Is Jesus begotten of the Father?
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
The passage being recited is from Surah 19, ‘Mary’ and includes some apocryphal material about Jesus speaking as a baby from the cradle. This is pretty docetic stuff and a little infant speaking adult words is a kind of ‘superhuman’ Jesus that is miles away from the Biblical view. The source of this material is from the Syriac Infancy Gospel, an apocryphal document from the fifth or sixth century. Needless to say, it’s not even vaguely ‘Scripture’ and Michael Nazir-Ali is right to condemn the use of it in a church service by Kelvin Holdsworth, the Provost of Glasgow.
There is, however, another dimension to this service that hasn’t yet been picked up in commentary, which should disturb Anglicans everywhere far more than simply telling fairy tales about Jesus in a church. The liturgy for the service includes an English language copy of what is being recited in Arabic. Here it is.
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