On July 22nd, 2015, the BBC and other news outlets led with a story claiming that scholars at Birmingham University in England had found and dated what could possibly be the oldest, if not the original extant Qur'an in existence, and the Muslims all over the world were ecstatic, for finally science had proved categorically that the Qur'an was from the mid-7th century, and even possibly form Muhammad, because who can question science.

Dr. David Thomas, the curator for the Birmingham University library where this Qur'anic manuscript was housed believing that his Qur'an actually dated back to Muhammad’s lifetime was quoted as saying:

“The writer of this manuscript could well have known the Prophet Muhammad. He would have seen him probably, he would maybe have heard him preach. He may have known him personally - and that really is quite a thought to conjure with."

And why did he say this, because the carbon dating from the laboratory in Oxford had just dated these two folios from 568 AD - 645 AD. Muhammad lived from 570 AD - 632 AD, so these folios would have been written while Muhammad was living, making them the earliest Qur'anic material anywhere in the world.

If this was true, it would be a huge win for Islam, because up till now all of the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts have been dated from the 8th - 10th centuries, which is just too late to be of any worth historically.

But, while the carbon dates may be accurate, is the text, or rather excerpts within these two folios actually Muhammad’s teachings, or even remotely from Muhammad himself? That is a question no one has bothered to ask...until now...

To begin with, in reality, a Qur'an was not found. What we have are simply 2 pages (front and back) from a possible larger manuscript; in fact, a mere 33 verses.

So, we are only looking at 33 verses, out of a possible 6,236 verses which are in the Qur’an.

Yet, they come from 3 Surahs, 18, 19, and 20 which have a total of 343 verses; so 33 verses out of total of 343 verses makes only 10% of those Surahs.

It’s clear that this is not a full Qur’an at all, so why do Muslims and others keep saying that it is?

What's more, when you look at these 33 verses, they have to do with 3 stories which are all borrowed from earlier Christian and Jewish sources...note:

Surah 18:17-31 is the story of the 7 sleepers of Ephesus, first written about by the Syrian Bishop Jacob of Sarug in 512 AD, which is almost 60 years before Muhammad was born, and a good 100 years before the Qur'an was even revealed.

Surah 19:91-98 is an account borrowed from the Proto-Evangelium of James, first compiled in 145 AD, and then repeated in the Pseudo Gospel of Matthew in 600 AD. So the account predates the Qur'an by over 400 years.

Surah 20:1-40 is part of the story of Moses, taken from the Old Testament, and first written in 1400
BC, a good 2,000 years before the Qur'an was ever compiled.

So, these 3 stories not only predate Islam, they predate Muhammad, and certainly predate the Qur'an as well!

There are other problems with these 2 folios:

•The Ink has not been dated, so that 568-645 AD only tell us when the animal died, but not when these stories were written.

•The scholar Fedeli says this: “The person in charge of writing this manuscript was copying the text from an exemplar, and laid out and executed a rather well-proportioned relationship between letter blocks and empty spaces…the regular and coherent presence of a blank line between two Suras suggests a sign of a later practice, since this was introduced and established by al-Hajjaj between 703 and 705 AD” (Fedeli 2015:182-183)

•Another scholar, Francois Deroche dates these folios to the early eighth century, saying that it “clearly bears the marks of a high level of sophistication in writing that one would associate with production at the Imperial chancery of Abd al-Malik” (Deroche 2014:69)

•If the dates are correct, then the classical account (652 AD) is wrong as these folios predate it by 7 years!

This suggests that the 3 stories in the 2 folios were simply borrowed from Jewish and Christian accounts, usually made up of simple stories, all written in Arabic, and all earlier than the Qur’an.

CONCLUSION: The 33 verses found in the 2 Birmingham folios, consequently, are nothing more than examples of pre-Islamic, pre-Muhammad, pre-Uthmanic, and pre-Qur’anic borrowings which were then compiled into the Qur'an sometime in the 8th - 9th centuries and are now found in Surahs 18-20?

© Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, June 20, 2023
(80,200) Music: "Feeling the Caribbean Sun" by Horst Hoffman, from filmmusic-io