Surah Al-Araf 157: “Those who follow the Messenger, the Ummiyy (unlettered) prophet whom they find written with them in the Torah and the Injil and who bids the what is fair and forbids what is unfair, and makes lawful for the good things, and makes unlawful for the impure things, and relieves them of their burden, and of the shackles that were upon them.The Qur’an even goes so far as to assert that the prophet Muhammad is prophesied in both the Old and New Testaments. Surah Al-Anbiya: “And We have written in Zabur (Psalms) after the advice that the land will be inherited by My righteous slaves.”.Say, “Call those who you assume (to be gods), besides Him, while they have no power to remove distress from you, nor to change it.”“ Surah Al-Isra: “Your Lord knows best about all those in the heavens and the earth, and We have certainly granted excellence to some prophets over some others, and We gave Dawud the Zabur (the Psalms).Surah An-Nisa 163: “Surely, We have revealed to you as We have revealed to Nuh and to the prophets after him and We have revealed to Ibrahim, Isma’il, Ishaq, Ya’qub and their children, and to Isa, Ayyub, Yunus, Harun, and Salaiman, and We have given Zabur to Dawud.”.Whoever disbelieves in Allah and His angels and His Books and His Messengers and the Last Day has indeed gone far astray.” Surah An-Nisa 136: “O you who believe, do believe in Allah and His Messenger and in the Book He has revealed to His Messenger and in the Books He has revealed earlier.Surah Al-E-Imran 3: “He has revealed to you the Book with the truth, confirming what has been before it, and has sent down the Torah and the Injil.”.Consider, for example, the following verses. What, then, of Premise 3? The Qur’an, over and over again, affirms the Christian Scriptures, claiming consistency with them, and asserting that the Torah and the Gospel (the “Injil”), and also the Psalms, are previous revelations from Allah. As I have shown, Premises 1 and 2 cannot be reasonably denied. The Qur’an’s Affirmation of the Christian and Jewish Scripturesįor the Muslim to reject the conclusion of the argument, at least one of the three Premises must also be rejected. If, then, the Christian Scriptures are indeed the inspired Word of God, the Muslim Scriptures cannot be, since the Qur’an so fundamentally disagrees with the theology of the Bible. The Qur’an, of course, repeatedly misrepresents Christian theology on these matters, as I discuss here, but this is immaterial to the issues that concern us here. The Qur’an, on multiple occasions, denies the Trinity (e.g. The Qur’an also repeatedly denies the core Biblical concept that Christ is the incarnate eternal Son of God, affirming instead that He is only a messenger or prophet (e.g. The most obvious item of conflict relates to whether Jesus died by crucifixion, denied by the Qur’an (Surah An-Nisa 157-158) but affirmed throughout the New Testament and indeed a cornerstone of New Testament theology. Premise 2 is easy to establish, since the Qur’an and the Bible fundamentally contradict one another. Premise 1 need not be defended, since it is self-evident that the two alternatives are mutually exclusive and exhaustive possibilities. Granted, there are textual variants in the New Testament Greek manuscripts, but the core message of the New Testament remains the same - they are thus immaterial to what I’m attempting to establish here. By “the Bible” I refer to the Old and New Testaments as we possess them today and as possessed by Christians at the time of Muhammad in the seventh century. Premise 3: If the Bible is not the Word of God, the Qur’an is not.Ĭonclusion: Therefore, the Qur’an is not the Word of God.įirst, a note of qualification. Premise 2: If the Bible is the Word of God, the Qur’an is not. Premise 1: Either the Bible is the Word of God or it is not. My argument here can be summarized in syllogistic form as follows: In future articles, we will consider some other serious difficulties with the idea that the Qur’an represents the revealed words of God. In this article, I am going to offer one of those reasons, which I perceive to be the most damning. Such an assertion, however, is highly problematic, and many, many arguments could be given to convincingly refute it. The Islamic religion claims that the Qur’an, revealed allegedly by the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad beginning in 610 A.D., is the inspired and inerrant word of God.
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