Is Muhammad prophesied in the Bible?

Summary

The Quran says that Jesus announced a messenger coming after him, and that the People of the Book find that messenger "written" in their own scriptures.¹  From the ninth century to the present, Muslim writers have gone looking for him there.  This article takes the nine texts they produce and reads each one in the language it was written in.

• The Paraclete claim is the one that can be settled with documents, and it is settled. Transcriptions of six Greek manuscripts of John were read line by line: P66 and P75, both copied around 200 AD, and the fourth- and fifth-century codices Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus and Bezae. All of them read parakletos, "advocate." None reads periklytos, "far-famed."² The word periklytos occurs zero times in the Greek New Testament and zero times in the Greek Old Testament.³⁴ P66 and P75 were copied roughly four hundred years before Muhammad was born.
• The periklytos theory did not come from Muslims. Its first known appearance is in the Refutatio Alcorani of Ludovico Marracci (d. 1700), an Italian Catholic priest, professor of Arabic in Rome, and confessor to Pope Innocent XI, published in Padua in 1698.⁵ The classical Muslim scholars who identified the Paraclete with Muhammad — Ibn Ishaq (d. 150/767), Ali ibn Rabban al-Tabari (fl. 241/855), Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), Ibn Hazm (d. 456/1064) — accepted the Greek word parakletos and reinterpreted it.⁶ Ibn Ishaq writes flatly that "in Greek he is the paraclete."⁷ The modern claim is worse scholarship than the medieval one it replaced.
• Deuteronomy 18:15 says two things, and the argument uses only one of them. The Hebrew is navi mi-qirbekha me-acheikha — "a prophet from your own midst, from your brothers."⁸ Twenty verses earlier, Deuteronomy 17:15 uses the same phrase for choosing a king and then defines it by contrast: "you may not put over you a foreign man, who is not your brother."⁸ The word "Ishmael" appears zero times in Deuteronomy.⁸
• Every biblical datum puts Paran about a thousand kilometres north of Mecca. 1 Kings 11:18 routes a fugitive from Midian through Paran to Egypt.⁹ Numbers 13:26 puts Kadesh inside the wilderness of Paran, and Kadesh-barnea sits on Judah's southern border.⁹ Mecca is 987 km from Jebel Musa, 1,023 km from Aqaba and 1,160 km from Tell el-Qudeirat. Mecca to Medina is 339 km.¹⁰
• Isaiah's own Greek translators named the servant of Isaiah 42:1, and the name is not Muhammad. The Septuagint reads "Jacob my servant … Israel my chosen."⁴ Seven verses later the same chapter says God will not give his glory to another.⁸
• Isaiah 29:11 and 29:12 are one sentence with two halves, and both halves are failures. The literate man cannot read the book because it is sealed; the illiterate man cannot read it because he cannot read.⁸ Nothing is revealed to either. Isaiah gives his own resolution at 29:18: "the deaf shall hear the words of a book."⁹
• The two Hebrew words read as "Muhammad" in Habakkuk 3:3 are from other roots. Hodo is "his splendour," from hod. Tehillato is "his praise," from the root h-l-l, the root of hallelujah. Neither is from h-m-d, the root of Muhammad's name.⁸ The ninth-century writers who found "Muhammad" here were reading a Syriac Bible, translating "praise" into Arabic as hamd, and then treating their own Arabic word as though it were the original.¹¹
• In Song of Songs 5:16, machamaddim is a common noun in the predicate, balanced against another one in the same clause. "His palate is mamtaqqim [sweetnesses], and all of him is machamaddim [desirablenesses]."⁸ Gesenius' grammar §124e and Brown-Driver-Briggs p. 326 both list it, by name, as an intensive plural.¹²¹³ If it is a personal name, so is mamtaqqim, and the verse announces two prophets.
• On the Quran's own side, "Ahmad" in Quran 61:6 may not be a name at all. Marmaduke Pickthall, a Muslim convert whose 1930 translation is one of the four standard English ones, rendered it "whose name is the Praised One."¹⁴ Al-Tha'labi (d. 427/1035) and al-Wahidi (d. 468/1076) read it adjectivally, and Sean Anthony calls that reading "the most credible."⁵
• The classical Islamic tradition is divided about which son Abraham was told to sacrifice, and the greatest of the Quran commentators concluded it was Isaac. Al-Tabari (d. 310/923) wrote: "the sounder of the two views … on the plain sense of the revelation … is the view of the one who says: it is Isaac."¹⁵ Reuven Firestone's tally of the early transmitters finds 39 authorities quoted 141 times for Isaac against 29 quoted 133 times for Ishmael.¹⁶

Verdict:  none of the nine claims survives contact with the source languages, and one of them fails on documentary evidence that predates Islam by four centuries.  That verdict should not be mistaken for a claim that the arguments are silly.  Several of the associations they rest on are real.  Genesis 21:21 genuinely does put Ishmael in the wilderness of Paran.⁹  Kedar genuinely is Ishmael's second son.⁹  The Hebrew root behind machamaddim and the Arabic root behind Muhammad genuinely are the same Semitic root.  Pre-Islamic Jews and pre-Islamic Christians both connected Paran with Ishmael, centuries before there was any Muslim reason to.¹⁷¹⁸  What fails, every single time, is the step from association to identification.

• Weaknesses of this article's own case, stated plainly. Three of the standard Christian replies in circulation are false and are corrected below: that Deuteronomy 18 can only mean Jesus, that nobody before Islam connected Paran with Ishmael, and that "brother" in Deuteronomy always means an Israelite. Two more are overstated. W. Montgomery Watt's 1953 article on the name Ahmad, which both sides cite, sits behind a paywall and could not be opened; it is named here only as a position, never quoted. Martin Accad's four-part inventory of Muslim Gospel citations, the best available map of this literature, could not be obtained either. The Syriac of John 14:16 was not checked directly; the statement that all Syriac versions read paraqlita rests on Alfred Guillaume and Sean Anthony, two competent Semitists, rather than on bytes read here. And the Christian reading of Isaiah 42:1-4 as a prophecy of Jesus comes from Matthew 12:18-21; a non-Christian reader is not obliged to grant it, and the case against the Muslim reading of that chapter does not depend on it.

The claim being tested

The claim is Quranic before it is apologetic.  Two verses set it up.

Quran 7:157 describes the saved as those who follow "the Messenger, the unlettered prophet, whom they find written [i.e., described] in what they have of the Torah and the Gospel."¹  Quran 2:146:  "Those to whom We gave the Scripture know him [i.e., Prophet Muhammad] as they know their own sons."¹⁹  And Quran 61:6 puts a specific announcement in Jesus' mouth:  "bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad."¹⁴

From those verses the argument runs to the Bible.  Four separate propositions travel together, and they are usually blurred:

1. The general prediction claim. The Torah and the Gospel, as they stood in Muhammad's lifetime, described a coming prophet who matches Muhammad.
2. The specific text claim. Particular verses still standing in the Bible today are those descriptions — Deuteronomy 18:18, Deuteronomy 33:2, Isaiah 42:11, Isaiah 29:12, Habakkuk 3:3, Song of Songs 5:16, and the Paraclete sayings in John 14-16.
3. The name claim. At least two of those texts contain Muhammad's name itself: machamaddim in Song of Songs 5:16, and periklytos behind the parakletos of John.
4. The removal claim. Where a text does not say what is claimed, the announcements — the bisharat, "glad tidings" — were cut out by Jews or Christians.

Propositions 2, 3 and 4 are the testable ones, and they interact.  Proposition 4 is the fallback for the failure of 2 and 3, which is why it has to be tested last and tested for whether it can fail at all.

Note what is not being tested.  Whether Muhammad was a prophet is a much larger question, treated in the article on his life.  This article asks a narrower and more tractable one:  do these specific texts, read in Hebrew and Greek, say what is claimed of them?

The strongest case for the Muslim claim

Stated at full strength, before any evaluation.

The framework is not arbitrary.  Christianity itself was launched on exactly this move.  The New Testament reads the Hebrew scriptures as pointing forward to a figure they never name, and it does so by clustering associations — a town, a tribe, a manner of death, a servant who suffers.  Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1, "out of Egypt I called my son," a verse whose plain subject is the nation of Israel, and applies it to a child.  A Christian who accepts that method cannot object to a Muslim using it.  The Berean Archive's own articles on Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 argue that the method is legitimate when the correspondences are specific and the reading is not driven backwards from the conclusion.  The Muslim case asks for the same courtesy.

The individual arguments, at their best.

• Deuteronomy 18:18 promises a prophet "like you" — like Moses. Deuteronomy 34:10 then says that no prophet like Moses has arisen in Israel.⁸ Read together, that is a promise pointing outside Israel. And Muhammad resembles Moses in ways Jesus does not: both had a human father and mother, both married and had children, both brought a law, both led a community in war, both died naturally and were buried. Ahmed Deedat pressed exactly this list.²⁰
• Deuteronomy 33:2 has God dawn from Sinai, shine from Seir, and blaze from Mount Paran.⁸ Genesis 21:21 puts Ishmael in the wilderness of Paran.⁹ Ibn Qutayba stated the conclusion without hedging: "the mountains of Paran, which are the mountains of Mecca. There is no disagreement between the Muslims and the People of the Book concerning the fact that Paran is Mecca."⁶ Three place names, three revelations: Sinai to Moses, Seir to Jesus, Paran to Muhammad.
• Isaiah 42 describes a servant who brings justice to the nations and "shall not grow dim or be crushed till he has set justice in the earth" — endurance, not execution. Verse 11 calls on "the villages where Kedar dwells" to sing, and Kedar is Ishmael's son.⁹ Ibn Rabban asked: "who is Kedar, except the descendants of Ishmael … who inhabit caves, and give Hamd to the Lord?"¹¹
• Isaiah 29:12 has a book handed to a man who cannot read, with the command "Read this," and the answer "I do not know writing." In the earliest Muslim account of Muhammad's first revelation, the angel says iqra', "Read," and Muhammad answers ma ana bi-qari', rendered on sunnah.com as "I do not know how to read."²¹ The verbal correspondence is genuinely striking, and it is the strongest single verbal parallel in the whole set.
• Habakkuk 3:3 puts God's coming at Teman and Mount Paran and says his praise filled the earth. Ibn Qutayba's Arabic version reads that "the earth was filled with the praise and sanctification of the praiseworthy one (ahmad)."⁶
• Song of Songs 5:16 contains the consonants m-ch-m-d-y-m. Zakir Naik's form of the argument: "In the Hebrew language im is added for respect. Similarly im is added after the name of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to make it Muhammadim."²²
• John 14-16 promises a Paraclete who will come only after Jesus departs, who will "abide for ever," who will "guide you into all truth," and who "shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak." That last clause reads naturally as a description of a prophet receiving revelation. And Jesus says another Paraclete — implying one of the same kind as himself, which is to say a man.²⁰
• Quran 61:6 then names him: Ahmad. And Muhammad, in a report in Sahih al-Bukhari, lists Ahmad among his own five names.²³

The strongest structural point.  A Christian who says "these are strained readings" is standing in a glass house.  The rabbis of the first century did not read Isaiah 53 of a crucified Galilean, and Jewish critics have said for two thousand years that Christian messianic proof-texts are strained.  The Muslim is doing to the Christian Bible exactly what the Christian did to the Jewish one.  Any answer that does not survive that mirror is worthless.

So the test used here is a symmetrical one.  Read the text in its own language.  Read the whole unit, not a clause.  Ask what the earliest translators, who had no stake in the dispute, understood it to mean.  Ask what the manuscripts say.  Where those tests can be applied to a Christian claim as well, they are.

Who made the argument, and when

This matters more than it looks, because the modern popular argument and the classical scholarly argument are not the same argument.  The strongest Muslim writers did not make the move that is most often attacked.

Two facts in that table deserve to be pulled out.

The first is that the classical Muslim scholars accepted the Greek text.  Camilla Adang's survey of Muslim writing on the Bible names Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Rabban, Ibn Qutayba, al-Maqdisi and Ibn Hazm as all identifying the Paraclete with Muhammad — and none of them claims the Greek word was originally something else.⁶  They took the text as they found it and argued about what it meant.  Ibn Rabban's Paraclete argument is a numerological one:  he adds up the numerical values of the letters of paraqlit in Syriac and finds they total the same as "Muhammad ibn Abdallah, the guiding prophet."¹¹  That argument only works if parakletos is the right reading.  Ibn Ishaq, a century earlier, had already written that "in Greek he is the paraclete."⁷

The second is where the periklytos theory came from.  Sean Anthony of Ohio State traced it, and the answer is uncomfortable for everyone.  It was proposed by Ludovico Marracci, professor of Arabic at La Sapienza in Rome, confessor to Pope Innocent XI, and author of a Latin refutation of the Quran published in 1698.⁵  Anthony sets out what the theory has to assume — that Muhammad or an early redactor knew both Greek and Syriac, did not have the Greek Gospels, reverse-engineered the Greek consonants from a Syriac spelling, and re-vocalised them wrongly but conveniently — and calls the result "so convoluted as to be absurd."⁵

That is not a scoring point, and it should not be used as one.  The right lesson is about quality.  Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Rabban worked from the Gospel texts actually available to them in Syriac and Aramaic and built arguments on what those texts said.  The modern claim replaced their argument with a European polemicist's guess.

The Paraclete: what the manuscripts actually say

The claim

Yusuf Ali's note 5438, which is the source almost every later statement of this claim goes back to:

"'Ahmad', or 'Muhammad', the Praised One, is almost a translation of the Greek word Periclytos.  In the present Gospel of John, 14:16, 15:26, and 16:7, the word 'Comforter' in the English version is for the Greek word 'Paracletos', which means 'Advocate', 'one called to the help of another, a kind friend', rather than 'Comforter'.  Our doctors contend that Paracletos is a corrupt reading for Periclytos, and that in their original saying of Jesus there was a prophecy of our Prophet Ahmad by name."²⁴

Deedat reprints that paragraph in full.²⁰  Naik paraphrases it.  It is the single most repeated claim in this whole field.

The manuscripts

This is a claim about what a Greek text originally said, so it is answered by Greek manuscripts.  Transcriptions were downloaded from the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, which publishes machine-readable transcriptions of the manuscripts themselves, and were read locally.  Corrector readings are stripped;  what follows is what the first hand wrote.²

Six manuscripts, four verses, twenty surviving readings of one word, and one damaged twenty-first — the four surviving letters of which are ΠΑΡΑ.²

The obvious objection to a table like this is that transcriptions smooth over disagreement.  They do not here, and it is easy to check.  These same transcriptions record genuine scribal variation inside the same verses.  Sinaiticus writes τηρησω, "I will keep," where the others write ερωτησω, "I will ask," at John 14:16.  Sinaiticus writes ημας for υμας at 16:7.  The first hand of P66 writes αλλα where the corrector writes αλλον.  Bezae adds μου after πατηρ at 14:26.²  Scribes made mistakes in these verses and the record shows them.  The record is silent on periklytos because no scribe ever wrote it.

Two further searches close the gap.

The word does not occur in the Greek New Testament at all.  A regular-expression search of the SBL Greek New Testament across all twenty-seven books for περικλυτ- and περικλητ-, accented and unaccented, returns nothing.³

It does not occur in the Greek Old Testament either.  The same search across Rahlfs' Septuagint, including the deuterocanonical books and the Odes, returns nothing.  The nearest relative anywhere in the Greek Bible is παρακλητικούς, "comforting words," at Zechariah 1:13.⁴

The word is real, but it is Homeric.  περικλυτός occurs twelve times in the Iliad, most often as the fixed epithet of Hephaestus and of gifts:  περικλυτὸς ἀμφιγυήεις, περικλυτὰ δῶρα.²⁵  It is built from περί plus κλυτός, from κλύω, "to hear" — so, "heard of all around," far-famed.  It belongs to epic verse, not to the plain Koine Greek of John.  Anthony's own note on the point is that the word, "albeit present in Classical Greek lexica, is virtually unknown to the Greek lexica of the New Testament, early Christian writings, Patristic writings, or even the pseudepigrapha," and that the only use he could locate is in the Testament of Solomon, where a demon introduces himself as "Asmodeus the renowned."⁵

The dates are the heart of it.  P66 and P75 were copied around 200 AD.  Muhammad was born about 570.  Any theory that the word was altered to hide a prophecy of him has to explain two manuscripts written roughly four centuries before he existed, in a language the alterers would have had to reach across the Mediterranean to change, in copies already scattered from Egypt to Gaul.

What the passage says about the Paraclete

Suppose all of that is set aside and the word parakletos is granted.  John still identifies the figure, four times, inside the same discourse.

1. "Another Paraclete." John 14:16: κἀγὼ ἐρωτήσω τὸν πατέρα καὶ ἄλλον παράκλητον δώσει ὑμῖν.³ The word occurs five times in the New Testament, and the fifth is 1 John 2:1: "we have a parakletos with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous."³ So the first Paraclete is Jesus, and the promise is of a second one. This is the verse Deedat builds on, and it is a fair verse to build on.
2. The next verse rules out a human successor. John 14:17: "the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, because he abides with you and will be in you."³ A man born five centuries later is not someone the world "cannot see." He is not someone the disciples standing in the room already know. And he is not "in" them.
3. The verse after that names him. John 14:26: ὁ δὲ παράκλητος, τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον — "the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit."³ All six manuscripts checked above read τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον here, P66 and P75 included. There is no manuscript basis for the occasional claim that "the Holy Spirit" was inserted.²
4. John 15:26 and 16:13 repeat the title. "The Spirit of truth."

The text dates its own fulfilment

The strongest internal evidence is not a word-study.  It is that the same author's second volume records the promise being kept, about ten days later.

Jesus tells the disciples to stay in Jerusalem "for the promise of the Father … you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now" (Acts 1:4-5).  Acts 2:1-4 narrates it at Pentecost.  Acts 2:33 makes the link explicit:  "having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you now see and hear."³

A Muslim reader is not obliged to believe that Pentecost happened.  But the argument here is about what the text claims, and the text claims a fulfilment ten days after the promise, not 570 years after it.  For the Paraclete to be Muhammad, Acts has to be describing something else and saying it is this.

The three standard rejoinders

"The Holy Spirit already existed in Jesus' time, so the Comforter who was still to come cannot be the Spirit."  This is Yusuf Ali's argument in note 416 and Naik's after him.²⁴  John anticipates it:  οὔπω γὰρ ἦν πνεῦμα, ὅτι Ἰησοῦς οὐδέπω ἐδοξάσθη — "for the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified" (John 7:39).³  John's own idiom distinguishes the Spirit's existence from the Spirit's coming as Paraclete, and ties the second to the glorification.  Whatever one makes of that theology, it is John's, and it removes the contradiction the objection depends on.

"'Another Comforter' means another of the same kind as Jesus, therefore a man."  Deedat's point.²⁰  ἄλλος does mean "another of the same kind," but the kind in view is stated by the noun:  another advocate.  And the text immediately supplies the differences:  this advocate abides for ever (14:16), the world cannot see him (14:17), he is the Holy Spirit (14:26).  The differentiating clauses are in the next two verses, not somewhere else in the Bible.

"1 John uses 'spirit' to mean 'prophet,' so 'Holy Spirit' means 'Holy Prophet.'"  Deedat again, citing 1 John 4:1, "test the spirits … because many false prophets have gone out into the world."²⁰  The verse does use the words that way.  But the next verse gives the test, and quoting 4:1 without 4:2 removes the point of the passage:  "every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh is from God," and "every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God."³  On its own terms, the passage is a filter that Islam's Christology does not pass.  It cannot be used as a bridge.

And one major Muslim source concedes the difficulty.  The Study Quran, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and published by HarperOne in 2015, states the Paraclete identification and then adds:  "Such an interpretation is, however, complicated by the next verse, 14:17, where the Advocate or Paraclete is said to be 'the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.  You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you,' and by 14:26, where the Advocate is again equated with the Holy Spirit."²⁶

Verdict:  fails decisively, on documents.

Deuteronomy 18:15-19: "from among their brothers"

The claim

Moses promises a prophet "like me," raised up "from among their brothers."  Israel's brothers, on the argument, include the Ishmaelites, since Ishmael and Isaac were sons of the same father.  Deuteronomy 34:10 then says that no prophet like Moses arose in Israel, which is read as pointing the promise outward.  This is the oldest of the arguments — Ibn Rabban leads with it in the 850s — and the most widely used.  Naik's tract puts Deuteronomy 18:18-19 first.²²

The Hebrew has two phrases, and the argument uses one

Deuteronomy 18:15 in the Masoretic Text:  navi mi-qirbekha me-acheikha kamoni yaqim lekha YHWH elohekha — "a prophet from your midst, from your brothers, like me, YHWH your God will raise up for you."⁸

Mi-qirbekha means "from your own midst," from qerev, the inward part.  It is the first qualifier and the argument does not engage it.  Verse 18 repeats the second qualifier alone, mi-qerev acheihem, "from the midst of their brothers,"⁸ and that is the verse the tracts quote.

The control text is twenty verses earlier

Deuteronomy 17:15 uses the same construction for choosing a king, and then defines it:

mi-qerev acheikha tasim aleikha melekh, lo tukhal latet aleikha ish nokhri asher lo achikha hu — "from the midst of your brothers you shall set a king over you;  you may not put over you a foreign man, who is not your brother."⁸

Deuteronomy itself supplies the antonym.  A "brother" in this formula is the opposite of a nokhri, a foreigner.  If mi-qerev acheikha can mean an Arab in 18:15, then 17:15 permits a foreign king, which is the exact thing 17:15 forbids.  Every king Israel actually crowned under this law was an Israelite.

Where the standard Christian claim is wrong

It is often said that "brother" in Deuteronomy always means a fellow Israelite.  That is false, and a Muslim who checks will find it out.

The lemma ach occurs 48 times in Deuteronomy.⁸  Forty-five of those mean fellow Israelites — the debt-release laws of 15:2-12, the lost-ox law of 22:1-4, levirate marriage in 25:5-9, the appointment of judges in 1:16, the Levites in 18:2 and 18:7.  Three do not:

• 2:4 — "you are passing through the territory of your brothers, the sons of Esau, who dwell in Seir."
• 2:8 — "we passed by from our brothers, the sons of Esau."
• 23:8 — "you shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother."⁸

So Deuteronomy does use "brother" of a kindred nation.  The argument therefore cannot rest on a false universal.  It rests on three narrower facts.

First, in all three exceptions the nation is Edom, it is named, and the reason is given:  Esau was Jacob's twin.  Numbers 20:14 has Israel address the king of Edom as "your brother Israel."  The usage is specific, not open-ended.

Second, "Ishmael" occurs zero times in Deuteronomy.  It occurs zero times in Numbers.  It occurs seventeen times in Genesis and never once in the book that contains the promise.⁸  Deuteronomy never calls Ishmaelites or Arabs Israel's brothers, in this formula or any other.

Third, the nearest thing Genesis offers runs the other way.  Genesis 16:12 says Ishmael will dwell al-penei kol echav, "over against all his brothers," and Genesis 25:18 repeats it.⁹  The word "brothers" is there, and the relationship it describes is estrangement.

"Like me"

Deuteronomy 34:10-12 is the other half of the argument, and the Muslim reading of "in Israel" is a fair reading of the words:

"And there has not arisen a prophet again in Israel like Moses, whom YHWH knew face to face" — followed by "for all the signs and wonders which YHWH sent him to do in the land of Egypt."⁸

The verse does say "in Israel."  What it also does is supply two criteria for "like Moses," and they are testable:  direct face-to-face speech with God, and public evidential miracles of the Exodus kind.

This is where a Christian argument usually overreaches, so it needs stating carefully.  It is often said that Muhammad worked no miracles and therefore fails the test.  But the hadith and the sira report many — the splitting of the moon, water flowing from his fingers, the palm trunk that moaned.  A Muslim who accepts those reports is not answered by asserting the opposite.

The honest form of the point is that it is a tension inside the Islamic sources, not one imported from outside them.  When the Quran is asked for a sign, its answer is repeatedly that the Quran is the sign.  "And they say, 'Why has a sign not been sent down to him from his Lord?'  Say, 'Indeed, Allah is Able to send down a sign, but most of them do not know'" (Quran 6:37).²⁷  "Say, 'The signs are only with Allah, and I am only a clear warner.'  And is it not sufficient for them that We revealed to you the Book [i.e., the Quran] which is recited to them?" (Quran 29:50-51).²⁸  "And nothing has prevented Us from sending signs [i.e., miracles] except that the former peoples denied them" (Quran 17:59).²⁹  That is a coherent position.  It is not the category Deuteronomy 34:11 names.

Deedat's inverse argument — that Muhammad is more like Moses than Jesus is, because both had two human parents, married, had children, brought a law, led armies, and died naturally — is a real argument and deserves a real answer.²⁰  The answer is that Deuteronomy 18 supplies its own test, and it is not biographical resemblance.  The passage sits inside a unit about telling true prophets from diviners (18:9-14), and it ends by giving the criterion:  "when a prophet speaks in the name of YHWH, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which YHWH has not spoken" (18:21-22).⁹  Fulfilled prediction, not similarity of life.

How the passage was read before Christianity

The Christian reading of Deuteronomy 18 as a single coming figure is not a Christian invention.  It is attested in a Jewish text older than the New Testament.

4Q175, called 4QTestimonia, was found in Cave 4 at Qumran and is written in a Hasmonean hand of the early first century BC.  It is a short anthology of four scriptural passages.  Lines 5-8 quote Deuteronomy 18:18-19 verbatim, immediately after Deuteronomy 5:28-29 and immediately before Numbers 24:15-17, the star out of Jacob.³⁰  A Jewish community before Christ was already reading Deuteronomy 18:18 as a promise of a specific coming figure, and reading it alongside other messianic texts.

The Gospel of John shows the same expectation in circulation.  Priests and Levites ask John the Baptist three questions in a row:  are you the Messiah, are you Elijah, "are you the Prophet?"  Three separate expected figures, and "the Prophet" is one of them, definite and known.³  After the feeding of the five thousand the crowd says, "this is truly the Prophet who is coming into the world."³  Acts 3:22-23 and Acts 7:37 then quote Deuteronomy 18:15-19 and apply it to Jesus.³

Verdict:  fails.  The promise is doubly localised in the Hebrew, the book that contains it never mentions Ishmael, and the singular-figure reading it does support was already attached to a Jewish messianic expectation two centuries before Christianity, let alone Islam.

Deuteronomy 33:2 and Habakkuk 3:3: where is Paran?

The claim

Deuteronomy 33:2:  "YHWH came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon them;  he shone forth from Mount Paran."⁸  Habakkuk 3:3:  "Eloah comes from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran."⁸  Three place names, on the argument, mean three revelations:  Sinai for Moses, Seir for Jesus, Paran for Muhammad — because Genesis 21:21 says Ishmael "dwelt in the wilderness of Paran," and Ishmael's descendants settled Arabia.  Ibn Qutayba stated it as common ground:  "the mountains of Paran, which are the mountains of Mecca.  There is no disagreement between the Muslims and the People of the Book concerning the fact that Paran is Mecca."⁶

The Christian reply that does not work

It is often said that nobody before Islam connected Paran with Ishmael or with Arabia.  That is wrong three times over, and a reader who checks will lose confidence in everything else on the page.

• Genesis 21:21 itself puts Ishmael in the wilderness of Paran. That is the Bible's own datum, and Muslims are quoting it correctly.⁹
• Rabbinic Judaism made the connection before Islam existed. Sifrei Devarim 343, a commentary from roughly the third century, tells a story in which God offers the Torah to the sons of Esau, then to Ammon and Moab, then to the sons of Ishmael, and each refuses.¹⁷ The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Avodah Zarah 2b, gives the same tradition in the name of Rabbi Yohanan (d. 279): God "took the Torah around to every nation … such as the Edomites in Seir and the Ishmaelites in Paran, but they did not accept it" — and quotes Deuteronomy 33:2 and Habakkuk 3:3 together to prove it, exactly as the Muslim writers later would.¹⁷ Rashi (d. 1105) repeats it on Deuteronomy 33:2.¹⁷
• A pre-Islamic Christian bishop made it too. Eusebius of Caesarea compiled a gazetteer of biblical place names, the Onomasticon, around 320-330. His entry for Pharan reads: "a city beyond Arabia adjoining the desert of the Saracens … through which the children of Israel went moving camp from Sinai … three days journey to the east of Aila, where Scripture affirms Ismael dwelled, whence the Ishmaelites."¹⁸

So the association is real, ancient, and made independently by Jews and Christians three centuries before Islam.  The defensible Christian claim is narrower and much stronger:  no ancient source places Paran at Mecca, and every locational datum in the Bible places it about a thousand kilometres north of Mecca.

Where the Bible puts Paran

Two of those are decisive on their own.⁹

1 Kings 11:18 places Paran on the road between Midian and Egypt.  Whatever Paran is, it is somewhere a man travelling from north-west Arabia to Egypt passes through and can recruit from.  That is the Sinai peninsula or its immediate margins.  A detour to Mecca would be an eleven-hundred-kilometre round trip in the wrong direction.

Numbers 13:26 puts Kadesh inside the wilderness of Paran, and Numbers 34:4 and Joshua 15:3 put Kadesh-barnea on Judah's southern border.  Paran therefore reaches up to the edge of Judah.

Eusebius' own coordinate agrees.  Three days' journey east of Aila — that is, Aqaba, at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba — is roughly 90 to 120 kilometres.  "Arabia" in Roman usage means Provincia Arabia, the old Nabataean kingdom in what is now Jordan, not the Hijaz.

The distances

Straight-line distances from Mecca, computed on the WGS84 ellipsoid:¹⁰

For scale, Mecca to Medina is 339 km.  Every candidate site for Paran is three times farther from Mecca than Medina is.

The passages are about one event, not three

Deuteronomy 33:2 names three places in a single line of Hebrew poetry, in synonymous parallelism, and the next two verses say what the event was:  "Moses commanded us a law, an inheritance for the assembly of Jacob."⁹  It is the giving of the Torah, described as a storm sweeping up from the south.  Habakkuk 3 does the same thing at greater length:  verse 7 names "the tents of Cushan" and "the curtains of the land of Midian," verses 8-9 the rivers and the sea, verse 13 "you went forth for the salvation of your people, for the salvation of your anointed."⁹  It is a hymn about the Exodus and the conquest.  The one who comes is Eloah and qadosh — God and the Holy One — not a man.

And Teman is Edom, named as such repeatedly:  Jeremiah 49:7 heads its oracle against Edom "is there no more wisdom in Teman?";  Amos 1:12, "I will send fire on Teman … the fortresses of Bozrah";  Obadiah 9, "your warriors shall be dismayed, O Teman … from the mount of Esau";  Ezekiel 25:13 places Teman inside the judgement on Edom.⁹  Teman parallels Paran in Habakkuk exactly as Seir parallels Paran in Deuteronomy.  The direction is south and south-east of Judah.

The "praise" in Habakkuk 3:3

Ibn Rabban's Arabic version of the verse reads:  "God came from the South, and the Holy One from Mount Paran.  Heaven was eclipsed by the resplendence of Muhammad, and the earth was full of his Hamd."  He introduces the chapter by saying it mentions the Prophet "twice by name."¹¹

The Hebrew words are hodo and tehillato.⁸  Hodo is "his splendour," from the noun hod.  Tehillato is "his praise," from the root h-l-l — the root of hallelu-yah.  Neither has any connection with h-m-d, the root of hamd and Muhammad.

What happened is visible in the sources themselves.  Ibn Rabban and Ibn Qutayba were working from a Syriac Bible.  They translated the Syriac word for "praise" into Arabic as hamd, and then treated the Arabic word they had themselves chosen as though it were the source text's word.  Alphonse Mingana, who translated Ibn Rabban into English in 1922, flags the same move elsewhere in the same book.  At Isaiah 55:5 Ibn Rabban has God say to the nations "he hath made thee Ahmad," and Mingana footnotes it:  the Syriac reads "has glorified thee."¹¹  The Hebrew there is pe'arakh, from the root p-'-r, "to glorify."  The same is true of Isaiah 60:7, where Ibn Rabban reads "a Hamd to the house of my mahmadah" and the Hebrew is beit tif'arti, "my beautiful house," root p-'-r again.

And the Septuagint did not read a place name at all

The oldest translation of Habakkuk, made by Jews in the second or third century BC, renders 3:3 as ὁ θεὸς ἐκ Θαιμαν ἥξει καὶ ὁ ἅγιος ἐξ ὄρους κατασκίου δασέος — "God will come from Teman, and the Holy One from a shaded, thickly wooded mountain."⁴  The translator evidently connected paran with a Hebrew word for foliage.  He may well have been wrong.  The point is that the earliest translator saw no proper name here requiring a location, which is fatal to Ibn Qutayba's claim that there is "no disagreement" about Paran meaning Mecca.

Verdict:  fails on geography.  The association of Paran with Ishmael is genuine and pre-Islamic.  The identification of Paran with Mecca has no ancient support and contradicts every locational datum in the Hebrew Bible.

Isaiah 42: the servant, and Kedar

The claim

Isaiah 42 opens with a servant whom God upholds, who brings justice to the nations, and who "shall not grow dim or be crushed till he has set justice in the earth."  Verse 11 calls on the desert and its cities, "the villages where Kedar dwells," to lift up their voice.  Kedar is Ishmael's second son.⁹  Verse 13 has the Lord go out "like a mighty man" and prevail against his enemies.

Ibn Rabban put the case in the 850s:  "To whom does the wilderness belong … except to this nation?  And who is Kedar, except the descendants of Ishmael … who inhabit caves, and give Hamd to the Lord …?  And who is he who rebuked, became mighty, and killed his enemies, except Muhammad?"¹¹  Yusuf Ali's note 416 makes the same move:  "the rise of the Arab nation in Isaiah xlii. 11, for Kedar was a son of Isma'il."²⁴

The argument has a real advantage.  A servant who does not fail or grow faint until he has established justice in the earth reads more naturally as a victorious founder than as an executed teacher.

Isaiah names the servant, and the Greek names him in this very verse

The Septuagint of Isaiah 42:1 does not leave the servant anonymous:

Ιακωβ ὁ παῖς μου, ἀντιλήμψομαι αὐτοῦ· Ισραηλ ὁ ἐκλεκτός μου, προσεδέξατο αὐτὸν ἡ ψυχή μου — "Jacob my servant, I will uphold him;  Israel my chosen, my soul has accepted him."⁴

That is the oldest surviving translation of Isaiah, made by Jews before Christianity existed, and it reads the servant of 42:1 as the nation.

Isaiah says the same thing repeatedly in the surrounding chapters, in Hebrew:  41:8, "you, Israel, my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen";  44:1-2, "hear now, O Jacob my servant";  44:21, "you are my servant … O Israel";  45:4, "for the sake of my servant Jacob";  49:3, "you are my servant, Israel."⁹  And seventeen verses after the passage in dispute, 42:19:  "Who is blind but my servant?  or deaf as my messenger whom I send?"⁹  That is neither Muhammad nor Jesus.  It is the nation under judgement.

The chapter's own hinge verse

Isaiah 42:8:  ani YHWH hu shemi, u-khvodi le-acher lo etten, u-tehillati la-pesilim — "I am YHWH, that is my name;  my glory I will not give to another, nor my praise to graven images."⁸

A chapter that stops in the middle to insist God gives his glory to no other is a poor vehicle for the announcement of a new prophet's glory.

Verse 11 is a summons, not a prediction

Yis'u midbar we-arav, chatzerim teshev Qedar, yaronnu yoshvei Sela — "let the desert and its cities lift up, the villages where Kedar dwells;  let the inhabitants of Sela sing."⁸  The Septuagint translates Sela as Πέτραν, Petra — the Edomite rock city.⁴

Kedar and Petra are paired.  They are two desert peoples, called to praise the God of Israel, alongside "the coastlands" and "those who go down to the sea" in verse 10.  It is a summons to worship, in the imperative, addressed to the ends of the earth.  It is not the announcement of a prophet arising among one of them.  If it were, Petra would have equal claim.

Isaiah elsewhere prophesies Kedar's collapse rather than its elevation:  "within a year, according to the years of a hired worker, all the glory of Kedar shall fail" (Isaiah 21:16-17).⁹

The warrior in verse 13 is God

YHWH ka-gibbor yetze — "YHWH goes out like a mighty man."⁸  Ibn Rabban's reading requires "the Lord" here to be a human lord of high standing.  The Hebrew is the divine name, and the simile — like a mighty man — exists precisely because the subject is not one.

Where the Christian reply is weaker than it sounds

Matthew 12:17-21 quotes Isaiah 42:1-4 of Jesus.³  That is the earliest surviving application of the passage to any individual, and it is worth noticing that Matthew quotes it precisely at the point of not fighting:  "he will not quarrel or cry out, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets;  a bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not quench."

But a skeptical reader is not obliged to accept Matthew's application, and a Muslim reader certainly is not.  The case against the Muslim reading does not depend on it.  It stands on three things internal to Isaiah:  the Septuagint's naming of the servant at 42:1, the identification of the servant as Israel five times in the surrounding chapters, and 42:8.

Verdict:  fails.

Isaiah 29:12: "one who does not know writing"

The claim

Naik states it in three lines:  "When Archangel Gabrail commanded Muhammad (pbuh) by saying Iqra — 'Read', he replied, 'I am not learned.'"²²

The earliest full account of the first revelation is a report from Aisha in Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith 3.  Bukhari carries no external grade line, because inclusion in the Sahih is itself the claim.  In it the angel says iqra', "Read," and Muhammad answers three times ma ana bi-qari' — usually rendered "I do not know how to read," and defensible also as "What shall I read?"²¹

Isaiah 29:12 says:  "and the book is given to one who does not know writing, saying, 'Read this,' and he says, 'I do not know writing.'"⁸

The verbal correspondence is genuinely close, and this is the strongest single verbal parallel in the whole set.  It deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal.

The audit

1.  Verses 11 and 12 are one sentence with two halves, and both halves are failures.  Verse 11 comes first:  "and every vision has become for you like the words of a sealed book, which they give to one who knows writing, saying, 'Read this,' and he says, 'I cannot, for it is sealed.'"⁸  The literate man fails because the book is sealed.  The illiterate man fails because he cannot read.  It is a two-part illustration of the same point.  If verse 12 predicts a revelation, verse 11 predicts nothing at all, and the structure collapses.

2.  Nothing is revealed to either man.  In Isaiah the exchange ends with the refusal.  In the cave narrative the angel presses three times and then recites Quran 96:1-3, and Muhammad repeats it.  The Isaiah text has no third stage and no recitation.  The one element that would make it a prophecy of revelation is the element it does not have.

3.  It is flagged as a simile.  "Every vision has become for you like the words of a sealed book."  And the subject was stated two verses earlier, at 29:10:  "YHWH has poured over you a spirit of deep sleep, and has shut your eyes — the prophets;  and covered your heads — the seers."⁹  The unreadable book is Judah's own prophetic word, made unintelligible to Judah as a judgement on it.  The passage is about a nation that cannot hear, not about a man who cannot read.

4.  Isaiah supplies the resolution, and it is not in Arabia.  Six verses later:  "in that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see" (29:18), followed by the restoration of Jacob (29:22-24).⁹  Isaiah opens the sealed book himself, inside the same paragraph, and the beneficiaries are Israel.

5.  The Septuagint reads it as a statement about literacy.  Isaiah 29:12 in Greek:  "and this book will be given into the hands of a man who does not know letters … and he will say, 'I do not know letters.'"⁴  A pre-Christian Jewish translator understood the phrase as being about reading, not about prophethood.

Verdict:  fails.  The parallel is real at the level of a single line and disappears the moment the previous verse is read with it.

Song of Songs 5:16: is machamaddim a name?

The claim

This is the boldest of the arguments, because it claims Muhammad's name appears in the Hebrew text as it stands.  Naik:  "Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is mentioned by name in the Song of Solomon chapter 5 verse 16 … In the Hebrew language im is added for respect.  Similarly im is added after the name of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to make it Muhammadim."²²

The Hebrew of the clause is chikko mamtaqqim we-khullo machamaddim, zeh dodi we-zeh re'i, benot Yerushalayim.⁸  The consonants of the word at issue are מחמדים — m-ch-m-d-y-m.  They are there.  So the question is what kind of word it is.

Five independent checks answer it, and all five point the same way.

(a) Every other occurrence of the noun is a common noun

The noun machmad occurs thirteen times in the Hebrew Bible.  Twelve of them are in the construct state, which is the form a Hebrew noun takes when it is bound to a following word — "the delight of something."  Song of Songs 5:16 is the only absolute form.⁸

That is what an abstract predicate noun looks like:  "all of him is desirablenesses."

(b) Its twin in the same clause settles it

The word next to it does exactly the same thing.  Mamtaqqim occurs twice in the whole Hebrew Bible — here and at Nehemiah 8:10, "drink sweet drinks."  Both are absolute masculine plurals.⁸  The verse sets the two in perfect balance:

chikko mamtaqqim — "his palate is sweetnesses" we-khullo machamaddim — "and all of him is desirablenesses"

If machamaddim is a proper name, then mamtaqqim is one too, and Song of Songs 5:16 announces two prophets in one line.

(c) The standard reference grammar classifies both words, by name

Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, in the standard Kautzsch-Cowley English edition of 1910, treats plurals that intensify rather than count at §124e.  Among the examples it lists, in sequence, are מַמְתַקִּים sweetness and מַחֲמַדִּים preciousness.¹²  Gesenius put the two words of Song 5:16 side by side in the same list, for the same reason, a century before anybody needed them for this argument.

(d) The standard lexicon says the same

Brown-Driver-Briggs, page 326, under מַחְמָד:  "desire, desirable thing … pl. intens. כֻּלּוֹ מַחֲמַדִּים Ct 5:16 all of him is delightfulnesses (‖ מַמְתַקִּים)."¹³  The lexicon marks it "pl. intens." — intensive plural — and prints the parallel with mamtaqqim itself.

(e) The ancient translators read a common noun

• Septuagint, second or first century BC: φάρυγξ αὐτοῦ γλυκασμοὶ καὶ ὅλος ἐπιθυμία — "his throat is sweetnesses and the whole of him is desire."⁴
• Vulgate, Jerome, about 400, translating from the Hebrew: Guttur illius suavissimum, et totus desiderabilis — "his throat is most sweet, and he is wholly desirable."³¹

Watch what the Septuagint does.  It keeps glykasmoi plural and turns machamaddim into a singular abstract noun, epithymia, "desire."  That is a translator handling an intensive plural exactly as Gesenius describes it, eight hundred years before Gesenius.

Where the Christian reply overstates

It is often said that machamaddim "has nothing to do with" Muhammad's name.  That is imprecise, and a Muslim who knows Arabic will notice.

The Semitic root ḥ-m-d is genuinely shared between the two languages.  What differs is the meaning.  In Hebrew the root means desire or covet — its most famous occurrence is Exodus 20:17, lo tachmod, "you shall not covet."  In Arabic it means praise:  hamd is praise, Muhammad is "the much-praised," Ahmad is "most praised."  Cognate roots drift, and this pair drifted.

The morphology also leaves no room for a name.  Machamaddim is not "Muhammad" with a suffix.  The ma- is the ordinary Hebrew maqtal prefix that makes a noun of place, instrument, or object from a verb root — so mach-mad, "an object of desiring," pluralised machamaddim.  Every letter is accounted for by Hebrew word-formation before any name is invoked.

As for "im is added for respect":  Hebrew does have a plural of majesty, and Gesenius treats it at §124g as a subtype of the same intensive plural.  It applies to common nouns — elohim, adonim, be'alim — and it does not turn a common noun into a personal name.  Gesenius closes that same paragraph with the sentence that answers the claim directly:  "The use of the plural as a form of respectful address is quite foreign to Hebrew."¹²  Hebrew has proper names ending in -im, such as Ephraim and Mizraim, but those are lexicalised names, not the result of appending a suffix to a foreign name as an honorific.

And the context is a love poem in which a woman describes her absent lover part by part:  his head, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his hands, his body, "his legs are pillars of marble" (5:10-15).  Verse 16 closes the description and names him by relationship, not by proper name:  "this is my beloved (dodi), and this is my friend (re'i), O daughters of Jerusalem."⁹

Verdict:  fails.  A common noun in the predicate of a nominal clause, in the only absolute form the word takes in the Bible, matched to another abstract plural in the same breath, classified as an intensive plural by both standard reference works, and rendered as an adjective by both ancient versions.

The reverse question: is "Ahmad" a name in Quran 61:6?

The Bible claims all rest on a Quranic premise, so the premise is worth testing too.  This section is not an attack.  It reports a disagreement that runs through the Muslim tradition itself.

The Arabic of Quran 61:6 is wa-mubashshiran bi-rasulin ya'ti min ba'di ismuhu ahmad — literally, "and giving good tidings of a messenger who comes after me, his name ahmad."¹⁴  Ahmad is an elative, the Arabic form that does the work of "greater" or "greatest."  From the root h-m-d it means "more praised" or "most praised."  Arabic elatives are ordinary adjectives, and they are also used as personal names, which is why the sentence can be read two ways.

The translations divide exactly where the question lies:

Marmaduke Pickthall was an English convert to Islam, and his translation is one of the four standard English versions.  He read ahmad as an adjective and translated it that way.¹⁴  That should be said first, because it removes any suggestion that the adjectival reading is a hostile invention.

Sean Anthony surveys four ways scholars have handled the verse and endorses the fourth, which he calls "the most credible," noting that it is "also a solution favoured by major exegetes of the classical tradition" — naming al-Tha'labi (d. 427/1035) and al-Wahidi (d. 468/1076), and citing Tilman Nagel's 2008 biography of Muhammad:

"In this reading, 'Ahmad' is not a proper name at all, but rather an adjective:  the Arabic phrase ismuhu ahmad should not be read as 'his name is Ahmad' but rather 'his name is most praised' — reading ahmad as a straightforward superlative.  In other words, this reading severs the putative connection between Jesus's Quranic proclamation from the Paraclete discourse of the Gospel of John."⁵

W. Montgomery Watt argued the same case in 1953, in an article called "His Name is Ahmad."  That article is behind a paywall and was not opened for this piece;  it is named here as a position and never quoted.³²

But the Muslim case for the name is not weak, and overstating this point is a mistake Christians make.  A report in Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith 3532, from Jubayr ibn Mut'im, has Muhammad say:  "I have five names:  I am Muhammad and Ahmad;  I am Al-Mahi through whom Allah will eliminate infidelity;  I am Al-Hashir who will be the first to be resurrected … and I am also Al-'Aqib."²³  The Study Quran cites that hadith and adds that many other reports simply call the Prophet Ahmad.²⁶  A Muslim who reads ahmad in Quran 61:6 as a name is standing on his own tradition's ground.

What does not follow is that any biblical text contains it.  Quran 61:6 is a Quranic statement about what Jesus said.  It is not evidence about the wording of any Gospel, and Anthony's conclusion is that it was probably never about John's Paraclete in the first place.⁵

Genesis 21 and 22: Ishmael, and which son was on the mountain

What Genesis actually promises Ishmael

Say this before saying anything else, because Christians often skip it and it is in the text.

Genesis 17:18-21 has Abraham plead for Ishmael, and God answers:  "As for Ishmael, I have heeded you.  I hereby bless him.  I will make him fertile and exceedingly numerous.  He shall be the father of twelve chieftains, and I will make of him a great nation.  But my covenant I will establish with Isaac."⁹  Genesis 21:13 and 21:18 repeat the promise of nationhood.  Genesis 21:20-21:  "God was with the boy, and he grew up;  he dwelt in the wilderness and became an archer.  He lived in the wilderness of Paran."⁹

So the Bible blesses Ishmael, promises him a great nation, says God was with him, and puts him in Paran.  A Christian who denies any of that is misrepresenting his own scripture.  What Genesis distinguishes is nationhood from covenant, and it assigns the covenant to Isaac in the same sentence in which it grants Ishmael the nation.

Genesis 22

The Hebrew of 22:2:  qach na et-binkha et-yechidkha asher ahavta et-Yitzchaq — "take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac."⁹  Isaac is named in the chapter at verses 2, 3, 6, 7 and 9.  Genesis 21 has already narrated Ishmael's departure, so Isaac is the only son in Abraham's household when chapter 22 opens.  And Genesis 21:12 has already said, "in Isaac shall your seed be called."

The Arabic word usually translated "only son" is where the standard counter-argument starts.  The Hebrew yachid means "only, sole, unique, precious," and the Septuagint renders it not "only" but ton agapeton, "the beloved," at 22:2, 22:12 and 22:16.⁴

Ibn Kathir (d. 774/1373) argues that the name was inserted:  "According to their Book, Allah commanded Ibrahim to sacrifice his only son, and in another text it says his firstborn son.  But here they falsely inserted the name of Ishaq … They inserted the name of Ishaq because he is their ancestor, while Isma'il is the ancestor of the Arabs."³³

That is an assertion about a Hebrew text he did not have.  The check available now is the Septuagint, which reads Ισαακ at Genesis 22:2.  It was made by Jews, in Greek-speaking Egypt, before Christianity existed and centuries before there was any Arab question to take sides in.

What the Quran says, and does not say

Quran 37:99-113 never names the son.  Verse 101, "So We gave him good tidings of a forbearing boy";  verse 102, the dream;  verse 107, "And We ransomed him with a great sacrifice";  and then verse 112:  "And We gave him good tidings of Isaac, a prophet from among the righteous."³⁴

The Ishmael reading takes 37:112 as a second, later announcement, proving the boy of 37:101 was someone else.  The Isaac reading takes 37:112 as the announcement of Isaac's prophethood, granted after the test as a reward.

The classical tradition is divided, and the surprise runs the other way

This is the part that surprises readers on both sides.

Al-Tabari (d. 310/923), whose Jami' al-bayan is the foundational Quran commentary, sets out both sets of reports at length — the Isaac reports first, then the Ishmael reports — and then gives his own verdict:

qala Abu Ja'far:  wa-awla al-qawlayn bi'l-sawab fi'l-mafdiyy min ibnay Ibrahim khalil al-rahman ala zahir al-tanzil qawl man qala:  huwa Ishaq — "Abu Ja'far [al-Tabari] said:  the sounder of the two views regarding which of the two sons of Abraham, the Friend of the Merciful, was the one ransomed — on the plain sense of the revelation — is the view of the one who says:  it is Isaac."¹⁵

His reasons, in his order:  the ransomed boy is the boy who was announced, and when the Quran reports an annunciation to Abraham it means Isaac (he cites Quran 11:71, "Then We gave her good tidings of Isaac and after Isaac, Jacob");  Abraham asked for a righteous son when he had none, so the announced boy is the first;  the objection that Isaac had already been promised a son, Jacob, fails because the command came when the boy "reached the age of exertion," at which age Isaac had no children yet;  the objection from 37:112 fails because the tidings there are of Isaac's prophethood, given after the ransom;  and the objection that the ram's horns hung in the Kaaba fails, because they could have been carried there — and, he adds, a group of the people of knowledge hold that the sacrifice was commanded in Syria.  Al-Tabari even opens his gloss on 37:107 with the words wa-fadayna Ishaq bi-dhibhin azim, "and We ransomed Isaac with a great sacrifice."¹⁵

Ibn Kathir, four centuries later, goes the other way and hard, heading his section "Reports which state that the one who was to be sacrificed was Isma'il, and that this is correct," and listing Ibn Abbas, Ibn Umar, Mujahid, al-Sha'bi, al-Hasan al-Basri, Muhammad ibn Ka'b al-Qurazi, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Abu Hatim.³³

Reuven Firestone counted.  His 1989 study in the Journal of Semitic Studies tallies the early authorities on each side:

"we find that thirty-nine early traditionists are quoted 141 times as supporting Isaac in the role of intended Sacrifice.  Twenty-nine are quoted 133 times in support of Ishmael.  Ten famous and respected early traditionists such as Ali b. Abi Talib, 'Ata', Ibn 'Abbas, Mujahid, al-Sha'bi, al-Suddi, and al-Hasan al-Basri, are quoted variously as believing it was Isaac and that it was Ishmael."¹⁶

His conclusion is that the Isaac view is the older one:  "The particular make-up of the ultimate authorities of the isnads therefore suggests that Isaac was originally considered the intended victim of the sacrifice.  Later, when the status of Ishmael became more important to Islam, traditions evolved or were attributed to respected early authorities that supported his position as the intended sacrifice."¹⁶  He connects the shift to the hardening of the Ishmael-Arab genealogy, citing René Dagorn's 1981 study, which argued that the genealogical link between Ishmael and the Arabs does not predate Islam.  Dagorn's thesis is contested and is reported here as Firestone's citation, not as an established result.¹⁶

The point is not a gotcha.  It is that a Muslim who has been told "the Jews changed the Bible to hide that it was Ishmael" is entitled to know that the greatest of the classical Quran commentators read the Quran and concluded it was Isaac, and that the early transmitters divided roughly evenly with a slight majority on the Isaac side.

Verdict:  fails, and the Islamic tradition is itself divided.

"The glad tidings were removed"

When a text is produced and does not say what was claimed, the usual next move is that the bisharat — the glad tidings of Muhammad — were cut out of the Bible by Jews or Christians.  The general question of biblical corruption is its own subject, treated in the article on tahrif, with the manuscript side in the article on New Testament manuscripts and the article on the Old Testament text.  Three things belong here specifically.

First, as usually deployed, the move cannot fail.  Its content is that the evidence which would test it no longer exists.  Produce a manuscript, and the answer is that this copy is already corrupted.  Point out that no variant exists anywhere, and the answer is that the corruption was universal and early.  A claim that predicts the same observation no matter what the world looks like is not doing any work.  That is a comment on the form of the argument, not on the sincerity of anyone making it.

Second, the earliest and best Muslim writers on the Bible did not make it.  Camilla Adang's judgement on Ibn Qutayba:

"In Dala'il al-nubuwwa, Ibn Qutayba twice suggests that the People of the Book are guilty of tahrif, viz. when they deny that Paran is in fact Mecca, and that Habakkuk mentions Muhammad … In both these cases, however, it is clear that what is meant by tahrif is giving a wrong interpretation to an otherwise genuine text.  Ibn Qutayba does not question the authenticity or validity of the Jewish scriptures, and nowhere does he accuse the Jews of having distorted them."⁶

The classical tradition distinguished tahrif al-ma'na, distortion of the meaning, from tahrif al-lafz, alteration of the actual wording.  The early testimonia writers were arguing the first.  Ibn Rabban argued from the Bible he had.  Ibn Ishaq quoted a Christian Aramaic Gospel as a source of proof.  You cannot argue from a book you believe has been rewritten.

Third, the test is available and has already been run in one direction.  What would falsify the removal claim is a pre-Islamic witness that still contains the excised prophecy.  What would confirm the received text is a body of pre-Islamic witnesses agreeing with the medieval text.  The second exists in quantity:

Note that these witnesses were all written and copied long before Islam existed, by communities with no motive and no ability to coordinate.³⁵

And there is a clean positive test the other way, which anyone can run:  produce one pre-Islamic witness — Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, or a quotation in any church father — reading περικλυτός at John 14:16, 15:26 or 16:7.  In three centuries of this debate none has been produced.

Where the Christian response is weak or overstated

A skeptical reader will check the strongest claims on both sides.  Several of the standard Christian ones are false, and repeating them costs more than it gains.

1. "Deuteronomy 18 can only mean Jesus." It cannot only mean Jesus. Rashi on 18:15 reads it of a succession: "one who is as I am, from your midst, of your brethren … will he raise up unto thee in my stead, and so likewise from prophet to prophet throughout all ages."¹⁷ Ibn Ezra reads it against the diviners of 18:9-14: "Like unto me. Who is a prophet of God and not an enchanter."¹⁷ Nachmanides offers both the succession reading and a singular one.¹⁷ The primary sense of the passage is institutional: Israel will have prophets instead of the diviners the nations consult. The singular reading is real and ancient and Jewish — 4Q175, John 1:21 — and Christians are entitled to it. "Only Jesus" overstates it.
2. "Nobody before Islam read Paran as Arabia or connected it with Ishmael." False, as shown above: Genesis 21:21, Sifrei Devarim 343, Avodah Zarah 2b, and Eusebius all make the connection. The defensible claim is that no ancient source puts Paran at Mecca.
3. "'Brothers' in Deuteronomy always means Israelites." False. Deuteronomy 2:4, 2:8 and 23:8 call Edomites Israel's brothers. The argument has to run through the contrast in 17:15, the mi-qirbekha of 18:15, and the total absence of Ishmael from the book.
4. "Ahmad is not a name, so Quran 61:6 refutes itself." Overstated. Sahih al-Bukhari 3532 has Muhammad list Ahmad among his own names. The honest form is that the adjectival reading is a classical Muslim reading, held by al-Tha'labi and al-Wahidi and preferred by Pickthall in translation — and that on either reading, a Quranic report of Jesus' words is not evidence about the Gospel text.
5. "No serious scholar has ever doubted the Paraclete is the Holy Spirit." The identification is secure in the text, because John 14:26 states it. But the history of the Paraclete figure is a live question in Johannine scholarship — its possible background, the grammatical tension between the masculine pronoun ekeinos and the neuter noun pneuma, how the five sayings relate to each other. That debate is about where the concept came from. None of it touches the word on the page. Deedat's opposite claim, that no biblical scholar of standing has ever equated the Paraclete with the Holy Spirit, is answered by John 14:26 itself rather than by a list of names.²⁰
6. "Muhammad worked no miracles, so he fails Deuteronomy 34:11." Handle with care or it becomes a double standard. The hadith and the sira report many miracles. The defensible form is that the Quran's own answer to demands for a sign is that the Quran is the sign, which is a different category from the Exodus wonders Deuteronomy 34:11 names — and that this is a tension inside the Islamic sources, not one imported from outside.
7. "Machamaddim has nothing to do with Muhammad." Imprecise. The root is shared. What is decisive is grammar and semantics, not etymology.
8. "The servant of Isaiah 42 is obviously Jesus and nobody else." The servant is explicitly Israel at 41:8, 44:1-2, 44:21, 45:4 and 49:3, the Septuagint puts Jacob and Israel into 42:1 itself, and 42:19 calls the servant blind and deaf. The Christian reading of 42:1-4 comes from Matthew and is a Christian application.
9. "Islam has always said the sacrificed son was Ishmael." False. Al-Tabari says Isaac, and Firestone counts more early traditionists for Isaac than for Ishmael.
10. The periklytos origin is not a scoring point. Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Rabban engaged the text they actually had, in Syriac and Aramaic, and built arguments on it. The right conclusion is that the medieval Muslim argument was better scholarship than the modern one that replaced it.

The strongest Muslim responses

Camilla Adang's history of the field is the best answer to a lazy dismissal.  Her Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, published by Brill in 1996, shows that ninth- and tenth-century Muslim scholars read the Bible seriously, in translation, and argued from it with care.⁶  Ibn Rabban compiled the first systematic testimonia list;  Ibn Qutayba worked through Isaiah and Habakkuk;  Ibn Hazm produced the first sustained internal critique of the biblical text by any writer of any religion.  Anyone who treats the whole tradition as folk apologetics has not read it.  The failure of the individual arguments is a failure of specific readings, not of the enterprise.

Martin Accad's inventory shows the scale.  His four-part study in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in 2003 is an inventorial table of Gospel citations across the medieval Muslim discourse, running to more than seventy printed pages.  This is not a handful of tracts.  It is a literature.  The four articles could not be obtained for this piece, so no figure from them is quoted here;  they are named as a position, and the page ranges are given so a reader with access can go straight to them.³⁶

The Study Quran's response is the model of how to hold the claim honestly.  It states the Paraclete identification, then names the two verses that complicate it, and does not pretend the difficulty away.²⁶  That is more than most popular Christian apologetics does with its own hard verses.

The methodological challenge stands and should be conceded where it lands.  A Christian who says the Muslim readings are driven backwards from the conclusion has to explain why "out of Egypt I called my son," whose subject in Hosea 11:1 is plainly the nation of Israel, is a legitimate prophecy of a child in Matthew 2:15.  The honest answer is that the two cases differ in a way that is testable:  the Christian claim about Isaiah 53 or Psalm 22 rests on what the passage says, in the language it is written in, and can be argued from the Hebrew.  The Muslim claims examined here mostly fail in the source language, before anyone gets to the question of method — a common noun mistaken for a name, a Syriac translator's word mistaken for a Hebrew one, a Greek word that no manuscript contains.  Where a Christian claim fails the same way, it should be dropped;  that is why the Isaiah 42 section above declines to lean on Matthew.

And the strongest Muslim point of all is the one about expectation.  If God had intended a final prophet in Arabia, would the earlier scriptures have said nothing?  That is a real question, and the Christian answer to it is not "look at these verses."  It is that the earlier scriptures do announce a coming figure, at length, and that the announcements have content — a tribe, a town, a manner of death, a covenant, a resurrection — which is why the Christian claim can be checked and can in principle be falsified.  A prophecy that has to be extracted by re-vocalising a Greek word or re-parsing a Hebrew plural is not the same kind of thing.

Common objections and responses

"You are using Christian manuscripts to judge a Christian text."

The manuscripts are not Christian arguments;  they are physical objects with dates.  P66 and P75 were bought on the antiquities market in the 1950s, are held in the Bodmer Library in Geneva and the Vatican Library, and are dated by handwriting to around 200 AD by palaeographers with no stake in Islam.  The transcriptions used here are published by a German university institute and can be downloaded by anyone.  And the argument does not depend on trusting them:  it depends on the absence of a single counter-example from any tradition, in any language, anywhere.

"The Bible was corrupted before those manuscripts were written."

Then the corruption happened before 200 AD, which is before Muhammad, before Islam, and before anyone had a motive to hide a prophecy of him.  Moving the corruption earlier does not help the claim;  it removes the motive.  And it makes the claim untestable, which is the problem described above.

"Even if periklytos is wrong, the description still fits Muhammad."

This is the strongest retreat position, and it should be met on its own terms rather than by re-running the word argument.  The description is given in the same paragraph:  the world cannot see him, the disciples already know him, he will be in them, and he is the Holy Spirit (John 14:17, 14:26).  Three of those four are false of any human being, and the fourth is stated outright.

"Muhammad was illiterate, and Isaiah 29:12 describes exactly that."

It describes a man who cannot read failing to read a book.  It also describes, one verse earlier, a man who can read failing to read the same book.  Both halves are illustrations of Judah's stupor, and Isaiah says so at 29:10 and undoes it at 29:18.

"Christians accept far more strained prophecies than these."

Sometimes true, and where it is true the Christian claim should be dropped rather than defended.  The test applied in this article is the same one the Berean Archive applies to Christian claims:  read the whole unit in the source language, ask what the earliest translators understood, and check the manuscripts.  Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 are argued that way in their own articles, and readers are invited to hold those to exactly this standard.

"The Jews removed Muhammad's name from Song of Songs 5:16."

They did not remove it;  it is still there, in the sense that the consonants m-ch-m-d are on the page.  The dispute is over what part of speech the word is.  That is settled by the grammar of the clause, which no scribe controls.

"Deuteronomy says the prophet will speak God's words, and that describes the Quran."

Deuteronomy 18:18 does say "I will put my words in his mouth."  It also gives the test for a claimant, thirty verses on:  if what he says in God's name does not come to pass, God did not speak it (18:21-22).  That is a criterion any candidate can be measured against, and it is a different criterion from resemblance to Moses' biography.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

What would strengthen the Muslim claim:

• One pre-Islamic Greek manuscript, version, lectionary, or patristic quotation reading περικλυτός at John 14:16, 15:26 or 16:7. A single one would overturn the central section of this article. None is known.
• A pre-Islamic Hebrew manuscript of Song of Songs 5:16 in which machamaddim is pointed or written as a proper noun, or an ancient version translating it as a name rather than an abstract.
• A pre-Islamic source of any kind — Jewish, Christian, Greek, Latin, Syriac, or an inscription — placing Paran in the central Hijaz rather than in the Sinai or the Negev.
• Evidence that Ishmaelites or Arabs are called Israel's "brothers" anywhere in Deuteronomy, or in the Pentateuch, in the covenant sense the argument requires.
• A demonstration that Isaiah 42:1 originally lacked the Septuagint's "Jacob … Israel," and that the servant of 42:1-4 is distinguished in the Hebrew from the servant of 41:8, 44:1 and 49:3.
• A pre-Islamic Christian or Jewish text acknowledging that a prophecy of a coming Arabian prophet had been removed, or a manuscript with a physical erasure at one of these points.

What would weaken the Christian case as stated here:

• Evidence that the Septuagint of Isaiah 42:1 was expanded by a later hand, which would remove the naming of the servant.
• A demonstration that machamaddim is used as a proper name anywhere in Northwest Semitic epigraphy.
• A Johannine text-critical result showing that "the Holy Spirit" at John 14:26 is a later gloss. The six manuscripts checked here all have it, and the two earliest are from about 200, so this looks closed; but it is the right place to look.
• On the Christian side generally, any of the ten overstatements listed above being repeated after being corrected. This article's credibility on the Muslim claims depends on getting the Christian ones right too.

The nine claims, and the verdict on each

Sources