Ibn Isḥāq's reading of John 15: 23–16: 1

The earliest exemplar of Muslim attempts to connect Q. 61: 6 and the Paraclete is the translation of John 15: 26–16: 1 found in Ibn Isḥāq's Kitāb al-Maghāzī, a work compiled and taught under ʿAbbāsid patronage during the caliphate of Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr (r. 754–75).Footnote ⁷ The historical importance of Ibn Isḥāq's reworking of this passage from the Johannine discourse on the Paraclete has been recognized for over a century, inspiring a substantial corpus of scholarship.Footnote ⁸ This scholarly corpus has been primarily interested in Ibn Isḥāq's excerpt of the Gospel of John because it predates all other extant translations of the Gospels into Arabic – even translations by Arabic-speaking Christians.Footnote ⁹ Yet, there remains one key aspect of Ibn Isḥāq's excerpt from the Gospel of John – an aspect that, in my view, has been underappreciated.

What makes Ibn Isḥāq's translation exceptional, even among its successors, is that his version draws on neither a Greek nor a Syriac version of the Gospel text. Unlike subsequent Arabic translations of the Bible, behind Ibn Isḥāq's translation lay a Christian Palestinian Aramaic (hereafter CPA) version of the Gospel of John. The significance of this fact deserves further emphasis, because the language of the template for Ibn Isḥāq's translation sheds considerable light on its provenance, both in terms of geography and chronology.

Christian Palestinian Aramaic is a “Western” Aramaic dialect once used by Christians of Palestine, Roman Arabia and the Sinai. It differs from Syriac – an “Eastern” Aramaic dialect used predominantly, though not exclusively, by non-Chalcedonian Christians – in its script, corpus and geographical reach. Whereas the corpus of Christian Syriac spans chronologically from the second century ce to the contemporary era and spread geographically from the Near East to the reaches of China, CPA survives in a far more limited corpus that flourished in a comparatively circumscribed geographical area. The CPA corpus consists mostly of inscriptions, short texts (personal letters, prayers, etc.), and translations of Greek texts (e.g. the Septuagint and New Testament, vitae, homilies, and liturgies). Scholars divide the corpus into three periods: the early (400–700 ce), the middle (700–900 ce), and the late period (900–1300 ce).Footnote ¹⁰ Lastly, whereas Syriac emerges as the language par excellence of non-Chalcedonian, Miaphysite Christology in Late Antiquity, CPA gradually emerges as a key language for the monastic communities of Eastern Palestine and the Transjordan from the sixth to eighth centuries ce. As a different Aramaic dialect to that of Syriac, the distinctiveness of CPA and its script provided a viable, and perhaps purposefully elevated, diophysite alternative to the increasingly dominant Syriac lexicon of miaphysite theology by the time of the Islamic conquests. Hence, CPA found favour in particular alongside Levantine Greek with the diophysite monastics that dominated the Jerusalem Patriarchate and powerful Sabaite monasteries of the Judaean desert,Footnote ¹¹ a favour it enjoyed at least until the mid-ninth century ce when Arabic began to eclipse CPA among Melkite Christians.Footnote ¹²

Ibn Isḥāq's reliance on a CPA version of John is, therefore, not merely a philological curiosity. His reliance on a CPA Vorlage means that historians can trace his source text to a particular geography within the early Islamic polity and a specific Christian community. To my knowledge, no other Arabic translations of biblical texts, fragmentary or otherwise, draw upon a CPA Vorlage – although one may reasonably expect future research to bring more to light.

The transmission history of Ibn Isḥāq's biography of Muḥammad is notoriously complex: the text survives in at least four discrete recensions, most of which are fragmentary. Yet the Arabic Gospel text only appears in one recension of Ibn Isḥāq's work. This recension is also the most widely preserved: the recension transmitted from Ibn Isḥāq's student, Ziyād ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Bakkaʾī (d. 799).Footnote ¹³ Other redactors of Ibn Isḥāq either omitted the text, or else their version thereof does not survive, given the fragmentary state of their preservation.Footnote ¹⁴ For this reason, the passage appears independently attested in only two works, each drawing from Ziyād al-Bakkāʾī's recension: Ibn Hishām's (d. c. 830) al-Sīra al-nabawiyya and an unedited fragment of Abū Jaʿfar Ibn Abī Shayba's (d. 909) Tārīkh.Footnote ¹⁵ Insofar as the latter source is accessible only in manuscript, I reproduce the Arabic text in an appendix.

Other key aspects of Ibn Isḥāq's version the Johannine Paraclete discourse become clearer with reading; its text runs as follows:Footnote ¹⁶

As amply documented by Griffith,Footnote ²³ Ibn Isḥāq's translation is not merely a literal, word-for-word Arabic rendering. He also offers a quasi-Islamicized version of the passage. Hence, “my Father” (ʾby) and “the Father” (ʾbʾ) in the CPA become merely “the Lord” (al-rabb) in the Arabic. Moreover, in Ibn Isḥāq's rendering of John 15: 26, God rather than Jesus sends the Paraclete. All of these modifications accommodate touchstone tenets of Islamic Christology. However, Ibn Isḥāq's rendering of the passage still preserves sufficient vestiges of the original to determine with relative certainty its source.

Two features reveal to us that Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic translation derives from a CPA Gospel. The first is the rendering of the Paraclete as al-mnḥmnā, thus transcribing the CPA mnḥmnʾ (comforter) rather than the Greek παράκλμτος. In contrast to CPA, where the lexical root nḥm generally means “to comfort”,Footnote ²⁴ neither nḥm nor mnḥmnʾ mean “comforter” in Syriac,Footnote ²⁵ nor is the Syriac root used to translate the Greek paráklētos in Syriac versions of John's Gospel (see below). The second is the rendering of the Johannine “Spirit of Truth” in Arabic as rūḥ al-qisṭ, conforming to the CPA rwḥʾ d-qwšṭʾ rather than the Syriac rwḥʾ d-šrʾrʾ ().Footnote ²⁶

The first feature is especially striking. Immediately after his quotation from the Gospel of John, Ibn Isḥāq explains to his readers that al-Mnḥmnā in “Aramaic” (al-siryāniyya)Footnote ²⁷ and means “Muḥammad”. He also notes that in Greek (al-rūmiyya) the word is al-Baraqlīṭus (البرقليطس = παράκλητος). While the equivalence of mnḥmnʾ and paráklētos is relatively straightforward, the identification of these words with Muḥammad is certainly less so. Unlike mnḥmnʾ in Aramaic and paráklētos in Greek, “Muḥammad” does not mean “comforter” in Arabic, but rather “praised one”.Footnote ²⁸

Although Ibn Isḥāq's version of this excerpt from the Gospel of John is early, it is also scarcely cited outside Ibn Hishām's recension. This is puzzling given that the Johannine Paraclete discourse plays an exceedingly prominent role in Muslim discussions of the Bible from the eighth century ce onwards. Yet, Ibn Isḥāq's citation of the CPA mnḥmnʾ to demonstrate Muḥammad's identity with the Paraclete is nearly without parallel – virtually all discussions of Muḥammad as mnḥmnʾ elsewhere derive from Ibn Hishām's recension of his text.Footnote ²⁹ Without the version preserved in Abū Jaʿfar Ibn Abī Shayba's Tārīkh, one could justifiably doubt whether the passage really went back to Ibn Isḥāq at all.

Muslim theological literature is replete with references to Muḥammad as the Paraclete,Footnote ³⁰ but such literature, rather than being indebted to Ibn Isḥāq or Ibn Hishām, are most often indebted to Ibn Qutayba's (d. 889) Aʿlām al-nubuwwa and, to a lesser extent, the works of ʿAlī b. Rabban al-Ṭabarī (d. c. 860).Footnote ³¹ Hence, the singularity of Ibn Isḥāq's rendering of the biblical proof-text is not because Muslim scholars rarely cited this proof-text. The Johannine Paraclete discourses left a profound mark on nearly all of the earliest ʿAbbāsid-era testimonia to Gospel proof-texts for Muḥammad's prophecy.

Even non-Muslim sources testify to the currency of the Johannine proof-text in Muslim scholarly circles. Thus, it appears as an integral theme in the disputation of the caliph al-Mahdī (r. 775–785) with the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I (780–823) in 165/781 (or shortly thereafter). The caliph al-Mahdī at one point challenges the patriarch, “Who then is the Paraclete ()?” “The Holy Spirit!” the patriarch answers and courteously refutes the caliph's attempts to read John's Gospel as predicting the advent of Muḥammad.Footnote ³² The debate over the identity of the Paraclete also manifests itself in the famous, although dubious, correspondence between the Byzantine emperor Leo III (r. 717–741) and the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II (r. 717–720).Footnote ³³

Yet another early rendering of John 15: 26 also appears during the caliphate of Hārūn al-Rashīd in a disputational letter composed by the caliph's scribe (kātib) Abū l-Rabīʿ Muḥammad ibn Layth. Rashīd dispatched the letter in c. 796 to Constantine VI (r. 790–797). In the letter, Rashīd's scribe declares to the Byzantine emperor, “Jesus has testified of [Muḥammad] in your midst (ʿindakum) and described him (bayyanahu) to you (pl.) in the Gospel”. Thereafter, the Muslim scholar cites a garbled excerpt of the Johannine Paraclete discourse mixing elements from John 15: 26 and 16: 7–9, 13. His quotation of Jesus’ Paraclete discourse reads as follows:

Ibn al-Layth then concludes by glossing his text, “the translation (tarjama) of Paraclete is Aḥmad”.Footnote ³⁵ Even though this is a fascinating specimen of an early Arabic translation of John's Gospel, the text notably lacks the distinctiveness in language that separates Ibn Isḥāq's version from all of its successors. In other words, Ibn Layth's version shows no trace of a CPA Vorlage; rather, this later text appears to have been translated from either Greek, Syriac, or a combination of the two.

Why was Ibn Isḥāq's translation so singular and neglected? Part of the answer must be that later, ʿAbbāsid-era, translations of the Gospels into Arabic from Greek and Syriac swiftly eclipsed the ad hoc translation Ibn Isḥāq transmitted. A second possibility merits consideration, too: Ibn Isḥāq's translation probably derived from a Syrian, Umayyad-era tradition of ad hoc translations of the Bible into Arabic that did not otherwise survive the vicissitudes of the ʿAbbāsid transformation of the early Islamic polity.

A number of considerations make this second thesis highly plausible. First, Ibn Isḥāq must have acquired his translation of the Johannine Paraclete discourse prior to seeking out ʿAbbāsid patronage because of the limited geographical circuit of the CPA corpus. Although he hailed from Medina, Ibn Isḥāq compiled and transmitted his works, in particular his works on the Prophet's biography, exclusively in Iraq (Ḥīra, Baghdād), the Jazīra (Ḥarrān), and Rayy, due to, on the one hand, the networks of patronage he enjoyed there from the ʿAbbāsids and, on the other, the controversies surrounding him in his native Medina.

Ibn Isḥāq had sought ʿAbbāsid patronage as a virtual exile from Medina, in part due to the fierce and violent opposition he faced from Mālik b. Anas's followers.Footnote ³⁶ He first adopted the ʿAbbāsid governor of Mesopotamia, al-ʿAbbās b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī, as his patron in Ḥarrān and subsequently the caliph al-Manṣūr in Ḥīra.Footnote ³⁷ Prior to his exile, however, Ibn Isḥāq was deeply enmeshed in Medinan scholarly circles and their networks in Syria and Egypt.Footnote ³⁸ CPA circulated in these western territories in the Levant; however, CPA was foreign to the eastern territories where Ibn Isḥāq found refuge from the tribulations he suffered at the hands of the Medinans. Subsequent renderings of the Johannine Paraclete discourse (i.e. from the early ʿAbbāsid period onwards) are not dependent on CPA but, rather, derive from either Greek or Syriac Gospel texts. If CPA texts did not circulate in the cities where Ibn Isḥāq taught and transmitted his Kitāb al-Maghāzī (i.e. Ḥarrān, Ḥīra, Rayy and Baghdād) then Ibn Isḥāq must have acquired the text prior to his exile from Medina.Footnote ³⁹

Second, Ibn Isḥāq possessed no knowledge of CPA as far as we know. Scholars have speculated that Ibn Ishāq's grandfather Yasār was Christian and, therefore, knew Syriac,Footnote ⁴⁰ since he was taken captive from a sanctuary of worship, sometimes called a synagogue and on other occasions a church, in 12/633 at ʿAyn Tamr in Iraq.Footnote ⁴¹ However, even if Ibn Isḥāq's ancestry were Christian, this ancestry would most likely be rooted in the East Syrian (so-called “Nestorian”) Christianity that predominated in this region of the former Sasanid Empire – i.e. of Syriac- or Aramaic-speaking heritage but not a speaker of CPA. Furthermore, speculation regarding the putative Christian heritage of Ibn Isḥāq, as recently argued by Michael Lecker, is tendentious – he is just as likely to have been of Jewish heritage.Footnote ⁴²

Lastly, the Syrian, late Umayyad provenance of Ibn Isḥāq's Gospel text is made all the more plausible by the fact that the only other Muslim upon whom the influence of the CPA versions of the Gospel has been directly documented is Ibn Isḥāq's teacher Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 742). An eminent scholar of Qurashī descent with intimate ties to the Umayyad court, al-Zuhrī's connections with the Umayyads earned him fame and controversy. His seminal influence on early Muslim scholarship, however, is beyond dispute.Footnote ⁴³ A star student of al-Zuhrī,Footnote ⁴⁴ Ibn Isḥāq might have acquired the Johannine text through his teacher, but just as feasibly through his own exertions. Ibn Isḥāq was an intrepid scholar who courted controversy by transmitting materials from Jews and Christians – one detractor claimed to have seen Ibn Isḥāq copy down written material from one of “the people of the Book”.Footnote ⁴⁵ Other critics even cited the name of one of Ibn Isḥāq's non-Muslim sources, calling him “Jacob the Jew”.Footnote ⁴⁶

However, in citing non-Muslims as authorities, Ibn Isḥāq also emulated his teacher al-Zuhrī. In his narrative of Muḥammad's letter to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, al-Zuhrī cites the authority of a Christian cleric from Jerusalem whom he met during the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) to vouch for its authenticity.Footnote ⁴⁷ The language of the letter bears out al-Zuhrī's claim (in part at least) to have drawn from a Christian Palestinian source. Muḥammad's letter threatens that Heraclius and the Byzantines will suffer “the sin of the tenants (ithm al-arīsīn)” – a clear reference to the gospel parable of the “wicked tenants” dispossessed of their land due to their evil deeds (cf. Mark 12: 1–12; Matt. 21: 33–46; Luke 20: 9–20). Yet, the word for “tenant” used in al-Zuhrī's account, arīs, is neither Arabic, Greek, nor Syriac. Arīs only appears as a word for tenant in CPA translations of the Gospels.Footnote ⁴⁸ If Ibn Isḥāq's translation does not derive from his teacher al-Zuhrī, he certainly acquired his Arabic rendition of the Johannine Paraclete discourse from the same networks exploited by al-Zuhrī.

Arabic sources are rich with anecdotes of Muslims acquiring, requesting and stumbling upon the sacred writings of Jews and Christians. Some accounts appear contradictory and offer conflicting data. ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb and his daughter Ḥafṣa allegedly aroused the Prophet's ire by over-indulging in their enthusiasm for reading stories from Jewish scripture,Footnote ⁴⁹ and in other accounts, ʿUmar as caliph berates a man so severely for reading the prophecies of Daniel that he erases the book.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet other accounts portray ʿUmar as constantly wooed by Kaʿb al-Aḥbār's ability to decipher the caliph's fortune from the Hebrew scriptures.Footnote ⁵¹ Equally curious stories circulate about personalities of later generations, too, such as the intrepid bibliophile Mālik b. Dīnār (d. 748), who would eagerly pilfer the libraries of Iraq's monasteries for learnèd tomes,Footnote ⁵² and Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. c. 732) about whom stories abound of the prodigious erudition he acquired by studying with non-Muslim scholars.Footnote ⁵³ Yet, as fascinating as these anecdotes are, they are scarcely verifiable. In the case of Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic rendition of the Johannine Paraclete discourse, however, the philological data present us with a verifiable and accessible case of historical transmission.

Menaḥem and the Paraclete

Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic rendition of John 15: 23–16: 1 sheds light not merely on Muslim interest in the Bible – his Arabic rendition also sheds light on a key facet of the translation of the Gospels into CPA in the context of transformations of Late Antiquity and early Islam. The rendering of the Greek paráklētos into CPA as mnḥmnʾ – an Aramaic word meaning “comforter” – was not an artificial concoction of Ibn Isḥāq. Rather, he bears witness to an authentic and autochthonous shift in Christian translation of the Gospel of John into CPA. Two textual corpora confirm this: 1) palimpsests of a CPA lectionary edited by A.S. Lewis and M.D. Gibson from two twelfth-century Sinai codices discovered at St. Catherine's Monastery; and 2) the Evangeliarium Hierosolymitanum dating to 1029 ce.Footnote ⁵⁴ All of these twelfth-century CPA versions of the Gospel of John, like Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic version, translate the Greek paráklētos with the CPA mnḥmnʾ. Yet, these two texts are also late – they belong to the so-called late period (c. 900–1300 ce) of the CPA corpus. Hence, a considerable chronological gap separates these twelfth-century witnesses and our earliest, surviving exemplar of the Gospels in CPA on the one hand and, on the other, Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic version of Johannine Paraclete discourse.Footnote ⁵⁵ What makes matters more curious is that the earliest testimonia to the Gospels in CPA, in particular the Codex Climaci Rescriptus (CCR) (c. sixth century ce), lack any attempt to provide a vernacular translation of the Greek paráklētos and, instead, merely transcribe the Greek original as prqlyṭʾ, as do all Syriac versions of the Gospels.Footnote ⁵⁶ Why this discrepancy?

I would like to suggest that Ibn Isḥāq offers us a key testimony to a sea change in CPA translations of John's Gospel, wherein Christians translating John's Gospel into CPA began rendering Paraclete as mnḥmnʾ, probably from the seventh century onwards. In other words, Ibn Isḥāq's text, although a Muslim text preserved for Muslim theological purposes, provides us with an important terminus ante quem for a key change in the translation practices of CPA. Sometime before Ibn Isḥāq's composition of his biography of Muḥammad in the mid-eighth century ce but after the sixth-century Codex Climaci Rescriptus, CPA translators began rendering paráklētos as mnḥmnʾ. Yet, why did this sea-change in CPA translations of paráklētos transpire in the first place?

In order for this process to transpire, two key developments were necessary. The first is the emergence and dominance of the exegetical current that interpreted the Paraclete as “comforter” rather than “advocate”. The Greek paráklētos can mean either “comforter” or “advocate”. Indeed, modern Bible translations tend to prefer the meaning “advocate” as the earlier sense, perhaps even rooted in Aramaic usage of paráklētos as a calque. Grounds for this judgement can be found in the fact that, by the Roman period, the Greek word paráklētos entered Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic as the loanword פרקליט, meaning “advocate”, as it was often paired with its antonym קטיגוד, another loanword from the Greek katḗgōr, meaning “accuser”.Footnote ⁵⁷ In patristic exegesis, however, the Paraclete's role primarily in the sense of a “comforter” rather than an “advocate” gradually came to hold sway, thus eclipsing the earliest meaning of the term. We can see this, for example, in a seminal treatise on the Holy Spirit by Basil of Caesarea (d. 379), who writes:

Evidence for this shift in the interpretation of paráklētos appears in the CPA translation of the Catechesis of Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–387) as well. This CPA translation of Cyril's Catechesis – dating perhaps to the sixth or seventh century ce Footnote ⁵⁹ – simultaneously renders the Greek paráklētos first as mnḥmn (comforter) and then subsequently in transcription as prqlyṭʾ in a matter of a few lines.Footnote ⁶⁰

Yet, this exegetical shift in reading of the Paraclete as “comforter” does not merely hold importance for CPA Gospel translations. The impetus behind a shift in Palestinian–Aramaic Gospel translations away from transcribing παράκλητος as prqlyṭʾ and towards a new trend in favour of translating paráklētos into mnḥmnʾ must also be placed in the broader religious context of Late Antique Palestine. This leads us to our second key development that gave rise to this translation shift: the CPA translation of paráklētos as mnḥmnʾ emerges simultaneously with the rise in messianic expectations among Palestinian Jewry of Late Antiquity.Footnote ⁶¹

A central theme to the Jewish messianism of Palestine in Late Antiquity is the expectation of the advent of a Messiah named Menaḥem. The name is highly significant. Menaḥem means “comforter”. The name is thus roughly the Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic equivalent of paráklētos and mnḥmnʾ of the Paraclete discourse. The name Menaḥem is also widely attested in Late Antique Jewish texts, appearing in the seminal Talmudic discussions of the Messiah's names as well as Jewish apocalypses and Palestinian piyyuṭim.Footnote ⁶²

The Jerusalem Talmud provides one of the earliest attestations to the Messiah named Menaḥem in a story attributed to Rabbi Aibo. In R. Aibo's tale, an Arab delivers shocking news to a Jew ploughing his fields. First, the Arab announces the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, but then he relates what is seemingly more hopeful news (y.Ber 2.4.25b):Footnote ⁶³

Upon hearing the Arab's declaration of the Messiah's birth, the Jew promptly abandons his life as a farmer to become a peddler of swaddling cloth for children. Travelling and selling his wares, he finally come across the Messiah's mother, to whom he offers his wares on a loan. When he later returns for his payment, he asks about her child, but receives a shocking reply: “She answered, ‘After you saw me, winds and whirlwinds came and snatched him out of my hands’”.Footnote ⁶⁴

R. Aibo's curious story of the Messiah's birth has inspired numerous studies of its interpretation,Footnote ⁶⁵ but our main interest lies in the name Menaḥem it provides for the Messiah. As noted above, Menaḥem simply means “comforter” – a perfectly apt title for a Messiah. The Babylonian Talmud illuminates the Biblical roots behind calling the messiah Menaḥem/“comforter” (b.San 98b):

Regardless of the original intent of R. Aibo's story, its reverberations – especially the idea that Israel's messiah had already been born and awaits the time of his advent – can be found in an array of sources. A popular messianic motif, for example, places the Messiah at the gates of Rome where he suffers in solidarity with Israel as a leper indistinguishable from the throngs of lepers around him until the time of his re-appearance draws nigh.Footnote ⁶⁷

Leading up to the seventh century, the urgency of messianic fervour among the Jews of Palestine becomes particularly acute in the liturgy (amida) and hymns (piyyutim) of the synagogue as well as in apocalyptic literature.Footnote ⁶⁸ The expectation of a Messiah called Menaḥem is a common motif throughout the compositions of this period. The words of the payytan Shimʿon bar Megus offer a vivid example of such messianic urgency:Footnote ⁶⁹

An important catalyst for the spread and codification of these ideas, particularly in Jewish apocalyptic literature, comes first in the form of the Perso-Byzantine War (602–628) and in the form of the Arab conquest of Jerusalem (637), leading to yet another expulsion of Byzantines from Syria. The Sasanid conquest of Jerusalem in 614 even briefly placed Palestinian Jews in control of the city until 617 and saw in particular the outbreak of spectacular violence and upheaval that struck many as apocalyptic in significance, if not in scale.Footnote ⁷⁰ However short-lived this restoration of Jerusalem to the Jews was, Byzantium's humiliation stoked eschatological dreams of Israel as Rome's messianic and imperial heir and of the Messiah Menaḥem's imminent advent.Footnote ⁷¹

No Jewish apocalyptic work embodies these expectations more vividly than the early seventh-century apocalypse Sefer Zerubbabel, itself likely written in response to the tumultuous events in Palestine and Syria during the Perso-Byzantine War (601–628).Footnote ⁷² The apocalypse recounts the vision of the Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel of Biblical fame, whom the archangel Michael carries away to the gates of Rome to meet the Messiah-in-waiting:Footnote ⁷³

This Menaḥem, the angel reveals, will soon defeat the satanic “Armilos”Footnote ⁷⁵ and liberate Jerusalem to restore Israel. Reference to the Sefer Zerubbabel and Menaḥem's role therein appears also in Jewish hymnography, as one can see the piyyut known as ʾOto ha-Yom:Footnote ⁷⁶

Read in light of these currents of Jewish Messianism in Palestine, the tiny shift in the translation of the Gospel of John into CPA in which “Paraclete” becomes mnḥmnʾ, in my view, creates a profound statement. This subtle shift marks the emergence of a discretely Christian counter-discourse against Jewish expectations of their own messiah-comforter whom they call “Menaḥem”. By calling the Paraclete mnḥmnʾ, the Christians using CPA signalled that their Comforter – their Menaḥem – had already come. He was at once the Christ Jesus of Nazareth and the “other Comforter” (John 14: 16), the Spirit of Truth who comforts Christ's followers in his absence. What makes the story of this subtle shift in CPA translation practice in response to Late Antique Jewish messianism all the more extraordinary is that, wittingly or unwittingly, Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic rendition of John 15: 23–16: 1 offers us our best evidence that this shift transpired simultaneously with the rising tides of Jewish messianism at its epicentre in Palestine.

The broad currents of Late Antique apocalypticism did not disappear with the rise of Islam. Indeed, the Islamic conquest harnessed and reinvigorated these currents in unanticipated ways, as apocalypticism and its attendant literature continued to flourish well into the second century of the Islamic conquests.Footnote ⁷⁹ Does Ibn Isḥāq's appropriation of the Johannine Paraclete discourse, therefore, share a messianic subtext with CPA translations of paráklētos as mnḥmnʾ?

On the one hand, scholars have long seen in Ibn Isḥāq's narrative of Muḥammad's call (mabʿath) and his encounter with the angel Gabriel at Mt. Ḥirāʾ references to passages from the Biblical book of Isaiah in the textual underlayer of the narrative – in particular Is. 29: 12 and 40: 6.Footnote ⁸⁰ The latter passage serves as quite a striking example. When in Ibn Isḥāq's narrative Gabriel appears to Muḥammad in his sleep and, holding a silk scroll, commands, “Read (iqraʾ)!”, the Prophet famously replies, “I cannot read (mā aqraʾ)!”Footnote ⁸¹ Isaiah 40: 6 shares a similar structure and wording with the passage, even in the Hebrew: “A voice says, ‘Proclaim/Read (qĕrā)!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry out (māh ʾeqrā)?’” What makes this correspondence significant for our concerns is that Isaiah 40 actually begins with divine admonition to “comfort” God's people, “Comfort, comfort my people (naḥămū naḥămū ʿammî), says your God…”. The CPA version of Isaiah 40: 1 matches the Hebrew very closely, reading: nḥmw nḥmw qhly ʾmr ʾlhʾ.Footnote ⁸² Targumic readings of Isaiah 40, in fact, connect the command to “comfort” explicitly with the act of prophecy.Footnote ⁸³ Is this the messianic subtext to Ibn Isḥāq's narrative of Muḥammad's call to prophecy? Put another way: is Muḥammad a/the “comforter” – in the mould of Menaḥem and the Paraclete/mnḥmnʾ – by virtue of his prophetic mission? The evidence for affirming that Ibn Isḥāq's text does put forward such a view is not definitive, but it is suggestive.

Conclusion: “… and his name will be most praised”

The preceding analysis leaves us with a curious result. Even though the tools of historical philology illuminate considerably not just the provenance of Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic translation of the Johannine Paralcete discourse but also important features of his source-text, we have learned little about the Quranic text that ostensibly inspired this early Arabic translation. Part of the issue is that the connection between the Gospel of John's Paraclete and Q. 61: 6 is tendentious. “Aḥmad” and “Muḥammad” on the one hand and paráklētos/mnḥmnʾ/Menaḥem on the other do not carry even approximately similar meanings. The words are simply incommensurate. Polemicists note the fact that the Johannine proof-text fails to work the way early Muslim apologists would like virtually from the outset. Ps.-Leo III thus writes to the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II:

The relationship between Q. 61: 6 and John is, therefore, tenuous at best. Most likely, Q. 61: 6 is not a reference to the Johannine Paraclete at all, and the putative Biblical subtext Ibn Isḥāq posits for Q. 61: 6, is a red-herring. If I am correct, this realization represents a significant step forward, but it also admittedly leaves modern scholars with a vexing loose end: the significance of “Aḥmad” in Q. 61: 6 remains unresolved. Several solutions have appeared over the centuries; we explore them below.

The first is what one might called the “philological” solution – even if the philology supporting it is rather dubious. This solution aims to maintain the connection between Q. 61: 6 and the Paraclete of John's Gospel, but it proposes a rather novel solution to the incommensurability between the Arabic aḥmad and the Greek paráklētos. According to this argument, the Greek παράκλητος (“comforter/advocate”) was either misread or misunderstood as περικλυτός – meaning “renowned”, “far-famed”, or even (with a little imagination) “praised one”. This proposition first appears, to my knowledge, in the Refutatio Alcorani of the pioneering Italian professor of Arabic at La Sapienza University, Ludovicco Marracci (d. 1700).Footnote ⁸⁶ A modified version of Marracci's suggestion has gained and maintains a considerable following in popular Muslim apologetic writings. Drawing upon Quranic claims regarding the corruption (taḥrīf) of Jewish and Christian scriptures, such writings argue that periklytós was the original reading of the Greek text John's Gospel rather than paráklētos. It's certainly an odd twist of fate that the arguments of such Muslim apologetic works ultimately derive from a suggestion popularized by a priest of the Order of the Mother of God and confessor to pope Innocent XI.

Marracci's suggestion is clever, but probably too clever. In order for his proposition to work, one first must assume that Muḥammad (or even, say, a hypothetical redactor of the Quran) knew both Greek and Syriac. Second, one must assume that Muḥammad, or the Quran's redactor, lacked access to the original Greek text of the Gospels, and so had to “reverse engineer” a Greek word from the Semitic consonantal skeleton p.r.q.l.y.ṭ.s, which he found in either a Syriac or CPA Gospel text. Faced with the Greek letters π.ρ.κ.λ.τ.ς, either Muḥammad or the redactor then reinserted the missing Greek vowels but arrived at περικλυτός, “renowned”, rather than παράκλητος, “comforter”. While the reading butchered the original text of John's Gospel, it did just so happen to match, albeit rather approximately, the meaning of “Aḥmad”. The scenario is so convoluted as to be absurd.Footnote ⁸⁷

Another radical solution tweaks not the text of the New Testament but rather the text of the Quran. This second, “codicological”, solution jettisons the aya in which Jesus prophesies a future Messenger (rasūl) altogether, in favour of an alternative, albeit far less historically attested, reading. Nearly a century ago, Arthur Jeffery unearthed a reading of Q. 61: 6 ostensibly deriving from the Companion Quran codex (muṣḥaf) of Ubayy b. Kaʿb (d. c. 640–656) that provided an entirely different rendering of Jesus's prophecy of a future messenger (rasūl) named Aḥmad. In the reading attributed to Ubayy's codex, Jesus's prophecy in Q. 61: 6 rather ran as follows:

Thus did Ubayy's codex purportedly omit any mention of Jesus's prophecy of a prophet named Aḥmad altogether.Footnote ⁸⁸ While an intriguing possibility, the documentation for this variant reading attributed to Ubayy is late and exceedingly sparse. Jeffery uncovered the reading from the margins of an autograph manuscript titled Qurrat ʿayn al-qurrāʾ, a work on variant readings (qirāʾāt) of the Quran by an otherwise unknown Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm ibn Muhammad ibn ʿAlī al-Qawāsī al-Marandī (fl. latter half of sixth/thirteenth century).Footnote ⁸⁹ The work remains unpublished, but the manuscript remains accessible in the Escorial Library in Madrid. Jeffery characterizes this source as exceedingly rich with information on readings from Ubayy's muṣḥaf, and indeed, his Materials drew heavily on the manuscript when documenting the hypothetical text of Ubayy's codex.Footnote ⁹⁰ Yet, outside al-Marandī's work, the reading offered for Q. 61: 1 is rarely, if ever, attested in the qirāʾāt literature or in the earliest extant manuscripts of the Quran. Any argument in favour of Ubayy's reading as an “original” and, therefore, “better” reading of the Quran faces an uphill climb.

The reading attributed by al-Marandī to Ubayy, however, deserves careful consideration. Aspects of the reading suggest an early, perhaps even a seventh-century, dating. Its tone is, for one, eschatological. On the other hand, other aspects of the reading suggest that it post-dates the seventh century. Its depiction of Muḥammad as the final prophet is categorical and unambiguous. Muḥammad “seals [the line of] prophets and messengers”. This is a sentiment paralleled only in Q. 33: 40 where Muḥammad is also deemed “Messenger of God and the Seal of the Prophets (rasūl Allāh wa-khātam al-nabiyyīn)”. Yet, the latter, far better-attested verse also suggests that al-Marandī's alternative rendering of Q. 61: 6 is late. The categorical interpretation of Muḥammad as the seal of the prophets is not present in Q. 33: 40, which suggests that the categorical tenor of al-Marandī's/Ubayy's reading of Q. 61: 6 probably reflects a more systematic and developed prophetology than one would expect to encounter in the Quran. Early Arabic poetry provides more than one compelling example of how the root kh.t.m. in the early Islamic period does not necessarily denote finality. Hence, a verse attributed to Umayya b. Abī Ṣalt speaks of Muḥammad as the man, “by whom God sealed the prophets who come before him and after him (bihi khatama Allāhu man qablahu/wa-man baʿdahu min nabiyyin khatam)”. Likewise the Naqāʾiḍ of the Umayyad-era poets Jarīr and Farazdaq refers to Muḥammad as “the best of the seals (khayr al-khawātim)”Footnote ⁹¹ – where the very multiplicity of “seals” precludes their finality.

Moreover, the explicit pairing of the plurals “prophets (anbiyāʾ)” and “messengers (rusul)” in al-Marandī's alternative reading occurs nowhere else in the Quran – and this despite the near ubiquity of these terms throughout the Quran. Hence, the pairing seems to be at odds with Quranic diction. Lastly, nowhere does the Quran refer to Muḥammad's community (umma) as the last (ākhir al-umam). While not at odds with Quranic eschatology per se, this phrase does appear early on in the ḥadīth literature where it seems to first proliferate.Footnote ⁹² All of this evidence argues against accepting the reading al-Marandī attributes to Ubayy's codex as either an original, or even a historically preferable, reading of Q. 61: 6.

A third option entertained at least as early as the late ninth century – but unlikely to find many defenders among modern scholars – is what one might call the “sectarian” solution. This solution denies that the “Aḥmad” figure foretold by Jesus in the Quran intends to refer to Muḥammad at all. In his Kitāb al-Maqālāt, the Muʿtazilī scholar Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. c. 915–916) provides an early testimony to such a view, writing that Qarāmiṭa rebels of his day justified their belief that Muḥammad was not the last prophet by claiming: 1) Jesus would return to Earth and thus be a prophet after Muḥammad; and 2) that Jesus foretold a prophet named Aḥmad, whose coming they await, and not a prophet named Muḥammad.Footnote ⁹³ Elsewhere, al-Ṭabarī (d. 922) records a letter purportedly penned by one of these millenarian rebels’ leaders in which he claimed to be an agent (dāʿī) working on behalf of the Mahdī Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya, “the Messiah who Jesus, who is the Word, … who is Gabriel”.Footnote ⁹⁴ While certainly an extreme example, the Qarmaṭīs at least demonstrate that not all Muslims identified the Quranic Aḥmad with Muḥammad.

There remains only one other solution, and to my mind it is also the most credible. This is what I would like to call the “minimalist” solution. The minimalist solution essentially rejects the very premise of Ibn Isḥāq's early quest for a Gospel proof-text; it is also a solution favoured by major exegetes of the classical tradition.Footnote ⁹⁵ In this reading, “Aḥmad” is not a proper name at all, but rather an adjective: the Arabic phrase ismuhu aḥmad should not be read as “his name is Aḥmad” but rather “his name is most praised” – reading aḥmad as a straightforward elative. In other words, this reading severs the putative connection between Jesus's Quranic proclamation from the Paraclete discourse of the Gospel of John. While decoupling these two texts may defy the unrelenting impulse to embed every verse of the Quran in a biblical subtext, intertext, or source text, such a decisive decoupling of the Q. 61: 6 from the textual cobwebs of biblical proof-texts, in this one instance at least, provides the most convincing reading.