Trinity as Father, Mary, Jesus — Misrepresenting Christianity
Q 5:116 depicts a future scene on Judgment Day in which Allah questions Jesus about whether he commanded his followers to worship him and his mother as deities alongside Allah. The implicit claim of the verse is that Christians do worship Jesus and Mary as gods alongside the Father — a three-deity system of Father, Mary, and Jesus.
This is not the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Christian Trinitarian doctrine, as defined by the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and the Creed of Constantinople (381 CE) — both more than two centuries before Muhammad — holds that there is one God in three persons: Father, Son (Jesus), and Holy Spirit. Mary is not part of the Trinity. Mary is a created human being. She is venerated in Catholic and Orthodox traditions but is never worshipped as a deity. No major Christian denomination — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopian — has ever taught that Mary is part of the Trinity.
Q 5:73 reinforces this misrepresentation: 'They have certainly disbelieved who say, "Allah is the third of three."' This is sometimes read as an attack on the Trinity, but the Trinity is not 'God is the third of three' — Christian doctrine holds that all three persons are coequal and coeternal, not that one is third in a sequence.
The most plausible explanation is that Muhammad's information about Christianity came from heterodox sources — possibly the Collyridian sect. Epiphanius of Salamis, writing in his Panarion (§79, c. 375 CE), describes a group of women in Thrace and Arabia who offered small cakes (kollurides) to Mary as a goddess, assembling to perform what Epiphanius regarded as irregular priestly acts in her honour — the only known pre-Islamic source depicting a trinitarian-style formula with Mary elevated to a divine role alongside the Father and the Son. The Collyridians were condemned as heretical by Epiphanius and by mainstream Christianity, and appear to have been extinct or near-extinct by the seventh century. Gabriel Said Reynolds, in The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge, 2010), argues that the Quran's passages about Jesus and Mary make best sense when read against the diverse Christian traditions of Late Antiquity rather than against Nicene orthodoxy — an approach developed further in his Christianity and the Qur'an: The Rise of Islam in Christian Arabia (Yale University Press, 2025), which presents evidence that the Quran emerged within a substantially Christian Arabian milieu in which heterodox Marian traditions were present alongside Nicene ones. If Muhammad encountered Collyridian or similar fringe doctrines and assumed they represented mainstream Christianity, that would explain Q 5:116. But this means the Quran's information about the central religion of the Eastern Roman Empire is drawn from a tiny heretical sect rather than from the Council of Nicaea — a serious indictment of the book's omniscient claim. Sidney H. Griffith, in The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (Princeton University Press, 2008), documents the theological plurality of Christian communities in the pre-Islamic Near East and Arabia — Nestorians, Jacobites, Melkites, Copts — showing that Nicene orthodoxy was unevenly distributed across the region. This is the very pluralism that would have created the conditions for Muhammad's misapprehension. David Wood (Acts 17 Apologetics), in the video "Three MORE Quran Verses Every Christian Should Know," likewise presses this point from a polemical standpoint: Q 5:116 does not engage with Nicene Christianity but with a localised, minority practice that orthodox Christians had already repudiated two centuries earlier.
The alternative interpretation — that Q 5:116 is not a misrepresentation but a future revelation about what Jesus will say on Judgment Day in response to a hypothetical accusation — does not survive Q 5:73 ('the third of three') and Q 4:171 ('do not say three; cease, it is better for you'), which present the Trinity in distorted terms throughout.
- P1. Q 5:116 implies that Christians worship Jesus and Mary as deities alongside Allah — i.e., that the Trinity is Father, Mary, Jesus.
- P2. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, settled at Nicaea (325 CE) and Constantinople (381 CE), is Father, Son, Holy Spirit — not Father, Mary, Jesus. Mary is a created human, not a deity.
- P3. No major Christian denomination — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopian — has ever taught that Mary is part of the Trinity.
- P4. The doctrine the Quran appears to be attacking corresponds to a tiny heretical sect (possibly Collyridian) that mainstream Christianity rejected centuries before Muhammad.
- P5. An omniscient God authoring a critique of Christianity would critique what Christianity actually teaches, not a fringe heresy that was already centuries dead.
- P6. The misrepresentation is consistent with a seventh-century Arabian author drawing information from limited and possibly heterodox sources, but inconsistent with divine omniscience.
- P7. The Quran's misunderstanding of the Trinity weakens its credibility as a corrective revelation to Christianity, since it cannot accurately describe the doctrine it is correcting.
The Quran attacks a version of the Trinity that no mainstream Christian has ever held. The misrepresentation is best explained by Muhammad's exposure to heterodox or popular Christianity rather than to the Nicene mainstream — exposure consistent with a seventh-century Arabian merchant's environment, but inconsistent with the supposed source (an omniscient God who knows precisely what Christians believe). A revelation correcting Christian error must accurately state Christian doctrine before it can correct it. Q 5:116 fails this prerequisite and so cannot function as a credible corrective.
Q 5:116 is not saying Christians worship Mary — it is asking Jesus a hypothetical question about whether he taught such a thing.
The form of the question presupposes the accusation. Allah does not ask hypothetical questions on Judgment Day; the verse functions as an indictment of those who do worship Jesus and Mary, with Jesus's denial serving to acquit himself and condemn his followers. Otherwise the verse is empty — why frame this hypothetical at all if no one is doing it? Classical tafsir treats the verse as targeting a real Christian practice: Ibn Kathir's commentary on Q 5:116 states explicitly that "the Christians were not content merely with deifying Jesus and the Holy Spirit — they even turned Mary, the mother of Jesus, into a full-fledged object of worship." The Saudi Permanent Committee and Al-Azhar have both used the verse to argue that some Christians 'have made Mary a goddess.' Classical exegetes are thus unanimous that the verse is targeting an actual practice, not posing an idle hypothetical.
Some Christians did worship Mary — the Collyridian sect, Marian devotional practices in Catholicism, etc.
The Collyridian sect was tiny, heretical, and centred in the Arabian peninsula — not representative of Christianity. Epiphanius of Salamis condemned them in Panarion §79 (c. 375 CE) precisely because they contradicted orthodox Marian theology: mainstream Christianity taught veneration of Mary (hyperdulia), never her worship (latria). That distinction — worship reserved for God alone, veneration permissible for saints — has been doctrine since at least Augustine. The Quran does not attack 'Marian veneration'; it attacks 'taking Mary as a deity' (ilāhayni min dūni Allāh) — a position no mainstream Christian has held. Conflating veneration with worship is exactly the misrepresentation under critique, and that the Quran makes the same error as a tiny heretical sect Epiphanius had already refuted two centuries earlier is itself telling.
Q 4:171 distinguishes the proper view of Jesus and warns against 'three' — a fair critique of the Trinity.
Q 4:171 says 'say not three' (lā taqūlū thalāthatun) — an injunction that targets the number, not the substance. Christian Trinitarian doctrine is not 'God is three' (tritheism); it is 'one God in three persons.' The Quran's repeated use of 'three' as a count of deities suggests Muhammad understood the Trinity as tritheism. This is the misrepresentation problem in another form.
The Quran is criticising those Christians who functionally treat Mary as divine through prayer and intercession.
Functional analysis is not what the verse says. Q 5:116 quotes Jesus as saying 'take me and my mother as deities' (ilāhayni min dūni Allāh) — a direct theological proposition about deity-status, not a behavioural critique of intercessory prayer practices. Furthermore, intercessory prayer to saints/Mary is doctrinally a request for them to pray for the petitioner — Mary is asked to intercede with God, not to grant requests as God. The Quran's framing collapses the distinction in a way that mainstream Christianity has never collapsed it.
The Quran addresses the limitations of Arabian Christians of the seventh century — accurate to their actual beliefs.
This concedes the central point. If the Quran is calibrated to seventh-century Arabian Christian beliefs (some of which were heterodox), then the Quran is a seventh-century Arabian document, not an eternal divine revelation valid for all Christians. The same critique that applies to Pauline Christianity (the actual majority position by 600 CE) does not appear in the Quran because Muhammad was not engaging with Pauline Christianity. This is exactly what we would expect of a human author with limited access to global theology.