Thanks for this. I found it supremely interesting, and hope I am not going to annoy you with this question. From a Muslim's standpoint, the Quran is considered the literal word of God. The Prophet would be talking, and then his voice/tone would change and he would be speaking a revelation. Now, the culture was not big on the written word and very strongly steeped in the oral tradition. They would hear something and immediately commit it to memory. And with enough people there, the memorization is more or less helped along with everyone there. There's a lot of recitation throughout the day whether in prayers or not, so the words get even more strongly imprinted
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The situation with scholarship on the Qur'an is unfortunately well behind that on the NT. The texts we have are based on a standardized recension from Uthmān ibn Affan (born 12 years after the Prophet's death), which may have significantly reworked/harmonized the previous versions (we can't tell, because he destroyed all variant texts in promulgating the standard text); in addition, there is concerted opposition from orthodox Muslims to anything resembling the "Higher Criticism" of the Bible -- to such a degree that one major recent study arguing for the influence of Syriac on some parts was published under a pseudonym (Christoph Luxenberg) and even general reports of it have been banned in some Muslim countries. So the reliability of the transmission from the Prophet's mouth to the standard text has not been studied in the same way the NT has
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Since you mentioned elsewhere that your actual questions didn't seem to be answered, let me try again ;-)
* The apostles did write things down, didn't they? In some cases, yes, and in other cases, no. In most cases, nobody really knows who, exactly, wrote what, exactly, when, exactly. I *think* that it's generally thought that within 100 years, the gospels we have today were written down in some sort of final form and being disseminated. The gospel of Mark was probably the first such compilation, with Matthew and Luke following, using both Mark and other sources (both oral and written). Finally John was written, which seems to have used the other three to a limited extent, but basically tells the whole story from a different perspective entirely. It's in John where the events of Jesus's ministry takes place over 3 years, for instance; the other three are sometimes called the 'synoptic gospels' because while they never say 'then this happened on june 24th', you could fit the stuff they talk about into about a single year. As
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There used to be an online version of Streeter's The Four Gospels, which covers the MSS situation as it stood in the 1920s fairly well, but it seems to have vanished
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* The apostles did write things down, didn't they? In some cases, yes, and in other cases, no. In most cases, nobody really knows who, exactly, wrote what, exactly, when, exactly. I *think* that it's generally thought that within 100 years, the gospels we have today were written down in some sort of final form and being disseminated. The gospel of Mark was probably the first such compilation, with Matthew and Luke following, using both Mark and other sources (both oral and written). Finally John was written, which seems to have used the other three to a limited extent, but basically tells the whole story from a different perspective entirely. It's in John where the events of Jesus's ministry takes place over 3 years, for instance; the other three are sometimes called the 'synoptic gospels' because while they never say 'then this happened on june 24th', you could fit the stuff they talk about into about a single year. As ( ... )
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