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Mary, Sister of Aaron: Difference between revisions
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<br />The use of "sister of 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 an extremely complex 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 tradition narrative: | <br />The use of "sister of 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 an extremely complex 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 tradition narrative: | ||
#The Arab audience of the northern Hijaz was not actually illiterate and pagan, but was rather already in Muhammad's time Christian and intimately familiar with the literate, multi-lingual Grecophone and Syriac-speaking culture of the Byzantine near east. | #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 Christian and intimately familiar with the literate, multi-lingual Grecophone and Syriac-speaking culture of the Byzantine near east. | ||
#This surah was not composed as a 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, and the entire surah as a whole is thus a composite work. | #This surah (at least the first section) was not composed as a 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, and the entire surah as a whole is thus a composite work. | ||
#Muhammad did not compose and preach this surah in the | #Muhammad did not compose and preach this surah in the Hijaz, but rather in or around Palestine for an audience which would understand it; if Shoemaker is to be believed, this could have been after he personally conquered Jerusalem itself. | ||
===Likely Meaning Imran=== | ===Likely Meaning Imran=== | ||