Manuscript transmission: 5 differences between the Quran and the New Testament

The Quran was memorised in full by many of the Prophet’s companions during his lifetime and recited publicly, daily, in prayer. The written copies were a check on the memory, not the other way round. That chain of memorisers has never broken; there are millions of people alive today who hold the whole text by heart.

Early reports say that the Prophet (peace be upon him) reviewed the whole Quran with the angel Gabriel each Ramadan, and twice in his last year. After the battle of Yamama in 632 or 633, in which many reciters were killed, the first caliph Abu Bakr had the scattered writings gathered into one set of pages under the supervision of Zayd ibn Thabit, who was himself a scribe of the revelation and a memoriser.^[1]

The New Testament books were written, copied, and copied again. Their contents did circulate by word of mouth before they were written down, but there was no parallel institution of memorisation that checked the written copies against a fixed recitation. Reliability rests on the manuscripts, together with the early translations and the quotations of early Christian writers, which also serve as witnesses to the text. A fair critic of the Muslim account will say that the reports of this early process were written down later, and that is true. The test is whether the manuscripts agree with them, which the following entries examine.

Within 20 years of the Prophet’s death the caliph Uthman had a standard written copy produced and distributed. The tradition says that Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman, returning from the northern campaigns, warned him that soldiers from different regions were disputing how the Quran should be recited. Uthman asked Zayd ibn Thabit and three men of Quraysh to write out the text in the dialect of Quraysh and sent a copy to each major city.^[2] Regional readings differ in pronunciation and a small number of word forms, all catalogued, all within a known tradition.

The New Testament has no equivalent moment. The text printed today is a scholarly reconstruction from thousands of Greek manuscripts that disagree in hundreds of thousands of variant readings, a variant being counted in each manuscript where it occurs. Most variants are trivial, and many are spelling. Some are not, and the field of textual criticism exists to adjudicate them.

A fair objection is that early Muslims did not all agree. Companions such as Ibn Masʿūd are reported to have kept their own codices and to have disliked the order to burn the others. The reports are real, and the usual answer is that the differences recorded were of reading and arrangement and were settled within a generation by the community’s acceptance of the Uthmanic copy. Ahmad Ali al-Imam counts 123 differences between the Uthmanic text and all the personal codices of the Companions, 102 of them from Ibn Masʿūd, in a text of over 77,000 words, and reports that the classical scholars judged the stories of omitted and added surahs groundless.^[3]

Quran manuscripts on parchment exist from the first century of Islam. The Birmingham leaves, radiocarbon dated to a range that overlaps the Prophet’s lifetime, carry text matching the standard copy.^[4] They contain portions of chapters 18 to 20, and the dating applies to the parchment, so the writing may be somewhat later than the animal that gave the skin.

For the New Testament the earliest substantial manuscripts date from the 3rd and 4th centuries, 150 to 300 years after the events. Fragments are older; whole books are not. The papyri of the early third century in the Chester Beatty collection hold large parts of the gospels and the letters of Paul, and the two great fourth-century codices hold nearly the whole New Testament.

Honesty requires saying that the Quran’s early manuscript record has questions of its own. The undertext of the Sanaa palimpsest, a parchment scraped and reused, shows a written text with some variant wording and chapter order, and its editors place it in the early period.^[5] Scholars treat it as evidence of the variety of the earliest readings, within a text recognisably the same book.

Some passages printed in the New Testament are absent from the oldest manuscripts and were added later. The longer ending of Mark, the woman taken in adultery, the Trinitarian clause in the first letter of John: modern critical editions bracket or footnote all of them. Christian scholars say so openly, and most modern translations carry a note.

The manuscripts show how it happened. The two oldest complete Greek copies of the Gospels, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, both from the fourth century, end Mark with the women fleeing the tomb in silence, “for they were afraid”.^[6] In Vaticanus, as a scholar noted in 1912, the scribe left the rest of that column blank and the whole of the next, the only such gap at the end of any book in the manuscript, as though he knew of more and could not decide whether to copy it.^[7]

Other copies added material outright. Codex Bezae, copied around the year 400 and now in Cambridge, places a saying found in no other manuscript after Luke’s account of the disciples picking grain on the Sabbath: Jesus sees a man working on the Sabbath and tells him that he is blessed if he knows what he is doing, and cursed if he does not.^[8] A Catholic translation of the Bible calls the passage interesting, but probably spurious.^[9]

There is no comparable category for the Quran. No passage in the standard text is regarded, by any tradition, as a later insertion. The nearest the Muslim sources come is a report in which ʿUmar says a verse on stoning was recited and then lifted; the jurists classed it as a ruling kept in force after its wording was withdrawn, and not as a verse missing from the book.^[10]

Muslims claim the Quran is the words God revealed, preserved letter by letter. The text itself makes the claim: “We have sent down the Reminder, and We will guard it”.^[11] It is a strong claim and it has to be defended at that strength.

Christians, in the main, do not claim that for the gospels. They claim inspiration of the authors and a text that is reliable enough; the letter to Timothy says that all scripture is breathed out by God.^[12] That is a weaker claim, easier to defend, and it concedes at the outset what the Muslim argument is trying to establish: that the text we have is not exactly what was written.

Some conservative Christians hold that the original manuscripts were without error, and they place the difficulty in the copies. The Muslim reply is that a book whose originals are lost, and whose copies disagree, gives its readers no certain way to find where the error lies.