Home > Arguments for the Bible's corruption
"The Bible, as it exists today, has been corrupted from its original form, altered by human hands over time. The Qur'an warns, ‘So woe to those who write the scripture with their own hands, then say, "This is from Allah," to exchange it for a small price' (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:79). Jesus (peace be upon him) taught Allah's pure message, but what we have now—full of contradictions, like calling him God in some places (John 1:1) while he prays to God in others (Matthew 26:39)—shows it's been changed. Scholars admit it's a mix of texts, edited and added to over centuries.
In Islam, we believe Allah sent the Qur'an to correct this: ‘Indeed, it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will be its guardian' (Surah Al-Hijr, 15:9). Jesus was a prophet, not divine, and the Qur'an restores his true role: ‘The Messiah, son of Mary, was no more than a messenger' (Surah Al-Ma'idah, 5:75). The Bible's corruption veered people away from Allah's oneness, but the Qur'an brings back what Jesus really preached."
Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:79
Surah Al-Ma'idah, 5:13
The Bible has been transmitted without any kind of central regulation; people copied it freely and shared it far and wide. We know this thanks to thousands of manuscripts that have survived to this day. This large wealth of manuscript evidence allows us to use comparative analysis to determine what has been altered, added or removed. In this way, we can ascertain with great precision what the earliest versions contained, and update modern translations to reflect this. This means that the more manuscript evidence we discover, the closer new Bible versions can be aligned to the originals. Therefore, the reality of "textual corruption" is the complete opposite of the islamic claim: it does not lead to confusion and distortion, but rather provides us with objective means by which we can weed out mistakes and manipulations in the texts, which naturally occur when a text gets manually copied thousands of times by human beings. The charge of textual corruption is therefore invalid, as it conflates the academic term "textual corruption" with corruption of meaning and message. No serious scholar would agree with the latter, and no one has ever presented credible evidence that earlier Bible versions aligned more closely with the message of Islam, which exposes this claim as a bad-faith argument that lacks any kind of evidential basis.