Mary, Sister of Aaron: Difference between revisions

[[bg:Грешки в Корана: Моисей и Аарон – вуйчовци на Иисус]]

{{QualityScore|Lead=3|Structure=4|Content=4|Language=4|References=4}}'''Mary (Miriam) the sister of Aaron''' (and of Moses),  is a phrase used in the [[Quran]] to refer to Mary the mother of [[Jesus]].<ref>{{Quran-range|19|27|34}}</ref> From at least the 8th century, and perhaps as far back as [[Muhammad ibn Abdullah|Muhammad]]'s time, [[Critics of Islam|critics]] have attacked this verse as a simple but revealing error.<ref name=":02">Mughira b. Shu'ba reported: When I came to Najran, they (the Christians of Najran) asked me: You read  "O sister of Harun" (i. e. Hadrat Maryam) in the Qur'an, whereas Moses was born much before Jesus. When I came back to Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) I asked him about that, whereupon he said: The (people of the old age) used to give names (to their persons) after the names of Apostles and pious persons who had gone before them. {{Muslim|25|5326|}}</ref> In [[Arabic]] both Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary the sister of Aaron and Moses are called by the same name, مريم (''Maryam''). Skeptical Jewish and Christian scholars believed that Muhammad had mistaken Jesus' mother for Moses' sister.<ref name=":02" /> While they shared a name, according to the Bible these two women lived more than a thousand years apart. In the [[hadith]] Muhammad explains that this criticism was a misunderstanding, but, according to these same texts many remained unconvinced.<ref name=":02" /> Ultimately, it seems, the Hadith and sirah traditions came to assert that Aaron and Moses had a sister whose name was Kulthum rather than Miriam, which seems to point to the tradition’s fundamental inability to understand the context of these verses and how they relate to the two biblical Miriams.<ref>{{Quran-range|19|27|28}}.</ref><ref>{{Muslim|25|5326}}.</ref><ref>[http://www.al-islam.org/hayat-al-qulub-vol2-allamah-muhammad-baqir-al-majlisi/ Majlisi, ''Hayat al-Qulub'' 2:26].</ref> In contrast to the traditional narrative, some modern scholars have rather found in this surah a complex web of inter-textual references, pointing to a highly literate and Christian audience of the original text <ref> Guillaume Dye, “The Qur’ān and its Hypertextuality in Light of Redaction Criticism,” The Fourth Nangeroni Meeting Early Islam: The Sectarian Milieu of Late Antiquity? (Early Islamic Studies Seminar, Milan) (15-19 June 2015): 8</ref><ref>Suleiman A. Mourad, “Mary in the Qur’an: a reexamination of her presentation,” The Qur'an in its Historical Context, Edited by Gabriel Said Reynolds (2008): 165.</ref>.

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The Genealogy of Moses b. Amram

Since Mary and Miriam are both pronounced Maryam in Arabic, it's possible that Muhammad, based on the Christian stories he heard,<ref>For example from Waraqa ibn Nawfal.</ref> mixed these two women into one person when he was composing/relaying the Qur'an.

==Modern Scholarly Interpretations==

{{Quote|The Lection of Jeremiah|“And the prophet [Jeremiah] said: ‘His coming will be a sign for you, and for other children at the end of the world.57 And nobody will bring forth the hidden Ark from the rock, except the priest Aaron, '''''the brother of Mary'''''. And nobody will unveil the tables therein, nor be able to read them, except the lawgiver Moses, the chosen of the Lord. And at the resurrection of the dead, the Ark will be the first to rise from the rock and to be placed on Mount Sinai, so that the word of the prophet David will be fulfilled, in which he said: ‘Arise, O Lord, to your resting place, You and the Ark of Your holiness’, which is the Holy Virgin Mary who passes from this world to the presence of God, she to whom the apostles proclaimed in Zion the praise of Myrrh saying: ‘Today the Virgin is being guided from Bethlehem to Zion, and today from earth to heaven’, and all the saints are gathered together around her and wait for the Lord, putting to flight the enemy who aims to destroy them.”}}

#The Arab audience of the northern Hijaz was not actually illiterate and pagan as the sirah and tafsir literature would have us believe, but was rather already in Muhammad's time largely Christian and intimately familiar with the literate, multi-lingual Grecophone and Syriac-speaking culture of the Byzantine near east.

#Muhammad did not compose and preach this surah in the Hijaz, but rather in or around Palestine for an audience that would understand it; if Shoemaker in his book ''The Death of a Prophet'' is to be believed, this could have been after he personally conquered Jerusalem itself.

==See Also==

[[Category:Jewish tradition]]

[[Category:Sacred history]]