IS THE KORAN MORE REALIABLE THAN THE BIBLE?
It is common to
hear Muslims say that the New Testament should not be trusted because it is
full of inconsistencies and errors, and are only anonymous documents from the
not less than 30 years regarding the letters of Paul, and minimum 60 years for
the gospels, extending to the year 100 or more, after the death of JESUS, while
the Koran was collected and put in a book form not more than 20 years after the
death of Mohammed, by the third Calipha, UTHMAN, in the year 650CE.
NEW
TESTAMENT COLLECTION
The New
Testament was collected officially in the fifth century in a handwritten book
form, but obeyed to the consistent testimony of the living Christian
communities who held these 27 books as inspired from the time of the apostles,
but in a lose form all over the known world, from Spain to China.
And even though
the documents that make the NT have common errors of history and human details,
in regards to spiritual doctrine that is considered necessary for salvation. is
surprisingly unanimous across all ages, including in the non-canonical
documents that are not part of the recognized canon. And all of this, despite
the fact that they were put in writing half a century after JESUS by anonymous
authors (1).
THE
COLLECTION OF THE KORAN
Muhammad, the
same as Jesus, never left anything written down. His revelations, which came
one by one is a lose manner, came as a form of trance in him, and people used
to cover him up, as a sign of respect, so they would not see his convulsions.
But these revelations were freely written down by people present, each the best
they could, while others learned some of them by memory, specially like Sura 1,
which were short and easy to remember in the easter form of songs.
So, after Mohammed
died, and the Muslims expanded all over the middle east, the existence of
different suras were noted, so much, that in Syrian, the soldiers refused to pray
with other Arabs because they recited the suras they knew, in a different
manner, with different words. The problem increased so much, that became
evident that Islam needed a single certified copy of the Koran, and not just to
rely on ‘tradition’.
Around the year
647, Calipha UTHMAN, appointed a commission of three reputable Muslims to collect
all suras they could find from among the people, and thus, be able to put them
in a book form.
This group,
collected lose suras from pieces of papyri, stones, wood, and oral traditions,
so that by the year 650, they gave UTHMAN a collection of 114 suras (Chapters),
consisting of roughly 6,300 lose verses.
Once this
collection was approved by the Caliph and his high officials, UTHMAN ordered
the two other current version of the Koran, unofficially collected by different
groups of people, to be burned and forbidden to keep, under death penalty.
THE PROBLEM
The reason why
UTHMAN ordered a final collection of the suras, it is because various versions
of the suras were in existence for nearly 20 years after Mohammed’s death. This
means that the ‘memory’ that held this ‘revelations’ given to Mohammed, were
not kept unanimous during this time, especially if they were passed on orally.
Once a third
collection, made with diligence and care, came to be, UTHMAN decided to
proclaim this third one the ‘official’ one, sending the two other versions to
be destroyed, so that no antagonism would rise later regarding the unity of the
Koran (2).
This proves that
the accuracy of the actual suras and verses that conform the Koran today, have
no guarantee to be correct.
The memory of
Muslims failed to keep the Koran current, and instead, produced at least two
other major versions, which we will never know now, how different they were,
but they must have been very much so, to penalize all those who held them as
scripture, after the final version was produced.
THE SANAA
TEXT
Confirming this
theory of differences in the Muslim transmission of the Koran, in 1972, workers
discovered in the Mosque of Sanaa, in YEMEN,
a codex dating from 578CE, before the UTHMAN canon of the Koran was
emitted, written in HIJAZI Arabic, containing 17 differences with the canonical
version of the Koran, even though it is 90% similar in content.
The manuscript is
now closed and under protection of the Yemeni government (3),
CONCLUSION
No religion present
in the world, has their own scriptures free from human errors, since they were
transmitted through human voice, and then written, by people who never knew
their authors.
The Tripitakas
in Buddhism, the Vedas and Ghita in Hinduism, as well as the Christian gospels
and the Koran in Islam, all were written by authors who never witnessed any of
the stories and teachings face to face. But from all of them, Christianity’s
own high number of manuscripts, all consistent across themselves, are living
prove of their credibility, that versions whose rivals were eliminated, as in
the Koran, who by this same elimination of the two other versions, are proof
that the source of information in Islam, was fallible.
We will not condemn
the current Koran as false, since we have no original to compare it with. But
certainly, Islamic history discredits the current version, as fallible, as its
sources have proven to be.
But certainly we
will reject strongly, the Islamic suggestion that the Christian scriptures
cannot be trusted, since they can be compared 10,000 times through history, from
all the copies and fragments in existence, of various origins and languages,
that give clear proof of their human source, in their variants, but also of
supernatural intervention in the perfect unity of essential doctrinal points,
across all these same variant versions of the NT.
Between Islamic
and Christian scriptures, I believe that Islamic scriptures fall behind, by
eliminating the alternative versions, which prove that they were never
infallible, or inerrable, and how far they differed from their ‘truth’, is
something nobody will ever know.
Omar Flores
(1) Carter Lindberg, A Brief History of Christianity
(2006).
Werner Kümmel, Introduction
to the New Testament (1975).
(2) Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: at the Origins
of Islam (2010).
Oliver Leaman, The Qur'an:
an Encyclopedia (2006).
Isaiah Goldfield, "The
Illiterate Prophet (Nabi Ummi): An inquiry into the development of a dogma in
Islamic tradition" (1980).
Al-Tabari, Ihsan Abbas, C.
E. Bosworth, Franz Rosenthal, Ehsan Yar-Sharter (eds.). The History of
al-Tabari: The Crisis of the Early Caliphate. Stephen Humphreys (1990), p.8,42.
Sean W. Anthony, Catherine
L. Bronson "Did Ḥafṣah Edit the Qurʾān? A Response with Notes on the Codices of the
Prophet's Wives". Journal of the International Qur'anic Studies
Association. 1: 108–112 (2016).
(3) Behnam Sadegui, Mohsen Goudarzi, "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān" (2012).
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