The Kor’an consists exclusively of the revelations or commands which Mohammad professed, from time to time, to receive through Gabriel, as a message direct from God; and which, under alleged divine direction, he delivered to those about him. At the moment of inspiration or shortly after, each passage was recited by Mohammad before the friends or followers who happened to be present, and was generally committed to writing by some one amongst them, at the time or afterwards, upon palm-leaves, leather, stones, or such other rude material as conveniently came to hand. These divine messages continued throughout the three-and-twenty years of his prophetical life ...

The divine revelation was the corner-stone of Islam. The recital of a passage from it formed an essential part of daily prayer public and private; and its perusal and repetition were enforced as a duty and privilege fraught with religious merit. Such is the universal voice of early tradition, and may be gathered also from the revelation itself. The Kor’an was accordingly committed to memory more or less by every adherent of Islam, and extent to which it could be recited was one of the chief distinctions in the early Muslim empire ...

Writing was without doubt generally known to Mecca long before Mohammad assumed the prophetical office. And at Medina many of his followers were employed by the Prophet in writing his letters or dispatches ... The ability thus existing, it may be safely inferred that the verses so indefatigably committed to memory would also be likewise committed carefully to writing ...

Such was the condition of the text during Mohammad’s lifetime, and such it remained for about a year after his death, imprinted upon the hearts of his people, and fragmentary transcripts increasing daily. The two sources would correspond closely each other; for the Kor’an, even during the Prophet’s lifetime, was regarded with a superstitious awe as containing the very words of God; so that any variations would be reconciled by a direct reference to Mohammad himself, and after his death to the originals, or to copies, or to the memory of the Prophet’s confidential friends and amanuenses ...

By the labours of Zeid, these scattered and confused materials were within two or three years reduced to the order and sequence in which we now find them, and in which it is said that Zeid used to repeat the Kor’an in the presence of Mohammad. The original copy thus prepared was committed by Omar to the custody of his daughter Hafsa, the Prophet’s widow ...

[By the order of the next Caliph Othman, many transcripts were made from the original kept in the custody of Hafsa and forwarded to the chief cities of the Muslim world]

The recension of Othman has been handed down to us unaltered. So carefully, indeed, has it been preserved, that there are no variations of importance – we might almost say no variations at all – to be found in the innumerable copies scattered throughout the vast bounds of the empire of Islam. Contending and embittered factions, taking their rise in the murder of Othman himself within a quarter of a century from the death of Mohammad have ever since rent the Mohammadan world. Yet but ONE KOR’AN has been current amongst them; and the consentaneous use by all of the same Scripture in every age to the present day is an irrefragable proof that we have now before us the very text prepared by the command of the unfortunate Caliph. There is probably in the world no other work which has remained twelve centuries with so pure a text.[1]

• The words and teachings of Jesus (peace be upon him) remained in oral tradition for at least forty to fifty years, passing orally from one generation to the next. Then the four gospels, as we know them today, were reduced to writing in a period of forty-five years – between 70 A.D. and 115 A.D.
• The four Gospels were written in Greek. The original words spoken by Jesus (peace be upon him) are lost, for he and his disciples spoke Aramaic, a language that is now extinct.
• We do not even have the original manuscripts of the Greek gospels available today.
• Though the four gospels bear the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John who were supposedly disciples of Jesus (peace be upon him), the historical fact is that they are not the actual authors, for nothing was written during forty to fifty years after Jesus. Historian H.G. Wells writes:

  None of those who had conversed with Jesus wrote any account of what they had seen and heard. But as the first generation began to die away, collections of his “Logia” or “Sayings”, which were mostly brief, pointed, and figurative, were put together.[2]

  As a matter of fact, the actual authors are unknown, who most likely attributed their works to the above four disciples. This is not unusual, for authoring a work and attributing it to some respectable figure was a tradition that was often practiced during that era, according to historians. Prof. Burton Mack, a renowned scholar of the New Testament, writes:

  As for the latter attribution of anonymous literature to known figures of the past, that also was a standard practice during the Greco-Roman period … Scholars agree, in any case, that for these and other reasons, most of the writings in the New Testament were written anonymously and later assigned to a person of the past or written later as pseudonym for some person thought to have been important for earliest period.[3]

  As for the dates of the four gospels, Prof. Mack writes,

  ... the New Testament is commonly viewed and treated as a charter document that came into being much like the Constitution of the United States. According to this view, the authors of the New Testament were all present at the historic beginnings of the new religion and collectively wrote their gospels and letters for the purpose of founding the Christian church that Jesus came to inaugurate. Unfortunately for this view, that is not the way it happened. Scholars locate the various writings of the New Testament at different times and places over a period of one hundred fifty years, from the letters of Paul in the 50s of the first century, through the writing of the gospels of Mark and Matthew in the 70s and 80s, the gospels of John and Luke around the turn of the second century, some as late as 140 to 150 C.E.[4]

• Unlike the Qur’an which is the direct words of God, written down immediately as they came, the gospels are the third-party historical narrations of the life and teachings of Jesus, peace be upon him. Thus they do not contain God’s own and direct words, but those of the narrators who described the events.
• The four gospels did not become canonical until the fourth century. There were many gospels around – as many as fifty - written by many different authors until that time. There were bitter factions among different religious groups, each interpreting teachings of Jesus or the doctrines of the Trinity differently from the other. Most notable among these were tow factions. One of them was headed by a priest of Alexandria called Arius who held the view that Jesus was not co-equal with God, that he did not always exist, and that he was a creature and created. The other group was headed by Bishop Athanasius, also of Alexandria, who strictly maintained that Jesus was co-equal and co-eternal with God, un-created and always existed. It is because of this particular rivalry that caused unrest in the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine, who took power in 323 A.D., found his empire divided into these two rival factions. This led him to call for the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. It is in that Council that the four gospels were given their canonical authority and Jesus was given the status of full divinity. Arius was condemned and exiled from the empire. All other gospels and scriptures circulated around were banned and destroyed.[5]

It is today perfectly obvious that there is a vast difference between the nature of the messages of Jesus and Paul. At times this has led to unsparing condemnation of Paul and his associates who perverted the simple gospel stream. The slogan “Back to Jesus” has simply meant “Away from Paul” … To make it concrete: Had Jesus been able to attend a church service in Corinth in the year 54 A.D., he would have astounded, and might well have asked himself in amazement: Is this the result of my work in Galilee? [7]

We have, without doubt, sent down the Message; and We will assuredly guard it (from corruption) [8]