No, it wasn’t. And God used a Muslim shepherd boy, Muhammed edh-Dhib, to prove beyond all doubt that He had preserved His word accurately. It so happened that in the winter of 1946-47 Muhammed and his cousin, Jum’a, were herding goats near the Dead Sea in Palestine, when, by the will of God, Muhammed discovered a cave full of ancient scrolls. Over the next eight years, ten more caves were found containing jars filled with ancient Scriptures that dated back 2,000 years from 150 bc to 70 ad.
Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, many people argued that there had likely been so many changes in the Hebrew text that there was no way of knowing if what we have today is the same as the original Scriptures. But then Muhammed found the scrolls, and the Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed the remarkable accuracy of the Hebrew text that we have today.
We also know that the text of the New Testament manuscripts was preserved accurately because early copies have survived to this very day. We have twelve copies written in the original Greek that date back to the 100s AD, not many years after they were first written. Also, another 64 copies from the 200s AD, and 48 Greek manuscripts made in the 300s AD, still exist today. These early manuscripts contain the complete Gospel and other New Testament Scriptures many times over. Also, we have over 5,350 more Greek manuscripts from later centuries.
When we compare all these copies—from the very earliest to the most recent—we see at once that the Gospel of Jesus has remained the same over the entire period of time. Its message hasn’t changed since the beginning. There are some minor scribal errors in various manuscripts, introduced by scribes as they copied the text by hand, but the vast majority of these are obvious spelling errors. None of these affect any important Christian teaching.
In conclusion: the Bible that existed in Muhammad’s day (570–632 AD) is the same Bible that we have today. Muslims back then could confidently say, “We believe in ... the Books given to Moses, Jesus, and the prophets” (Sura 3:84), and Muslims today can say the same thing.
