Better than any other scripture: manuscripts dated to the Prophet's ﷺ own era match today's text (Qur'an 15:9), and the mass memorization never broke. By contrast, textual critics count hundreds of thousands of variants across the Bible's manuscripts.
Mainstream textual scholarship accepts the Uthmanic origin of today's text; the history of the earliest companion codices (e.g., the Sanaa lower text) is still actively debated among specialists.
No divine claim is made for any of these texts, and none is needed. Their authority is evidential and always revisable: each book stands or falls by its arguments, and an atheist may reject all of them and remain an atheist.
No divine claim is made — by the texts or for them. Their only authority is the strength of their arguments, which every reader is invited to test and free to reject; as for the divine-origin claims of other traditions' scriptures, the agnostic canon's verdict is that they have not met their burden of proof.
Christians claim the writers were inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16); no promise of miraculously protected copies is made. The record: about 5,800 Greek manuscripts, with fragments from the 2nd century — richer attestation than any other ancient text — but they contain hundreds of thousands of copying variants, the vast majority trivial (spelling, word order). Most textual scholars judge the original text recoverable with high confidence; skeptics led by Bart Ehrman stress that the originals are lost and that a few variants touch doctrine.
Scholars agree on the manuscript data but not the verdict: Metzger and most specialists see an exceptionally well-preserved text; Ehrman argues the uncertainty matters more than believers concede.
Tradition holds God dictated the Torah to Moses, and the copying record is genuinely strong: the Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd century BCE–1st century CE) largely match the Masoretic text copied a thousand years later. Academic scholarship, however, mostly concludes the Torah reached its final form centuries after Moses, woven from earlier sources (the documentary hypothesis); traditional scholars reject or qualify that conclusion.
Preservation of the received text is well documented (the Masoretic tradition, confirmed at most points by the Dead Sea Scrolls); the Torah's original authorship is where traditional belief and critical scholarship genuinely part ways.
No divine origin is claimed: the texts present the Buddha as an awakened human being, and their authority rests on his awakening and on the teaching proving true in practice. Preservation was by disciplined oral tradition — impressive, but never claimed to be miraculously guarded word for word.
The claim is unusual: the Mimamsa school holds the Vedas are apaurusheya — authorless and eternal, "seen" by the rishis rather than composed. Scholars agree the Rig Veda's oral transmission was extraordinarily exact once the text was fixed, but treat the texts as human compositions built up between roughly 1500 and 500 BCE.
Traditional scholars and historical-critical scholars read the same evidence differently: the fidelity of transmission is agreed; the eternity of the text is not.
Unusually well, by wide scholarly agreement: the scripture was compiled by the Gurus themselves in their own lifetimes — not reconstructed by followers generations later — and every printed copy today carries the same 1,430 pages. Sikhs hold the bani to be God's revealed word; text scholars note some early manuscript variants (the Kartarpur and Banno recensions) yet judge the preservation among the strongest of any scripture.
Traditional accounts and academic textual criticism disagree over details of the early recensions; Pashaura Singh's manuscript studies sparked controversy within the community, though the standard text itself is not in dispute.
No divine claim is made for any of these texts, so nothing rests on miraculous preservation. Their authority is human and twofold: the arguments persuade or fail on their merits, and the constitutional texts bind because peoples ratified them and courts enforce them.
No divine claim is made — the texts claim only the authority of their arguments. They are explicitly revisable, and humanists present that as a strength: a statement that can be corrected is one that can stay honest.
No divine claim is made for any liberal text. Their authority is persuasive only — a book binds no one until its argument convinces; constitutions bind legally because peoples ratified them, not because they are sacred, and all remain amendable.
No divine claim is made for any feminist text. Their authority is only the strength of their arguments and evidence, and every one of them is freely criticized — including by feminists.
No divine claim is made for any nationalist text. Their authority is that of persuasive human argument and of the movements that adopted them — nothing more is claimed, so preservation is an ordinary publishing matter.
THE SAME WORDING, PUT TO EVERY WORLDVIEW — EACH ANSWERS IN ITS OWN TERMS, IN ITS STRONGEST FORM
Didn't He Say