Who Were the Authors of the Qur’an?

A Critical Turning Point in Qur’anic Studies

At the beginning of the 2000s, a decisive turning point occurred in Qur’anic and Islamic studies. When one compares the Qur’anic text with the Islamic religion itself, a profound discrepancy becomes apparent between these two realms. The debates between conservative and critical scholars are particularly intriguing, especially considering that thousands of Arabic inscriptions carved in stone—discovered in Western Asia and northern Arabia—remain largely undeciphered. Nonetheless, conservative approaches are gradually giving way to innovative scholars who apply critical methods of textual analysis, commonly used in the study of biblical texts, to the Qur’an.

By the end of the 20th century, the application of scientific methods to the study of the Qur’an had profoundly challenged many long-standing assumptions about the origins of Islam and the stages of its development. Philological and archaeological research has raised new questions concerning the geographical context of this emerging religion. It may no longer necessarily be the Arabian Peninsula but rather a setting located in Western Asia, particularly in Syria and the Land of Israel. Consequently, even the existence of the city of Mecca at the time of the Qur’an’s composition is now open to question. Scholars such as John Wansbrough, Christoph Luxenberg, Günter Lüling, Patricia Crone, and Michael Cook have put forth the hypothesis that a preliminary version of the Qur’an may have been composed as a prayer book by an Aramaic-Syriac Christian community, in opposition to the Christian orthodoxy established at the Councils of Nicaea (325 CE) and Constantinople (553 CE).

The Qur’anic text differs radically from Islamic traditions, which were only codified starting in the 9th century—that is, more than two centuries later. Moreover, there is a significant geographical gap between the Hejaz, located in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, and northern Persia, from where the main theologians responsible for shaping Islamic doctrine emerged. This is particularly relevant to the oral traditions compiled in the ḥadīth and the sīra (biography of Muhammad). From a historical standpoint, it is therefore necessary to dissociate these two corpora and to analyze the Qur’anic text autonomously, independently of later traditions. The researcher must set aside popular narratives and favor a diachronic historiographical reading of the text. This task proves all the more challenging given how deeply we are influenced by traditional accounts that shape our understanding. It is just as difficult not to project onto an 8th-century BCE biblical text elements of a later oral tradition. Those who succeed in making such a distinction may discover a reality that is radically different from the one conveyed by tradition.

A Surprising Absence of Muhammad?

One particularly surprising aspect lies in the fact that the Qur’an does not provide the kind of information one would most expect: a biography of Muhammad. We know nothing of his origins—neither the identity of his parents, nor the place and date of his birth, nor the existence of siblings or companions. No miracle is attributed to him: he does not heal the sick, nor raise the dead. He delivers no founding discourse, no words of wisdom or moral instruction—all elements that are omnipresent in the Gospel narratives concerning Jesus or in the four books of the Torah that recount the life of Moses. The central figure of Islam thus appears strangely absent from the Qur’an. How can this enigma be explained?

Remarkably, the Qur’an grants a central role to a completely different character: Jesus, the son of Mary. It is striking to note that Jesus—and even more so Mary—are among the major figures of the Qur’an, alongside Abraham and Moses. Unlike the Gospels, where the figure of Jesus may give rise to debates and controversies, the Qur’an presents him in an exclusively positive light. What conclusions should be drawn from this?

The Qur’anic text mentions about thirty-two biblical figures, all indiscriminately designated as “prophets.” In contrast, the historical prophets—such as those found in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible—are absent from the text, and this omission is not coincidental. The Qur’an’s redactors likely did not have access to the full set of biblical scrolls, particularly the prophetic books and historical accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah. Like the sages of the Talmud, who often cited from memory, their knowledge of biblical figures appears to have come primarily from orally transmitted narratives.

Among the names mentioned in the Qur’an, only about six are relatively difficult to identify in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. Approximately twenty-six figures originate primarily from the Pentateuch. The two most frequently mentioned characters are Jesus (ʿĪsā in the Qur’an) and Moses, each cited about 130 times. They are followed by Abraham (69 occurrences), Noah (43, with a surah bearing his name), 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), Elisha and Saul (once each). Joseph is mentioned twice outside of Surah 12, which is dedicated to him.

Other figures come from the New Testament, such as John the Baptist (Yaḥyā) and his father Zechariah. There are also references to Shuʿayb (often equated with Jethro), Idrīs (possibly Enoch), Hūd (Heber?), Ṣāliḥ, al-Khiḍr (Salah?), Dhul-Kifl (Ezekiel?), as well as Luqmān and Dhul-Qarnayn (often identified with Alexander the Great).

It remains difficult to explain why Jesus/Yeshua is referred to as ʿĪsā in the Qur’an. His mother, Mary, is surprisingly designated there as the “sister of Aaron” and is mentioned eleven times by her proper name, as well as thirty-four times as the “mother of ʿĪsā/Yeshua,” whereas in the New Testament, she appears only twenty-four times. In reality, the expression “sister of Aaron” appears to be a set formula borrowed from Exodus: “Then Miriam, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand” (Exodus 15:20).

Contrary to expectations, Mecca is not mentioned in the Qur’an. Although the sequence of letters MHMD appears four times in the text, it is highly probable that it represents an honorific title rather than a proper name. Thus, Muhammad—the central figure of post-Qur’anic Islam—is entirely absent from the text as a historically identifiable character.

An Unexpected Landscape in Climatic and Geographical Domains

In the absence of a precise date of composition and explicit historical markers, scholars have examined the geographical setting evoked in the Qur’an. Tradition situates the emergence of Islam in the Hijaz, around Mecca, in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula—a region distant from the major trade routes connecting Yemen to Damascus. This territory lay outside the control of the great ancient civilizations—Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome—and its sparse population left behind no substantial literary corpus.

However, to the surprise of scholars, the Qur’anic descriptions of landscape and climate bear no resemblance to those of an arid and inhospitable desert. Far from depicting a dry and rocky Hijaz, the Qur’an portrays a lush environment, traversed by rivers and covered 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 unfamiliar to desert populations. The theologian al-Bukhārī even recounts the astonishment of a prisoner upon seeing grapes in Mecca, though they were out of season. Tellingly, the Qur’an contains no explicit descriptions of desert landscapes: no mention of sand dunes, scorching dryness, or barren isolation.

Orality, Writing, and Transmission 

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

Islamic tradition holds that the Qur’an and the hadiths were transmitted exclusively through oral means until the 10th century, thanks to professional “memorizers” who were believed to have faithfully preserved an unwritten text. However, with the expansion of Islamic conquests, religious and political authorities grew concerned about the possible deaths of these memorizers on the battlefield and therefore decided to commit the texts to 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 mistrust of writing, viewing it as potentially misleading: “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie” (Jeremiah 8:8).

Even today, some scholars of rabbinic literature continue to claim that generations of trained “memorizers” were tasked with preserving portions of the Mishnah and halakhic debates in order to transmit them orally, until the redaction of the Talmud in the 10th century. Contemporary scholars’ interest in the theory of memorizers aims to explain this apparent paradox: a rigorous oral transmission of complex texts across many generations.

The Qur’an is a text composed in early Arabic, whose reading is even more challenging than that of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. It contains no diacritical marks for long vowels and no indicators distinguishing among five consonants that share the same script. Its interpretation therefore requires recourse to complex philological methods.

This text combines various literary genres: praises to the deity, prayers, poems and rhymed prose, maxims of wisdom and morality, as well as legal rules and religious commandments. Biblical characters appear only fragmentarily, without detailed narrative context, as if the audience were already familiar with the stories through oral transmission. Thus, the Qur’an does not dwell on elaborate presentations of these figures, implying a prior, implicit knowledge of their histories.

Literary Structure and Composition of the Qur’an

The Qur’an is characterized by numerous structural inconsistencies, frequent repetitions, and above all, statements often disconnected from their immediate context. These elements clearly indicate that the text cannot be attributed to a single author, but rather underwent several phases of writing and revision, under the influence of successive redactors, over an extended period.

At the beginning of the 2000s, a decisive shift occurred in Qur’anic and Islamic studies. When one compares the Qur’anic text with the religion of Islam itself, a profound discrepancy emerges between these two spheres. The debates between conservative and critical scholars are particularly compelling, especially given that thousands of Arabic inscriptions carved in stone—discovered across Western Asia and northern Arabia—remain largely undeciphered. Nevertheless, conservative approaches are gradually giving way to more innovative researchers who apply critical analytical methods, commonly used in biblical studies, to the Qur’anic text.

By the end of the 20th century, the application of scientific methodologies to the study of the Qur’an had fundamentally challenged many long-standing assumptions about the origins of Islam and the stages of its formation. Philological and archaeological research raised new questions regarding the geographical context of this emerging religion. It may no longer be assumed that its cradle was necessarily the Arabian Peninsula, but rather a setting in Western Asia, particularly in Syria and the Land of Israel. Consequently, even the historical existence of the city of Mecca at the time of the Qur’an’s composition has become a matter of scholarly doubt. Researchers such as John Wansbrough, Christoph Luxenberg, Günter Lüling, as well as Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, have suggested that a preliminary version of the Qur’an may have been composed as a prayer book by an Aramaic-Syriac Christian community, in opposition to the Christian orthodoxy established at the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (553).

The Qur’an and Islamic Tradition: A Discrepancy

The Qur’anic text differs radically from Islamic traditions, which were only codified starting in the 9th century—more than two centuries later. Moreover, there is a significant geographical gap between the Hejaz, in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, and northern Persia, from which emerged the main theologians who shaped Islamic doctrine. This applies particularly to the oral traditions compiled in the ḥadīth and the sīra (the biography of Muhammad). From a historical perspective, these two corpora must therefore be dissociated, and the Qur’anic text analyzed independently of the later traditions. Scholars must set aside popular narratives and adopt a historiographic, diachronic reading of the text. This task is made all the more difficult by our deep immersion in traditional narratives that shape our understanding. It is just as challenging not to project elements of later oral tradition onto an 8th-century BCE biblical text. One who succeeds in making this distinction may uncover a reality radically different from that conveyed by tradition.

A particularly surprising feature of the Qur’an is that it does not provide the very information one would expect as a priority: a biography of Muhammad. We know nothing about his origins—his parents’ identities, his birthplace and birthdate, whether he had siblings, or the names of his companions or followers. No miracles are attributed to him: he does not heal the sick or raise the dead. He delivers no founding speech, nor any words of wisdom or moral instruction—all of which are abundant in the Gospel narratives about Jesus or in the four books of the Torah that recount the life of Moses. The central figure of Islam thus appears strangely absent from the Qur’an. How can this enigma be explained?

Remarkably, the Qur’an gives central prominence to a completely different figure: Jesus, son of Mary. It is striking that Jesus—and even more so Mary—are among the major figures in the Qur’an, alongside Abraham and Moses. Unlike the Gospels, where Jesus’ figure may provoke debate and controversy, the Qur’an presents an entirely positive image of him. What should be concluded from this?

The Qur’anic text mentions approximately thirty-two biblical figures, all indiscriminately referred to as “prophets.” However, the historical prophets—those found in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible—are absent from the text, and this omission appears intentional. The Qur’an’s authors likely did not have access to the full range of biblical scrolls, particularly the prophetic books and historical accounts concerning the kings of Israel and Judah. Like the sages of the Talmud, who often quoted from memory, their knowledge of biblical characters appears to have stemmed primarily from orally transmitted stories.

Biblical Figures and Their Significance in the Qur’an

Among the names mentioned in the Qur’an, only about six are relatively difficult to identify in the Hebrew Bible or New Testament. About twenty-six figures originate primarily from the Pentateuch. The two most frequently cited characters are Jesus (ʿĪsā in the Qur’an) and Moses, each mentioned roughly 130 times. They are followed by Abraham (69 occurrences), Noah (43, including a surah bearing his name), 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), Elisha and Saul (once each). Joseph is mentioned twice outside of Surah 12, which is dedicated to him.

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

Under the Abbasid dynasty, based in Baghdad, several attempts were made to organize the surahs of the Qur’an according to thematic or chronological order, but all of them systematically failed. Lacking firm reference points, the compilers ultimately settled on an artificial criterion for arranging the 114 surahs in codex form (mushaf): a descending order of length, from the longest to the shortest.

Strikingly, the fourteen epistles of Paul in the New Testament were arranged according to the same principle. Is this a mere coincidence? The Mishnah and the books of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible also follow this structural method. What does this shared literary practice among the foundational texts of the major religious traditions reveal? It would seem that, confronted with the impossibility of establishing a thematic or chronological hierarchy, the compilers adopted a pragmatic logic: placing the most voluminous texts first, as they were often regarded as the most significant.

Any historical analysis begins with two fundamental questions: who authored the text, and when? The Qur’an, however, provides no concrete clues. No historical event is mentioned explicitly. The Byzantine Empire appears only through interpretation, while the Sassanid Persian Empire is entirely absent—as are the Jewish and Christian kingdoms of southern Arabia, such as Himyar, Yemen, and Saba, or the Nabataean-Arab kingdoms. Yet these political entities necessarily influenced the populations of the Hejaz, particularly through their trade caravans that traversed the peninsula from south to north. The historian is thus confronted with a largely decontextualized text, lacking any satisfactory historical grounding.

A scholarly approach requires distancing oneself from later interpretations and examining the Qur’an without theological filters. A plausible working hypothesis is that the text was initially written in Syriac—the dominant language in the eastern part of the Christian Byzantine Empire—before being translated into Arabic, following a method similar to that used in the study of the New Testament.

The presence of biblical figures suggests that the Qur’an is a reformulation of narratives derived from biblical tradition, much like the Pesharim manuscripts discovered at Qumran. However, the central role attributed to Mary and Jesus points to an extracanonical Christian origin. In-depth analysis reveals that the portrayals of Jesus and Mary in the Qur’an correspond closely to those found in apocryphal gospels circulating among Messianic communities in Greater Syria. Notable parallels appear with the Protoevangelium of James, the Gospel of Barnabas, and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. These communities also shared theological affinities with the Book of Revelation, the Monophysite or Miaphysite doctrine—which held that Christ possessed only a single, divine nature—and Docetism, which denied the reality of Jesus’ crucifixion.

At the time of the Qur’an’s composition, the Near East was largely populated by Syriac- and Greek-speaking Christians of Aramaic and Assyrian traditions. Among them were so-called “Judeo-Christian” communities, which included the Nazarenes/Nazōreans (Nasāra in the Qur’an), the Ebionites, and the Elcesaites. However, this label is reductive, as these groups did not define themselves as purely Christian or purely Jewish. They formed Messianic communities that adhered to Jewish laws and practices, but had been rejected by Christian orthodoxy following the Councils of Constantinople (381 and 553). Their beliefs diverged significantly from Byzantine orthodoxy: they denied Jesus’ divinity and the Trinity, rejected Paul’s epistles—which they considered falsified—and denied the crucifixion of Jesus, viewing it as an illusion. Some even claimed that Paul was not a Judean but a Greek convert who had failed to marry the daughter of the high priest. These groups primarily aligned themselves with James, the brother of Jesus, whom they regarded as his true successor.

The Absence of Muhammad and the Central Role of Jesus and Mary

The historian must also interrogate Islamic traditions to assess their compatibility with the Qur’an. Ibn Hishām’s Sīra († 834) recounts that Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570, received revelation at the age of forty through the angel Gabriel, and died in 632. However, this version does not allow for the identification of an author, as it presents the Qur’an as divine revelation. Yet, nothing in the Qur’anic text explicitly refers to an angelic revelation addressed to Muhammad—just as the epistles do not mention Jesus’ appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus. Is this again a coincidence?

If the Qur’an was not composed in Arabia, then where do Islamic traditions originate? Who were the actual authors of the Sīra and the thousands of hadiths that structured Islam? These authors were neither Arabs nor from the Byzantine Empire. They hailed from the Sassanid Empire, far from the Arabian Peninsula. Among them were major figures such as Muhammad al-Bukhārī (810–870), Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj (821–875), Imām al-Tirmidhī (824–892), and the historian al-Ṭabarī (839–923), all born in regions of Persia and Central Asia (Khurasan, Bukhara, Tabaristan), north of ancient Zoroastrian Persia, in what are now Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. They compiled oral traditions and produced tens of thousands of hadiths, often with little direct connection to the Qur’anic text, while laying the foundations for sharia and the practices of the sunna.

Although our sources confirm the historical existence of Muhammad in the first half of the 7th century, these authors had no direct information about him. In fact, we know more about the historical Muhammad than about Jesus—if we exclude the latter’s crucifixion by Roman authorities. Based on numerous extra-Islamic sources, there is little doubt that a figure named Muhammad played a decisive role in the conquest of Gaza and Jerusalem in 635 at the expense of the Byzantines—an event that is entirely absent from the Qur’an.

The dating of the Qur’an’s composition remains a subject of intense scholarly debate. Hypotheses, based on tradition, range from the period of Muhammad’s presumed activity (622–636), to the caliphate of ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (644–656), to that of ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (685–705), or the Umayyad dynasty (657–750). Some scholars propose that the definitive version of the text was fixed under the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad (750–870), or even as late as the 10th century. A distinctive feature of these compilation efforts is that each new ruler ascending to power in Damascus or Baghdad would destroy previous versions to impose a revised version of the text serving to legitimize his authority. This phenomenon has no equivalent in the composition of biblical or New Testament texts, whose authors, rather than erasing earlier versions, simply added their own contributions.

If Mary and Jesus occupy a central place in the Qur’an, to the detriment of Muhammad, and if nearly all the figures mentioned are derived from the Hebrew Bible, can this text still be considered a Muslim work? The inevitable conclusion is that the Qur’an constitutes a heterodox Christian production, more faithful to the biological family of Jesus of Galilee than to the Church Fathers. As for Islam as a religion, it is a later construction that relies on the Qur’an only in an allusive manner.