The Koran uses pronouns like I, you, he, and they, and the reader cannot be sure to whom these pronouns refer. The Koran does not finish most of the stories it refers to. The Koran is not in chronological or subject order.
The Exodus story is repeated 27 times. This verse is not unique. Scholars who have devoted their lives to studying the Koran report that perhaps twenty percent of the Koran has no agreed upon meaning whatsoever. The ordinary reader, therefore, need not delve too deeply into this matter.
Merely mouthing alien, Arabic syllables is deemed holy. In addition to canonical Biblical texts, the Koran makes use of folklore. Some of the folktales found in the Koran: the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; a legend about Alexander the Great; a passage from the non-Biblical Infancy Gospel of Thomas, about Jesus bringing life to clay birds; and, from the non-Biblical Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, Mary picking dates from a palm tree that bent down for her.
We cannot assume that any of them were invented by Muhammad. Both Biblical women shared the same first name. The Protoevangelium actually tells the story completely in a comprehensible narrative fashion. The story is alluded to in Koran , but not told. The verses before and after Koran have nothing to do with the chosen-by-lots story. Placed in the context of other world faiths, Islam is remarkable for the degree to which it is less a declaration of a new faith than an angry critique of two previous faiths, Judaism and Christianity.
All religions express hostility towards other groups. But one could extract Amalek from the Old Testament, or anti-Buddhist rhetoric from Hindu scripture, or the notorious Matthew from Christianity, and still have coherent religions.
In Islam, by contrast, hostility to Jews and Christians occupies so large and central a place that Islam would be substantially different if that hostility were edited out of Islamic art, architecture, practice, and daily prayer. Jihad has been a central feature of Islam since the seventh century to the present.
These repeated words identify Jews as angering God and Christians as going astray. The first six verses praise Allah, and verse 7 condemns Christians and Jews. There are no parallels in any other world religion. Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Christians, and Jews are not required to repeat seventeen times a day that members of another religious group are disgusting to God himself. The Dome of the Rock is one of the oldest examples of Islamic architecture.
It was completed a mere sixty years after the year Muhammad is believed to have died. As such, one would expect its inscriptions to record a powerful encapsulation of Islamic theology. In fact, the Dome is more anti-Christian than it is a coherent expression of any new faith. The inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock are obsessively focused, not on Muhammad, but on Jesus Christ. Bill Warner ran the numbers. These mentions of Muhammad may well refer to Jesus; compare Koran and Koran So, we have a religion whose foundational scripture defies narrative standards.
This scripture makes use of material from two other faiths, Judaism and Christianity. This religion is often more focused on critiquing two previously existing religions than on presenting a new ethos. What do these facts suggest about the question of whether or not Muhammad existed? Muslims brag that the success of that conquest is proof that Allah was on their side.
History suggests otherwise. From the second to the fifth centuries, Christians engaged in heated debate over the nature of Christ, including at the first seven ecumenical councils. Was Jesus a God, a man, a combination of the two? Nestorius, a fifth century archbishop, held that Jesus had distinct human and divine natures. The Council of Chalcedon , in AD, held that Jesus was true God and true man, and that any other understanding was wrong. Nestorius was anathematized by his peers.
These Nestorian churches were located to the east of Constantinople, in places like modern-day Syria and Turkey, and as far east as China. As we shall see, this debate helped pave the way for Islam.
Other events created a power vacuum that Islam would eventually fill. In , Visigoths sacked Rome. This was the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign invader in almost eight hundred years. Medieval scholar Michael McCormick nominates as the worst year to be alive. An Icelandic volcano erupted. In the early seventh century, Persia and Byzantium fought their last war, which exhausted both sides. All these events contributed to the total exhaustion of the powers — Romans, Greeks, and Persians — who had dominated the Mediterranean and Middle East for a thousand years.
Their exhaustion created a power vacuum and paved the way for the Arab Conquest. Beginning in the seventh century, Arabs advanced on a good portion of the world, from Spain to India and China.
We think of these Arabs as Muslims. Modern scholarship calls this identification into question. Which brings us back to those who had heterodox ideas about the nature of Jesus. Some of them spoke Syriac, an Aramaic language related to Arabic. It is possible that one or more of them produced a lectionary, that is, a collection of scriptural readings.
This proposed lectionary would contain many assertions that Jesus was not God. This lectionary would make reference to, but not repeat full texts of, Biblical stories and other material that the author knew his audience would be familiar with. This proposed lectionary was later repurposed by Arabs seeking a document that would unify and justify their new empire.
The Arab alphabet in use in the seventh century was a blunt instrument, given to ambiguity. Luxenberg recognized, in those old manuscripts, that many words could have different translations. In fact, Luxenberg believed, the source document for the Koran was probably written in Syriac.
He believes that his Syriac reading renders clear currently unclear Koran passages. Your lord has placed a little river beneath you. Luxenberg re-translates the verse, with an eye to the Syriac language. Your Lord has made your delivery legitimate. Mary is a virgin and she is sad because she has just given birth to a child without a natural father. God comforts Mary by telling her that He, God, has rendered her child legitimate.
The source document was not meant to be the foundational scripture of a new revelation. It was also not written in Arabic. It was merely a lectionary, a document that would make reference to, and comment on, but never fully flesh out, pre-existence Biblical and folk narratives, which is exactly what the Koran does. It would not be in chronological order, but rather it would hop from story to story, as the author commenting on stories saw fit to make the point he was trying to make.
Perhaps the author of the source document for the Koran was a heretical Christian who had been anathematized and sent into exile for his belief that Jesus was not divine. No wonder the Koran, the Dome of the Rock inscriptions, and other Islamic material are full of denunciations of mainstream Christianity, and repeatedly insist that Allah is the greatest, Allah never had a son, Jesus was not divine, and the Trinity is an abomination.
Christoph Luxenberg is not alone. Other authors have studied the same material and come to similar, but slightly different, conclusions. One of the first of these scholars was John Wansbrough The Koran, Gallez and Lafontaine agree, is the record of a heterodox community of believers who accepted some aspects of Christianity and Judaism as we understand those religions today, and rejected other aspects.
They argue that the community that produced the documents that became the Koran accepted descent from Abraham and the Torah, but that they rejected the Babylonian Talmud, that appeared around AD. Lafontaine says, for example, that Koran is an explicit protest against derogatory statements the Babylonian Talmud made about Mary.
Bukhari , a prominent collector of hadith , was a Persian, not an Arab, and born in Uzbekistan, almost 2, miles from Mecca. Muslims openly acknowledged that other Muslims invented hadith to serve their own purposes. If someone wanted to promote behavior X, that person merely invented a hadith approving of behavior X. The first biography we have of Muhammad was produced by Ibn Hisham , who died in , two hundred years after Muhammad. Ibn Hisham lived in Cairo, a largely Christian city, worlds away from the Meccan desert.
As Spencer points out, these volumes upon volumes of late-appearing hadith and sira are highly detailed, reporting on the most trivial details of daily life. Hadith describe highly detailed instructions on toilet use. Nothing in the scholarship on oral cultures supports the supposition that it is plausible that reams of highly detailed, personal information could be accurately safeguarded, and remain unknown to the wider world, for two hundred years.
Oral cultures retain general outlines of history and basic facts about heroes. Arabs rapidly conquered ancient civilizations, full of scribes. If Arab conquerors were inflamed by a scripture passed directly from an angel to a camel driver, they could have hired scribes to write that material down. The mere sight of a cross is an abomination to orthodox Muslims. Apparently the questioner was not alone because many authorities had handed down rulings on the use of the plus sign.
Early Arab conquerors minting coins with crosses defies Islam as it is understood today. But this widely accepted story begins to crumble on close examination, as Robert Spencer shows in his eye-opening new book.
In his blockbuster bestseller The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer revealed the shocking contents of the earliest Islamic biographical material about the prophet of Islam. Now, in Did Muhammad Exist? Did Muhammad Exist? While Judaism and Christianity have been subjected to searching historical criticism for more than two centuries, Islam has never received the same treatment on any significant scale.
The real story of Muhammad and early Islam has long remained in the shadows. Robert Spencer brings it into the light at long last. Are jihadis dying for a fiction? Is there any sound historical evidence that the prophet of Islam actually existed, or is the entire story of Muhammad fable or fiction? Virtually everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, takes for granted that the prophet of Islam lived as a prophet, as well as a political and military leader, in seventh-century Arabia.
But this widely accepted story begins to crumble on close examination. Now, in this newly revised and expanded version of Did Muhammad Exist? So, each part will start with page number 1. The reason is simple there are 2books inside this 1book. So you are getting double informations on the price of 1.
Biography of Muhammad by a non Muslim. Biography of Muhammad by a Muslim. What do non Muslim scholars say about Muhammad. Complete valid information about Jesus. Proven facts about the great Jesus. A research project on Abrahamic religions. Aramaic the true language of Jesus. God definitions of various religions.
Women in various faiths. Proof that Jesus existed. Proof that Muhammad existed. Does God exist? Message from the author: My intention is not to criticize any one's beliefe. I hope any person with an open mind or a truth seeker will love my book.
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