Speaking of Mary, the mother of Jesus, we read the following in the Qur’an:
She went back to her people carrying the child, and they said, ‘Mary! You have done something terrible! Sister of Aaron! Your father was not a bad man; your mother was not unchaste!’ She pointed at him. They said, ‘How can we converse with an infant?’ (Quran, Surah 19 vv. 27-29)
Many have argued that, upon the basis that Mary is called the “sister of Aaron,” such is evidence of the fallibility of the Qur’an. As Tisdall wrote:
In Surah 19, Maryam, 28-29, we are told that when Mary came to her people after the birth of our Lord, they said to her, “O Mary, truly thou hast done a strange thing. O sister of Aaron, thy father was not a man of wickedness, and thy mother was not rebellious.” From these words it is evident that, in Muhammad’s opinion, Mary was identical with Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron (In the Sahih of Muslim [Kitabu’l Adab] we are told that the Christians of Najran pointed this blunder out to Al Mughairah. He consulted Muhammad about it, but could get no satisfactory answer)! This is made still more clear by Surah 66, At Tahrim, 12, where Mary is styled “the daughter of “Imran” the latter being the Arabic form of Amram, who in the Pentateuch is called the father of “Aaron and Moses and Miriam their sister” (Num. 26:59). The title “sister of Aaron” is given to Miriam in Exod. 15:20, and it must be from this passage that Muhammad borrowed the expression. The reason for the mistake which identifies the mother of Jesus Christ with a woman who lived about one thousand five hundred and seventy years before His birth is evidently the act that in Arabic both names, Mary and Miriam, are on and the same in form, Maryam. (W. St. Clair Tisdall, The Original Sources of the Qur’an: Its Origin In Pagan Legends and Mythology, p. 106)
Overall, I think this is a clear error in the Qur’an, showing that all texts that claim to be Scripture can and do indeed contain “the mistakes of men.”
While not persuasive, the scholarly The Study Quran has the following note attempting to get around this error:
That Mary is addressed as sister of Aaron is not, according to commentators, meant to indicate that she was the biological sister of the prophet Aaron, brother of Moses. This would be chronologically impossible, although Mary's father's name is 'Imrān (66:12), as is that of the prophets Moses and Aaron, according to Islamic tradition. Some commentators explain that the name Aaron signified righteousness among the Jews of this time, and so the title sister of Aaron was meant to indicate that Mary was like Aaron in righteousness (ṭ, ṭs). Another explanation is that the name Aaron was common among the Israelites and that Mary had a half brother named Aaron (Th, ṭs, Z). The most widely held view among the commentators is that Mary was a descendant of the prophet Aaron, and the title sister of Aaron is meant as a reference to her noble lineage (Bḍ, Th, ṭs, Z). (The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, page 1226 of 1988; location 37344 of 90397 of kindle edition)
This is an issue that interests me perhaps more than others as it deals with the issue of the mother of Jesus, a topic which I wrote a book on:
