How genuine and well preserved are the Bible and the Holy Qur’an?

Whether a scripture comes from God can be judged by two standards, the goodness of its teaching and its agreement with the nature God has created. The Bible was the word of God, but people changed it. The Holy Qur’an is guarded by God Himself.

The first standard is the teaching itself. A teaching from God is good, honest and straightforward. Someone who makes false claims usually has aims of his own. His teaching brings advantages to him and his followers and has something crooked about it. An impostor would have no reason to bring a plain and reasonable teaching that serves only what is good. That is why the Holy Qur’an points again and again to the common core that all true religions have taught.

The second standard is nature. God created the world, and His word cannot contradict His work. If a scripture claims something that goes against nature, then people added that passage later or misunderstood it. Often they were people of an age that did not yet understand nature.

One example is the idea that the earth had to stand still with everything circling around it, because Jesus (as) was born on it. For a long time many Christians held this as part of their faith. Galileo Galilei nearly paid a heavy price for saying the opposite. Reading the Bible carefully, one sees that God never said such a thing. It was human understanding that had been attributed to scripture.

This is also how the Holy Qur’an sees it. The Bible was the word of God, but people and scribes changed it, as the first verse above shows. Where contradictions appear, it is not one word of God contradicting another. They come from human interference. The Holy Qur’an, on the other hand, says that God Himself guards it, and it challenges everyone to search it for contradictions.

This does not belittle the Bible. All true religions were in harmony with the nature God created when they began. That is why a Muslim also defends the divine core of the Bible. He only asks that it be read in the light of these two standards.