Here's What Happens When You Compare Violence in the Quran to Violence in the Bible

To the well-informed this staggering statistic should come as no surprise: Fifty-eight percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Islam. And with that comes a laundry list of misinformation about the faith's holy text, the Quran.

But a recent project by data analyst and research marketer Tom Anderson turns one common misconception on its head: that the Quran is more consumed by blood thirst than the Christian Bible. Using text-analysis tools developed by OdinText, Anderson determined what percentage of the Bible was devoted to discussion of violence and then compared those results to that of the Quran.

The point of the project, Anderson wrote, was to "uncover with as little bias as possible the extent to which any of these texts is qualitatively and/or quantitatively distinct from the others using metrics associated with violence, love and so on."

Of the three books, the project found, the Old Testament is the most violent, with approximately 5.3% of the text referring to "destruction and killing" — the Quran clocked in at just 2.1%, with the New Testament slightly higher at 2.8%.

While the New Testament led in mentions of the concept of love, the Quran leads heavily in mentions of mercy — thanks partially to Allah's title, "the merciful."

Perhaps the most notable difference, though, was between the frequency of positive emotions that surfaced in the Quran when compared to both books of the Bible, as depicted in the chart below.