(i.e. archangel Gabriel). Mary asks how she can bear a son in view of her chastity and is told that God creates what he wills and that these things are easy for God.

More recently Suleiman Ali Mourad began to look at broader mythological traditions of antiquity, rather than only identifying well-established pre-Islamic Christian intertexts. He thereby identified divine birth narratives as general sources and particularly the birth of the Greek god, Apollo, as