Relentless Reasoning

The Gospel That Wasn’t Lost

A Critical Response to “The Gospel That Got Lost” (Published on Medium by Mohamed, Ph.D)

Introduction — When Faith Rewrites What Facts Already Recorded

A recent article titled “The Gospel That Got Lost” invites readers to believe that Islam restores a pure, original revelation of Jesus that Christianity allegedly corrupted. It presents Islam as the gentle custodian of divine clarity, sweeping away centuries of distortion.
It’s eloquent, compassionate—and historically indefensible.

This essay examines those claims through three lenses: history, text, and logic.
Each will be tested by the same rule:

If it happened in reality, reality will show it.

Our tools are simple but non-negotiable:
the Law of Identity, the Law of Non-Contradiction, and the Law of the Excluded Middle.
Either the Injīl that existed in the seventh century is the same Gospel Christians possessed—or it isn’t. Both cannot be true.

What follows is not polemic; it’s forensics.

1 | What the Article Claims

“Islam doesn’t reject Jesus. It reveres him. Not as a god, but as a prophet… He was given a divine revelation called the Injeel. That message was pure but later altered through translations, debates, and institutional decisions.”

The argument rests on three pillars:

An unwritten, purely oral Injīl revealed to Jesus.
A claim of subsequent textual corruption of the canonical Gospels.
Islam’s superior preservation as divine correction.

Each collapses under scrutiny.

2 | History Has No Memory of a Different Injīl

The Qurʾān commands:

“Let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allah revealed therein.” (Q 5 : 47)

That verse presupposes a present, functional text. In the 7th century the “People of the Gospel” were Syriac, Greek, and Coptic Christians reading the same four canonical Gospels attested in thousands of manuscripts centuries before Islam.
No record—Christian, Jewish, or secular—mentions a vanished “book of Jesus.”

Early Christian witnesses—Papias (c. 110 CE), Justin Martyr (150 CE), Irenaeus (180 CE)—quote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as authoritative decades before the Qurʾān. Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (4th c.) contain nearly the complete New Testament. These manuscripts pre-date Muhammad by 300 years.

To claim a “lost oral Injīl” is therefore to invent a history no historian, archaeologist, or manuscript ever recorded.

3 | Misusing Textual Criticism

“Modern biblical scholarship confirms that the New Testament contains thousands of variations.”

Yes—mostly spelling, punctuation, or word order. Of ~140 000 Greek words in the New Testament, over 99 % are unaffected by any meaningful variant. The major ones (Mark 16 : 9-20; John 7 : 53–8 : 11; 1 John 5 : 7) are transparently footnoted in every modern translation.
That’s preservation with honesty, not corruption with concealment.

Bart Ehrman himself, frequently quoted by apologists, wrote:

“Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants.” (Misquoting Jesus, p. 252)

Thus the “thousands of variations” argument confuses scribal detail with doctrinal change.

4 | Islam’s Preservation Claim Meets Its Own Mirror

“The Qur’an is preserved word-for-word in its original Arabic.”

Historical record: not exactly.

The Ṣanʿāʾ palimpsest (mid-7th century) preserves variant verse orders and wording.
Early scholars such as Ibn Mujāhid (10th c.) canonized seven readings, while others admitted up to twenty.
Classical sources acknowledge missing material: verses once recited about stoning, suckling, or prayer numbers.

If textual variety equals corruption, Islam fails its own test.
If variety can exist without doctrinal loss, then the same logic vindicates the Bible.

5 | The Qurʾān’s Own Witness to the Gospel

The Qurʾān speaks of the Gospel with present-tense immediacy:

“We sent Jesus, son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him, and We gave him the Gospel wherein is guidance and light.” (Q 5 : 46)
“Let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allah revealed therein.” (Q 5 : 47)
“Say, O People of the Book, you have no ground until you uphold the Torah and the Gospel.” (Q 5 : 68)

Each verse affirms continuity, not loss. The wording “with them” (ʿindahum) anchors these scriptures in the possession of contemporaries.

To reinterpret “guidance and light” as a vanished book violates the Law of Identity:
the Gospel affirmed and the Gospel denied cannot both be the same object.

If Injīl of ʿĪsā = Injīl with them, the claim of a missing text is self-contradictory.
If they are different, the Qurʾān’s commands become meaningless, addressing a non-existent book.

6 | When Theology Rewrites Revelation

“Islam teaches that the original Gospel was pure and divine but later altered by human hands through translation and debate.”

That sentence describes not history but theological evolution.
No early Muslim source—not Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, nor Qatādah—claimed that earlier scriptures were textually rewritten. They accused certain Jews and Christians of taḥrīf al-maʿnā — distorting meaning, not taḥrīf al-naṣṣ — changing text.
The Qurʾānic language confirms this:

“They distort the word after understanding it.” (Q 2 : 75)
“They twist their tongues with it.” (Q 3 : 78)

That is misinterpretation, not manuscript tampering.
Only under the Abbasids—two centuries later—did Muslim polemicists, facing Christian apologists fluent in Arabic, redefine taḥrīf to mean textual corruption.
Al-Jāḥiẓ (9 th c.) hinted at it, al-Ṭabarī recorded the rumor but kept the old sense, and Ibn Ḥazm (11 th c.) codified it into dogma.
Thus a 7 th-century affirmation became an 11 th-century accusation.

7 | The Turning of the Centuries: From Verification to Denial

The shift was psychological as much as doctrinal.
Early Islam needed Judaism and Christianity as credentials—confirmation that revelation was one continuous chain.
Later Islam, solidified into empire, needed separation—its own unique scripture, untainted by predecessors.

Yet the Qurʾān itself built verification upon those very scriptures:
“If you are in doubt about what We revealed to you, ask those who read the Scripture before you.” (Q 10 : 94)

That verse presupposes trustworthy existing readers, not corrupted texts.
To reinterpret it as a rhetorical flourish is to nullify its evidential value.
If God tells Muhammad to verify revelation through corrupted books, divine logic collapses.

The Law of Non-Contradiction forbids both statements—
1️⃣ These earlier scriptures are guidance and light.
2️⃣ These scriptures are corrupted and unreliable.
—being true simultaneously.
Islamic orthodoxy affirms both.
Therefore one must be false, and the Qurʾānic affirmation stands first in time and in text.

8 | Historical Continuity of the Gospel

Long before Islam, the Gospel existed as a stable corpus.
Manuscripts spanning centuries—P^52 (John 18, c. 125 CE), P^45, P^46, P^66, P^75, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus—demonstrate near-identical text to today’s New Testament.
By the time the Qurʾān appeared, Syriac, Coptic, and Greek copies circulated across Arabia.
Christians in Najrān, Yemen, and Syria all read the same Gospel narrative.
There is no gap into which a “different Injīl” could fit.

If the Gospel had vanished, early Muslim polemicists would have faced opponents with no scriptures to cite; instead, they argued against the Gospel’s content.
That confirms its presence, not its absence.

9 | The Preservation Mirror

Islamic apologetics often contrast Qurʾānic preservation with Christian “loss.”
But both traditions share the same human medium: memorization, manuscript copying, and recension.
The Qurʾān’s own compilation history—Abū Bakr’s collection, ʿUthmān’s recension, and the burning of variant codices—shows a textual process, not a miracle of instant uniformity.
Even within that process, variant readings (qirāʾāt) persisted.

If multiplicity disproves divine origin, Islam undermines itself.
If multiplicity is compatible with divine supervision, then the same courtesy must be extended to the Bible.

Truth is consistent across standards; double standards are not truth.

10 | Applying the Laws of Logic

Identity: The Injīl affirmed in the Qurʾān = the Gospel possessed by Christians in the 7 th century. If they are identical, the corruption claim is false; if they differ, the Qurʾānic command becomes void.
Non-Contradiction: A text cannot be both preserved and corrupted in the same respect. The Qurʾān calls the Gospel “guidance and light”; theology later calls it darkness.
Excluded Middle: Either God’s word endures or it doesn’t—there is no third option of “enduring but lost.”

To violate these laws is to abandon rational discourse.
A revelation that claims divine authorship must, at minimum, satisfy the logic its own verses invoke:
“Had it been from other than Allah, they would have found within it much contradiction.” (Q 4 : 82)

11 | Textual Evidence and the Manuscript Trail

The Christian manuscript tradition is unmatched in volume and transparency.
Over 5 800 Greek manuscripts, 10 000 Latin, and 9 000 vernacular witnesses allow reconstruction of the autographic text to within fractions of a percent accuracy.
Where differences exist, they are logged, debated, and published—not hidden.

Contrast that with the Qurʾān’s early record:
no complete manuscript from Muhammad’s lifetime, and none universally identical until centuries later.
The Ṣanʿāʾ palimpsest alone contains over 60 textual differences from the 1924 Cairo edition—proof that early transmission was dynamic, not frozen.

Thus, by historical measure, the New Testament’s documentation surpasses that of the Qurʾān, not the other way around.

12 | When Faith Evades Evidence

“Islam doesn’t ask for blind belief. It invites honest comparison.”

An honest comparison demands symmetrical scrutiny.
Yet Islamic apologetics routinely apply microscope to the Bible and telescope to the Qurʾān.
When evidence favors the Bible, faith retreats into mysticism:

“Truth resides in the heart, not in human records.”
But revelation, by definition, is a human record of divine speech.
If that record collapses, so does revelation.

To move from verifiable history to mystical abstraction is to concede defeat on empirical ground.

13 | The Moral of Preservation

The Bible’s openness—its footnotes, apparatus, and scholarly candor—embodies confidence in truth.
Islam’s insistence on a single untouchable text conceals internal diversity under reverence.
True preservation is not uniformity by decree, but transparency under scrutiny.

Revelation that survives investigation is revelation that never needed protection from it.

14 | Rebuilding the Chain of Continuity

From Moses to Christ to Muhammad, the Qurʾān portrays a single line of prophets.
If that chain were broken by textual corruption, Islam inherits not restoration but rupture.
For Islam to stand, earlier revelation must still be recognizable, because the Qurʾān repeatedly appeals to it for validation.

Therefore, denying the authenticity of the Torah and Gospel negates Islam’s own credibility claim.
It is the theological equivalent of cutting the branch while standing on it.

15 | The Logical Verdict

The Qurʾān affirms the Torah and Gospel as living, guiding revelation.
The earliest Muslims interpreted taḥrīf as misinterpretation, not textual change.
Later theology reversed that meaning under polemical pressure.
Historical manuscripts confirm textual continuity of the Bible before, during, and after the Qurʾān’s emergence.
Therefore, the “lost Gospel” theory contradicts both the Qurʾān’s original stance and all verifiable evidence.

The unavoidable conclusion:

The Gospel that Islam says was lost never existed outside imagination.

Conclusion — Truth That Never Needed Restoring

The narrative of a “lost Gospel” is comforting because it absolves contradiction without evidence.
But comfort is not confirmation.
The real Gospel—the canonical witness to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection—was never lost, never rewritten, and never replaced.
It stood in the hands of Christians long before Islam and remains the same today.

The Qurʾān’s own language affirms it; history documents it; logic demands it.
Only theology denies it, and only by contradicting its own foundation.

Produce one rock-solid, verifiable 7 th-century fragment of a different Injīl.
Until then, the verdict stands: the Injīl of Jesus = the Injīl “with them.”
The “lost Gospel” is not history—it’s revision.

Author’s Reflection

Every generation faces the same fork in the road:
accept evidence wherever it leads, or reshape evidence to fit belief.
Faith that fears inquiry is already wounded; truth that welcomes scrutiny needs no defense.

The Gospel was never lost.
Only our willingness to face facts ever was.