When the disciples said: O Jesus, son of Mary! Is thy Lord able to send down for us a table spread with food from heaven? He said: Observe your duty to Allah, if ye are true believers.
Sura 5:112
In this verse, the disciples are speaking to Jesus, addressing him as Jesus, son of Mary. On the surface it may not seem like anything unusual here but there is a subtle problem that most readers of the Quran fail to notice.
Almost every time that the name of Jesus is mentioned in the Quran, it is followed by the qualifier, “son of Mary.” (cf 5:110, 5:115, 3:45, 4:157. etc). Doesn’t that strike you as odd?
In 3:45,
Behold! the angels said: “O Mary! Allah giveth thee glad tidings of a Word from Him: HIS NAME WILL BE CHRIST JESUS, THE SON OF MARY, held in honour in this world and the Hereafter and of (the company of) those nearest to Allah.
Wait. His name will be “Christ Jesus, the son of Mary”? That’s his name? That is what the Quran seems to be telling us. Repeatedly.
In the Gospel accounts and the New Testament, Jesus is never called “son of Mary” except on one occasion and that too was in mockery, by those who doubted and disbelieved him, and were offended by him.
Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.
Mark 6:3
And yet, the Quran quotes Jesus’ disciples as supposedly calling him the very same thing.
In the Gospel accounts, we know that His disciples addressed Jesus as “Lord”, “Master”, “Rabbi”, “Teacher”, but never by His name Jesus, when speaking to Him. It would have been disrespectful for them to address their Rabbi or Teacher by name.
Allah adds the qualifier “son of Mary” in the mouth of the disciples when they were speaking to Him. This is not just unnatural speech but also disrespectful. Furthermore it makes little sense, unless it was used as a form of mockery or disbelief.
No one else in the Quran gets this treatment. Moses is not called “Moses son of…”; Abraham is not called “Abraham son of…”; David is not called “David son of…”; even Muhammad is not called Muhammad son of…”. Yet Allah seems to go out of his way to add “son of Mary” to Jesus! Why?
That leaves us with the question; why is “son of Mary” explicitly added when someone addresses Jesus?
Why would the disciples feel the necessity to mention that he is the son of Mary when they were talking directly to him? Are they telling him something he did not already know?
It is because the author of the Quran was trying to make a theological point that Jesus was not the son of God, but merely the son of an ordinary woman.
But why would the disciples bother to make that point?
According to Muslims, Jesus never said he was the son of God, so therefore his disciples would never need to make such a point. To make such a point would have been a ridiculous, redundant, and derogatory thing to do.
The fact that he was the son of a woman and only a prophet would have already been clearly understood by them. Adding these qualifiers onto the disciples speech surely means that this qualifier is an addition to what was actually said!
In other words, the author of the Quran was putting his own words in the mouth of the disciples. He was fabricating quotes so that he could artificially create reinforcement and confirmation of the points he was trying to make, which is that Jesus was not the Son of God.
