Does the Qur’an Misunderstand the Trinity?

What the Qur’an rejects about “three,” what the Orthodox Church actually confesses about the Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Mary, and the scholarly debate over the gap between them.

Published 2026-08-17 · Updated 2026-10-18 · By the HonestApologist editorial team · How we work

Few verses have been argued over between Christians and Muslims as often as the Qur’an’s short statements about “three.” The Qur’an tells the People of the Book not to say “three,” condemns those who say that God is “the third of three,” and pictures God asking Jesus whether he told people to take him and his mother as two gods. Christians often answer that they have never believed any such thing: their Trinity is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin Mary, however honored, has never been counted as part of the Godhead. Muslims answer that the Qur’an rejects something Christians really do, which is to worship Jesus alongside God.

Both answers contain truth, which is why the question needs care. If the Qur’an describes Christian belief inaccurately, that matters to anyone weighing its claim to correct the communities that came before it. If instead it restates Christian belief on purpose, in its own polemical terms, then the charge of “misunderstanding” misreads the text, and Christians who repeat it are the ones being careless.

This article sets out what the Qur’an says and what the Orthodox Church confesses, then how Muslim commentators and modern scholars have explained the gap. The word “misunderstand” in our title is itself contested, and part of the task is to decide whether it fits.

In brief

The Qur’an rejects any belief that God has a son, that Jesus is God, or that God is “three” (4:171; 5:17, 72–73; 6:101; 112). In one scene it has God ask Jesus whether he told people to take him and his mother as “two gods alongside God” (5:116). The Church has never confessed God, Jesus and Mary as a Trinity. It confesses one God, the Father, with his only-begotten Son and his Holy Spirit, one essence in three hypostases, and it honors Mary as Theotokos, the Mother of God, while reserving worship for God alone. Some Qur’anic wording therefore does not match the Church’s formulas, but that alone does not settle what the Qur’an meant. Classical Muslim commentators knew the formula of one substance in three hypostases and offered more than one reading. Modern scholars are divided: some point to fringe groups such as the Collyridians, for whom the evidence is thin; Sidney Griffith reads deliberate polemic aimed at mainstream Christians; Gabriel Said Reynolds thinks 5:116 suggests the Qur’an’s author pictured the Trinity as Father, Mother and Son. Beneath the debate lies a disagreement no one disputes: the Qur’an judges the worship of Christ to be association of a partner with God, and the Church confesses Christ as true God of true God.

Thesis: The Qur’an’s verses against the Trinity do not describe the Church’s faith in the Church’s own terms, and one of them (5:116) says something no orthodox Christian teaching ever said; whether that reflects misunderstanding or deliberate polemic is an open scholarly question, but underneath it lies a real and accurately aimed disagreement about whether Jesus Christ is God.

What the Qur’an says

Translation is already interpretation here. Unless noted, quotations come from M. A. S. Abdel Haleem’s translation (Oxford University Press), with the Saheeh International translation and the Arabic where a single word carries weight.¹

Do not say “three” (4:171)

The fullest passage is addressed to the “People of the Book.” It tells them not to “go to excess” in their religion and then says that “the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was nothing more than a messenger of God, His word, directed to Mary, a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers and do not speak of a ‘Trinity’.” It goes on to confess: “God is only one God, He is far above having a son.”²

The Arabic has no technical word for “Trinity” here. It says thalāthatun, “three,” and Saheeh International renders it more literally: “do not say, ‘Three’.” Abdel Haleem’s “Trinity” is a fair reading of the target, but it is a reading. The verse does not say who the three are, so on its own it cannot show that the Qur’an placed Mary in the Trinity; it does reject, without ambiguity, any confession of God that counts three. It also calls Jesus God’s “word” (kalimatuhu) and “a spirit from Him” (rūḥun minhu), titles Muslim commentators such as Ibn Kathir explain as the creative command “Be” and a spirit created by God.

“God is the Messiah” and “the third of three” (5:72–75)

Two verses in Sura 5 open alike. The first: “Those who say, ‘God is the Messiah, son of Mary,’ have defied God,” followed by a warning: “If anyone associates others with God, God will forbid him from the Garden.” The second: “Those people who say that God is the third of three are defying [the truth]: there is only One God.”³ The phrase “the third of three” (thālithu thalāthatin), read literally, attributes to someone the claim that God is one member of a set of three. Two verses later comes an argument: “The Messiah, son of Mary, was only a messenger … his mother was a virtuous woman; both ate food [like other mortals].” Because it is applied to Jesus and Mary together, it suggests the Qur’an thinks of both as receiving divine honor.

“Take me and my mother as two gods” (5:116)

Near the end of the same sura, God questions Jesus: “Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to people, ‘Take me and my mother as two gods alongside God’?” Jesus answers, “May You be exalted! I would never say what I had no right to say,” and adds that he told them only, “Worship God, my Lord and your Lord.”⁴ The Arabic ilāhayn is a dual, “two gods,” and min dūni llāh means “besides God”; Saheeh International has “as deities besides Allāh.” This verse, which many commentators set on the Day of Judgment (al-Tabari preferred the moment God raised Jesus to himself), is at the center of the controversy. It does not use the word “three” or mention a Trinity, but it does say that some people took Jesus and his mother as gods.

“He begot no one” (6:101; 112; 19:35)

Alongside these verses stands a steady rejection of divine sonship. “How could He have children when He has no spouse,” asks 6:101. Sura 112 confesses: “He begot no one nor was He begotten. No one is comparable to Him.” And 19:35 says that “it would not befit God to have a child.”⁵ Qur’an 9:30 reports that “the Christians said, ‘The Messiah is the son of God’” in the same verse as a puzzling claim about Ezra, examined in our article on Qur’an 9:30.

What the Qur’an does not mention

The Qur’an never names the Holy Spirit as one of “three.” It speaks of “the holy spirit” strengthening Jesus (2:87; 5:110) and bringing down revelation (16:102), a spirit Muslim commentators generally identify with the angel Gabriel, as Saheeh International’s bracketed glosses show.⁶ Nor do its criticisms use the conciliar vocabulary of essence and person. Scholars argue about what that silence means.

What the Church actually confesses

Against these verses stands the confession the Church had held for more than two centuries before the Qur’an. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, as the Orthodox Church prays it, begins: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth … And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages … begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father.” Of the Spirit it says: “the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.”⁷ (The Latin West later added “and the Son,” the Filioque, to the clause on the Spirit; it is not part of the text of 381, and the Orthodox Church has never accepted it.) For a line-by-line guide, see What Is Nicene Christianity?

One God, the Father, with his Word and his Spirit

The Creed does not begin with a “Godhead” divided into thirds. It begins with “one God, the Father,” and confesses the Son and the Spirit as from him, following the Apostle Paul: “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6, RSV). It keeps faith with the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4, RSV).⁸

Orthodox theology speaks of the “monarchy” of the Father: the Father is the one source, from whom the Son is eternally begotten and the Spirit eternally proceeds (John 15:26). The Son and the Spirit are not further gods beside the Father. They share his one divine nature (ousia), while each is a distinct hypostasis, a distinct “who.” Saint Gregory the Theologian, writing in 380, described the begetting this way: “The Father is the Begetter and the Emitter; without passion of course, and without reference to time, and not in a corporeal manner.”⁹ On the Church’s own terms, then, the Son is not the result of God taking a wife, which is what Qur’an 6:101 denies. On the vocabulary see The Cappadocian Fathers; on its scriptural roots, The Biblical Case for the Trinity.

The Church has faced the “three gods” question from inside

The objection that three divine persons must mean three gods was pressed by Christians on their own teachers. Saint Gregory of Nyssa opens his letter To Ablabius by admitting that the question seems to force one of two errors: “either to say there are three Gods, which is unlawful, or not to acknowledge the Godhead of the Son and the Holy Spirit, which is impious and absurd.” His answer is that the Church must “confess one God … even though the name of Godhead extends through the Holy Trinity.”¹⁰ A Muslim may find that answer unpersuasive, but it cannot fairly be said that Christians never noticed the problem, or that they confess three gods.

Mary: Mother of God, honored and never worshipped

The Church calls Mary Theotokos, “the one who gave birth to God.” The Council of Ephesus (431) upheld the title, and its point is about Christ: the child born of Mary is God the Word made flesh (John 1:14). Elizabeth greets her as “the mother of my Lord,” and Mary says, “all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:43, 48, RSV).¹¹ See Mary in the Early Church and the infographic Mary and Eve.

Honor is not worship, and the Church said so in conciliar language. The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) allowed honor and veneration to icons of Christ, the Mother of God and the saints, but “not indeed that true worship of faith [latreia] which pertains alone to the divine nature.”¹² Four centuries earlier, Saint Epiphanius of Salamis had condemned a group that made offerings to Mary with a blunt rule (our translation of his Greek): “Let Mary be held in honor … let no one worship Mary.”¹³ {{very-strong: No ecumenical council or creed of the Church has ever counted Mary as divine or as a member of the Trinity.}}

Orthodox devotion to the Theotokos is warm and constant, with hymns, feasts, icons and prayers asking for her help, and a visitor unaware of the distinction between worship and veneration could easily mistake one for the other.

Setting the two side by side

Some of the Qur’an’s statements aim squarely at what the Church confesses; others describe something it does not.

Qur’anic wording	What the Church confesses	Does it target what the Church teaches?
“do not say, ‘Three’” (4:171, Saheeh International)	One God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit	Yes. A direct disagreement.
“He begot no one nor was He begotten” (112:3)	The Son is “begotten of the Father before all ages”	Yes. A direct contradiction.
“If anyone associates others with God” (5:72)	Christ is worshipped as God, of one essence with the Father	Yes. The heart of the dispute.
“How could He have children when He has no spouse” (6:101)	The Son’s begetting is eternal and not physical	The Church also rejects what is denied here.
“God is the Messiah, son of Mary” (5:72; compare 5:17)	The Messiah is God the Son; “one God” in the Creed names the Father	Partly. The word order is reversed.
“God is the third of three” (5:73)	One God, not one god among three	Not as worded. Its meaning is debated.
“Take me and my mother as two gods alongside God” (5:116)	Mary is a creature, honored as Theotokos, never worshipped	No. No orthodox teaching matches this.

The first four rows are where the real conversation between Christians and Muslims lies. The question in our title concerns the last three.

How Muslim commentators have read these verses

Christian writers sometimes assume that Muslims never noticed the gap between 5:116 and the Creed. The commentaries show otherwise.

Al-Tabari (d. 923)

Al-Tabari’s commentary is the great early collection of Sunni interpretation. On 5:73 he writes (our translation from the Arabic) that “this was the teaching of most Christians before the Jacobites, Melkites and Nestorians divided,” and that, according to reports that reached him, they said: “The eternal God is one substance (jawhar) comprising three hypostases (aqānīm): a father who begets and is not begotten, a son who is begotten and does not beget.” The printed text describes the third member with the word zawj, “spouse” or “partner,” in a phrase that is hard to construe.¹⁴ {{strong: By the early tenth century, the leading Sunni commentator knew the Christian formula of one substance in three hypostases.}}

In the same entry al-Tabari also records an older reading from al-Suddi (d. 745): “The Christians said: He, and the Messiah, and his mother,” and al-Suddi connected 5:73 with 5:116. On 5:116 itself al-Tabari explains “two gods” as “two objects of worship whom you worship besides God.”¹⁵ Al-Tabari’s commentary thus holds two readings side by side, one close to the Church’s formula and one placing Mary in the three.

Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210)

Al-Razi, among the most philosophically careful commentators, explains the command of 4:171 as “do not say that God is one in substance, three in hypostases.” On 5:116 he raises an objection himself. The verse speaks of two gods “besides God,” yet “none of the Christians held the divinity of Jesus and Mary together with denying the divinity of God Most High,” so how can the charge be attributed to them? His answer is that a god is a creator, and that Christians attributed the miracles that appeared through Jesus and Mary to Jesus and Mary themselves rather than to God; in respect of those works, he argues, they treated the two as gods (our translations).¹⁶ The objection is narrow, and his answer still assumes that Christians ascribed divine power to Mary, but it shows a major commentator aware that Christians never set Jesus and Mary up in place of God.

The Jalalayn and Ibn Kathir

Other commentators took the Marian reading directly. The fifteenth-century Tafsir al-Jalalayn, still widely used, glosses 5:73 as saying that God is “one of them the other two being Jesus and his mother and they who claim this are a Christian sect” (trans. Feras Hamza). Ibn Kathir (d. 1373) records al-Suddi’s view on 5:73 and explains the command of 4:171 as “do not elevate `Isa and his mother to be gods with Allah.”¹⁷ Yet, drawing on the tenth-century Christian historian Sa‘id ibn Batriq (Eutychius), Ibn Kathir also describes a great council in the days of Constantine, where the emperor backed the creed of a party of 318 bishops (he does not name Nicaea, but the council and its traditional number of 318 fathers are those of Nicaea), and the three main Christian churches, which, he says, agreed that Jesus was divine but disputed how his divinity related to his humanity.

Modern Muslim commentary

The twentieth-century Ma‘arif al-Qur’an of Mufti Muhammad Shafi‘, drawing on notes by Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, says that “the third of three” refers to the Messiah, the Holy Spirit and God, “or to Masih, Maryam (Mary) and Allah,” and that “unity in trinity, with three persons in one godhead, is the common belief of Christians.”¹⁸ Maulana Wahiduddin Khan reads the passages as a lesson about devotion: “When a man makes somebody the centre of his veneration and love, the underlying feeling is that that ‘somebody’ enjoys a high status in this world of God.”¹⁹

Taken together, these commentators do not stake the Qur’an’s case on Mary being a member of the Trinity. As we understand it, the mainstream Muslim view is that the Qur’an condemns the deification of Jesus, and any honor to a creature that belongs to God alone, however Christians express it. From that standpoint, the formula itself is the problem.

The scholarly debate over the gap

Modern historians offer several explanations for the verses that do not match Christian teaching, and they are not all exclusive.

Explanation one: unusual Christian groups

A long-standing explanation is that the Qur’an met Christians whose beliefs were not orthodox, usually the group Epiphanius called the Collyridians. In his Panarion (written in the 370s), he describes women who had brought from Thrace into Arabia the practice of offering small loaves (kollyris) to Mary, and he condemns it sharply. Reynolds summarizes the report as describing “a group of women in the Arabian desert who considered Mary a goddess and offered her cakes of bread.”²⁰ Earlier scholars such as W. Montgomery Watt, Griffith notes, took the Qur’an to hold that the Christian Trinity included Mary, sometimes citing the Collyridians in support.²¹

The difficulties are serious. Epiphanius is the only witness, he wrote some two and a half centuries before the Qur’an, and his descriptions of heretics are not neutral. Reading Epiphanius’s rhetoric closely, Stephen Shoemaker argues that the Collyridians “merely were offering Mary a kind of veneration that during the late fourth century was increasingly directed toward Christian saints,” close to rituals prescribed in an early Dormition text “without any indication of belief in Mary’s divinity.”²² There is no evidence that such a group survived into seventh-century Arabia. Reynolds’s verdict is short: “None of this speculation is necessary.”²³ {{debated: That a Mary-worshipping sect such as the Collyridians existed in seventh-century Arabia and lies behind Qur’an 5:116.}}

Explanation two: deliberate polemic against mainstream Christians

Sidney Griffith, in The Bible in Arabic (2013), argues the opposite: the Christians the Qur’an criticizes were the mainstream Melkite, Jacobite and Nestorian communities whose presence in Arabia is historically attested, and the Qur’an knew their language well enough to turn it.²⁴

He begins with word order. Christians of the time would have said that the Messiah is God, but “for reasons of orthodoxy they would never have said that God is Jesus.” Griffith reads 5:72’s “God is the Messiah” as a deliberate reversal. On “the third of three,” he argues that thālithu thalāthatin renders a Syriac epithet for Christ, tlithaya, used in mainstream homilies to call the Son “one of three” in the Trinity. If he is right, 5:72 and 5:73 make the same complaint twice: both are about calling Christ God, and neither is about Mary.²⁵ Reynolds accepts this reading of 5:73 in his commentary, observing that the verse’s concern, “as in the previous verse, is Christ.”²⁶

On 5:116, Griffith writes that, read rhetorically, “the verse cannot reasonably be taken as evidence that the Qur’ān supposes that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a member of the Christian Trinity.” Instead it highlights what the Qur’an sees as “the absurd corollary of the Christian belief that Jesus is the Son of God, namely that Mary his mother must therefore also somehow be divine.” He connects the verse with the dispute then dividing Syriac-speaking Christians over the title Theotokos, which the Nestorians rejected, he notes, “for much the same reason” as the Qur’an: it seemed to claim too much for Jesus’ human mother.²⁷

Explanation three: the Qur’an pictured a Father, Mother and Son

Reynolds, in The Qur’an and the Bible (2018), agrees with Griffith about 5:73 but reads 5:116 differently. He writes that the verse “need not be a precise record of the doctrines held by the Christians in the Qur’ān’s immediate context,” and then adds: “this verse does seem to suggest that the Qur’ān’s author thought of the Trinity as ‘Father, Mother, Son’ (God, Mary, Jesus).” He points to 5:75, where Jesus and Mary are paired, and to “the absence of any connection in the Qur’ān between the Holy Spirit and the Christian teaching of the Trinity.”²⁸ The reading coincides with that of al-Suddi and the Jalalayn, and it should not be waved away.

Explanation four: a judgment on devotion

A fourth reading treats 5:116 as a judgment on practice rather than a report of doctrine. Wahiduddin Khan’s comment points this way. (Al-Tabari’s gloss, “two objects of worship,” is weaker support: he glosses “god” the same way on 5:73, and reads 5:116 as reporting what Christians said about Jesus and his mother.) Shoemaker points to Marian rituals already prescribed in a fourth-century text, and the Church’s need to define worship and veneration at Nicaea II suggests the line was not always obvious to observers.

Two early witnesses

The inscription inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, dated AH 72 (691–692), addresses the “People of the Book,” quotes the substance of 4:171, including the command not to say “three,” and also quotes Sura 112.²⁹ Within about sixty years of Muhammad’s death, then, Muslim rulers were applying these verses to the Christians they governed, in a city whose church was the imperial, Chalcedonian one. In our reading, the earliest public use of the command not to say “three” was aimed at mainstream Christianity, not a fringe sect.

Saint John of Damascus, a monk near Jerusalem who wrote one of the earliest Orthodox accounts of Islam in the mid-eighth century, paraphrases the scene in 5:116 with no Mary in it: “O Jesus, didst thou say: I am the Son of God and God?” He reports that Muslims “call us Hetaeriasts, or Associators, because, they say, we introduce an associate with God,” and he answers from the Qur’an’s own titles for Jesus: “As long as you say that Christ is the Word of God and Spirit, why do you accuse us of being Hetaeriasts?”³⁰ John was a polemicist, but his summary suggests that early Christian respondents heard the dispute as being about Christ, not Mary.

So, does the Qur’an “misunderstand” the Trinity?

The question bundles together three separate claims. The first concerns description: does the Qur’an’s wording match the Church’s formulas? It does not, at least in 5:73 as literally worded and in 5:116. No council, creed or recognized teacher of the Church ever confessed that God is one of three gods, or that Mary is a god alongside God.

The second concerns knowledge: did the Qur’an’s author know the Church’s doctrine and recast it on purpose, or did he believe Christians worshipped a Father, Mother and Son? We cannot tell from the text alone. Griffith reads informed polemic; Reynolds thinks 5:116 suggests a mistaken picture. (Muslims, holding the Qur’an to be God’s word, would not pose the question this way.)

The third concerns substance: does the Qur’an reject the Church’s real faith? Yes, and accurately. The Church does confess Jesus Christ as “true God of true God,” worships him with the Father and the Spirit, and says the Son is begotten of the Father. The Qur’an says that God “begot no one,” that worshipping Christ associates a partner with God, and that Christians must stop saying “three.” Here there is no misunderstanding, only disagreement. For the two faiths’ larger pictures of Jesus, see Jesus in Christianity and Islam.

The fairest summary is that the Qur’an rejects the Trinity without describing it in the Church’s terms, and at one point says something no orthodox Christian taught. Whether that reflects a mistake or a deliberate polemical move is an open question, and Christians should argue it as one.

There is a better question for Christians to raise, and John of Damascus already asked it. The Qur’an calls Jesus God’s “word” and “a spirit from Him.” Is God’s Word eternal or created? Islamic theology fought its own long battle over whether God’s speech, the Qur’an, is created, a debate traced in Is the Qur’an Created or Eternal? That is where Christian and Muslim thinking about God comes closest.

Objections and responses

“The Qur’an does not need to quote your creed”

A Muslim reader might say: The command not to say “three” rejects every Trinity, however phrased, and 5:72 rejects the deity of Christ, which the Creed affirms. The charge of misunderstanding is a distraction.

Response: Much of this is right: the central disagreement is real and accurately aimed. But 5:116 attributes to Christians something the Church condemned, and historians may fairly ask why. If the deeper objection is that three persons who are each fully God must be three gods, that is a philosophical argument the Church has engaged at least since Gregory of Nyssa, and it should be argued on its merits, not assumed.

“Christians do treat Mary as divine in practice”

A Muslim reader might say: Christians call Mary “Mother of God,” pray to her, sing to her and keep feasts for her. Whatever their theologians say, that is worship.

Response: The title Theotokos is a statement about who Christ is, not a claim that Mary is divine. Prayers to her ask for her intercession, and the Church distinguishes the worship owed to God alone from the honor given to his saints, as Nicaea II and Epiphanius both did. Al-Razi’s answer assumes that Christians credit the miracles associated with Mary to Mary rather than to God; Christians credit them to God working through his servants, as when “God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul” (Acts 19:11, RSV).³¹ Popular devotion can run ahead of theology, and the distinction may be hard for an outsider to see. But the Church’s standard was clear, and stated long before Islam.

“Reynolds is right: the Qur’an simply got it wrong”

A skeptical reader might say: A leading scholar concludes that the Qur’an’s author thought the Trinity was Father, Mother and Son. Calling that “rhetoric” is special pleading.

Response: Reynolds’s reading deserves to be taken seriously. But its evidence is one verse, one pairing in 5:75 and one silence about the Spirit, and the silence is weak evidence, since the Qur’an has its own account of “the holy spirit” and may simply refuse to treat the Spirit as divine. Griffith offers a coherent alternative grounded in the Theotokos controversy, and Reynolds himself cautions that 5:116 need not record what local Christians believed. The question is open.

“If the Qur’an were from God, it would describe the Trinity precisely”

A Christian reader might say: A revelation sent to correct Christians should state their faith accurately before condemning it. Its failure to do so counts against its divine origin.

Response: This argument has force only if the verses are meant as descriptions. Many Muslim readers take them as verdicts, and much modern scholarship reads them as polemic. On Griffith’s reading the argument loses most of its force; on Reynolds’s it keeps some. Christians should not present 5:116 as proof that Muhammad thought Mary was in the Trinity. The text does not carry that weight.

What we can say confidently

The Qur’an rejects the confession that God has a Son, that Jesus is God, and that God is “three” (4:171; 5:72–73; 6:101; 112).
The Church’s Trinity is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, one essence in three hypostases, with the Father as the one source. No council or creed ever placed Mary in the Godhead.
The Church distinguished the worship due to God alone from the honor given to Mary and the saints, in the fourth century (Epiphanius) and in conciliar form in 787 (Nicaea II).
Qur’an 5:116 describes a belief, Jesus and Mary as two gods besides God, that matches no orthodox Christian teaching.
Classical Muslim commentators knew the formula of one substance in three hypostases and also recorded readings that placed Mary in the three.
The Dome of the Rock inscription (691–692) publicly addressed these verses to the “People of the Book” in Jerusalem, and John of Damascus, an early Orthodox respondent, understood the dispute as being about Christ.
The central disagreement, whether worshipping Jesus Christ is worshipping God or associating a creature with him, is real on both sides.

What remains disputed

Whether 5:116 reflects a belief that Mary belonged to the Trinity (Reynolds) or is a deliberate reductio aimed at Christian claims about Jesus and the title Theotokos (Griffith).
Whether “the third of three” in 5:73 renders a Syriac epithet for Christ, as Griffith argues, or should be read literally as a claim about three gods.
Whether the Collyridians existed as Epiphanius describes them, and whether anything like them survived into seventh-century Arabia.
Whether the Qur’an’s silence about the Holy Spirit as a divine person tells us anything about what its author knew, and how far Marian devotion shaped outsiders’ view of Christian practice.
Whether “misunderstanding,” “polemical reframing” or “judgment on devotion” is the best overall description. The evidence allows more than one answer.

Conclusion

Orthodox Christians do not need the Qur’an to have misunderstood the Trinity. Our confession rests on what God has revealed in his Son, not on the accuracy of another scripture’s summary of it. What we do need is to describe our own faith truthfully and our neighbors’ faith with the same care. That means admitting that some Christian arguments about 5:116 have claimed more than the text can bear, and asking Muslim friends to grant, in turn, that no Christian creed ever made Mary a goddess.

Christians and Muslims share the first line of the confession: God is one. The Church confesses one God, the Father, who has never been without his Word and his Spirit; his Son, “begotten, not made,” who for our salvation was born of the Virgin Mary; and the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. We honor Mary because of whom she bore, and we worship him because he is the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1). That is the faith the Qur’an rejects, and it is better for both communities to disagree about it as it really is than to agree about a caricature.

Notes

M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, trans., The Qur’an: A New Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), as given on Quran.com (translation 85). Comparisons use the Saheeh International translation on Quran.com (translation 20). Arabic text from Quran.com (Uthmani script). ↩
Qur’an 4:171, trans. Abdel Haleem. Saheeh International: “And do not say, ‘Three’; desist.” ↩
Qur’an 5:72–73 and 5:75, trans. Abdel Haleem; compare 5:17. Saheeh International renders 5:73 “Allāh is the third of three,” with a footnote: “i.e., one part of three, referring to the Christian concept of trinity.” ↩
Qur’an 5:116–117, trans. Abdel Haleem; Saheeh International for the alternative rendering. ↩
Qur’an 6:101; 112:3–4; 19:35; 9:30, trans. Abdel Haleem. ↩
Qur’an 2:87; 5:110; 16:102. Saheeh International glosses the spirit in 2:87 and 5:110 as “[i.e., the angel Gabriel]” and in 16:102 as “[i.e., Gabriel].” ↩
The Symbol of Faith (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed), English text of the Orthodox Church in America. ↩
Bible quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV). ↩
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29 (Third Theological Oration), 2, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, NPNF2 vol. 7. ↩
Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not Three Gods”: To Ablabius, trans. H. A. Wilson, NPNF2 vol. 5. ↩
John 1:14; Luke 1:43, 48 (RSV). ↩
Second Council of Nicaea (787), Decree, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14. ↩
Epiphanius, Panarion 79 (Against the Collyridians). The Greek reads Ἐν τιμῇ ἔστω Μαρία … τὴν Μαρίαν μηδεὶς προσκυνείτω, as printed in Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 3, §82, n. 795; our translation. The omitted words name the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as the ones to be worshipped. Epiphanius uses the verb proskyneō here in the sense of worship; Nicaea II later used its noun, proskynēsis, for the “honourable reverence” it allowed to icons, as distinct from latreia. The full English translation is Frank Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III (Leiden: Brill). ↩
Al-Tabari, Jami‘ al-Bayan, on Qur’an 5:73 (Arabic text on Quran.com, tafsir 15); translation ours. The phrase describing the third member reads wa-zawjan mutatabba‘atan baynahumā; we have not attempted a confident rendering of it. ↩
Al-Tabari, Jami‘ al-Bayan, on 5:73 (report no. 12294, from al-Suddi) and on 5:116 (“ma‘būdayn ta‘budūnahumā min dūni llāh”); translation ours. ↩
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Mafatih al-Ghayb (al-Tafsir al-Kabir), on Qur’an 4:171 and 5:116 (Arabic text on Altafsir.com); translations ours. On 4:171 al-Razi also records al-Zajjaj’s reading (“do not say, ‘Our gods are three’”), on the ground that 5:116 shows Christians counting God, the Messiah and Mary as three gods. ↩
Tafsir al-Jalalayn on 5:73, trans. Feras Hamza (Amman: Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought), on Altafsir.com; Ibn Kathir, Tafsir (abridged English edition on Quran.com) on 5:73 and 4:171; on 4:171 the number 318 and the word “bishops” are from the Arabic text (also on Quran.com), which the abridged English renders “more than three hundred Patriarchs.” ↩
Mufti Muhammad Shafi‘, Ma‘arif al-Qur’an (English edition on Quran.com), on 5:72–75, citing Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. ↩
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, Tazkirul Quran (English, on Quran.com), on 5:73–76; see also his comment on 5:116–118. ↩
Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’an and the Bible: Text and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 218, on 5:116–19. ↩
Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 35 n. 80, citing W. Montgomery Watt, “The Christianity Criticized in the Qur’ān,” The Muslim World 57 (1967): 197–201. ↩
Stephen J. Shoemaker, “Epiphanius of Salamis, the Kollyridians, and the Early Dormition Narratives: The Cult of the Virgin in the Fourth Century,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 3 (2008): 371–401 (abstract). ↩
Reynolds, The Qur’an and the Bible, 218. ↩
Griffith, The Bible in Arabic, 25–36, esp. 28 and 36. ↩
Griffith, The Bible in Arabic, 33–34; the full argument is in Sidney H. Griffith, “Syriacisms in the Arabic Qur’ān: Who Were ‘Those Who Said Allāh Is Third of Three’ according to al-Mā’idah 73?” in A Word Fitly Spoken, ed. Meir M. Bar-Asher et al. (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2007), 83–110. ↩
Reynolds, The Qur’an and the Bible, 208, on 5:73. Reynolds also notes that the Jalalayn read the verse as about Jesus and his mother. ↩
Griffith, The Bible in Arabic, 35. ↩
Reynolds, The Qur’an and the Bible, 218. ↩
Christel Kessler, “‘Abd al-Malik’s Inscription in the Dome of the Rock: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 102, no. 1 (1970): 2–14; transcription and translation of the inner and outer inscriptions on Islamic-Awareness.org. ↩
John of Damascus, On Heresies 100/101 (“The Heresy of the Ishmaelites”) (a few scholars have questioned whether this chapter is John’s own; most accept it), in Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase Jr., Fathers of the Church 37 (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1958; later Catholic University of America Press), 153–60. ↩
Acts 19:11 (RSV). ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

The Qur’an: A New Translation. Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cited from Quran.com.
The Qur’an. Saheeh International translation. Cited from Quran.com.
The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version. Cited from BibleGateway.com.
The Symbol of Faith (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). Orthodox Church in America, oca.org.
Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion, sect 79. English: The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III. Translated by Frank Williams. Leiden: Brill. Greek excerpt as printed in Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 3, §82 (CCEL).
The Dome of the Rock inscriptions (AH 72 / 691–692). Transcription and translation at Islamic-Awareness.org.

Orthodox and patristic sources

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 29. Translated by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow. NPNF2, vol. 7. Buffalo, 1894. New Advent.
Gregory of Nyssa. On “Not Three Gods”: To Ablabius. Translated by H. A. Wilson. NPNF2, vol. 5. Buffalo, 1893. New Advent.
Second Council of Nicaea. Decree. Translated by Henry Percival. NPNF2, vol. 14. Buffalo, 1900. New Advent.
John of Damascus. Writings. Translated by Frederic H. Chase Jr. Fathers of the Church 37. New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1958; later Catholic University of America Press.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

Griffith, Sidney H. The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Griffith, Sidney H. “Syriacisms in the Arabic Qur’ān: Who Were ‘Those Who Said Allāh Is Third of Three’ according to al-Mā’idah 73?” In A Word Fitly Spoken: Studies in Mediaeval Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’ān Presented to Haggai Ben-Shammai, edited by Meir M. Bar-Asher, Simon Hopkins, Sarah Stroumsa and Bruno Chiesa, 83–110. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2007.
Reynolds, Gabriel Said. The Qur’an and the Bible: Text and Commentary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Shoemaker, Stephen J. “Epiphanius of Salamis, the Kollyridians, and the Early Dormition Narratives: The Cult of the Virgin in the Fourth Century.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 3 (2008): 371–401.
Kessler, Christel. “‘Abd al-Malik’s Inscription in the Dome of the Rock: A Reconsideration.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 102, no. 1 (1970): 2–14.
Watt, W. Montgomery. “The Christianity Criticized in the Qur’ān.” The Muslim World 57, no. 3 (1967): 197–201.

Sources from the Islamic tradition

Al-Tabari, Abu Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Jarir. Jami‘ al-Bayan ‘an Ta’wil Ay al-Qur’an. Arabic text on Quran.com.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. Mafatih al-Ghayb (al-Tafsir al-Kabir). Arabic text on Altafsir.com.
Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli and Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti. Tafsir al-Jalalayn. Translated by Feras Hamza. Amman: Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought. Altafsir.com.
Ibn Kathir. Tafsir Ibn Kathir (abridged English edition). Quran.com.
Shafi‘, Mufti Muhammad. Ma‘arif al-Qur’an. English edition on Quran.com.
Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin. Tazkirul Quran. English edition on Quran.com.