People in Mecca said it first, while Muhammad was still alive. They said he was writing down old stories. The Quran recorded their accusation and answered it. Fourteen centuries later the same charge is still being made, so here it is again.
Yes, the same prophets are in both books, and often the same scenes. That is not in dispute. But copying needs something to copy from, and no Arabic Bible has ever been found from before Islam. The overlap is also what Islam claims will happen: one God, sending the same message again. It is not evidence either way.
Adam. Noah. Abraham. Joseph. Moses. David. Solomon. Jonah. Zechariah. John. Jesus. Mary. All of them are in the Quran, and often in scenes a Bible reader would recognise on sight.
No Muslim has ever denied this. It is not a discovery, and it is not an embarrassment. If someone presents the overlap to you as though it were a trap being sprung, the first thing to say is yes, and the second thing to say is that we have been saying yes for fourteen hundred years.
What follows is about what the overlap shows, which is a different question and the only one worth arguing.
The charge is not modern. People who knew Muhammad personally made it, and the Quran wrote down what they said.
And those who disbelieve say, "This [Qur’ān] is not except a falsehood he invented, and another people assisted him in it." But they have committed an injustice and a lie. And they say, "Legends of the former peoples which he has written down, and they are dictated to him morning and afternoon." Say, [O Muḥammad], "It has been revealed by He who knows [every] secret within the heavens and the earth. Indeed, He is ever Forgiving and Merciful."
Read what they are actually alleging. Not that the stories are similar. That he is being coached: someone is dictating to him, morning and evening, and he is writing it down. They named a suspect, too, and the Quran answers that one directly.
And We certainly know that they say, "It is only a human being who teaches him [i.e., the Prophet (ﷺ)]." The tongue of the one they refer to is foreign, and this [recitation, i.e., Qur’ān] is [in] a clear Arabic language.
That answer is worth pausing on, because it is a falsifiable one made in front of the people best placed to check it. The man you are pointing at does not speak Arabic well, and this is Arabic that has stopped you in the street. Anyone in Mecca who thought that was untrue could have said so.
Here is the picture in the question: a man with a book open in front of him, working through it. So ask what that man would have needed. A text, in a language he read, in the place he lived.
Sidney Griffith, who wrote the standard book on Arabic Christian scripture, concludes from that record that written Arabic translation of the Bible begins after the Islamic conquests, not before them. He is the specialist on this exact question and this is his subject.
Take that for exactly what it is and no more. It is not proof that no Arabic scripture existed anywhere. Hikmat Kashouh argues that features inside some later gospel manuscripts point back to older Arabic versions we no longer have. That is an argument from internal evidence rather than from a surviving copy, it has not persuaded most people working on the question, and it is not a fringe position either.
What the record does say is this: the book the popular charge requires has never been produced. Not one copy, not one fragment, not one reference to someone reading one. The picture in the question is missing its central object.
Suppose the missing book turned up tomorrow. Would that settle it?
No, and this is the step most versions of this argument never take. Ask what each side actually predicts. If Islam is false and Muhammad assembled this from what was around him, you would expect the Quran to contain biblical material. Now ask the other one. If Islam is true, one God sent the Torah, the Gospel and the Quran, to the same humanity, about the same prophets. What would you expect then?
He has sent down upon you, [O Muḥammad], the Book in truth, confirming what was before it. And He revealed the Torah and the Gospel
The same thing. You would expect exactly the same thing. The Quran says so about itself, in plain terms, as its own claim: it confirms what came before it.
So the overlap, on its own, is not evidence. It cannot be. It is the one result both stories were always going to produce, which is why it feels so decisive to whoever brings it up and settles nothing when they do. If the Quran had contained no biblical material at all, that would have been the surprising thing, and it would have been a problem for Islam rather than for anyone else.
This cuts both ways and we should say so. The same reasoning means the overlap is not evidence for Islam either. Nobody gets to bank it. It comes off the table entirely, and the argument has to be made somewhere else.
There is a serious version of this charge. It is not the one in the question, and nothing above answers it, so here it is stated properly rather than quietly skipped.
Scholars including Joseph Witztum and Gabriel Said Reynolds argue that particular Quranic retellings stand unusually close to specific older Jewish and Christian material, and that this material circulated by preaching and retelling rather than by book. Sermons in verse, delivered aloud to congregations who could not read them. That case never needed an Arabic Bible, so the section above leaves it entirely untouched.
Two things about it, and we are not going to soften either. It is real work by serious people, and it is argued one passage at a time, which means it has to be met one passage at a time rather than dismissed wholesale. And it does not deliver what the popular charge wants from it: showing that a story has older relatives is not showing who composed the Quran. Those are different claims, and running them together is the most common mistake in this whole dispute, on every side of it.
On that second question, be careful of a claim you will hear from our own side: that historians have no idea who produced the Quran. They are closer to agreement than that. Ilkka Lindstedt, surveying the field, describes a budding consensus on where the text came from, how early it was gathered into a book, and how little the manuscripts move, and he names Stephen Shoemaker as the serious recent challenge to it. That evidence is laid out here, with the manuscripts and the objections. What is genuinely still argued is narrower: how the gathering was done, who edited what, and the history of particular passages.
No. Take the question the way it is meant, a man working from a Bible in front of him, and the book at the centre of that scene has never been found: not a copy, not a fragment, not a record of anyone owning one, in any language he read, from anywhere near his lifetime. And the thing that made the question feel obvious, all those shared prophets, was never evidence either. If Muhammad borrowed the material, of course the prophets match. If God sent both books, of course the prophets match. What both explanations require cannot help you choose between them.
Which leaves the real question. Two books say they carry a message from God and they do not agree about what it is. You do not settle that by counting what they share. You examine each account, asking who wrote it and whether what you are holding is what was written, and asked that way the two do not come back alike. Their histories are set out side by side here, with the dates and the manuscripts. Which is the quiet problem with this charge. It tells you to examine the Quran, and examining is the right instinct. It just does not survive being applied evenly, and what it finds when you do apply it evenly is what the Quran said about itself before there were any manuscripts to count.
Indeed, it is We who sent down the message [i.e., the Qur’ān], and indeed, We will be its guardian.
Some readers arrive here unsettled: Muslims meeting the borrowing charge head-on for the first time, Christians who have pressed it for years and met only dismissal. The stakes are worth stating plainly. This is a dispute about which teaching carries God's message, between two faiths that both seek Him. However you weigh the answers, do not let an argument about sources become a reason to step back from God.
The written case above is this page's argument. The question also gets argued live, and two recordings follow, embedded whole. Timestamps jump to each argument. Both are street conversations with Christian questioners: the first presses on what the proposed sources fail to cover, the second on what shared characters do and do not prove.
A street conversation with a Christian on whether the Quran copied the Bible or the apocryphaA street conversation with a Christian on whether the Quran copied the Bible or the apocrypha · Muhammed Ali (The Muslim Lantern) ↗
9:39 ↗ He tests the borrowing hypothesis against specifics: the Quran's account of Pharaoh claiming divinity, and of Abraham's people worshipping sun, moon, and Venus, appear in neither the Bible nor the apocrypha the Christian he is speaking with named as the source.
“Question is, where would the Quran bring this information from? If it was looking and thinking that apocrypha was the true source, where does this information come from? Because it's not in the apocrypha.”
12:12 ↗ He states the evidentiary burden for a copying thesis: parallels in a few stories cannot establish wholesale borrowing while Quranic material absent from the proposed sources remains unexplained.
“Look, what you're saying is, few stories found in the apocrypha, therefore I'm going to say all of them taken from the apocrypha. You have to prove that all stories are taken from apocrypha, otherwise you have to demonstrate which source brings this other information that are within the Quran that are not within the Bible or the apocrypha.”
24:36 ↗ He makes an access argument: he contends the historical details in question only became recoverable after later discoveries such as the Rosetta Stone and the excavated temple at Ur, in a Sumerian language dead by Muhammad's time. The archaeological premises are his contentions, presented as such.
“And the Sumerian language was dead at the time of Prophet Muhammad anyway, so no one spoke, and the temple was buried under the sand. He could not have access this information, which shows that the Quran is not copying from the apocrypha, nor it's copying from the Bible.”
A street conversation with a Christian on what shared stories prove about copyingA street conversation with a Christian on what shared stories prove about copying · Korra The Taymi ↗
3:33 ↗ He runs a consistency test on the logic of the Christian he is speaking with: if shared content between the Quran and the Bible proved Christianity, then the New Testament's overlap with the Hebrew scriptures would equally prove Judaism.
“So by your logic, Judaism is true, because the statements in the New Testament are taken from the Old Testament. So according to you, you just proved that Judaism is true.”
5:12 ↗ He distinguishes mentioning the same figures from textual dependence, and gets the Christian he is speaking with to agree that character overlap alone is not evidence of copying.
“Your only argument for my book taking from yours is that my book mentions the same characters as your book, and you just conceded that that's not an evidence that the Quran takes from the Bible. Therefore you have no argument.”
The two scriptures' preservation histories and their claims about each other, set side by side.
Twelve passages quoted whole, in both voices: the affirmations, the charges, and the three classical readings of what the criticism means.
The passages Muslims read as describing a prophet to come, with the Christian readings of the same verses.
Yes. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, Jonah, Zechariah, John, Jesus and Mary are all in the Quran, and often in scenes a Bible reader would recognise. Muslims do not deny this and never have. The disagreement is not about whether the overlap exists. It is about what the overlap shows.
None has ever been found. No manuscript of an Arabic Bible from before Islam survives, and the oldest ones we have are ninth century, after the Islamic conquests. Sidney Griffith, who wrote the standard book on Arabic Christian scripture, concludes from that record that written Arabic translation begins after Islam rather than before it. Hikmat Kashouh argues that features inside some later manuscripts point back to older Arabic versions we no longer have, which is an argument from internal evidence rather than from a surviving copy, and it has not persuaded most people working on the question.
Only if you assume the two books are unrelated to begin with. Islam claims they are not: one God sent both, so the same prophets and the same events should turn up in both. On that claim, the overlap is the expected result rather than a problem. A fact that both sides predict is not evidence for either side, and this is that kind of fact.
Yes, and it is not the one in the question. Scholars including Joseph Witztum and Gabriel Said Reynolds argue that particular Quranic retellings stand close to older Jewish and Christian material that circulated by preaching rather than by book. That work is real, it never needed an Arabic Bible, and nothing on this page answers it. It is argued passage by passage. It also does not deliver what the popular charge wants: showing a story has older relatives is not showing who composed the Quran.
Scripture quotations link to stable public editions and name the text tradition they translate; Quran quotations follow the Saheeh International translation; scholarly attributions name their authors and sources. If a quotation or attribution is inaccurate, send a correction.