Thread by @FGhoddoussi

@emrane Hi Emran, Thank you very much for the thread. I will add some quotations
from Michel Cuypers book the Banquet as a complementary to your fine discussion. I know you have touched & covered much of it, but it may gave another relevant perspective.

@emrane Q5:116-Translation:
And when God said, “O Jesus son of Mary! Didst thou say unto mankind, ‘Take me and my mother as gods apart from God?’” He said, “Glory be to Thee! It is not for me to utter that to which I have no right. Had I said it, Thou wouldst surely have known it.

@emrane Thou knowest what is in my self and I know not what is in Thy Self. Truly it is Thou Who knowest best the things unseen."

@emrane The Banquet – By: Michel Cuypers (pages 431-432)
«Take me and my mother to be two divinities in addition to God»
(Qur’an Surah 5: verse 116 section c)
The Qur'an's assertion of Mary's non-divinity is surprising.

@emrane Only marginal, insignificant groups, such as the Collyridians or the Mariamites, seem to have practiced «Mariolatry». According to St Epiphanius (fourth century), women in Arabia ( modern Syria)demonstrated a misplaced veneration for the Virgin Mary.

@emrane Rivaling some pagan cults of female divinities, they offered small cakes, known as kolluris; to Mary, before eating them . If these women of unwise piety ever existed, they have left no trace in history, and they could not in all seriousness be presented by the Qur'an

@emrane as representative of general Christian doctrine. As or the Mariamites, who were said to have confessed two gods alongside the Father, Christ and the Virgin, they are described by the Coptic historian al-Makin (d.l273) as having been part of the heresies of the time of

@emrane the Council of Nicea ; any link with the Qur'an is therefore also most unlikely.

Some have thought that Jesus' mother [امی] might be describing the Holy Spirit, a confusion which goes back to the Gnostic sect of Ophites, mentioned by Irenaeus (second century), which turned

@emrane the Holy Spirit into the primordial Woman who begot Christ (as «spirit»,ruh (روح), is feminine in Arabic, as it is in Aramaic and Hebrew). But here again, could the Qur'an confuse the doctrine of contemporary Christians with the doctrine of a sect which had probably

@emrane died out long before? In any case, nothing in the Qur'anic sequence B3 lends itself to the unbridled Gnostic speculations reported by Irenaeus .

@emrane The solution is probably much more simple, if we recall that since the time of the Council of Ephesus(431) , most Churches have honored the Virgin Mary with the title of Theotokos, «Mother of God» I «God-bearers» - a fearsome theological shortcut which was

@emrane obviously open to an interpretation divinizing Mary.
Neither should we lose sight that the outer sequences (BI and B3) of section B [ of Surah 5 The Banquet] together constitute an urgent invitation to Christians to convert to Islam, turning away from their basic doctrinal error,

@emrane which is the divinization of Jesus. A whole series of methods of persuasion is used to convince them that even though Jesus was a great wonder-working prophet, he-is still only simply a human being- he is only given the title «Jesus son of Mary», which emphasizes his purely human

@emrane - albeit miraculous- beginnings; he eats and drinks like any other man; he is helped by the Holy Spirit; he only works miracles «with God's
permission» and speaks to God as «my Lord». What is at stake in v.116, it seems, is not so much a Mariological heresy

@emrane [but] as a final argument, ad absurdum [برهان خلف], to show that Jesus cannot be a divinity, for if he were, his mother necessarily would be one too: one can not imagine a human being begetting a divinity! lt is of course accepted by all, including Christians, that Mary was only

@emrane a human being, so Jesus, necessarily, is also and simply a human being. Here we see the underlying syllogism in the Qur'anic shortcut. It is as though God said to Jesus, «Have you taught that you are divine? If this was the case, you would have taught that your

@emrane mother was also a divinity!» The absurdity of the conclusion is to lead Christians to deny Jesus' divinity at the same time as they deny his mother's divinity. Now, the Ephesus formula, which had entered most Christian liturgies, of course lent itself to such criticism.

@emrane It had already come from Nestorius, who wrote, «We must not make a goddess of Mary! Mary has not brought forth the divinity'".It is also possible that Nestorian circle&Nestorian converts to Islam were not unconnected with this Qur'anic expression.
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