The Bible is about ten times the length of the Quran though. Some people like John Goetsch and Tom Meyer currently have most of it memorized nonetheless, but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what, so memorization is just for personal betterment and to better share it with others.
The Bible’s also not generally regarded as wholly and precisely an exact, unaltered, unfiltered, and unadulterated message directly, syllable-by-syllable and letter-by-letter, as written on the page, message straight from God, not so much as a word out of place for its entire length, all as revealed in a single (long) event to a single person and recorded without error. I think that has a major effect on how important precise preservation of the Quran is to believers, and how interested in memorizing part of all of it they might be, versus the Bible.
To add, Jesus only commanded the spread of the Gospel, and not the books or writing, but rather just teaching about Jesus and how he provides salvation through his sacrifice.
After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.
People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.
Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.
The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
> After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.
There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.
> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.
Just in case you don't realise the Gospel is 'the message of salvation through Jesus' and is not the books in the New Testament called "the gospels". In the Bible when Jesus tells disciples to teach the gospel, the Greek word can be translated 'good news'.
A similar reference-instance error occurs with the Bible itself: 'the Word of God' is Jesus, not the Bible, the Bible is a pointer to the Word.
I mean. Bibles are everywhere. It is really hard to imagine all of them getting destroyed all at once. Even harder to imagine a scenario where that happens and yet we have humans still around after that.
I'm American and have spent the majority of my life in the US, so limited perspective and all, but Bibles are literally disposable here. There's plenty of instances of overzealous churches setting up on a corner and forcing cheap mass produced pocket-Bibles into the hands of college students or pedestrians on the street who walk past them. The Christians already have usable full sized copies and will eventually realize they don't need a hard to read $0.10 copy and the unreligious mostly don't want it at all, neither group revere the physical item and will commonly throw it away. Some Christians take even take pride in showing off they have a well used Bible, to the point that they purposefully let it get worn and ragged. Eventually they will also just replace it with a fresh copy. I think you could excavate any random landfill in the US if you absolutely needed to retrieve a few hundred intact copies of the Bible.
Forget the entire Bible, how about memorizing just the Gospel or the New Testament that's pertinent to Jesus, I think that all the Christians will fail that too including the Pope.
Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].
Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].
The Gospel is literally the good news of God coming to earth as a man to die for our sins, not the literal words of the Bible. It's this message that is to be shared, not necessarily the exact words on the page, especially because it's going to be translated anyway.
But the Bible does promise that it will be preserved to the letter regardless:
Isaiah 40:8
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Matthew 5:18
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
