Home > Surah 35 - The Originator
1. Internal Textual Contradiction:
While Surah 35:18 asserts that no soul bears the burden of another, Surah 16:25 states that leaders will bear both their own burdens and those of the people they misled, creating a direct conflict regarding individual guilt.
2. Scapegoating and Theological Double Standard:
Despite rejecting Christian substitutionary atonement on moral grounds, orthodox Hadith (Sahih Muslim 2767) explicitly describes God transferring the sins of Muslims onto Jews and Christians to rescue Muslims from Hell, contradicting the non-transfer principle.
This verse sets forth a fundamental Islamic thesis regarding individual spiritual responsibility, a point frequently utilized by Muslim apologists to argue against the Christian doctrine of Christ's atonement.
The Quran Verse
Surah 35:18:
And no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another. And if a heavily laden soul calls [another] to [carry some of] its load, nothing of it will be carried, even if he should be a close relative...
While this verse explicitly states that guilt cannot be transferred, both the Quran itself and orthodox Hadith literature directly contradict this principle.
The text attempts to reject the biblical narrative of substitutionary sacrifice (Jesus bearing the sins of humanity), yet falls into internal inconsistency by allowing the transfer of sins to scapegoats (Jews and Christians) in its secondary theology.