Did Jesus (a.s.) Speak in the Cradle? -Mufti Abu Layth

uh question Salam brother I keep asking that Al Imran verse stating that you will talk in the cradle and in maturity how is it a miracle to speak as an adult ja AK Allah all right what an name what an name right so this is a question people that I I I believe I've answered before but I'll I'll take a I'll take a little stab at it again so look people say did Jesus speak in the

Cradle Jesus Christ right the you know actually on a side note just to say it's is amazing how uh isaam Jesus is one of the the most amazing people in what he has inspired after him it is amazing in that sense that the whole world today or not the whole world but a substantial part of the world how it's all being influenced to some extent uh by Christianity as so by Islam as well but by Christianity as well the Roman Empire

things like this and how that has then you know obviously finds even though one could say whether it was St Paul or other people that had a greater influence but the point is it still traces its roots to uh Jesus Christ now right so the question is did Jesus speak to speak as a baby um people feel that the Quran teaches us that Jesus spoke as a as a baby or as a child or something now I have mentioned

that the Quran doesn't actually say that okay now there's two things there's different verses that can be used to allude to that okay so there's one verse so the story that people have taken okay so this is the common story that a lot of Muslims have Muslims believe that Mary went off came back with a baby and the Jews were up in arms and they said Stone her Stone her adultery adultery and and she

said and Jesus spoke to them as a little let's say as a two three month old baby and he start to speak and you start to say you know hey this this this this this and they said oh wow and then they said okay we won't Stone you this is what a lot of Muslims do believe this unfortunately it's not actually true in my understanding at all but a lot of Muslims believe this and as a story it sounds nice so I get that um the the reading of the Quran can bend that way I accept that it can bend it doesn't actually explicitly say any of

these things but it can bend that way to to to carry this story that I've just explained the truth is the nature of the Quran whenever speaking about Jesus is often vague and ambiguous uh it's never quite clear and and and I think that's fascinating and one of the reasons it may have adopted that nature was so maybe Muslims could Bridge a gap between them and Christians but whenever the Quran speaks about Jesus like I said it will mention a lot of things um which are very we don't fully understand what they mean like what does that even mean and what

is this like why is Jesus referred to as the word of God logos which is from the Bible uh and what does that even mean that Jesus is the word of God and Jesus has the holy spirit with him no other Prophet is really mentioned in the Quran with the Holy Spirit uh no other Prophet is mentioned as the word of God um these kind of things are really vague like we don't fully understand what what is what is going on here why are biblical almost Christian um Concepts which no Muslims actually believe no Muslims believe that they don't believe in Jesus to be the word of God but yet the Quran does say

that Jesus is the word of God so what was this saying here that it's quite vague in its Essence and like I said it was using terms to build Bridges between Christians and Muslims now which it did to a great extent so the story coming back to this point and the reason why that is important is you've got to understand uh once you understand that okay there were vague terms used to build Bridges it then helps you understand this there's two points where this is mentioned one is the story of Mary and Jesus pointing to

Jesus most likely this event is nothing to do with Jesus being a baby Okay the reason being in all honesty if Mary came back with a baby and and the Jews at the time felt she had committed adultery let's say let's run with this hypothesis there is no question that they would have killed her there is no question about that Mary was nowhere near a force to stop the Jews okay from killing her they would have stoned her to death there is no two ways about

that saying that oh they saw the miracle of Jesus and therefore stopped is silly because they never ever accepted Jesus they never in fact they lead to his crucifixion in the end right because they they never accept I mean whether he actually dies or not is obviously Muslims don't believe he actually died there but the point is the crucifixion as in putting him up on the cross this was done by the Jews um so it's not that they weren't really going to be enamored by Jesus Christ they didn't like Jesus by any standard and they weren't going to say oh wow that's a miracle so we now believe in Jesus they don't believe in Jesus right they

never did believe in Jesus so that wasn't going to stop them they would have just killed him as well so It Isn't So this story like I said if you zoom out you know it comes to that zooming out and zooming in if you zoom out it's a nice story and it's nice and you can run with it if you want but if you zoom in it doesn't add up none of the details actually add up because they would have just they wouldn't have cared cuz you know that because they didn't even care with Jesus they wanted to kill him so the other thing is Mary is never in the Bible ever accused of adultery nobody ever accused

Mary of adultery through the early Christian sources I don't mean later on later on they did like hundreds of years after Mary they started to accuse her of having an affair as the Christians started to popularize the concept that Jesus never had a father but in early Christianity this isn't a popular concept so nobody in the gospels ever is speaking about or in the early in the New Testament nobody's really speaking of Jesus without a father so these things don't actually they're not really mentioned at all back then and Mary's never ever uh you know she's never has

an accusation in her lifetime of being an adulteress so this doesn't happen like that so now we've got to zoom in and look at the details most likely this is referring to the incident uh which is referred to in the Gospel of Luke okay in the the Gospel of Luke what happens is Jesus is brought to because remember Jesus is not from Jerusalem Jesus is from Nazareth and he grows up around there around Galilee and and and those places he doesn't grow up in Jerusalem at all although he does visit Jerusalem regularly may have visited it

every year as well as was mandatory upon males uh to visit the temple once a year now the question is that in the Gospel of Luke at the age of 12 Joseph and Mary bring Jesus to the festival now when the caravan's about to set off and it sets off Jesus is missing and they can't find him and they search for Jesus according to the Gospel of Luke they search for him for three days uh so they're looking for him for all these days and they can't find Jesus they don't know where he is and Mary is really worried where her son is um

eventually they find him him sitting with the high priests in the Great temple um so he's in Jerusalem and you not really one children are not really meant to be going I mean they do go to the temple but they're not given any seniority any you know they don't have a place really they're just meant to kind of tag along but he's sitting in there debating the high priests so what happens is they are really kind of flabber Ed and they they're frustrated with him because who does he

think he is he's just a kid yet he's getting the answers right and he's running rings around some of them and he's a young man he's only 12 according to the Gospel of Luke so the question is that and he's there for a few days and this is in the Gospel of Luke this is the only incident really the main incident of Jesus before he becomes a man otherwise the gospels don't speak of Jesus as a child this is one of the only mentions Jesus gets as a child in the gospel I think it's in the Gospel of Luke at the age of 12 when he's missing for over three days and Mary can't find him she eventually finds him in the in

the temple with the high priest and he's debating with them and teaching them so they find this or at least many of them if not all of them but many of them find this greatly offensive that how dare and if if you and just to understand that you just have to look at how the high priests would behave the rituals in fact there were certain parts that nobody except only certain priests could enter in that Temple and there were certain things and certain offerings that you had to certain rituals and not everybody could address all the high priests and they had a huge list a code of conduct and here is this young man debating them

about God about questioning them and running rings around and things about them so they're getting very angry but it is a festival it's a holy time now Mary finds him when Mary finds him they this is where they say to her that he's yours is he your child and they say you and him like what an insolent rude disrespectful child and they say yeah maram yeah you come from a a sacred kind of

lineage like you you know oh sister of Aon right your father was not a man of bad conduct and your woman wasn't and your mother wasn't a filthy woman either here many people thought they're talking about adultery no they weren't they were talking about then how have you brought this thing how dare he sit here and challenge us you know if you've come from a noble does he not understand nobility does he not understand

etiquette so she just says like like she doesn't know what to say and plus a woman wasn't given a high place to speak so she points at him and he responds he said but I am just a servant of God and they are accusing him of not only being rude to them but inadvertently he's an affront to his mom because by bringing by being disrespectful he's bringing shame onto his own mother so here he says that Allah has made

me he's made me like kind and good to my mother and and so these things that Jesus is saying is most likely the incident of when he was 12 years old with the high priests that's what this incident is talking about okay and hence they begin by when she says look why don't you just ask him I don't know they

say how should you want us to speak to somebody who was only a child yesterday because he's 12 and they're belittling him who was just a boy you want us to speak to this boy who was in the Cradle only yesterday this is like when we say to people that you were only born yesterday and and you're trying to teach me this doesn't mean you're literally born yesterday but what it's trying to say is like you have no experience like who are you that is what this verse is mentioning so that's one verse that

people misunderstand and they think that oh this is speaking about Jesus was a baby talking to he wasn't doing that the other thing is that they use a verse elsewhere that Jesus and his message that and they think this is referring to Jesus because of the first story that they've misunderstood but it isn't that he will speak to people

whether they he will speak to all people that are around him those in the cradle and those of old age too so what that means is that Jesus when he will preach that he will have such wisdom that he will have an expression that it doesn't matter whether they're so young he will be able to relate to them if they're so old he will be able to relate to them if they are amongst the pious he will be able to relate to them that this is not to do with the the subject

is to do with the he will speak to people so this is the the the difference so it doesn't categorically say anyway that Jesus himself spoke but I except that that is the popular story going by that interpretation and I think that interpretation is based on the apocryphal kind of um Christian Transmissions that are not reliable but there are some Christian uh like so for example Jesus has some infancy there are some infancy gospels like the infancy

Gospel of Thomas uh that's to differentiate from the Gospel of Thomas so he has the Gospel of Thomas Thomas but the infancy gospel of Thomas and things like this where they speak about uh Jesus as a child doing some of these things like he speaks as a baby and does these kind of things but the these were not authentic even the Christians did not accept them now it may have been that in Early Times some Muslims assumed them to be correct and therefore interpreted these verses to match the APO apocryphal gospels that they were finding the infancy Gospels so they may

have said ah maybe that's what Allah's trying to say and then they've Twisted it that way but the verses didn't actually say that explicitly and I would say once you zoom in with that story it falls apart so it's okay if you zoom out and it's just a nice story uh and then you could you could believe it it doesn't really make a difference it's just a nice story but when you zoom in it's a problem because nothing adds up because first of all Mary was never accused of adulter at all in her whole lifetime and you know none of these things actually happened so it doesn't add up like what uh and if it

had happened they would have just killed her and if this had happened if Jesus spoke as a baby they would have believed him as the Messiah but we never get in there's no such thing as them accepting him as the Messiah and you know he's never considered even special as a boy he just goes back and so none of these things add up when you zoom in so I hope that um makes some sense