The last of the New Testament books was penned at the end of the first century, and sometime in the mid-second century, these texts began to be gathered into collections.
Copies were passed along to neighboring churches where further copies were made, and the process was repeated 7a. For this reason, the texts of the New Testament were copied by whoever could access them some copies were made for personal use, some for congregational reading. In this environment, there was no mechanism by which the text of the New Testament could have been controlled: no scriptoria to mass produce a single text and no central authority to select the preferred recension. Christians on the other hand were under attack from the start, first from the Jews, and then by the Romans. The first Muslims after Mohammad had the kingdom he had carved in which to transmit the early Quranic texts. The first Christians did not have the comparative luxury of existing in an environment receptive to their faith when the New Testament texts were produced. Once written, the process of transmission begins. Therefore, the beginning of the New Testament’s transmission begins with twenty six separate manuscripts, written at different times and different locations, for a diversity of audiences. The teachings of Jesus, the founder of the Christian faith, are preserved in those texts by direct quotations from the gospel writers, and in Spirit by the epistle writers such as Peter, John, and Paul.
Rather, it is the original written text of the four canonical gospels (those according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and those of the epistles that are considered to be God-breathed and these texts verify themselves by their agreement with one another. There was no single author, nor have Christians traditionally sought to “prove” the veracity of these texts by looking to sources from before they were written **. In contrast to the Quran, the New Testament is a collection of a number of writings. Zaid collected verses of the first fully written Quran from the memories of reciters, parchments, and even fragments of bone An Uncontrolled Transmission: The New Testament Uthman ordered the original returned to its keeper, and then ordered that everyone who possessed even a portion of the Quran other than the freshly made recension should burn the manuscripts, thus destroying all texts that did not agree with the Uthmanic recenssion 5. Zaid, having mistakenly left out at least one verse which he recalled Mohammad saying decades earlier, took the opportunity to find the verse and include it in the revision. In response, he ordered Zaid to retrieve the original compilation made and, with the aid of three others scholars, produce copies of a standardized text which was then sent to major cities across Uthman’s expanding kingdom.
Uthman gained word that some among the Muslims were reciting the Quran differently from others and dissention was beginning to stir because of it. But with this rapid expansion came new troubles. By this time the Islamic nation had turned its attention outward Egypt and much of Mesopotamia were already conquered, and Islamic forces were pressing eastward. Less than two decades after this incident a third Caliph had arisen – Uthman. The resultant manuscript he gave to Abu-Bakr who kept it until his death 4. Zaid collected sayings from every scrap of bone he could find and consulted the Qaris who yet remained until he was satisfied he had amassed the entire collection of teachings. To prevent further calamity, Abu-Bakr ordered Zaid bin Thabit (a man who had once written many Mohammad’s teachings as he heard them) to collect all the teachings into a single manuscript. Indeed, according to some sources, portions of the Quran were already lost 9. During this period, many of the Qaris were killed in battle, and a grave concern was raised that, if many more met a similar faith, the Quran might very well be lost forever. The result was the Ridda Wars, from 632-633, in which Abu Bakr struggled to reunite Muhammad’s kingdom 3. Mohammad had spent much of his later life bringing the Arabian peninsula under his control by way of both the tongue and the sword, but he appointed no direct successor to take his place, and it was only after some dissention that Abu-Bakr was chosen as the first Caliph (literally “representative”) 2b. Almost immediately after Mohammed’s death, insurrection broke out throughout Arabia.
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