Does the Quran describe Christianity accurately?

Summary

• The Quran condemns Christian doctrine in about a dozen verses, and one of them describes a doctrine no church has ever held. Quran 5:116 has God ask Jesus whether he told people to "take me and my mother as two gods besides Allāh."¹ Mary has never been a person of the Trinity in any creed, council, or major church, East or West.
• This matters more than it first looks. A book claiming to be the speech of a God who knows all things should not have to be defended on the ground that it misunderstood the belief it was correcting. A human preacher working from what he had heard might make that mistake. An omniscient author would not.
• But the charge has to be made precisely, because most of the Quran's other statements about Christianity are not mistakes at all. Quran 4:171 says "do not say, 'Three.'"² Christians do say three. That is a disagreement, not a misdescription. Quran 5:17 and 5:72 say "Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary,"³ which is not the Chalcedonian formula but is within earshot of the title Theotokos, "God-bearer," which the Council of Chalcedon itself confirmed for Mary in 451.⁴
• The classical Muslim commentators split, and one of them got the Trinity right. The earliest surviving commentary on the whole Quran, by Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d. 150/767), glosses "the third of three" as "the Melkites — they said: God, the Messiah, and Mary," which shows the Marian reading is old and shows it aimed at a named church that did not hold it.⁵ Al-Tabari (d. 310/923) reports the Christian formula as "one substance comprising three hypostases," with a Father who begets and is not begotten and a Son begotten who does not beget — which is the language of the creeds, in the standard Arabic equivalents of ousia and hypostasis.⁶ Al-Razi (d. 606/1210) reports it as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one substance, and compares it to the sun's disc, ray and heat.⁷ Both of them also record the other reading, that the three are God, Jesus and Mary.⁶
• The one thing the Quran never criticises is the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and that silence is the most informative fact in the whole discussion. If the Quran had simply garbled a creed, the Spirit would be somewhere in the wreckage. It is not. Mohsen Goudarzi's explanation is that the Quran is describing what people did rather than what bishops taught, and seventh-century Christians brought offerings to Mary's shrines and did not bring offerings to the Holy Spirit.⁸
• The Collyridian answer that Christian apologists reach for does not work, and this article will not use it. Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403) describes women in Arabia offering bread to Mary, and then admits he does not know how they understood what they were doing.⁹ In the same chapter he writes that "the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit should be worshiped; no one should worship Mary" — so the one source the argument rests on is itself a witness that Mary was not in the Trinity.⁹ Nothing links them to the seventh century. Sidney Griffith's survey of the evidence finds "no indisputable documentary evidence" for any such group in Arabia in the period that matters, and warns that the scholars who posit one are reading it out of the Quran and then explaining the Quran by it.¹⁰
• The Christian bodies actually present in and around Arabia were the Melkites, the Jacobites and the Nestorians.¹⁰ They fought bitterly with each other about how the divine and human natures unite in Christ. All three confessed the Nicene Creed, and none of the three put Mary in the Trinity.
• The Quran's argument against divine sonship is an argument about biology, and its own commentators say so. Quran 6:101 asks, "How could He have a son when He does not have a companion?"¹¹ Al-Tabari's gloss: a child comes only from a male and a female.¹² The Study Quran, a mainstream Muslim work, spells it out further — siring offspring requires part of a male body to be transferred to a female body, and God has no body.¹³ Christians agree with every word of that. John of Damascus, writing in Damascus under Muslim rule around 743, had already said the Son's generation is "passionless" and not "dependent on the union of two."¹⁴
• Set against that, the Quran says things about Jesus that no other non-Christian scripture says. He is born of a virgin,¹⁵ called the Messiah,² called a word from God and a spirit from Him,² announced as "a pure boy,"¹⁶ and credited with healing the blind and raising the dead.¹⁷ Meanwhile the Quran twice commands Muhammad to seek forgiveness for his own sin, and a third verse promises him forgiveness for it.¹⁸ That asymmetry is real, it is checkable, and it is the strongest ground a Christian has for a conversation rather than an argument.

Verdict.  The Quran's account of Christianity is accurate about Jesus and inaccurate about the Trinity.  On the central charge — that Christians take Jesus and Mary as two gods — no ecumenical council taught it, no major church held it, no Christian text says it, and the sect usually blamed for it cannot be shown to have existed anywhere near Muhammad.  The best available explanation, and it is a Muslim-friendly one, is that the Quran is describing seventh-century Christian worship rather than seventh-century Christian doctrine — and seventh-century Christian worship really did look, to an outsider, like the worship of a woman.  That is a genuine charge against the practice of the churches, and Christians should answer it as such.  But it is not what the verses say.  They say Christians believe this, and no Christians did.  A revelation from a God who knows all things should not have to be rescued by the observation that its author was working from what worshippers looked like they were doing.

• Where this article's own case is weakest. Five places. First, the Quran never lists the three; 4:171 and 5:73 say "three" and stop, so "the Quran teaches a Father-Mary-Jesus Trinity" is an inference from 5:116 and 5:75 rather than a statement anywhere in the text.¹⁹ Second, 5:116 is a question, not an assertion — God asks whether Jesus said it, and Jesus says no — so its charge is carried by a presupposition rather than by a claim. Third, the Christian answer to the Marian charge is a distinction between worship owed to God and honour paid to saints, and that is an answer about what the churches taught, not about what their congregations did. Fourth, this article applies a standard the Bible would also have to meet: Isaiah 44 describes idol-makers in terms no educated pagan would have recognised as his own view of images, and a fair reader will ask why polemical shorthand is allowed to Isaiah and not to the Quran. Fifth, on Quran 9:30 the strongest claim available is a negative one — no Jewish text says Ezra is God's son — and Gabriel Said Reynolds, who is not defending Islam, thinks the verse may not be about Ezra at all.¹⁹

The claim being tested

Four different propositions get folded together in this argument, and they have to be separated because the evidence for each is different.

1. The Quran condemns Christian doctrine. Nobody disputes this. Quran 4:171, 5:17, 5:72, 5:73, 5:116, 9:30 and 9:31 all say plainly that Christians have gone wrong about God.
2. The doctrine the Quran condemns is the doctrine Christians actually hold. This is the question the article is about.
3. If the Quran misdescribes the doctrine, its author was not omniscient. This is the inference a Christian wants to draw, and it is not automatic. A speaker may describe an opponent's position in a hostile shorthand without being ignorant of it.
4. If the Quran describes a real Christian group accurately, Christians have to concede the point. This is what a Muslim may reply, and it is a fair reply. If some Christians in Muhammad's world really did venerate Mary as divine, then the Quran is reporting, not inventing.

The Muslim claim, stated in Muslim terms, is straightforward and dignified.  God is one, tawhid.  The one sin God does not forgive is shirk, associating a partner with Him — Quran 4:48 and 4:116 say this twice in almost the same words.²⁰  Jesus was a great prophet, a servant of God, born of a virgin, a worker of miracles, and a man.  Christians took a prophet and made him a god, and made his mother something close to one, and the Quran was sent in part to call them back.  Quran 4:171 puts it in one word:  la taghlu, "do not commit excess."²

The Christian claim is that the God of the Bible is one God in three persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — one in being, three in relation;  that Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal Son become man;  and that Mary is a creature who bore him.  Christians deny that there are three gods.  They deny that God has a wife.  They deny that Mary is divine.  They have denied all three of these in writing, in council, and under penalty, since the fourth century.

So the test is narrow and answerable.  Take each passage.  Ask what the Arabic says, what the classical commentators took it to mean, and what the Christian creeds actually say.  Then see whether the target the Quran shoots at is a target anybody was standing on.

This article does not cover two nearby questions, which have their own articles.  Whether Jesus died on the cross is the crucifixion question.  Whether the Bible has been textually corrupted is the tahrif question.  Where the Quran's stories about Jesus came from is the earlier-literature question.

The strongest case for the Muslim claim

Stated at full strength, before any evaluation, and a believing Muslim should recognise it.

First, the Quran is not describing a creed.  It is describing worship.  The word at Quran 5:116 is ittakhidhuni, "take me" — take me and my mother as two gods.  That is a verb about what people do, not about what they subscribe to.  The Quran's whole quarrel with the Meccan pagans runs the same way:  they acknowledged Allah as creator and still brought offerings to intermediaries, and the Quran calls that shirk.  By that standard, the question is not whether any council put Mary in the Trinity.  It is whether Christians in the seventh century prayed to Mary, kept festivals for her, brought gifts to her churches, and asked her to save them.  They did.

Second, the Quran denies a Trinity that Christians also deny.  The Study Quran, a mainstream Muslim commentary published by HarperOne in 2015, says this in print:  in Quran 4:171 and 5:73 "the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as three 'persons,' or hypostases, 'within' the One God is not explicitly referenced, and the criticism seems directed at those who assert the existence of three distinct 'gods,' an idea that Christians themselves reject."¹³  If that is right, then a Christian who says "the Quran attacks a Trinity I do not believe in" has conceded the Quran's point rather than refuted it.  The Quran attacks three gods.  Christians say there are not three gods.  So far the two agree.

Third, Christians disagree so sharply about the Trinity that there is no single target.  The three Christian communions in Arabia's neighbourhood in Muhammad's lifetime had already anathematised each other over how Christ's natures unite.  Melkites, Jacobites and Nestorians each called the other two heretics.¹⁰  A Muslim may reasonably ask which of these was the correct Christianity the Quran is accused of misdescribing.

Fourth, the Marian language really did sound like the language of divinity.  Chalcedon in 451 confirmed the title Theotokos for Mary — "the Mother of God."⁴  Philip Schaff, a Protestant church historian with no motive to concede this, wrote that this "unscriptural" term and its Latin equivalents "remind one of the heathen mothers of gods" and "have greatly promoted Mariolatry."⁴  A seventh-century Arab hearing Christians call a woman the Mother of God, and watching them keep her feasts and bring offerings to her shrines, would not be inventing anything by reporting that they took her as a deity.

Fifth, the Quran's Jesus material is not the work of someone ignorant of Christianity.  The Quran affirms the virgin birth in two independent narratives, calls Jesus al-Masih, calls him a word from God and a spirit from Him, has him heal the blind and raise the dead, and has him return at the end of the age.  Whoever produced this text knew a great deal about Christianity.  The suggestion that the same author simply did not know what the Trinity was has to explain that.

That is a strong case, and the rest of this article is written with it in view.  Here is how much of it survives, stated in advance so the reader can hold the article to it.  The fourth part and the fifth stand entirely:  Marian language really did sound like the language of divinity, and whoever produced the Quran knew a great deal about Christianity.  The second part stands for Quran 4:171 and 5:73 and fails for Quran 5:116.  The first part is largely true as history and does not do the work it is asked to do.  The third part is true and lands in the wrong department.

The six passages, and what each actually says

Arabic and English are both given, because the argument turns on wording throughout.  Translations are named every time.  Sahih International's square brackets are the translators' own additions and are kept visible.

Quran 5:116 — "take me and my mother as two gods"

This is the verse everything turns on.

And [beware the Day] when Allāh will say, "O Jesus, Son of Mary, did you say to the people, 'Take me and my mother as deities besides Allāh?'"  He will say, "Exalted are You!  It was not for me to say that to which I have no right."¹

The Arabic clause is ittakhidhuni wa-ummiya ilahayni min duni llah.  Ilahayni is the dual of ilah, god — "two gods," not "gods" in general.  Abdel Haleem renders it "Take me and my mother as two gods alongside God";  Pickthall, "Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah";  Yusuf Ali paraphrases, "worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of Allah."¹

Three features of the verse are usually missed and all three matter.

It is a question, not a statement.  God asks Jesus whether he said it.  Jesus says he did not.  The verse never says in its own voice that Christians believe this.  What carries the charge is the presupposition — the question only makes sense if somebody was in fact taking the two of them as gods.

Mary stands where the Holy Spirit belongs.  If this is a description of the Trinity, then the Trinity in view is Father, Mary and Jesus.  Gabriel Said Reynolds, a Notre Dame scholar of the Quran and not an apologist for either side, writes that "this verse does seem to suggest that the Qurʾān's author thought of the Trinity as 'Father, Mother, Son' (God, Mary, Jesus)," and adds that the same conclusion is suggested by Quran 5:75 and "by the absence of any connection in the Qurʾān between the Holy Spirit and the Christian teaching of the Trinity."¹⁹

Quran 5:75, in the same surah, makes the same pairing.  "The Messiah, son of Mary, was not but a messenger;  [other] messengers have passed on before him.  And his mother was a supporter of truth.  They both used to eat food."²¹  Reynolds notes that eating food is a standard Quranic proof of being human, and that the verse "seems to assume that Christians consider Jesus and Mary to be divine."¹⁹  The argument from eating only bites if somebody thought Mary was more than human.

Quran 5:73 — "the third of three"

They have certainly disbelieved who say, "Allāh is the third of three."  And there is no god except one God.²²

The Arabic is inna llaha thalithu thalathatin.  Reynolds points out that this is literally "third of three," and argues that the phrase most likely concerns Christ — that verses 72 and 73 are one unit, both about people who say God is Christ.¹⁹  Yusuf Ali and Hilali-Khan both translate the phrase interpretively as "one of three in a Trinity," which is a decision, not the Arabic.²²

Read as "God is one of three gods," this condemns tritheism, which Christians condemn too.  Read as "God is the third of three persons," it condemns the Trinity as Christians hold it.  The Arabic will bear either.  Al-Wahidi (d. 468/1076) noticed the ambiguity and drew a striking conclusion, preserved by al-Razi:  a man who says "God is the third of three" is not an unbeliever if he does not mean the third of three gods — because, as Quran 58:7 says, there is no private conversation of three but God is the fourth of them.⁷

Quran 4:171 — "do not say 'Three'"

O People of the Scripture, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allāh except the truth.  The Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allāh and His word which He directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from Him.  So believe in Allāh and His messengers.  And do not say, "Three";  desist - it is better for you.  Indeed, Allāh is but one God.  Exalted is He above having a son.²

The Arabic is wa-la taqulu thalatha — "and do not say 'three.'"  That is all.  There is no word for Trinity in the sentence.  Yusuf Ali supplies one:  "Say not 'Trinity.'"  Abdel Haleem supplies one and marks it with quotation marks:  "do not speak of a 'Trinity.'"  Pickthall and Sahih International keep the bare word:  "say not 'Three.'"²  Reynolds is blunt about it:  the interpretive rendering "reflects the common Islamic interpretation of this verse.  However, the Qurʾān here has simply 'Do not say "three."'"¹⁹

This verse is the strongest of the six for the Muslim side, and a Christian article should say so plainly.  Christians do say three.  The Nicene Creed names three:  Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  A command not to say "three" is a real disagreement about God, not a misunderstanding of what Christians believe.  Anyone arguing that the Quran misdescribes the Trinity should build the case somewhere other than here.

Al-Tabari's gloss, though, moves it back toward misdescription.  He reads la taqulu thalatha as la taqulu al-arbab thalatha — "do not say the lords are three."²³  On that reading the target is again three gods, not three persons.

Quran 5:17 and 5:72 — "Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary"

Both verses open with the same formula.

They have certainly disbelieved who say, "Allāh is the Messiah, the son of Mary" while the Messiah has said, "O Children of Israel, worship Allāh, my Lord and your Lord."³  Abdel Haleem and Pickthall render the opening the same way:  "Those who say, 'God is the Messiah, son of Mary,' have defied God";  "They surely disbelieve who say:  Lo!  Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary."³

At first glance this looks like a plain misreport.  Christians do not say "God is Jesus" in the sense of identifying the whole Godhead with the Son.  The creed says the Son is God;  it does not say God is the Son, because those are different statements, and the second one collapses the Father and the Spirit into the Son.

But this is the one place where the Quran's formula lands close to something real.  Al-Razi identifies the speakers as the Jacobites — the Miaphysite churches — "because they say that Mary gave birth to a god," and suggests their doctrine means God indwelt the essence of Jesus and united with it.⁷  He is describing the Christian language of his own world accurately.  Chalcedon's own definition, in 451, confirmed that Christ was "born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood."⁴  Strip off the last four words, which is exactly what happens when a phrase travels by word of mouth, and "Mary is the Mother of God" becomes "God is the son of Mary."

So Quran 5:17 and 5:72 are not describing nothing.  They are describing real Christian speech with its qualifier missing.  That is a much weaker charge against the Quran than 5:116 carries, and this article does not press it.

Quran 9:30 — "the Jews say, 'Ezra is the son of Allāh'"

The Jews say, "Ezra is the son of Allāh";  and the Christians say, "The Messiah is the son of Allāh."  That is their statement from their mouths;  they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before [them].²⁴

The Arabic is uzayrun ibnu llah.  Abdel Haleem and Pickthall both render it "Ezra is the son of God."²⁴  This verse is included here because it is the clearest test case available:  a checkable claim about what a second religious community says, made by a text whose own community had that community living next door.

No Jewish source says it.  Reynolds states the problem in one sentence:  "Jews do not consider Ezra 'son of God' in any way parallel to the way Christians consider Christ the 'Son of God' (and indeed Ezra is far from the most important personality in Jewish teaching)."¹⁹  The nearest rabbinic material is a Tannaitic saying at Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 21b:  "Rabbi Yosei says:  Ezra was suitable, given his greatness, for the Torah to be given by him to the Jewish people, had Moses not come first."²⁵  That is high praise.  It is not sonship.

The Muslim tradition itself is uneasy.  Al-Tabari opens by saying the exegetes disagreed about who said it, and prints four reports that do not agree.  The first is that it was one man's opinion, not a community's:  Abd Allah ibn Ubayd ibn Umayr says "one man said it," and names him Phinehas.²⁶  A second report, going through Ibn Ishaq to Ibn Abbas, has four named Medinan Jews challenge Muhammad:  "How shall we follow you when you have abandoned our qibla, and you do not claim that Uzayr is the son of God?"²⁶  A third, also from Ibn Abbas, explains the belief by a legend in which Israel lost the Torah, Ezra prayed, a light entered him, and the restored text matched the recovered ark — "so they said:  By God, Ezra was given this only because he is the son of God."²⁶  The Study Quran summarises the position honestly:  it "was the opinion of one Jew," or of "some Jews at one time," and "this belief eventually disappeared."¹³

The strongest Muslim answer is that the verse addresses a specific local group, and it deserves its force.  The Quran is not a survey of Jewish theology.  It is speech addressed to a particular audience in Medina, and the earliest Muslim reports read it exactly that way — one man, or a few men, in one city, saying one thing in one argument.  If some Medinan Jews said something like this in a dispute with Muhammad, the verse reports an event and not a doctrine, and the modern reader's inability to find it in the Mishnah proves nothing about a seventh-century street argument.  That answer is a good one and this article does not try to knock it down.

The residue after granting it is still real, and it is narrow.  The verse does not say "some Jews in Medina said."  It says wa-qalati l-yahud, "and the Jews said," in a sentence whose second half — "and the Christians say, 'The Messiah is the son of Allāh'" — is a true and documentable statement about a whole community.  The two halves of one verse are built in parallel, and one half is checkable against a mountain of Christian texts while the other is checkable against nothing at all.  That asymmetry inside a single verse is the whole of the point, and it is a smaller point than Christian polemic usually makes of it.

And the Christian should not press this too hard, because Reynolds offers a way out that is not friendly to either apologetic.  He suggests uzayr may not be Ezra at all — that it could be a garbled form of the fallen angel Azazel or Azael of 1 Enoch, whom some Jews of the period did treat as a heavenly power, with the final l misread or misheard as r.¹⁹  That is speculation and he says so.  But it is enough to keep "the Quran got Judaism wrong" from being a closed case.

Quran 6:101 and 19:88–93 — a son requires a wife

The Quran's argument against divine sonship is stated most fully in two places.

[He is] Originator of the heavens and the earth.  How could He have a son when He does not have a companion [i.e., wife] and He created all things?¹¹

And they say, "The Most Merciful has taken [for Himself] a son."  You have done an atrocious thing.  The heavens almost rupture therefrom and the earth splits open and the mountains collapse in devastation.  That they attribute to the Most Merciful a son.  And it is not appropriate for the Most Merciful that He should take a son.  There is no one in the heavens and earth but that he comes to the Most Merciful as a servant.²⁷

The word in both places is walad, offspring or child, not ibn, son in the relational sense.  Abdel Haleem makes the difference visible in English, translating 19:88 as "The Lord of Mercy has offspring" where Saheeh International and Pickthall both write "son."²⁷  The word for what God does not have at 6:101 is sahiba — a female companion, a consort.  Quran 72:3 pairs the same two:  God "has not taken a wife or a son," ma ttakhadha sahibatan wa-la waladan.²⁸

The frame is unmistakable once the neighbouring verses are read.  Quran 6:100, one verse earlier, is about pagans who "have fabricated for Him sons and daughters."²⁹  Quran 16:57 is about people who "attribute to Allāh daughters."³⁰  Quran 37:149–152 asks the Meccans, "Does your Lord have daughters while they have sons?" and says "it is out of their [invented] falsehood that they say, 'Allāh has begotten.'"³¹  The argument being run is the argument against the Arabian goddesses.  Divine sonship gets refuted the way a claim about procreation gets refuted:  by pointing out that there is no mother.

That is not a Christian doctrine.  Not one Christian in the seventh century held that God had a consort.  The section below on what the creeds say sets out what Christians did hold, and how early they said it.

What the classical commentators took these verses to mean

The Muslim exegetical tradition did not settle on one reading.  It preserved both, and it is more interesting than the popular argument on either side.

The earliest surviving commentary already reads the three as God, Jesus and Mary — and names a church

Muqatil ibn Sulayman al-Balkhi (d. 150/767) wrote the earliest continuous commentary on the whole Quran that survives.  His standing has to be stated before he is used, because it is poor.  The hadith critics attacked him hard;  he was accused of transmitting from unreliable sources and of anthropomorphism, and no Sunni school treats him as an authority in law.  Western scholars use him anyway, and so does this article, for one narrow purpose:  he is the earliest witness available to how these verses were read, and a commentary nobody had a motive to protect is a good witness to what was ordinary rather than to what was defensible.

His whole gloss on Quran 5:73 is one line:

"They have certainly disbelieved who say that Allāh is the third of three" — meaning the Melkites.  They said:  God, the Messiah, and Mary.⁵

That is the God-Jesus-Mary reading in the middle of the second Islamic century, about 135 years after Muhammad died, and it is attached to a named church.  The Melkites are the Chalcedonian Greek Orthodox, one of the three communions Griffith identifies in Arabia's neighbourhood.¹⁰  They confessed the creed of 381 and they did not put Mary in the Trinity.  So the earliest Muslim commentary on the verse does two things at once:  it shows that the Marian reading is old rather than a later invention, and it shows that reading being aimed at a body whose actual confession is on record and does not match.

Al-Tabari records the Christian creed almost correctly, and then records the other reading beside it

Al-Tabari (d. 310/923) wrote the earliest of the great comprehensive commentaries to survive entire.  Earlier tafsir works do survive — Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d. 150/767) and Abd al-Razzaq (d. 211/827) among them — but al-Tabari's is the vast compendium that collects the earlier reports with their chains and weighs them, and it is the one everything later depends on.  On Quran 5:73 he begins by identifying the speakers, and then says something that ought to be better known:

This was a doctrine held by the mass of the Christians before the Jacobites, the Melkites and the Nestorians split apart.  They used to say, as has reached us:  "The eternal God is one substance comprising three hypostases — a Father who begets and is not begotten, a Son begotten who does not beget, and a zawj traced between the two."⁶

The first two clauses of that formula are the Nicene Creed.  "Begotten, not made" is in the creed of 381;⁴  "The Father is made of none:  neither created, nor begotten.  The Son is of the Father alone:  not made, nor created:  but begotten" is in the Athanasian Creed.⁴  Al-Tabari has the terms jawhar for substance and aqanim for hypostases — the standard Syriac-derived Arabic vocabulary for exactly what the Greek creeds say.  A Muslim writing in Baghdad around the year 900 had the doctrine right.

The third clause is obscure and this article will not pretend otherwise.  The Arabic is wa-zawjan mutatabba'atan baynahuma.  Zawj ordinarily means a spouse or one of a pair;  mutatabba'a is from a root meaning to follow or trace.  The most natural reading of the phrase in Arabic is something like "a consort traced between the two," which is not what any Christian said about the Holy Spirit.  A reader who wants the charitable reading can take it as a clumsy rendering of procession — the Spirit proceeding from the Father.  Either way, the pattern is the one this whole article keeps running into.  The Father and the Son came through the Arabic sources intact.  The third person did not.

Immediately after that paragraph, al-Tabari prints the rival reading as a numbered report:

12294 — Muhammad ibn al-Husayn told us:  Ahmad ibn al-Mufaddal told us:  Asbat told us, from al-Suddi:  "They have certainly disbelieved who say, 'Indeed, Allāh is the third of three'" — he said:  the Christians said, "He and the Messiah and his mother," and that is the saying of God Most High, "Did you say to the people, 'Take me and my mother as two gods besides Allāh?'"⁶

Al-Suddi (d. 127/745) is an early Kufan exegete.  Mujahid (d. c. 104/722) is reported to the same effect in the next line.⁶  So within roughly a century of Muhammad, the reading "the three are God, Jesus and Mary" was already in circulation among Muslim commentators, and it was grounded on Quran 5:116, exactly as a modern reader would ground it.

Al-Razi reports the doctrine accurately and rejects it as illogical, not as a misunderstanding

Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1210) is the most philosophically rigorous of the classical commentators, and on Quran 5:73 he sets out two routes.

The first is al-Suddi's:  some commentators say the three meant are God, Mary and Jesus, "and what confirms this is God's saying to the Messiah, 'Did you say to the people, take me and my mother as two gods besides Allāh?'"⁷

The second route is the accurate one, and it is worth quoting at length:

The second route:  the mutakallimun have reported of the Christians that they say:  one substance, three hypostases — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and these three are one God, just as "the sun" is a name that takes in the disc, the ray and the heat.  And they mean by the Father the Essence, by the Son the Word, and by the Spirit the Life;  and they affirmed the Essence, the Word and the Life.⁷

That is not a caricature.  It is a competent summary of Trinitarian theology in the vocabulary of Islamic kalam, produced by a Muslim scholar nearly six hundred years after Muhammad, and it correctly names the Holy Spirit as the third.  Al-Razi then adds his own verdict, and it is severe:

Know that this is known to be false by the self-evidence of reason, for three cannot be one and one cannot be three;  and there is not seen in the world a doctrine more corrupt or more evidently false than the doctrine of the Christians.⁷

Note precisely what al-Razi is doing.  He is not saying that Christians worship three gods and are confused about it.  He is saying that he understands what they claim and thinks it is a contradiction.  That is a philosophical objection to the doctrine of the Trinity, and it deserves a philosophical answer.  It is not evidence that the Quran misdescribed anything.  It is evidence that by al-Razi's day, around the year 1200, the tradition knew perfectly well what the doctrine was.

The Study Quran summarises al-Razi's position the same way:  he "understood the three persons in the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity to represent for Christians three aspects of God, respectively:  His Essence, His Word, and His Life," and this "puts trinitarian doctrine in terms that make some sense in relation to the Islamic view of God's Essence and Attributes, but it does not persuade him to view this doctrine as acceptable."¹³

Ibn Kathir names the three churches and reads 5:116 as a rebuke to Christians in general

Ibn Kathir (d. 774/1373) is the most widely read commentator in modern Sunni Islam.  On Quran 5:72–73 the Darussalam English abridgement has him say that "the Christians such sects as Monarchite, Jacobite and Nestorite are disbelievers, those among them who say that Isa is Allah," and then report both readings of "third of three": "Mujahid and several others said that this Ayah was revealed about the Christians in particular. As-Suddi and others said that this Ayah was revealed about takingIsa and his mother as gods besides Allah, thus making Allah the third in a trinity."³²

On Quran 5:116 he leaves no ambiguity about the addressee:  God speaks to Jesus "in the presence of those who worshipped `Isa and his mother as gods besides Allah," and "this is a threat and a warning to Christians, chastising them in public, as Qatadah and others said."³²  Not to a sect.  To Christians.

Al-Jalalayn, the short commentary that most Muslim students meet first, is reported by Reynolds as reading Quran 5:73 to condemn those who say God is one of three gods, "the other two being Jesus and his mother."¹⁹

On Quran 5:116 the commentators cannot agree when the conversation happens

A small point, but it shows how little the tradition had to work with.  Al-Tabari records four reports.  Al-Suddi says God said it to Jesus when He raised him, in this world, because "the Christians said what they said, and claimed that Jesus commanded them to do so."³³  Ibn Jurayj says it happens on the Day of Resurrection, in front of everyone, so that those who said what they said about Jesus would learn they had been speaking falsehood.³³  A report from Maysara says Jesus' joints trembled and he feared that he might have said it.³³  Qatada says it is the Day of Resurrection, and points to the next verse, "This is a Day on which the truthful will profit from their truth."³³

If the verse had a known and specific target — a named group, a place, an incident — the earliest exegetes were the people who would have preserved it.  They did not.

On divine sonship the commentators read the Quran biologically, and say so

Al-Tabari on Quran 6:101:

"How could He have a child when He has no consort" — a child is only from a male and a female, and it is not fitting that God, glory be to Him, should have a consort, so that He should have a child.¹²

Al-Tabari on Quran 4:171, explaining why "Allāh is but one God" follows the command not to say three:

Because whoever has a child is not a god.  And likewise whoever has a consort, it is not permissible that he should be a god who is worshipped.  Rather God, to whom divinity and worship belong, is one God, worshipped, having no child, no parent, no consort, and no partner.²³

Ibn Kathir on the same verse:  "do not lie and claim that Allah has a wife or a son."³²

The Study Quran spells the reasoning out at Quran 6:101 in modern prose, citing al-Razi and al-Zamakhshari:

In v. 101, the impossibility of God having a child is argued on the basis that He has no consort (Ṣāḥibah), meaning no female partner through whom He could beget offspring (see 72:3). … Finally, siring offspring is a bodily process, requiring that "part" of the male body (namely, sperm) be separated from him and transferred to the body of the female;  since God has no body and no "parts," such a process cannot be ascribed to Him.¹³

That is the classical Islamic argument against the divine sonship of Christ, stated as clearly as it can be stated.  Every step of it is one Christians accept.

What the creeds actually say

The Christian doctrine of God is not a matter of opinion or of local custom.  It was fixed in council, in writing, under anathema, more than two centuries before Muhammad was born.  The three Christian communions in and around Arabia disagreed about Christology — how the divine and the human unite in Christ — and did not disagree about the Trinity.¹⁰  Four texts settle what the Quran's target should have been.

The Nicene Creed of 325, expanded at Constantinople in 381, is the confession of every church discussed in this article.  In the received English of the Western churches:

I believe in one God the Father Almighty;  Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.  And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds [God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance [essence] with the Father.⁴

And on the third person:

And [I believe] in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life;  who proceedeth from the Father [and the Son];  who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified;  who spake by the Prophets.⁴

Three things are in that creed and nowhere in the Quran's account of it.  The creed begins with one God.  It says the Son is "begotten, not made" and "of one substance" with the Father — which is a denial that he is a second god beside the first.  And it names the Holy Spirit as the third, and says the Spirit is worshipped together with the Father and the Son.  Mary is not in the creed at all.

The Definition of Chalcedon, 451, is the text that defined the Melkite position and that the other two communions did not receive, so it marks the boundary of the argument that actually divided Christians in the region.  Schaff notes that its four adverbs were aimed in two directions at once:  "without confusion, without conversion or change" against Eutychianism, and "without division, without separation" against Nestorianism.⁴  Schaff is careful to separate Eutychians from Miaphysites — the Eutychians taught that Christ's humanity was absorbed into his divinity, and the Miaphysites rejected that absorption while still teaching one composite nature — and it is the Miaphysites whom Arabic writers call Jacobites.  It confesses Christ

perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood;  truly God and truly man … consubstantial [coessential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood;  in all things like unto us, without sin;  begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood.⁴

Note the four last words.  Chalcedon does call Mary Theotokos, "the Mother of God" — and then immediately restricts it:  according to the Manhood.  Schaff's own comment on the title is worth quoting because he is a Protestant and hostile to Marian devotion:  the term "is directed against Nestorius, and was meant originally not so much to exalt the Virgin Mary, as to assert the true divinity of Christ and the realness of the Incarnation," and yet "there is no doubt … that the unscriptural terms ϑεοτόκος, Dei genitrix, Deipara, mater Dei, which remind one of the heathen mothers of gods, have greatly promoted Mariolatry."⁴

The Athanasian Creed states the anti-tritheist point more bluntly than any other creed:

So the Father is God:  the Son is God:  and the Holy Ghost is God.  And yet they are not three Gods:  but one God. … So are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion:  to say, There be [are] three Gods, or three Lords.⁴

And, against any reading of "the third of three" as a ranking:  "in this Trinity none is afore, or after another:  none is greater, or less than another."⁴

Honesty requires a caveat here.  The Athanasian Creed is a Latin text of the Western church, probably fifth or sixth century, and it was not received in the Greek and Syriac East where Muhammad's Christian neighbours lived.  It is quoted because it says crisply what the Eastern creeds say more slowly, not because Arabian Christians recited it.

And John of Damascus, who is the best witness available for what Christians in the Arabic-speaking world were actually saying to Muslims, because he lived among them.  He was a Christian official in the Umayyad administration in Damascus and wrote his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith around 743, roughly a century after Muhammad.  On the begetting of the Son:

For in God, Who is without time and beginning, passionless, not liable to flux, incorporeal, alone and without end, generation is without time and beginning, passionless and not liable to flux, nor dependent on the union of two … independent of the union of two again because He is incorporeal but also because He is the one and only God, and stands in need of no co-operation.¹⁴

And on how the divine begetting differs from the human:

But with man clearly it is otherwise, for generation is with him a matter of sex, and destruction and flux and increase and body clothe him round about, and he possesses a nature which is male or female.  For the male requires the assistance of the female.¹⁴

That is the same argument the Quran makes, and it reaches the opposite conclusion.  Quran 6:101 says God cannot have a child because He has no consort.  John of Damascus says the Son's generation is "not dependent on the union of two" precisely because God is incorporeal.  The Quran treats "no consort, therefore no son" as decisive.  The Christian treats "no consort" as true and irrelevant, because the sonship claimed was never a claim about consorts.

Which means that Quran 6:101, 19:88–93, 39:4 and 72:3 do not touch the Christian doctrine.  They answer a doctrine about divine procreation — the doctrine the pagan Meccans held about the daughters of Allah, which Quran 37:149–152 and 16:57 attack in the same words.  Against Christianity, the argument misses by a wide margin, and it misses because it is aimed somewhere else.

Two qualifications, because this argument is often overstated.  First, the Quran does not read sonship physically everywhere.  Quran 43:81 says, "If the Most Merciful had a son, then I would be the first of [his] worshippers,"³⁴ and Quran 39:4 says God "could have chosen from what He creates whatever He willed"³⁵ — neither of which is about biology.  Quran 9:30 uses ibn, "son," not walad, "offspring."  So "the Quran only understands physical sonship" is false as a general claim.  Second, the Christian claim that the Son is "begotten" of the Father is genuinely hard, and Christians have needed centuries of argument to say what it means and does not mean.  A reader who finds the Quran's objection crude should notice that Arius found the same objection compelling, and Arius was a Christian priest.

Which Christians were actually there?

The whole argument turns on this question, and it can be answered from the evidence rather than guessed at.

Sidney Griffith, a Catholic University of America scholar who has spent his career on the Christian Arabic sources, sets out the finding in The Bible in Arabic (Princeton University Press, 2013).  On the communities:

it seems clear from these sources that the major Christian communities who made headway among the Arabs in the several centuries just prior to the rise of Islam were the so-called Melkites, Jacobites, and Nestorians.  Their principal ecclesiastical language was Syriac, or Christian Palestinian Aramaic among the Melkites, albeit that their ecclesial identities were largely determined by the positions they adopted in the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries.¹⁰

Griffith adds that in South Arabia there was also a significant Ethiopian presence, "and while their Christological sympathies were with the Jacobites and the Copts of Egypt, their ecclesiastical language was Geʾez."¹⁰  Christians were massacred at Najran in the 520s under the Jewish Himyarite king Yusuf, an event that produced a large Syriac martyr literature and brought Arabian affairs to the notice of the wider Christian world.¹⁰

Then the sentence that closes the door on the Collyridian argument:

The historical record preserves no memory of any other significant Christian presence among the Arabs or in their environs in the crucial period from the fifth century to the first third of the seventh century.  In particular … there is no indisputable documentary evidence for the presence of any notable Jewish Christian group thriving in Arabia in this period.  Modern scholars who have postulated such a presence have done so, we shall argue, on the basis of extrapolations from their theological interpretations of certain passages in the Arabic Qurʾān.¹⁰

Read the last sentence twice, because it is a trap that catches both sides.  If you infer a Marian sect from Quran 5:116, and then explain Quran 5:116 by that sect, you have argued in a circle.  That is what a great deal of Christian apologetics on this verse does.

What follows from Griffith's finding is simple.  Melkites, Jacobites and Nestorians disagreed violently about how the two natures unite in Christ.  They did not disagree about the Trinity.  All three confessed the Nicene Creed of 381 — Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God.  None of the three put Mary in the Godhead.  So the doctrine condemned at Quran 5:116 was not held by any of the Christian bodies in or near Arabia at the time it was condemned.

The honest counterweight.  Griffith's own account has a real difficulty attached to it:  there is no positive documentary evidence for organised Christian communities in the Hijaz itself.  Nicolai Sinai, arguing against the scholars who conclude from this that the Quran was not produced in the Hijaz, concedes the point at full strength:  "There is, admittedly, no positive evidence at the current time that the Ḥijāz was indeed a significant target of Christian missionary efforts."³⁶  Which cuts both ways.  It means the Quran's picture of Christianity may reflect a thin and second-hand acquaintance — which helps explain a misdescription.  It also means nobody can prove which Christians, if any, were in the room.

The Collyridian claim, and why this article will not use it

The standard Christian answer to Quran 5:116 is that Muhammad ran into a heretical sect who worshipped Mary — the Collyridians, named from the Greek kollyris, a small loaf or cake, because they are said to have offered Mary bread.  The sect is known from one source:  Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403), Panarion 79.

The claim fails in four separate ways, and any one of them would be enough.  A fifth point follows, and it shows that the Christian case is better off without the sect than with it.

First, Epiphanius does not know what they believed.  Mohsen Goudarzi's study of this material, published in the Journal of Late Antiquity in 2025, traces the shift inside Panarion 79 itself.  Epiphanius first accuses them of offering Mary the Eucharist and of making offerings "in Mary's name."⁹  Then he says the practice is heretical either way — whether they "offer Mary the loaf as though in worship of her" or whether they "mean to offer this rotten fruit on her behalf."⁹  Goudarzi's conclusion:  "It appears, then, that Epiphanius was not sure how the Collyridians conceptualized their worship."⁸  A hostile heresiographer who cannot say what his opponents thought is not a witness to their doctrine.

Second, if they existed, what they did stopped being heresy almost immediately.  Goudarzi quotes Stephen Shoemaker, whose work on the early Marian cult is the standard treatment:  the putative Collyridians "were simply a little ahead of the curve:  only half a century later their veneration of the Virgin would likely have placed them within the mainstream of Christian piety."⁸  A group whose distinctive practice becomes normal within fifty years was not holding a distinctive doctrine.

Third, and decisively, there is no trace of them in seventh-century Arabia.  Epiphanius places them in Arabia in the fourth century.  Nothing connects them to Muhammad's world three centuries later.  Griffith's finding, quoted above, is that the record preserves no memory of any other significant Christian presence among the Arabs in the period from the fifth century to the first third of the seventh, and that scholars who posit one are reading it out of the Quran.¹⁰

Fourth, the scholar who states the Christian side of this case most sharply also says the sect is unnecessary.  Reynolds, having laid out both the "Arabia is the mother of heresies" tradition and the Collyridian material, writes:  "None of this speculation is necessary.  Verse 116 need not be a precise record of the doctrines held by the Christians in the Qurʾān's immediate context."¹⁹

Fifth, and this one is a gain rather than a loss.  The text the Collyridian argument rests on is itself a witness against the doctrine Quran 5:116 describes.  Epiphanius is writing about Arabia, in the fourth century, and what he says in the same chapter is:  "Mary should be honored, but the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit should be worshiped;  no one should worship Mary."⁹  He names the three, and Mary is not one of them.  He also denies that the Incarnation was "from a virgin who is worshiped, or to make her God, or to have us make offerings in her name."  So a Christian who reaches for Epiphanius to explain Quran 5:116 is reaching for a bishop whose own point is that Christians do not put Mary in the Trinity — which is the article's thesis, stated by a fourth-century witness, and does not need the sect at all.

So the Collyridian argument is retired here, and a Christian who uses it should stop.  It converts a strong argument — that no church taught what Quran 5:116 condemns — into a weak one, by resting the strong argument on a sect that cannot be shown to have been anywhere near the people the Quran was talking to.  The strong argument does not need it.

Two further names sometimes appear in this discussion and both should be handled with the same care.  The Shia commentator al-Tusi (d. 460/1067) reports a Christian informant's account of a past group called the Maryamiyya who considered Mary a goddess;  Ibn Hazm (d. 456/1064) refers to a group called the Barbaraniyya and says they have died out.⁸  Both are late Muslim reports of extinct groups.  Neither produces a text.

The best explanation on the table, and it is not comfortable for either side

If not a sect, then what?  Goudarzi's answer is the most persuasive one currently available, and it is worth taking seriously precisely because it is not a Christian answer.

His thesis:  the Quran is criticising worship, not doctrine.  In his words, Quran 5:116 "seems to refer not to official belief in Mary as a person of the Trinity but rather to her worship next to that of Christ — and perhaps especially to the suspicion that some Christians made offerings (including the Eucharist) to Mary during her festivals.  If so, then what the surah criticizes in Q 5:116 is not the standard doctrinal Trinity but rather what can be called the devotional or cultic Trinity of Father, Son, and Mary."⁸

The evidence he assembles for that is strong.  By the early seventh century Marian feasts were kept widely;  the Eucharist was celebrated at them;  worshippers brought offerings to Mary's churches and asked for her intercession.  And in late antiquity sacrifice was understood as an act owed to God alone.  Goudarzi's two epigraphs make the point without further argument.  Augustine of Hippo (d. 430):  "no one has ever claimed to sacrifice except to that Being whom he knew or thought or pretended to be God."  Epiphanius:  "There is no commandment to [offer] the Eucharist even to a man, [as though] to God, let alone to a woman."⁸  Both quotations were checked against the sources themselves and not only against Goudarzi;  the Epiphanius sentence stands at Panarion 79.7.5, Williams p. 643.⁹

Goudarzi's closing statement is the one an honest Christian has to sit with:

Considering these historical precedents, it is tenable to view cultic devotion to Mary as the reason behind the qur'anic claim of taking her as a goddess. … The same focus on rituals of worship may explain why the Qur'an does not mention or criticize the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the official Trinity, because the Holy Spirit was not a major object of practical Christian devotion in late antiquity.⁸

The missing Holy Spirit is the single most informative fact in the argument

Here is the datum both sides should build on.

The Quran attacks the divinity of Jesus in at least half a dozen places.  It attacks the veneration of Mary at 5:116 and implies it at 5:75.  It attacks rabbis and monks being taken as lords at 9:31.  It never once criticises the Christian belief that the Holy Spirit is God.  It never lists the Spirit among the "three."  It uses the phrase ruh al-qudus, the Holy Spirit, exactly four times — Quran 2:87, 2:253, 5:110 and 16:102 — and in three of the four it is something God strengthens Jesus with, not a person of God.³⁷  Sahih International glosses it at 2:87 as "[i.e., the angel Gabriel]," which is the majority classical identification and is the translators' addition, not the Arabic.

That silence is very hard to explain on the theory that the Quran simply had a garbled creed.  If the author of the Quran had heard a mangled Trinity and was correcting it, the Spirit would be somewhere in the wreckage — misplaced, misnamed, condemned by the wrong title.  Instead the Spirit is absent from the polemic entirely and present elsewhere in the text with a different job.

Goudarzi's explanation accounts for the silence exactly.  Late antique Christians did not build shrines to the Holy Spirit, did not make pilgrimages to them, did not bring offerings to the Spirit, and did not commonly invoke the Spirit for relief.  The Spirit was named in the Eucharistic prayers, but those prayers address the Father and are about the Son.  Goudarzi's summary is that among the three persons the Spirit was the only one to remain "without a personal face."⁸  A polemicist working from a botched creed would not produce that pattern.  An observer describing what he saw people doing would.

So the Muslim has the better of this particular exchange, and the Christian should concede it.  The pattern of the Quran's Christian polemic tracks the pattern of seventh-century Christian devotion, not the pattern of seventh-century Christian doctrine.  That is a real result and it counts against the crude version of the Christian argument.

But it does not rescue the verses, for two reasons.

First, the verses say belief, not practice.  Quran 5:73 says "they have certainly disbelieved who say" — qalu, they said.  Quran 9:30 says "that is their statement from their mouths" — a claim about words, twice over.  Quran 4:171 says "do not say."  These are statements about what people assert.  If the real target was practice, then the Quran has described a practice in the vocabulary of doctrine, and it has done so repeatedly, and the classical commentators who read it as doctrine were reading it the obvious way.

Second, the fix costs the Muslim something.  A revelation whose criticisms of another religion track that religion's popular devotion rather than its actual teaching is behaving exactly like a well-informed seventh-century observer.  That is not a criticism of a seventh-century observer.  It is a problem for the claim that the observer is God.  God is not restricted to what the crowd at a shrine looks like it is doing.  The whole force of Goudarzi's argument — which is a good argument — is that the Quran sees Christianity "from below," in the phrase he borrows from Jack Tannous.⁸  Seeing a religion from below is what human beings do.

What the Quran gets right about Christianity, which is a great deal

A Christian who only lists what the Quran gets wrong about Christianity has misrepresented the Quran.  Set the affirmations out plainly, because they are remarkable and because they are the reason a conversation is possible at all.

The virgin birth, affirmed twice, in two independent narratives.  Quran 3:45–47 has the angels tell Mary that God gives her "good tidings of a word from Him, whose name will be the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary,"¹⁵ and when she asks how she can have a child when no man has touched her, she is told that God creates what He wills.  Quran 19:16–22 gives the fuller narrative:  Mary withdraws, the angel comes to announce "a pure boy," she protests that no man has touched her and that she has not been unchaste, and she conceives.¹⁶  No scripture outside the Bible affirms the virgin birth of Jesus except this one.  Judaism does not.  A Muslim who denies the virgin birth is contradicting his own book.

The title Messiah.  The Quran calls Jesus al-Masih eleven times.  Muhammad is never called it.  Nobody else in the Quran is called it.  Al-Tabari derives the word from masaha, to wipe or anoint, and explains that God named him so "because He purified him from sins."²³

A word from God and a spirit from Him.  Quran 4:171 calls Jesus "His word which He directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from Him."²  Sahih International's bracket is the translators';  the Arabic is wa-ruhun minhu, "and a spirit from Him."  Abdel Haleem renders it plainly:  "His word, directed to Mary, a spirit from Him."  The Study Quran, a Muslim work, is unusually candid about how far this goes:

while all created beings are brought into existence through God's Word, Christ alone is specifically identified as "a Word from God."  Some might argue, therefore, that Jesus, by virtue of being identified as God's Word, somehow participates (uniquely) in the Divine Creative Command, although this is not the traditional Islamic understanding of Jesus' identification as a Word from Him (3:45).¹³

Miracles, including raising the dead.  Quran 3:49 and 5:110 have Jesus heal the blind from birth and the leper, form a bird from clay and breathe life into it, and raise the dead — each time with the qualifier bi-idhni llah, "by permission of Allāh."¹⁷  The Quran gives Muhammad no comparable list.  Where the Quran's opponents demand a sign from him, its answer is that the Quran itself is the sign.  This is a point about the Quran and not about Muhammad:  the hadith collections report many miracles of his, and a Christian who says "Muhammad admitted he worked no miracles" is wrong.

Sinlessness, and the asymmetry with Muhammad.  This is the strongest of the affirmations, and it has to be stated carefully because it is usually overstated.

The Quran never attributes sin to Jesus.  It calls him at his announcement ghulaman zakiyya, "a pure boy."¹⁶  Meanwhile the Quran twice commands Muhammad to seek forgiveness for his own sin.  Quran 40:55:  "ask forgiveness for your sin."  Quran 47:19:  "ask forgiveness for your sin and for the believing men and believing women."  Those two verses carry the imperative wa-staghfir li-dhanbika, and a search of the whole Arabic text finds no third place where Muhammad is told to seek forgiveness for his own dhanb.  A third verse is often added to the list and should not be:  Quran 48:2, "that Allāh may forgive for you what preceded of your sin and what will follow," is a promise about what God will do, not a command.¹⁸  Sahih al-Bukhari 6307 has Muhammad say, "By Allah!  I ask for forgiveness from Allah and turn to Him in repentance more than seventy times a day."³⁸

And the sharpest item is inside the Sunni canon.  Sahih al-Bukhari 4712, the intercession hadith, has the crowds on the Day of Judgement go from prophet to prophet, and each names the sin that disqualifies him.  Adam:  "He forbade me (to eat of the fruit of) the tree, but I disobeyed Him."  Noah, Abraham — "I had told three lies" — Moses:  "I killed a person whom I had not been ordered to kill."  Then:  "Jesus will not mention any sin," and sends them to Muhammad, of whom the crowds say, "Allah forgave your early and late sins."³⁹

Four qualifications keep that from being overstated, and they should be printed with it.  Jesus is not unique in receiving purity language — Quran 19:13 says God gave John the Baptist "purity," and Quran 19:15 gives John the same peace formula later given to Jesus at 19:33.⁴⁰  Muslim orthodoxy does not concede the premise, because the majority hold all prophets ma'sum, protected from sin, and read Quran 40:55 and 48:2 as devotional rather than confessional.¹³  Other prophets do confess sin in the Quran — Adam at 7:23, Moses at 28:16, Jonah at 21:87, Abraham at 26:82 — so Quran 48:2 does not single Muhammad out;  it puts him in the ordinary prophetic category, from which Jesus is the exception.  And a silence is a silence:  the Quran does not attribute sin to Mary or to John either.  The argument's force is the pattern, not any one item.

Christians praised, by name.  Quran 5:82:  "you will find the nearest of them in affection to the believers those who say, 'We are Christians.'  That is because among them are priests and monks and because they are not arrogant."⁴¹  Quran 3:64 calls the People of the Scripture to "a word that is equitable between us and you."⁴²  And The Study Quran records a legal consequence that Christian polemic almost never mentions:  "Islamic Law never considered Christians to be 'idolaters' (mushrikūn) and accepted Christians' own assertions of monotheistic belief, maintaining the clear distinction the Quran itself makes between idolaters and the People of the Book."¹³

Set all of that beside the argument of this article.  The Quran's picture of Jesus is detailed, respectful, and in several places closer to the Gospels than to anything a hostile source would produce.  Its picture of the Trinity is not.  That combination is exactly what you would expect from a text formed in a world where the story of Jesus circulated widely in preaching and hymn, and where the technical vocabulary of the councils — ousia, hypostasis, homoousios — did not.

The strongest Muslim responses

Four, at full strength, each answered.

"The Quran denies a Trinity that Christians also deny, so there is no misdescription"

This is the strongest response and it is stated best by The Study Quran:  in Quran 4:171 and 5:73 "the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as three 'persons,' or hypostases, 'within' the One God is not explicitly referenced, and the criticism seems directed at those who assert the existence of three distinct 'gods,' an idea that Christians themselves reject."¹³

It works for 4:171 and 5:73 and fails for 5:116.  On the two "three" verses the response is largely right, and this article has already granted it:  neither verse names the three, both are compatible with a condemnation of tritheism, and al-Tabari's own gloss on 4:171 is "do not say the lords are three."²³  A Christian who builds his case on those two verses is on soft ground.

But 5:116 does not say "three."  It names two, and it names them:  Jesus and his mother.  No Christian rejects that as a doctrine, because no Christian ever held it as a doctrine.  There is nothing there for a Christian to agree with the Quran about.

"The Quran is criticising practice, and the practice was real"

Goudarzi's case, set out above.  This article accepts a great deal of it — the Marian devotion was real, the offerings were real, the Eucharist at Marian festivals was real, and the absence of the Holy Spirit from the Quran's polemic is powerful evidence for the reading.

A mainstream Muslim commentary makes the same move, and concedes the Christian premise while doing it.  The Study Quran on Quran 5:116:  "Although traditional Christian doctrine does not view Mary as a member of the Trinity, the Quran may here be referring to certain Orthodox and Roman Catholic doctrines regarding Mary, for example, her identification as Theotokos, or 'Mother of God' … In this verse, however, the Quran may be criticizing not Christian doctrinal formulations concerning Mary, but rather popular Christian exaggerations of Mary's status that approach divinization."¹³  That first clause is the whole Christian argument, printed inside a Muslim work of reference.

Two answers.  The first is textual:  the verses use the vocabulary of assertion, not of practice — qalu, "they said";  qawluhum bi-afwahihim, "their statement from their mouths";  la taqulu, "do not say."  Every classical commentator in this article read them as reports of belief.  If they are reports of practice, the Quran has systematically used the wrong words and its own tradition never noticed.

The second answer is that the reading, if accepted, changes what kind of book the Quran is.  A text whose account of another religion is calibrated to what that religion's worshippers looked like they were doing is a text with a human vantage point.  That is not a knock-down argument — God may choose to address people where they are — but it is the opposite of the apologetic use the argument is usually put to.

"Christians disagree so violently about the Trinity that there is no single target"

True as a description and beside the point as a defence.  The Melkites, Jacobites and Nestorians anathematised each other, and they anathematised each other about Christology — how the divine and human natures are united in Christ — not about the Trinity.  On the Trinity all three said the same thing, because all three confessed the creed of 381.  The disagreement a Muslim can point to is real and is in the wrong department.

"The Christian answer is a technical distinction that ordinary Christians did not observe"

The Christian answer to the Marian charge is the distinction between the worship owed to God alone and the honour paid to creatures — in the Latin terms, latria and dulia.  A Muslim may fairly reply that a distinction the theologians drew and the congregations blurred is not much of a defence.

That reply lands, and Christians have made it against each other.  The Protestant Reformers made exactly this charge against the medieval cult of the saints:  that whatever the schoolmen distinguished, the practice at the shrines was worship.  Schaff, quoted above, says as a Protestant historian that the term Theotokos and its Latin equivalents "have greatly promoted Mariolatry."⁴  A Christian who wants to answer the Quran here has to answer on the ground of practice, and the honest answer is that the churches taught the distinction and often failed to enforce it.

What it does not do is rescue the verse.  Quran 5:116 is not "your people worship her."  It is "did you tell them to take me and my mother as two gods."  That is a charge about what was believed and taught, and the answer to it is that nobody taught it.

Common objections and responses

"Quran 5:116 does not say Christians believe this. It asks Jesus a question, and Jesus says no."

Correct, and this article has said so twice.  The verse is a question with a presupposition.  But a question presupposing a false state of affairs is still a claim about the world.  "Have you stopped beating your wife" is a claim about wife-beating.  And the presupposition is not left hanging:  Quran 5:75 argues against the divinity of Mary and Jesus together, on the ground that they both ate food, which is only an argument if somebody said Mary was more than human.  Ibn Kathir reads 5:116 as a public rebuke "to Christians."³²  Al-Suddi, within a century of Muhammad, reads it as what the Christians said after the ascension.³³  Every classical commentator consulted for this article takes the presupposition as live, and none of them reads the verse as being about a sect.

"The Quran is correcting a later corruption. Original Christianity was unitarian, and the Trinity was invented at Nicaea in 325."

Then the correction is three centuries late, and it corrects the wrong thing.  Nicaea met in 325.  Constantinople met in 381.  Chalcedon met in 451.  Every Christian body in Arabia's neighbourhood in Muhammad's lifetime had held the Nicene faith for over two hundred years.  If the Quran were correcting the Council of Nicaea, it would have to describe what Nicaea decided, and it does not:  Nicaea's fight was about whether the Son is homoousios, of one substance with the Father, and the Quran never mentions it.  What the Quran describes at 5:116 was decided by no council anywhere.

"Christians really did worship Mary, so the Quran was right and this whole article is special pleading."

The practice was real and this article has conceded it at length.  The distinction that matters is between a description of practice and a description of belief, and the Quran's wording is on the belief side every time — qalu, "they said";  dhalika qawluhum bi-afwahihim, "that is their statement from their mouths";  la taqulu, "do not say."  Grant the practice and the charge still lands in the wrong place.

"The Bible caricatures its opponents too, so this is a double standard."

This is the best objection in the list and it should be conceded in part.  Isaiah 44 describes an idol-maker who cuts down a tree, burns half of it for fuel, cooks his dinner over it, and worships the other half:  "And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it.  He prays to it and says, 'Deliver me, for you are my god!'"⁴³  No educated pagan of the period would have recognised that as an account of what he thought an image was.  It is polemical shorthand and it is in the Hebrew Bible.  Anyone who allows Isaiah the licence and denies it to the Quran is applying two standards.

Three things keep the cases apart, and a reader is entitled to weigh them for himself.  First, what is being described.  Isaiah describes a practice — men making images and praying to them — and men did make images and pray to them.  The Quran at 5:116 describes a doctrine.  Second, who is speaking.  In Quran 5:116 the words are put in God's mouth addressing Jesus, and the content of the question is a report about what Jesus' followers believe.  Isaiah 44 is a prophet's sarcasm about carpentry.  Third, what is at stake.  Isaiah is not correcting a scripture.  The Quran presents itself as musaddiq li-ma bayna yadayh, confirming what came before it, and as the final correction of what Jews and Christians got wrong.  A correction has to hit its target more precisely than a taunt does.

And the honest residue:  if the reader concludes that Quran 5:116 is polemical shorthand of the Isaiah 44 kind, that is a coherent position, and Reynolds — who is not defending Islam — comes close to it.  He writes that the Quran "is shaped throughout by the concern of its author(s) with crafting polemical and apologetical messages, even when that involves putting words in its opponents' mouths," and gives Quran 9:30 and 9:31 as his examples.¹⁹  A Christian who takes that route has to accept the cost:  it means the Quran does not always report accurately, which is a strange property for a book its readers hold to be the uncreated speech of God.

"'Third of three' is accurate — Christians do say God is one of three persons."

If that is the reading, then Quran 5:73 is describing the doctrine correctly and condemning it, and the misdescription charge fails at that verse.  This article grants that.  Reynolds thinks the phrase is about Christ rather than about three gods, and translates it literally as "third of three" for that reason.¹⁹  Al-Wahidi thought the phrase was innocent unless three gods were meant.⁷  A Christian arguing from 5:73 alone would be building on sand.  The argument in this article runs on 5:116, where the two named are Jesus and Mary, and no reading makes that a Christian doctrine.

"Christians misrepresent Islam constantly, so this is hypocrisy."

They do, and this series has a list of it.  Christians repeat that Allah was a moon god, that taqiyya licenses lying, that Muslims worship Muhammad, that Islam has no concept of grace, and that the Quran denies Jesus' virgin birth and miracles.  All five are false, and the last one is refuted by the same passages this article has just praised.  None of that changes what the Quran says.  It changes who is entitled to say it, which is a real point about conversation and not a point about evidence.

"The Quran calls Mary the Mother of God too, so it is only using Christian language."

It does not.  The Quran never uses any expression corresponding to Theotokos.  It calls Mary siddiqa, a woman of truth (Quran 5:75), says she and her son ate food, and at Quran 3:42 says God chose her and purified her above the women of the worlds.  The Quran's Mary is honoured and created.  On this point the Quran is a good deal more restrained than the seventh-century churches were.

"It does not matter. The real disagreement is whether Jesus is God, and the Quran says no."

This is the most serious objection and it is right about the stakes.  Whether Jesus is God is the question;  whether the Quran states the doctrine of the Trinity correctly is a question about the Quran.

But it is not a small question about the Quran.  The Muslim claim is not that the Quran is a good seventh-century Arabic sermon.  It is that the Quran is the speech of God, unaltered, delivered through a messenger who added nothing.  A book with that claim, correcting a named religion by name, and getting that religion's central doctrine wrong in a way that its own commentators noticed and split over, has a problem that a book with a lesser claim would not have.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

What would strengthen the Muslim claim, and what this article would accept:

• A pre-Islamic Christian text, in any language, that names Mary as a person of the Trinity or as a deity to be worshipped alongside God. Not a hostile report about a sect; a text from inside such a group. Nothing of the kind is known.
• Documentary evidence for such a group in Arabia between about 500 and 632 — an inscription, a letter, a conciliar condemnation with a date and a place. Griffith's survey found none.¹⁰
• A demonstration that the Arabic of Quran 5:116 will bear a reading about devotional practice rather than doctrinal assertion. Goudarzi's case is historical and contextual; a lexical case would be much stronger, and it has not been made.
• Evidence that some Arabian Christians actually addressed prayer to Mary as God rather than asking her intercession. Marian intercession is documented in quantity. Marian latria is not.
• A pre-Nicene or early Syriac liturgy in which the Trinity is named as Father, Mary and Son. This would settle the matter in the Quran's favour outright.

What would weaken it, and some of it is already in hand:

• Every additional early Christian creed and liturgy that names Father, Son and Holy Spirit and excludes Mary. The list is long and it is uncontested.
• Al-Tabari's and al-Razi's own accurate reports of the doctrine.⁶ If a Muslim scholar in Baghdad around the year 900 could state the Trinity correctly from Christian informants, the information was not hard to get.
• The absence of any asbab al-nuzul report naming a Marian sect. The occasions-of-revelation literature names groups, places, and individuals for hundreds of verses. Al-Wahidi's Asbab al-nuzul carries no entry at all for Quran 5:116 or Quran 5:73, and its entry for Quran 4:171 says only that the verse "was revealed concerning groups of the Christians when they said, 'Jesus is the son of God.'"⁴⁴
• A demonstration that the Quran's Christian material as a whole tracks popular devotion rather than church teaching. This is Goudarzi's own finding, and although he offers it as an explanation, it also establishes that the Quran's vantage point on Christianity is the vantage point of an observer in the street.

What would change nothing either way.  Finding more evidence of Marian devotion in the seventh century.  Everyone already agrees it was enormous.  The dispute is not about how much Mary was venerated.  It is about whether anybody taught that she was God.

Sources