And if they say, “But the Apostles were infallible,” Muslims and Jews alike categorically reject that claim. Even were we to concede it for argument’s sake, the Jews, too, received their scriptures from an infallible messenger who preceded the Apostles. In that light, no one can plausibly argue that the prophetic books in Christian hands were transmitted from an infallible source with greater certainty than those in Jewish possession. Indeed, every fair-minded person recognizes that the textual transmission of the Torah is more reliable than that of the Gospel.

This can be demonstrated from several angles. First, all religious communities agree that the Torah was taken directly from an infallible prophet, and before the Messiah it circulated among the prophets and the Children of Israel on a scale far surpassing anything recorded for the Gospel. After the Messiah’s time, both Jews and Christians continued to transmit it.

Accordingly, when we find that the copies of the prophetic writings held by the Jews and by the Samaritans differ in certain phrases from the versions held by the Christians, that very divergence shows that these books were not all copied from a single, uniform archetype and that not every word in them has reached us through uninterrupted mass transmission. Allah knows best.