English: BIK01 - Unit 02: The Size of the Text of Bible and Koran

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BIK01 - Biblical Investigations of the Koran

A Ministry Course on Biblical Content in the Koran

STAGE 1 - INTRODUCTION

UNIT 02 - INNER LIMITS: Comparing the Bible and the Koran as BOOKS

044 - DIFFERENCE 5: The Size of the Text of Bible and Koran

An additional difference between the Bible and the Koran is the difference in the sizes of these two books. But how do you compare the sizes of books? If you take the number of pages in a specific copy of each book then the result is misleading, because most probably the pages of each of the two books have a different layout and font size resulting in an artificially different number of pages between the two. You get a better feeling for the difference in size between the Bible and the Koran when comparing the way each book organizes its text units. We go from the large to the small in the following manner:

The Bible comprises 66 books, while the Koran is only one book. So, on the level of the books of the Bible, the Koran has 1.5% as many books as the Bible and the Bible has 66 times the number of books of the Koran.

The Bible comprises 1,191 chapters (931 chapters for the Old Testament and 260 chapters for the New Testament). The Koran, however, only has 114 “chapters”, which Muslims call Suras. So, on the level of the chapters of the Bible, the Koran has 9.6% as many chapters as the Bible, or the Bible has 10.4 times as many chapters as the Koran.

The Bible comprises 31,169 verses (23,213 verses in the Old Testament and 7,956 verses in the New Testament). The Koran, however, only has 6,236 verses, which the Muslims call Aayaa, literally meaning “miraculous signs”. So, on the level of the verses of the Bible, the Koran has 20% as many verses as the Bible, or the Bible has 5 times as many verses as the Koran.

In Unit 11 we will find two more ways for comparing the sizes of the Bible and the Koran (using the number of words and the number of letters in each book). We will see that the most accurate comparison will reveal that the size of the text of the Koran is only 17.5% the size of the Bible (i.e. roughly one sixth the length of the Bible) and that the Bible has 5.7 times the amount of text as the Koran.

If every 2% of the text of the Bible is represented by one “x” sign, then 50 such “x” signs represent the whole text of the Bible, while roughly 9 such “x” signs represent the complete text of the Koran:

BIBLE: xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx

KORAN: xxxxx xxxx

In other words, the Bible is significantly longer than the Koran and the Koran is significantly shorter than the Bible, even shorter than the New Testament. If you read from the Gospel of Matthew up till the end of the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, then you have read an amount of text, which is roughly the same as the amount of text in the Koran.

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