Muhammad was foretold in the Bible

The Qur’an does not say Muhammad was described in some lost original. It says he is found “in what they have of the Torah and the Gospel” (7:157), the books Jews and Christians of his time were reading. Those books survive in manuscripts from well before the seventh century, and they are the ones Jews and Christians read today. The page on whether the Bible is corrupted looks at that evidence.

So read the passages in the Torah and Gospel as they stand, with the verses around them, and ask whom they describe. That is the test the Qur’an itself invites. A phrase that fits proves little, because any long text contains lines that can be matched to a later figure.

Here is the promise in full: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. You must listen to him” (Deuteronomy 18:15-18). In verse 15 the Hebrew is fuller than most translations show: miqqirbeka me’acheka, “from your midst, from your brothers.” The prophet comes from among the people Moses is speaking to.

The rest of Deuteronomy confirms how it uses “brothers.” One chapter earlier, about choosing a king, Moses says: “Appoint a king from among your brothers; you are not to set over yourselves a foreigner who is not one of your brothers” (17:15). There “brothers” means fellow Israelites, and it is set against foreigners. A few verses before the promise of the prophet, the tribe of Levi is said to have “no inheritance among their brothers” (18:2), meaning the other tribes of Israel.

The last chapter of Deuteronomy adds: “Since that time, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses” (34:10). The expectation that followed was for a prophet in Israel. That is why, centuries later, Jewish leaders asked John the Baptist, “Are you the Prophet?” (John 1:21). They were waiting for one of their own.

Deuteronomy surrounds the promise with guidance on how to recognize a prophet who truly speaks for God. His words must come true (Deuteronomy 18:20-22), and he must not lead people away from the way the LORD has already commanded (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). These tests apply to anyone said to be the promised prophet, Jesus included.

The prophet like Moses was to continue what God had already said through Moses, not to replace it. The Qur’an makes a similar claim for itself: it says it comes “confirming that which preceded it of the Scripture” (5:48).

The early followers of Jesus, who were Jews, read Deuteronomy 18 as fulfilled in him; Peter quotes it in an early sermon (Acts 3:22-26). You need not accept their reading. It does show that the passage was understood, from the first century, as a promise of a prophet from within Israel.

The Greek word parakletos means one called alongside to help: an advocate, a helper, or a comforter. By “the Holy Spirit,” Christians mean God’s own Spirit, not an angel; the Qur’an’s “Pure Spirit” is usually understood by Muslims to be Gabriel, which is a different figure. Jesus speaks of this figure several times on the night before his death, and the descriptions are specific.

• He names him: “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name” (John 14:26).
• He will be invisible and within the disciples: “the Spirit of truth. The world cannot receive Him, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. But you do know Him, for He abides with you and will be in you” (14:17).
• He will stay: “to be with you forever” (14:16).
• He is sent to the men in the room: “if I go, I will send Him to you” (16:7).
• He will point to Jesus: “He will testify about Me. And you also must testify, because you have been with Me from the beginning” (15:26-27); “He will glorify Me by taking from what is Mine and disclosing it to you” (16:14).

Luke’s account adds that Jesus told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem, because “in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:5).

A prophet born in Mecca around AD 570 was not seen by those disciples, did not live within them, and did not come to them a few days after Jesus left. These verses describe the Holy Spirit, as the text itself says.

The suggestion that John originally wrote periklytos, “renowned” or “praised,” rather than parakletos is a guess about what the text might once have said. No Greek manuscript of John has periklytos in these verses. The early papyri of John, copied centuries before Islam, and the later manuscripts all read parakletos, and so do the ancient translations into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic.

The idea also does not fit the sentences. “Another periklytos” would mean “another praised one,” but the sentences around it describe an advocate who teaches, reminds, testifies, and lives within the disciples. The word in the manuscripts matches what the passage describes.

That leaves Qur’an 61:6 as a statement of the Qur’an, not a reading found in the Gospel. A Muslim can hold that Jesus spoke those words. What cannot be said, on the evidence, is that John’s Gospel records them.