The Reliability of the New Testament

Now that the reliability of the Qur’an has been covered, I will address the reliability of the New Testament. As someone who often discusses the NT with Muslims, I have noticed that people share many of the same misconceptions about the New Testament. I will address these “Islamic myths” that come up so often.

The Reliability of the Qur’an (Pt. 3): The Content of the Qur’an

In this section I will argue that even if the Qur’an we have today is the exact Qur’an that was revealed to Muhammad in the seventh century, there is still no reason to trust it because of it’s content. The gnostic influence, historical inaccuracies, and false understanding of the Jewish religion found in the Qur’an is enough to not trust it as the word of God.

The Reliability of the Qur’an (Pt. 2): The Compilation/Preservation of the Qur’an

I touched on this area a bit in the last section, but allow me to further elaborate here. We have already addressed how the language of the Qur’an has effected the preservation of the text, here we will address the issues of the variant texts during the time of Uthman, existing variant texts and the physical corrections made to these texts, and Qur’anic inscriptions found outside of the Qur’an that do not match up with the Qur’an we have today.

The Reliability of the Qur’an (Pt. 1): The Language of the Qur’an

It is a commonly held belief among Muslims today that Muhammad’s Qur’an of the seventh century (ca. 609-632 AD) is the same Qur’an we have in our possession today. This is a recent theological development in more conservative Islamic sects, but was not believed by Medieval Islamic scholars or historians. Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 AD) attributed problems in the text of the Qur’an to the lack of writing skills among the Sahaba (companions of Muhammad) who recorded the Qur’an in his highly influential work The Muqaddimah. Even serious Islamic scholars of our day like Muhammad Mustafa Al-A’zami have acknowledge Qur’anic variant texts (we will cover this more in depth in the next section).

Gnostic Influence on the Qur’an

Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter

The following are a few examples of stories found in the Qur’an that were lifted from Gnostic texts.