Medieval polemicists quoted Qur’anic praise of Christ chiefly as ammo against Islam

Evidence

With most academic or intellectual writers, citation of the Qur’anic praise of Christ was for controversial ends, not for its own sake. San Pedro’s account of the miracles of Christ in the Qur’an suggests an appreciative sense of the marvellous: ‘whatever Jesus Christ said, instantly it was so’ - this ‘Muhammad said, and has written in his Qur’an’; but he strongly attacked the Christology of the Qur’an as inconsistent. It made Jesus out to be a man, and yet not to die; made Him holy and sinless, yet supposed that He would allow another to die in His place; made out, in fact, that He was born by the power of God, only to deceive men by this false crucifixion, in a world already full of deceivers. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 950

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here the medieval Christian construction of Islam as internally inconsistent heresy.