Four years hence, I look back on some of my statements re: Mustafa Akyol's The Islamic Jesus with rueful acknowledgement... but not all such statements. To that end, this statement needs a revisit:
when Akyol is marshalling his predecessors for Qur'anic doctrine about Jesus, he stumbles into a junkpile of pious apocrypha that no serious Christian scholar would allow anywhere near him. Like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, or Pseudo Matthew, or the Protoevangelion of James. All this stuff is clearly made up after the fact, but Muslims are stuck with it because the Qur'an endorses them [sic]. So Akyol is stuck with it too.
As I read Akyol p. 122, and based on what (else) I was reading since Winter 2019/20, the "junkpile" deserves a better hearing. (And for that matter, a better presentation. Akyol, like Republicans, needs to lay off the Q.) Here is where was mooted that Jesus was not the Royal Anointed but the Priestly Anointed.
The Royal Anointed is what Saints Paul and Mark present to us, Jesus as Bar-Daweid (Mark 10:47). This went through the "seed" (Romans 1:3... and Ignatius almost passim to the Smyrnaeans, Ephesians, et al.). If anyone was going to provide a nirth certifikit for such a christ, a Jew would have to bear him to Bethlehem - or at least one and/or the other of his natural parent/s but preferably the sperm-producing one. The Synoptics spin out the tale accordingly. (And John... well, we love John . . .) For Mark, Jesus is G-d's apostle whom Everyone Knows as a Nazarene, but is secretly Davidide. Jesus owns a πατρίς town which, perhaps, might not be Galilean. (Mark has a famously cagey presentation of his Christ and Lord.)
Thus, the NT core. However there exist(ed) alternatives in early Christendom. The Epistle of James, for a start - literally Akyol's start - didn't care about Yeshu's death and glorious resurrection. This strain will reëmerge in "2 Thessalonians" and the Gospel Of Thomas so-called. Saint Mark was, in part, struggling against this very strain in the Faith which is why he organises his evangel around the Passion, and above all why he's got that pericope about Simon Cephas trying to figure out what Jesus is.
Also extant as option is the Priestly Messiah. This, we get in the "epistle" to the Hebrews, a work associated with Paul's community but widely regarded as not from Paul himself. Mark seems unaware of this argument himself; we might see reflections in canonical John 1-20.
Akyol points out that the Elkasai sect revered Mary as a Levite, and that a Jerushalmi lection "of Jeremiah" lauds Aaron as "Mary's brother". Not "Miriam", as the Torah and LXX: "Mary".
It stands to reason that if a Jew wanted to float a nonroyal saint - perhaps if he denied the right of kingship entire besides G-d's - he'd have the man born anywhere but Bethlehem. And this is what Akyol finds in the Kathisma Church, forerunner of sûratayn 3 and 19: an illustration of the datepalms by which God fed Mary and the infant Jesus. Hence also much of Akyol's apocryphal Oxyrhynchus, particularly Pseudo-Matthew.
Aletheo-Matthew wants Jesus to be the Son Of David so he's got a seed genealogy, through Joseph. He leaves Mary alone and this gap is what allows the Elkasai sect to speculate on her. Luke is the one who draws the David-to-Mary chain. But you know what, I don't trust Luke; and I get a strong impression that a lot of early Christians also didn't, hence the post-resurrection appearances rife in, say, Secret James. UPDATE 9/5/23: And then there's Mary as the Tabernacle in her own self.
After all the above text, I'm still left seeing Akyol's argument as impressionistic. But that might be about as good as we get from the available content. Mary got associated with the Temple so anciently and to such an extent that Matthew had to note it, and Luke had to hide it. And Palaestinian Christianity never quite forgot it.
As for what this means for Islam, I am less certain. I speculate the Qurân's return to this well has to do with the Umayyads' rededication of the Haram al-Sharif and their general motive to pander to west-Syrian Christianity, against Byzantium. At the same time the Umayyads as Arabs could hardly lay claim to Jesus' royal crown. So they cobbled together a Prophetic Jesus who didn't own that crown. That had to be Mary's Jesus.
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