The test of a true prophet

What the Bible asks of a prophet

A prophet is judged by what he foretells and by what he is. The Torah itself raises the question, and answers it:

And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

Deuteronomy 18:21-22

The verse before it settles the fate of the one who speaks in God’s name without having been commanded: “even that prophet shall die” (Deuteronomy 18:20). Munqidh al-Saqqar makes this a key to the reading: the Prophet ﷺ was protected, he prevailed, and his religion spread. Gamaliel had already said as much in the Acts of the Apostles: if this work “be of men, it will come to nought” (Acts 5:38-39; al-Saqqar, pp. 15-16).

The second test concerns the message. Even if his sign comes to pass, the prophet who says “Let us go after other gods” is not to be heeded (Deuteronomy 13:1-3). The Prophet ﷺ called to none but the God of Abraham, one and without partner.

The third is the test of Jesus: “Beware of false prophets”, and then: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15-16; see Matthew 7:15-20). Sami Ameri points out that this warning presupposes prophets who will be judged by their fruits. It calls for an examination, not a refusal on principle (Ameri, p. 31).

The Christian objection, and its answer

“The decisive test is doctrine: whoever denies the Son is not of God.” The objection rests on the First Epistle of John: “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father” (1 John 2:22-23). Paul, likewise, declares accursed anyone who would preach “any other gospel” (Galatians 1:8).

But the Qur’an denies neither God nor Jesus: what it denies is sonship (19:35; 112:3).

Jesus himself speaks of God as the Qur’an does. He addresses God as “the only true God” (John 17:3). He quotes the first commandment: “The Lord our God is one Lord” (Mark 12:29). He says too: “my God, and your God” (John 20:17). The formula of one essence in three persons was fixed only at the councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), three centuries after him.

Christians answer with other verses, “the Word was God” (John 1:1) and “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), and read the oneness of God as a single essence. The debate therefore turns on the test itself and on how these verses are read (research file v1, part 4). On the test of the Torah, by contrast, the answer is plain: the Prophet ﷺ called to no other god, and his prophecies came to pass.

Does a saying written down later lose its worth?

The predictions of the Qur’an were fixed in the text before the event: the believers recited them before they saw them fulfilled. Those of the hadith were handed down through chains of narrators that the hadith scholars examined, then recorded in collections in the ninth century (research file v1, part 4).

Hence the historians’ objection: “These prophecies were written after the facts.” It takes nothing away from an authentic saying: a saying whose transmission is established loses nothing by the date of the book that records it. And for some of the prophecies, the objection falls of itself, because the event came after the collection was written down. These are the strongest, and these pages say so each time, giving both dates:

• the fire of the Hijaz is foretold in the collection of al-Bukhari, completed before 870; it broke out in 1256, nearly four centuries later;
• Constantinople, “the city of Heraclius”, will be taken first, before Rome: the hadith is reported by Ahmad, whose Musnad dates from the ninth century; the city fell in 1453;
• the Prophet ﷺ hopes that his community will be granted half a day, five hundred years according to Sa’d, in a hadith of Abu Dawud, a ninth-century collection: that term was reached in 500 AH (1106-1107);
• the hadith of al-Bukhari on Dhu l-Khalasa, the idol of the tribe of Daws, whose cult had revived when its walls were pulled down in 1925: how it applies is still debated.

The first three are on page 3, the fourth on page 4.

Three periods, five pages

Ibn Kathir opens his chapter on what the Prophet ﷺ foretold with a warning: the chapter is vast, “we indicate only a part of it” (Ibn Kathir, Mu’jizat, I, 235). Hudhayfa said that the Prophet ﷺ had once stood among them and left out nothing that would happen until the Hour (Ibn Kathir, Mu’jizat, I, 253).

This part follows the order of time. On each page, the best-established prophecies come first; those whose transmission or application is debated are given with their limits; the signs not yet fulfilled are announced as still to come, as what the believer awaits.

1. The Qur’an’s predictions: the Romans victorious “within a few years”, Abu Lahab, Badr, the entry into Mecca, the challenge of the Qur’an.
2. Fulfilled in his lifetime: Umayya ibn Khalaf and the admission of an enemy, the places where the dead of Badr would fall, pointed out the day before, the Negus and the commanders of Mu’ta, then Adi ibn Hatim, witness to what had been foretold to him.
3. Fulfilled after him, down to the classical authors: the fire of the Hijaz, Constantinople, the Kharijites, Thaqif, the caliphate of thirty years, down to Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH / 1373) and al-Salihi (d. 942 AH / 1536).
4. The signs of the Hour, down to our day: the shepherds who vie in the height of their buildings, knowledge passing away, and the signs still to come.
5. The testimony of his person: a truthfulness his enemies acknowledged, the Qur’an that rebukes him ﷺ, a death without wealth.

How this page connects to the others

• The prophet “like Moses”, foretold in the same chapter of Deuteronomy: A prophet like Moses.
• The test of the Bible applied to the foretellings as a whole: The convergence.
• The objections: written after the events; vague, or refuted; the sincere error.

Sources for this page

• Bible: King James Version.
• Qur’an: Tanzil text (Uthmani); translation of the meaning by the site.
• Ibn Kathir, Mu’jizat al-Nabi ﷺ (extract from al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya), ed. al-Sayyid Ibrahim Amin Muhammad, al-Maktaba al-Tawfiqiyya, Cairo, I, 235 and 253 (Shamela 23678).
• Munqidh al-Saqqar, Hal bashshara al-Kitab al-Muqaddas bi-Muhammad ﷺ?, al-Huda wa-l-Nur series, 5, 2023, pp. 15-16.
• Sami Ameri, al-Bishara bi-nabi al-islam fi kutub al-yahud wa-l-nasara, Takween, 2nd ed., 2021, p. 31.
• Research file “The Prophet ﷺ Foretold”, v1.0, 14 October 2026, part 4 (revised 3 November 2026).
• Research file “His prophecies, from his lifetime to our day”, v1.0, 2 November 2026 (framework and method).