Was Prophet Mohammed a caravan thieve?

[The Grand Nudger]

Or, at least, they have what islam decides is a good enough chain of narrators.

Sally heard it from bill who got it from steve who spoke to jon that heard from jenny who knew thomas edison... that he hated peas!  Great point about hadith and magic book though...both were constructed using that same reliable™ process.

And what possible process can they have? How can history be preserved if not by having a similar reliable process... Another reason why it's reliable is the huge amount of hadiths, stories, recitations of the Qur'an they rejected, and some of them recently, based on the same mechanisms.

And it's a whole field of study and lots of hadith terminology you have there, I am just trying to simplify things.

Studying the historic development of religions. We're so lucky as to have seen them born in the age of cameras and audio recordings, even. 

The sheer volume of work produced by an author or a group of ideologically aligned authors is no indication that any of it is true, or reliable.  

That's a non sequitur.

Beneath it all, magic book (any magic book..and this goes beyond magic books to most ideology) isn't about what happened or what is, but about how it's authors wished for things to be. The story in question, for example..is written from a point of ideological assent to the actions of a warlord. It offers pretense, but we'd have to be very credulous to believe that what a warlord's pr shills wrote was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (as told by steve who heard it from jan who..).

Even if we assume as much, for reasons of pure lulz - magic book still describes big mo as a caravan raider. People who don't subscribe to the ideological ticks of a 7th century warlord aren't even going to care whether things happened as described. It's completely irrelevant to their rejection of your magic book as a source of truth or virtue. If big mo did what magic book said, I'm not interested..if big mo didn't do what magic book said, and for whatever reason magic book just describes him that way, in error...I'm still not interested.

The issue isn't whether or not big mo really believed that angels were talking to him, it's that what those angels said...allegedly the contents of your magic book, is filth.