It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[Minimalist]

Well, I guess it's not worth my time to explain any of this to you since you seem to be fiercely biased to believe that the whole thing is a myth.

Nothing can really convince such people.

I'm sure the irony of your statement escaped you completely. It's why I told you before that I get it. You have been brain-washed by professionals and you are not ready to even consider the possibility that you have been bullshitted for your whole life.

I still love ya, man. You're the best theist on these boards...which granted isn't much of a compliment but its the best I can do at the moment.

[Rayaan]

I'm sure the irony of your statement escaped you completely. It's why I told you before that I get it. You have been brain-washed by professionals and you are not ready to even consider the possibility that you have been bullshitted for your whole life.

Pfft. Obviously you would think that. Your own worldview is superior and correct without a shadow of doubt.

Rumor... maybe...
Did you see the list on my second post? That gives you all the info you need.

Yes, but those are very general statements about liars. None of that answers the specific questions that I asked before which are:

1. The problem with that is, how could that person make a supernatural claim about some dead guy without first convincing people that he has divine and/or psychic abilities? How else can he claim to know such things that no one else knows?

2. If he is so trustworthy that no one would even question him, what prevented him from claiming himself to be a prophet?

You really want an honest answer?
Yes, it does seem to refer to a god. But let's look at what comes before that expression, shall we?...
"as if by God's command", which is the main lead to assigning god to that "command from on high".
It's almost "as if" this was not a certain thing.... "as if" the story was not entirely believed... "as if" the story was made up after Mehmet's death and spread until it arrived at Sebeos' place, still in its infancy... "as if" the people telling the story weren't sure.

If Sebeos was a Christian, then would he acknowledge Muhammad as an actual Prophet? Of course not. That's why the "as if" makes sense in that regards.

A lot of people perceived Muhammad as preaching under God's command, but maybe Sebeos didn't accept his Prophethood, therefore the "as if by God's command."

And the "command from on high" must be referring to that same "as if" command above - i.e. God's command.

The man was so believable to all arabs, but lowly christians couldn't believe him?...
Double standard... -.-'

Wrong. He was almost equally disbelieved by Arabs.

For years he was mocked, insulted, challenged, pushed out of Mecca, his companions were beaten, abused, and even killed, he was spit on, he was beaten so severely that there was blood dripping from his face, the Quraish rejoiced at the fact that all of his sons died so early, they boycotted his followers, and so on and so forth, and yet he was praying for guidance and forgiveness for the same people who were hurting him. He was seen as an enemy even by his own tribe after he started the mission of preaching Islam.

About Sebeos, "He maintains that the account of Arab conquests derives from the fugitives who had been eyewitnesses thereof."

So what?

Just because it's a second hand account somehow implies that all of that started off as a rumor?

[pocaracas]

Rumor... maybe...
Did you see the list on my second post? That gives you all the info you need.

Yes, but those are very general statements about liars. None of that answers the specific questions that I asked before which are:

1. The problem with that is, how could that person make a supernatural claim about some dead guy without first convincing people that he has divine and/or psychic abilities? How else can he claim to know such things that no one else knows?

2. If he is so trustworthy that no one would even question him, what prevented him from claiming himself to be a prophet?

Can I start with 2, first?
Liars claim things about other people. Typically, liars refrain from attributing anything to themselves... it's one of the rules.

1. If Mo was the legendary leader people hailed him to be (in those two notes about him predating Sebeos), then such tales of divine inspiration could easily surface. Like I said before, these tales may have been just people jesting, or suggesting... but others may have picked it up as truth and passed it on... that's why I called it a rumor.

You really want an honest answer?
Yes, it does seem to refer to a god. But let's look at what comes before that expression, shall we?...
"as if by God's command", which is the main lead to assigning god to that "command from on high".
It's almost "as if" this was not a certain thing.... "as if" the story was not entirely believed... "as if" the story was made up after Mehmet's death and spread until it arrived at Sebeos' place, still in its infancy... "as if" the people telling the story weren't sure.

If Sebeos was a Christian, then would he acknowledge Muhammad as an actual Prophet? Of course not. That's why the "as if" makes sense in that regards.

A lot of people perceived Muhammad as preaching under God's command, but maybe Sebeos didn't accept his Prophethood, therefore the "as if by God's command."

And the "command from on high" must be referring to that same "as if" command above - i.e. God's command.

Or maybe the tale came to him with the requirement of a few grains of salt... maybe the tale came to him from some hearsay merchant, some hearsay fugitive. Fugitive? from where? these fugitives would be fleeing Mehmet's arabs? Then they were the enemy... odd.

Anyway... Hearsay, rumor... human nature.
Why do you keep dismissing these as unlikely players in the tale?

The man was so believable to all arabs, but lowly christians couldn't believe him?...
Double standard... -.-'

Wrong. He was almost equally disbelieved by Arabs.

For years he was mocked, insulted, challenged, pushed out of Mecca, his companions were beaten, abused, and even killed, he was spit on, he was beaten so severely that there was blood dripping from his face, the Quraish rejoiced at the fact that all of his sons died so early, they boycotted his followers, and so on and so forth, and yet he was praying for guidance and forgiveness for the same people who were hurting him. He was seen as an enemy even by his own tribe after he started the mission of preaching Islam.

Damn.... it's almost the same tale as Jesus' disciples, huh?
Are you sure that's not a play repeating a previously successful theme?

About Sebeos, "He maintains that the account of Arab conquests derives from the fugitives who had been eyewitnesses thereof."

So what?

Just because it's a second hand account somehow implies that all of that started off as a rumor?

No, it doesn't imply that.
But that is one option of how things came to be.

[Rayaan]

Can I start with 2, first?
Liars claim things about other people. Typically, liars refrain from attributing anything to themselves... it's one of the rules.

But liars typically do not make supernatural claims about dead people, especially since it's obvious that they (just like everyone else) have no way of even knowing such things ... unless they received them via divine revelations.

If they claim to know such (unknowable) things, then they've automatically ascribed supernatural abilities to their own selves.

1. If Mo was the legendary leader people hailed him to be (in those two notes about him predating Sebeos), then such tales of divine inspiration could easily surface. Like I said before, these tales may have been just people jesting, or suggesting... but others may have picked it up as truth and passed it on... that's why I called it a rumor.

They do surface - all found in the oral traditions recorded in the hadiths.

And your answer still evades the question, which is:
How can a person (i.e. the rumor starter) make a supernatural claim about some dead guy without first convincing people that he has divine and/or psychic abilities? How else can he claim to know such things that no one else knows?

Or maybe the tale came to him with the requirement of a few grains of salt... maybe the tale came to him from some hearsay merchant, some hearsay fugitive.

Or maybe it didn't. (I can start using "maybe" to suit my arguments just like you do ... it's just so convenient).

Fugitive? from where? these fugitives would be fleeing Mehmet's arabs? Then they were the enemy... odd.

Enemy or not, it still doesn't negate the interpretation that the words "command from on high" in Sebeos's quote seems to refer to God's command, which you admitted previously.

Anyway... Hearsay, rumor... human nature.
Why do you keep dismissing these as unlikely players in the tale?

Because I believe in the sacred texts.

You, of course, prefer to believe in hearsay and rumor theories which you have no evidence for, either.

No, it doesn't imply that.
But that is one option of how things came to be.

So that also means that nothing about that quote implies what you've been arguing for (i.e. the "option of how things came to be"). There's no actual implication of a rumor ... it's just an "option" ...

Then what about the option that the rumor was true from the very beginning? Does that have less of an implication? If so, then why?

[Minimalist]

Guys, I hate to piss on Rayaan's parade all the time but this Sebeos stuff has a shaky history. It was not published until 1851 in Istanbul of all places and, even the Encyclopedia Iranica notes

http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/sebeos

The history attributed to Sebeos has survived in a single late manuscript, Matenadaran 2639 (dated 1672). It was the last in a series of texts, constituting a virtual canon of historical writing, brought together in this famous manuscript. A second, older manuscript (dated 1568) was known and used for the first edition published in 1851, but it has since been lost. The editor, T‘adēos Mihrdatean, was responsible for its widely accepted identification with a history of Heraclius written by Sebeos, a text cited in lists of anterior works given by Step‘anos Taronets‘i (early eleventh century) and a number of other, later Armenian historians. It is striking, however, that the early tenth-century historian, T‘ovma Artsruni, who quotes extensively from the text, makes no reference to Sebeos or to a history of Heraclius.

Bart Ehrman has shown what happens to copies of copies of copies of text down through the years.

[pocaracas]

Can I start with 2, first?
Liars claim things about other people. Typically, liars refrain from attributing anything to themselves... it's one of the rules.

But liars typically do not make supernatural claims about dead people, especially since it's obvious that they (just like everyone else) have no way of even knowing such things ... unless they received them via divine revelations.

If they claim to know such (unknowable) things, then they've automatically ascribed supernatural abilities to their own selves.

Lots of people have claimed to know unknowable things throughout history...
Some believed in them, some didn't.
Cue to every religion that has ever existed on this planet.

1. If Mo was the legendary leader people hailed him to be (in those two notes about him predating Sebeos), then such tales of divine inspiration could easily surface. Like I said before, these tales may have been just people jesting, or suggesting... but others may have picked it up as truth and passed it on... that's why I called it a rumor.

They do surface - all found in the oral traditions recorded in the hadiths.

And your answer still evades the question, which is:
How can a person (i.e. the rumor starter) make a supernatural claim about some dead guy without first convincing people that he has divine and/or psychic abilities? How else can he claim to know such things that no one else knows?

Didn't I say it could have started as an obvious jest? and I can complete it with a: with each retelling the ironic bits fell off and people started giving credence to the tale., hence a rumor started that the legendary leader of the arab conquering tribe was also divinely inspired.
It's a possible scenario.
One that plays with elements from humanity with which we deal almost daily.

Or maybe the tale came to him with the requirement of a few grains of salt... maybe the tale came to him from some hearsay merchant, some hearsay fugitive.

Or maybe it didn't. (I can start using "maybe" to suit my arguments just like you do ... it's just so convenient).

Like we've said all along... we have nothing concrete, many options are valid...
Even the fabrication of the whole (or part of) Sebeos account, like Min has hinted.

Fugitive? from where? these fugitives would be fleeing Mehmet's arabs? Then they were the enemy... odd.

Enemy or not, it still doesn't negate the interpretation that the words "command from on high" in Sebeos's quote seems to refer to God's command, which you admitted previously.

It does render the story similar to what cartographers and sailors of old would label as "here be monsters".
How would enemies know about the beliefs of their conquerors?
How would they know about the origin of their beliefs?
And fugitives are seldom high ranking (in the know) personnel... they're the dung heap no one cares about and are allowed to escape.

Anyway... Hearsay, rumor... human nature.
Why do you keep dismissing these as unlikely players in the tale?

Because I believe in the sacred texts.

You, of course, prefer to believe in hearsay and rumor theories which you have no evidence for, either.

Why do you believe in those texts?
What renders their content so "sacred"?
Why the ones you believe in and not others? Many alleged sacred texts exist, from several places and time periods on Earth. Why those in particular?
Why believe in any of them?
What part of human nature renders sacred texts more believable than their fabrication?

No, it doesn't imply that.
But that is one option of how things came to be.

So that also means that nothing about that quote implies what you've been arguing for (i.e. the "option of how things came to be"). There's no actual implication of a rumor ... it's just an "option" ...

Then what about the option that the rumor was true from the very beginning? Does that have less of an implication? If so, then why?

The option that the rumor was true would imply that Mo was a great leader, a great preacher and also had a direct channel with a god.
And this god, instead of giving Mo the most wonderful treasure of information.. information about the past, about the future, about the world, about human peaceful co-existence, about how to bring his neighbors in league with him... gave him commands to take over his neighbors by force and rule them, with such ludicrous rules as cover the women so other men will not covet them.
Way to go, oh god-seemingly-made-in-man's-image.
What a waste of a prophet.

But if it was just a claim and no actual channel to any god existed for real.
Well then, I'll have to throw this one back at you: how could he have convinced his people that he did have a channel to a god?
Oh, never mind, con artists do it all the time. Human nature works, too. Although, it would have been more difficult than if that notion surfaced as a rumor that later took hold.
But if he did manage to convince people of his prophethood and they did win so many battles and he became a legendary prophet, then why has nothing contemporary mentioning such an astonishing person ever been found?
We have lots of contemporary stuff for other people... older people... even for Herod (nothing mentioning a Jesus, nor a zombie apocalypse, curiously)... but for a desert dwelling, highly influential leader of a tribe in the early 600's there is a remarkable absence.
Why is everything written about the man from after his death?

Oh... and if Min's hint that Sebeos is a fabrication... oh well... back to nothing-land for old Mehmet.

[Rayaan]

But if he did manage to convince people of his prophethood and they did win so many battles and he became a legendary prophet, then why has nothing contemporary mentioning such an astonishing person ever been found?
We have lots of contemporary stuff for other people... older people... even for Herod (nothing mentioning a Jesus, nor a zombie apocalypse, curiously)... but for a desert dwelling, highly influential leader of a tribe in the early 600's there is a remarkable absence.
Why is everything written about the man from after his death?

Well, since there are no contemporary writings of the Prophet Muhammad, what is next most reliable are the later writings we have. And later writings are better than no evidence at all.

And the surfacing of later writings doesn't imply that it was all started as a rumor or an 'obvious jest'. It can just mean that it wasn't written down for that long. It can mean that it was being passed on from mouth to ear before it was written. This is called oral transmission, and this was the way knowledge used to be spread amongst each other in the early and Pre-Islamic times. And the best recording device that they had was not paper, but their own memories. The Arabs at that time were also known to be accomplished at retaining long lines poetry in their heads without needing to write any of that down. And these poems were transmitted orally for centuries:

The earliest examples of Arabic poetry that are available to us today were recorded in writing after the revelation of the Qur'an, but they belong to a tradition of orally performed and transmitted poetry that goes back several centuries; by the very nature of the transfer process—from one poet and bard to the next generation, we have no way of dating the origins of the tradition. The primary context of those poets and their poetry is the desert environment and the tribes who tended their animals there—prime amongst them, camels and horses. The poems, still prized by Arabs today as the major jewels of their literary heritage, are thus full of imagery of the desert—sand, wind, the occasional rain-cloud—and celebrate companionship and tribal solidarity while acknowledging the dangers of desert life and the need for sterling qualities to confront them.

http://www.pimsleurapproach.com/resource...iterature/


I get the impression that the difference between you and me is that you're just generally more distrustful of oral tradition (because you wrote: "with each retelling the ironic bits fell off and people started giving credence to the tale"}. That conveys to me that you assign a much less reliability to oral transmission than written transmission as an arbiter of what actually happened. You think that such huge-and-yet-undetectable distortions about a person can occur in orally transmitted information in merely 30 years after his death. I also regard written materials to be more reliable than oral transmission (since I can see them with my eyes), but that doesn't mean that all oral transmissions are to be considered untrustworthy or discredited as "rumors" only. The important thing is, writing and speaking are both two different modes of communication, and the latter is the type which was dominant in Arabia at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, so the absence of contemporary writings about him is not really surprising to me.

It doesn't make a difference to me if the quote attributed to Sebeos is not authentic either. The problem is yours, because you (and Min) seem to place a disproportionately high amount of credibility to the early/contemporary writings as compared to the later ones. But, unlike you, I treat them almost the same because I take into account the fact that writing was very uncommon in those times in Arabia, and oral transmission was the primary means of communication. Therefore it is perfectly reasonable that writings about Muhammad's life would surface later on instead of earlier. There is nothing strange or unlikely about that.

Human memory and history are two interconnected things. Both written and oral transmissions of past events are, ultimately, products of memory. So, if you're going to discredit the oral part of it and give credence to the writings only, then you've rejected a very basic method of historical transmission.

Memory has many flaws, yes, but it is also underappreciated nowadays since modern society has allowed us to live with the luxury of paper, books, and computers to record information on.

[Mudhammam]

It really is hard to explain why early "muslim" conquerors would have issued coins with crosses on them. Yet, they exist.

Not really so sure I'd agree. This explanation seems perfectly reasonable:

After the Muslims defeated the armies of Byzantine and Sassanian empires, there came the need to administer the conquered territories. The early Muslim from Arabia did not have a sophisticated system like that of the two defeated empires. So, the best recourse for them was to maintain the existing administrative systems just like other conquerers before and after them did. However, the early Muslims inherited two different administrative systems from the conquered two empires. Hence they had to maintain two parallel administrative systems one in the east and another in the west, which differed in their languages, culture, monetary systems and controls. The Muslims maintained these parallel systems for over 50 years until the reforms of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik.
Before the reforms of ʿAbd al-Malik, the Muslims used the existing monetary systems of their Sassanian and the Byzantine predecessors. There is a debate concerning the earliest coinage and their dating. Some argue that Muslims started striking coinage almost immediately as they did in the former Sassanian domain. Other argue that the Muslims did not strike coins in the former Byzantine realms until the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik. However, the middle ground appears to be more appropriate as the the coinage of the era before the advent of ʿAbd al-Malik was very complex. At some point in time, both in the east and in the west, the Islamic empire started to make its presence known via the coins that circulated in their domains. Initially, the changes were very minor with the addition of short phrases in Arabic and/or the addition of hijra dates. These lasted until a complete reform of the administrative system by ʿAbd al-Malik who united it in Arabic and changed the coinage drastically to what we essentially call as Islamic coins. The reformed coinage of ʿAbd al-Malik was different from its earlier predecessors in epigraphy as well as religious content. The new coins asserted the oneness of Allah and Muḥammad as His last Messenger.

http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Coins/

[Minimalist]

Yeah - apologists are creative when it comes to contriving excuses.

http://academicatheism.tumblr.com/post/6...e-muhammad

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, 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.

Coins in circulation would have remained in circulation but would a fiercely expansionist new doctrine have really included enemy symbolism on its newly-minted coins? Doubtful. Coins were hardly new technology. They'd been around for nearly 1500 years at this point and everyone knew how to mint them.

[Mudhammam]

Yeah - apologists are creative when it comes to contriving excuses.

http://academicatheism.tumblr.com/post/6...e-muhammad

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, 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.

Coins in circulation would have remained in circulation but would a fiercely expansionist new doctrine have really included enemy symbolism on its newly-minted coins? Doubtful. Coins were hardly new technology. They'd been around for nearly 1500 years at this point and everyone knew how to mint them.

Yeah, I should have known better. I was weary about quoting a religious source but I figured I would see what came from it.