Christians have interpreted the Scriptures in a certain manner since the prophecies of the coming Messiah and well after the incarnation of our Lord. Yet many Muslims believe that the prophecies of Scripture speak of the coming of not Jesus, or of the Holy Spirit, but their very own prophet, Muhammad.
To bolster their claim that the Bible foreshadows the coming of Muhammad, Muslim apologists often take two tacks, one from the Old Testament and the other from the New. The first centers on Deuteronomy 18. The “prophet” foretold in Deuteronomy—“the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you,” Moses says (v. 15)—is to be a military leader, for example, and perform great miracles that line up perfectly with Islam’s holy figure.
Let’s look at what Deuteronomy 18:15-18 says:
The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren—him you shall heed—just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, “Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, or see this great fire any more, lest I die.” And the Lord said to me, “They have rightly said all that they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.”
According to Islamic scholar Dr. Zakir Naik, Muslims believe that this prophecy is properly fulfilled in Muhammad, since their holy book refers to the Unlettered Prophet who is also a military leader.
Quran 7:157 reads:
Those who follow the messenger, the Prophet who can neither read nor write, whom they will find described in the Torah and the Gospel (which are) with them. He will enjoin on them that which is right and forbid them that which is wrong. He will make lawful for them all good things and prohibit for them only the foul; and he will relieve them of their burden and the fetters that they used to wear. Then those who believe in him, and honor him, and help him, and follow the light which is sent down with him: they are the successful.
But the prophet who would be raised up like Moses was clearly Christ. The amazing parallels match only Jesus. For example, the context of the “brethren” indicates that the prophet would come from Jewish lineage. This becomes evident in Galatians 4:
But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons (vv. 4-5).
Moreover, in multiple places (like John 4:19), Christ calls himself a “prophet,” noting that the crowds believed him to be one (as in Matt. 24:11).
To summarize the message of Deuteronomy 18, the Lord God directly tells Moses that a future prophet will be raised up like him, from the midst of the Israelite people. This proves problematic for Islamic theology, for Muslims teach that Muhammad is an Ishmaelite prophet, but the Torah refers to Moses as the epitome of a true prophet. In Deuteronomy 34:10-12, we read that the “prophet like Moses” would know the Lord “face to face.” This eliminates Muhammad as a candidate because he never spoke to Allah “face to face.”
Weighing the evidence from Scripture, and from the early testimonies to the faith that Christ left us, it is clear that it is Jesus and not Muhammad who fulfills the prophecy of Deuteronomy 18. We know that Christ is prophet, priest, and king who has seen the Father (John 6:46).
What about the New Testament? One passage that Muslims claim foretells Muhammad is in the Gospel of St. John:
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor (allon parakleton) to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you (14:16-17)
On a recent Facebook livestream, Dr. Shabir Ally claimed that Muhammad was the prophesied future Counselor to be given to the people. But the Gospel of John identifies who this Counselor is:
But the Counselor [de parakletos], the Holy Spirit [pneuma to hagion], whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you (v. 26).
Ally has noted that not all ancient manuscripts of John 14 include the term “Holy Spirit,” so “the Spirit of truth can refer to a human being.” But the truth of the matter is that every single ancient Greek manuscript from the second century on includes “Holy Spirit,” and the one manuscript he refers to was a Syriac text—and even that text still identifies the figure of John’s Gospel as a spirit and not a person, as would be needed in order for it even to remotely point to Muhammad.
So what does this leave us? When all is said and done, we are reminded of the words of the great sixteenth-century missionary to Muslims, St. Juan de Ribera, writing in Catechism of Instruction to the New Converts:
He [Muhammad] did not prove his new sect with any motive, nor with supernatural miracles or natural reasons, but instead introduced this [sect] with the force of arms, violence, fictions, and carnal pleasures.
It’s Jesus—God himself—who’s the prophet of Moses, and God himself who’s the Counselor. There can be no other.