6 prophets both books share, and where the accounts diverge

Both: created by God, placed in a garden, disobeyed, expelled.

The difference is in what follows. In Genesis the disobedience has consequences that run down every generation. In the Quran, Adam repents, God forgives him, and the matter is closed.^[1] There is no original sin. The Quran states that no soul bears the burden of another, and a hadith of the Prophet says that every child is born in the natural state, the fitra.^[2][3] That single divergence sits under the whole later dispute about why Jesus came.

Two cautions are fair. The doctrine of inherited sin was developed in Western Christianity from Augustine onward, and the Eastern Orthodox churches speak of inherited mortality rather than inherited guilt. Ismail al Faruqi gives the Islamic side sharply: “far from being the father of sin, Adam is the father of the prophets”, and his act was “not a ‘fall’ but a discovery that it is possible to confuse the good with the evil”.^[20] That is his reading of the Quranic story and a robust one; a Christian reader will not accept his account of what Christianity teaches, and the Orthodox position above already differs from the one he criticises. The Quran also does not pretend the fall cost nothing, since Adam and his wife are sent down to earth with a life of hardship ahead. Al-Faruqi describes the doctrine he is answering. He quotes the Protestant missionary Lesslie Newbigin that sin “is seated at the very center of the human personality” and that “there is a bias towards evil”, and he names the position “peccatism”, the claim that sin is “a universal and necessary phenomenon” rooted in the nature of man.^[21] Newbigin speaks for one tradition, not all Christians, as the Orthodox caution above shows.

Both: a flood, an ark, a family saved.

The Quran adds a son who refuses to board, climbs a mountain instead, and drowns.^[4] The point is made explicitly: kinship saves nobody. Noah’s own child is lost because he did not believe. It is a harder story than the Genesis one, and the Quran tells it to remove any idea that faith is inherited.

Noah pleads for the boy, and God answers that he is not of Noah’s family, for his conduct was not righteous.^[5] Commentators read “not of your family” as a statement about belief, since the boy was Noah’s son by blood. The Quran gives a second example in the wives of Noah and Lot, who stood beside prophets and still betrayed them.^[6]

Both: the father of the faith, tested by a command to sacrifice his son.

The Bible names the son as Isaac. The Quran does not name him, and the majority Muslim view is that it was Ishmael.^[7] The early authorities were divided. Al-Tabari preferred Isaac, and Ibn Kathir argued for Ishmael, partly because the Quran’s account of the sacrifice ends before it announces the glad tidings of Isaac.^[8] Some Muslim writers also point to the phrase “your only son” in the Genesis account, which they take to fit Ishmael, who was for some years the only son. Genesis 22:2 itself names Isaac, and Jewish and Christian readers take “only” to mean the only son of the promise, so this argument rests on the Muslim reading of the text and not on the Bible’s own wording. The Quran adds that the son, when told, answers: do as you are commanded, you will find me patient.

Beyond that, the Quran gives Abraham a story the Bible does not: as a young man he breaks his father’s idols and argues with his people about worshipping things they made themselves.^[9] A Jewish midrash, Genesis Rabbah, tells of Abraham breaking idols in his father’s shop, so the tale is older than the Quran.^[10] In the Quran he is a reasoner before he is a patriarch.

The closest match of the 6. The Quran tells the whole story in one chapter, and it follows Genesis closely: the dream, the brothers, the well, Egypt, the prison, the interpretation, the famine, the reunion.

What differs is the woman. In Genesis, Potiphar’s wife is a villain and vanishes. In the Quran she is “the wife of the Aziz”, the chief minister, and she is not named. Later tradition calls her Zulaykhā. The Quran adds a scene in which the women of the city blame her, and she then says in public that Joseph was innocent and the fault was hers.^[11] Later tradition treats this as repentance.

Commentators differ on who speaks the next verse, “I do not acquit myself”, with al-Tabari giving it to Joseph and Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Kathir to the woman. The Quran’s own wording gives her a voice, and the story lets her speak the truth.

Both: the basket, Pharaoh, the burning bush, the plagues, the sea, the tablets, the golden calf.

The Quran mentions Moses more than any other prophet, and the emphasis falls on his confrontation with Pharaoh as a confrontation between a messenger and a tyrant who claims divinity. Aaron is a co-prophet, sent alongside him at Moses’s own request.^[12] At the golden calf, Exodus has Aaron fashion the idol, while the Quran blames a man called al-Sāmirī and has Aaron try to stop the people.^[13]

And the Quran has Moses meet an unnamed teacher who shows him that things which look unjust have reasons he cannot see.^[14] The Quran calls him only “one of Our servants”, and a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari identifies him as al-Khidr. That episode has no biblical parallel at all, although scholars have compared it to later Jewish tales.

Both: virgin birth, miracles, disciples, Messiah.

The Quran adds miracles the gospels do not have: Jesus speaking as an infant in the cradle, and forming a bird from clay and breathing life into it.^[15] Similar stories appear in apocryphal infancy gospels of the second century and later, which the church did not accept as scripture.^[16] The Quran’s passages on Mary’s birth and childhood also echo the Protoevangelium of James. Cornelia Horn finds striking parallels there but no direct evidence that the author of the passages in Quran 3 and 19 used any text of the infancy-gospel genre as a documentary source, and she leaves open whether that text is the original source of the story or a witness to an older, perhaps oral, one.^[17] It removes the crucifixion as an accomplished death, saying it was made to appear so.^[18] Commentators differ on how: most hold that another person was made to resemble him, and a few read the verse about God taking him as a death followed by a raising.

And it removes divinity. He is the Messiah, a word from God, and a servant.^[19] The Quran says the Messiah would never disdain to be a servant of God. That is a large subject of its own, and here only the Quran’s wording is given.