only a creature of Allah. The words Holy Spirit do not have
the connotation of divinity for Muslims that they do for
Christians. For a Christian, the Holy Spirit is the third Person
of the Trinity; the Spirit shares in the divine nature with God
the Father and the Son.
Calling the angel Gabriel ‘‘Spirit’’ and ‘‘Holy Spirit’’
without qualification thus entangles Muslims in some
difficulty. If he is simply ‘‘the Spirit,’’ does the Koran mean
to say that he is the Spirit of Allah? And if so, wouldn’t that
make him an eternal, uncreated being, since the eternal God
could never have existed without His Spirit? To escape this
conclusion, Muslims would have to differentiate various
aspects of Allah’s Nature, but to do so would compromise
their monotheism.
Of course, the Koranic record is not clear about Gabriel: it
does not say explicitly that he is the Spirit of Allah, but it
comes close enough to raise uncomfortable questions for
Muslims. When Gabriel appeared to Mary and the ‘‘spirit
entered in her’’ or, as it says in Sura 66:12:‘‘we breathed in
her Our spirit,’’ it is evident that the spirit meant is the Spirit
of Allah. The great Muslim commentator on the Koran, Ibn
Kathir, has this comment on Sura 66:12:‘‘we breathed in
her, through the angel Gabriel, whom God sent and who
resembled to Mary as a full man and God commanded him
to breathe in her — and this breath dwelt in her womb and
became Jesus [emphasis added].’’[7]
Again, it is highly likely that these problems arise
because fragments of Christian theology have been