The corruption charge also defies common sense. No
‘‘original’’ (that is, ‘‘uncorrupted’’) fragments of Old or
New Testament texts exist that corroborate this charge. In
addition, it would have been geographically impossible for
such a conspiracy to succeed, since there were innumerable
copies of the Old and New Testaments all over the world,
and no one would possibly have been able to find and gain
possession of all of them. Many of them were in the hands
of desert monks who had little or no communication with
the outside world. How such an organized ‘‘corruption
campaign’’ could take place in a world without mass
communication, separated by mountains and oceans, among
men of different races, languages, and religions, is never
adequately explained by Muslims.
The care with which Jews and Christians treated the
Scriptures also testifies against the idea of corruption.
Catholic (and later Orthodox) religious orders designated
scribes whose sole task in life was to transcribe the entire
Bible by hand. These holy monks were scrupulously careful
not to alter one line of Scripture. The manual copying of the
Old Testament went on for much a longer period than did
that of the New Testament, but here again there are
numerous indications that it was done with tremendous care.
The discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that the Old
Testament we have today is identical with that of two
thousand years ago and more, and that in centuries of
manual transmission no significant alterations occurred,
even of a single line.[39]
Indeed, the reverential attitude of Jewish priests and