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Origins of the Quran

Unveiled Artist

Veteran Member
Muslims.

I was told by a christian the other day that Muhammad took parts of the Bible and put it into the Quran. She asserted that her faith is true one of many reasons because other religions "stole" from the Bible. Is the former true?

I told her that time period doesnt change a sacred book's authenticity. How does being the oldest abrahamic faith (which I believe is Judaism to make it simple) make one religion true and the other false?
 

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
The Quran does refer to the existence of the Gospels and acknowledge them as originally a legitimate revelation from God, albeit one that was not properly maintained since.

It does the same for the Torah. And then it assures the reader that such will never happen with the (original, Arabic) text of the Quran, which came in part to correct the mistakes that the failure to properly keep those two revelations caused.

What, if anything, that means from an autenticity standpoint, I can't tell. Except that it suggests that Judaism and Christianity were known by the people of Mohammad, and that by Muslim perspective they are not stealing, but rather preserving and rescuing the true message of Christianity.
 

Unveiled Artist

Veteran Member
The Quran does refer to the existence of the Gospels and acknowledge them as originally a legitimate revelation from God, albeit one that was not properly maintained since.

It does the same for the Torah. And then it assures the reader that such will never happen with the (original, Arabic) text of the Quran, which came in part to correct the mistakes that the failure to properly keep those two revelations caused.

What, if anything, that means from an autenticity standpoint, I can't tell. Except that it suggests that Judaism and Christianity were known by the people of Mohammad, and that by Muslim perspective they are not stealing, but rather preserving and rescuing the true message of Christianity.

Nice. So the Quran is an attempt (to try and put. icely) together god's word in which both gospels and torah tried but went in error?
 
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wizanda

One Accepts All Religious Texts
Premium Member
The Quran is like a review of the Bible, it doesn't take sections out as such; just correct somethings, it sees as mistakes. ;)
 

Thana

Lady
Muslims.

I was told by a christian the other day that Muhammad took parts of the Bible and put it into the Quran. She asserted that her faith is true one of many reasons because other religions "stole" from the Bible. Is the former true?

I told her that time period doesnt change a sacred book's authenticity. How does being the oldest abrahamic faith (which I believe is Judaism to make it simple) make one religion true and the other false?

Technically half the bible isn't even ours so personally I wouldn't feel comfortable saying the words 'stole from the bible'.

There are plenty of reasons why Islam is false, but it being a relatively young religion and the youngest of Abrahamics is not one of them imo.
 

David1967

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
The Quran is like a review of the Bible, it doesn't take sections out as such; just correct somethings, it sees as mistakes. ;)

It seems that they (Islam) takes the parts of Torah and Gospels that agree with Islam as true and the parts that don't as corrupted.:confused:
 

Tumah

Veteran Member
Technically half the bible isn't even ours so personally I wouldn't feel comfortable saying the words 'stole from the bible'.

There are plenty of reasons why Islam is false, but it being a relatively young religion and the youngest of Abrahamics is not one of them imo.
I don't think they're the youngest anymore. I think Baha'i now has that distinction.
 

wizanda

One Accepts All Religious Texts
Premium Member
It seems that they (Islam) takes the parts of Torah and Gospels that agree with Islam as true and the parts that don't as corrupted.:confused:
Some Muslims do, yet the Quran doesn't specifically say to ignore it, and say it is all corrupt... :confused:
 
I was told by a christian the other day that Muhammad took parts of the Bible and put it into the Quran. She asserted that her faith is true one of many reasons because other religions "stole" from the Bible. Is the former true?

As has been mentioned, the Quran is said to be a continuation of the message delivered to Abraham, Moses, Jesus, etc.

"Even a brief perusal of the Arabic Qurʾān is sufficient to convince the first-time reader that the text presumes a high degree of scriptural literacy on the part of its audience. In it there are frequent references to biblical patriarchs, prophets, and other gures of Late Antique, Jewish, and Christian religious lore. One hears of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, Solomon, Job, and Jonah, among others from the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, one reads of Jesus, Mary, Zecharaiah, John the Baptist, and Jesus’ disciples from the New Testament, but no mention of Paul and his epistles. What is more, there are numerous echoes in the Qurʾān of non- biblical, Jewish and Christian traditions, some of them otherwise found in so-called apocryphal or pseudepigraphic biblical texts. So prominent is this scriptural material in the body of the Islamic scripture that one twentieth- century Western scholar of Islam was prompted to speak of the Qurʾān as “a truncated, Arabic edition of the Bible.” But in fact the Qurʾān is much more than just an evocation of earlier biblical narratives; it incorporates the recollection of those earlier scriptures into its own call to belief, to Islam and its proper observance, as it says, in good, clarifying Arabic" S. Griffiths - The Bible in Arabic

It contains aspects of the bible but also aspects of non-cannonical Gospels, Midrashic teachings, non-scriptual Christian myth (Alexander romance, & sleepers of Ephasus) and Christian Church orders (Didascalia Apostolorum)

As regard academic scholarship the origins of the Quran are very controversial, with numerous competing theories, all of which are to some degree tentative.

For example:

"a good number of Qur’ānic pericopes look like Arabic ingenious patchworks of Biblical and para- Biblical texts, designed to comment passages or aspects of the Scripture, whereas others look like Arabic translations of liturgical formulas.

This is not unexpected if we have in mind some Late Antique religious practices, namely the well-known fact that Christian Churches followed the Jewish custom of reading publicly the Scriptures, according to the lectionary principle. In other words, people did not read the whole of the Scripture to the assembly, but lectionaries (Syriac qǝryānā, “reading of Scripture in Divine Service”, etymon of Arabic qur’ān), containing selected passages of the Scripture, to be read in the community. Therefore, many of the texts which constitute the Qur’ān should not be seen (at least if we are interested in their original Sitz im Leben) as substitutes for the (Jewish or Christian) Scripture, but rather as a (putatively divinely inspired) commentary of Scripture."
Traces of Bilingualism/Multilingualism in Qur'anic Arabic - G. Dye

From an academic perspective (rather than theological), the origins of the Quran are very much up for debate. And Muslims would disagree with many academic contentions calling them 'orientalist'.

If you are interested in the topic this book is decent place to start:

https://serdargunes.files.wordpress...-historical-context-gabriel-said-reynolds.pdf

(And if you are really interested I can find you a whole load more academic resources, but most of them aren't really light reading)
 

David1967

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
Some Muslims do, yet the Quran doesn't specifically say to ignore it, and say it is all corrupt... :confused:

True, the Quran emphasizes that God has no equal and needs no partner. I didn't say that they believe that it is all corrupted, just the parts that go against the Quran.
 

Gharib

I want Khilafah back
Muslims.

I was told by a christian the other day that Muhammad took parts of the Bible and put it into the Quran. She asserted that her faith is true one of many reasons because other religions "stole" from the Bible. Is the former true?

I told her that time period doesnt change a sacred book's authenticity. How does being the oldest abrahamic faith (which I believe is Judaism to make it simple) make one religion true and the other false?

If Muhammed copied the Bible how would he know not to copy those parts which are contradictory? How did he come up with the notion that the universe is expanding, the Bible doesn't teach this, no one taught this back then. How could he have known which parts to copy and which not?

There are similarities because they all originate from the same God.

And Christians have changed and corrupted the Bible over time. We have a modern example of how the teachings of the Bible are eventually changed either physically in the text or are interpreted in different ways as time goes by:

“If someone is gay and searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Two years ago Tuesday, Pope Francis uttered these words, sending shockwaves throughout the Catholic Church and the world. His position stood in contrast to that of his predecessors: Months earlier, Pope Benedict XVI suggested that gay marriage was a threat to global peace.

2. Pope Francis suggested the church could be open to civil unions — March 5, 2014
Francis said in an interview that the church could be open to same-sex civil unions, a view he had first voiced as archbishop of Buenos Aires. The pope reiterated the church’s teaching that a “marriage is between a man and a woman” but argued that on civil unions, “we have to look at different cases and evaluate them in their variety.”


http://time.com/3975630/pope-francis-lgbt-issues/
 

Unveiled Artist

Veteran Member
If Muhammed copied the Bible how would he know not to copy those parts which are contradictory? How did he come up with the notion that the universe is expanding, the Bible doesn't teach this, no one taught this back then. How could he have known which parts to copy and which not?

There are similarities because they all originate from the same God.

And Christians have changed and corrupted the Bible over time. We have a modern example of how the teachings of the Bible are eventually changed either physically in the text or are interpreted in different ways as time goes by:

“If someone is gay and searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Two years ago Tuesday, Pope Francis uttered these words, sending shockwaves throughout the Catholic Church and the world. His position stood in contrast to that of his predecessors: Months earlier, Pope Benedict XVI suggested that gay marriage was a threat to global peace.

2. Pope Francis suggested the church could be open to civil unions — March 5, 2014
Francis said in an interview that the church could be open to same-sex civil unions, a view he had first voiced as archbishop of Buenos Aires. The pope reiterated the church’s teaching that a “marriage is between a man and a woman” but argued that on civil unions, “we have to look at different cases and evaluate them in their variety.”


http://time.com/3975630/pope-francis-lgbt-issues/


Oh my. Wow. That must have put a crink in the Catholic crowd. Your first part, yeah, my co-worker was saying how Muhammad changed a lot of the Bible and such. She also said Christianity was the first religion. I was honestly shocked. Whether it is truth or not depends on the person, but paganism (native religions) have been here for yeearrs. I just wanted to make sure out of my limited short read of the Quran.

Thank you.
 

paarsurrey

Veteran Member
The Quran does refer to the existence of the Gospels and acknowledge them as originally a legitimate revelation from God, albeit one that was not properly maintained since.
It does the same for the Torah. And then it assures the reader that such will never happen with the (original, Arabic) text of the Quran, which came in part to correct the mistakes that the failure to properly keep those two revelations caused.
What, if anything, that means from an autenticity standpoint, I can't tell. Except that it suggests that Judaism and Christianity were known by the people of Mohammad, and that by Muslim perspective they are not stealing, but rather preserving and rescuing the true message of Christianity.
I agree with you and would like to add that Quran not only preserves the truthful core messages of Christianity and Judaism but of all the revealed religions, it stole nothing from anybody.
Regards
 

McBell

Resident Sourpuss
The Quran does refer to the existence of the Gospels and acknowledge them as originally a legitimate revelation from God, albeit one that was not properly maintained since.

It does the same for the Torah. And then it assures the reader that such will never happen with the (original, Arabic) text of the Quran, which came in part to correct the mistakes that the failure to properly keep those two revelations caused.

What, if anything, that means from an autenticity standpoint, I can't tell. Except that it suggests that Judaism and Christianity were known by the people of Mohammad, and that by Muslim perspective they are not stealing, but rather preserving and rescuing the true message of Christianity.
My understanding is that Muslims believe the Koran corrects the changes and mistakes of the first two attempts....
third times the charm and all.
 

paarsurrey

Veteran Member
Muslims.
I was told by a christian the other day that Muhammad took parts of the Bible and put it into the Quran. She asserted that her faith is true one of many reasons because other religions "stole" from the Bible. Is the former true?
I told her that time period doesnt change a sacred book's authenticity. How does being the oldest abrahamic faith (which I believe is Judaism to make it simple) make one religion true and the other false?
One may like to view my post #1170 in another thread in this connection. Please
Regards
 

outhouse

Atheistically
I was told by a christian the other day that Muhammad took parts of the Bible and put it into the Quran.

The koran did plagiarize the bible heavily.

She asserted that her faith is true one of many reasons because other religions "stole" from the Bible. Is the former true?

False

Christians pervert the OT, and plagiarized it.

Israelites plagiarized Canaanite and Mesopotamian mythology

islam plagiarized it all

I told her that time period doesnt change a sacred book's authenticity

True

How does being the oldest abrahamic faith (which I believe is Judaism to make it simple) make one religion true and the other false?

They all changed previous traditions to meet their new cultural needs. Age does not matter
 

outhouse

Atheistically
If Muhammed copied the Bible how would he know not to copy those parts which are contradictory?

muhammad did not do it. he sold it to the people, not create it. Waraka muhammads cousin was a priest and new the bible well, and had a life long relationship with the man

I see Waraka doing this with all his biblical knowledge

How did he come up with the notion that the universe is expanding, the Bible doesn't teach this, no one taught this back then

Luck he did not know this.

How could he have known which parts to copy and which not?

It was plagiarized, not copied.


Muhammad had to factually have a teacher, it did not come out of thin air, and his cousin a priest taught him what he knew.
 
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