The Testimony of the Quran to the Bible
I. The Quran States that the Bible is the Word of God
The Quran states: “Lo! We did reveal the Torah [the Old Testament], wherein is guidance and light. By its standard have been judged the Jews, by the prophets who bowed to Allah’s will, by the rabbis and the doctors of the law: for to them was entrusted the protection of Allah’s Book, and they were witnesses to it: therefore fear not men, but fear me, and sell not my signs for a miserable price. If any do fail to judge by what Allah has revealed, they are infidels. . . . Whoever judges not by that which Allah has revealed: such are wrong-doers. . . . And we caused Jesus, son of Mary, to follow in their footsteps, confirming that which was (revealed) before him in the Torah, and we bestowed on him the Gospel [the New Testament] wherein is guidance and light, confirming that which was revealed before it in the Torah—a guidance and an admonition to those who ward off evil. Let the People of the Gospel judge by that which Allah hath revealed therein. Whoever judges not by that which Allah hath revealed: such are evil-livers” (Surah 5:44-47).
The Quran plainly declares that God revealed the Old and New Testaments, that they are guidance and light. The Quran states, as quoted above, that anyone who fails to judge by what is revealed in them is an infidel, wrong-doer, and evil-liver. In fact, the Quran declares: “O People of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! You have naught of guidance till you observe the Torah and the Gospel and that which was revealed to you from your Lord” (5:68). For that matter, the Quran records Allah’s declaration to Muhammad, the founder of Islam, to look to the Old and New Testaments if he had any doubts about the Quran: “And if you [Muhammad] are in doubt concerning that which we reveal to you, then question those who read the Scripture that was before you” (10:94). If Muhammad, who the Quran states is a “good example” (33:21) for Muslims, was told to test the Quran by the Scripture that was given before, the Old and New Testaments, and Jews and Christians have “naught of guidance” until they listen to and obey the Bible, and anyone who does not fail to judge by the Bible, in which is guidance and light, is an infidel, wrong-doer, and evil-liver, then every Muslim, everyone who listens to the message of the Quran, must carefully study the Bible and compare it with the Quran. To fail to do so is to reject the Quran and Muhammad. The Quran claims, over and over again, to confirm and uphold the Torah and the Gospel, the Old and New Testaments—Muhammad claimed he was the “messenger from Allah, confirming . . . the Scripture . . . which they [the people of the Book, the Jews and Christians] possess” (2:101; cf. 2:41, 89, 91, 97; 3:3, 81; 4:47; 6:92; 12:111; 35:31; etc.) Every Muslim must believe that “this Quran . . . is a confirmation of what is before it” (10:37). Every Muslim must recognize that the Quran places the Old and New Testaments on an equal level with itself as Scripture: “Believe in Allah and His messenger and the Scripture which He has revealed to His messenger, and the Scripture which He revealed aforetime. Whoever disbelieves in Allah and His angels and His scriptures and His messengers and the Last Day, he truly has wandered far astray” (4:136). “We believe in Allah and that which is revealed to us and that which was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and that which was vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus and the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them” (3:84).
II. The Quran, the Bible, and History Prove that the Bible is Pure and Uncorrupted
Some today claim that the Bible was indeed the pure and perfect Word of God when it was originally written, but it later became corrupt, so that the declarations found in the Quran about it are no longer true today. No Muslim should dare to make such statements, for in doing so he plainly contradicts the Quran, the Bible, and the facts of history.
The Quran affirms that the Bible had not been corrupted from the time it was written until Muhammad’s day. It constantly states that it is confirming what was already revealed by God, and never states or hints that the text of the Bible has been corrupted in any way. As already demonstrated in the quotations above, the Quran commands people alive during Muhammad’s lifetime in the late sixth and early seventh century A. D. to “judge” by the Old and New Testaments, and calls those who do not do so infidels, wrong-doers, and evil-livers (5:44-47). How could the Quran command people to judge truth based on the Bible if the Bible had been corrupted? The Quran warns that the “People of the Scripture . . . have naught of guidance till you observe the Torah and the Gospel and that which was revealed to you from your Lord” (5:68). How could they obey the Torah and the Gospel if they had been corrupted and lost? Would God have told Muhammad to evaluate the Quran based on the Bible available to the Christians and Jews of his day if the Bible had become corrupt (10:94)? Why would the Quran state, “Bring the Torah and study it, if you be men of truth” (3:93)? How could the Quran state that the religious “doctors of the children of Israel know . . . [what is in] the scriptures from the men of old” (26:196-197)? How could they know what was in the Bible if it had been lost and corrupted? Why would Muhammad be “confirming . . . the Scripture . . . which they [the Jews and Christians] possess” (2:101) if the Bible that they possessed was corrupt? If the Bible had been changed, would Muhammad be a true messenger from God if he confirmed the copies of Bible the Jews and Christians had instead of warning that they were corrupt? The Quran states that it is “a scripture from Allah, confirming that in their [the Jews and Christians] possession” (2:89). Would God confirm the Scriptures in the possession of the Jews and Christians if they were corrupt? Anyone who states that the Bible had been corrupted from the time it was given by God to the lifetime of Muhammad rejects the Quran. No Muslim dare do so.
Not only must every Muslim believe that the Bible has been preserved pure and uncorrupted from the days it was given by God to the time of Muhammad, he must believe that it has not been corrupted since Muhammad’s day down to the present time. “No change can there be in the words of Allah” (10:64), and “there is none that can alter the words of God” (6:34), so the Bible could not become textually corrupt at any time. Similarly, Allah in the Quran states: “We have, without doubt, sent down the Message: and we assuredly guard it from corruption” (15:9). The Bible also claims that God would preserve all of His Word pure and free from corruption: “The words of the LORD[1] 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” (Ps 12:6-7). “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot [the smallest consonant of the Bible] or one tittle [the smallest vowel or even one dot or mark of any kind] shall in no wise pass from the law” (Mt 5:18). Jesus said, “my words shall not pass away” (Mt 24:35). God promised that the pure Word of God would be available to every generation of believers: “As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed [descendants], nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the LORD, from henceforth and for ever” (Is 59:21).
History makes it clear that the Quran and the Bible are right when they teach that the Old and New Testaments have been preserved pure and uncorrupted. There are thousands of manuscripts of the Old Testament. One source, the Cairo synagogue geniza (a storehouse for manuscripts), discovered in the 1890s, held over 10,000 manuscript portions. Thousands of Old Testament manuscripts from other locations are also in existence. Extremely ancient Old Testament manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or those discovered in the ancient fortress of Masada have been discovered that are letter-for-letter identical, line after line, with Hebrew manuscripts that were made 1,000 years later, and with printed editions of the Old Testament today. At the end of the books of the Hebrew Old Testament one can read notes such as the following: “The number of the verses of the book of Genesis is a thousand and five hundred and thirty and four. . . . And its middle point is, ‘And by thy sword shalt thou live’ (27:40). And the words are twenty thousand and six hundred and twelve. And the letters are eight and seventy thousand and sixty and four.” At the end of the first five books, one can read a note which states: “The number of the verses of the whole [first five books] is five thousand and eight hundred and forty and five. . . . And its middle point is, ‘And he placed on the breastplate the Urim and the Thummim’ (Lev 8:8). The number of all the words is eighty-one thousand four hundred and forty. The number of all the letters is three hundred and four thousand and eight hundred and seven.” Notes like this exist for every book of the Old Testament—the ancient scribes counted and verified every single verse, word, and letter of their copies! The Old Testament has not been corrupted or changed!
Approximately 6,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, along with over 10,000 Latin manuscripts and at least 9,300 manuscripts of other early versions, for a total of approximately 25,000 New Testament manuscripts. This is far, far more than the evidence for any ancient book outside of the Bible—the book with the second largest number of copies is the Illiad of Homer, of which we have thousands and thousands of fewer copies—although it was the most widely read book in classical antiquity! In addition, all but 11 of the 7,957 verses of the New Testament could be reproduced without a single one of the 25,000 manuscripts we have from the 36,289 quotes made by early writers in Christendom from the second to the fourth century. Furthermore, New Testament manuscripts date back to the time period that the books were written; a number of ancient sections of Scripture on papyrus date to shortly after the final books of the New Testament were written. In contrast, the oldest copy of Homer’s Illiad dates to centuries after the book was composed! The Bible remains “by far the most attested ancient work. . . . if . . . skeptics . . . reject [its] transmissional relability[,] . . . then they must also consider unreliable all other manuscripts of antiquity . . . [and] throw out [their] knowledge of the classical world.”[2] If the Bible has not been preserved, then nothing has been preserved. If anything in ancient history is reliable, then the Bible is reliable. History validates what the Quran and the Bible teach—the New Testament has not been corrupted or changed![3]
In summary, every Muslim must believe that “no change can there be in the words of Allah” (10:64), who would “assuredly guard . . . from corruption” those words (15:9), so the Bible cannot have been corrupted. The Quran clearly teaches that the Bible had not been corrupted from the time God gave it to the days of Muhammad in the 7th century A. D. The Quran regularly teaches that the Bible that was then in use by the Jews and Christians was the pure Word of God. The Bible cannot have been corrupted after the days of Muhammad, for we have many Biblical manuscripts today that were already centuries old when he was born, and the text of the Bible that is found in these ancient copies is the same type of text that is found in later copies and in modern printed editions of the Bible. History confirms what both the Quran and the Bible teach—the Old and New Testaments have not been corrupted, but are still the pure and perfect Word of God today.
III. The Quran’s Declarations that the Bible is the Word of God are
Confirmed by Overwhelming Evidence
As already noted, the Quran teaches that the Bible has been preserved free from corruption, and that it is the very Word of God. There is overwhelming evidence that the Quran is correct in affirming that the Bible comes from God. Three sorts of evidence will be briefly considered.[4]
First, the Bible is confirmed by many facts of science that were unknown or denied when it was written. The Bible affirms that the world is round (Is 40:22), the earth is suspended in empty space (Job 26:7) and rotates on its axis, producing sequences of day and night (Job 38:12-14), air has weight (Job 28:25), the ocean has currents (Ps 8:8; Is 43:16), the ocean floor has springs (Job 38:16), blood is essential for life (Lev 17:11), light travels and is moving, unlike darkness (Job 38:19), light can be parted into a spectrum, and light from the sun creates wind as it heats the earth (Job 38:24), the wind has circuits (Ec 1:6), and there are huge numbers of stars, far beyond what can be seen with the naked eye (Gen 22:17; Jer 31:37), which differ in brightness or magnitude (1 Cor 15:41). The Bible likewise presents the hydrological cycle (Job 26:8; 36:27-28; 37:11, 16; 38:25-30) and teaches the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics (Gen 2:2; Ps 105:25-27), among many other principles of modern science. The Bible also contains no scientific errors—or any other kinds of errors or contradictions, despite being penned by over forty different prophets over a period of some 1,500 years!
Second, the prophets who gave us the Bible confirmed their message by doing many miracles from God. For example, the prophet “Elijah . . . said . . . As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word” (1 Ki 17:1), and as a result, “it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six m…onths. And [Elijah] prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit” (Jam 5:17-18). When Joshua spoke “to the LORD . . . before the children of Israel, and he said . . . Sun, stand thou still . . . the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day” (Josh 10:12-13). Moses made the Red Sea dry up so that the Jews could go through on dry ground, and then had the waters come back and destroy the Egyptian army that was chasing them (Ex 14-15). Jesus Christ did tremendous miracles. He healed vast multitudes from all their diseases (Mt 12:15), proving the truth of His claims, because “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, [and] the dead are raised up” (Mt 11:5). He took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed far over five thousand people, with twelve baskets full pieces of bread and fish left over (Mt 14:14-21). He raised many people from the dead, even, before many eyewitnesses, raising someone who had been decomposing for days (Jn 11). His enemies had to admit, “this man doeth many miracles” (Jn 11:47). Elijah, Joshua, Moses, other prophets in the Bible, and especially Jesus Christ, did many other miracles, validating their message. The Quran also confirms that the Lord Jesus, Moses, and other prophets did many miracles (5:110; 7:06-108, 116-119; 3:183-184).