robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

The first biographer of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq, lends additional support to this possibility. Recall that in
Qur'an 61:6, Jesus is depicted as prophesying the coming of a new “Messenger of God,” “whose name
shall be Ahmad.” Because Ahmad—the “praised one”—is a variant of Muhammad, Islamic scholars take
this passage to be a reference to the prophet of Islam. Ibn Ishaq amplifies this view in his biography of
Muhammad, quoting “the Gospel,” the New Testament, where Jesus says that “when the Comforter
[Munahhemana] has come whom God will send to you from the Lord's presence, and the spirit of truth
which will have gone forth from the Lord's presence, he (shall bear) witness of me and ye also, because
ye have been with me from the beginning. I have spoken unto you about this that ye should not be in
doubt.” Ibn Ishaq then explains: “the Munahhemana (God bless and preserve him!) in Syriac is
Muhammad; in Greek he is the paraclete.” 16
Ibn Ishaq's English translator Alfred Guillaume notes that the word Munahhemana “in the Eastern
patristic literature…is applied to our Lord Himself”—that is, not to Muhammad but to Jesus. The original
bearer of the title “praised one” was Jesus, and this title and the accompanying prophecy were “skillfully
manipulated to provide the reading we have” in Ibn Ishaq's biography of Muhammad—and, for that
matter, in the Qur'an itself. 17
Whichever of these possibilities is correct, the weakest hypothesis is that these muhammad coins refer
to the prophet of the new religion as he is depicted in the Qur'an and the Hadith. 18 For there are no
contemporary references to Muhammad, the Islamic prophet who received the Qur'an and preached its
message to unify Arabia (often by force) and whose followers then carried his jihad far beyond Arabia;
the first clear records of the Muhammad of Islam far postdate these coins.
The Cross and the Crescent Together
Equally curious is a coin that was to all appearances minted officially in northern Palestine or Jordan
during the reign of Muawiya. The sovereign depicted on it (it is unclear whether it is Muawiya himself or
someone else) is shown not with the cross topping a globe, which was a feature of Byzantine coinage of
the period, but with a cross that features a crescent at the top of its vertical bar. 19
The crescent appears at the top of the cross on the obverse, at the right of the image of the sovereign.
Could this unusual design be a remnant of a long-forgotten synthesis? Or was it struck at a time when the
distinction between Christianity and Arabic / Islamic monotheism was not as sharp as it eventually
became? Whatever the case may be, it is hard to imagine that such a coin would have been minted at all
had the dogmatic Islamic abhorrence of the cross been in place at the time, as one would expect if Islam