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)