Two books,
one problem.
The Quran tells the Christians of Muhammad's own day to judge by the Gospel in their hands. We know what was in their hands. That is where the difficulty begins.
Codex Sinaiticus, c. 340 AD — Greek majuscule, unspaced, with the sacred names abbreviated and ruled above.
ΕΝΑΡΧΗΗΝΟΛΟΓΟϹΚΑΙΟΛΟΓΟϹΗΝΠΡΟϹΤΟΝΘΝΚΑΙΘϹΗΝΟΛΟΓΟϹ
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1
Surah 5:47 — early Arabic script carried consonants only. The short vowels were added later.
وَلْيَحْكُمْ أَهْلُ الْإِنْجِيلِ
Let the People of the Gospel judge by what God revealed in it. Surah 5:47
The argument known as the Islamic Dilemma is an internal critique. It does not begin by assuming the Bible is true or that the Quran is false. It begins inside Islamic scripture and asks whether its statements about earlier revelation can all be held at once.
The Quran repeatedly affirms the Torah and the Gospel as genuine revelation, and it addresses seventh-century Jews and Christians in the present tense about the books they possess. It tells them to judge by those books Surah 5:47, says they stand on nothing until they uphold them Surah 5:68, and at one point tells Muhammad himself to consult the people who have been reading scripture before him Surah 10:94. It also insists that nobody can change God's words Surah 6:115.
We know what those books said, because we have them. Complete Greek copies of the New Testament survive from roughly three centuries before Muhammad, and thousands of earlier fragments and translations besides. Every one of them teaches that Jesus is the divine Son, that he was crucified, and that he rose. The Quran denies all three Surah 4:157, Surah 9:30.
Where to go from here #
The argument, step by step
The syllogism laid out, with both horns of the dilemma stated as strongly as they can be.
02What the Quran actually says
Nine passages, each linked to the Arabic, the word-by-word grammar and parallel translations.
03The manuscript record
What survives from before Islam, how much of it there is, and how it is dated.
04How Muslims answer
Seven replies — tahrif, the lost Injil, the Uthmanic recension — steelmanned first.
05Jesus and Isa
Where the New Testament claims deity, and how the Quranic portrait differs point by point.
06The Qira'at
Ten canonical readings and the differences between them, from Islamic scholarship itself.
07Having the conversation
How to raise this without turning a friendship into a debate you win and a person you lose.
08People who changed their minds
Former imams, dawah workers and Al-Azhar scholars, and what moved them.
09A reading list
Forty-odd books: Christian faith and practice, the evidence, and Islam — including Muslim authors.
A word about how this is written #
An argument that only sounds strong to people who already agree with it is not worth much. So every claim here is linked to a source you can open, and the Muslim responses are set out in their own terms before anything is said against them. Where scholars genuinely disagree, that is said plainly rather than smoothed over.
The point of the exercise is not to corner anyone. It is to make an honest question available: if the earliest Christian writings we possess say what they say, what should we do about the man they describe? Everything on this site is in service of 1 Peter 3:15 — an answer given with gentleness and respect, or not given at all.