The context makes it clear that the “wife of Imran” is the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. But the list in 3:33 implies that Imran is the father of Moses, meaning that Moses is Jesus’ uncle! This apparent inconsistency was noticed by John of Damascus as well as Niketas Byzantios,14 who thought Muhammad had confused Jesus’ mother with Moses’ sister Miriam the prophetess, who “took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing.”15
The fact that there is a natural reading at all, that is, reading both tokens of “Imran” as having the same reference, and reading “wife” as meaning a woman who has undergone a legal marriage ceremony with the person she is wife of, suggests some sort of rule or heuristic for determining reference, and the logical difficulty of the natural reading implies, as Spinoza argues in another context, that the author of the scripture made an error in doctrine, or that he did not know how to express himself properly, both of which undermine the authority of scripture.16 Perhaps the natural reading is not the correct reading, but this requires defining what “correct” means here. For example, the traditional reading, probably following the commentary of Al-Baidawi,17 avoids the problem of Moses being the uncle of Jesus on the assumption that the first occurrence of “Imran” refers to the father of Moses, the second to the father of Mary. Dawood follows this in an explanatory footnote to his translation.18 Others have suggested that both tokens of “Imran” do refer to the father of Moses, but since “wife” in Arabic also means “woman,” “wife of Imran” must be read as “woman of Imran,” that is, a descendant of Imran, just as Luke 1 says that Elizabeth was “of the daughters of Aaron,” meaning a descendant of Moses’ brother Aaron.19A third interpretation is that both tokens of “Imran” refer to the father of Mary.20
The difficulty with any alternative reading, as Spinoza persuasively suggests,21 is it that it implies a correct interpretation, that is, a method or rule of interpretation, which we could systematically apply to every passage of the scripture, which other writers could emulate without going astray. Otherwise there is no method or rule for interpreting scripture, and “anyone could make up anything [i.e., any interpretation] he liked.” This is the precisely the difficulty with the interpretation of Quran 3.33–35. The first interpretation implies the rule that we may use the same proper name, without qualification or warning, to refer to different individuals. But if this rule were systematically employed, we would everywhere find sudden jumps like the one from Imran the father of Moses in 3:33 to the grandfather of Jesus in 3:35, which we generally don’t find, and the principle would hardly be recommended in manuals of style, or courses in clear speaking. The whole point of a proper name is for consistency of reference: unless indicated otherwise, repeated tokens of the same name have the same reference. The second interpretation implies that “sister of” is systematically ambiguous between a living relation and a descendant, yet there is no evidence of the term “sister” being used in this way in any other part of the Quran.22 The third, namely that “Imran” in 3:33 refers to the father of Mary, leads to the difficulty that the list does not include the grandfather or father of Noah, so why should it include the grandfather of Jesus? The point of the list is to mention all those individuals (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Imran) as chosen above all others by God. Also, why does the list not include Moses, who the Quran mentions more than any other prophet, if not because the Imran of the list is Moses’ father? Sale23 mentions a further interpretation by some Muhammadan writers who “have imagined that the same individual Mary, the sister of Moses, was miraculously preserved alive from his time till that of Jesus Christ, purposely to become the mother of the latter.” Hermeneutically, this is the least problematic reading, although it conflicts with the principle that names of people from wildly different time periods do not co-refer (unless it is explicitly stated that the person had lived to be 1,000 years old).
The fact that different authors can write a single large and complex work is further evidence for a uniform or natural method of interpretation. The author of Psalm 106 who says that Phinehas “stayed the plague,” is almost certainly different from the author of Numbers 25:7, who says that Phinehas, “son of Eleazar,” kills an Israelite man and the Midianite woman who he brought into the camp “before the eyes of Moses.” But the author of the Psalm is presumably aware that there is a Phinehas “the son of Eli” mentioned in 1 Samuel 1:3, and so adds a description and a background to distinguish them, so that the meaning is not “Phinehas, son of Eli,” but rather, “Phinehas, plague stopper.” Likewise, the author of Deuteronomy24 would be aware that it is the fifth book in the series, and that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers precede it. Even if the books were authored separately, the editor would have been aware of this. Thus, Joshua begins “After the death of Moses,” Judges begins “after the death of Joshua,” and so on. The author of that sentence is glancing over his shoulder back to the text that ends Deuteronomy 34, assuming the reader will have it available also. Each successive chapter or book could thus have different authors without impacting the unity of the narrative, so long as they wrote as if they were the same author.25 There is no reason why multiple authors cannot achieve the same effect as a single author, so long as each author understands the text or texts that will be available to the final audience. They (or the editors) have complete control over which characters are introduced, and over the order in which this happens. It does not matter whether they are different, so long as each author is aware of the background information available to the audience, and the multiple authors act as though they were a single author. Think of the different people who write the different episodes of a television soap series. Nothing in the story-relative account requires that the same proper name always signifies co-reference, any more than use of the same pronoun signifies this. The “standard” use of a proper name in the same text is one which conforms to unstated but commonly understood rules for resolving ambiguity.
In some exceptional cases, the ambiguity is resolved on the assumption that co-reference would lead to internal contradictions. For example, Acts 1, where the name “Judas” occurs twice.
Acts 1:13 Coming in, they went up into the upper room where they dwelt, Peter and John, James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas the brother of James.
[..]
Acts 1:16 Brethren, he [Peter] said, there is a prophecy in scripture that must needs be fulfilled; that which the Holy Spirit made, by the lips of David, about Judas, who shewed the way to the men that arrested Jesus.
This appears to break the rule that successive tokens of the same proper name always co-refer. Clearly in this case they do not. But this is signaled in two ways. First, by a sort of description. One person called “Judas” is described as the brother of James, the other as the betrayer of Christ, just as one person called “Mary” is qualified as Magdalene, another person so-called as the mother of James and Joseph (see earlier). Second, it is signalled from the context that the first person called “Judas” is still alive, being present at the meeting of the brethren, whereas the second is now dead, as Peter explains in verse 18.
Descriptions
The rule for descriptions seems to be that terms involving the same definite description always co-refer, and that an indefinite description can refers forward to some definite description, but (as will be discussed in the next chapter) never backward. Ezekiel 10:7 says that one of the cherubim took a burning coal “and put it into the hands of the man in linen.” Who is the man in linen? Refer back to 9:2:
I saw six men coming from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with a deadly weapon in his hand. With them was a man clothed in linen who had a writing kit at his side.
The indefinite description “a man clothed in linen” in 9:2 refers forward to 10:7, so to speak, although it cannot refer further back. There might have been another man in linen mentioned prior to 9:2, but it would not be signified that he was the same (or different) from the one in 9:2. By contrast, it is part of the meaning of the text that the man in 9:2 and the man in 10:7 are the same person.
The