Is Islam the only religion that says the Bible was altered? 8 answers

The oldest dispute over an altered scripture is between Jews and Samaritans, both of whom accept the five books of Moses. Their texts differ over the mountain on which Israel was to build its altar: the Jewish text of Deuteronomy 27:4 names Mount Ebal, and the Samaritan text names Mount Gerizim, the Samaritans’ holy place. The Samaritan text also adds a command to build an altar on Gerizim to the Ten Commandments.^[1]

Each side accused the other of tampering. The Talmud records that Rabbi Eleazar son of Rabbi Simeon said: “I said to the scribes of the Samaritans: you have falsified your Torah, and gained nothing by it.” He went on to argue that their reading of Deuteronomy 11:30 contradicted itself.^[2] The Samaritans, for their part, have held from antiquity that the Jews altered the Torah in Ezra’s time. Modern textual critics, as the site’s article on Old Testament variants explains, think that in Deuteronomy 27:4 the Samaritan reading may be the older one.

So the charge of falsified scripture was made between two communities that both accepted the Torah, long before Christianity or Islam.

Within a century of the New Testament, Christian writers were accusing Jewish teachers of having altered the Old Testament.

Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho written around 160, charged the Jewish teachers with having cut from the scriptures passages that foretold Christ. He gave examples: words he said had been removed from Ezra, from Jeremiah, and from Psalm 96:10, which he quoted as “the Lord has reigned from the tree”.^[3] None of these passages is found in any Hebrew manuscript, and the Psalm reading is found in no early Greek one, so modern scholars think Justin was using Christian additions as if they were original. The point here is that Justin made the charge.

Later Christian writers made it again. Some accused the Jews of shortening the ages of the patriarchs in Genesis, so as to place the coming of Christ earlier in world history than the Messiah was expected. Augustine discussed the accusation in The City of God and rejected it, saying that the Jews, scattered across the world, could not have agreed on such a falsification.^[4] His argument is the same one that Christians now use against Muslims. It was first made in defence of the Jews, against other Christians.

In the second century, the pagan philosopher Celsus wrote a critique of Christianity called The True Word. It survives in long quotations in Origen’s reply, Against Celsus, written about 248.

Celsus said that some Christians, “as if from a drinking bout”, had altered the original text of the Gospel “three or four or several times over”, and remodelled it so as to be able to deny the objections made against it.^[5] Origen replied that he knew of no one who had altered the Gospel except the followers of Marcion, Valentinus and perhaps Lucan, and that this was the fault of heretics and not of the Christian teaching.

A century later another pagan philosopher, Porphyry, argued in his Against the Christians that the Book of Daniel was written in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, around 165 BCE, and was later credited to a prophet of the sixth century BCE, so that its “prophecies” were history written after the event. Jerome preserved the argument in his commentary on Daniel in order to answer it.^[6] Most modern critical scholars now date Daniel as Porphyry did.

Origen’s answer to Celsus admits the more important fact: Christians themselves accused one another of changing the text.

Marcion of Sinope, in the middle of the second century, produced an edition of the Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul from which he removed what he regarded as Jewish additions, including the birth narratives. Tertullian and Irenaeus accused him of mutilating the scriptures. Marcion, for his part, held that the other churches’ copies had been corrupted by Judaisers.^[7]

Dionysius, bishop of Corinth around 170, complained that his own letters had been tampered with by “apostles of the devil”, who had removed some things and added others, and remarked: “It is no wonder, then, that some have attempted to falsify even the Lord’s scriptures, since they have plotted against writings far inferior.”^[8] An anonymous writer quoted by Eusebius accused the followers of Theodotus, a teacher in Rome who held that Jesus was a man, of having “laid hands fearlessly on the divine scriptures, claiming to have corrected them”, and observed that their copies did not agree with each other.^[9]

These writers were not Muslims and had no presupposition about the Quran. They lived in the second century, they knew the manuscripts of their own time, and they said that scripture was being altered.

A further group made the charge against the Old Testament from within Christianity. The Jewish Christians known as Ebionites kept the Law of Moses, rejected Paul as an apostate from it, and used a Gospel of their own without the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. Irenaeus and Epiphanius describe them, and Epiphanius quotes passages from their Gospel.^[10]

A body of writings from Jewish-Christian circles, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, compiled in the third or fourth century, goes further. In them the apostle Peter teaches that the scriptures contain “false passages”, added after Moses, which say unworthy things of God: that He repents, that He is ignorant, that He tempts, that He lies. The true teaching of Moses, Peter says, was handed down orally to seventy wise men, and the written law was later corrupted. The way to tell the true from the false is to test each passage against the teaching of the true prophet, and Jesus’ saying “be skilful money-changers” is cited as the rule.^[11]

Scholars have often remarked on how close this is to the Muslim position: a true revelation given to Moses, a written text into which false passages entered, and a later prophet whose teaching serves as the test. The Homilies were written centuries before the Quran by people who called themselves followers of Jesus. Whatever one makes of their argument, it was not a Muslim presupposition.

The closest anticipation of the Muslim view comes from the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian teacher Mani, who spread across the Roman and Persian empires in the third and fourth centuries.

Faustus of Milevis, a Manichaean bishop in North Africa, argued in a debate with Augustine that the Gospels had been written long after the apostles by unknown men, who mixed true sayings of Jesus with false ones and added Jewish elements to them. He accepted those parts of the Gospels that agreed with what he held to be Christ’s true teaching and rejected the rest, and he said openly that much in the New Testament had been inserted by earlier writers under the names of the apostles.^[12] Augustine answered him at length in his Reply to Faustus.

The Manichaeans had their own reasons, and their teaching was very different from Islam’s. Their existence still answers the claim that only Muslims say the Bible was altered. A view that Jesus taught a true message which was later mixed with additions was being argued in Christian North Africa two centuries before the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

The Christian argument often assumes that Muslims claim the whole Bible was rewritten. The Quran says something narrower. It speaks of some among the People of the Book who “distort the words from their places” (4:46, 5:13), who “twist their tongues with the Book so that you may think it is from the Book when it is not” (3:78), and of those “who write the Book with their own hands and then say, this is from God” (2:79).^[13] It also tells the people of the Gospel to “judge by what God has revealed in it” (5:47), which assumes that something of the revelation remained.

The classical scholars disagreed about what the distortion was. One group held that the distortion lay mainly in interpretation, tahrif al-mana, with the words left standing; a gloss in a chapter heading of al-Bukhari says that no one can remove a word from God’s books, though they misread them, and Ibn Hajar found no sound chain for its attribution to Ibn Abbas. Another, represented most forcefully by Ibn Hazm of Cordoba in the eleventh century, held that the text itself had been altered, tahrif al-lafz, and gave examples from the Bible to prove it. Ibn Taymiyya took a middle position, accepting that some words had been changed while holding that most of the text was preserved and misread.^[14] Al-Bukhari records Ibn Abbas warning Muslims that the People of the Book “altered the Book of God and changed it, and wrote the Book with their own hands”.^[15]

So the Muslim charge was argued among Muslims, with evidence, and not simply assumed. The site’s article on the Islamic dilemma sets out how this debate bears on the Quran’s references to the Torah and the Gospel.

The argument that Muslims begin from a presupposition has a fair point in it. A reader who has decided in advance that a text must be corrupted will find corruption, and a reader who has decided that it cannot be will find none. Both are reasoning backwards.

The best answer to that problem is evidence, and modern Christian scholarship has supplied a great deal of it. Textual critics, most of them Christians, now document places where scribes altered the New Testament for doctrinal reasons. Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, published by Oxford University Press in 1993, studies changes made by orthodox scribes to make the text support the doctrine of Christ’s divinity against its opponents.^[16] The history of 1 John 5:7, discussed in its own article on this site, is a well-known example, and 1 Timothy 3:16 is another. Christian scholars disagree about how many such changes there are and how much they matter. They do not dispute that they exist.

The charge that the scriptures were altered, then, was made by Jews against Samaritans and by Samaritans against Jews, by Christians against Jews, by pagans against Christians, by Christians against heretics and by heretics against the churches. The Quran added its own version of the charge, more limited than many of these. A Christian is entitled to dispute it on the evidence. He is not entitled to say that it is a Muslim invention.