Scholarly consensus

The Qur’an’s accounts of Mary and of Jesus have parallels in Christian books older than the Qur’an. Scholars agree on that. They differ on what the parallels mean.

The charge

The charge says that the Qur’an took its stories from earlier books and from people who knew them. For Mary and Jesus it names the Infancy Gospel of James, for Mary’s dedication to the temple and her care there; the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for the clay birds; the Arabic Infancy Gospel, for the infant who speaks from the cradle; and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, for the palm tree. It is not a new charge. The Qur’an records it: “it is only a man who teaches him” (16:103), “old stories that he has had written down” (25:4-5), “you have studied” (6:105), “taught by others, a madman” (44:14).

The parallels, and where they stop

Agrees Mary’s mother vows her unborn child to God’s service (Qur’an 3:35; Infancy Gospel of James 4).
Agrees Mary is brought up in the temple, and food is found with her (Qur’an 3:37; James 7-8).
Agrees An angel announces the birth of Jesus (Qur’an 3:45; 19:19; James 11).
Conflicts Her guardian is Zechariah in the Qur’an (3:37). In the book it is Joseph, chosen by a sign from staffs (James 9). The Qur’an never names Joseph.
Conflicts The birth. In the Qur’an Mary withdraws to a remote place and labour takes her to the trunk of a palm (19:22-23). In the book Joseph finds a cave, a midwife is fetched, and Salome tests Mary (James 17-20).
Conflicts The clay birds. In the Qur’an the sign belongs to the ministry and is done by God’s permission, as a sign to the Israelites (3:49; 5:110). In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas a five-year-old makes twelve sparrows on a Sabbath and claps, and God’s permission is not mentioned (Thomas 2).
Conflicts The child. The Qur’an’s infant says God made him blessed, dutiful to his mother, and neither arrogant nor wretched (19:31-32). The child of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas curses a playmate so that he withers and another so that he dies (Thomas 3-4).
Conflicts The speech from the cradle. The Qur’an’s infant says, “I am a servant of God” (19:30). The cradle speech in the Arabic Infancy Gospel calls him the Son of God. Its date is debated, and its surviving form may be later than the Qur’an. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which has the palm tree, is usually dated to the eighth or ninth century, after the Qur’an.

What the parallels show

A resemblance of motif is not dependence. Dependence needs a shared and distinctive wording, or a shared order, or a shared mistake, and a route by which the material could have reached the author. Here the shared material is a handful of motifs: a vow, a temple, an angel, a bird of clay. Each is told differently, and the Qur’an and the books share no sentence and no sequence. Where they overlap, the Qur’an turns each story to its own point: the vow becomes a prayer heard (3:35-37), the birds become a sign given by God’s permission (3:49), the speech from the cradle becomes the infant’s confession of servanthood (19:30).

The books are themselves late and derived. Most scholars hold that the Infancy Gospel of James draws on Matthew and Luke. If dependence of one text on another made the later a borrower from the earlier, then Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark and from Q, as the synoptic problem shows, and the same test would turn on the gospels first.

The route

No Arabic translation of the gospels or of the infancy gospels is known from before the Qur’an. The earliest Arabic gospel manuscripts that survive were copied after the rise of Islam, as Sidney Griffith shows in The Bible in Arabic. The claim that a man taught the Prophet rests on later biographies. The Qur’an answers it on its own ground: the tongue of the one they point to is foreign, and this is clear Arabic (16:103).

What can be conceded

The Qur’an was addressed to people who already knew stories of Mary, of the prophets and of Jesus, from Jews and Christians around them. Gabriel Said Reynolds argues in The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext that the Qur’an assumes this familiarity and answers it. This website does not deny that stories of Mary circulated before the Qur’an. The Qur’an does not claim to tell what no one had told. It claims to tell it truly: “this is the true narrative” (3:62), “that is Jesus, son of Mary, the word of truth, about which they dispute” (19:34), and it calls the accounts “news of the unseen” which the Prophet did not know (3:44; 11:49; 12:102).

Islamic position

The Muslim position is that the Qur’an is a confirmation, a guardian over the earlier books (5:48), and a judge between those who differ (27:76). A guardian does not copy; it keeps what is true and corrects the rest. That is the measure this website applies in The Gospel According to Islam: where an infancy gospel agrees with the Qur’an, the item is used and marked; where it conflicts, it is set aside and the reason is given. See sections 1, 2, 4, 5 and 14.

What would count as evidence

A sentence in the Qur’an that matches the wording of an earlier book and is unusual enough that chance cannot explain it.
A mistake in an earlier book that the Qur’an repeats.
A known route: a text in a language the author could read, in a place the author could reach.
A source that can be dated before the Qur’an.

None of the four has been shown for the stories of Mary and Jesus. The manuscripts and dates of the books concerned are set out on the manuscripts of the extracanonical gospels.

Sources

Mark M. Mattison (trans.), The Infancy Gospel of James and The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, public domain, gospels.net, with the manuscript information at gospels.net/manuscript.
Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (London: Routledge, 2010).
Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
The Qur’an: 3:35-49, 62; 5:48, 110; 6:105; 11:49; 12:102; 16:103; 19:16-34; 25:4-5; 27:76; 44:14.

Did the Qur’an borrow its stories?