The Injil: no manuscript, no fragment, no quotation

The Muslim answer, at full strength

Two lines are given, and they do not agree with each other. IslamQA holds that the original Injil was Allah's spoken revelation to Jesus, surviving partly inside the four Gospels but tangled with human narrative.

Quran 5:47 then means: judge by what remains genuine. The other line is revisionist.

V. A.

Mohamad Ashrof, a Muslim writer, calls the lost book a myth. On his reading the Quran's Injil simply is the Gospel Christians held, and the corruption verses concern misreading — which Gordon Nickel's work on early tafsir supports.

They say the Injil was Jesus's own message, lost early, and partly kept in the Gospels.

There are two lines, and they do not fit together. The mainstream one, from IslamQA, holds that the original Injil was Allah's spoken revelation to Jesus, carried in his preaching. It survives in part inside the four gospels, but tangled with human narrative, which is tahrif, corruption. Quran 5:47 then tells Christians to judge by what remains of the true revelation inside their books. No separate manuscript should be expected, since it was lost early. That loss is the whole reason the Quran was sent.

The other line is revisionist. V. A. Mohamad Ashrof and other modernists grant that the lost-book thesis is a myth. On that view, the Quran's Injil simply is the gospel held by 7th-century Christians, treated as holding true revelation. The corruption verses then aim at misreading and hiding, not at textual loss. Gordon Nickel's work on the early tafsir supports that reading.