Parallels Between the Qur'an and Late Antique Judeo-Christian Literature: Difference between revisions

The similarities between the Qur'an and previous scriptures has been noted since the advent of Islam. However, the Judeo-Christian tales and their Qur'anic counterparts do not always match. A claim found in the Qur'an and other Islamic literature is that the Jews and Christians deliberately changed their scriptures to obscure the truth of the Qur'an. There is no documentary evidence in the textual traditions of those religions to support this claim, and as it would require a conspiracy of people across centuries and empires to have done such a thing the claim is generally not taken seriously by modern scholars.  

The more accepted account is that the Qur'an burrows stories from the ancient milieu in which it arose--Christianity and Judaism of the late antique period in the near or middle east. Contrary to the Islamic tradition, most scholars today agree that the Qur'an must have been composed in an environment in which Christian and Jewish stories were very familiar, both to the person(people) writing the Qur'an and to the audience. As such borrowings are to be expected, and in a semi-literate culture before the advent of the printing press different versions of the same story as well as mistakes in transmission from one medium to the other are also to be expected.