Is the Quran a Christian Work?

At the beginning of the 2000s, a major turning point occurred in the study of the Quran and Islam. A comparison between the Quranic text and the religion of Islam itself reveals a significant gap between these two realms. Debates between conservative and critical scholars are in full swing, even as thousands of Arabic inscriptions carved in stone—discovered in Western Asia and northern Arabia—remain only partially deciphered. Nevertheless, conservative approaches are gradually giving way to innovative scholars who apply the critical analytical methods used in biblical studies to the Quranic text.

By the end of the 20th century, the application of scientific methodologies to the study of the Quran had begun to challenge many long-held assumptions about the origins of Islam and the stages of its formation. Philological and archaeological research has raised questions about the geographical context of this new religion. Rather than originating in the Arabian Peninsula, the evidence increasingly points to Western Asia, particularly Syria and the Land of Israel. As a result, even the historical existence of Mecca at the time the Quran was written is now being questioned. Scholars such as John Wansbrough, Christoph Luxenberg, and Günter Lüling—followed by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook—have argued that a preliminary version of the Quran may have been composed as a prayer book by an Aramaic-Syriac Christian community, in opposition to the Christian orthodoxy defined at the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (553).

The Quranic text stands in stark contrast to Islamic traditions, which did not take shape until more than two centuries later. Moreover, there is a significant geographical divide between the Hejaz, located in the heart of Arabia, and northern Persia, where the theologians who shaped Islam eventually emerged. This is especially true for the oral traditions compiled in the ḥadīth and the sīra (biography of Muhammad). From a historical perspective, it is therefore essential to dissociate these two sources and to analyze the Quranic text independently of Islamic traditions. Scholars must set aside popular narratives and adopt a diachronic historiographical approach to the text. This task is made all the more difficult by the extent to which we are steeped in traditional narratives that shape our perceptions. It is equally challenging to resist projecting oral traditions onto a biblical text written in the 8th century BCE. Those who succeed in making this distinction may uncover a reality radically different from that presented by traditional accounts.

One striking aspect of the Quran is that it fails to provide the most expected information: a biography of Muhammad. We know nothing of his origins—his parents’ identities, his place and date of birth, the existence of siblings, or any details about his companions and followers. No miracles are attributed to him: no healing of the sick, no raising of the dead. He delivers no foundational discourses, nor sayings of wisdom or morality—features that are omnipresent in the Gospel narratives of Jesus’s life or in the Torah’s four books recounting the life of Moses. In this sense, the central figure of Islam appears to be almost entirely absent from the Quran. How can this enigma be explained?

Surprisingly, the Quran grants a central place to a very different figure: Jesus, the son of Mary. It is striking to observe that Jesus—and even more so, Mary—are among the Quran’s most prominent figures, alongside Abraham and Moses. Unlike in the Gospels, where his figure is sometimes controversial, the portrayal of Jesus in the Quran is uniformly positive. What should we make of this?

The Quranic text references approximately 32 biblical figures, all of whom are uniformly referred to as prophets. However, historical prophets are entirely absent from the text, and this absence does not appear to be accidental. It seems likely that the Quran’s authors did not have access to the complete corpus of biblical scrolls, particularly the prophetic books and accounts of historical figures such as the kings of Israel and Judah. Much like the sages of the Talmud, who often cited from memory, their knowledge of biblical figures was likely derived from orally transmitted narratives.

Among all the names mentioned in the Qur’an, only about six are relatively difficult to identify in the Bible or the New Testament. Approximately 26 biblical figures referenced in the Qur’an originate primarily from the Pentateuch. The two most frequently mentioned individuals are Jesus (ʿĪsā in the Qur’an) and Moses, each cited around 130 times. They are followed by Abraham (69 occurrences), Noah (43—one surah is named after him), then Adam and Lot (25 mentions each), Aaron (20), Isaac and Solomon (17), David and Jacob (16), Ishmael (12), Jonah and Job (4), Elijah (2), and Elisha and Saul (once each). Although Joseph is not explicitly named in some lists, an entire surah is dedicated to him.

Other figures originate from the New Testament, such as John the Baptist (Yaḥyā) and his father Zechariah. The Qur’an also includes figures such as Shuʿayb (often identified with Jethro), Idrīs (possibly Enoch), Hūd (perhaps Eber), Ṣāliḥ, al-Khiḍr (possibly Shelah), and Dhul-Kifl (possibly Ezekiel), as well as more enigmatic characters like Luqmān and Dhul-Qarnayn—often associated with Alexander the Great.

It is difficult to explain why Jesus/Yeshua is referred to as ʿĪsā in the Qur’an. His mother, Mary, is curiously described as the “sister of Aaron” and is mentioned by name eleven times, as well as thirty-four times under the designation “mother of ʿĪsā/Yeshua”, whereas in the New Testament she is cited only twenty-four times. In fact, the expression “sister of Aaron” is a set phrase borrowed from Exodus: “Then Miriam, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand” (Exodus 15:20).

Contrary to common assumptions, Mecca is not mentioned in the Qur’an. Although the consonants MHMD appear four times in the text, it is highly likely that this refers to an honorific title rather than a proper name. Thus, Muhammad, the central figure of Islam, is entirely absent from the Qur’an as a tangible historical character.

In the absence of a precise date of composition and explicit historical references, scholars have examined the geographical setting described in the Qur’anic text. Tradition locates the emergence of Islam in the Hijaz, around Mecca, in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula—a region far removed from the major trade routes connecting Yemen to Damascus. This territory lay beyond the control of the great ancient civilizations—Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome—and its sparse population left behind no notable literary heritage.

Surprisingly, however, the landscape and climate described in the Qur’an do not resemble an arid desert where survival is difficult. Unlike the dry and rocky Hijaz, the Qur’an evokes a lush environment, traversed by rivers and dotted with green wheat fields, date palms, olive trees, vines, fig trees, and pomegranate trees. In the background, the text mentions ships sailing on a stormy sea, fishermen, and various species of fish—a fauna unknown to desert dwellers. The theologian Al-Bukhārī even records the astonishment of a prisoner at the sight of grapes in Mecca, despite their being out of season. Strikingly, the Qur’an contains no explicit descriptions of desert landscapes: there are no sand dunes, no scorching drought, and no sense of barren isolation.

The question of orality versus writing preoccupied the Qur’an’s redactors, just as it had preoccupied the authors of the Jewish oral tradition. Initially, these redactors opposed writing, warning: “Woe to those who write the Book with their own hands, then say, ‘This is from God,’ to gain a small profit from it” (Surah Al-Baqara, 2:79).

Islamic tradition maintains that the Qur’an and the hadiths were transmitted exclusively through oral means until the 10th century, thanks to professional memorizers who supposedly preserved a non-written text with fidelity. However, with the expansion of Islamic conquests, leaders became concerned about the deaths of these memorizers on the battlefield and decided to record the texts in writing. The theologian Muhammad Al-Bukhārī (810–870) emphasized the physiological impossibility of memorizing over 200,000 hadiths without ever writing them down. Long before him, the prophet Jeremiah of Anathoth had already expressed distrust toward writing, which he considered deceptive: “How can you say, ‘We are wise, for we have the law of the Lord,’ when actually the lying pen of the scribes has handled it falsely?” (Jeremiah 8:8).

Exegeses in rabbinic literature suggest that, for several generations, experienced “memorizers” were responsible for retaining portions of the Mishnah and halakhic debates to pass them on to others, until the Talmud was finally written down in the 10th century. The interest of modern scholars in the theory of memorizers seeks to explain the apparent paradox of the rigorous oral transmission of texts over many generations.

The Qur’an is written in an early form of Arabic, more difficult to decipher than the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. It lacks diacritical marks for long vowels and signs to distinguish between five consonants with identical graphic forms. Its interpretation, therefore, requires complex philological methods.

The text blends several literary genres: praise of the divine, prayers, poetry and rhymed prose, maxims of wisdom and morality, as well as laws and commandments. Biblical characters appear in fragmentary form, without detailed context, as though the audience was already familiar with these stories through oral tradition. As a result, the Qur’an does not dwell on in-depth introductions of these figures, assuming prior knowledge of their narratives.

The Qur’an is marked by numerous inconsistencies, frequent repetitions, and, above all, sentences often disconnected from their context. These features clearly indicate that the text is not the work of a single author but rather the product of multiple writing and revision phases by successive editors over an extended period.

Under the Abbasid dynasty, which ruled in Baghdad, several attempts were made to organize the surahs of the Qur’an according to thematic or chronological order, but these efforts consistently failed. Lacking clear reference points, the text’s compilers ultimately ordered the 114 surahs in the codex (mushaf) by an artificial criterion: their length, from longest to shortest.

It is difficult not to notice that the fourteen epistles of Paul in the New Testament were arranged according to the same principle. Mere coincidence? The Mishnah and the books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible also adopt this structuring method. What does this shared literary practice across the great religious traditions reveal? It seems that the compilers, faced with the impossibility of establishing a clear chronological or thematic hierarchy, applied a pragmatic logic: placing the longest texts first, as they were often perceived to be the most important.

Any historical analysis must begin with two essential questions: who wrote the text, and in what era? The Qur’an, however, offers no direct clues. It does not explicitly mention any precise historical events. The Byzantine Empire appears only through interpretative efforts, the Persian Sasanian Empire is entirely absent, and so are the Jewish and Christian kingdoms of southern Arabia—Himyar, Yemen, Saba—as well as the Nabataean-Arab kingdoms. Yet these kingdoms must necessarily have influenced the populations of the Hejaz, as their trade caravans traversed the peninsula from south to north. Historians are thus faced with a decontextualized text lacking clear historical anchoring.

A scientific approach requires setting aside later interpretations and examining the Qur’an without a theological lens. A plausible working hypothesis is that the text was originally composed in Syriac—the dominant language in the eastern regions of the Christian Byzantine Empire—before being translated into Arabic. This method is comparable to that used in the study of the New Testament.

The presence of biblical figures suggests that the Qur’an may be a reformulation of biblical narratives, akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Pesharim. However, the central role given to Mary and Jesus points to a non-canonical Christian origin. In-depth analysis shows that the portrayals of Jesus and Mary in the Qur’an correspond to apocryphal narratives that circulated among the messianic communities of Greater Syria. Notably, there are parallels with the Protoevangelium of James, the Gospel of Barnabas, and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. These communities also shared affinities with the Book of Revelation, the Monophysite doctrine (which holds that Christ has only one nature—divine), and Docetism, which denies the reality of Jesus’s crucifixion.

At the time of its composition, the Near East was predominantly inhabited by Syriac- and Greek-speaking Christians from Aramaic and Assyrian traditions. Among them, so-called “Judeo-Christian” communities included the Nazarenes/Nazōreans (Nasāra in the Qur’an), the Ebionites, and the Elcesaites. However, this term is misleading, as these groups did not define themselves strictly as Christians or Jews. They were messianic communities faithful to Jewish laws and practices, yet rejected by Christian orthodoxy following the Councils of Constantinople (381 and 553). Their beliefs diverged radically from those of the Church Fathers: they rejected the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity, repudiated Paul’s epistles—viewing them as forgeries—and denied the crucifixion, considering it an illusion. Some even claimed that Paul was not Judean but a Greek convert who married the high priest’s daughter. They identified foremost with James, the brother of Jesus, whom they considered his true successor.

The historian must also scrutinize Islamic traditions to assess their compatibility with the Qur’an. The Sīra of Ibn Hishām († 834) recounts that Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570, received revelation at the age of 40 from the angel Gabriel, and died in 632. However, this account does not help identify an author, as it presents the Qur’an as a divine revelation. Yet nothing in the Qur’anic text explicitly mentions an angelic revelation to Muhammad—just as Paul’s epistles do not directly describe his visionary encounter with Jesus. Mere coincidence?

If the Qur’an was not written in Arabia, then where did Islamic traditions originate? Who were the true authors of the Sīra and the thousands of hadiths that shaped Islam? These authors were neither Arabs nor from the Byzantine Empire. They were born within the Sasanian Empire, far from the Arabian Peninsula. Among them were key figures such as Muhammad al-Bukhārī (810–870), Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj (821–875), Imam al-Tirmidhī (824–892), and the historian al-Ṭabarī (839–923), all from regions in Persia and Central Asia—Khurasan, Bukhara, Tabaristan—north of Zoroastrian Persia (modern-day Uzbekistan and Afghanistan). They compiled oral traditions and produced tens of thousands of hadiths, often with little or no direct connection to the Qur’an, while also codifying Sharia law and the practices of the Sunna. Although sources confirm the undeniable historical existence of Muhammad in the first half of the 7th century, these compilers possessed no concrete information about him. In fact, we know more about the historical Muhammad than we do about Jesus—excluding the latter’s crucifixion by the Romans. According to numerous extra-Islamic sources, there is no doubt that a significant figure named Muhammad played a decisive role in the conquest of Gaza and Jerusalem in 635, defeating the Byzantines—an event that is not mentioned in the Qur’an.

The dating of the Qur’an’s composition is a subject of intense scholarly debate. Estimates range from the period associated with Muhammad’s activity (622–636), to the caliphate of ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (644–656), to the reign of Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (685–705), and the broader Umayyad dynasty of Damascus (657–750). Some scholars argue that the definitive text was established during the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad (750–870), or even in the 10th century. A striking feature of these compilation attempts is that each ruler who ascended to power in Damascus or Baghdad sought to destroy previous versions of the Qur’an in order to impose a revised text that legitimized their rule. Such a phenomenon is absent in the composition of the biblical books or the New Testament. The authors of these texts did not dare to erase previous versions but simply incorporated additions into them.

If Mary and Jesus are the central figures in the Qur’an—and not Muhammad—if nearly all the named individuals come from the Bible, can this text still be regarded as a Muslim work? The unavoidable conclusion is that the Qur’an is a non-orthodox Christian creation, one that remained more faithful to Jesus’s biological family from Galilee than to the Church Fathers. As for Islam as a religion, it is a later construction that connects to the Qur’an only indirectly.