Many Muslims believe that the text of the Bible has been corrupted. For Muslims, this would explain why Christians hold to beliefs that Muslims believe are mistaken, like the divinity of Jesus. I was reminded of this just a few days ago as I was reading an essay written by one of my students from Saudi Arabia. He had chosen to write an essay comparing Christianity and Islam, and mentioned the alleged corruption of the biblical text in his essay.
Like Muslims, Jefferson claimed that the Bible contained corrupted ideas. He differed, though, from Muslims in believing the corruptions had occurred in the original text, rather than being introduced later, as Muslims believe. According to Norman L. Geisler in The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics:
...Jefferson regarded the Gospels as distortions when they intimated supernatural action by God [as a deist, Jefferson did not believe God intervened supernaturally in the world]. He charged the writers with "forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from Him, by giving their own misconceptions as His dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves"...Jesus' teachings had been rendered "mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible"...by a band of "dupes and imposters" who corrupted the true moral teachings. Worst in this bad lot was the apostle Paul, "the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the Doctrines of Jesus". (p. 379--citations omitted)
However, unfortunately for Muslims and Jefferson, this belief in a corrupted Bible does not hold up to scrutiny. With regard to the Muslim view that the Bible has been corrupted over time, we have copies of the New Testament that were composed within a few centuries or less of the original manuscripts. As Geisler points out:
Most ancient books survive in manuscripts that were copied about 1000 years after they were composed. It is rare to have, as the Odyssey does, a copy made only 500 years after the original. Most of the New Testament is preserved in manuscripts less than two hundred years from the original..., some books of the New Testament dating from little over one hundred years after their composition..., and one fragment...comes within a generation of the first century. (The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 532)
Thus, we have a pretty clear idea of what the original text of the New Testament contained, so it is relatively easy to determine whether the current version of the New Testament differs greatly from that original text. As it turns out, "the New Testament is the most accurately copied book from the ancient world" (Geisler, The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 532). According to Geisler, "New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger estimated that the Mahabharata of Hinduism is copied with only about 90 percent accuracy and Homer's Iliad with about 95 percent accuracy. By comparison, he estimated the New Testament is about 99.5 percent accurate" (The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, pp. 532-533). With regard to the Old Testament, the discovery of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls more than a half century ago demonstrated that the modern-day text of the Old Testament differs very little from its text two thousand years ago. As Geisler states, "The thousands of Hebrew manuscripts, with their confirmation by the Septuagint [an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament] and the Samaritan Pentateuch [the first five books of the Old Testament], and numerous cross-checks from outside and inside the text provide overwhelming support for the reliability of the Old Testament text" (The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 553). So much for the Muslim belief that the Bible has been corrupted over time!
As for Jefferson's notion that the New Testament authors distorted the teachings of Jesus from the beginning, this is also untenable. There is considerable evidence that the books of the New Testament were originally written within a few decades of the time when Jesus was crucified (in the early 30s AD). For example, as Geisler notes, "Of the four Gospels alone there are 19,368 citations by the church fathers [early Christian writers] from the late first century on...This argues powerfully that the Gospels were in existence before the end of the first century, while some eyewitnesses...were still alive" (The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 529-530). Consequently, it would have been quite difficult for the authors of the Gospels, writing within a few decades after Jesus' death, to have so distorted His teachings without being called to account for it. As for Jefferson's claim that the Apostle Paul was the "first corrupter of the Doctrines of Jesus," Geisler points out that "it is widely accepted by critical and conservative scholars that 1 Corinthians [a letter authored by Paul] was written by 55 or 56 [AD]. This is less than a quarter century after the crucifixion in 33" (The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 529). Thus, the same argument made for the Gospels can also be made for the writings of Paul--if Paul had so corrupted "the Doctrines of Jesus," how could he have gotten away with it when there were still people around who had memories of what Jesus had taught?
In short, Jefferson was wrong to believe that the New Testament did not contain the authentic "Doctrines of Jesus," and Muslims today have no reason to believe that the current text of the Bible is a corrupted version of the original text. In other words, Jefferson's connection with Muslims is not only that he owned a copy of the Koran, but also, like them, he held to an erroneous belief about the Bible.
Rembrandt Peale portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Image from Wikimedia Commons.