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Muhammad and the Bible

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Through Muhammad, Jesus and Medina

Muslim theologians have argued that a number of specific passages within the biblical text can be specifically identified as references to Muhammad, both in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and in the Christian New Testament. Several verses in the Quran, as well as several Hadiths, state that Muhammad is described in the Bible.

On the other hand, scholars have generally interpreted these verses as referring to the community of Israel or Yahweh's personal soteriological actions regarding the Israelites or members of the faithful community, such as in the cases of Isaiah 42. The apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas, which explicitly mentions Muhammad, is widely recognized by scholars as a fabrication from the Early Modern Age. Some Muslim theologians also claimed the Paraclete (Greek New Testament) as Muhammad, although scholars identify it with the Holy Spirit.

History

The question of the presence of Muhammad in the Bible has been a long-standing topic in Christian-Muslim dialogue, present already in the fictitious Correspondence between Leo III and Umar II, penned as early as the first half of the eighth century.

The first Islamic author that gave a detailed argument for the presence of biblical prophecies of Muhammad was Amr ibn al-Layth, ruler of the Saffarid dynasty, in a letter at the turn of the 9th century. He largely focused on the Old Testament, although he also drew from some texts in the New Testament, primarily the Gospel of John when doing so. Many of Ibn al-Layth's proof-texts would be commonly cited in later apologetic works, including Deuteronomy 18:18, Deuteronomy 33:2, Isaiah 42, and the Paraclete from the Gospel of John. Ibn al-Layth also cited other proof-texts such as Psalm 149 and Isaiah 21:6–7. The latter contains a brief reference to two riders, on a camel and on a donkey. One of the riders was commonly viewed as Jesus. Ibn al-Layth reasoned that as Muhammad was the only prophet since Moses to ride on a camel, he must have been the second rider. With the advent of Ibn al-Layth's letter, Muslim scholars employed fairly consistent lists of prophecies about Muhammad.

Insights from this period into Islamic apologetics about biblical prophecies of Muhammad also come from Christian responses. According to a disputation report written by Patriarch Timothy I, the caliph Al-Mahdi first argued that the absence of biblical prophecies of Muhammad was caused by the Christian corruption of the Bible. When Timothy rebuts this by claiming that there is no textual evidence for such corruptions, Al-Mahdi modifies his strategy and claims that such prophecies do exist. Examples cited are Deuteronomy 18:18 and Isaiah 21:6–9. Though the interaction (or at least the details of it reported by Timothy I) are unlikely to be historical, the line of reasoning it portrays is thought to reflect argumentation used by Muslim scholars and dignitaries of the time.

The first Islamic text that is entirely dedicated to adducing evidences for Muhammad as a prophet, and the one most popular in contemporary apologetics is Ibn Rabbān ‘Alī al-Ṭabarī's (9th century) The Book of Religion and Empire (Kitāb al-Dīn wa’l-dawla). The ninth and tenth chapters of this book use biblical proof-texts and occupy half the space of the entire work. Although Ibn Rabban made more sparing use of the New Testament, he produced predictions "from [the] Psalms, Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel." Ibn Rabbān takes a variety of references in Isaiah to praise to be direct uses of Muhammad's name, whose root means "the praised one". Ibn Rabbān reads "the ends of the Earth" from Isaiah 24, Ezekiels' temple in Ezekiel 40–47, and "the house of God" in 1 Peter 4:17 all to be references to Mecca. In many cases, Ibn Rabban's prophetic proof-texts were taken from earlier Christian lists of prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament, which he reoriented as prophecies of Muhammad. At the time, Ibn Rabban's work was not received among other Muslim scholars. The first evidence of reception of his work in Muslim circles is from the 11th century.

Ibn Qutaybah (9th century) was a Hanbalite judge and produced what was in his time popular arguments for predictions of Muhammad in the Bible. He did this in several of his writings, one example being in his Proofs of Prophethood (Dalā’il al-nubuwwa). The version of the Bible he had access to was an Arabic translation of the Syriac Peshitta, although he only produced exact quotes from Genesis and sourced the rest paraphrastically. Isaiah and Psalms figure most prominently in his proof-texts, but Genesis, Deuteronomy (e.g. ch. 18), and Habakkuk also appear. Ibn Qutayba also asserted that the reference to the coming of Elijah in Matthew 11:14 must have originally actually referred to Muhammad on the basis of his belief that it was believed Muhammad, not Elijah, was to come. This claim was complemented by an accusation of corruption (taḥrīf) against the New Testament. For similar reasons, he believed that John's Paraclete must have also been a reference to Muhammad by name. Syrian scholar Ibn Abi Talib al-Dimashqi (13th-14th century) supported this view, stating that the Paraclete verses had referred to Muhammad, but had been altered by church leaders to influence Constantine the Great.

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