وَلۡيَحۡكُمۡ أَهۡلُ ٱلۡإِنجِيلِ
let the people of the Injīl judge · Q 5:47
The Islamic Dilemma, answered
What the argument claims, where it came from, the assumptions it rests on, why it fails, and the strongest Christian reply. The sections on its origin, its substitutions and the verses it rests on draw on the study Reconsidering the “Islamic Dilemma” by Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi.
Scholarly consensus
What is the Islamic Dilemma?
The Islamic Dilemma is a Christian apologetic argument, popularised online in the 2010s. It says the Qur'an affirms the Torah and the Gospel yet contradicts them. If those books are preserved, the Qur'an is wrong to contradict them; if they are corrupted, the Qur'an is wrong to affirm them. Either way, it concludes, the Qur'an fails.
Where the argument came from
The argument is older than its name. A dilemma of the same shape was pressed against Christianity itself by the pagan critics Celsus and Julian, as Robert Wilken records, long before it was turned on Islam. The ninth-century Christian apology written under the name of al-Kindī reasoned from the Qur’an’s respect for the earlier scriptures against its Muslim correspondent. A letter of 1732 by the Christian writer Isṭifān Ward, known only in summary, argues that Qur’an 3:84, 5:46 and 2:87 attest the authenticity of the Torah and Gospel, which is the first horn of the dilemma. Karl Pfander’s Mīzān al-Ḥaqq (“The Balance of Truth”, drafted in German in 1829 and printed in Persian in the 1830s) made the same move the centrepiece of a missionary apologetic, and Muslim scholars answered it in its own day. Its modern home is Answering Islam, where Sam Shamoun’s articles on the Qur’an’s witness to the Bible and on taḥrīf (corruption) make the case; the circle around David Wood, Acts 17 Apologetics and the late Nabeel Qureshi gave it its name, its two-horned form and its reach on video from the 2010s.
The argument, stated fairly
- The Qur'an says God gave ʿĪsā the Injīl as guidance and light (5:46), and tells its people to judge by what God revealed in it (5:47).
- The Qur'an says no one can change the words of God (6:115; 18:27).
- The four gospels teach that Jesus died on the cross and is the Son of God. The Qur'an denies both (4:157; 5:116-117).
- So either the gospels are preserved, and the Qur'an contradicts scripture it affirms, or they are corrupted, and the Qur'an affirms a corrupted book.
The force of the argument depends on four substitutions that are rarely stated. “Gospel” is made to mean the fourfold New Testament canon. “Torah” is made to mean the whole received Old Testament. “Confirmation” is made to mean endorsement of the text word for word. And “the People of the Book” are made to possess one stable Bible, identical to a later Protestant, Catholic or critical edition. Once the four substitutions are named, the dilemma becomes a chain of contested assumptions. The six answers below take them in turn.
Why the Islamic Dilemma fails
Answer · I
The Injīl is not the four gospels
The Qur'an speaks of one Injīl that God gave to ʿĪsā, as the Torah was given to Mūsā (5:46). Every Qur’anic use of al-Injīl is singular, as Sidney Griffith notes, and the plural anājīl never occurs; al-Tawrāh is likewise always singular, and neither names a multi-book canon. The church received four books written about him, anonymous, in Greek, decades after his ministry. Luke says he compiled his from earlier accounts (1:1-4). The dilemma treats the revelation and the biographies as one thing.
There was also no single Bible for the Qur’an’s first audience to confirm. Tatian’s harmony of the four gospels, not the separate four, was the dominant gospel in the Syriac world of the late seventh century, on Griffith’s evidence. The Syriac New Testament of the Church of the East, the Peshitta, had twenty-two books, without 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. And Irenaeus, about 180 CE, is the first Christian to argue formally for four gospels, against those who held to one. The prior question is always which Bible, in which language, with which canon.
Answer · II
Confirming is not certifying every word
The Qur'an calls itself muṣaddiq, confirming, and muhaymin, guardian, over the scripture before it (5:48). A guardian keeps what is true and rejects what is not. The dilemma reads “confirm” as “endorse in full”, which the verse does not say.
Muṣaddiq is applied in the Qur’an to a message or a prophet, never to a textual canon; Jesus is said to confirm Moses (3:50; 5:46). The same verse shows that confirming is not endorsing everything: Jesus confirms the Torah and makes lawful some of what it forbade.
On muhaymin, Ibn Kathīr, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās and others, lists its senses as trustworthy (amīn), witness (shāhid) and dominant over every earlier scripture. Al-Ṭabarī says the Qur’an is the trustworthy custodian: whatever in the earlier books conforms to it is true, and whatever disagrees with it is false. The guardian does not hand its authority over to what it guards.
Answer · III
The Qur'an itself describes alteration
The same book accuses some of writing scripture with their own hands (2:79), twisting it with their tongues (3:78), distorting words from their places, and forgetting part of what they were given (5:13-14). A third option is the one the Qur'an states: preserved in part, altered in part.
The charge is more precise than the dilemma allows. The verb yuḥarrifūna occurs four times (2:75; 4:46; 5:13; 5:41), and always of Jews, never of Christians. Of Christians the Qur’an says they forgot part of what they were reminded of (5:14). Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that 4:46 is best read “they shift words out of their contexts”. Camilla Adang, surveying nine Muslim authors from Ibn Rabbān al-Ṭabarī to Ibn Ḥazm, found that the majority held that the meaning of the text had been changed and the text itself had not. Al-Ṭabarī read 2:75 as an oral distortion, and al-Rāzī argued that a text so widely recited could not have been changed wholesale.
Ryan Schaffner adds that early Muslim polemicists often made both charges together, meaning and text, with the Qur’an as the filter: biblical material was accepted when it agreed with the Qur’an and rejected as corrupted when it did not. The classical method was a discriminating one, which is not the blanket theory of textual corruption the dilemma attacks.
Answer · IV
The Bible’s own textual history
The Dead Sea Scrolls show that before 70 CE the Hebrew Bible existed in several forms side by side, and Emanuel Tov concludes that the Masoretic Text should no longer sit at the centre of textual thinking. In the New Testament, every modern critical edition judges the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7-8) spurious, the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) is absent from the earliest Greek witnesses, and Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus end Mark at 16:8. Bruce Metzger notes that no uncial manuscript in its original hand before the eighth or ninth century supports the reading “God” at 1 Timothy 3:16.
None of this is a Muslim claim. It is the finding of mainstream textual criticism, and it fits the classical doctrine of taḥrīf. It does not fit the assumption that the Bible Christians held in 1480, 1611 or today is textually identical to the revelations the Qur’an affirms.
Answer · V
Paul stands outside, and the canon is not of one mind
Fourteen of the New Testament’s twenty-seven documents are attributed to Paul of Tarsus or, in the case of Hebrews, were placed under his name, and Islam does not recognise Paul as a prophet. Islamic theology holds, on reports in al-Bukhārī and Muslim, that no prophet came between ʿĪsā and Muḥammad, and Paul claims a commission from the risen Christ. The Qur’anic ḥawāriyyūn (3:52; 5:111-112; 61:14) were the companions of Jesus in his lifetime, a category Paul by his own account does not fill. The command at 5:47 concerns the revelation given to Jesus, and Paul’s letters, written decades later, are a separate body of writing.
The canon is also divided on the doctrines the dilemma turns on. Hebrews says that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (9:22). Psalm 51:16-17, Hosea 6:6 and Ezekiel 18 speak of forgiveness through a broken heart, mercy and repentance. And the Qur’an attributes to the scrolls of Abraham and Moses the principle that no bearer of burdens bears another’s burden (53:36-38). The argument grants the Bible a harmonising reading in advance and denies the Qur’an the same.
Answer · VI
Muslims have always read the gospels this way
The Prophet’s own instruction, recorded in al-Bukhārī (7362), was “do not believe the People of the Book and do not disbelieve them, but say: we believe in God and in what was revealed to us”. Ibn Ḥajar reads it as reserve, with the Qur’an as the criterion. That is how the scholars went on to read: medieval Muslim authors quoted all four gospels, more than 1,270 times across twenty authors in one survey, and sorted what agreed with the Qur'an from what did not. In the fifteenth century Ibrāhīm al-Biqāʿī defended the use of the Bible in commentary, against a rival who accused him of glorifying it, and said that the Qur’an, the Prophet, the Companions and the scholars of every age had referred to the earlier scriptures.
The Gospel According to Islam on this website continues that practice: the gospels read with the Qur’an as the measure, and what agrees with it kept.
How the verses work
The verses on earlier scripture are arguments. They address specific Jewish and Christian communities in the Ḥijāz and Medina, and hold them to their own scripture: if they truly revered what they were given, they would recognise its continuity with what is now sent to Muḥammad (5:43-48, 68). Where those verses use confirmation to settle a point for listeners who had never heard the stories of Moses and Jesus, they tell them that these stories stand in continuity with revelation their neighbours already accepted.
The Qur’an speaks across four registers, which the dilemma collapses into one:
- Original revelation: affirmed, as given to Moses and Jesus.
- Historical transmission: criticised, as handled by the communities entrusted with it (5:44; 5:14).
- Communal canon: never identified with the original, and never named.
- Continuing authority: held by the Qur’an as muhaymin (5:48).
Jesus himself offers a parallel in the first gospel. He tells his disciples that the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat and that they should do “all” that they say (Matthew 23:1-3), and then condemns specific Pharisaic teachings in the same chapter. Christian readers rightly take “all” with care. The same care applies to “uphold the Torah and the Gospel”.
A note on method. The study observes that Answering Islam applies textual criticism one way: it questions the Bible’s alleged predictions of Muḥammad (Deuteronomy 18:18; John 14-16) from the manuscripts, yet treats the manuscripts behind the Trinitarian and Christological proof-texts (1 John 5:7-8; 1 Timothy 3:16; John 1:18; Hebrews 2:9) as settled. It also sets the gospels’ “eyewitness” character against the Qur’an, though the gospels are anonymous and Mark is dated about 35 to 45 years after the events. Christians read the Old Testament by a later revelation as criterion, treating the dietary laws and the temple cult as superseded, and that is the structure of the Muslim reading of both earlier scriptures. Either both traditions may arbitrate earlier scripture, or neither.
Objection and reply
Objection
The Qur'an tells the Christians of the seventh century to judge by the Injīl (5:47) and says the Prophet is described in the Torah and the Injīl that are with them (7:157). If the Injīl was not the four gospels, what book did those Christians hold in their hands?
Best Christian reply
The Christians of Arabia and Syria had no gospel but the four, read in Greek and Syriac, or in Tatian's harmony of the four. When the Qur'an says "the Injīl" and "with them", it can only mean the book in their possession. A revelation that no one possessed could not be a standard for anyone to judge by. So the Qur'an endorses the gospels Christians had, and the dilemma stands. This is the form of the argument in Gordon Nickel, The Gentle Answer to the Muslim Accusation of Biblical Falsification (2015), and in Samuel Green's articles, answered on Responses to named articles; it is the reasoning of Pfander's Mīzān al-Ḥaqq before them, and the form the dilemma takes on Answering Islam and in the videos of David Wood.
Response
The verse does not say "judge by the book you hold". It says "let the people of the Injīl judge by what God has revealed in it" (bimā anzala Allāhu fīhi). The object of the command is the revelation, and the verse before it defines that revelation: the Injīl is what God gave to ʿĪsā, "guidance and light" (5:46). Al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Kathīr both gloss 5:47 as a command to judge by what God sent down in the Injīl, and neither reads it as a certificate for every line in Christian hands; the same Qur'an says, of the same people, that some wrote scripture with their own hands (2:79) and moved words from their places (5:13-14). The books the Christians held carried the Injīl, which is why 7:157 can say the Prophet is found written in them, and carried other things too, which is why the Qur'an corrects them. The reply also proves less than it claims: Christian writers do not agree whether the book in question was the four gospels or the Diatessaron (see the named articles), and neither candidate is a book given to ʿĪsā. What the seventh-century Christians held is a question about manuscripts. What God revealed in the Injīl is a question the Qur'an answers itself, as guardian over the earlier scripture (5:48), and this website follows that answer on the measure. The Injīl is the revelation given to ʿĪsā, which the canonical gospels, the harmonised tradition, the Jewish-Christian gospel material and the oral tradition behind them each preserve in part: a theological category, the heavenly archetype of that revelation, so that asking where the lost book is presupposes a position Muslims do not hold.
The argument has also been restated as a secular case with two steps and four exits, and answered by a historical-critical reply that grants its first step. Both are taken point by point on The Islamic Dilemma without theology.
Questions about the Islamic Dilemma
Who popularised the Islamic Dilemma?
In its present name and two-horned form, David Wood of Acts 17 Apologetics, in videos and debates from the 2010s, and Sam Shamoun of Answering Islam, who had used the argument in writing before that. The argument itself runs back through Pfander’s Mīzān al-Ḥaqq (1830s), Isṭifān Ward’s letter of 1732 and the ninth-century apology under the name of al-Kindī to a dilemma of the same shape that Celsus and Julian pressed against Christianity; the section “Where the argument came from” above gives the line. Muslim scholars answered each form in its day; this website answers the current one.
Does Qur'an 6:115 mean the Bible cannot be corrupted?
No. The verse says the word of your Lord is perfected in truth and justice and none can change His words (6:115; so also 18:27). The words are God's decree and revelation, not the ink of every copy made of them. The same book says people wrote scripture with their own hands (2:79) and moved words from their places (5:13). God's word stands whatever a scribe does to a page. Al-Ṭabarī, al-Rāzī and Ibn Kathīr read the two verses of God's decrees, promises and judgements, or of the Qur'an itself; 18:27 opens with an instruction to the Prophet about the Qur'an. The Qur'an itself draws the line between earlier custody by people (5:44) and its own divine guarding (15:9).
Does Qur'an 5:47 tell Christians to follow the four gospels?
No. The verse tells the people of the Injīl to judge by what God revealed in it. The Qur'an names the Injīl as a revelation given to ʿĪsā (5:46), not four accounts written about him decades later by others. The command reaches the revelation within those books, which the Qur'an, as guardian over them (5:48), identifies.
Does the Qur’an say the Bible is corrupted?
It says some of the People of the Book wrote scripture with their own hands and called it God’s (2:79), moved words from their places (4:46; 5:13), and forgot part of what they were given (5:14). It does not say every book was wholly replaced, and this website does not rest its case on that charge. See the measure.
What is the Injīl according to the Qur’an?
The revelation God gave to Jesus, “guidance and light” (5:46), confirming the Torah. It is always singular. The four gospels are books written about Jesus by others, decades later; they contain the Injīl and other things, and the Qur’an, as guardian over them (5:48), is the measure of which is which.
Is the Islamic Dilemma a good argument?
It is valid only if the Injīl the Qur’an affirms is identical with the four gospels. That is the assumption both horns share, and the Qur’an itself denies it: the Injīl was given to Jesus; the gospels were written by others. Once the assumption goes, there is no dilemma, only the ordinary task of telling the revelation from the record. The six answers above set it out.
Does Qur’an 10:94, “ask those who recite the Book before you”, make the Bible reliable?
No. Al-Ṭabarī and al-Rāzī read the address as rhetorical: the Prophet was free of doubt, and the condition is for any hearer who might doubt. The earliest commentators identify the people to ask as former Jews and Christians who had accepted Islam, such as ʿAbdullāh ibn Salām and Salmān al-Fārisī, whose reading of their own scriptures had led them to it.
Does Qur’an 3:84, “we make no distinction between any of them”, forbid calling the Bible corrupt?
No. The antecedent is persons, the prophets, not their texts. Tafrīq in the Qur’an is accepting some messengers and rejecting others (2:285; 4:150-152). A Muslim who rejects a doctrine later attributed to Jesus rejects the accretion and keeps the messenger.
Does Qur’an 5:68, “uphold the Torah, the Gospel”, bind Muslims to the present Bible?
No. The verse is addressed to the People of the Book in their own time and calls them to consistency with the revelation given to them. It goes on to say that what is sent down to Muḥammad will increase many of them in transgression, which presupposes a tension between the genuine revelation and the tradition built on it.
Is it circular for Muslims to accept what agrees with the Qur’an and reject the rest?
Every later revelation works this way. Christians read the Hebrew scriptures through Christ, treating the dietary laws as abrogated and the priesthood and temple as fulfilled. That is the same method as the Muslim reading of both earlier scriptures, so the charge of circularity either falls on both or on neither.
Where is the Injīl, if it is not the four gospels?
It was never a book that Muslims say survives on a shelf. It is the revelation given to ʿĪsā, which the canonical gospels, Tatian’s harmony, the Jewish-Christian gospels and the oral tradition behind them each preserve in part. The Jewish-Christian gospels, known from Jerome, Epiphanius and Origen, are fragmentary and are not to be identified directly with the Injīl, though they show that early devotion to Jesus was more varied than the later canon suggests.
Sources
- Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi, Reconsidering the “Islamic Dilemma” (Kuala Lumpur, first published 1 May 2026; version 1.1.0, 4 October 2026), which gives the full notes for the sections drawn from it.
- Gordon Nickel, The Gentle Answer to the Muslim Accusation of Biblical Falsification (2015); Samuel Green’s articles, answered on Responses to named articles.
- Camilla Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabbān to Ibn Ḥazm (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
- Gabriel Said Reynolds, “On the Qurʾānic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (taḥrīf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.2 (2010).
- Ryan Schaffner, “The Bible through a Qurʾānic Filter: Scripture Falsification (Taḥrīf) in 8th- and 9th-Century Muslim Disputational Literature” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2016).
- Sidney H. Griffith, “Gospel”, in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), and The Bible in Arabic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
- Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
- Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 4th rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022); Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).
- Walid Saleh, In Defense of the Bible: A Critical Edition and an Introduction to al-Biqāʿī’s Bible Treatise (Leiden: Brill, 2008); David Thomas and John Chesworth (eds.), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
- Karl Pfander, Mīzān al-Ḥaqq (“The Balance of Truth”); the writing of Sam Shamoun on Answering Islam and the videos of David Wood (Acts 17 Apologetics), as the argument answered here.