QUR’AN: Its Manuscripts are worse than its Qira’ats!
Dr Jay Smith
We now move into the more problematic area of Qur’anic criticism, the difficulties with the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts. Muslims claim that the Qur’an:
1) Is un-created and exists eternally on clay tablets in heaven (S.85:22)
2) Was sent down to Muhammad between 610 – 632 AD (Al Bukhari 6:509)
3) Was completed by Uthman in 652 AD (Al Bukhari 6:510)
4) Is unchanged in the last 1400 years (Surahs 10:15; 18:27) -Not one WORD, nor one LETTER has been changed
5) Is guarded from corruption by Allah (Surah 15:9)
6) Was finally canonized in 1924 AD, and made official in 1985 We can’t critique ‘un-created’ or ‘sent down’. But we can critique complete, unchanged, guarded & canonized. Thus, we would want to find: •
1 Qur’anic manuscript
•Compiled in the Mid 7th century (652 AD)
•Complete (i.e. all 114 Surahs)
•Unchanged (throughout the intervening 1400 years)
•Canonized (exactly like the 1924 ‘Hafs’ Qur’an used today) But no Muslim has ever produced such a Qur’an, though they will continue to claim they have it, hoping that no one will demand they support what they claim.
So, in this lecture Jays goes through 6 areas of investigation:
[1] The 2 Compilations of the Qur’an
[2] The 6 Earliest Qur’anic Manuscripts
[3] The 2 layers of the Sana’a palimpsest
[4] The 2 Birmingham Folios and Radio-Carbon 14
[5] The 4,000 Early Consonantal Variants
[6] The 63 Earliest Extant Fragments
And in a period of 2 hours he concludes the following:
•Our source for the Qur’an’s compilation is 200 – 300 years too late, and thus worthless
•The 2 compilations, 20 years apart, prove that men changed even the earliest Qur’ans
•The 6 manuscripts were not analyzed textually, nor dated correctly, & there’s no original
•The 6 manuscripts are not complete, nor the same, nor early, and all from the 8th–9th c.
•The 2 Layers of the Sana’a manuscript prove that men created a nascent Qur’an in the 7th century, didn’t like it, so washed it, and subsequently rewrote over top of it
•The Birmingham folios are not early, but part of the later Petropolitanus Manuscript
•The 4 Carbon dated Lab reports prove that RC-14 is much too inexact, and that men borrowed stories created long before the Qur’an
•The 4,000 Consonantal Variants prove that Muslims have been, and are possibly still, changing and standardizing the text of the Qur’an
•The 63 fragments employed to find just 96% of the Qur’an proves there was no Qur’an for the first 100 years, while ALL the fragments they have found are either tentative, or quite late, or they have no sources, suggesting little is known about these manuscripts
•The 2 Compilations, along with the 6 different manuscripts, along with the changed Palimpsest, and the 4,000 consonantal variants, as well as the 63 supposed early fragments, prove that when Muslims find problems with their Qur’an, they either burn them, wash them, erase them, cover them, or sink them to destroy the evidence!
Jay’s final Conclusion? From what we have researched, and found, we can say that:
•The Qur’an was not created by God at all
•The Qur’an was not sent down to Muhammad between 610 – 632 AD
•The Qur’an was not completed by Uthman in 652 AD
•The Qur’an was changed in the last 1300 years (note that I’m specifically using 1300)
•The Qur’an was finally compiled in 1924, and made official in 1985
•Thus, the Qur’an is a mere 96…no wait…35 years old! Consequently, many of you reading this are actually older than the Qur’an!
© Pfander Centre for Apologetics – US, 2020 (40,550) (Music: “small adventure”, by Rafael Krux, from filmmusic-io – License CC BY)
