Omar6741 said

The evidence for lack of influence by Greek-speaking Christians lies in the sheer distance of Mecca and Medina from any area where the ability to speak Greek might have been useful on a regular basis.

But during his lifetime the areas he controlled expanded to border greek speaking areas.

As for the bilingual folk living in or near Byzantine territory: it is unclear to me what motivation they might have for spending their time coming up with a novel apologetic on behalf of a new religious movement emerging in the Peninsula, a new religious movement that anyone would expect to fail or be crushed by the major empires of the day. Might they have been motivated by money? Maybe, though there was much more money to be found in serving the Byzantines than in propping up a new unheard of prophet who had little momney and in the beginning was facing persecution, and wouldn’t be expected to succeed anyway.

By the time of his death he controlled most of the arabian peninsula and within another few years arab armies would conquer large swathes of the roman and persian empires. He was clearly a powerful and influencial figure who claimed he had been prophecied in the jewish and christian scriptures. Bilingual arabs would have every motivation to find one of those prophecies and translate it in a convenient fashion for him.

And if there was some such motivation, they would need to be highly literate, which was already rare. Then they would need access to the gospel of John, which is by no means guaranteed, as scripture was not made freely available (unlike today).

His cousin in law had access to it. Anyone within the territory he controlled could bring it to him.

Then they would need to overcome the normal tendency to think that the paraclete was the Holy Spirit, something that would defeat any pro-Islamic apologetic based on the gospel of John.

Overcoming normal tendecies is quite common in apologetics. 

Then, even if they decided to go along with the idea that the paraclete was really a man, something explicitly rejected by the text itself, they would need to overlook the more obvious and well-known meanings of ‘paracletos’, such as “intercessor”. But why would they have any motivation to do that, given that intercessor is a standard prophetic function in Islam, and fits perfectly with Islamic doctrine?

Yes the ordinary meaning of the text clearly does not prophecy muhammad so any apologist would need to go against commonly held opinions on the meaning of the words.

Using the name ‘Ahmad’ instead of ‘Muhammad’ in a prophecy would make for a pretty incompetent apologetic, as it opens the door for a new prophetic claimant to say “This prophecy does not refer to Muhammad, it refers to someone with a different name, Ahmad, and that is me!” In fact, new prophetic claimants in the Islamic world have regularly been claiming that.

It wouldnt matter – that new claimant wouldnt be commander of an army in control of the arabian peninsula.

Prophecies are most persuasive when they are exact; the tolerance for interpretation of prophecies comes from the failure of so many prophecies if one does not interpret them. Again, it is very unclear why anyone would go to such trouble to come up with a prophecy that does not really fit anyway, and that nobody could readily see in the text of John’s gospel. 

The derivation is not supposed to be persuasive – it just needs to be a plausible fullfilment of the claim that muhammad is prophecied in the gospel.

Much more likely is a scenario like this: there were traditions independent of the Greek text of John that were circulating in Mecca and Medina, and that prophesied a future figure named ‘Ahmad’; Muslims appropriated these while expanding their repertoire of prophetic names to include ‘Ahmad’ alongside ‘Muhammad’ to overcome the obvious discrepancy.

But thats not likely because the derivation of ‘most praised’ is contrived in both greek and arabic.

Omar6741 said

This did not come close to happening by the time sura 61 — which contains ‘Ahmad’ — was being propagated. Mecca had not been conquered, and the Muslims would have been obliterated in the Battle of the Trench had it not been for some fortuitous circumstances: they had no control over Greek speaking areas, and there was no reason for anyone knowledgeable in Greek to help them. 

There’s no historically compelling reason to believe the surahs remqined untouched eithwr in muhammads lifetime or after it. 61.6 could have been qdded or changed at any time – especially seeing as it is unrelated to the rest of the chapter.

The material concerning Waraqa shows no sign that he had access to any written Greek text, let alone the Gospel of John, something exceedingly unlikely given that he lived in Mecca, a thoroughly pagan environment where there were no Christian mission at all had succeeded.

It shows mecca wasnt a thoroughly pagan society untouched by christian influence and that christian missionaries had had at least some success in converting people close to muhammad.

The NT was not translated into Arabic until well after the rise of Islam, hence we can rule out Arabic translations of ‘paraclete’ at that early stage. Had such been made, they would much more likely have translated it as something like ‘intercessor’, since, as it happens, that is not only the standard meaning of ‘paracletos’, unlike “more praised”, but it is also one of the most important prophetic functions in Islam, and would make perfect sense in the Islamic context.

We’re not talking about a written text, we’re talking about an oral translation given to muhammad favorable to his claims of prophethood.

Paracletos translated as intercessor might be consistent with important prophetic functions in islam, but the problem is you’d be missing a mention of muhammad in the gospels. You need to translate something contrary to the norm in order to get such a prophecy.