Discrepancies between the Bible and Quran

According to secular scholars

These scholars account for the many similarities between the Qur'an and the Jewish and Hebrew scriptures by saying that Muhammad was teaching what he believed a universal history, as he had heard it from the Jews and Christians he had encountered in Arabia and on his travels. Differences between the Qur'an and the Judeo-Christian scriptures can usually be explained by Muhammad's reliance on folk traditions rather than the actual text of the scriptures. There have been many studies of Muhammad's sources in the Jewish Mishnah, Gemara, and Midrash, and the Christian Apocrypha. This, of course, directly contradicts the Islamic teaching that it is the Judeo-Christian texts that are corrupt.

"Some asked what need there was for God to take oaths like any mortal being, as when he swears by the fig and olive, and by Mount Sinai (95:1); by the declining day (103:1); and by the stars, the night and the dawn (81:15-18). Above all, they asked why the Almighty had to swear on himself ..." (Walker, cited in Foundations of Islam, Peter Owen, 1998 p. 156)

Some Western scholars are less willing to attribute the entire Qur'an to Muhammad. They argue that there is no real proof that the text of the Qur'an was collected under Uthman, since the earliest surviving copies of the complete Qur'an are centuries later than Uthman. (The oldest existing copy of the full text is from the ninth century [2].) They see Islam as being formed slowly, over the centuries after the Muslim conquests, as the Islamic conquerors elaborated their beliefs in response to Jewish and Christian challenges.

One influential proponent of this point of view was Dr. John Wansbrough, an English academic. Wansbrough wrote in a dense, complex, almost hermetic style, and he has had much more influence on Islamic studies through his students, Michael Cook and Patricia Crone than he has through his own writings. In 1977 Crone and Cook published a book called Hagarism, which argued that,

The Qur'an is strikingly lacking in overall structure, frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content, perfunctory in its linking of disparate materials, and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions. On this basis it can plausibly be argued that the book is the product of belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions. (Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge, 1977, p. 18.)

Hagarism was extremely controversial at the time, as it challenged not only Muslim orthodoxy, but the prevailing attitudes among secular Islamicists. Crone and Cook have since retreated from their extreme claims that the Qur'an evolved over several centuries, but they still believe that the Sunni scholarly tradition is extremely unreliable, as it projects current Sunni orthodoxy onto the past -- much as if New Testament scholars were dedicated to proving that Jesus was a Presbyterian or a Methodist.

Fred Donner has argued against Crone and Cook, and for an early date for the collection of the Qur'an, based on his reading of the text itself. He points out that if the Qur'an had been collected over the tumultuous early centuries of Islam, with their vast conquests and bloody squabbles between rivals for the caliphate, there would have been some evidence of this history in the text. However, there is nothing in the Qur'an that does not reflect what is known of the earliest Muslim community. (Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, Donner, Darwin Press, 1998, p. 60.)

Recent archaeological finds have also shed some light on the origins of the Qur'an. In 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of San'a, in Yemen, laborers stumbled upon a "paper grave" containing tens of thousands of fragments of parchment on which verses of the Qur'an were written. (Qur'ans were and still are disposed thus, so as to avoid the impiety of treating the sacred text like ordinary garbage.) Some of these fragments were the oldest Quranic texts yet found [3]. The European scholar Gerd-R. Puin has studied these fragments and published not only a corpus of texts, but some preliminary findings. Interestingly enough, the variations from the received text that he did find seemed to match variations reported by Islamic scholars, in their descriptions of the variant Qur'ans once held by Abdallah Ibn Masud, Ubay Ibn Ka'b, and Ali, and suppressed by Uthman's order. ("Observations on Early Qur'an Manuscripts in San'a", Puin, in The Qur'an as Text, ed. Wild, Brill, 1996)

Originally posted by Belisarius What is the big deal? It is the same God. You guys are all my brothers, as far as I am concerned. However, since we are just goofing around, it is the Jewish God that had the genocidal tendencies.

True, but overall Abrahamic religions as a whole are exclusionary, intolerant, and opressive.  They are all effectively the same relgions and they are all very harmful for the earth, thankfully their absolutism prevents them from ever getting along.  Not even amosgnst Muslims and Christians is there one unified doctrine, and I am very thankful for that.