The Quran is unambiguous that Jesus received a scripture. It names it, the Injil, and places it in a series alongside the Tawrat given to Moses and the Zabur given to David. It describes it as guidance and light, confirming what came before it.
Which raises a question that is easy to ask and surprisingly hard to answer: what became of it?
The two common answers
The first, and the most widely held, is that the Injil was a single book revealed to Jesus, distinct from the four Gospels of the New Testament, and that it has been lost or corrupted. On this view the Christian Gospels are biographies written by followers, not the revealed book itself.
The second is that the Injil is the Gospel message and that the Christian material preserves it, in some form.
The Quran does not settle between these. This is worth stating plainly, because both positions are often asserted as though the text were explicit and it is not.
The difficulty with the lost-book account
Take the first view seriously and follow it through, because it generates real problems.
There is no trace of such a book. Not a manuscript, not a fragment, not a quotation in an opponent, not a mention by name in any first- or second-century source, Christian or hostile. Early Christianity had energetic critics — Celsus, later Porphyry — who attacked its texts vigorously. None of them mention a suppressed original. Nor do the various heretical movements which had every motive to appeal to one.
Compare this with the situation for texts that were suppressed. We know about them anyway. We have the Gnostic gospels, precisely because suppression in the ancient world was leaky and inefficient. A book revealed to Jesus and then erased so thoroughly that no enemy, no heretic, and no manuscript preserves a line of it would be an achievement without parallel.
The timing does not work. Christianity spread rapidly across a wide geographic area under conditions of persecution rather than central control. There was no institution positioned to coordinate the removal of a book from Egypt to Gaul before copies proliferated — and copies did proliferate, which is why we have thousands of them.
The verse that cuts the other way
Here is the detail that tends to redirect the conversation.
Surah al-Ma'idah instructs the people of the Injil to judge by what God has revealed in it. That instruction is addressed to Christians contemporary with the Quran's revelation — in the seventh century.
It is difficult to make sense of an instruction to judge by a book that had been lost six centuries earlier, or corrupted beyond use. The command presupposes that the addressees possessed something they could consult and be held responsible to.
And we know what seventh-century Christians possessed, in considerable detail, because we have their manuscripts. It was substantially the same New Testament text we have now. The great codices predate the Quran by centuries, and papyrus fragments run back to the second.
Whatever the Injil is, then, the Quran appears to treat it as available at the time it was speaking. That is an awkward result for the strong version of the corruption thesis, and it is where the discussion usually turns to the tahrif objection, which we answer at length on its own page.
What the manuscripts allow us to say
The textual position is checkable and does not require anyone's word for it.
The New Testament survives in thousands of Greek manuscripts, plus early translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic and other languages, plus extensive quotation in early Christian writers. The earliest fragments are second-century. This is an unusually rich body of evidence by the standards of ancient literature, where a gap of many centuries between composition and earliest surviving copy is entirely normal.
That abundance means variants can be identified rather than hidden — and there are many thousands of them, which apologists on all sides sometimes misuse. The overwhelming majority are spelling and word order. The substantive ones are known, marked in modern editions, and do not touch the central claims. We go through this evidence properly in is the Bible corrupted.
A reasonable place to land
You do not have to accept a Christian conclusion to notice the shape of the problem. The lost-book account requires an event for which there is no evidence and against which there is a great deal. The Quran's own instruction to Christians presupposes a usable text. And a usable text is exactly what the manuscript record shows was in circulation.
Which leaves the most obvious course open, and it is the one a great many people take: read it and see. If the question is what Jesus taught, the documents are available, and available in your own language.
Common questions
Is the Gospel of Barnabas the lost Injil?
No. It survives in Italian and Spanish manuscripts of the medieval or early modern period, contains anachronisms pointing to a late European origin, and is not accepted as ancient by scholars, including Muslim scholars working on the text.
Why are there four Gospels rather than one?
Early Christianity treated them as four accounts of one Gospel, and their differences of emphasis and detail are visible rather than harmonised away — which most historians regard as a mark of independent testimony rather than of coordination.
Where should I start reading?
Most people begin with Luke or John. Luke is the most orderly and explicitly presents itself as an investigation of sources; John is the most direct about who Jesus claimed to be.