Home > Surah 3 - The Family of Imran
This set of verses offers a rare Quranic concession, distinguishing between those of the People of the Book who have gone astray and an "upright" group whose practices, devotion, and recitation of Scripture are explicitly praised by Allah.
Surah 3:113-116:
"They are not the same; among the People of the Scripture is a community standing, reciting the verses of Allah during periods of the night and prostrating . They believe in Allah and the Last Day, and they enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and hasten to good deeds. And those are among the righteous. And whatever good they do - never will it be removed from them... Indeed, those who disbelieve- never will their wealth or their children avail them against Allah at all..."
In a debate, the Christian polemicist focuses on the phrase "reciting the verses of Allah."
In the Quran, the phrase Ayat Allah is almost always used to describe divine revelation that is authoritative and true.
If the 7th-century Jews and Christians were reciting Ayat Allah from their own books, then the Bible is the Ayat Allah. Since the Quran says the Ayat Allah cannot be altered, the modern Muslim claim of Tahrif (textual corruption) is a direct contradiction of Surah 3:113.
The verse mentions they recite these verses "during periods of the night."
This refers to the established liturgical practices (like the Christian Vigil or Jewish Ma'ariv) of the 7th century. We know exactly what texts were used in these liturgies because we have the manuscripts (like the Sinaiticus or Vaticanus).
If Allah praises the people who recite these specific manuscripts as "righteous," He is endorsing the contents of those manuscripts. Those manuscripts contain the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, which clearly teach the Divinity of Christ—doctrines the Quran later calls "disbelief."
This destroys the argument that "all Christians and Jews" conspired to corrupt the Bible. If there was an "upright community" that was "righteous" and "recited the verses of Allah," they would have been the first to protest any attempt to change the text.
The existence of a "righteous" group among the People of the Book serves as a historical guarantee that the Scriptures remained intact. If the text were changed, this "upright community" would no longer be standing in "the verses of Allah."
Surah 3:113-116 serves as a divine character reference for the 7th-century Bible. By labeling the text recited by Jews and Christians as the "verses of Allah" and calling the reciters "righteous," the Quran effectively "canonizes" the Bible of Muhammad's day.
The Quran validates the people and the book that explicitly deny the Quran's core tenets. If the "righteous" were reciting the truth, then the message of the Cross and the Sonship of Christ—which is the heart of what they recited—is the Truth validated by Allah.
How does the Quran's description of the People of the Book "mixing truth with falsehood" in Surah 3:71 compare with this praise of the "upright community" in, 3:113?