Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 5. The Crucifixion
Were the stories about Jesus passed on reliably?
In short
- 1.Between Jesus and the first Gospel lie roughly forty years of anonymous oral transmission in a different language.
- 2.Stories circulated among ordinary believers with no chain of custody and no mechanism for verifying who told what to whom.
- 3.Demonstrably legendary material entered the tradition: the **woman caught in adultery** [John 7:53-8:11] and the **long ending of Mark** [16:9-20] are absent from the oldest manuscripts.
- 4.Islam records both the text and the chain: every hadith has a named isnad, and every narrator has a documented biography (**ilm al-rijal**).
The claim being examined
Even if written late, the Gospel traditions are said to have been preserved faithfully by a careful oral culture.
The Islamic position
Islam contrasts an uncontrolled oral tradition with the Muslim system of **isnad** — named, verified chains of transmission with a science of criticism attached.
Analysis
The contrast is methodological rather than merely polemical. Oral transmission is not inherently unreliable, but reliability requires controls — and the Christian tradition did not develop mechanisms for tracking who transmitted a saying, when, and with what reputation. Islam's isnad system, with its rejected narrators and graded reports, exists specifically to make transmission auditable. That two well-known Gospel passages entered the text late and are now bracketed in modern Bibles shows what happens without such controls.
From the Qur'an
Qur'an 15:9
إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ
Indeed it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed We will be its guardian.
From the Bible
John 7:53-8:11
—
The pericope of the woman caught in adultery: absent from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts.
Read it in their BibleMark 16:9-20
—
The longer ending of Mark: absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.
Read it in their BibleFrom the Sunnah
Introduction to Sahih Muslim · Sahih
Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak said: The isnad is part of the religion; were it not for the isnad, whoever wished could say whatever he wished.
Sources
Abu Zakariya, Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus · Bruce Metzger · Harald Motzki on isnad · Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah — ch. 5, pp. 110-121
The spoken script for this entry is inside the app.
Members get the word-for-word delivery guide — how to open, what to say, the likely replies and how to close warmly — plus notes, a dawah journal and the study assistant.
Open the app