Studying the history of the earlier scriptures through textual and historical criticism uncovers facts documented in Western theological sources themselves, showing that the books of the Torah and the Gospel were altered across the centuries.

This article sets out direct textual evidence from within the Old and New Testaments, and from the writings of leading theologians and church historians, to show how human intervention and broken chains of transmission produced what these texts now contain.

The Torah and the evidence of textual criticism

Modern critical scholarship holds that the Torah was not written by Moses in its present form, but is the fruit of compilation and editing from several sources over centuries — what is known as the Documentary Hypothesis.

Open numerical disagreement appears between the books of the Old Testament: Second Samuel (24:13) gives seven years of famine, while First Chronicles (21:12) gives three for the very same episode. A similar divergence recurs in the number of horsemen reported in the two books.

To this the historical sources add the break in transmission after the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE, and what is attributed to the priest Ezra of regathering the books decades afterwards.

The Gospels and their manuscripts

Leading textual critics in the West acknowledge that the Greek manuscripts of the Gospels carry thousands of variants and additions introduced by copyists in later centuries.

The best known is the Johannine Comma in the First Epistle of John (5:7–8), the text long relied upon for the Trinity. Scholars agree it is a late Latin insertion with no presence in the oldest Greek manuscripts, and it has accordingly been dropped from modern critical translations.

Critical footnotes in contemporary editions confirm that the account of the adulterous woman in John (7:53 – 8:11), and the ending of Mark (16:9–20), are absent from the oldest manuscripts such as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.

Disagreement among the Gospels

The four Gospels carry open historical and textual disagreement. Joseph's lineage in Matthew (1:1–16) runs through Solomon in twenty-six generations; in Luke (3:23–38) it runs through Nathan in forty-one.

The Gospels also differ over the last words attributed to Christ on the cross: in Matthew and Mark a cry of forsakenness, in Luke the committing of the spirit, in John a word of completion. The three cannot stand together in a single scene.

Anonymous authorship and the lost original tongue

Western historical scholarship holds that the four Gospels were originally written without authors' names, and that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached to them in the second century.

To this may be added that Jesus spoke Aramaic, while the Gospels of the New Testament were all set down in Greek decades after him. Of the text in the tongue he actually spoke, nothing has reached us.

Conclusion

The manuscript evidence and the work of textual criticism converge on an academic and theological acknowledgement that change and disagreement entered the books of both Testaments. This, in the Muslim's view, makes plain the need for a scripture kept by divine preservation and free of such defects: the Qurʾān.