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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Shi'i beliefs in the Bible Lecture 6: The Book of the Gospel Rediscovered Wherever I go to lecture I hear one question first of all: “What is the true Gospel of Jesus (as)?” There is always someone who wants to know whether the book of the Gospel has been irretrievably lost, or whether it is to be found among the apocryphal gospels not included by the Church fathers in the canon of the New Testament.

I have invariably had to answer that unfortunately all of the books which claim to be the Gospel of Jesus (as) contain passages that are clearly corruptions of the original text, so that even if we could point to one or another book as that received by Jesus as the Gospel, it would not be perfectly intact. This is an area in which historical criticism has serve us well.

The canonical gospels, or the books in the Christian Bible which are called gospels, do not claim to be the message of God sent down to Jesus (as). They do not correspond to what the holy Qur’an calls the Injil or Gospel, nor is such a document mentioned in them. They bear the title in Greek, evangelion, from which comes the Arabic word Injil, but they do not claim to be divine messages as such. Rather, they are collections of stories about what Jesus (as) did and said.

As such, they are much more in the character of Islamic hadith literature than they are in the character of a revealed book as Muslims think of it. Some of the gospels not included in the Bible are collections of sayings, but even these generally remind us more of ahadith than of the holy Qur’an or the Hebrew prophetic writings. None of the so-called gospels even claims to be a book sent down from God to Jesus (as).

All of them claim to be the work of one author-witness, not always an eye-witness, but historical criticism leads us to doubt even that in most cases. Much has been written about the value and validity of the Gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, that we have in our possession. This scholarship might make us turn our sights towards other sources, such as new archeological finds, in our search for the Injil mentioned in the holy Qur’an. So far little in that way has turned up.

The Qumran texts, to cite the most popular source, might contain some passages worthy of examination by the criteria presented below, but do not provide us with a book that in itself could be considered the lost Gospel of Jesus (as). There is another possibility.