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The Quran affirms that Allah revealed the Injil to Isa ibn Maryam (عليه السلام) as guidance and light for Banu Isra'il, confirming the Torah before it and calling people to the worship of Allah alone. This was a single, coherent revelation — not a library of texts assembled over centuries by human editors. What survives today under the name "New Testament" bears little resemblance to that original scripture. The process by which the revealed Injil was lost, altered, and replaced by human compositions is what the Quran calls tahrif — the corruption of divine scripture.
Allah states plainly in the Quran that the People of the Book altered their scriptures. In Surah Aal Imran, He says: "And indeed, there is among them a party who alter the Scripture with their tongues so you may think it is from the Scripture, but it is not from the Scripture. And they say, 'This is from Allah,' but it is not from Allah. And they speak untruth about Allah while they know" (3:78).
The word tahrif in Arabic carries two meanings that both apply here. The first is tahrif al-lafz — changing the actual words of a text, substituting one phrase for another, or removing passages entirely. The second is tahrif al-ma'na — distorting the meaning of words that remain, reinterpreting clear statements to serve a different theology. Ibn Kathir, in his tafsir, explained that both forms were practiced by those who handled the earlier scriptures.
Allah also says: "They distort words from their [proper] usages and have forgotten a portion of that of which they were reminded" (Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:13). The phrase "forgotten a portion" indicates that parts of the original revelation were not merely misinterpreted but lost entirely — whether through deliberate suppression or simple neglect over generations of oral and written transmission.
One of the most consequential alterations concerned the prophecy of the final Messenger. The Quran records that Isa (عليه السلام) himself gave glad tidings of a messenger to come after him, "whose name shall be Ahmad" (Surah As-Saff 61:6). Muslim scholars, including Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim, identified traces of this prophecy in what the Gospel of John calls the Parakletos — rendered in English as "Comforter" or "Advocate." They argued that an earlier form, Periklytos (meaning "the praised one," equivalent to Ahmad), was altered during the Greek transmission of the text. Whether or not the specific linguistic argument is accepted in every detail, the Quranic testimony that Isa foretold the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) is decisive for the Muslim. That this prophecy does not appear clearly in the surviving Gospels is itself evidence of the corruption the Quran describes.
The texts that make up the New Testament were not written by Isa (عليه السلام). They were composed by various authors — some known, some anonymous — writing in Greek decades after Isa's departure. The earliest letters attributed to Paul of Tarsus date to roughly 50 CE, and Paul never met Isa during his earthly ministry. The four canonical Gospels were written between approximately 70 and 100 CE, each reflecting the theological concerns of its community.
The progression across these texts is telling. The earlier Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) present Isa in terms that, while already shaped by later theology, retain elements of a human prophet calling to the worship of God. The Gospel of John, written last and most heavily influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, opens with the declaration that Isa is the pre-existent divine Word — a formulation that would have been foreign to the original Hawariyin (disciples) and that provided the theological raw material for the doctrine of the Trinity formalized centuries later.
The selection of which texts would constitute the official "New Testament" was a process spanning centuries and driven by ecclesiastical politics. Dozens of texts circulated among early communities, many of which maintained a more strictly monotheistic understanding of Isa. These were systematically marginalized and destroyed as the institutional church consolidated its authority. The councils that finalized the canon were not guided by revelation but by the power dynamics of a Roman imperial religion.
For the Muslim, the corruption of the Injil is not a matter of hostility toward Christians or their scriptures. It is a matter of historical and theological reality that the Quran addresses directly. Fragments of truth remain in the biblical text — moral teachings, parables, and echoes of tawhid that reflect what Isa (عليه السلام) actually taught. But the text as a whole can no longer be treated as the preserved Word of Allah.
This is precisely why the Quran was sent as the final revelation, with a divine guarantee that no previous scripture received: "Indeed, it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will be its guardian" (Surah Al-Hijr 15:9). The protection that was not granted to the Torah or the Injil — because their purpose was fulfilled in their time — was granted permanently to the Quran, the last message from Allah to all of humanity until the Day of Judgment.