The Islamic Dilemma was argued before it had a name. Karl Gottlieb Pfander (1803 to 1865), a Basel missionary who worked in the Caucasus, in India and at Constantinople, wrote Mīzān al-Ḥaqq, The Balance of Truth, in German at Shusha in 1829, had it printed in Armenian in 1831 and in Persian in 1835, and carried it into Urdu, Arabic and Turkish.
R. H. Weakley’s English translation appeared in London in 1866, and W. St Clair Tisdall revised the book in 1910. For a century it was the handbook of Christian controversy with Muslims, and the argument this website answers is its argument.
The book argues for far more than the question at issue here: its second part sets out Christian doctrine and its third attacks the Prophet and the Qur’an. The first part is the one that matters for the Injīl, and it is answered below.
The text used is Weakley’s translation of 1866, from the Bodleian Library copy digitised by Google; the quotations are short and have been checked against the scan.
What Pfander argued
The first part of the book has 3 chapters, and their titles are the argument. The books current among Christians, “i.e. the Old and New Testaments”, are “declared by the Koran to be Divine revelations”. Those books were “never at any time abrogated”. And the Muslim assertion that they “have been corrupted and changed” is “refuted”.
The first chapter cites 5 verses (42:15; 29:46; 5:5; 2:44; 3:3) to show that the Qur’an honours the scriptures of the People of the Book, then adds in a sentence what the whole case needs: “It is also evident that the books understood to have been given to the Jews and Christians are the Old and New Testaments.” The conclusion follows at once: “whosoever accepts the Koran must accept them.”
The third chapter asks the questions that later apologists have repeated: “at what period, by whom, and in what manner this tampering with the text was effected; and which are the corrupted passages”. It argues that Christians had no motive to corrupt their books and no means, since they were scattered from Spain to India and divided among themselves; that the great codices in Rome, St Petersburg, London and Paris, and the quotations of the Fathers, agree with the printed Bibles; that the Qur’an itself sends the Prophet to “those who have read the book before thee” (10:94; 21:7); and that Jesus never charged the Jews with corrupting the Torah.
Then comes the turn that the Islamic Dilemma later made its whole case. Pfander writes that the Prophet “acknowledged the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God; and on the other, he taught a religion at variance with those books; and so, to cover this discrepancy, he was obliged to assert that they had been corrupted.” That is the dilemma of 1829: affirm the books and contradict them, or call them corrupt and lose the affirmation.
Where the argument meets this website
“The books given to the Jews and Christians are the Old and New Testaments”
Pfander asserts the identification in one sentence and never argues it. The Qur’an speaks of one Injīl, given to ʿĪsā as the Torah was given to Mūsā (5:46), and every use of the word is singular. The four gospels are, on their own account, books written about him by others; Luke opens his by saying that many had already drawn up accounts and that he used what was handed down (Luke 1:1-4).
The Christians Pfander wrote for in Persia and India read a Bible that the Christians of the Qur’an’s own century did not possess in that form: the Syriac churches read Tatian’s harmony of the four gospels, and their New Testament had 22 books. The first answer on the Islamic Dilemma, answered sets this out, and the five gospels show what the books are.
“Whosoever accepts the Koran must accept them”
The verse Pfander does not quote is 5:48, where the Qur’an calls itself muṣaddiq, confirming, and muhaymin, guardian, over the scripture before it. Al-Ṭabarī reads the guardian as the trustworthy custodian: what in the earlier books agrees with the Qur’an is true, and what disagrees with it is false.
Confirming a revelation and certifying every line of the books that carry it are different acts, and the same verse that has Jesus confirm the Torah has him make lawful part of what it forbade (3:50). Pfander’s own second chapter grants the principle when it says that the Gospel did not abrogate the Torah but “completed what had been begun”; the Qur’an says the same of itself, and adds the word guardian. The measure applies it.
“Not a single passage … more precise than the general statement”
Pfander says the Qur’an never specifies what was corrupted. It names the kinds. Some “write the book with their own hands and then say, This is from God” (2:79); others “alter words from their places” (4:46; 5:13) or “twist their tongues with the book” so that it is taken for scripture (3:78); and some conceal much of it (5:15).
Alteration of the text and alteration of its meaning are both charged, and this website charges each only where it can be shown.
Pfander also dates the corruption from Sūrat al-Bayyina (98:4) to the years after the Prophet appeared; but the verse speaks of the People of the Book dividing among themselves, tafarraqa, and says nothing about their text. The third answer on the pillar page gives the verses in full.
“At what period, by whom, and in what manner”
The question assumes a conspiracy, and this website needs none. The gospels were layered when they were written: Mark first, Matthew and Luke rewriting Mark with other material, John last and apart. That is the finding of the scholarship of the 2 centuries since Pfander, and it is set out on the synoptic problem.
The additions that textual criticism has since identified were made by copyists in the first centuries, long before Islam, and no Christian in the seventh century had a motive to make them.
Pfander’s own witnesses tell against him here. He names the Codex Vaticanus and the codex then in St Petersburg, now the Codex Sinaiticus, as agreeing with the printed Bibles. Both end Mark at 16:8, without the appearances and the ascension that the printed Bibles of his day carried; both omit the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53 to 8:11); neither has the heavenly witnesses of 1 John 5:7.
He could not know this in 1829, when neither codex had been published. The reader of 1866 could, and the reader of today can see it on the page on Mark and the discrepancy tables.
“Christ never charged the Jews with corrupting the Torah”
Jesus is recorded saying that the Jews had made the word of God void by their tradition (Mark 7:13), and that “Moses, for the hardness of your hearts, wrote you this precept” (Mark 10:5). The gospels’ Jesus distinguishes the commandment of God from what had been written and taught beside it. That is the Qur’an’s distinction too, and it is the whole of this website’s position: the revelation lies within the books, and the Qur’an is the measure that sorts it from the rest.
The collection of the Qur’an
Pfander turns the charge round and argues from the reports of the readings and of ʿUthmān’s codex that the Qur’an itself might be corrupt. The question is outside this website, which answers the Christian case about the Injīl and does not pursue the Christian case against the Qur’an. One remark belongs here.
The reports Pfander quotes are in Bukhārī, where every Muslim can read them; the tradition that records the history of its own text in its canonical collections is doing the opposite of concealing it. The manuscripts and the reports are set out at Best of Islam: ʿUthmān’s copies and manuscript transmission in the Qur’an and the New Testament.
The Prophet foretold
The first chapter of Pfander’s third part is the ancestor of the standard Christian reply on Aḥmad: the name is not in the Gospel, the Paraclete of John 14 to 16 is the Holy Spirit, and the Qur’an’s claim came from “some apostate Christian” who flattered the Prophet. The last is a guess, offered without a source. The rest is answered, and its force conceded where it has force, on the good news of Aḥmad. Pfander’s footnote on the word ummī, which he renders “illiterate”, is answered in Was Muḥammad illiterate? at Best of Islam.
What Pfander has right
Three of his points stand. The Gospel did not abrogate the Torah; Matthew 5:17 says so, and the Qur’an says that Jesus confirmed what was before him (3:50; 61:6).
The Qur’an does send its hearers to the People of the Book (10:94; 16:43; 21:7), and this website reads those verses as it reads 7:157: the revelation was present with them, carried in the books they held. And no Christian in the seventh century replaced the gospels; the manuscripts show that the text of the four has been copied with care since the fourth century, and this website says so.
None of this reaches the conclusion. A book carried faithfully for 12 centuries is still a book about Jesus, written by others, and the question of what in it is the Injīl given to him is the question Pfander never asked.
From Pfander to the Islamic Dilemma
Raḥmatullāh al-Kairānawī answered the book in its own day: he debated Pfander at Agra in April 1854 and published Iẕhār al-Ḥaqq, The Demonstration of Truth, at Constantinople in 1864, using the European biblical criticism of his time against the claim that the text had never changed. Pfander’s book was revised in 1910 and reprinted through the twentieth century, and the two-part form that Answering Islam and Acts 17 Apologetics gave the argument in the 2000s and 2010s is Pfander’s sentence about the Prophet being “obliged to assert that they had been corrupted”, turned into a dilemma and pressed on video. The pillar page follows the line from Celsus and Julian, through the apology under the name of al-Kindī and Isṭifān Ward, to Pfander and his successors.
Questions about Pfander and the Balance of Truth
Who was Karl Gottlieb Pfander?
A German missionary of the Basel Mission (1803 to 1865) who worked at Shusha in the Caucasus, then in India for the Church Missionary Society, then at Constantinople. He wrote Mīzān al-Ḥaqq in 1829 and debated Raḥmatullāh al-Kairānawī at Agra in 1854.
What does the Balance of Truth argue?
That the Qur’an declares the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God, that they were never abrogated or corrupted, and that the Prophet was therefore obliged to call them corrupt because his teaching differed from them. Its second part sets out Christian doctrine and its third attacks the Qur’an and the Prophet.
Did Muslims answer it?
Yes, from the first. Raḥmatullāh al-Kairānawī’s Iẕhār al-Ḥaqq (1864) was written against it after the Agra debate of 1854, and it remains in print. Avril Powell’s Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India gives the history of the controversy.
Is the Islamic Dilemma in Pfander?
In substance. The name and the two-part form came later. His sentence that the Prophet acknowledged the books as the word of God and taught against them, and so had to call them corrupt, is the dilemma in one line. The modern form adds nothing to his premises, and it fails where his fail: the Injīl is taken to be the four gospels, and confirming is taken to mean certifying every word.
Sources
- C. G. Pfander, The Mizan ul Haqq; or, Balance of Truth, trans. R. H. Weakley (London: Church Missionary House, 1866); the Bodleian Library copy digitised by Google. Revised edition by W. St Clair Tisdall (London: Religious Tract Society, 1910).
- Raḥmatullāh al-Kairānawī, Iẕhār al-Ḥaqq (Constantinople, 1864).
- Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London: Curzon Press, 1993), on Pfander, the Agra debate and Iẕhār al-Ḥaqq.
- Christine Schirrmacher, Mit den Waffen des Gegners: Christlich-muslimische Kontroversen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1992), on the Pfander and Kairānawī controversy and its afterlife.
- Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), on the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus and the passages they lack.