What the Scholars have to Say
I continue (https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/is-god-jesus-and-the-third-of-three-pt-1/)
with my discussion regarding the Quran’s mistaken understanding of the core
doctrines of the Christian faith.
The fact is that scholars and apologists have long recognized
that the Quran is mistaken when it comes to the beliefs of the historic
Christian faith:
“In many passages of the Qur’an Muhammad accuses the Christians
of being Polytheists, on account of their holding to the doctrines of the
Trinity… and the divine sonship of the Lord Jesus. It is evident that Muhammad was mistaken in his
opinion of the doctrine of the Trinity held by Christians,
which he represents as God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary and confounded it with
Tritheism.” (F. A. Klein, The
Religion of Islam (1906) [Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2009], p.
52; bold emphasis ours)
“Into the history and meaning of these controversies we need not
enter further than to indicate their bearing on the situation at the time of
the rise of Muhammad. In the Trinitarian disputes of the fourth century we are
not much interested in this connection. They were bitter enough while they
lasted, and were the occasion of the first manifestation within the Church of
the persecuting spirit which ultimately wrought such havoc. But long before the
rise of Islam the doctrine of the Trinity had been settled, and the dispute had
passed to other subjects. Muhammad
certainly misunderstood the doctrine and regarded it as tritheistic…”
(Richard Bell, The Origin of Islam in its Christian
Environment [Frank Cass, London, UK. 1968],
p. 7; bold emphasis ours)
4. Objection:
God cannot be “Christ, the son of Mary,” because then God would be a creature,
in need of food and shelter, not the sovereign creator of heaven and earth,
beyond all needs.
Response: Christians generally do not say that God
was Christ; I
know of no significant classical theologian who makes that claim.
Instead, Christians say that “Christ was God” (or, to use New Testament
phrases, “God was in Christ”
[see 2 Cor. 5:19] or the eternal “Word became flesh” [John 1:14]). The two claims
– that God was Christ, and Christ was God – seem similar, but are in fact very different.
Christians believe that Christ was fully human, and therefore in need of food
and shelter, as well as fully divine, and therefore of one undivided essence
with God. (Miroslav Volf, Allah:
A Christian Response [HarperOne, 2011], Part III: Critical
Themes: The Trinity and Love, Chapter 7. The One God and the Holy Trinity, p.
134; bold emphasis ours)
Mistakes
About the Trinity
The Quran contains many errors about what Christians believe and
practice. One of the most significant is that the Quran misrepresents the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
Muhammad mistakenly thought that Christians worshiped three
gods: the Father, the Mother (Mary), and the Son (Jesus), (Sura 5:73–75, 116).25
As Richard Bell pointed out:
[Muhammad] never understood the doctrine of the Trinity.26
Encyclopedia Britannica states:
[There are] mistaken concepts of the Trinity in the Quran.27
Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Quran tries to avoid this error by
deliberately mistranslating Sura 5:73.
The Arabic text condemns those who say that “Allah is the third
of three,” that is to say Allah is only one of three gods! Both
Arberry and Pickthall translate this correctly.
Ali mistranslates Sura 5:73 to read:
They do blaspheme who say: God is one of three in a Trinity.
The words “in a Trinity” are not in the Arabic text. Ali
puts it in his translation in an attempt to avoid the rather obvious error that
Christians believe in three gods.
In reality, Christians believe only in one God who is in three
persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They do not believe that
Mary is a part of the Trinity.
Even the Concise Dictionary of Islam admits:
In some cases the “material” which forms the substance of
Quranic narrative, details of the creeds of Christianity and Judaism for
example, does not correspond to those religion’s own understanding of
their beliefs. This could be said, for example, of the notion of the Trinity
found in the Quran, the story of Satan’s refusal to bow down to Adam, the
Docetist view of the crucifixion, all of which can be traced to the dogmas of
Gnostic sects, which are heretical in relationship to orthodox Christianity and
Judaism. The Trinity “seen” in the Quran is not the Trinity of the Apostles
Creed, or of the Nicene Creed.28
The Quran is so clearly erroneous at this point that Muslims
such as Yusuf Ali must mistranslate the Quran to get away from it!
Mistakes
About the “Son” Of God
The Quran also makes the mistake of saying that Christians
believe Jesus is the “Son” of God in the sense that God the “Father” has a male
body and had sexual intercourse with Mary.
In Muhammad’s mind, to say that God had a son was to blaspheme
because it meant that God had sex with a woman (Suras 2:116; 6:100, 101; 10:68;
16:57; 19:35; 23:91; 37:149, 157; 43:16-19).
Christians believe that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was
conceived in her by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35).
Thus Jesus is the “Son” of God, but not in the sexual sense that
Muhammad understood. God the “Father” is not a man and hence does not
have a male body and has not had sex with anyone. The Quran is 100 percent
wrong on this issue.
25 Concise Dictionary of Islam, pp.
229ff.; H Becker, Christianity and Islam, pp. 21ff.
26 Richard Bell, Introduction to the
Quran, p. 141.
27 Encyclopedia Britannica, 12:708.
28 Concise Dictionary of Islam, pp. 229–230. (Dr. Robert A.
Morey, The Islamic
Invasion: Confronting the World’s Fastest Religion [Published
by Christian Scholars Press, Revised 1992], Part Five: The Sacred Book of
Islam, Ten: A Scientific Examination of the Quran, pp. 175-177; underline
emphasis ours)
At the heart of all Muslim misunderstandings of the
Trinity is the
Qur’anic misrepresentation of it as a triad of deities, being Jesus the
Messiah, his mother Mary, and Allah – in that order. The word “Trinity” nowhere
appears in the Qur’an either but it is clear that the
book sets out to oppose Christian belief in a divine threesome, no matter what
that belief ultimately may be. In three places we find this belief attacked.
The first reads Wa
laa taquuluu thalaathah – “And say not ‘three”‘ (Surah 4.171),
an exhortation to Christians not to exaggerate in their beliefs. The word thalauthah is a common Qur’anic word
appearing some nineteen times in the book and it ALWAYS means, quite simply,
the number three…
I have deliberately quoted Professor Arberry’s translation here
rather than Yusuf Ali’s for
the latter appears to have purposefully mistranslated the text.
His rendering of the first part reads “They do blaspheme who say: God is one of
three in a Trinity”. It
is in this conscious mistranslation that the author seeks to hide the Qur’anic
misconception of the Trinity. The Arabic reads that the
unbelievers say innallaaha
thaalithu thalaathah which,
correctly translated, can only mean what Arberry takes it to mean, namely
that Allah is the third (thaalithu) of three (thalaathah), that is, that he is considered
to be the third god in a tritheism. Hence the rebuke in the
next sentence, “No god is there but the One God!” Who, then, are the other two
gods? Two verses further down we find them named:
Christ the son of Mary was no more than an Apostle; many were
the apostles that passed away before him. His mother was a woman of truth. They
both had to eat their (daily) food. See how God cloth make his Signs clear
to them; yet see in what ways they are deluded away from the truth! Surah 5.78
The argument just cannot be missed or mistaken. The Messiah was
only an apostle, his
mother was only a chaste woman, and they both had to eat food
to sustain themselves – how then can they be considered as two gods alongside
Allah? The
Qur’an, therefore, quite obviously takes the Christian belief in a divine
threesome to be a tritheistic belief, an adoration of
three gods being Jesus, Mary and God, and in that order, God clearly being said to be
only the third of the three.
How far the Qur’an is from the true Christian belief in the one true God who
is triune,
the personalities in order being the Father, Son and Holy Spirit…
The third passage of the Qur’an and the only other one which
touches on Christian belief in this connection reads:
And behold! God will say: “O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou
say unto men, ‘Worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of God’?” Surah 5.119
Once again we find the same thing – Jesus and Mary as gods
alongside Allah. The verses following make it quite plain that it is the
Christians, the followers of Jesus, who are charged with holding such a belief
in three gods. Today
Muslim writers resort to all sorts of expedients to get around the plain
declaration of the Qur’an that Christians believe in a tritheism of Jesus, Mary
and Allah. Yusuf Ali’s mistranslation of Surah 5.76 is a good
example where he takes the simple words thaalithu
thalaathah to mean “one of three in a Trinity” instead of what they can only
mean, namely “the third of three”. The great Muslim commentators of earlier
centuries, however, were in no doubt as to what was being opposed in the Qur’an
in the verses we have quoted. They were quite convinced that
Surah 5.78 and Surah 5.119 represented Jesus, Mary and Allah as the Christian
threesome.
These verses are explained by the commentators Jalalu’ddin and
Yahya as being the answer to the statement which Muhammad heard certain Christians
make that there are three Gods, that is to say God the Father, Mary, and Jesus.
(Tisdall, The
Original Sources of the Qur’an, p. 180).
God, Mary and Jesus – these are quite obviously the persons
Muhammad understood as forming the threesome of which he had obviously vaguely
heard and could not fully understand. It is most significant
that all three verses occur in some of the very last surahs of the Qur’an to be
“revealed”, indicating
that it was only late in his mission that he first heard of Christian belief in
a divine threesome. Another great and famous commentator,
Zamakhshari, says on the word thalaathah in
Surah 4.171:
According to the evidence of the Qur’an, the Christians maintain
that God, Christ, and Mary are three gods, and that Christ is the child of God
by Mary, as God says (in the Qur’an): ‘O Jesus son of Mary, didst thou say unto
men: “Take me and my mother as gods, apart from God”?’ (Surah 5.116), or: ‘The
Christians say: “The Messiah is the Son of God”‘ (Surah 9.30). (Gatje, The Qur’an and its Exegesis,
p. 126).
The learned Muslim scholar was in no doubt that the Qur’an was attacking a
tritheism of Jesus, Mary and Allah – a concept indeed far
closer to the pagan triads of old than the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity…
When all is said and done, however, we are left with a patent
error in the Qur’an. Whatever Muslim apologists may say in their attempts to
circumvent this error, it
does not appear to us that an objective study of the three verses quoted can lead
to any other conclusion than that Muhammad had a limited and defective
knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity and mistook it as a tritheism of
Jesus, Mary and Allah.
It is clear from these passages that the whole argument of
Muhammad was against a system of tritheism which he believed to be held by the
Christian Church of his day. He
nowhere says a word which leads us to suppose that he had ever heard of a
Trinity of Persons in the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
His whole attack on the Christian position was based on the supposition
that the Church taught that God had entered into physical relations with Mary,
and that the man Jesus and his mother were therefore associated with God in
worship and adoration. (Gardner, The
Qur’anic Doctrine of God, p. 11).
Nothing but the most profound ignorance of the Bible and of the
true nature of Christianity can account for the fact that Muhammad evidently
believed the Virgin to be one of the Persons in the Holy Trinity.
(Tisdall, The
Religion of the Crescent, p. 169).
From this misconception come all the Muslim arguments against
the Trinity. I have yet to find a Muslim writing on the subject that allows the
possibility that the doctrine is consistent with monotheism. Such an allowance
would be perfectly consistent with the doctrine as it is set forth in the
Bible, but would be inconsistent with the Qur’an’s insistence that the
Christian belief is tritheistic rather than trinitarian, hence the allowance
dare not be made.
There is ample evidence to show that the true doctrine was known
in Arabia and
that Muhammad could have ascertained its real nature. The
Christian King of Yemen, Abraha, who lived and reigned shortly before the time
of Muhammad, wrote an inscription at Marib describing certain events relating
to his conquests in the region. The inscription began with a tribute to the
Trinity.
Arabia was full of heresies, and yet we have epigraphic evidence
that the real doctrine of the Trinity obtained in Arabia, instead of that which
Mohammed asserts the Christians hold. In 1888 Edward Glaser, the explorer,
brought from Mareb, the Sabean capital, a copy of an inscription, telling of
the suppression of a revolt against the Ethiopic rule then established in
Yemen. This inscription, which dates from 542 A. D., opens with the
words: “In the
Power of the All-Merciful, and his Messia and the Holy Ghost“.
(Zwemer, Islam: A
Challenge to Faith, p. 21).
The actual tribute, recorded in basic Arabic consonants only,
reads Rhmnn w mshh
w rh qds (Trimingham, Christianity
Among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times, p. 301) which clearly means
that it was in the power of the “Merciful One” (ar-Rahmann) and his “Messiah” (wal-Mashih) and the
“Holy Spirit” (war-Ruhul-Qudus).
Thus there is clear evidence that the true doctrine of the Trinity was known in
the Arabian Peninsula.
There is no evidence that any Christian sect actually believed
that the Trinity consisted of God, Jesus and Mary, least of all that God was
the third of these three,
although there were a number of sects which venerated Mary almost to the point
of deifying her, such as the Collyridians. The Nestorians, however, widely
distributed in the regions of western Asia, believed that Mary was indeed no
more than a woman “and that it was an abomination to style her, as was the custom
of the church, the Mother of God” (Irving, The Life of Mahomet, p. 51).
Whatever confusion existed about her status among Christians
only seems to have been compounded rather than corrected in the Qur’an.
No Christian should fear making a defence of the doctrine of the
Trinity to Muslims and should always use the opportunity to witness to the
manner in which God has redeemed us through the work of his Son and the
presence of his Spirit in our lives. In fact, once a Muslim is himself put on
to the defensive to explain the Qur’anic teaching on this subject, the
Christian evangelist will find that the doctrine itself can be far more easily
justified than the Qur’anic misconception of it. Our doctrine is the true doctrine,
the true God is indeed the Triune God of the Bible – Father, Son and Holy
Spirit – and we need never fear standing on the rock of this revealed eternal
truth. (John Gilchrist, The
Christian Witness to the Muslim, 8. Objections to Fundamental
Christian Doctrines, A. The Biblical Doctrine of the
Trinity; bold emphasis ours)
And:
Christians do not say
that “Allah is Christ, the son of Mary” as the Qur’an alleges they do (innallaaha huwal Masiihubnu Maryam –
Sura al-Ma’ida 5:72), that
is, that God is Jesus. We believe that God is a Supreme Being
in a threefold unity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that the Son
alone took human form as the man Christ Jesus.
We do believe
that the Son is subject to the authority of the Father (the very titles imply
an equality in essence and nature between them on the one hand and the
subjection of one to the other on the other hand). We do also believe that the
Son was sent into the world according to the Father’s purpose and will, as
Jesus himself said: “I came not of my own accord but he sent me” (John 8:42).
Likewise we accept that he does nothing of his own accord but only what the
Father wills and does and,
because he is the eternal Son of God, has omnipotent power to put this divine
will and activity into effect (John 5:19). These are basic
Christian teachings…
Booklets like The
God that Never Was which
represent Jesus in Christian doctrine as God absolutely, with
no reference to the Father and the Holy Spirit or to his subjection to the
former in authority, misrepresent
Christianity altogether. Such publications accordingly serve no
useful purpose. If Muslims would only assess this doctrine for what it really
is, they would find it not as far removed from their own as they generally
suppose, and would perhaps come to a truer and closer knowledge of who Jesus really is –
not a “god” who “never was” but
the eternal Son from heaven who truly remains the “same yesterday, today and
forever” (Hebrews 13:8). (Gilchrist, Christ in Islam and Christianity:
A comparative study of the Christian and Muslim attitudes to the person of
Jesus Christ, The God That “Never Was”?;
bold emphasis ours)
So much for the Quran being the perfect word of an omniscient God
which is free from all contradictions.
Sources: https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/is-god-jesus-and-the-third-of-three-pt-2/
IHS
