(July 27, 2011 at 4:40 pm)Rayaan Wrote: This is what I posted in a different thread, which is:
1. There are mention of him by his friends, family members, caliphs/successors, AND historians.
2. If Muhammad didn't exist, then how did Islam start in the first place? Who did all the Muslims learn from?
3. I think it is more likely to be correct if a person says that Muhammad was not a "prophet" than saying that he was "non-existent."
4. So you believe that Muhammad is a fictional character (if you're being honest). But, I'll agree to disagree like I always do (though I can still talk about this if I want to).
While I believe there was an "historical" Muhammad, like a "historical" Jesus of Nazareth. However like Jesus of Nazareth, Muhammad's life story has been embellished with a lot of mythology which was built up in the centuries after this death. For example the earliest surviving biographies of Muhammad's life were written one to two hundred years after his death. Likewise the Hadiths were put together at roughly the same time. This all occurred after Islam had spread from the Atlantic to the Indus. The accuracy of any oral traditions which were passed down about Muhammad would have been embellished in a major way with all kinds of mythology. Not to mention the tradition of the Uthman ibn Affan destroying all copies of the Quran apart from the one he considered the authentic one.
In comparison when the Gospels of the New Testament were written down in the late 1st century, between 40 and 80 years after the death of Jesus. Also the Christian community was still pretty small at that stage with no more than several thousand in the whole community and being confined to a small number of communities in the Mediterranean basin, which are both conductive towards effective transmission of oral traditions. Not to mention that we have like thousands of different biblical manuscripts of the New Testament in various sizes dating as far back to the 2nd Century. Even in-spite of all that in my opinion we know relatively little about the historical Jesus.
undefined