Likewise, were someone to make such a claim about the copies of any other book, ordinary experience shows that manuscripts diverge: some contain material that others omit, and vice-versa. As for the Qur’an, which has come down through continuous mass transmission, its preservation never depended on written codices; it depended on the memorisation of the countless transmitters who carried it in their hearts.

For that reason, whenever a codex is found that differs from what the community has memorised, they amend it. An error may appear in a given manuscript, but it is simply disregarded. Indeed, the copies penned by the Companions had their script and orthography carefully recorded, and even that record has been conveyed by mass transmission. Thus the wording of the Qur’an has been preserved orally, and the orthography of its codices has likewise been preserved, both through multiple, mutually confirming chains.

We do not pretend that every single manuscript copy of the Qur’an is identical, any more than we claim that every person who has memorised the Qur’an is incapable of error. What we assert is that its wording has been conveyed—both in memory and in writing—by continuous mass transmission; consequently, if anyone departs from that text, people at once recognise the mistake, because it clashes with the definitive, multiply attested transmission. The situation of these other books is different: the Christians never preserved them in their entirety by heart, receiving them from the Apostles through uninterrupted memorisation. In fact, no individual among them memorised the whole corpus, still less a body of transmitters large enough to constitute mass transmission, and least of all was there, for each language version, a group that had mastered that version in full.