Mary, Sister of Aaron

Mary (Miriam) the sister of Aaron (and of Moses), is a phrase used in the Quran to refer to Mary the mother of Jesus.^[1] From at least the 8th century, and perhaps as far back as Muhammad's time, critics have attacked this verse as a simple but revealing error.^[2] 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.^[2] 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.^[2] 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.^[3][4][5] 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 ^[6][7].

Mention of Mary in the Quran

Qur'an

Mary the mother of Jesus is called sister of Aaron in sura 19:

The Qur'an also says the wife of Imran gave birth to the virgin Mary who gave birth to Jesus. "Wife of 'Imran" is here im'ra-atu ʿim'rāna, literally woman of Imran, though the same construction certainly means "wife" a few verses later (Quran 3:40), and in several other verses.

The Quran mentions prominent families:

Relevant Quotations

Biblical and Talmudic accounts of Mary

Miriam, Aaron, and Moses were the children of Amram (Imran in Arabic):

Mary, the mother of Jesus, was the daughter of Joachim and from the family of David (not from the family of Aaron):

Traditional Muslim Explanations

Ibn Kathir gave the following explanation in his tafsir:

That he mentioned two alternative explanations suggests he was unsure regarding the certainty of either of them.

"Sister of Aaron means a descendant of Aaron"

The Qur'an says "sister (أُخْتَ) of Aaron" and people understood the verse to literally mean "sister of Aaron". Only after this relation was criticized as an error did it become instead understood as a metaphor meaning "a descendant of Aaron". Christian sources consistently stated that Mary was from the family of David, so many wondered why the Qur'an would describe her as instead being from the family of Aaron. Some point out that in Luke 1:5, Elizabeth is said to be a descendant of Aaron; and in Luke 1:36, Elizabeth is said to be a cousin or relative of Mary ^[9]. But being related to another person does not guarantee that one also descends from any particular one of that person’s distant ancestors (Aaron in this case).

Furthermore, if she was a known descendant of Aaron, then one wonders why the learned Arab Christians (and Aisha and Mughira b. Shu'ba) of Muhammad's time were unaware of this.

The additional description of her as the "daughter of Amram (Imran)" in Surahs 3 and 66 appears to make the matter even foggier and more clearly problematic.

"Mary coincidentally had a father called Imran and a brother called Aaron"

Christian sources say her father was named Joachim, and they don't mention she had a brother called Aaron. And if she had a brother called Aaron, then the question still is, why is she called "sister of Aaron"? If this brother is so important that he had to be mentioned with her name, why don't we hear more about him? It is more probable that the author of the Qur'an thought that she really is the sister of Aaron and Moses, and so in the Qur'an people called her "sister of Aaron" to emphasize her social status.

In other words, the people asked "How can you have a baby without a husband, when you are from such a moral family".

Moses' Father

In Hebrew he is called Amram (עַמְרָם) with the letter mem (ם) at the end. In the Arabic Bible he is also called Amram (عمرام), with the letter meem (م) at the end:

In Islamic sources he is called Imran (عمران). English translators commonly choose to translate the name as Amram:

The Arabic original has the letter nun (ن) at the end:

Miriam was the daughter of Amram and a sister of Aaron. The Qur'an describes Mary, the mother of Jesus, as being a daughter of Amram and a sister of Aaron - in the same family relationship as Miriam. Many people, including Aisha, understood Mary and Miriam to be the same person, based on their understanding of the Qur'anic text.

When Christians criticized the verse which calls Mary "sister of Aaron" in the Quran, Muhammad's response was that "people were named after pious persons who lived before them". Islamic scholars concluded that Mary was either called "sister of Aaron" because she was his descendant or she had a brother coincidentally called Aaron. Both these solutions seem to be inventions, because Mary was not known to be a descendant of Aaron and she was not known to have a brother called "Aaron". On the other hand, Miriam was well-known to be a sister of Aaron.

Since Mary and Miriam are both pronounced Maryam in Arabic, it seems possible that Muhammad, based on the Christian stories he heard,^[11] mixed these two women into one person when he was making up the Qur'an.

Modern Scholarly Interpretations

Some Modern scholars note that the author of Surat-Maryam had an in-depth knowledge of Christian tradition, and that he may have been a Christian clergyman whose work was used by the incipient believers movement, or who had joined the movement himself. As the author was evidently steeped in Christian tradition, it seems unlikely that he would have made a mistake about of Mary, the mother of Jesus, conflating her with Mary, the sister of Aaron and Moses. Rather, what is being invoked here is likely both Mary's descent from the scions of the Jewish people, Moses and Aaron, as well a priestly tradition in the Church of Kathisma in Jerusalem, linking the Dormition (apparent death, followed by the resurrection and assumption of Mary alive into heaven) with the priesthood of Aaron. A pre-Islamic Georgian Christian homiletic text exists that seems to explicitly call Mary the sister of Aaron. The shared phrasing between this Georgian text from Jerusalem and the Qur'an is remarkable; it suggests that whoever the author is of the rest of the Qur'an and even surat-Maryam, the author of this specific passage must have been a Christian from the area around Jerusalem, who was intimately familiar with the Christian tradition around the church of Kathisma and the liturgical traditions the church possessed around the virgin Mary ^[12].

References to Other Narratives

The entire first portion of Surat-Maryam (verses 1-63) makes constant references to apocryphal stories from legendary apocryphal gospels such as the Protoevangelium of James and the gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. These texts outline an infancy gospel of the Virgin Mary, telling of her father Joachim and mother Ana, righteous Jews who served the poor and followed the word of the Lord. Joachim was excluded from a temple ritual because of his lack of a child, however, since all righteous men of Israel had children. He went to the desert to pray and fast while Ana prayed for children from the Lord; after seeing a sparrow's nest in a tree, the angel of the Lord appeared to her and informed her that she would bear a child. In their joy for being granted a child at such an advanced age, the couple dedicated the child, Mary, as a perpetual virgin to the Lord. When she grew older she was entrusted to the care of an older man, Joseph, who would act as her husband but would not engage in sexual intercourse with her. When the Lord impregnated Mary with Jesus, the Jews accused Joseph and Mary of violating her oath to the Lord. The priest of the temple put Joseph to the test of the water of the ordeal of the Lord, drinking it and returning unharmed; furthermore, when Mary gave birth to Jesus, a blinding white light bathed the cave she was in, and both the midwife and the accused inserted their finger into her vagina and were shocked to see that even after Jesus' birth she was still a virgin. After seeing these great signs, the faith of Mary and Joseph was vindicated. Although these sources are uncredited in Muslim exegesis, there is no doubt that Surat-Maryam makes numerous references to this Marian infancy cycle, and in ayah 25 it also makes explicit reference to the Palm miracle recorded in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 20:1-2 (itself a reworking of the pagan fable of Leto giving birth to Apollo ^[13]).

Compare with the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew:

While there are doubts as to the dating of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and its ability to directly influence the Quran, Stephen Shoemaker has found that the story was already developing in an earlier form in a set of early 5th century CE texts (at the latest) known as the Dormition of the Virgin, for which we have later fifth century Syriac manuscript fragments as the earliest textual witnesses (see Parallelism Between the Qur'an and Judeo-Christian Scriptures).

The Palestinian Connection

There exists in Palestine a Byzantine Church dedicated to the virgin Mary, the church of the Kathisma or Holy Throne of the virgin Mary. This church has a deep and complex relationship with the Islamic tradition, and was the likely model for the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem ^[14]. Around the time of Muhammad, this church was a center of the Christian cult of the virgin Mary. Unlike modern Catholic and Orthodox Church, where only the Bible is read from the lectionary during the mass, at this time it was not unusual for reading to be done from the apocrypha and other non-canonized works. The Kathisma was built upon the site of the palm miracle mentioned in Pseudo Matthew chapter 20 and surat Maryam verse 23-25. According to the lectionary found for this church, the miracle of the palm, the virgin conception of Jesus, the immaculate (sin-free, virgin) conception of Mary, and the dormition (assumption into heaven alive) of Mary were all celebrated at this church. The Marian stational liturgy of the Dormition was celebrated here from the 13th of August to the 17th of August in the church calendar. In addition, in the middle of this celebration there were also reading on the 14th of August from the Life of Jeremiah. The Life purports to tell how the prophet Jeremiah saved the Ark of the Covenant and concealed it after the destruction of the 1st temple by the Babylonians. A text from the Kathisma , preserved in Georgian, one of the languages of mass celebration at the church, adds an extra prophecy to the story in the Life of Jeremiah ^[15].

The use of "sister of Aaron" (here reversed as "the brother of Mary" for Aaron) is being invoked here deliberately by the Georgian author, who always uses "Mary" for the mother of Jesus and "Miriam" for the actual sister of Aaron. The Qur'an is thus not showing its ignorance here; rather the reference to Mary as Aaron's sister is a reference to the celebration of the cult of the virgin Mary in Palestine. It is thus unlikely that an uneducated pagan audience in Mecca or Medina might have understood this verse; there are several explanations for how such a complex reference could have made its way into the Qur'an, and none of them align with the traditional narrative:

1. 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.
2. This surah (at least the first section) was not composed as the preaching of Muhammad, but was rather the product of Christian holy men working for an Arabic-speaking audience inside of the Byzantine empire; the first part of the surah which makes these allusions is thus a separate text from the later part of the surah which is heavily "Islamic" and lacks the complex Christian allusions. The entire surah as a whole is thus a composite work.
3. 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.

Likely Meaning of Imran

When the Qur'an states that Mary is the daughter of 'Imran, it is likely using typology, an approach to scripture that sees later figures as reflections of their biblical forebears. Thus what the Qur'an is here saying, through the mother of Jewish interlocuters, is that Mary and her family were pre-figured by the family of Aaron and Miryam. This pre-figurement further plays into the links established between Mary and Miriam at the church of the Kathisma, and once again demonstrates the author’s intimate knowledge of the Palestinian cult of the virgin Mary ^[16].

See Also

• Imran in Islam

• Scientific Errors in the Quran

• Contradictions in the Quran‎

• "Mary, Sister of Aaron & Daughter of Amram" (Answering Islam)

• "Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew" (The Gnostic Society Library)

• "The Infancy Gospel of James" AKA the Protoevangelium of James (Early Christian Writings)

• "The Quran and its Hypertextuality in Light of Redaction Criticism" (Academia.edu)

Translations

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References