What is the Injīl?

The word Injīl appears in the Qurʼān twelve times, always in connection with Jesus or the People of the Book. These verses are decisive for the historical question of which Gospel is in view.

• Q 5:47 — “Let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allah has revealed in it.” The verse is present-tense and addresses Christians as people who already possess the Gospel and can act on it.
• Q 5:68 — “Say: O People of the Book, you have nothing to stand on until you uphold the Torah and the Gospel and what has been revealed to you from your Lord.” The Prophet is told to confront Christians with their own scripture.
• Q 7:157 — The Prophet is found described as someone Christians and Jews “find written down with them” (ʿindahum) in the Torah and the Gospel. The phrase places the description in their possession, not in a separate book they no longer have.
• Q 3:3 — The Qurʼān is sent down “confirming what was before it,” explicitly the Torah and the Gospel.
• Q 10:94 — The Prophet himself is told, “if you are in doubt about what We have revealed to you, ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you.”

Together, these passages presuppose accessible Christian and Jewish scripture in the world of Muhammad’s audience.

Classical tafsīr and later polemic should also be distinguished.

• Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī on Q 5:46 reads Injīl as the message Jesus preached, broadly continuous with what his followers wrote.
• The “lost original Injīl given only to Jesus” framework is rare in the earliest tafsīr; it becomes prominent in later polemical literature (Ibn Ḥazm and afterwards), built outward from the doctrine of taḥrīf rather than from the verses themselves.

Muslim explanations of the Injīl are not all the same. A careful reader should separate the common modern explanation from earlier and broader ways Muslims have understood the word.

• The lost-book explanation: Many Muslims today are taught that Allah revealed a single book to Jesus, that this book no longer exists, and that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are later human writings about Jesus rather than the Injīl revealed to him.
• The Gospel-as-message explanation: Other Muslim readings understand Injīl as the divine message Jesus preached, broadly continuous with what reached his followers. Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī fits this broader reading when it treats the Injīl as the guidance and message given through Jesus rather than requiring a separate book now absent from history.

The lost-book explanation has to answer several Qurʼānic details. Q 5:47 commands the People of the Gospel to judge by what is in the Gospel. Q 5:68 tells the People of the Book they have nothing to stand on unless they uphold the Torah and Gospel. Q 7:157 says the Prophet is found written with them in the Torah and Gospel. Q 10:94 points to people already reading earlier scripture. Those verses do not sound like references to a vanished book unavailable to the Christian audience.

The Gospel-as-message explanation sits more comfortably with the Qurʼān’s wording and with the documented fact that Christians in 7th-century Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Ethiopia possessed the four canonical Gospels — see How was the Bible transmitted?. Its cost is that Q 5:47 can then apply, at least in principle, to the Gospel material Christians actually had, which is what the verse most naturally says.

By the time of Muhammad, the four-Gospel canon had been fixed for over four centuries.

• Patristic witnesses. Irenaeus of Lyon (~180 CE) treats Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as already canonical (Against Heresies III.11.8). Origen (~230 CE) and Eusebius (~325 CE) confirm the same fourfold canon; Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter (367 CE) lists the New Testament books in essentially the form Christians read today.
• Manuscript evidence. Papyrus 52 (~125 CE) is a fragment of John from Egypt, a century before Nicaea. The Chester Beatty papyri (~200 CE) contain large portions of the Gospels and Pauline letters. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (~325–360 CE) preserve the complete Greek New Testament and are freely available online. All of this predates Islam by 300–500 years and witnesses substantially the same New Testament Christians and Muslims encounter today.
• Languages in Muhammad’s milieu. Ethiopian Geʿez Christians had the four Gospels by the 5th century; Syriac Christians had the Peshitta; Egyptian Christians had Coptic versions. The Qurʼān itself acknowledges these communities — see Q 5:82 on Christian monks and the Najrānī delegation behind Q 3:61. Their scriptures are well attested in the historical record.

Academic assessment. Sidney Griffith, professor of early Islamic and Christian Arabic studies at the Catholic University of America, concludes in The Bible in Arabic (Princeton, 2013) that for the specifically Muslim idea of a separately revealed Gospel given to Jesus, the Qurʼān is the sole witness. Walid Saleh (Toronto), Gabriel Said Reynolds (Notre Dame), and Angelika Neuwirth (Freie Universität Berlin) — all senior scholars in Qurʼānic studies — read the Qurʼānic Injīl as engaging the late-antique Christian biblical tradition that was actually in the world, not a parallel scripture absent from history.