How the Quran and the Bible each reached us

The New Testament's variant counts are famous and often weaponized; both halves of the picture belong together. Bart Ehrman puts it this way: “there are more variants in the manuscripts of the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament” (his own restatement ↗). The claim is arithmetically true across ~5,800 Greek manuscripts. And Ehrman himself writes that “of all the hundreds of thousands of changes found among the manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant,” while textual critic Daniel Wallace estimates that “only about 1% of the textual variants are both meaningful and viable” (Wallace, JETS 49/2, quoting Misquoting Jesus ↗). Both sentences are true at once. Text-critically prominent variants (Mark's ending, Luke 22:43-44, the Comma Johanneum) are treated individually on the passage pages.

What the Quran's history includes

Uthman standardized a text that “had existed in various versions.” The canonical qira'at preserve vocalic, morphological, and some consonantal differences, constrained by the related regional Uthmanic rasms; the tradition's own scholars documented them for centuries. And the Sanaa palimpsest's lower text is, in its editors' words, “the only known manuscript of a non-Uthmanic text type” (Sadeghi & Bergmann, Arabica 57 ↗). The comparison is only worth making with every one of these facts in it.

What those same studies conclude

A related peer-reviewed study of the same palimpsest dates its parchment “to the period before AD 671 with a probability of 99%,” and concludes that “the sūras were formed earlier” than Uthman's standardization. It explains the variants by “semi-oral transmission, most likely via hearers who wrote down a text that was recited by the Prophet” (Sadeghi & Goudarzi, Der Islam 87; quotes verified against the published article; the journal's page requires access). The parchment date is a date for the skin, not the writing, and sura formation is a distinct question from final standardization. Oxford's Nicolai Sinai, surveying the field's most skeptical proposals, concludes that “the traditional dating of the standard rasm… to 650 or earlier ought to be our default view,” while allowing that rival recensions and the enforcement of a sole standard continued after that date (Bulletin of SOAS 77/3 ↗).

What the comparison actually supports

Compare like with like. For fragments: early Quranic manuscript witnesses are commonly dated to the seventh century, within decades of the Prophet; the earliest New Testament papyri are second-century, several decades to a century after composition. For complete copies: the earliest essentially complete Quranic codices are commonly dated to the eighth century or later; the earliest complete New Testament is the fourth-century Sinaiticus. For standardization: the Quran's consonantal text received a central, official standard within a generation of the man who recited it, while the New Testament's individual books, internally anonymous in the Gospels' case (the per-book scholarship), circulated and were copied for centuries with no central textual authority, and the 27-book anthology itself is a separate, later question: canon formation, first attested as an exact list in 367 CE.

Answer it carefully, because the answer is bounded. The Quranic text was standardized far earlier and more centrally than the New Testament's text or canon; that much the manuscripts settle. Early, central standardization is consistent with the Muslim reading of the Quran's own claim to preservation (Quran 15:9 ↗); manuscript history alone cannot prove a divine claim. What it can do is show you the two roads.

The written case above stands on its own. Two recordings follow, each embedded whole: lectures from Blogging Theology, a channel presented by Paul Williams, one on how the New Testament came to be treated as scripture and one on whether the Quran's traditional origin story survives modern academic challenge. Timestamps jump to each argument. In both lectures Williams reads passages from other people's books aloud, so each summary says whose words you are about to hear: the Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, the Oxford biblical scholar John Barton, and the Berlin Quran scholar Angelika Neuwirth. Only one of the six quotes is Williams arguing in his own voice. The first lecture also reads out a claim that goes further than this page does, that the Quranic text has kept a perfect purity. We did not select that passage; the section above on variant readings and the Sanaa palimpsest records the complications it would pass over.