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Wait, does that mean that they would accept the untranslated versions? We definitely still have those. (Or, more precisely, while there are minor textual differences between manuscripts, we can be sure of the text of the vast majority, and even more if you only care about ones where the differences are at all meaningful)
No. This is a polemic tracing its way directly to Mohammed. He claimed he was prophesied in the Torah and Gospel (a common sort of claim for an upstart) and he just...wasn't. The Qur'an cannot be wrong, so the solution for him was to claim it was corrupted. The Qur'anic phrasing usually implies mistranslation or lying - it says people cover up the truth or lie with their mouths, not that the books were lost. It's a more extreme version of the polemics of some early Christians about Jews hiding prophecies of Jesus. God has a sense of humor.
But Muslims eventually* realized that what Christians especially believed about the Gospel was utterly incompatible with their own (the Qur'an seems to believe it was a Qur'an-like book given to Jesus that commanded his followers to fight and die) and so they insisted that it was utterly, totally lost. Meanwhile the Torah was conveniently corrupted enough to eliminate the references to Mohammed.
This also led to a polemic that Islam was so much better because it was perfectly preserved. Not actually true but Islam does have earlier witnesses of the Qur'an compared to say...the Bible and they're remarkably similar to what we have, even though there's still variants due to the consonantal text. Muslims reacted really badly to even one Islamic scholar pointing out "holes in the narrative". It's a deeply emotional issue, a pillar they take for granted.
Muslims instrumentally use critical scholarship to point to things like the Documentary Hypothesis that they think backs their view of corruption. But they will never take the conclusions to their natural end. Conclusions like:
Yes, things like the Exodus and Patriarchs are inherently historically dubious and part of works that show clear artifice. Given the Qur'an copies them...
Yes, even though that is the case we actually have a very reasonable view of what the Bible says over centuries, even if it isn't historically credible and there's no "Muslim Gospel of Jesus" or missing links in the Torah - it's an apologetic construction. We have a general idea of when books were compiled and we certainly have a lot of witnesses and variants that help us try to figure out what was meant (unlike the Qur'an where the "bad" manuscripts were all burned by Caliphal fiat).
There's no "'goldilocks zone" where we accept all we've learned about corruption but also the Bible is corrupted in these exact ways that're helpful for Islam but also substantially true in the telling of its legends that we know from critical scholarship are dubious.
tl;dr: Textual criticism for Muslims is a train: they reach their station (Bible is corrupted and they took out the references to Mohammed) and get off. No amount of showing them ancient copies of Deuteronomy that match what we have now will change their minds. They're right for the wrong reasons.
* The Bible probably wasn't translated into Arabic in Mohammed's time. In fact: a lot of the stories people think the Qur'an got from the Bible actually came from Syriac Christian apocryphal versions that likely would have been spread orally in the region. Most obviously Jesus' miracle of breathing life into the clay birds - not Biblical, but from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
Interestingly, from this side of the fence, Islam was treated early on as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion of its own - see Dante putting Mohammed and Ali into the bolge of the Schismatics in the Eight Circle of Hell in the Inferno.
People of the time certainly didn't consider it original: "And when Our verses are recited to them, they say, "We have heard. If we willed, we could say [something] like this. This is not but legends of the former peoples." (Q8:31).
The modern revisionist school (people like Fred Donner and Stephen Shoemaker) sees Islam as a sort of ecumenical Abrahamic movement of "Believers" that reached out to conquer the Holy Land (which might explain the smoothness of the conquests). Later Caliphs had to construct a more exclusionary identity for "Muslims" in the wake of Mohammed's death (since most of the biographical material is relatively late by Gospel standards)
IMO Muslims early on probably didn't think of themselves as a distinct and overriding religion. Besides the reasons stated, the Quran says that it was sent so the Arabs could have their own revelation (which fits with the absence of an Arabic Bible at the time) and multiple times it speaks to insist the other groups judge by their books.
The Qur'an clearly relies on other faiths to back Islam (Q7:157) and tells them to judge by their existing books - the doctrine of corruption has done a remarkable job at obscuring that Islam can't actually be a theologically self-sustaining religion for this reason.
The book gives us a criteria to prove Islam and...it lies with other faiths. You can see why the rejection of the Qur'an by Jews prompted such issues and polemics and why Muslims today have this weird mix of token respect for the Bible as an earlier stage in the fossil record but also it's corrupt and you don't need it and maybe don't even read it cause people changed it to lie.
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If these sort of "if you just look at the material reality, you will discover you're completely wrong" arguments have been roundly dismissed in discussions about actual material reality, then why are wwe expecting anyone to take them seriously when the conversation is explicitly about religion?
Don't be so sure, at least for some the best path to atheism is autistically researching the origin of the holly books. When you see the profane and base materialness and petty power struggles of the Church's body it really sours the whole thing.
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Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following.
I read you as saying that things are hard to interpret or make sense of, and so we can't trust people to do so, religiously or in real life.
I read the post I was originally responding to as saying that things are hard to translate, and so we can't trust translations. But that particular difficulty can be overcome by not using a translation, since we have texts. So then I was expressing confusion, since I wouldn't have expected that a muslim would consider the bible safe to trust if we read it in the original greek or whatever the way they would think of the Quran.
That seems to hold independently of whether things are hard to interpret or make sense of.
No, I'm saying that even when things are easy to interpret and make sense, people are still going to reject them, if they go against someone's preconceived ideas. Even if these people swear up and down they they're unbiased, and just searching for the truth.
On the other hand, when it comes to religion, most of them openly state they're a matter of faith, so why would you be surprised that people reject things that contradict their religion?
Probably! I still appreciated the question, though. Even with religion, sometimes you can have an interesting conversation with someone who is willing to take these questions seriously.
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