The Rightly-Guided Injil

Credits

Texts

  • The Gospel According to Islam, sections 1 to 27 and the Introduction: Dr. Ahmad Shafaat, The Gospel According to Islam (New York: Vantage Press, 1985). Spelling and scanning errors were corrected. The text and notes follow the arrangement of The Narrative of Jesus, Son of Mary, in which the Qur’anic passages are set among the sections and the notes are numbered through the whole.
  • The Gospel According to Islam, printed edition: Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi, The Gospel According to Islam (Seri Kembangan: Langgam Fikir, first edition, 2028). The text on this website was checked against the book.
  • The Qur’anic passages on Jesus, with their headings and footnotes: Alham Ahmed, The Gospel According to the Quran: Jesus and His Teachings (Toronto: Noor Lal Foundation, 2021), in the translation The Clear Quran by Dr. Mustafa Khattab (Al-Furqaan Foundation, theclearquran.org), which the compiler acknowledges using with the foundation’s permission.
  • An Epistle unto the Congregation of Paul of Tarsus: an English rendering of the Malay letter Epistel Kepada Jemaat Paulus, with footnotes added by this website.
  • The Gospel of Thomas: sayings are numbered as in the standard edition. The summaries woven into the gospel are this website’s own, prepared from Thomas O. Lambdin’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), and checked against the two translations printed in full on their own pages: Mark M. Mattison’s, based on Nag Hammadi Codex II, 2, which its translator has placed in the public domain (gospels.net, a Luminescence, L.L.C. website; the manuscript dates follow the same site), and Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer’s, from The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version, ed. Robert J. Miller (Polebridge Press, 1992, 1994), reproduced with permission. The introduction’s dating, manuscripts and the debate over independence draw on Peter Kirby, Early Christian Writings (earlychristianwritings.com/thomas.html), who cites Ron Cameron, Stephen Patterson and Stevan Davies.
  • The witnesses to the substitution, at section 26: paraphrases of Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.4, on Basilides; of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth (Nag Hammadi Codex VII, 2), after Roger A. Bullard and Joseph A. Gibbons; and of the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (Codex VII, 3), after James Brashler and Roger A. Bullard, both in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988). In each the laughter attributed to Jesus, and in the two Nag Hammadi texts their docetism and their polemics, are set aside and the notes say so. On the lost gospel: Bart D. Ehrman, “The Lost Gospel of Basilides”, The Bart Ehrman Blog, 1 July 2023.
  • The classical commentaries on the Qur’anic passages about Jesus (al-Ṭabarī, al-Baghawī, al-Qurṭubī, Ibn Kathīr, Tanwīr al-Miqbās, al-Jalālayn, al-Durr al-Manthūr and al-Saʿdī): English renderings prepared for this website from the public-domain Arabic texts published at tafsir.app and, for Tanwīr al-Miqbās, at shamela.ws (book 12877); the modern editors’ apparatus is not translated. The renderings are released with the site and may be quoted with credit and a link; they have not been checked by a second translator, and the Arabic source is named on every page.
  • The Islamic Dilemma, answered: the sections on the origin of the argument, its four substitutions, the Bible’s textual history, Paul, the four registers of the verses and the added questions draw on the study Reconsidering the “Islamic Dilemma” by Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi (Kuala Lumpur, 2026), with the scholarship it cites named on the page.
  • Thomas and the synoptic gospels: the sayings-order test: the analysis, tables and quotations come from the note “Correlation Analysis”; it draws on Helmut Koester’s list of parallels, R. McL. Wilson (1960) and Stephen Patterson (1988). The page restates it in this website’s words.
  • The infancy gospels, Q and the manuscript table: the summaries are this website’s own, prepared from Mark M. Mattison’s public-domain translations of the Infancy Gospel of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, from his edition of Q (based on The Critical Edition of Q), and from the manuscript information, all at gospels.net.
  • All other text, including the section titles, the colour-coded Gospel of Thomas sections and their notes, the answers and the replies: this website.

Images

Manuscript images load from Wikimedia Commons. Each carries its credit and a link to its Commons page in its caption.

Design

Built on the Twenty Twenty-Five theme. Typefaces keep their own licences; see the licence files in the theme’s font folder.

The ornament of this website, the eight-pointed star lattice behind every page, the dividers and the stylised icons, follows a principle rather than a fashion. Al-Fārūqī argued that the Muslim artist’s stylisation of the natural figure, and his final turn to pure geometry and to a pattern that repeats without end, are the visual form of lā ilāha illā Allāh: a refusal to let anything in nature stand for the divine, and an attempt to express not God, who cannot be expressed, but His inexpressibility, by setting the eye on a course it cannot complete. The lattice here is drawn in that spirit. Nothing on the site figures the divine; the only images are manuscripts, which are the evidence. See Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (1983), pp. 28-32.

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