# Who Really Wrote the Bible? Christian Scholars Admit It! The Forgotten Jesus | Ep. 2

- Language: en
- Published: 2026-11-10
- Canonical: https://blog.towardseternity.com/en/blog/how-anonymous-books-became-the-bible-the-forgotten-jesus-ep-2
- Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qSnaX5RmAc
- Channel: Towards Eternity

This is the cleaned transcript of the source video. The speech is unaltered.

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Imagine holding a book. A book that over 2 billion people entrusts their eternal life to. You open it and see the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But then you discover something shocking. None of them were actually written by the people they are named after. Today, we are uncovering a truth that biblical scholars openly admit yet the average Christian is never told. The Gospels are completely anonymous. They were written by authors who never saw Jesus, never met him, and were written in a language Jesus never even spoke. Koine Greek. What if I told you that the earliest Gospel was not written until 40 years after Jesus? And the others? 50, 60, even 70 years later.

So how did these books come to be? Who actually wrote them? As Muslims, we believe Jesus brought a pure divine message. But when you look at the historical evidence, anonymous manuscripts, a gap of several decades, and thousands of textual variations, it becomes clear that human hands change the narrative. So our goal is simple. To uncover the original message Jesus actually brought to humanity. In our first episode, we looked at the core beliefs of the Church. The Trinity, God taking human form, and the cross. And today, we are revealing the truth behind how the Gospels were actually written.

If I talk to you for days on various topics, and ask you to repeat my exact words just a single year later, wouldn't that be almost impossible? Now imagine if I asked you to accurately record those conversations 40, 50, or 60 years later. This is the massive problem we face with the Gospels. According to the vast majority of biblical scholars, the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written about 40 years after Jesus. Matthew and Luke were written at least 50 years later, and the Gospel of John, around 60 to 70 years after him. At this point, we need to be clear about one thing. A Gospel being written 40 years after Jesus does not mean we actually have that original text today.

When you look for the very first physical manuscript in our hands, the picture looks completely different. The earliest surviving fragment we have of any Gospel is P52, the tiny fragment of the Gospel of John, dating to around 125 to 175 CE, roughly a century or more after Jesus left this world. Yet, this fragment does not even contain 0.1% of the Gospel of John. It's just a few broken lines. In fact, 90% of our 2nd and 3rd century papyri are tiny fragments, no larger than a credit card, with barely a few verses written on them. Even though P45 is often highlighted for containing all four Gospels, which dates back to around 250 CE, only 30 of its original 112 leaves have survived.

The world had to wait roughly three full centuries after Jesus for the first complete manuscripts of the four Gospels to appear, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, generally dated to around 325 and 350 CE. And ironically, by the time these complete manuscripts were finally compiled, the Council of Nicaea, the pivotal event we mentioned in our first episode, had already taken place. “We have gathered here to settle this dispute and seek unity.“ At this point, you might ask, can we perhaps trace these books through the early Church Fathers?

For the first 150 years, the writings of early Christian figures like Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin Martyr, and even early texts like the Didache, contain very few quotes from the Gospels. In fact, all of them combined cover barely 10% of the modern Gospel texts. In the past, there was also a claim that the entire New Testament could almost be rewritten from the writings of the early Church Fathers alone. But Christian scholars themselves later refuted this claim and showed it to be false. “The four Gospels are anonymous, as you correctly say. You get the Gospel of Matthew, for example, the first one in the New Testament, the first book of the New Testament.

It never says who it's by. Christians I speak to don't agree with me on that. So I say, okay, I'll wait. Give me a passage in any of the Gospels where it says a name of a person who wrote them. Oh, yeah, yeah, it does. It says it in John's Gospel. Fine, I'll wait. Here's your Bible. Show me where it says it. So I wait. And I usually give them two minutes because I've got things to do with my life. And I always know, because it's a game of chess, that they're going to come back and say… And they change the subject. They just change the subject because it doesn't say in John anywhere a named person who wrote it. It's simply not there.

But they believe it is because that's what they've been told.” At the start of each Gospel in the New Testament, we see headings like "Gospel according to Matthew" or "the Gospel according to Mark." Have you ever wondered why it says "according to"? The truth is, whoever added those titles later wanted to attribute these texts to those famous names. If these men were the actual authors, the manuscripts would not say "according to Matthew." They would simply say "the Gospel written by Matthew." If they were actually eyewitnesses to the events they described, they would have definitely put their names on the text to build trust. But they didn't.

Because they never claimed to be who most people think they are. This makes sense for Mark and Luke because they weren't even apostles or eyewitnesses. But what about Matthew and John who are believed to be original apostles of Jesus? Take Matthew 9,9, for example. It says, As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. "Follow me," he told him. And Matthew got up and followed him. Think about how strange that language is. If you were writing your own story about the day your life completely changed, would you say, Jesus saw a man named Matthew and told him to follow him? No.

You would simply say, Jesus saw me, he told me to follow him, and I got up and followed him. Moreover, modern biblical scholars agree on another shocking fact. The author of the Gospel of Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as his primary source and copied over 90% of its entire text. Think about the profound contradiction here. Matthew is supposed to be an actual apostle, a first-hand eyewitness who walked with Jesus while Mark was not. Why would an apostle need to copy the narrative, the structure, and the exact words of someone who wasn't even there? Why would Matthew need to look at another man's text to remember his own life?

If the author were truly an apostle, he wouldn't copy a second-hand account written 40 years after the events. So who exactly was Mark? St. Irenaeus, an early Christian leader, wrote this about Mark. “Mark, who was a student and interpreter of the apostle Peter, wrote down his teacher's sermons after the deaths of Peter and Paul.” Think about what that means. Since the apostle Peter was no longer alive, he couldn't check Mark's text for errors, additions, or omissions. So the chain looks like this. The Gospel of Matthew copies Mark. Mark copies down Peter's words from memory, and Peter is already dead. Therefore, you're left with a copy of a copy of an unchecked memory.

“My focus of studies was going to be textual criticism, which is studying the oldest documents we have of the Bible, etc. So digging into the Bible led me to understand that it is not, and even from a scholarly perspective, it is not a perfect book. And this is what I told one of the professors at Bob Jones University at the time. I had a conversation with him, and I asked him a question. This was a logical question. I said, is God perfect? He said, yes. I said, okay. If God is perfect, then by default, everything that comes from God should be perfect by its nature, right? He said, yes. I said, is the Bible perfect? He said, no.

If God is perfect and He has a book, then that book should also be perfect.“ And then we have the Gospel of John. The only Gospel that claims to have been written by a disciple of Jesus within its own text. But if you actually open it and look at the end of the book, you find something remarkable. Referring to this disciple, who is widely believed to be the Apostle John, the text says, “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.” Read the last sentence carefully. We know that his testimony is true. Wait a second. Who is this mysterious "we"?

If the Apostle John were the one holding the pen, why didn't he say, I'm the disciple and you know my testimony is true? So if it wasn't John, who actually wrote it? We don't know. And when we don't even know who the author is, how can we trust this testimony? In other passages of John, we continue to see the same third-person narration style. Throughout the Gospel of John, this figure is constantly referred to as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Look at John 13:23. “One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him.” If the writer were John himself, wouldn't he just say, I was reclining next to him?

Besides this third-person narrative style, there is another major difference that sets the Gospel of John completely apart from the other three. “And that's the least historical Gospel of all, and that's the Gospel of John. Only in one place in the Gospels does Jesus walk around saying, I am the light of the world, or before Abraham was, I am, or I am the resurrection of the life, or I am the light of the world. All these I am statements are only found in one Gospel, the last Gospel of John.

If you look at the early Gospels, Jesus never speaks like this.” The first three Gospels, also known as the Synoptic Gospels, focus heavily on the humanity of Jesus, depicting him as a prophet preaching in parables, short moral stories to ordinary people and simple villagers. However, the Gospel of John is completely different in both style and content. It portrays Jesus like a Greek philosopher who preaches through long and complex speeches. If it were read in isolation, then one would never guess that parables were a primary teaching method of Jesus. Because the Gospel of John contains literally zero traditional parables.

Instead, it replaces these simple stories with complex allegories and metaphors. The text contains many theological and philosophical concepts about Jesus But most importantly, contrary to the others that highlight the humanity of Jesus, the goal of the Gospel of John is to portray Jesus as divine. “In John, it gets a bit more complicated. Jesus comes across as a somewhat divine figure. In the beginning was the Word, the Gospel begins, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, etc. Now, all of this is very late. And if Jesus actually went around saying these amazing things that John claims he did, why did no one else report that?

So we have an earlier Gospel, the Gospel of Luke, for example. In the entire Gospel of Luke, Jesus never speaks like that. He never speaks about himself so much.” All these factors led many scholars to conclude that the author of John was likely a well-educated Jew raised in Greek culture, not a simple fisherman like the apostle John. In fact, in the second century, some Christians argued that this Gospel was not written by John, and they later became known as the Alogi. “This Gospel cannot have been written by John. Then who wrote it? I don't know.” But later on, it got accepted as canonical.

“So, the bad news is, the Gospel of John is used by Christians more than any other Gospel to preach. For example, the American evangelist, who I saw in London some years ago, he'd say, Jesus says, I am the light of the world. And, you know, his scholars will say, no, he probably didn't say that. That's not historical. And this is the scandal. Christians generally don't know about what their own scholars are saying about this. That's worrying because how can you trust them now if they contain made-up stories? There are made-up stories in the Gospels.” So, why do scholars say this? The answer is simple. Because there were no scribes around Jesus, recording his sermons word for word.

Nor were there official filters to check the accuracy of the narratives. To ensure authenticity, no critical questions were asked, such as, How strong were the memories of the narratives? Were they reliable people? Could they have narrated something inaccurately? Instead, there was just absolute silence about this for decades. All 27 books in the New Testament are attributed to well-known figures. But scholars widely agree that only seven of them were actually written by their named authors. And those are seven letters of Paul. And as for who Paul really was, we talked extensively about him in the first episode. “There are authors in the Bible that are still unknown.

And as I'm learning the historicity of the Bible, so I can convince others of its authority, I am starting to have concerns, right? I'm learning what I didn't know. And going from certainty, I became more skeptical the more I learned. That process continued until I got to a point where I was upset that this isn't getting better.” Now, things get even more complicated. Jesus, peace be upon him, was speaking Aramaic. So he delivered his message in this language. But the Gospels we have today were all originally written in Koine Greek, not even in Hebrew, the traditional language of Jewish scriptures.

This means, except for a few isolated words, we do not have a single recorded speech of Jesus in the actual language he spoke. When we put all these pieces together, we can see exactly how irrational dogmas we talked about in the first episode were mixed into the true teachings of Jesus. A noble prophet like him would never preach anything so contrary to reason. And all of this forces us to ask one critical question. Can a text shaped by an unchecked chain of memories and written in a different language decades after Jesus truly be what you entrust your afterlife to?

All of this must have seemed unreliable, not just for us today, but also for those who wanted to present these texts as sacred authority. So they had to create a narrative. “We need a narrative that gives these writings divine authority.” They said these books were written through divine inspiration. However, there's no evidence for this claim. And more importantly, the original authors never made such a claim about themselves. Just put these four Gospels side by side. Remember, they are all supposed to tell the exact same story of Jesus.

Yet, you will see them constantly contradict each other, changing the order of events, altering facts, and giving completely different details about the same events. Take the final moments of Jesus, for example. In Mark, Jesus cries out in despair, My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? But in contrast, Luke paints an entirely different picture, portraying Jesus with peaceful submission as he says, Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit. Actually, these contradictory accounts shouldn't surprise us. After all, none of these who reported these words were actually present at the alleged crucifixion. Let's continue. Mark states that Jesus was crucified at the third hour.

But John claims he was still standing trial before Pilate, the Roman governor, at the sixth hour. Look at the Last Supper. The first three Gospels say it was a Passover meal. But John says Jesus was already dead before Passover even started. Even the fate of Judas contradicts itself. Matthew claims Judas hanged himself out of guilt. While the Book of Acts in the New Testament says he died after falling headlong in a field. Matthew says an officer in the Roman army came to Jesus face to face to ask for help. But Luke says the officer never came himself, he just sent some messengers instead. Even the simplest instructions contradict.

When sending the disciples out, Mark says Jesus explicitly told them to take a staff and wear sandals. But Matthew claims Jesus ordered them not to take a staff or wear sandals. If these authors were truly inspired by God, there would be no room for even a single minor inconsistency. In fact, scholars have found over 300 contradictions in the Old and New Testaments. Today, we have only covered a very small fraction of them. For those who wish to examine more examples, we will share a source later in this episode. “I'm reading the Bible. The first verse that I read was no man can see God and live after that.

And I'm thinking, but people called Jesus God and they all saw Jesus and no one died looking at Jesus. So the verse was, no man can look at God and live after. I turned the page to another verse, another story of Jacob. Not only does Jacob see God, he is wrestling God and says to God, I will not let You go until You bless me. Okay, wait a minute. You just said that if you even see God, that no man can live after that. Okay, so why is Jacob living after that? So what did I do? 14-year-old me raised my hand. The pastor came over and said, how can I help you? I showed him the two verses. And his reaction was, hmm, I didn't even know that that was in the Bible. And I said, I kind of, what?

But you're the Bible pastor.” The contradictions don't just stop with timelines, historical details, or these clear logical conflicts. They reach into the very core of divine justice. Just look at how God is described in the Old Testament, in Exodus 34:7: “Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished. He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” But if you turn to Ezekiel 18, verse 20, you find a completely opposite decree. “The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.

The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.” So which one is the true law of God? You cannot have it both ways. Also, modern Christianity relies entirely on the concept of original sin, the belief that every baby is born guilty simply because of the mistake of Prophet Adam. How can anyone reconcile that core doctrine with Ezekiel's explicit words? “How do we come into this world with a sin?

We've done nothing but be born.” “What Islam says is that Islam does not say original sin, Islam speaks about original goodness, that every child, every baby, every person is born with a clean heart, with a clean slate, innocent, pure, without any blemish, until you reach the age of puberty. And once, if you do right things, you'll be rewarded. If you do wrong things, there would be consequences. So according to the Islamic concept, after Adam and Eve, when they did the wrong thing, when they made the mistake, they both repented to God that, Oh God, please forgive us, and God forgive them. End of story. And every child is born with original goodness.

I mention this answer many times, every single time, in the masjid open houses, when the Christians, when they ask this question, every time they say, you know what, Sabeel, what she mentioned about Islamic concept of salvation, it is logical, it makes sense.” Look at the book of Genesis and the story of Noah's Ark. In Genesis 6:19, the command is clear. “Noah is told to take one pair of every living creature into the Ark, one male and one female. But in the very next chapter, in Genesis 7, verse 2 and 3, the instructions change significantly.” Suddenly, Noah is ordered to take seven pairs of every clean animal, and one pair of every unclean animal, and also seven pairs of every bird.

We are not comparing two different books written centuries apart by different authors. These contradictions are happening within the exact same book, just one chapter apart. In the Gospels and the rest of the Bible, many contradictions like these can be easily found. But these examples already make the point very clearly. Those who want to see more of them can look at Rahmatullah Kairanawi al-Hindi's famous work, Izhar al-Haqq. In his book, he documents 335 contradictions and errors, which is more than 33 times what we have discussed here today. “This Bible, I bought it in an antique store. It's from roughly, I think, 1825 or 1836 between that area.

I perused, you know, the verses and some of the verses were gone. They're just not there anymore. I looked for them and they're just not there.” Remember the question we asked earlier? How closely do those early discovered fragments actually match the modern Bible we have today? Here's the jaw-dropping answer. We have around 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, ranging from tiny fragments of papyrus to complete books. But among all of them, no two copies are identical. Every single handwritten text differs from the next, and there is not a single verse in the entire New Testament where every manuscript of that verse is completely identical.

In fact, scholars estimate that there are over 400,000 textual variations across these pages. Now, think about that for a second. The entire Greek New Testament contains only about 138,000 words, meaning the differences literally outnumber the words in the text itself. After all this, isn't it crystal clear how impossible it is to determine what the original text actually said? So, is having 5,700 manuscripts actually a good thing, or is it worse for mainstream Christianity? Don't let this large number mislead you, because only 60 or 70 of these manuscripts date back to the first three centuries after Jesus. In fact, more than 90% of them belong to the 8th and 16th centuries.

Does a manuscript written a thousand years after the events carry any historical weight? I'll leave that for you to decide. Scholars argue that 99% of these 400,000 textual variations are completely harmless. They consider them spelling differences, changes in word order, and other minor copying differences. But in a text that is claimed to be from God, no difference or change should be considered minor. Even if we accept their logic, that remaining 1% still leaves you with around 4,000 significant textual discrepancies, differences, that can affect meaning, interpretation, and even doctrine. How can anyone justify that?

If this book were truly protected by God, wouldn't we have just one single text? Unfortunately, it seems that over the centuries, those who were writing these manuscripts were changing their sacred texts to fit their own religious beliefs. For example, in 1 John 5, verses 7 and 8, the phrase referring to the Trinity is a well-documented later addition. We see this addition in the famous King James Version. It says, For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.

However, modern Bibles like the New International Version removed this explicit reference to the Trinity, as scholars found that it didn't exist in any Greek manuscripts before the 14th century. Now, let's look at how they corrected it. For there are three that testify, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the three are in agreement. As you see, there's no longer the reference to the Trinity in the same passage. “One more example can be, in the Gospel of John, the 4th Gospel, chapter number 7, verse number 53, it speaks about the prostitute and how people gathered around her to stone to her.

And Jesus came on the scene and he said, Okay, those who are without sin cast the first stone, right? You may have heard the story. That story is not there in the ancient manuscripts. King James Version has it. The RSV version of the Bible says, You know, this story is added. This is not there in the ancient manuscripts. So somebody added that story to it.” Let's give another example. Mark 16:9–20 is one of the most agreed upon additions to that Gospel. In fact, it's clearly marked in some versions of the Bible. In the New International Version, it says, The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9–20.

The original Gospel of Mark ends at verse 8, where the women flee from the empty tomb in fear. There is no resurrection appearance and no final command from Jesus. Also, in Mark 1, verse 1, the phrase "Son of God" is not found in some of the earliest manuscripts. As you can see, these are significant additions that aim to change the religious views fundamentally. “I'm a collector of the Bibles. 300 Bibles in my collection. Yes. Come to my library one time. From different times in history, different languages, and different versions, every single one of them, they're different. Example, right?

You have the King James Version of the Bible that was taken out in 1611 in the authorship, in the supervision of King James of England. So that Bible was revised in 1881 to 1885 because it has errors and it was not copied from ancient manuscripts. So they revised it in England in 1881. It also has some mistakes in it. So they started to revise again in 1901 called the American Standard Version. It also had mistakes in there because, you know, people started to discover new manuscripts. And the new manuscripts, they differ from this Bible, so they have to keep on updating the Bible. And I will give some examples, okay?

So the 1901 version of the American Standard Version, it has mistakes in it, so they revised it in 1952. That has mistakes in it, so they revised it again in 1971, NASB. It has mistakes, so they revised it in 1989 and then 2020 and then 2021, by the way. So you may be thinking, okay, Brother Sabeel, what's going on here? The thing is, okay, fine, you have like one Bible. But if they discover new manuscripts, they have to update this Bible, not the translation of it, but the contents of it. So they do their best from their mind, you know, taking the majority of the words, what passage should go here, what passage should go there. That's how they make the Bibles.

So, Muslims, when we make this statement, the Bibles have been changed, Quran has been preserved. We have ample credible evidence for what we say.” We are not even talking about the historical reliability of the Old Testament. Isn't this a profound irony that almost all the data we have listed today were exposed by Christian scholars themselves? The deeper people study Islam, the more reasons they find to accept the Quran. But the deeper they study the Bible, the result is the same. They still find reasons to accept the Quran. Whichever path of theological and textual research you choose, it leads to the same ultimate destination, the final revelation.

Perhaps it was part of Allah's plan that so much research would be done into the Bible by Christian scholars, so that people could eventually recognize the true message brought by Jesus, and that this is, in fact, the very same message found in the Quran. The scholars who have courageously pursued these studies in their search for the truth deserve appreciation. And I believe that their sincere efforts will one day lead them to the right path, insha'Allah. In Islam, every question has an answer, as long as you are willing to seek it sincerely. “The scholar, who was the professor of the class, and also a minister, a leader of a church, he looked at me and he said, why are you questioning?

And I said, well, I need to know what happened between what was written in Greek and what we have today in our English Bibles. And he said, look, this is the infallible, meaning the absolute, truthful word of God. And I said, how can it be? Because we've translated it, and something is missing in the translation. He said, I'll talk to you after class in my office. He said, okay, I'm ready. Class ended, and I went to him, and he said, if you don't believe this, yours is the hellfire. You must believe. I said, I'm sorry, but you can't convince me with those words. It doesn't make sense. It's not logical.

And at that point, I had read enough about Islam and read the Quran that everything that I had read was logical and seemed to fit in place. And what he had told me didn't. If they've got the truth, and they've got the market on the truth, why are they having to alter it all the time? Why are you constantly changing it? When I ask you a question as a preacher, why are you giving me the runaround instead of answering my question? A lot of times I would ask questions, and the response I would be, I would get is, brother, you just have to have faith. Because it's not rational, it's not logical.

You say that the Bible and the Torah are originally sent by God, and then you claim that they have been changed. Why would God allow this? The reason why God would allow this is because these particular revelations were sent for a specific people in a specific time. We don't believe that the Torah was sent for all humankind. Likewise, we don't believe that the Gospel that was originally sent to Jesus Christ was meant for all people in all times. We believe that the Quran was the only book really sent for all people in all times, accompanied with the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). So there wasn't an impending need for all of humanity to have these revelations actually preserved.

And that's why this is indicated in the meaning of the verse in the Quran, Bimas-tuhfizu min kitabillahi wa kanu 'alayhi shuhada. Which basically means that they were entrusted with the preservation of these books, i.e. the rabbis and the clergy of the old, and they failed, even though they were witness to it. So in other words, comparing that with what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says in the Quran about the Quran, Inna nahnu nazzalnadh-dhikra wa inna lahu lahafizun. That He will preserve it Himself, there's a clear difference.

And the difference is justified due to the fact that these books were specified to their people in time, and the Quran was sent for all people in all times.” “Even if God would have preserved the Injil or the revelation given by God to Jesus, it will not be enough for us for today, for all the solutions for the problems that we go through. So it was limited in scope, it was only for those people, and only for that time. For that reason, Allah in His wisdom did not took the commitment to preserve it. But Quran is for all of humanity, for all time, for all solutions, for any problem, for any culture, any race, for humanity.

And it is the last revelation, so Allah took the commitment to preserve it.” Through the light brought by Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), the Christian world was given a clear path back to the pure essence of Jesus' message. He brought back the truth of who he really was and what he actually taught. Allah sent His final messenger to lead the followers of Jesus, and the followers of all previous prophets, back to the right path. After all, Islam is not a new religion. It is the common, universal message preached by thousands of prophets sent to every corner of the earth since the time of Adam, alayhis salam.

Through this final, unchanging revelation, the message of Jesus is finally being cleansed of human alterations, restoring its true, uncorrupted form. So we have come to the end of part 2, but the story is far from over. If you think the 400,000 manuscript variations were shocking, wait until you see how much textual corruption can reshape the core of a faith. In the next episode, we will place the concepts of God in Christianity and Islam side by side to explore the massive differences between them. We will look at the obvious logical failures regarding the attributes of God known as the Father in the Bible.

And by doing so, we will highlight how the Quran provides the only flawless definition of God known to mankind. We will also reveal how the manuscript corruptions didn't just alter the text, but added horrific slanders against the noble prophets. Keep your curiosity and excitement alive. And to those in pursuit of the truth, see you in episode 3.