Minute with a Muslim #327 – Authenticity of The Quran Explained – What’s the Proof

So a lot of people have questions about the authenticity of a Koran. And this is something I didn't necessarily know a whole lot about until, until I had to, I was in kind of a conversation with a couple of evangelicals. And they were claiming that the New Testament was the best preserved, it's kind of ancient texts or whatever. And so I said, maybe it is, I don't know. And so I started kind of investigating. And,

you know, at first, the the numbers that people throw around, they have to do with how many manuscripts that are. So what's the manuscript manual from hand, the script writing, so it's talking about a human being sitting down writing something, right for the first time, and then they get copied, right, so then there's copies of copies of copies. So basically, you're kind of in like, you know, a detective trying to follow it back to get to the first, you know, manuscripts are to get to a certain time period and see how many are there? Right. So it's not necessarily significant. If they say that, you know, the New Testament has 5000 manuscripts, that might be a significant number,

or might not be depending on when were those manuscripts written? Are they written 500 years after Jesus? If they are, then it's not, that's not that significant. That means that there's 500 years that are unaccounted for, right, what happened in those 500 years, what changed, we can't tell unless we have a paper trail, or some sort of, you know, oral tradition verification, like we have in Islam, but that's another that's another video. So if you go to so I started looking. And basically what I found was that if you try to find how many manuscripts exist, for the New Testament that can be dated within 100 years of the life of Jesus.

There's only one really.

And the second question that you have to ask that's significant is okay, that manuscript, how much of the current text is represented in that manuscript are we talking about is this manuscript like a whole copy of the New Testament, and this one particular manuscript is the size of a business card, and I've got it had it contains a single verse of John, a gospel of John on it. So not very significant at all. You don't really get very many manuscripts of the New Testament, until you get into the 250s, and a three hundreds, especially after the Roman Empire, convert to Christianity, then you get what you get, as you get an explosion of manuscripts. Now everybody's doing it,

everybody's writing down, you know, the, the New Testament, producing copies and copies and copies. But that doesn't really help us. Right? When it comes to Okay, Jesus existed from this date to this date. And then there's this time period where the record goes blank.

There's no paper trail. There's no oral trail. We don't know who said what to who. And then some point 200 years later, 250 years later, 300 years later, somebody writes something now, that's basically what we have when it comes to the New Testament. And so you can tell this is not a very reliable source of information. Right? We haven't even the the the names of the people who supposedly wrote the Gospels. It's not written on there. It's not saying well, this is right. This is these are this is a lot of speculation. This is a lot of reading into things. And it's not really found on fact, and there are scholars who deal with this, specifically like Bart Ehrman, and these

guys, when it comes to the Koran, then I had to look into the Quran. Okay, what I found on the Koran is that the Quran, comparatively, is obviously a lot better, and thus more authentic as a text than the New Testament. So there are over 50 existing manuscripts in various libraries throughout the world and in private collections that can be dated to within 100 years of the Prophet Muhammad salallahu Alaihe. Salam

and of these, okay, then the second important question, okay, over 50 That's much more. How much of the Quran is represented in these manuscripts? Over 96% of the Quran is represented just some things pages missing here and there?

How, okay, great, how much difference is there between those manuscripts on the Koran that we hold in our hands today? Basically, nothing, you occasional typo. Right. And there's a website that collects all this information we can link to but the the so I set out to kind of look into these things. And I found something that I had,

that I had a hunch about before was that the Quran even if you just take the manuscript evidence is way more authentic as a document as a text than the New Testament or any other texts that I'm aware of, from that time period or earlier, and that doesn't even get into our oral tradition and the way that we authentic authenticate the oral tradition