In any case I am stunned by how incompregensible [sic] the Koran would be without the Bible

This is true. And that is because the Koran was very clearly a hastily constructed document made by the hands of men, not the word of God. When you’re in a great hurry to put together a prophetic revelation in order to construct a competing religious and national identity, you have to base your ideas on what already exists. And what existed at the time in 7th Century Arabia and Persia was not real Christianity – it was GNOSTIC Christianity, which was heretical at best and outright deluded at worst. Inevitably, the Koran had to borrow and pick from disjointed stories and ideas that came from Nestorians, Ebionites, and other Gnostics in the surrounding areas. But THOSE stories only made sense when rooted in the Bible anyway. So we’re already dealing with two levels of separation from the truth, and that’s before we get to the horrendously slapdash editing of the Izzlamic book.

But I’m a sinple man. I’ve read the Koran cover to cover in Dawood’s translation (no other is readable). As you said of the Koran “reading it feels like a punishment rather than a joy.” And if you read any translation other than Dawood then the punishment is more severe!

In any case I am stunned by how incompregensible the Koran would be without the Bible. The author lives to tell Bible stories, in mangled form, so abridged it would be impossible to make any sense of the story without a knowledge of the full Biblical version. Sometimes he also gets the characters wrong like changing Gideon to King Saul, or merging Mary and Miriam, or putting Haman in Pharaoh’s court, or gets chrobology vastly wrong, having Pharaoh crucify. But one of the most mangled is honestly Jonah.

In the Koran Jonah is commanded something by Allah (unspecified what it is) but he flees to the laden ship, where he casts lots and is found guilty. Then a whale swallows him and spits him up on a deserted island, where a gourd grows over his head.

Now from that telling of the story, if you didn’t know the Biblical version, you would have no clue what any of this is. Why is he fleeing to a “laden ship”? Why does the story teller assume we know there should be a “laden ship”? Why does he cast lots on the ship? Why is he condemned? How does a whale just show up and swallow him? What is the point of a gourd growing over him?

Oh also this is in a Sura that tells a Bible story then says “Thus do We reward the righteous” after each one. But in many the reward is unclear whereas in others it is merely “and we caused later generations to praise him.” With Jonah it looks like the gourd was his reward. Lol.

Simply reading the Koran ahoild disabuse anyone of any notion of its divine origin. Especially if they’ve read the Bible and can conpare the two. The problem with Muslims is they don’t actually read the Koran, and/or don’t read the Bible.