Surah 66:12:
And Mary, the daughter of 'Imran, who guarded her chastity (aḥṣanat farjahā), so We blew into through Our angel (fanafakhnā fīhi min rūḥinā), and she believed in the words of her Lord and His scriptures and was of the devoutly obedient.
Surah 66:12 significantly strengthens this dilemma by narrowing the argument from a general defense of "prior books" down to a highly specific textual verification. The verse states:"...and she [Mary] believed in the words of her Lord and His scriptures (kutubihi / His Books)..." From a historical-critical perspective, this specific phrasing traps the Quranic narrative in three distinct ways:
By explicitly praising Mary for believing in the plural "Books" (Kutub) of God, the Quran validates the existence of a multi-textual canon of scripture available during her 1st-century lifetime.
In the 1st century, the scriptures Mary would have known and "believed in" consisted of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) or its Greek translation (the Septuagint).
These specific books lay out the eternal, immutable covenant line through Isaac and Jacob, detail the Levitical sacrificial system for the atonement of sins, and contain prophecies of a Messiah who would suffer and be pierced for transgressions (e.g., Isaiah 53).
By declaring that Mary lived in absolute, devout compliance with those specific scriptures, the Quran implicitly authenticates the authority of the Old Testament canon—the very canon that leaves no theological room for the modified history later introduced by Islam.
According to standard Islamic theology, Jesus was given a single, singular book called the Injil. However, historical and textual criticism shows that Jesus never wrote or handed out a singular book; rather, his disciples recorded his life and teachings across four distinct, plural biographical accounts (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) alongside various epistles.
If Surah 66:12 implies that the "Books" Mary believed in included the prophetic revelations concerning her son's ministry, it ties the Quran's credibility to the historical manuscript record of the 1st century.
The earliest manuscript fragments of the New Testament (such as or the Egerton Gospel) confirm that from the earliest strata of Christian writing, Jesus was identified as the divine Son of God who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The Quran cannot claim Mary validated these testimonies while simultaneously claiming the testimonies themselves are a grand historical forgery.
The verse opens by identifying Mary as "Maryam, the daughter of 'Imran." As established by historians, this directly collapses Miriam (the Old Testament daughter of Amram/'Imran and sister of Aaron from 1300 BCE) and Mary (the mother of Jesus from the 1st century BCE) into the exact same person. This genealogical error completely shatters the bridge of continuity the Quran tries to build with previous scriptures:
By placing this chronological error in the exact same sentence where it praises Mary for believing in the "Books of her Lord," the text creates a self-defeating loop. It commands belief in scriptures that explicitly expose the Quran's own genealogical anachronism as a historical error.
To a historical critic, Surah 66:12 serves as a micro-cosm of the entire Islamic dilemma: it attempts to borrow the holy prestige of Judeo-Christian figures and scriptures to legitimize its own theology, while simultaneously displaying a lack of familiarity with the actual contents and timelines of the very books it purports to validate.