The Question About His Credibility — 15 September 1965, The Watchtower

Under this paragraph it says, “What kinds of proofs and miracles does Muhammad have to show that he is a prophet?” A comparison is made with Moses and an example is given. When Moses was commissioned as a prophet, he asked God: “What if they do not believe me? What if they will not listen to my words and say, ‘The Lord did not send you’?” This is taken up. (Exodus 4:1-31) And it is stated that with the three miracles God showed him, this problem was resolved. When the people saw this, they too believed. It is also written that over the course of forty years the Israelites in the wilderness witnessed countless miracles through Moses. For example, thunder, lightning, earthquakes, fire, smoke, and so on. (Exodus, chapters 7 through 15; 19:16-18; and Deuteronomy 8:14-16)

Then Muhammad is compared with Jesus Christ. Indeed, while the prophet John was in prison, he sent his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the Messiah, or should we expect someone else?” And Jesus sent back encouraging news. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the good news is being proclaimed to the poor.” To the religious people of that time as well, Jesus again gave this reply, “If I am not doing the works of my Father, do not believe me. But if I am doing them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works I do.” (Matthew 11:5; John 10:37-38)

In the Quran, however, it is stated that it is written that “those who did not believe in Muhammad and who wanted to see a miracle from him branded him a liar and a fraud.” Yes, there are such verses, but some of the places the Witnesses point to are verses that do not really shed light on the subject and are unrelated to it. Even so, I will write out for you the locations of the verses they cite there just as they are. The places I have underlined are the verses more suited to the subject. Perhaps they may have made a mistake. (Surah 2:112; 10:40; 11:18; 17:91/95; 21:5-6)

The Witnesses go on to write that in the Quran, those who listened to Muhammad are told again and again that he was merely a messenger and a warner. But this, they say, is nothing other than straying from the main subject. And the main subject is that they claim, “Why did Muhammad not perform miracles like Moses, like Jesus?! In the past, even though the prophets performed miracles, people still did not believe them. But this did not stop God from performing miracles.” (Surah 3:184-185, 5:42; 9:70) So claims the Watchtower publication of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Answer regarding the subject:

It is certain that Jehovah’s Witnesses, who compare Muhammad with Moses, at least do not understand the Holy Scriptures as they should. At the very end of the fifth book of Moses, called Deuteronomy, after the death of Moses, there is such a verse:

“And there has not arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, in all the signs and the wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and in all the mighty hand and in all the great terror that Moses displayed before the eyes of all Israel” (Deuteronomy 34:10-12). Even though many prophets came after Moses, these verses draw attention to the fact that, in matters of signs and miracles, none of them could be compared with Moses.

Next comes Jesus Christ, with whom they compare him. Moses, prophesying 1500 years earlier about the coming of Jesus, said before his death:

The Lord your God will raise up for you from among yourselves, from your brothers, a prophet like me; him you shall listen to. (Deuteronomy 18:15)

How many prophets does the Holy Scriptures speak of as having come? Were Moses and Jesus alone God’s prophets? No, there were at least more than 40 prophets who were writers. These are the people who wrote the Holy Scriptures and brought it into its present form. While God has named prophets who did not write anything in the Holy Scriptures, there are also many prophets whose names are not even mentioned. (1 Samuel 10:10; 1 Kings 13:1-32; Acts 21:9-10) Now you can consider their number for yourself.

If we go along with the Witnesses’ thinking and say “only performing miracles makes a person a prophet,” then we would have to say that there are, in the Holy Scriptures, many fraudulent prophets like Muhammad. They performed no miracles, yet they are accepted as prophets. I only want to point to a verse that says this plainly.

Many people came to him and said: “John indeed performed no sign; but everything John said about this man was true.” (John 10:41)

In the record found in the Gospel, those people accept and openly declare that John the Baptizer performed no miracle at all. If, relying on these writings of Jehovah’s Witnesses, we are not to accept Muhammad as a prophet, then John, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaac, David, Solomon, and a great many other prophets likewise never brought down fire from the heavens, never parted seas, never turned rivers to blood, never raised the dead, never opened the eyes of those born blind, never displayed a cloud of smoke or a pillar of fire and the like. According to the Witnesses’ critique, then, all these men were frauds, and God did not send them!!!

But let us set aside the logic of the Witnesses and come to what the quality is that makes a prophet a prophet. On this subject God gives Moses a clue.

But if a prophet presumptuously speaks in my name a word that I did not command him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. And if you say in your heart, How shall we know the word that the Lord has not spoken; when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and the thing does not happen and does not come to pass, that is the word the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you shall not be afraid of him. (Deuteronomy 18:20-22)

This means that a prophet must have at least one prophecy that he declared and proclaimed while still alive. And of course this cannot be expected to come to pass 500 years later. Otherwise God would not say, “If the thing he said does not come to pass, he has lied; you shall put him to death.” For whoever that person is, he will not live 500 years. This means that the prophet, while still alive, must make a prophecy that ought to come to pass in the near future. Muhammad fulfills this condition. I will already touch on this in later subjects. Still, can a prophet not prophesy about things that will come to pass 500-1000 years later? Of course he can, but that is not what is meant; what is meant concerns the reliability of whether that person is a prophet or not. But let us still not forget that false prophets, even though they were not sent by God, have both performed wonders and foretold things that would happen in the future, and those things came to pass. For God again warns about this matter as follows:

If a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, arises among you, and gives you a wonder or a sign, and the sign or the wonder of which he spoke to you comes to pass, saying, Let us go after other gods that you have not known and let us serve them; you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Deuteronomy 13:1-3

These verses do not, once again, put forward a condition that, regarding the quality of a prophet, it is necessary for him to perform a miracle. On the contrary, they state that even frauds who have no relationship whatsoever with God can perform such signs and wonders. God already showed us such examples plainly in Egypt, in the relationship between Moses and Pharaoh, so that we might understand what the magicians could do. Those magicians also turned rivers to blood, summoned frogs and they obeyed, turned a rod into a snake. Exodus 7:10-11 and 21-22; 8:6-7 speak of these matters. Those magicians who could do these things were not from God. Even so, they too had a certain limit, and at that limit they stopped, and when they saw the thing they could not do, they themselves openly acknowledged it and said, “this is the finger of God.” (Exodus 8:18-19) Did God perhaps not know how much power those magicians had or did not have? Why does He not, right at the outset, give Moses a miracle that they could not do? So that we might understand. In order to emphasize that people who do such works do not necessarily have to be from God, God chooses this way. John, who prophesies about the last days, does not write in vain in his book Revelation, or in the newer translation the book called Revelation, that the one opposed to God, likened to a beast, would perform signs so great as to even bring down fire from heaven. Revelation: 13:11-17

We see and read in all the Gospels (that is, in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that from someone like Jesus that people always demanded miracles. Yet even though those miraculous things took place right before their eyes, if these men say, “Show us a sign no matter what,” and Jesus does not respond to this demand of theirs, this does not make Jesus a fraud. For Jesus responds to these persistent demands of theirs as follows:

“A wicked and unfaithful generation keeps asking for a sign! But no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Then Jesus left them and went away. Matthew 16:4

Jesus does not say to those people: “Are you not ashamed? Have I not performed so many miracles before your eyes?” The event Jesus refers to as the sign of Jonah is his rising on the third day after being killed. That is, just as Jonah stayed three days in the belly of the fish, so Jesus used this example too. And when he rose, he appeared only to the community of believers, not to the unbelievers. In that case the unbelievers had no reason to believe that Jesus had risen either. By this logic the Jews still do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. They are no different from the Witnesses, or at the same time from all Christians. Just as the Jews do not believe in Jesus, so Christians do not believe that Muhammad is a prophet of God. And because of the reasons they put forward for not believing, I say, “they are no different from one another.”

After all these truths, the very fact that Muhammad performed no miracle at all increases my trust in that person even more. For if this man had been a fraud, with all the followers he had at that time it would have been no trouble at all for him to fabricate and even perform something like a miracle. If the revelations that came to Muhammad were not from God but from Satan, and he had even been deceived, then could he not at least have done the things Pharaoh’s magicians did? I write this too as an answer to the Christians who make the claim, “Why did Muhammad not perform a miracle.”

I will keep the subjects short throughout, otherwise all the subjects will become very long. Let us come to the second subject.