For centuries, a recurring allegation leveled by various critics and Christian polemicists has been that the Quran is merely a derivative work of the Bible. According to this narrative, Prophet Muhammad simply plagiarized his sacred text from the pages of the Old and New Testaments.
It is an undeniable historical reality that Prophet Muhammad received the revelations of the Quran chronologically after the Bible had already come into existence. Furthermore, it is equally true that both the biblical scriptures and the Quran cover a significant amount of common ground, sharing narratives of common prophets, historical events, and moral teachings. However, the definitive conclusion drawn by some critics—that the Prophet systematically studied the Bible with the explicit intention of copying its verses to fabricate the Quran—is regarded by scholars as historically absurd and entirely untenable when subjected to rigorous academic and chronological scrutiny.
To understand why this plagiarism theory collapses under investigation, historians point to several fundamental linguistic, historical, and biographical facts regarding seventh-century Arabia and the transmission of sacred texts.
The Linguistic Realities of Arabic Bible Translations
The first major hurdle for the plagiarism hypothesis lies in the simple matter of language and the availability of texts. During the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad, there was no Arabic translation of the Bible available in the Arabian Peninsula.
This historical gap is well-documented by biblical scholars. Ernst Würthwein, in his authoritative work The Text of the Old Testament, details the timeline of how biblical texts were translated into Arabic. He notes that with the rapid expansion and victory of Islam, the use of the Arabic language spread widely across the Near East. For the native Christian and Jewish communities living in these newly conquered lands, Arabic gradually became the dominant language of daily life.
This profound shift in demographics and linguistics created an urgent practical need for Arabic versions of the scriptures. According to Würthwein, this need was eventually met by a number of distinct versions, which were largely independent of one another and concerned primarily with theological and practical interpretation.
Consequently, the very first translations of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic did not emerge until well after the advent of Islam. Historical records show that the oldest dated manuscript of the Old Testament in Arabic dates only from the first half of the ninth century—centuries after the death of the Islamic prophet.
The timeline for the New Testament tells an identical story. Respected scholar Sidney H. Griffith, who has dedicated extensive academic research to the historical appearance of the Arabic language and the early circulation of the New Testament in Arabic, provides precise chronological markers. Griffith notes that the oldest dated manuscript containing the Gospels in Arabic is Sinai Arabic MS 72. In this historic document, the text of the four canonical Gospels is structured according to the lessons of the temporal cycle of the Greek liturgical calendar utilized by the Jerusalem Church.
Crucially, a colophon inscribed within the manuscript informs modern researchers that the document was copied and written by a scribe named Stephen of Ramleh. The date provided is in the year 284 of the Arab calendar, which corresponds precisely to the year 897 CE.
When measured against the life of Prophet Muhammad, who passed away in the first half of the seventh century in the year 632 CE, the chronological impossibility of the plagiarism claim becomes starkly apparent. The earliest known Arabic translation of the New Testament did not appear until more than 260 years after the Prophet’s death. For someone to study, copy, or plagiarize a text that did not yet exist in the local language of the region is a historical impossibility.
The Reality of the Unlettered Prophet
Beyond the linguistic barrier, the plagiarism narrative faces another insurmountable obstacle rooted in the well-documented biography of Prophet Muhammad. Critics of the theory point out the inherent irony in the suggestion that an unlettered individual could have independently studied, synthesized, and thoroughly assimilated a vast array of complex theological sources—ranging from Christian and Jewish texts to Zoroastrian, Hanif, and ancient pre-Islamic Arab beliefs—before compiling the sophisticated prose of the Quran.
The illiteracy of the Prophet is not merely a modern theological claim; it was a widely acknowledged fact recognized even by the fiercest enemies of Islam 1,400 years ago in Makkah. During an era when poetry and oral history were paramount, the Prophet’s inability to read or write was common knowledge among his contemporaries. Historical chronicles and biographical literature contain no record whatsoever of the pagan Arabs or the political adversaries of Makkah ever accusing Muhammad of secretly possessing the ability to read or write, or of pretending to be illiterate while privately studying foreign scriptures. Had such literacy existed, his detractors—who scrutinized his every action, message, and claim—would have seized upon it immediately to discredit his prophetic mission.
This historical reality is directly addressed within the text of the Quran itself. In Surah Al-‘Ankabut, verses 48 and 49, the scripture explicitly highlights this biographical context as a clear validation of its divine origin:
"And thou wast not [able] to recite a Book before this [Book came] nor art thou [able] to transcribe it with thy right hand: in that case indeed would the talkers of vanities have doubted. Nay here are signs self-evident in the hearts of those endowed with knowledge: and none but the unjust reject Our signs."
For scholars and historians examining the origins of the Quran, these overlapping lines of evidence—the complete absence of Arabic biblical texts during the seventh century, the proven timeline of later translations, and the universally recognized illiteracy of the Prophet—severely undermine the centuries-old allegations of literary theft. Instead, researchers continue to analyze the historical environment of late antiquity through documentation that prioritizes verifiable chronological data over unsubstantiated polemical claims.