“Would the followers of this new prophet, whose new religious
and political order was defiantly at odds with that of the “cross worshippers,”
have placed any figure bearing a cross on any of their coinage?”
http://academicatheism.tumblr.com/post/64217273791/jesus-the-muhammad
They did not slay him, neither crucified him" (Qur’an 4:157). Would the caliph, the leader of a religious group that claimed it a blasphemy for a rival religion to regard Jesus as the Son of God, really place the crowning symbol of that rival religion on his public inscriptions?
Would the leader of a religious group whose founding prophet claimed that Jesus would return at the end of the world and "break all crosses"—as an insult to himself and a testament to the transcendent majesty of Allah—really allow a cross to be featured on any inscription carved anywhere in his domains?
Would the followers of this new prophet, whose new religious and political order was defiantly at odds with that of the “cross worshippers,” have placed any figure bearing a cross on any of their coinage? Perhaps this can be interpreted as a gesture of Islam’s tolerance, given that Christians overwhelmingly populated the domains of the new Arabian Empire. Yet Islamic law as codified in the ninth and tenth centuries forbade Christians to display the cross openly—even on the outside of churches—and there is no indication that the imposition of this law was a reversal of an earlier practice. So it is exceedingly curious that Muslim conquerors of Christians would strike a coin bearing the central image of the very religion and political order they despised, defeated, and were determined to supplant.
Other coins from this period also bear the cross and the word Muhammad. A Syrian coin that dates from 686 or 687, at the earliest [sic], features what numismatist Volker Popp describes as “the muhammad motto” on the reserve side. The obverse depicts a ruler crowned with a cross and holding another cross.
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The most obvious explanation is that the “muhammad” to whom the coin refers is not the prophet of Islam. Alternatively, the figure on the coin could have evolved into the Muahmmad of Islam but was not much like him at the time the coin was issued. Or it may be that the word muhammad is not a name at all but a title, meaning the “praised one” or the “chosen one.” Popp, noting that some of these seventh-century cross-bearing coins also bear the legend bismillah—“in the name of God”—as well as muhammad, suggests that the coins are saying of the depicted ruler, “He is chosen in the name of god,” or “Let him be praised in the name of God.”
This could be a derivative of the common Christian liturgical phrase referring to the coming of Christ: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” In that case, the muhammad, the praised or blessed one, would be Jesus himself.
Supporting this possibility is the fact that the few times the Qur’an mentions Muhammad by name, the references are not clearly to the prophet of Islam but work equally well as general exhortations to obey that which was revealed to the “praised one,” who could be someone else. Jesus is the most likely candidate, because, as we have seen, the Qur’an tells believers that “Muhammad is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him” (3:144), using language identical to that it later uses of Jesus: “the Messiah, the son of Mary, is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him” (5:75). This opens the possibility that here, as elsewhere, Jesus is the one being referred to as the “praised one,” the muhammad.
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 who 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.”
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.
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. 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.
Spencer, Robert. Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins, p. 44-46. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2012. Print.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?195534-1/the-truth-muhammad
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