THE ANALYSIS OF THE QUR'AN IN THE LIGHT OF THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS OF INFANCY
Surah 19:19,21 vs. Surah 3:45In the Qur'an the first account of Jesus' birth is given in Surah 19, which belongs to the Mecca period.
He said: I am only a messenger of thy Lord, that I may bestow on thee a faultless son. (Surah 19:19 Pickthall)
He said: So (it will be). Thy Lord saith: It is easy for Me. And (it will be) that We may make of him a revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us, and it is a thing ordained. (Surah 19:21 Pickthall)
According to this first narrative, the angel/messenger of the Lord visits Mary and announces the birth of a son from her. Interestingly, Mary does not know how she will name the son that will be born of her since her visitor deprives her of this information. The narrator of Surah 19 gives the name of Mary's son in verse 34 while making comments on Christian tenets and rebuking Christians for calling Jesus the Son of God:
Such was
Jesus, son of Mary: (this is) a statement of the truth concerning which they doubt. (Surah 19:34 Pickthall)
Thus, the account of annunciation and Mary's delivery in Surah 19 does not contain the name Jesus.
However, in Surah 3 the story of Jesus' birth is once more related with variations, and this time the angels visiting Mary tell her that her son will have the name Messiah Jesus:
(And remember) when the angels said: O Mary! Lo! Allah giveth thee glad tidings of a word from him,
whose name is the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, illustrious in the world and the Hereafter, and one of those brought near (unto Allah). (Surah 3:45 Pickthall)
(Note that the so-called angelic message in Surah 3 goes redundant as it tells Mary that Mary's son will be called Mary's son!)
Here comes the question: why is this difference? Why in Surah 19 Mary was not told the simple and basic name of her son whereas in Surah 3 she was revealed even the redundant information about her son's name/s?
It is not easy for us to solve the mysteries and decipher the cryptic references of the Islamic scripture unless we discover its ties with the apocryphal writings that Muhammad copied from while devising his book.
The two narratives about Mary and Jesus in the Qur'an (Surah 19 and Surah 3) were derived from TWO distinct and independent non-canonical Gospels of Infancy. The source of the account in Surah 19 is the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew whilst of that in Surah 3 is the Gospel of James.
The source of Surah 19: The Gospel of Pseudo-MatthewAccording to Pseudo-Matthew's narrative, Mary was visited by a MAN of ineffable beauty while she was sewing something:
Again, on the third day,
while she was working at the purple with her fingers, there
entered a young man of ineffable beauty. And when Mary saw him, she exceedingly feared and trembled. And he said to her: Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And when she heard these words, she trembled, and was exceedingly afraid. Then the angel of the Lord added: Fear not, Mary; for you have found favour with God: Behold, you shall conceive in your womb, and shall bring forth a King, who fills not only the earth, but the heaven, and who reigns from generation to generation. (Pseudo-Matthew chapter 9)
Muhammad heard about this story and decided to adopt it into Surah 19. Note the similarities:
And
took a veil to shroud herself from them: and we sent our spirit to her, and
he took before her the form of a perfect man. She said, I fly for refuge unto the merciful [God, that he may defend me] from thee: If thou fearest [him, thou wilt not approach me]. He said: I am only a messenger of thy Lord, that I may bestow on thee a faultless son. (Surah 19:17-19)
Muhammad's plagiarism from Pseudo-Matthew is evident. He said that a messenger visited Mary in the form of a perfect man and that Mary was exceedingly afraid of him: this was what had been written in Pseudo-Matthew! However, Muhammad failed to understand why the account in Pseudo-Matthew talked about a veil and associated it with Mary right in the account of the annunciation. Muhammad only said that Mary took a veil, and Muslim commentators thought it was a veil that helped Mary seclude herself from people. Actually, it was the veil of the TEMPLE! Mary was working at the veil of the Temple when she was visited by an angelic messenger. Pseudo-Matthew made this clear in the previous chapter of his Gospel although that detail escaped Muhammad's notice:
For they cast lots among themselves what each virgin should do, and
the purple for the veil of the temple of the Lord fell to the lot of Mary. (Pseudo-Matthew chapter 8 )
Now let's get back to our primary question: why the name of Mary's to-be-born child is given by the angels during the annunciation in Surah 3 although it is not given until Surah 19:34, which comes right after the reference to baby Jesus' miraculous speech from the cradle.
The answer is simple: Muhammad copied the narrative of the angelic annunciation from Pseudo-Matthew ( as we have displayed above), and the visitor's prediction in that particular text did not include any information on this issue. This was most likely because the writer of this apocryphal Gospel claimed to be Apostle Matthew and did everything to sound credible when he attributed his book to Matthew. In oder to achieve parallelism with the canonical Gospel of Matthew, he had to teach that the birth and name of the child were announced to Joseph by an angel in his dream. Compare the following:
And when he was thinking of rising up and hiding himself, and dwelling in secret, behold, on that very night,
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in sleep, saying: Joseph, you son of David, fear not; receive Mary as your wife: for that which is in her womb is of the Holy Spirit. And she shall bring forth a son, and
His name shall be called Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. (Pseudo-Matthew chapter 11)
While his mother Mary was engaged to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph, her husband to be, was a righteous man, and because he did not want to disgrace her, he intended to divorce her privately. When he had contemplated this,
an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and
you will name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:18-21)
Since Muhammad's version did not include the section of Pseudo-Matthew quoted above, but only the first and last angelic visitation narrated in Pseudo-Matthew chapter 9, it is not surprising to see that the name Jesus is missing from the account of Mary's visitation by a messenger in Surah 19.
Further, the narrative in Surah 19 gives the name of Mary's son as Jesus in verse 34 right after the verses that refer to Mary's son's miraculous speech from the cradle. In order to discover why the name Jesus appears in the 34th verse of chapter 19, we must first remember that Surah 19:29-30 were plagiarized by Muhammad from another apocryphal Gospel: the Arabic Gospel of the Savior's Infancy. Let's compare and contrast the following parts:
We find what follows in the book of Joseph the high priest, who lived in the time of Christ. Some say that he is Caiaphas. He has said that
Jesus spoke, and, indeed,
when He was lying in His cradle said to Mary His mother:
I am Jesus, the Son of God, the Logos, whom you have brought forth, as the Angel Gabriel announced to you; and
my Father has sent me for the salvation of the world. (Arabic Gospel of Infancy chapter 1)
Then she pointed to him. They said:
How can we talk to one who is in the cradle, a young boy?
He spake: Lo! I am the slave of Allah. He hath given me the Scripture and hath appointed me a Prophet (Surah 19:29-30)
Obviously, Muhammad borrowed this miraculous incident and incorporated it into Surah 19 after drastic textual modifications. The interesting point is that in the first chapter of the Arabic Gospel, Jesus is overtly called the Christ/Messiah. However, Muhammad did not understand until after his migration to Medina that the word Christ was a title ascribed to Jesus. Consequently, he did not include it into the Meccan chapters making references to Mary's son. He did not have to care about this either, for in the peculiar part he copied from the apocryphal Gospel in Arabic, Mary's son identified Himself as Jesus, not as Christ. Muhammad inserted the name Jesus into verse 34, where he criticized Christians for calling Jesus the Son of God right after the reference to baby Jesus' miraculous speech.
The source of Surah 3: The Gospel of JamesIn Surah 3, however, Muhammad forgot about the previous narrative about Mary and Jesus in Surah 19 and gave a contradictory account. This was because he plagiarized from the Gospel of James while creating the story in Surah 3 after his migration. To compare:
(And remember) when the angels said: O Mary! Lo! Allah giveth thee glad tidings of
a word from him, whose name is the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, illustrious in the world and the Hereafter, and one of those brought near (unto Allah).
And behold an angel of the Lord stood before her saying: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace before the Lord of all things, and
thou shalt conceive of his word. And she, when she heard it, questioned in herself, saying: Shall I verily conceive of the living God, and bring forth after the manner of all women ? And the angel of the Lord said: Not so, Mary, for a power of the Lord shall overshadow thee: wherefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of the Highest. And
thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins. (Gospel of James chapter 11)
Unlike Surah 19, Surah 3 identifies Jesus as a word from Allah because the Gospel of James did so unlike the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. Similarly, unlike the narrative of the annunciation in Surah 19, the narrative of the annunciation in Surah 3 includes the name Jesus because the writer of the Gospel of James followed Evangelist Luke when he said that the angel announcing to Mary told her the name of her to-be-born son (see Luke 1:31) unlike Pseudo-Matthew, who inserted the name Jesus only into the account of the annunciation delivered to Joseph. The more we find out the differences between the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and that of James, the more we can understand why the narrative about Mary and Jesus in Surah 19 is different from that in Surah 3.
It must be noted that Muhammad did not only copy from these apocryphal Gospels of Infancy, but also distorted the information given in them. This is why it is natural to see differences between the original versions of the stories and Muhammad's false copies. For example, it is written in the Gospel of James that the angel visiting Mary only said that the child to be born would be called JESUS, which is more accurate than the information given in Surah 3:45 since Mary did not call her son the Messiah or Son of Mary! Muhammad simply added those words while distorting the apocryphal text. As he repeatedly called Jesus “the Son of Mary” in most of the chapters and mistakenly thought that the title Christ (al-Masih) was Jesus' second name, he rushed to attach them to the name Jesus even in the account of the angelic annunciation. This proves that Muhammad was not only a reckless borrower, but also a blind one that made mistakes due to his strategy of perversion.
Theophilos