Say: “Shall I seek for judge other than God? – when He it is Who hath sent unto you the Book, explained in detail.” They know full well, to whom We have given the Book, that it hath been sent down from thy Lord in truth. Never be then of those who doubt. S. 6:114 Y. Ali

This Qur’an is not such as can be produced by other than God; on the contrary it is a confirmation of (revelations) that went before it, and a fuller explanation of the Book – wherein there is no doubt – from the Lord of the worlds. S. 10:37 Y. Ali

There is, in their stories, instruction for men endued with understanding. It is not a tale invented, but a confirmation of what went before it, – a detailed exposition of all things, and a guide and a mercy to any such as believe. S. 12:111 Y. Ali

One day We shall raise from all Peoples a witness against them, from amongst themselves: and We shall bring thee as a witness against these (thy people): and We have sent down to thee the Book explaining all things, a Guide, a Mercy, and Glad Tidings to Muslims. S. 16:89 Y. Ali

A Book, whereof the verses are explained in detail; – a Qur’an in Arabic, for people who understand; – S. 41:3 Y. Ali

The Muslim scripture further attests that Jesus was given the Gospel:

“And He will teach him the Book, the Wisdom, the Torah, the Gospel,” S. 3:48 Arberry

When God said, ‘Jesus Son of Mary, remember My blessing upon thee and upon thy mother, when I confirmed thee with the Holy Spirit, to speak to men in the cradle, and of age; and when I taught thee the Book, the Wisdom, the Torah, the Gospel; and when thou createst out of clay, by My leave, as the likeness of a bird, and thou breathest into it, and it is a bird, by My leave; and thou healest the blind and the leper by My leave, and thou bringest the dead forth by My leave; and when restrained from thee the Children of Israel when thou camest unto them with the clear signs, and the unbelievers among them said, “This is nothing but sorcery manifest.” S. 5:110 Arberry

Then We sent, following in their footsteps, Our Messengers; and We sent, following, Jesus son of Mary, and gave unto him the Gospel. And We set in the hearts of those who followed him tenderness and mercy. And monasticism they invented — We did not prescribe it for them — only seeking the good pleasure of God; but they observed it not as it should be observed. So We gave those of them who believed their wage; and many of them are ungodly. S. 57:27 Arberry

The Islamic text states that the Gospel was in existence at Muhammad’s time, and that Christians were expected to live and judge by it:   

And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing. So let the People of the Gospel judge according to what God has sent down therein. Whosoever judges not according to what God has sent down — they are the ungodly. S. 5:46-47 Arberry

Had they performed the Torah and the Gospel, and what was sent down to them from their Lord, they would have. eaten both what was above them, and what was beneath their feet. Some of them are a just nation; but many of them — evil are the things they do. S. 5:66 Arberry

The Quran is also aware of certain teachings found in the Gospel:

Say: ‘People of the Book, you do not stand on anything, until you perform the Torah and the Gospel, and what was sent down to you from your Lord.’ And what has been sent down to thee from thy Lord will surely increase many of them in insolence and unbelief; so grieve not for the people of the unbelievers. S. 5:68 Arberry

God has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of God; they kill, and are killed; that IS a promise binding upon God IN the Torah, and the Gospel, and the Koran; and who fulfils his covenant truer than God? So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him; that is the mighty triumph. S. 9:111 Arberry    

Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another. Thou seest them bowing, prostrating, seeking bounty from God and good pleasure. Their mark is on their faces, the trace of prostration. That is their likeness in the Torah, and their likeness IN the Gospel: as a seed that puts forth its shoot, and strengthens it, and it grows stout and rises straight upon its stalk, pleasing the sowers, that through them He may enrage the unbelievers. God has promised those of them who believe and do deeds of righteousness forgiveness and a mighty wage. S. 48:29 Arberry

The Muslim scripture is even aware that the Gospel was sent down after the time of Abraham:

People of the Book! Why do you dispute concerning Abraham? The Torah was not sent down, neither the Gospel, but after him. What, have you no reason? S. 3:65 Arberry

The word Injil is always used for the Christian revelation, and particularly associated with Jesus. This word also occurs only in Medinan passages, with the exception of 7,156/157 which is traditionally regarded as late Meccan though it seems to have some Medinan references. The origins of Injil are clearly the Greek euangelion, Evangel, Good News, Gospel (Old English god-spel). Whether it entered Arabic from Syriac or Ethiopic has been debated, but the Ethiopic wangel has a long vowel like Injil and this suggests that the word was brought over by Abyssinian Christians and it was probably in widespread use in Arabia before Muhammad’s time.¹

Herein lies the problem.

Despite claiming that it is a scripture which explains all things in detail, the Quran fails to identify what the Gospel given to Jesus happens to be.

For instance, is the Gospel the revelation which Jesus proclaimed orally? Or does it also encompass the deeds of Christ, and not just to what he preached?

Does the Gospel mentioned in the Quran also refer to its eventual inscripturation, which became the means by which Jesus’ proclamation was preserved? After all, how could the Christians of Muhammad’s day live and judge by the Gospel if the term does not encompass the written component of the revelation given to and through Christ?

And since the only Gospel that the Christians of Muhammad’s day possessed are the four Gospels of the New Testament canon, wouldn’t this, therefore, prove that the Muslim scripture confirms the canonical Gospels as the preserved words of God?

Or does the Quran have in mind the diatessaron, which was a harmonization of the four Gospels into Syriac, composed by the Assyrian pupil of Justin Martyr named Tatian around 170 AD?

This Gospel harmony was what the Syriac speaking Christians went by until the fifth century AD when the Peshitta was produced, which contained a translation of all four of the Gospels separately.

How does any Muslim actually know?       

The Islamic scholar George Parrinder’s statements exemplify the confusion that academics in the field face in trying to figure out the Gospel that the Quran has in view:  

Whether Injil must be understood narrowly of the Gospel that Jesus preached, or more widely of the New Testament, the Christian scriptures, is a difficult question. Jesus brought the Gospel, but Christians later had the ‘Injil in their possession’. (7,156/157). This is a complex matter, and discussion must be deferred till later when consideration is given to the relationship between the words of Jesus and the four Gospels written by the evangelists, and the interdependence of the teaching and the life of Jesus.

The word Gospel (Injil) occurs twelve times in the Qur’an, as follows:

3,2/3: ‘He sent down the Torah and the Gospel aforetime as guidance for the people.’

3,43/48: ‘He will teach him the Book and the Wisdom and the Torah and the Gospel.’

3,58/65: ‘Why do ye dispute about Abraham, seeing that the Torah and the Gospel were not sent down till after his time?’

5,50/46: ‘We gave (Jesus) the Gospel, containing guidance and light, confirming the Torah which was before it, and as guidance and admonition to those who show piety.’

5,51/47: ‘Let the people of the Gospel judge by what God hath sent down therein; if any do not judge by what God hath sent down, they are the reprobate.’

5,70/66: ‘If they had established the Torah and the Gospel, and what has been sent down to them from their Lord, they would have eaten from above and from beneath their feet.’

5,72/68: ‘O People of the Book, ye have nothing to stand upon until ye establish the Torah and the Gospel and what has been sent down to you from your Lord.’

5,109/110: ‘I have taught thee the Book and the Wisdom and the Torah and the Gospel.’

7,156/157: ‘The Gospel in their possession, urging them to what is reputable, and restraining them from what is disreputable, making good things allowable for them and foul things forbidden, relieving them of their burden and the shackles which have been upon them.’

9,112/111: ‘A promise binding upon him in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an.’

48,29: ‘What they are compared to in the Gospel is a seed which puts forth its shoot.’

57,7: ‘We gave (Jesus) the Gospel.’

In the Meccan sura 19,31/30 comes the word attributed to Jesus: ‘He hath bestowed on me the Book’. The above verses show that Jesus was given all the truths enshrined in the sacred books, the Torah and the Wisdom. Ibn Ishaq said that ‘in the Gospel is what Jesus brought in confirmation of Moses and the Torah he brought from God.’¹

The holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are seen as belonging to a sacred succession; they are not outdated, but all bring divine truth to give guidance to men. Sura 3,2/3, addressed to Muhammad, says: ‘He hath sent down to thee the Book with the truth, confirming what was before it, and he sent down the Torah and the Gospel aforetime as guidance for the people, and he sent down the Furqan’. The Furqan is ‘discrimination’ or ‘revelation’. According to Zamakhshari it is used of the whole class of heavenly books, as in 21,49/48: ‘We gave to Moses and Aaron the Furqan and illumination.’ But in 3,2/3 and 25,’ and elsewhere it seems to be used of the Qur’an: ‘Blessed be he who hath sent down the Furqan upon his servant. ‘ In this sense the Qur’an is the Furqan as discrimination or criterion of truth, to make clear what went before. It is not an abrogation of previous scriptures, but a confirmation and a touchstone of truth, making clear what they meant: ‘This Qur’an is not such as to have been invented apart from God; but it is a confirmation of what is before it, and a distinct setting forth of the Book in which there is no doubt, from the Lord of the worlds.’ So also 2,98/97: ‘ Gabriel – verily he hath brought it down upon thy heart with the permission of God confirming what was before it.’ (Geoffrey Parrinder, Jesus in the Qur’ān [OneWorld Publishers, Oxford England, Reprinted 1996], 15. Gospel (Injil), pp. 142-144; bold emphasis mine)

Parrinder believes that the Muslim book does not differentiate between the Gospel of Jesus and the Gospels which the Christians possessed:

Behind the written books is the heavenly original or archetype, the ‘Mother of the Book’ (umm al-kitab). ‘Lo it is in the Mother of the Book in our presence, exalted, wise.’ (43,3/4; 3,5/7; 13,39) And again: ‘A messenger from God reciting sheets kept pure, in which are Books true.’ (98,2) Messengers may be thought of as receiving books from God, copies of the heavenly original, as some of the apocryphal epistles said that Jesus had a book which he revealed to his disciples.¹

There is no suggestion in the Qur’an that the Gospel given to Jesus was different from the canonical Gospels held by Christians. This is a matter of importance, in view of later Muslim polemic. Indeed the Qur’an enjoins the ‘people of the Gospel’ to ‘judge by what God hath sent down therein‘. (5,51/47) It speaks of ‘ the Gospel in their possession’ (7,156/157) and urges them to follow the messenger spoken of in it. The Qur’an itself is sent down to confirm the Book which was before it, and to act as a ‘protector over it’. (5,52/48) (Ibid., p. 145; bold emphasis mine)

Parrinder also mentions Muslims who reject the idea of the Quran proclaiming that the text of the previous Scriptures has been corrupted:

Later Muslim writers spoke of the ‘corruption’ (tahrif) of the scriptures by Jews and Christians. The Ebionites, JudeoChristians, had already accused the Jews of corrupting their scriptures. Muslim writers differed in their opinions about what had been done. Some scholars (e.g. Biruni) declared that Jews and Christians had actually altered the text of the Bible. But others (Tabari, Ibn Khaldun, etc.) said that they had interpreted the words incorrectly. It was argued that tahrif meant to change a thing from its original nature, but no man could possibly corrupt words that came from God. So at the most Christians could only corrupt by misrepresenting the meaning of the word of God. Muslims could do the same with the Qur’an and Jews with the Torah. The Gospel was in its original purity, but it was possible to distort its meaning by unsound arguments. This was the teaching of Bukhari, and sura 3,72/78 was quoted to show that the Jews might misinterpret the scriptures yet these remained intact: ‘A part of them twist their tongues in the Book, that ye may think it to be a bit of the Book, though it is not a bit of the Book Be ye rabbis in virtue of your teaching the Book, and in virtue of your having studied it. ‘

In modern times some popular polemic may blame Christians for corrupting the Gospel, yet there are Muslim commentators who prefer the view that exposition has been at fault rather than any tampering with the text. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who wrote the first commentary on the Bible by a Muslim, followed this viewpoint and he tried to bring Christian and Muslim exegesis into agreement. Another writer says: ‘In the Koran tahrif means either false interpretation of the passages bearing upon Mohammed or non-enforcement of the explicit laws of the Pentateuch. As for the text of the Bible, it had not been altered… No rival text is assumed.’¹

There remains the difficult problem of the relationship between the Gospel, the Good News that Jesus taught, and the record of his words in the four Gospels. There is no evidence that Jesus ever wrote a line of his teaching. Muslims also believe that Muhammad was illiterate and hence the written Qur’an was recorded by his followers; secretaries like Zaid ibn Thabit collected the written and oral fragments from ‘scraps of parchment and leather, tablets of stone, ribs of palm branches, camels’ shoulder-blades and ribs, pieces of board, and the breasts of men’. A similar process took place with the Gospel, though it had long been written down by the time of Muhammad. The canonical Gospels had been separated by the church from apocryphal legends. The first evangelists collected their material, as Luke says, from eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, and they tried to trace ‘the course of all things accurately from the first’. (Lk. 1,2f.)  (Ibid., pp. 146-147; bold emphasis mine)

What the foregoing highlights is that the only thing clear about the Quran is that it is far from being a perspicuous scripture. Rather, it is a confused, incoherent, unintelligible mishmash of fables and instructions that make absolutely no sense without the aid of sources external to itself.

As the Iranian scholar of Islam Ali Dashti put it:

“Unfortunately the Qor’an was badly edited and its content are very obtusely arranged. All students of the Qor’an wonder why the editors did not use the natural and logical method of ordering by date of revelation, as in ‘Ali b. Abi Taleb’s copy of the text.” (Dashti, Twenty-Three Years: A study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad (Allen and Unwin, London, 1985), p. 28; bold emphasis mine)

And:

“Among the Moslem scholars of the early period, before bigotry and hyperbole prevailed, were some such as Ebrahim on-Nazzam who openly acknowledged that the arrangement and syntax of the Qor’an are not miraculous and that work of equal or greater value could be produced by other God-fearing persons.

“Pupils and later admirers of on-Nazzam, such as Ebn Hazm and ol-Khayyat, wrote in his defence, and several other leading exponents of the Mo’tazelite school shared his opinion. They saw no conflict between the theses of on-Nazzam and the statements in the Qor’an. One of their arguments is that the Qor’an is miraculous because God deprived the Prophet Mohammad’s contemporaries of the ability to produce the like of it; in other times and places the production of phrases resembling Qor’anic verses IS POSSIBLE AND INDEED EASY.

“It is widely held that the blind Syrian poet Abu’l-‘Ala ol-Ma’arri (368/979-450/1058) wrote his Ketab ol-fosul wa’ l-ghayat, of which a part survives, in imitation of the Qor’an.

“The Qor’an contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words, and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concords of gender and number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects. These and other such aberrations in the language have given scope to critics who deny the Qor’an’s eloquence. The problem also occupied the minds of devout Moslems. It forced the commentators to search for explanations and was probably one of the causes of disagreement over readings.” (Pp. 48-49)

“To sum up, more than one hundred Qor’anic aberrations from the normal rules and structure of Arabic have been noted. Needless to say, THE COMMENTATORS STROVE TO FIND EXPLANATIONS AND JUSTIFICATIONS FOR THESE IRREGULARITIES. Among them was the great commentator and philologist MAHMUD OZ-ZAMAKHSHARI (467/1075-538/1144), of whom a Moorish author wrote: ‘This grammar-obsessed pedant has committed a shocking error. Our task IS NOT TO MAKE THE READINGS CONFORM TO ARABIC GRAMMAR, but to take the whole of the Qor’an as it is AND MAKE THE ARABIC GRAMMAR CONFORM TO THE QOR’AN.’

“Up to a point this argument is justifiable. A nation’s great speakers and writers respect the rules of its language in so far as they avoid modes of expression which are not generally understood and popularly accepted, though they may occasionally find themselves obliged to take liberties. Among the pre-Islamic Arabs, rhetoric and poetry WERE WELL DEVELOPED and grammatical conventions WERE ALREADY ESTABLISHED. The Qor’an, being in the belief of Moslems superior to all previous products of the rhetorical genius, must contain the fewest irregularities.

“Yet the Moorish author’s censure of Zamakhshari is open to criticism on the ground that it reverses the usual argument. This is that the Qor’an is God’s word because it has a sublime eloquence which no human being can match, and that the man who uttered it was therefore a prophet. The Moorish author maintained that the Qor’an is faultless because it is God’s word and that the problem of the grammatical errors in it MUST BE SOLVED BY CHANGING THE RULES OF ARABIC GRAMMAR. In other words, while most Moslems answer deniers by citing the Qor’an’s eloquence as proof of Mohammad’s prophethood, the Moorish author, having taken the Qor’an’s divine origin and Mohammad’s prophethood for granted, held all discussion of the Qor’an’s wording and contents to be inadmissible.” (Pp. 50-51)

“Neither the Qor’an’s eloquence nor its moral and legal precepts are miraculous. The Qor’an is miraculous because it enabled Mohammad, single-handedly and despite poverty and illiteracy, to overcome his people’s resistance and found a lasting religion because it moved wild men to obedience and imposed its bringer’s will on them.” (Ibid., p. 57; bold and capital emphasis mine)

Dashti further stated that,

“The Qor’an contains many instances of confusion between the two speakers, God and Mohammad, in the same verse… Among these many passages are some, like the above, which can be easily explained, but also others which present great difficulty… The presence of confusions between God and the Prophet in the Qor’an cannot objectively be disputed. Sometimes God speaks, giving to the Prophet the command ‘say’ (i.e. to the people). Sometimes the sentence structure proves that it is the Prophet who speaks, expressing devotion to God. The impression conveyed by the Qor’an is that a hidden voice in Mohammad’s soul or subconscious mind was continually impelling him to guide the people, restraining him from lapses, and providing him with solutions to problems.” (Ibid., pp. 150-151)

Finally:

“Confusion between God’s and Mohammad’s words is again apparent in two verses of sura 10 (Yunos). ‘And if your Lord so wished, all the dwellers on the earth would believe together. Are you going to compel the people to be believers?’ (verse 99). ‘It is only (possible) for a soul to believe with God’s permission. And He inflicts vileness on those who are intelligent’ (verse 100). In verse 99 the words are from God and addressed to the Prophet, but in verse 100 the words appear to be Mohammad’s, a sort of self-consolation followed by an explanation of the obduracy of the polytheists who would not heed his teaching.” (Ibid., p. 152)

FURTHER READING

What kind of book is the Injil?

Did Allah give a Greek Injil to the Jews?

Incompleteness and Incoherence of the Qur’an

Analysis of the White versus Zawadi Debate [Part 1]

THE QURAN’S GOSPEL

THE GOSPEL THAT IS WITH THEM

THE QURAN ON INSCRIPTURATION

MATERIAL FOR THE ANDANI DISCUSSION

All scriptural references taken from the Legacy Standard Bible (LSB).

FURTHER READING

An Articulation of the Incarnation

JESUS CHRIST: THE GOD-MAN

The Blood of God

Acts 20:28: The Blood of God

FURTHER READING

BIBLICAL OUTLINE OF THE TRINITY

The Biblical Basis of the Doctrine of the Trinity Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3

New Testament Outline to the Deity of Christ