In this video we continue to look at Mary and her baby, what the Qur'an has to say about
Mary the mother of Jesus, the Christian apocryphal literature, and also the New
Testament. I'm going to use continue to use as our guide to this rather excellent book 'The
Islamic Jesus' by Mustafa Akyol, 'How the King of the Jews became a prophet of the Muslims'. Now has
the Quran made a mistake? Is the Quran an error? Because there's a significant error alleged to
be made by the quran in the chapter called mary in the quran which talks uh as follows in chapter 19
verses 27 and 28 uh talking about mary uh having a child it says in verse 27 she mary went back to
her people carrying the child jesus and they said mary you have done something terrible sister of
aaron your father was not a bad man your mother was not unchaste now what is it was the fuss here
well sister of aaron who was aaron well aaron the only mention of aaron uh in the bible is
uh and in the quran is the brother of moses who i don't know lived a thousand years before mary so
has the crumb made a mistake and critics have attacked this verse as a simple but revealing
error ever since um now the verse itself is discussed uh not unexpectedly by uh mustafa akio
in his excellent book i just wanted to uh discuss some of the uh academic and recent scholarly work
uh that really has thrown new light on this whole question and he brings up some really obscure
references and texts um and scholarly quotations which um you would not normally be aware of unless
you really looked at the literature the academic literature so i want to share this fascinating
discovery uh with you so i'm just gonna read from uh the section uh of the chapter uh the chapter
is called mary and her baby page 119 onwards the section's called sister of aaron question
mark you know this is a this is a mistake surely as christian missionaries always says
obviously mohammed made a mistake but recent scholarship has proposed a credible and plausible
solution to this mystery and that's why i'm quite excited to share this with you so
it gets a bit detailed this but it really is worth hanging on uh uh to and and studying
this book uh in its entirety is important as well i think uh so page 119 when we go back to
the chronic story of mary he writes we see that the birth of jesus was only the beginning of her
ordeal for now she had to go back to her people a morally judgmental society to put it likely
with a a fatherless baby in her arms no wonder her situation immediately caused reactions as we read
in the chronic chapter mary and then it quotes 19 27 and 28 which i've just done i'll read it again
she brought him to her people carrying him they said mary you have done an unthinkable thing
sister of aaron your father was not an evil man nor was your mother an unchaste woman and quote
another a curious expression here that has raised much controversy sister of aaron there is only
one heir in the quran as in the old testament and he was the brother or he is the brother of
moses so mary who lived more than a thousand years later could certainly not be a sibling to aaron
meanwhile aaron did have a sister whose name was miriam this led to accusations that the quran
is confused has confused the two women miriam and mary whose names sound all too similar in return
muslim scholars have argued either that mary had an otherwise unknown uh brother named aaron or
more persuasively that being a sister of aaron can merely mean being a descendant of aaron uh
which mary arguably was now this is where it gets interesting so there's a note here at the back of
the book note 60 from which jewish tribe mary came has been disputed but there are grounds
to consider her a levite which would make her a descendant of aaron the gospel of luke chapter 1
verse 5 says that mary was the cousin of elizabeth who was a descendant of aaron the high priest
this suggests at least a possibility that mary 2 was a levite and then he continues after all jesus
was proclaimed to be the son of david as well yeah jesus constantly proclaimed the gospels to be son
of david and he obviously wasn't the son of david literally biologically speaking that's me speaking
by the way which implies not direct sonship but lineage so he comes from that line of aaron david
suleiman a morad who's an academic who supports this argument also adds quote the expression
sister of aaron moreover occurs in the quranic reference to the questioning of mary in the temple
it is especially appropriate in this context for the questioners the temple's priests to magnify
mary's moral transgression her pregnancy by appealing to her ancestor aaron whose
descendants are the only israelites qualified to serve in the temple where mary herself was raised
in other words mary as a descendant of aeron is expected to keep the purity of the sanctuary
rather than defile it by supposedly committing the shameful act that would lead to a pregnancy
here too there are no grounds on which to argue that the koran is identifying mary
literally biologically as the sister of aaron unquote yet mustafa continues the puzzle here
is not limited to mary's being the sister of aaron there is also the question of imran and imran's
wife who appear in the koran as mary's parents as mary's not jesus parents but mary's parents
the problem is that imran seems to be a reference to the biblical amran who
was the father not of mary but of moses and of aaron and miriam as a result there is an
additional claim of the quran being confused about biblical characters and their relations
however there is an alternative explanation to this riddle that seems to put everything in place
now i've read the rest of this section and i'll just say in advance the evidence that mustafa
act your actual gives in the book for applause maximization strikes me as credible it's
historically credible so i think he makes his point well although it's entirely up to you
as a viewer listener reader to make up your own mind i think an objective reader would see his
uh his explanation as having substance to it or that's impossible to prove absolutely but
it is a credible explanation i think so he continues the crown merely employs topology
which is an approach to scripture usually the bible whose basic principle is to
see former character characters or events as pre-figuring announcing later figures or events
so it's seeing events in the by earlier in the bible as pre-figuring or announcing in advance
later figures or events this is a very common strategy in the christian scriptures there's a
note here to uh note 62 which i'll read getting a bit uh academic here but the detail that matters
this comment which i've just read is actually in quotation marks comes from a chap called guyam dai
now he's a professor at the university of brussels
i think he's a christian scholar but he's a good academic he adds regarding the problem of the
quran's conflation of mary and miriam quote it is certainly fair to say that topology is one of the
most widespread exegetical devices in christianity it can easily be combined with allegoric exegesis
which considers biblical characters places or episodes as symbols of abstract or spiritual
notions so when the quran states that mary is aaron's sister and imran's daughter it does not
state that mary the mother of jesus is aaron's biological sister and imran's biological daughter
but it claims that she is prefigured one way or another by the family of imran especially aaron
and miriam in other words it is not simply a connection to uh aryan's lineage and that's some
guillaume die the crown and its hypertextuality in light of reduction criticism page nine so
continuing this approach says mustafa is used in the christian tradition as well
as has already been mentioned and remarkably and this is where it gets interesting for me
because i didn't know this before i read this book i had no idea about this and remarkably we
even have a case of it being used to connect mary and aaron in christian literature
it is in the election of jeremiah a short and largely unknown document that dates from the
first decades of the 7th century a.d and was used in liturgical celebrations in jerusalem
so we have a christian church in jerusalem using this election of jeremiah what does this text say
the text quotes oracles from the hebrew prophet jeremiah who uses the ark of the covenant as
a metaphor for the crib of the infant jesus in one place it reads and the prophet jeremiah said
his coming jesus coming will be a sign for you and for other children at the end of the world and
nobody will bring forth the hidden ark from the rock except the priest aaron the brother of mary
eron the brother of mary aaron the brother of mary clearly resonates with the quranic
mary the sister of aaron guinandai the scholar who brought this
fascinating yet much neglected text to everyone's attention argues quote
the election of jeremiah always speaks of mary not miriam and since the author is patently
a clever monk he would not mistake miriam for mary the formula priest brother of mary
is an addition of the lecture of election it's to pot typological and symbolically significant
end quote to this dai also adds that the election of jeremiah was read at the kassima church near
jerusalem as a liturgical check text that's k-a-t-h-i-s-m-a katsima church near jerusalem
as a liturgical text so we know the church is in jerusalem and it was recited in christian worship
then by recalling the parallels between the kasima church traditions and the quran story of
the nativity he died suggests that the election of jeremiah in terms of identifying mary might well
be the source of the quran however from the muslim point of view it could be taken as a confirmation
of the quran as well that the quran's typological identification of mary as the sister of aeron was
not without any historical basis in other words it has a basis in history it seems because of
the way it's used in the earlier christian sources moreover there is one more possibility as to why
the kran's identification of mary as the sister of aaron uh though sorry moreover there's one more
possibility as to why the quran's identity why the quran identifies mary as the sister of aaron
and it is fascinating as well and this is uh his final point first note that the quran calls mary
the sister of aaron but not of moses which may reflect an emphasis on the aranoid lineage or
aranoi means of aaron it's a way of shortening the expression uh an emphasis on the paranoid lineage
of mary this by extension would mean that jesus was of paranoid descent as well but jesus was
descendant of aaron this naturally would conflict with jesus davidic dissent from david which
traditionally has been accepted as the basis or a basis of his claim to messiahship for most jews
believe that the messiah will be a son of david yet and this is something again i didn't know
some jews had an alternative view they believed that the messiah would be from the line of aaron
believe it or not the earliest source in which this idea can be found is guess it or not the
dead sea scrolls in qumran believed to be used by the essenes as a jewish sect at the time of jesus
but lo and behold a branch of the akasaites i mispronounced that el chasoites
a later jewish christian sect also believed that mary was from wait for it the tribe of levi
from which the priests came they believed in other words that mary was from the bloodline of aaron
and there's another note here note 65 which refers to patricia crone a very prominent western
chronic scholar patricia cohen makes the same argument about the quran's implicit reference
to an aranoid messiah in her work jewish christianity and the torah page 11 to 14.
so to conclude the quran's designation of mary as a sister of error may perhaps be a
reflection of the idea of an aranoid messiah a messiah just saying send it from aeron
and this would be yet another parallel between jewish christianity and islam now this whole
idea of parallels between the earliest form of christianity and islam is a key theme of this
book and of much recent wider scholarship uh the idea that uh christianity really didn't start with
jesus uh he was a practicing jew tore observant jew as was his immediate followers and james
the head of the church in jerusalem and the parallels between what they believed
the early the earliest followers of jesus and what islam teaches about jesus are remarkable and they
more or less share the same understanding about jesus that's a different subject it's explored
in detail here and i've done some videos about it in the past as well anyway i hope you didn't find
that too confusing um do get this book if you want to dig deep into the history the sources the texts
and the arguments about the islamic jesus and his mother until next time