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The Quran is divided into a hundred and fourteen surahs, and the count is universally agreed across all Muslim traditions and all manuscript witnesses. Unlike almost every other canon discussed here, there is no denominational variation in it.

The arrangement is not chronological. The surahs run broadly from longest to shortest, with the short opening surah al-Fatiha placed first as a prayer, so that the early Meccan revelations, short, intense, often eschatological, cluster at the end of the book, and the long Medinan surahs with their legal material come near the front. Reading the Quran from front to back therefore reads it roughly backwards in time, which is one of the first things a reader needs to know about it.

Every surah opens with the basmala, in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, except the ninth, Surat at-Tawba. Why is an old question with no settled answer; explanations offered include that the ninth and eighth were once a single surah, and that the basmala was omitted because the surah opens with a declaration of war.

Each surah has a name, usually taken from a distinctive word in it rather than from its subject, the Cow, the Bee, the Spider, the Elephant, and each is designated Meccan or Medinan, an attribution which for some surahs is disputed and for some is mixed within a single surah.

Alongside the surah division the text carries an independent division into thirty ajza, parts, of roughly equal length, which cuts across the surahs and exists for the practical purpose of reading the whole in a month.

The Coptic Gospel of Thomas, recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, is conventionally divided into a hundred and fourteen sayings. That the Quran also has a hundred and fourteen divisions has been noticed and made much of, and the comparison does not survive examination.

The manuscript has no numbered divisions. Nag Hammadi Codex II, tractate 2, runs continuously, with the sayings separated only by the recurring formula Jesus said. The division into a hundred and fourteen numbered logia was imposed by modern editors from the first publications onward, in the late 1950s. It is a scholarly convenience that became standard because everyone needed a common reference system, and other divisions have been proposed; some editors combine or split sayings differently, giving different totals.

So the comparison sets a canonical, ancient and universally agreed count against a count decided by twentieth-century European editors. It is not a coincidence between two traditions. It is a coincidence between one tradition and a modern editorial choice.

The text itself is of real interest independently. It is a collection of sayings without narrative, passion or resurrection, roughly half of which have parallels in the synoptic gospels while the rest do not. Its date is genuinely contested: proposals range from the mid-first century, which would make it as early as any gospel, to the mid-second, and the argument turns on whether its parallels show knowledge of the canonical gospels or independent access to a common tradition. Greek fragments found at Oxyrhynchus decades before Nag Hammadi were identified as belonging to it only after the Coptic text appeared.