining through, because it is written by eyewitnesses, its creditability is well founded and unquestionable.  It is no wonder that Muhammad told Christians and Jews to judge what he says by the Holy books of God they possessed, because he knew that those holy books creditability was unquestionable and they were the only written Holy and pure books of God at the time he said those instructions.   He felt that he was continuing the message of God that was given to previous prophets and supplying it to the people of Arabia, but he received the wrong gospel and thereby led millions, possibly billions away from their salvation by it.