Expert: Marilyn - 12/3/2007

Question
Hello Marilyn, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving,

My question to you is well...............Muslims believe that Mohammad is in the Holy Bible because Jesus, speaking to the Apostles in John 14, 14"If you ask Me anything (V)in My name, I will do it.

  15"(W)If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.

Role of the Spirit
  16"I will ask the Father, and He will give you another (X)Helper, that He may be with you forever;

  17that is (Y)the Spirit of truth, (Z)whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.

  18"I will not leave you as orphans; (AA)I will come to you.

How on heavens earth would they get that from this passage??? I am hoping you could help me in clarifying this understanding or should I say misunderstanding.

Answer
The rest of your question from the other post:

Sorry Marilyn, what I failed to tell you is that Muslims believe that this Advocate (Holy Spirit) was to perform four certain things, and that Mohammad is this Advocate that Jesus spoke of,because he performed the four things that the Advocate was supposed to do. not when The Apostles recieved the Holy Spirit on the Day Of Pentecost.

Hello Junior;

I had a nice Thanksgiving, I hope you did also.

I think Islamics call the Old Testament the "Taurat" and the New Testament the "Injil."  The term "Taurat" is supposed to be the Islamic version of the Hebrew word "Torah," but the Torah consists of only the books written by Moses.  The word "Injil" is claimed to be an abbreviation of the Greek word which we understand as "Gospel."  This would seem to imply that the "Injil" consists of only the four Gospels, but actually it includes the rest of the New Testament as well.  However, just to keep everything confused, some Islamic scholars complain that the "Injil" is a lost book.

Mohammed or Muhammad or however you spell his name, or is it Ahmad?  Anyway, he came up with what he thought was a cool new religion.  He'd been sitting around listening to the Jews and Christians talking.  He misquoted a lot of what he heard and added some of his own "revelations" and presented the new configuration to the Jews and Christians at Medina.  They thought his new fangled religion was absurd.  This made Muhammad really mad.  From that day onward the tone of the Koran or Qur'an changed from "respect the people of the book" to "kill the Christian and Jew where you may find him."

Muhammad sought validation for his religion and his followers still do.  This twist on Jesus' Words is simply an  attempt to use the Injil, New Testament, to validate the Koran.  See Al A'raf 7:157 and Al Saff 61:6.  

To create this amazing twist (and Islamics must create quite a few see:  http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/science-and-islam/?searchterm=Islam%20&%20s... ) the Greek word, "parakletos," for which English translators choose the term "counselor," is rendered in Islamic parlance as "periklytos," which translates as "glorious."  Now, instead of reading "I will give you a helper, counselor," it reads "I will give you a glorious..."  

Unlike Hebrew which has no vowels, Greek has vowels and they're clearly written in any given word.  Ancient Greek New Testament texts are available today for perusal and confirm the original translation as "counselor" to be valid.

One of Islam's great tenets is that the New Testament is not valid without the Koran because it's been mistranslated or corrupted over time.  This is a bogus charge, but hey, they're grasping at straws.  Anyway, they take their translation over the traditional one.

In order to continue in this desperate grasp to validate their "holy book," they don't quote the entire passage you're referring to in John or even read the passages before and after.  They focus on John 14:16 and stop--Quick, shut that Bible before you get infected.  Still, even stopping there, the straw man of Jesus' prediction of Mohammed is on fire before it's even raised up--Muhammad didn't live forever!  But, hey, maybe they're not really talking about Muhammad, we're talking about the Koran...

Muhammad fails in every way to fulfill the role of the promised Helper, Counselor--ah, glorious whatever.  He didn't live forever; he cannot abide IN anyone; he wasn't a spirit, he was a human being, much less was he a "Spirit of Truth"--not even in his own mind, he admitted he sinned; he didn't remind anybody of what Jesus said, he misquotes Jesus when he quotes him at all and he never brought glory to Jesus.  Jesus repeatedly said that He would die and rise again, but Mohammed insists Jesus never died.  And nobody was ever baptized with Mohammed.

Examine the Jewish festivals.  Paul clearly says, "Jesus, our Passover Lamb."  He is the Passover Lamb, sacrificed at the same moment as the final sacrificial lamb was being offered in the Jewish temple and crying out before God and man, "It is finished," at exactly the same moment when the Jewish priest cried, "It is finished."

Jesus is the First Fruits, the first to be raised from the dead.  He is the Unleavened Bread of the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Holy Spirit is the Person who fulfilled the Feast of Pentecost exactly at the moment when the Jews began celebrating the Feast of Pentecost.  His coming was a partial fulfillment of Feast of Tabernacles (which incidentally puts Jesus' actual birth in the fall).  The next feast to be fulfilled is the Feast of Trumpets when the trumpets are blown and the Jews were to enter the city gates before they were shut.

Given that Jesus, a JEW, is the fulfillment of the Law, the fulfillment of the Torah and the Tanak (the Prophets), it is not possible in any stretch of the imagination that a Gentile bandit raider, Mohammed, born 570 years after Jesus could be the fulfillment of the Feast of Pentecost (or any other Jewish law or festival), which must occur a fixed number of days after Passover.

Islam also teaches that the angel Gabriel functions as the Holy Spirit.  Gabriel gave the Word of God to the OT prophets and later to Mohammed.  But Koran also teaches that Allah doesn't fellowship with humans.  

If the Koran is only validated by its self, then it is not valid.  Validating something by its self is circular and doesn't hold up.  But if it is validated by another text, then it is valid.  Thus, this great stretching to obtain validation from some external source.

FYI:  I found this interesting comparison on Islam & Christianity written by a former Muslim:

http://www.everystudent.com/wires/radical.html?gclid=COr5ufrLuo8CFRO-hgod1l-0YA

Hope this helps.  Great to hear from you,

Marilyn