The “Islamic Dilemma” is a polemical argument popularised by Christian apologist David Wood and, to a lesser extent, Sam Shamoun. The core claim runs as follows. The Qur’an repeatedly affirms the authority of the Torah and the Gospels as they existed in the seventh century. If those texts have since been corrupted, the Qur’an’s endorsement becomes worthless. If they have not been corrupted, then Islam contradicts itself, since Muslim theology holds that the Bible was altered. Either way, the argument concludes, Islam is left without a defensible position.
The argument is constructed to feel airtight. Three bodies of evidence undo it: the textual history of the Bible itself, the classical Islamic exegetical tradition on taḥrīf, and the Qur’an’s own vocabulary. A fourth consideration, addressed below, concerns the Pauline corpus.
What the argument actually says
Wood frames the dilemma across two horns.
Horn 1. If the Bible has been corrupted, the Qur’an erred in calling it authoritative. An endorsement of a corrupted source carries no weight.
Horn 2. If the Bible has not been corrupted, it stands as a direct challenge to Islamic theology. Its account of Jesus, the crucifixion, and prophethood conflicts with the Qur’anic account.
For audiences unfamiliar with what Islamic scholarship actually says about taḥrīf (تحريف, “distortion” or “corruption”), the dilemma can sound watertight. Once the actual scholarship is consulted, it reveals itself as a category error built on three false assumptions, with a fourth and independent problem concerning the Pauline corpus.
The first false assumption: that the Qur’an is endorsing the canonical Bible
The Islamic Dilemma rests on a specific reading of Qur’anic endorsement: that when the Qur’an describes the Torah and the Gospel as huda wa nur (هُدًى وَنُورٌ, “guidance and light”), it is confirming the textual integrity of every word in every extant manuscript of the Bible.
The Arabic terminology will not bear that weight. The relevant verb is muṣaddiq (مُصَدِّق), which carries the sense of confirming the truth of something rather than endorsing the textual identity of a specific manuscript tradition. Classical Qur’anic commentators understood taṣdīq as the Qur’an affirming what remained true in prior scriptures while correcting what had been distorted. The Qur’an regularly applies this verb to a prior message or prophet, as when Jesus is said to confirm Moses (Q 3:50; 5:46), never to a textual canon.
The decisive verse is Q 5:48, which describes the Qur’an as muhayminan ʿalayh (مُهَيْمِنًا عَلَيْهِ), guardian, custodian, and arbiter over the prior books. The lexical evidence is unambiguous. The standard Arabic dictionaries gloss the root h-y-m-n with amīn (trustworthy), raqīb (watcher), shāhid (witness), muʾtaman (entrusted), and ḥafīẓ (preserver).¹ Ibn Kathīr, commenting on this verse, compiles the entire spectrum on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, ʿIkrima, Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, Mujāhid, Qatāda, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, ʿAṭāʾ al-Khurasānī, al-Suddī, and Ibn Zayd. He concludes that the Qur’an stands as amīn, shāhid, and dominant over every Scripture that preceded it.²
Three features are jointly affirmed by this verse: confirmation, custody, and arbitration. Under a blanket-textual-corruption hypothesis these features become incoherent. Under the classical doctrine of taḥrīf al-maʿnā, corruption of meaning rather than text, they are coherent. The Qur’an does not direct its audience to seek out whatever manuscript happens to be in circulation and follow it; it states that it came to clarify precisely those matters over which the People of the Book had fallen into dispute.³
The second false assumption: that classical Islam requires belief in wholesale textual corruption
Recent academic scholarship has clarified the picture, and it does not match the straw-man position that polemicists routinely attribute to Islam.
Camilla Adang, after surveying nine major Muslim authors from Ibn Rabbān al-Ṭabarī (d. c. 855) to Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), concluded that the majority subscribed to a moderate interpretation of the Qur’anic charge. On their reading, only the sense of the biblical text had been changed, while the text itself remained intact.⁴ Thomas F. Michel, surveying the polemical tradition more broadly, drew the same conclusion. He identified the standard line through ʿAlī al-Ṭabarī, the Zaydī al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm, al-Bāqillānī, al-Ghazālī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī as one that approached the Bible as fundamentally sound in its text but misinterpreted by Christians and Jews.⁵
Classical scholars distinguished two principal modes of taḥrīf: taḥrīf al-lafẓ (تحريف اللفظ), corruption of the actual wording, and taḥrīf al-maʿnā (تحريف المعنى), corruption of meaning through misinterpretation. The technical Arabic term taḥrīf itself does not appear as a noun in the Qur’an. The verbal form yuḥarrifūna (يُحَرِّفُونَ) appears only four times, at Q 2:75, 4:46, 5:13, and 5:41, and is directed exclusively against Jews. The Qur’an never uses the verb of Christians.
The exegetical history of these verses is instructive. Al-Ṭabarī, commenting on Q 2:75, explicitly states that the distortion in question was an oral one, a deliberate bending of the original meaning rather than tampering with the written text.⁶ On Q 5:48 he writes that the Qur’an is muʾtaman, trustworthy custodian, over the books that preceded it: whatever in those previous books conforms to the Qur’an is true, and whatever disagrees with it is false.⁷ Al-Qurṭubī, commenting on Q 2:75, summarises three positions: oral substitution in recitation, misinterpretation of clear passages (especially descriptions of Muhammad and the rajm penalty), and rewriting of the text. He inclines toward the first two.⁸ Al-Māturīdī, on Q 4:46, argues that yuḥarrifūna al-kalima ʿan mawāḍiʿihi refers to attributing false interpretations to existing texts.⁹
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī advances perhaps the most rigorous classical argument against textual corruption. The Torah was widely diffused, mutawātir, recited by people of all kinds across East and West. By the logic of tawātur, mass concurrent transmission so widespread that collusion in alteration becomes mathematically untenable, the wholesale corruption thesis becomes self-defeating.¹⁰ Islamic epistemology, on al-Rāzī’s reading, militates against rather than for the proposition that Wood’s argument requires.
Gabriel Said Reynolds, in the standard academic article on the question, observes that the Qur’an does in fact accuse Jews and Christians of changing the Bible only in a particular sense. The Qur’an argues against those who treat the words of humans as revelation while neglecting the words of God.¹¹ Reynolds further argues, on the basis of the primary meaning of ḥ-r-f (“to turn”) and mawāḍiʿ (“places, contexts”), that Q 4:46’s yuḥarrifūna al-kalima ʿan mawāḍiʿihi is best translated “they shift words out of their contexts.” There is no compelling Qur’anic basis for the claim that taḥrīf involves textual alteration. The Qur’an intends scriptural falsification through reading or explaining scripture out of context.¹²
Q 5:14 is decisive on this point. Applied to the Naṣārā (Christians), it speaks only of forgetting and covenant-breaking. The verb yuḥarrifūna is absent. The Qur’an, on any careful reading, excuses Christians specifically from the charge of textual corruption that it levels at certain Jewish contemporaries of Muhammad in Medina. A polemical argument that depends on the Qur’an having charged the New Testament with textual corruption is therefore arguing against a charge the Qur’an does not make.
A note of intellectual honesty is in order. Recent scholarship has complicated the older picture in one important respect. Ryan Schaffner, in his Ohio State doctoral work on disputational literature of the eighth and ninth centuries, has shown that the dichotomy between an “early” charge of taḥrīf al-maʿnā and a “later” charge of taḥrīf al-naṣṣ is itself oversimplified.¹³ Through close examination of al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm’s anti-Christian polemic, the works of Ibn al-Layth, ʿAlī al-Ṭabarī, al-Jāḥiẓ, and Ibn Qutayba, and parallel Christian responses by Theodore Abū Qurrah, Timothy I, ʿAmmār al-Baṣrī, and Abraham of Tiberias, Schaffner demonstrates that early Muslim polemicists were advancing both charges in combination. The Qur’an served as the arbiter of scriptural truth, and biblical material was accepted when it aligned with Qur’anic principles and rejected as corrupted when it did not.¹⁴
This refinement strengthens rather than damages the apologetic case. The classical Muslim approach to the Bible was a discriminating posture, with the Qur’an as criterion. That approach is what Q 5:48 describes when it calls the Qur’an muhayminan ʿalayh. The question for any classical Muslim scholar was never whether the Bible in his hand was identical to the original revelation. The question was whether the material in front of him conformed to or contradicted the revelation given to Muhammad. Wood’s dilemma assumes a binary the tradition never accepted.
The reception of this discriminating approach within Islamic scholarship continued well into the late medieval period. Ibrāhīm ibn ʿUmar al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480), the Mamluk-era mufassir, faqīh, and muḥaddith, defended the use of biblical material in Qur’anic exegesis to such an extent that he was accused by his rival al-Sakhāwī of “glorifying the Bible and debasing the Qur’an.”¹⁵ Al-Biqāʿī’s reply argued that the use of the Torah and the Gospels was a venerable Islamic practice and that the Qur’an itself, the Prophet, the Companions, and the leading scholars of every generation had referred to these prior scriptures.¹⁶ A Muslim apologist confronted with the Islamic Dilemma in 1480 was citing the Bible directly and arguing that doing so was the orthodox practice.
The third false assumption: that the Qur’an’s Injīl is the New Testament
The strongest single counter-argument to Wood’s dilemma is also the most overlooked. Wood’s premise (2) treats “the Bible” as a stable object that the Qur’an’s audience would have recognised as identical to today’s Christian canon. This assumption is anachronistic and academically untenable.
Sidney Griffith, in the standard reference treatment of the question, observes that all Qur’anic uses of the term Injīl (إِنجِيل) are in the singular and betray no awareness of multiple Gospels.¹⁷ The Qur’an speaks of the Injīl as a scripture given to Jesus, on the order of the Torah given to Moses, or the Qur’an given to Muhammad. The plural form al-anājīl is absent from the Qur’an entirely.
This usage is decisive for Wood’s argument. The premise that the Qur’an confirms the textual reliability of the four-Gospel canon requires that al-Injīl refer to that canon. Qur’anic vocabulary points the other way. Griffith argues at length, on the basis of the Syriac liturgical and textual evidence, that the dominant Gospel-form in the Syriac-speaking world of the late seventh century was Tatian’s harmonised Gospel, a second-century compilation of the four Gospels rather than the four Gospels in their separate canonical form.¹⁸ The pre-Islamic Arabian Christian milieu was a polyphonic ecology of Syriac, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic, and Jewish-Christian materials, accessed through liturgy, oral tradition, and harmonised compilations, never a stabilised canonical-Bible environment.¹⁹
Najran Christians, the audience of Surah Āl ʿImrān’s polemical engagement with Christian theology, were a Miaphysite community whose scriptures circulated in Syriac, Geʿez, and Greek. The Church of the East, dominant in eastern Arabia, used the Peshitta. Miaphysite Jacobite communities along the Ghassanid frontier maintained their own textual traditions. Jewish-Christian groups, including descendants of the Ebionites, persisted into the early Islamic period in northwestern Arabia. Petri Luomanen has argued, on the basis of evidence from ʿAbd al-Jabbār ibn Aḥmad (d. 1025), that Jewish-Christian communities may have survived into the eleventh century in this region.²⁰ The Ebionite Gospel, composed in Hebrew or Aramaic, rejecting Pauline theology, denying the divinity of Christ, and presenting Jesus as a human prophet, represents a Christology strikingly close to the Qur’anic one.
The implication is straightforward. When the Qur’an speaks of al-Injīl, the referent is a divine revelation given to Jesus, conceived on the model of the heavenly archetype consonant with umm al-kitāb (Q 13:39; 43:4). Wood’s equation of al-Injīl with the canonical New Testament collapses on contact with the Qur’an’s own vocabulary and the historical record of seventh-century Arabian Christianity.
A second version of the same polemic asks where this Injīl is, if it differs from the canonical Gospels. The challenge proceeds from the absence of independent manuscript evidence for a distinct Injīl-document held in Christian hands, and concludes that the Qur’an must therefore be referring to the canonical Gospels themselves. The challenge misstates the Qur’anic claim. The Qur’anic position is that the Injīl is the divine revelation given to Jesus, the original substance of which the canonical Gospels, the Diatessaron tradition, the Jewish-Christian gospel material, and the underlying Aramaic and oral tradition behind the canonical texts each preserve in part. The Qur’an’s Injīl is a theological category. It is the heavenly archetype of the revelation given to Jesus, partially recoverable from a range of textual and oral traditions in the seventh-century Christian world. Asking where the lost Injīl book is presupposes a position Muslims do not hold.
What “the Bible” actually was, and is
The apologetic claim that the Bible has been altered may sound polemical. The textual evidence is neither polemical nor controversial. It is the consensus of mainstream biblical scholarship.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1946 and 1956 and dating from roughly 250 BCE to 68 CE, demonstrated that prior to 70 CE the Hebrew Bible existed in multiple recensions side by side. Emanuel Tov, in the standard reference work on Hebrew Bible textual criticism, classifies the Qumran biblical scrolls into five textual groupings: proto-Masoretic, pre-Samaritan, scrolls reflecting the Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint, non-aligned texts, and “Qumran practice” texts. He concludes that scholars should no longer position the Masoretic Text at the centre of textual thinking.²¹
The Great Isaiah Scroll preserves well over 2,600 textual variants from the later Masoretic Text. At Isaiah 53:11, the Qumran scroll adds the word “light” (“after the suffering of his soul, he shall see light”), agreeing with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. The reading is now incorporated into the New Revised Standard Version, the 2011 New International Version, and the English Standard Version. The Samuel scroll 4QSamᵃ (4Q51) demonstrates 183 documented agreements with the Old Greek Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. An entire paragraph describing the Ammonite king Nahash gouging out the right eyes of the Gadites and Reubenites, attested also in Josephus, was lost from the Masoretic Text and is now restored in the New Revised Standard Version and the New American Bible.²²
The Septuagint version of Jeremiah is approximately one-eighth shorter than the Masoretic version, with the Oracles Against the Nations rearranged. Tov, with the support of the Qumran fragments 4QJerᵇ and 4QJerᵈ, concluded that the Masoretic and Septuagint texts represent two successive editorial stages of a Hebrew book, both authoritative at Qumran. The Septuagint of Job is roughly one-sixth shorter than the Hebrew. Esther contains six major additions (107 verses) absent from the Masoretic Text. Daniel adds Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Prayer of Azariah. Genesis 5 and 11 chronologies differ across the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch by 600 to 1,400 years.²³
The Samaritan Pentateuch contains roughly 6,000 variants from the Masoretic Text, of which approximately 1,900 agree with the Septuagint. The most theologically loaded, Deuteronomy 27:4, where the Masoretic Text reads Mount Ebal but the Samaritan Pentateuch reads Mount Gerizim, is now supported by a Qumran Cave 4 Deuteronomy fragment, the Old Latin Codex 100, and Papyrus Giessen.²⁴
The New Testament differs from the Hebrew Bible in degree rather than kind. The Münster Liste catalogues approximately 5,800 to 5,999 Greek New Testament manuscripts. The Greek New Testament contains roughly 138,000 words. Estimates of the total number of textual variants range from 300,000 to 500,000.²⁵ The vast majority are spelling and orthographic variants, and Bart Ehrman and the late Bruce Metzger both agree that the essential outlines of Christian doctrine do not turn on contested variants. Several variants of significant theological weight are present in the manuscript tradition.
The Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7–8), which in the King James Version reads “there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one,” is judged spurious by every modern critical edition. Bruce Metzger writes that the words “are spurious and have no right to stand in the New Testament” and that they are absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight. The earliest Greek manuscript containing the passage is MS 629, dated to roughly 1362 CE. Erasmus omitted the passage from his first two editions of the Greek New Testament (1516, 1519), inserting it into his 1522 third edition only under pressure.²⁶
The Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53–8:11), the famous account of the woman caught in adultery, is absent from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts: 𝔓⁶⁶ (c. 200 CE), 𝔓⁷⁵ (early third century), Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Ephraemi, and a wide range of others. It is absent from the Old Syriac, Sahidic, early Bohairic, Armenian, Gothic, and early Georgian versions. It first appears in Codex Bezae around 400 CE. In the manuscript tradition the passage “floats.” It appears after Luke 21:38 in some manuscript families, after John 7:36 in others, after John 21:25 in still others. Metzger gives non-originality an A rating.²⁷
The long ending of Mark (16:9–20) is absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both of which end Mark at 16:8. Vaticanus leaves an unusual blank column at this point, the only such blank column in the entire New Testament. Eusebius and Jerome both attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies they knew. There are at least four endings preserved in the textual tradition: the Short Ending at 16:8, the Intermediate Ending in some Greek manuscripts, the Long Ending (16:9–20), and the Long Ending plus the Freer Logion found only in Codex Washingtonianus.²⁸
The textual situation extends to passages of direct Christological significance. At 1 Timothy 3:16, the Textus Receptus reads “God was manifested in the flesh.” Modern critical editions read “he who,” supported by the original hands of Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi. Metzger writes that no uncial manuscript in the original hand earlier than the eighth or ninth century supports the reading “God.” The change involves only the addition of two horizontal strokes to convert the Greek letters ΟC into ΘC, a change visibly documented in some manuscripts, including Codex Alexandrinus.²⁹ At Hebrews 2:9, where the standard text reads “by the grace of God [Jesus] should taste death for everyone,” a substantial group of witnesses including Origen reads “apart from God.” Ehrman argues the latter was original, altered by scribes uncomfortable with the implication that Jesus died forsaken by God.³⁰ At John 1:18, the question of whether the original reading is “only-begotten Son” or “only-begotten God” turns on a textual variant that arose in the early Christological controversies of the second and third centuries.³¹
To the textual variants must be added the questions of authorship and canon formation. All four canonical Gospels are formally anonymous; the titles “According to Matthew,” and so on, appear in manuscripts only from approximately 200 CE onward. Mainstream consensus dates Mark to roughly 65 to 75 CE, Matthew to 80 to 90 CE, Luke and Acts to 80 to 95 CE, and John to 90 to 110 CE. Of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament, mainstream scholarship considers seven undisputed and six disputed. The Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are judged pseudepigraphic by approximately 80 to 90 percent of critical scholars. Even D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo, writing as conservative evangelicals, concede that for no other letter in the New Testament is there a greater consensus of pseudepigraphic origin than 2 Peter.³²
Codex Sinaiticus, the only complete Greek manuscript of the entire New Testament from the fourth century, includes the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas as part of its New Testament, two works in no modern canon. Codex Alexandrinus, from the fifth century, treats First and Second Clement as canonical New Testament. The canon of the New Testament was not fixed even by the mid-fourth century. The Council of Carthage in 397 CE settled the matter in the Western church only after several centuries of variability.
These observations come from mainstream biblical textual criticism. They appear in the standard reference works on the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, in the apparatus of every modern critical edition, and in the publications of scholars who themselves accept the Bible’s authority. They are compatible with the Qur’anic doctrine of taḥrīf in its classical form. They are not compatible with the assumption that the Bible Christians possessed in 1480, or in 1611, or in 1977, was textually identical to the original revelations the Qur’an affirms.
The Pauline corpus and Islamic theology
A consideration of consequence for the Islamic Dilemma has not yet been addressed. The Christian New Testament includes thirteen letters traditionally attributed to Paul of Tarsus, plus the Epistle to the Hebrews, which the medieval and early modern Christian tradition also placed under his name. The total comes to fourteen documents, comprising a substantial portion of the New Testament canon and the dogmatic core from which Christian theology derived its doctrines of vicarious atonement, justification by faith, and the divinity of Jesus.
These fourteen documents have no scriptural standing in Islam, and the figure to whom they are attributed is rejected by classical and modern Muslim scholarship.
The academic position on the corpus itself is well established. Seven letters are widely accepted by critical scholarship as authentically Pauline: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. Three further letters (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians) are designated Deutero-Pauline, with critical scholarship divided on their authenticity. Three Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) are judged pseudepigraphic by the substantial majority of critical scholars and dated to roughly 80 to 100 CE, decades after Paul’s death. Hebrews is uniformly treated as non-Pauline by modern scholarship, with proposed alternative authors including Barnabas, Apollos, and Priscilla.³³
The Islamic objection to the Pauline corpus operates at a level deeper than the academic dispute over which letters are authentic. The question for Islamic theology is whether Paul possessed the standing to issue revelation in the first place.
The doctrinal foundation is the principle, established by reports preserved in al-Bukhārī and Muslim, that no prophet was sent between Jesus son of Mary and Muhammad. The Prophet states: al-anbiyāʾu ikhwah min ʿallāt, wa ummahātuhum shattā, wa dīnuhum wāḥid, wa laysa baynanā nabiyy, “the prophets are brothers from the same father, their mothers are different, their religion is one, and there is no prophet between us.”³⁴ The interval between the ministry of Jesus and the call of Muhammad is, on this principle, devoid of prophetic mediation.
Paul claimed precisely such mediation. He describes himself as an apostle (apostolos, ἀπόστολος) commissioned directly by the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus.³⁵ He insists that he is in no way inferior to the most eminent apostles,³⁶ and that his gospel was received “by revelation,” not from any man.³⁷ Within the Christian framework, where Jesus is held to be divine, this self-designation places Paul in the category of recipient of post-resurrection revelation. Within the Islamic framework, where Jesus is the human messenger of God and the principle established by the hadith forecloses any prophet between him and Muhammad, the claim is theologically inadmissible.
The full case has been set out in detail in the present author’s recent monograph on the figure of Paul.³⁸ The argument advanced there is that Paul invented a new religion built on doctrines (vicarious atonement, the divine sonship of Christ, the abrogation of the law) for which the Qur’an finds no warrant in the original Injīl.³⁹
The implication for Wood’s dilemma is direct. Even if every textual variant in the New Testament were resolved in favour of the Christian apologist, even if the manuscript tradition were uniformly pristine from the second century forward, the Pauline corpus would still constitute a body of material that Muslims have never accepted as scripture. Roughly half of the New Testament canon, by length, consists of texts attributed to a figure whom the Islamic tradition rejects as a self-appointed apostle whose claimed revelation contradicts the principle that no prophet was sent between Jesus and Muhammad.
The instruction in Q 5:47 concerns the original revelation given to Jesus. The Pauline corpus is a separate body of writings, composed several decades later by a figure whose status as rasul the Islamic tradition does not recognise. Wood’s argument requires treating these as a single category. Islamic theology treats them as distinct.
The specific verse-pairings
Wood and parallel apologists routinely cite three doctrinal contradictions between the Qur’an and the canonical New Testament. Each dissolves when traced to the specific texts involved.
The first is the doctrine of the Trinity, set out in Christian apologetics by appeal to passages such as 1 Corinthians 8:6 and 1 John 5:7-8.⁴⁰ The first of these is Pauline, and is therefore inadmissible as scripture under the principle established in the section above. The second is the Comma Johanneum, judged spurious by every modern critical edition of the Greek New Testament and absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight. The Trinitarian formulation in 1 John 5:7-8 has the weakest manuscript attestation of any verse in the New Testament canon, and is omitted from the New International Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the English Standard Version, and every other modern translation based on the critical text. A doctrine whose strongest scriptural proof-text is universally judged spurious cannot be invoked as a Qur’an-versus-Bible contradiction with any force.
The second is the doctrine of the unique mediation of Jesus, cited from 1 Timothy 2:5: “there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.”⁴¹ The verse appears in a Pastoral Epistle, judged pseudepigraphic by approximately 80 to 90 percent of critical scholars and dated to roughly 80 to 100 CE, decades after Paul’s death. It has no standing as evidence of Jesus’s own teaching on his role.
The third is the doctrine of salvation through belief in Jesus, cited from John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”⁴² The Greek term monogenēs (μονογενής, “only-begotten”) is itself textually contested in the Johannine corpus, particularly at John 1:18 where the manuscript tradition divides between “only-begotten Son” (μονογενὴς υἱός) and “only-begotten God” (μονογενὴς θεός). The variant arose in the Christological controversies of the second and third centuries.⁴³ The Qur’an affirms that every soul will taste death and that recompense will be rendered on the Day of Resurrection (Q 3:185).⁴⁴ The two statements are not in straightforward contradiction. The Qur’an does not deny eternal life; it locates it in the Day of Resurrection rather than in vicarious atonement through a divine son. The contradiction the polemicist constructs requires reading John 3:16 through the post-Nicene metaphysical framework, which the Greek text does not by itself compel.
The pattern is consistent. The verses cited as proof of Bible-Qur’an contradiction are concentrated in the Pauline corpus (which Islamic theology does not accept as scripture), the Pastoral Epistles (textually pseudepigraphic), the Comma Johanneum (textually spurious), or the Christologically contested passages of the Johannine corpus. The doctrines they support are precisely the ones early Islamic scholarship identified as later interpretive developments rather than authentic teaching of Jesus. Wood’s argument requires treating these passages as straightforward Christian Scripture. Islamic theology and modern textual criticism, in their separate ways, both treat them as later additions or interpretations.
The Euthyphro side argument
Some versions of the Islamic Dilemma fold in a separate philosophical challenge: the Euthyphro dilemma applied to Islamic theology. Is something good because Allah commands it, or does Allah command it because it is good? The question is legitimate. The conflation with the textual corruption issue is a rhetorical move, two distinct objections presented as a single overwhelming case.
The Islamic response to the Euthyphro-style challenge is grounded in the doctrine of al-Asmāʾ wa al-Ṣifāt (الأسماء والصفات, the Divine Names and Attributes). Allah’s commands flow from his nature, which is itself the standard of goodness. The Ashʿarī, Māturīdī, and Atharī schools have articulated this position with great precision for over a thousand years. The substance of the response stands on its own. It does not need to be conflated with the textual corruption question to receive a serious answer, and the conflation itself signals that the original dilemma is being padded out.
The polemical setting of the Qur’an’s address to the People of the Book
The Islamic Dilemma treats the Qur’anic verses about prior scripture as freestanding dogmatic statements: declarations that the Bible in its current form is divinely vouched for. The verses operate in a different mode.
The Qur’an’s discourse on the Torah and the Gospel is set within an argumentative context. The interlocutors are specific Jewish and Christian communities in seventh-century Medina and the surrounding Hijaz, and the Qur’an’s posture toward them is dialectical. The verses build a case against those communities for their refusal to recognise the prophethood of Muhammad while invoking their attachment to prior revelation as the reason.
The pattern is consistent across the relevant suwar. The People of the Book are addressed as already in possession of authentic revelation. They are then charged with neglecting it, with preferring competing standards over their own scripture, and with using their attachment to prior revelation as a pretext for rejecting the new revelation now offered to them.
Q 5:14, applied to Christians, states that they forgot a good portion of what they had been reminded of. The verb is nasū (نَسُوا, “they forgot”), and the Qur’anic verdict is that the loss is real. Q 2:75 charges a faction of the Jews with hearing the word of God and then yuḥarrifūnahu, distorting it, after they had understood it. Q 5:50 asks rhetorically whether the People of the Book prefer the rulings of the jāhiliyya (الجاهلية, the era of pre-Islamic ignorance) to the rulings of God. Q 5:42 describes some of them as eager listeners to falsehood and consumers of forbidden things who would seek the Prophet’s judgement only to evade their own scripture.
The hadith literature documents the practical operation of this charge. Reports preserved in al-Bukhārī and Muslim describe Jewish contemporaries of the Prophet approaching him with cases of adultery, hoping his ruling would be lighter than the rajm (الرجم, stoning) prescribed in the Torah, and then objecting when the Prophet’s ruling matched the Torah they had themselves attempted to set aside.⁴⁵ The episode is the historical kernel behind Q 5:41, where the Qur’an describes the rabbis as those who yuḥarrifūna al-kalima min baʿdi mawāḍiʿihi, displacing the words from their proper places.
Within this argumentative setting, the verses that command the People of the Book to uphold the Torah and the Gospel, to judge by what God has revealed therein, and to ask those who recite the Book before them, function as challenges to consistency. They press the addressees to be coherent on their own claimed terms. The Qur’an’s argument is that a sincere adherent of the prior revelation, examining what remains of it honestly, would recognise the new revelation rather than reject it.
The proper orientation the Qur’an commends is responsiveness to divine guidance whenever and through whomever it is given. The Qur’an criticises identity-based loyalty to prior revelation as insincerity when it is used to reject new revelation. The People of the Book are summoned to consistency: if they truly revered what was sent to them, they would recognise its continuity with what is now being sent to Muhammad. The fact that many among them did not do so is, in the Qur’anic argument, an indictment of those who claimed allegiance to the prior revelation while failing to honour it. The validity of the original revelation itself is left intact by the Qur’anic charge.
This setting is essential for reading the verses Wood relies on. The Qur’an’s rhetorical move is one familiar in any tradition of religious argument: holding the interlocutor accountable to their own claimed standards. The Islamic Dilemma misreads this rhetorical move as a doctrinal claim about the textual integrity of the modern Christian Bible.
What “confirmation” actually means
Several Qur’anic verses anchor Wood’s argument. Surah al-Māʾidah contains the instruction to the People of the Book to judge by what Allah revealed in the Torah.⁴⁶ Surah Āl ʿImrān describes the Qur’an as confirming what came before it.⁴⁷ Surah Yūnus states that the Qur’an is a confirmation of what was already in the hands of the People of the Book.⁴⁸
Wood reads “confirmation” as “endorsement of the present text.” The Arabic terminology, the classical exegesis, and the internal logic of the Qur’an itself militate against this reading. The Qur’an directs doubters to ask those who recite the Book before them.⁴⁹ It states that Muhammad is found written with them in the Torah and the Gospel.⁵⁰ It instructs the People of the Gospel to judge by what God has revealed therein. Each of these statements requires only that some authentic revelation persists, that some recognition of Muhammad’s prophethood was present in the prior scriptures, and that some segment of what Christians possessed remained faithful to the original revelation given to Jesus. None of them requires a stable, uncorrupted textual canon.
There is a straightforward internal logic at work. The Qur’an itself charges the People of the Book with concealing and altering scripture.⁵¹ ⁵² A text that explicitly accuses scribes of textual manipulation cannot simultaneously be read as offering blanket endorsement of the output of those same scribes. The dilemma dissolves once the Qur’an is read as a whole rather than through isolated verses mined for apparent contradiction.
Q 5:47 commands the People of the Gospel to judge by what God revealed in it, bimā unzila fīhi. The phrase is precise. It says “judge by what God has revealed therein,” leaving the question of which contents of the Christian canon constitute revelation open and dependent on the Qur’an’s own arbitration. Q 5:48 immediately reframes the Qur’an as muhaymin, the arbiter over the prior books. The verses assert the Qur’an’s adjudicative role over a textual heritage the Qur’an itself describes as having undergone interpretive distortion.
Three further verses are routinely deployed in the polemic, and each can be addressed in turn.
Q 29:46 instructs Muslims, in the context of dialogue with the People of the Book, to say: “We believe in what has been revealed to us and what has been revealed to you. Our God and your God is one, and to Him we submit.”⁵³ The passage concerns the proper conduct of inter-religious discourse. The affirmation “what has been revealed to you” attests the divine origin of the original revelation given to Jews and Christians. The textual reliability of every passage in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament as currently preserved is a separate matter, and one the verse does not address. The verse is consistent with the muhaymin doctrine. Muslims affirm the truth contained in the prior books, while the Qur’an stands as arbiter over what has survived. The clause “Our God and your God is one” affirms the identity of the original monotheistic God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus with the God revealed to Muhammad. The Trinitarian elaboration the post-Nicene Christian tradition built on top of that monotheism is something the Qur’an explicitly rejects elsewhere (Q 4:171; 5:73; 5:116) and falls outside what Q 29:46 affirms.
Q 5:68 commands the People of the Book to “uphold the Torah, the Gospel, and what has been revealed to you from your Lord.”⁵⁴ The verse is directed to its addressees in their own context, calling them to be consistent with the original revelation given to them. The canonical New Testament in its modern form is a distinct object the verse does not address. The verse continues with the warning that what has been revealed to Muhammad will only increase many of them in transgression and disbelief, which presupposes a tension between the genuine prior revelation and the interpretive tradition built upon it. The call in Q 5:68 is to authentic adherence to the original divine revelation, before whatever interpretive overlay has been built upon it.
Q 18:27 states: “Recite what has been revealed to you of the Book of your Lord. There is none who can change His words.”⁵⁵ The verse opens with an instruction to Muhammad concerning the Qur’an specifically. Classical commentators including al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr, and al-Rāzī read the phrase “His words” (kalimātihi, كَلِمَاتِهِ) as referring either to the Qur’an or to God’s decrees and judgements (sunan, سُنَن).⁵⁶ The textual transmission of prior scriptures is a different question that the verse does not address. The verse cannot bear the weight the polemicist puts on it, since the Qur’an itself elsewhere accuses scribes of altering scripture (Q 2:75; 4:46; 5:13). A reading of Q 18:27 as a guarantee of universal textual preservation across all prior revelations would put the Qur’an in direct contradiction with itself.
The “Answering Islam” framing
The Islamic Dilemma circulates in English-speaking apologetic contexts primarily through the Answering Islam platform, which hosts work by Sam Shamoun and a wider circle of contributors associated with David Wood, the late Nabeel Qureshi, and Acts 17 Apologetics. The presentation is consistent. Islam painted itself into a corner by affirming the Bible, and no escape is available.
The framing treats the question as already settled before the analysis begins. Fourteen centuries of Islamic scholarship on taḥrīf go unengaged in any depth. The manuscript tradition of the Bible is invoked selectively. The textual complexity of the canonical scriptures, documented at length by Christian biblical scholars, is acknowledged only when it serves the apologetic goal.
The pattern is clearest in the platform’s treatment of classical Muslim sources. Shamoun’s extended article on taḥrīf and the Torah surveys early Muslim writers and concludes that the prevailing classical position affirmed the textual integrity of the prior scriptures.⁵⁷ The argument rests on selective citation. Ibn Rabbān al-Ṭabarī (d. c. 855) is presented as endorsing the canonical Bible, with no acknowledgement that his comparative work proceeded by selecting biblical passages that aligned with Qur’anic principles, a methodology Schaffner has analysed as the operation of a Qur’anic filter.⁵⁸ The early Zaydī polemicist al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm (d. 860) goes unmentioned in Shamoun’s survey, even though al-Qāsim’s anti-Christian treatise contains an extended re-presentation of Matthew 1-8 that systematically alters the canonical text wherever it conflicts with Qur’anic theology. A method that produces such re-presentation cannot be read as endorsing the textual integrity of the source it rewrites.
The same selectivity governs the platform’s treatment of Q 5:48’s muhaymin. Shamoun’s article on the Qur’anic witness to the Bible cites Ibn Kathīr’s gloss on this term and renders it as “guardian” or “protector” of the prior books, taking this as confirmation of the textual integrity of the canonical scriptures.⁵⁹ The same passage of Ibn Kathīr that Shamoun cites also records the meanings amīn (trustworthy authority), shāhid (witness), and dominant arbiter, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, ʿIkrima, Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, Mujāhid, and Qatāda. The lexical multivalence of muhaymin is treated by the apologetic article as if there were a single fixed reading. The trustworthy-arbiter sense, which would imply the Qur’an’s authority over what survives in the prior scriptures rather than its endorsement of those scriptures’ textual reliability, goes undiscussed.
A second pattern is the asymmetric application of textual criticism. Christian apologetics in the Answering Islam tradition is sceptical of Muslim claims that the Bible contains predictions of Muhammad, often deploying the manuscript record to argue that contested passages in Deuteronomy 18:18, the Song of Songs 5:16, and the Johannine Paraclete sayings do not refer to Muhammad in their original form. The same apologetics is reluctant to apply equivalent scrutiny to the manuscript record of Trinitarian and high-Christological proof-texts. The Comma Johanneum, 1 Timothy 3:16, John 1:18, Hebrews 2:9, and Mark 1:41 are passages where the textual evidence is at least as contested as the verses Christian apologists challenge in Muslim use. Shamoun’s blog discussion of Hebrews 2:9 in connection with Syriac Christology is itself an extended exercise in textual criticism, drawing distinctions between Greek, Syriac, and Latin readings to defend a particular Christological reading.⁶⁰ The methodology functions properly when applied to that verse. Applied symmetrically to 1 John 5:7-8 or 1 Timothy 3:16, the same methodology dismantles the strongest Trinitarian proof-texts in the New Testament. The asymmetry undermines the apologetic project’s claim to careful scholarship.
A third pattern concerns the figure of Paul. Wood’s argument depends, at every stage, on the Pauline corpus being valid scripture, since the Christology the Qur’an is supposed to be contradicting cannot be derived from the original message of Jesus without Paul’s mediation. Answering Islam’s published material treats Paul’s apostolic standing as undisputed, citing Galatians 1:11-12, Acts 9, and 2 Peter 3:15-16. The first of these is Paul’s self-attestation, the very claim Muslims dispute. Acts 9 is a third-party narrative composed decades after the events by Paul’s own companion Luke and therefore partial in the technical sense. The 2 Peter citation is in a letter judged pseudepigraphic by the substantial majority of critical scholars, including conservative evangelicals such as Carson and Moo. Validating Paul’s authority by appeal to Paul’s own claims, his biographer’s narrative, and a pseudepigraphic letter is methodologically circular. The Islamic theological objection to the Pauline corpus, set out in detail in the present author’s recent monograph, goes unaddressed in any sustained way by the Answering Islam material.
Bart Ehrman, a former evangelical who holds the James A. Gray Distinguished Professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written at length on the textual phenomena that Answering Islam-style apologetics tends to minimise. His findings are contested in detail by scholars such as Daniel B. Wallace and Peter J. Williams on questions of interpretation and significance, but the existence of the phenomena Ehrman documents is settled in the field. He arrived at his conclusions through the same methods of historical scholarship that conservative biblical scholars use. The Answering Islam strategy of dismissing Ehrman as a hostile witness fails to engage his actual evidence, which is drawn from the Greek manuscript tradition that conservative biblical scholarship treats as the basis for the New Testament text. If the Answering Islam argument were correct, if the Bible’s textual integrity were as settled as Wood implies, Ehrman’s body of work would have nothing to examine, and Wallace’s measured responses to Ehrman would not concede, as they routinely do, that the textual variants in question are real and theologically meaningful in some cases.
The deeper problem with the Answering Islam framing is that it treats apologetic conclusions as if they were neutral analytic results. Wood’s videos and Shamoun’s articles begin from the assumption that the canonical Bible is the Injīl the Qur’an affirms, and read the rest of the Qur’an in light of that assumption. The position functions as the premise of the entire apologetic project, presented as if it were a conclusion arrived at through exegesis. A reader unfamiliar with the academic study of the Qur’an, of pre-Islamic Arabian Christianity, or of biblical textual criticism, can come away from Answering Islam’s material with the impression that the Islamic Dilemma is the consensus result of careful study. The actual academic literature, surveyed across this article, returns a different verdict.
Why this matters
The Islamic Dilemma circulates widely in online spaces because it sounds rigorous and because a proper response requires groundwork. An explanation of taḥrīf, a survey of the manuscript tradition, an examination of the Qur’anic Injīl, an account of the Pauline corpus’s standing in Islamic theology, and a careful reading of what classical Muslim scholarship actually said all have to be in place before the rebuttal can land.
This is the asymmetry polemicists rely on. An argument that takes thirty seconds to assert but ten minutes to answer will always win the comment section.
The response to Wood’s dilemma can be stated cleanly. The Qur’an affirms the original revelations as true. The Qur’an’s Injīl is the divine revelation given to Jesus, distinct from the four-Gospel canon written about him. The Pauline corpus, comprising thirteen letters plus Hebrews, has no scriptural standing in Islam, since Paul’s claim to apostolic commission falls within an interval the Qur’an and the hadith treat as devoid of prophetic mediation. The classical Islamic tradition, from al-Ṭabarī to al-Rāzī to al-Biqāʿī, engaged the prior scriptures with discrimination, accepting what conformed to the Qur’an and rejecting what did not, on the authority of Q 5:48’s muhaymin doctrine. The Bible, on the testimony of its own manuscript tradition, developed across fourteen centuries of transmission. These are distinct claims. The dilemma Wood constructs requires conflating them. Once they are kept distinct, it dissolves.
The verdict
The Islamic Dilemma rests on three false assumptions and ignores a fourth substantive consideration. The false assumptions are: that the Qur’anic Injīl refers to the canonical four-Gospel New Testament, that classical Islam requires belief in wholesale textual corruption of the Bible, and that the Bible Christians possessed in seventh-century Arabia was textually identical to the modern critical edition. The substantive consideration is the Pauline corpus, which Islam does not accept as scripture under any textual condition.
The Qur’an’s Injīl is consistently singular, conceived as a heavenly revelation given to Jesus. The dominant pre-modern Islamic exegetical tradition reads taḥrīf as discriminating engagement, with the Qur’an as criterion. The Bible’s textual history, from the Dead Sea Scrolls through the Comma Johanneum, the Pericope Adulterae, the long ending of Mark, the pseudepigraphic Pastorals, and the anonymity of the Gospels, exhibits the kind of accumulating editorial development that the Qur’anic doctrine of taḥrīf, properly understood, accommodates. The Pauline corpus belongs to a category Islamic theology has consistently placed outside the bounds of accepted revelation.
The argument is slick. It works on audiences who have not read the Qur’an in its full context, who are unfamiliar with the academic study of Qur’anic vocabulary, who have not encountered the textual history of the Bible, and who have not considered that roughly half of the Christian New Testament is attributed to a figure whose apostolic claim Islam does not recognise. Once the actual claims are traced back to the actual texts, the dilemma reveals itself as a category error.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Islamic Dilemma?
The Islamic Dilemma is a polemical argument popularised by Christian apologist David Wood. It claims that the Qur’an affirms the Bible as it existed in the seventh century, placing Islam in an alleged contradiction. Either the Qur’an endorsed corrupted scripture, in which case its endorsement is worthless, or the Qur’an endorsed authentic scripture that contradicts Islamic theology. The argument rests on a misreading of Qur’anic vocabulary, the classical doctrine of taḥrīf, and the manuscript history of the Bible.
Who is David Wood and what is his role in the Islamic Dilemma argument?
David Wood is the founder of Acts 17 Apologetics and a Christian apologist who completed a doctorate in philosophy at Fordham University. He has popularised the Islamic Dilemma argument through his YouTube channel and the Answering Muslims platform, debating Muslim apologists including Shabir Ally and Daniel Haqiqatjou. His formulation builds on earlier work by Sam Shamoun published through the Answering Islam website.
Is the Islamic Dilemma true?
No. The argument rests on three false assumptions: that the Qur’anic Injīl refers to the canonical four-Gospel New Testament, that classical Islamic scholarship requires belief in wholesale textual corruption of the Bible, and that the seventh-century Bible was textually identical to the modern critical edition. The Qur’an uses Injīl only in the singular, the dominant exegetical tradition reads taḥrīf as discriminating engagement, and the manuscript record shows extensive textual development across fourteen centuries.
Has the Islamic Dilemma been refuted or debunked?
Yes, on multiple grounds. Academic specialists in Qur’anic studies, including Sidney Griffith and Gabriel Said Reynolds, have shown that the argument misconstrues Qur’anic vocabulary and the textual landscape of seventh-century Christianity. Muslim apologists including Khalil Andani, Bassam Zawadi, and Shabir Ally have engaged the argument in formal debate. The biblical manuscript evidence, documented by mainstream textual critics including Bart Ehrman and Bruce Metzger, undermines the Christian premise that the Bible has been transmitted without alteration.
What is the Euthyphro Dilemma in Islam?
The Euthyphro Dilemma is a philosophical challenge asking whether something is good because Allah commands it, or whether Allah commands it because it is good. Some versions of the Islamic Dilemma argument fold it in as a separate objection. The Islamic response is grounded in the doctrine of al-Asmāʾ wa al-Ṣifāt (الأسماء والصفات, the Divine Names and Attributes). Allah’s commands flow from his nature, which is itself the standard of goodness, neither external to him nor arbitrary.
How does Answering Islam present the Islamic Dilemma?
The Answering Islam platform, associated with Sam Shamoun, presents the Islamic Dilemma as a closed case where Islam has painted itself into a logical corner by affirming the Bible. The presentation engages selectively with classical Islamic scholarship on taḥrīf and treats the Christian biblical canon as a stable seventh-century object. Both assumptions fail under academic scrutiny.
What is the origin of the Islamic Dilemma argument by David Wood and Sam Shamoun?
Sam Shamoun articulated an early version of the argument on the Answering Islam website, with particular emphasis on the exegesis of Surah 5:48 and the meaning of the Qur’anic term muhaymin drawn from Ibn Kathīr’s commentary. David Wood subsequently developed the rhetorical framing into the syllogistic Islamic Dilemma presentation now circulated on YouTube and through the Answering Muslims platform.
Do Muslims accept the letters of Paul as scripture?
No. The Christian New Testament includes thirteen letters traditionally attributed to Paul of Tarsus, plus the Epistle to the Hebrews, totalling fourteen documents. Islamic theology rejects this corpus on the basis of a hadith preserved in al-Bukhārī and Muslim establishing that no prophet was sent between Jesus and Muhammad. Paul’s self-designation as an apostle commissioned by the risen Jesus falls within an interval the Islamic tradition treats as devoid of prophetic mediation.
Footnotes
¹ See Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, vol. 1, s.v. h-y-m-n; cf. al-Jawharī, Ṣiḥāḥ, and al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿArūs, ad loc.
² Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ed. Sāmī ibn Muḥammad Salāma (Beirut: Dār Ṭayba, 1999), 3:127–128.
³ Al-Naḥl 16:64.
⁴ Camilla Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabbān to Ibn Ḥazm (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 251.
⁵ Thomas F. Michel, A Muslim Theologian’s Response to Christianity: Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1984), 89–90.
⁶ Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Shākir, 30 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1955–1969), commentary on Q 2:75. Cf. Adang, op. cit., 228.
⁷ Op. cit., 10:376–379.
⁸ Al-Qurṭubī, al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-Qurʾān, ed. Aḥmad al-Bardūnī and Ibrāhīm Aṭfīsh, 20 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1964), commentary on Q 2:75.
⁹ Al-Māturīdī, Taʾwīlāt ahl al-sunna, ed. Majdī Bāslūm, 10 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005), commentary on Q 4:46.
¹⁰ Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, 32 vols. (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 2000), commentary on Q 2:75 and 5:13.
¹¹ Gabriel Said Reynolds, “On the Qurʾānic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (taḥrīf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 2 (2010): 192–193.
¹² Ibid., 193–194.
¹³ Ryan Schaffner, “The Bible through a Qurʾānic Filter: Scripture Falsification (Taḥrīf) in 8th- and 9th-Century Muslim Disputational Literature” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2016).
¹⁴ Ibid., 359–362.
¹⁵ Walid Saleh, In Defense of the Bible: A Critical Edition and an Introduction to al-Biqāʿī’s Bible Treatise (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 3.
¹⁶ Ibid., 7, 118.
¹⁷ Sidney H. Griffith, “Gospel,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 2:342–343.
¹⁸ Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), passim.
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Petri Luomanen, Recovering Jewish-Christian Sects and Gospels (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
²¹ Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 4th rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022).
²² Frank Moore Cross and Richard J. Saley, “A Statistical Analysis of the Textual Character of 4QSamuelᵃ,” Dead Sea Discoveries 13, no. 1 (2006): 46–54; cf. Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus, HSM 19 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978).
²³ Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015).
²⁴ Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 204.
²⁵ Peter J. Gurry, “The Number of Variants in the Greek New Testament,” New Testament Studies 62 (2016): 97–121.
²⁶ Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 647–649.
²⁷ Op. cit., 187–189; cf. Chris Keith, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
²⁸ Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
²⁹ Metzger, Textual Commentary, 573–574.
³⁰ Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 146–150.
³¹ Ibid., 78–82.
³² D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 659.
³³ Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi, Paulus: Perosak Risalah al-Masīḥ. Sejarah Bagaimana Ajaran Kristian Dicipta Sepenuhnya (Seri Kembangan: Langgam Fikir, 2025), xviii–xxi.
³⁴ Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3258; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2365.
³⁵ Acts 9:1–19; cf. Galatians 1:11–17.
³⁶ 2 Corinthians 11:5.
³⁷ Galatians 1:11–12.
³⁸ Juferi, op. cit., 134–159 (chapter “Pandangan Islam Mengenai Paulus”).
³⁹ Op. cit., 113–133 (chapter “Paulus: Bapa Agama Baharu”); cf. op. cit., 84–102 (chapter “Wahyu Atau Plagiat?”).
⁴⁰ 1 Corinthians 8:6; 1 John 5:7-8.
⁴¹ 1 Timothy 2:5.
⁴² John 3:16.
⁴³ Cf. Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78–82.
⁴⁴ Q 3:185.
⁴⁵ Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6819, Kitāb al-Ḥudūd; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1699, Kitāb al-Ḥudūd; cf. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 4556 and 7332–7333 for parallel narrations.
⁴⁶ Al-Māʾidah 5:44.
⁴⁷ Āl ʿImrān 3:3.
⁴⁸ Yūnus 10:37.
⁴⁹ Yūnus 10:94.
⁵⁰ Al-Aʿrāf 7:157.
⁵¹ Al-Baqarah 2:75.
⁵² Al-Māʾidah 5:13.
⁵³ Al-ʿAnkabūt 29:46.
⁵⁴ Al-Māʾidah 5:68.
⁵⁵ Al-Kahf 18:27.
⁵⁶ Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, commentary on Q 18:27; cf. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ad loc.; al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, ad loc.
⁵⁷ Sam Shamoun, “Tahrif and the Torah: The Views of the Early Muslim Writers and Polemicists on the Authenticity of the Hebrew Scriptures,” answeringislam.org/Shamoun/tahrif.htm.
⁵⁸ Schaffner, op. cit., chs. 7–9; cf. Sam Shamoun, “The Quranic Witness to the Authority of the Holy Bible,” answeringislam.net/Shamoun/aboutbible.htm.
⁵⁹ Shamoun, “Quranic Witness,” op. cit.; cf. Sam Shamoun, “The Classical Muslim Commentators and Their Exegesis of Surah 5:48,” answeringislam.org. The full spectrum of meanings of muhaymin is set out at Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, 3:127–128.
⁶⁰ Sam Shamoun, “Hebrews 2:9 & Syriac Christology,” answeringislamblog.wordpress.com (9 October 2024); cf. Daniel B. Wallace, ed., Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011).