The denials fall into three groups.
One — the impossibility of offspring itself. God does not beget and is not begotten. Lam yalid wa lam yūlad — “He neither begets nor is begotten” (112:3). Mā yanbaghī li-r-Raḥmāni an yattakhidha waladā — “It is not befitting for the Merciful to take a child” (19:92). Annā yakūnu lahu waladun wa lam takun lahu ṣāḥibah — “How could He have a child when He has no consort?” (6:101). The same denial appears in 2:116, 10:68, 17:111, 18:4, 19:35, 23:91, 25:2, 39:4, and 72:3.
These are statements about what God is and is not: He has no offspring, does not beget, and possesses no child.
Alongside them stands 43:81, which works differently — qul in kāna li-r-Raḥmāni waladun fa-anā awwalu l-ʿābidīn, “Say: if the Merciful had a child, then I would be the first of the worshippers.” Not a direct statement of impossibility, but a challenge framed conditionally: the claim is put forward and left to collapse against the Qur’an’s theology of God.
Two — specific claims that particular beings are God’s offspring. Qur’an 9:30 reports the Jews saying Ezra is the son of God and the Christians saying the Messiah is the son of God. Elsewhere the Qur’an rejects daughters being attributed to God, including the identification of angels as female offspring (16:57; 37:149–153; 52:39; 53:21), and rejects sons and daughters being ascribed to Him generally (6:100). In 4:171, after identifying the Messiah as Jesus son of Mary, God’s messenger and His word, it commands: do not say “Three”; God is one God; exalted is He above having a walad.
Again, the target is not merely vocabulary. It is the assertion that God actually has offspring, or that a creature possesses filial status before Him.
Three — collective sonship, and this is especially revealing.
In 5:18 the Jews and Christians say:
Naḥnu abnāʾu llāhi wa aḥibbāʾuh — “We are the children of God and His beloved.”
Notice that the verse places two relational claims side by side: children of God — abnāʾ Allāh — and beloved of God — aḥibbāʾuh.
The Qur’an quotes both. But quotation is not endorsement.
That distinction matters, because Muslims themselves freely use relational honorifics of exactly this kind. Ḥabīb Allāh — Beloved of God — is used of Muhammad ﷺ, and Khalīl Allāh — Intimate Friend of God — is used of Ibrahim, a title the Qur’an itself gives at 4:125. These are constructions of relation. They describe how a person stands in relation to God; they do not by themselves make that person divine.
And aḥibbāʾuh in 5:18 and ḥabīb in the later title come from the same root, ḥ-b-b, and occupy the same semantic field of love and belovedness.
One should not argue that because aḥibbāʾuh occurs in Qur’an 5:18, the Qur’an therefore endorses that particular self-description. It does not. The verse is reporting what Jews and Christians said about themselves.
That is precisely the point.
A relational expression can be quoted, adopted, or used honorifically without its wording by itself settling an ontological question. Meaning comes from context and intended status.
The same principle must therefore be applied consistently to the other expression in the very same sentence: “children of God.”
The Qur’an answers:
Fa-lima yuʿadhdhibukum bi-dhunūbikum? — “Why then does He punish you for your sins?”
Then:
Bal antum basharun mimman khalaq — “Rather, you are human beings from among those He created.”
That response is crucial.
The Qur’an does not formulate a universal lexical rule saying “never use the word child metaphorically,” nor “all familial language concerning God is forbidden regardless of meaning.”
Instead it attacks the status being claimed.
You claim to be His children and His beloved? Then why does He punish you?
And then comes the categorical correction: you are human beings from among those He created.
The claimed privileged standing is stripped away, and the human creature is returned to his proper category.
And here the Qur’an’s method becomes visible as a method. Every time it clears away an offspring-claim, it does not merely police vocabulary — it supplies the true category in its place, often with the same grammatical move: bal, rather.
Bal antum basharun mimman khalaq — rather, you are human beings from among those He created (5:18).
Bal ʿibādun mukramūn — “They say, ‘The Most Merciful has taken a child.’ Glory be to Him! Rather, they are honoured servants” (21:26).
And 19:93 universalises it: everyone in the heavens and the earth comes to the Merciful ʿabdā — as a servant.
The pattern is clear: claimed elevated status is answered with the true creaturely category.
So the Qur’anic distinction is precise. It rejects God begetting, God possessing offspring, creatures being God’s actual children, and any ontological elevation implied by such sonship.
That is not the same thing as establishing a blanket prohibition on every metaphorical, covenantal, affectionate, or honorific use of relational language.
A further caution about the term itself.
We do not possess Jesus’ words in his own language. The Gospels are Greek; his speech was Aramaic. Across all four, one Aramaic word survives on his lips in this connection — Abba, at Mark 14:36 — and the identical word appears in Paul on the lips of ordinary believers (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6).
The distribution invites caution too. In Mark, the earliest Gospel, God is called Father four times in Jesus’ speech — Mark 8:38, 11:25, 13:32, and 14:36 — and Jesus never uses the exact expression “my Father.” A Byzantine/KJV reader will also encounter Mark 11:26, “your Father which is in heaven,” which does not change the point. In John, the latest Gospel, Father-language becomes one of its dominant theological idioms, occurring roughly a hundred and twenty times. Whatever accounts for that gap, it is not simply the uniform recording of a fixed verbal habit.
The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary notes the same difficulty, observing that the widespread use of Father-language for God appears to have developed after Easter, and that it may have arisen through the interpretation — or misinterpretation — of Jesus’ parabolic language.
The vineyard parable is a good example (Mark 12:1–12; Matthew 21:33–46; Luke 20:9–19). Nearly every element is deciphered symbolically — the vineyard, the tenants, the servants, the owner, the killing, the transfer of the vineyard — yet when the story reaches “son,” that one term is often left uninterpreted and carried straight over as literal ontological sonship. The method changes at precisely the word on which later theology depends.
And the claim once made for the term’s uniqueness has not held. Joachim Jeremias argued that Abba was childlike speech unparalleled in Jewish usage. That thesis was contested by Georg Schelbert and Geza Vermes, and dismantled by James Barr in “Abba Isn’t Daddy” (Journal of Theological Studies, 1988). Mary Rose D’Angelo argued further that the tradition reflects early Christian usage rather than an exclusively distinctive practice of Jesus (Journal of Biblical Literature, 1992). Abba is normal adult Aramaic for father.
None of which changes the Qur’anic question. Whether Jesus used the term rarely or constantly, whether later Father-language developed from his prayers, his sayings, or the interpretation of his parables, the word itself carries no necessary offspring-claim. Used in its proper relational sense — a servant addressing his Lord, as Jesus does in Gethsemane while submitting his own will to another’s — it falls nowhere near what the Qur’an condemns as walad: God possessing offspring.
And Qur’an 5:18 itself makes the issue impossible to reduce to vocabulary alone, because “children of God” and “beloved of God” occur together in the same sentence. Ḥabīb Allāh is read as a relation, as noted above — it describes how a person stands before God. The grammar does not force abnāʾ Allāh to carry an ontological meaning merely because it is a filial expression; that meaning has to come from context.
That matters enormously when Jesus says: “My Father.”
“My Father” is not lexically identical to “God has a walad.” It does not, merely by appearing, mean that God begot Jesus, that Jesus is God’s biological offspring, that Jesus shares God’s substance, or that Jesus is an ontological extension of God. Those are theological conclusions that must be demonstrated independently.
So when Jesus calls God “Father,” the question is not did he use filial language? Obviously he did. The question is what did he mean by it?
The Qur’an’s objection is not to the existence of a metaphor. Its repeated objection is to turning a creature into God’s actual offspring, or elevating that creature into divine status.
Its line is not never use relational or filial language.
Its line is:
God has no offspring. No creature is His child. You are created human beings, and servants of the One God.
The move from “Jesus called God Father” to “therefore Jesus claimed to be God’s Son by nature, sharing God’s essence” is not contained in the word Father.
It is an additional theological inference.
And that inference — not the mere use of filial language — is what must be proved before anyone can claim that Jesus’ own words contradict the Qur’an.