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Guest
To be clear, I am referring to the time before the printing press was invented and all copies were made by hand.
I am sorry, but after a brief search, I was not able to find an good source. However, it is a common story that most Christians have heard.
Have you ever been to a large library? In the reference room, often they would have a large catalog book chained to a table so people do not walk off with it, or move it somewhere where it does not belong. They do this to ensure the book is available everyone who uses the library.
A phone booth is another good example. The phone book is chained to the booth so it is available to all who need to use the phone.
Bible were extraordinarily valuable. The Bible is many times larger than the Koran and thus copies, because of the great labor involved, were that much more valuable.
Additionally, copies of the Bible had to be approved by Church authority. This was done to ensure that the copies were accurate and legitimate. Some copy errors did slip through, but because of the central authority of the Church and the fact that Christianity is not a “religion of the book”, this was rarely a problem beyond some minor local confusion.
Islam has no central authority. And the Koran was shorter than the Bible. Between the two of those, that allowed many more copies of the Koran to be produced than the Bible. However, because of the lack of central authority, some of the copies and some of the early translations, had serious errors. It took quite some time to find and correct these. Being a religion “of the Book” these errors often lead to some rather understandable and sometimes serious confusion.