This paper investigates the distribution of Quranic intertextual references to the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and other Jewish and Christian texts of Late Antiquity, as collected by Gabriel Reynolds in The Quran and the Bible. Comparing this distribution to the division of suras proposed by Andreas Kaplony in 2018 based on shared and almost mutually exclusive terminology for God, heaven, and hell, the intertextual references turn out to be strongly skewed toward one particular group, i.e. the one featuring the alternative name for God rabb al-ʿālamīn. This is especially true if considering only references to the Bible (HB/NT) itself — more than 80% are in the rabb al-ʿālamīn group, which only constitutes about half of the Quran. Building on Kaplony’s proposal that the Quran’s suras are of ‘diverse provenance,’ these results suggest that the transmission of the rabb al-ʿālamīn suras was correlated with people familiar with Biblical texts — most likely Jews, Christians, or other ‘peoples of the Book.’ In combination with Hannah Stork’s discovery that the same suras also contain a large majority of the Quran’s loanwords, our results imply that more diverse and cosmopolitan social groups with looser social networks may have been behind the transmission of the rabb al-ʿālamīn suras. We explore the ramifications for future research in this vein.