I spend a lot of time following the debate about the historical Jesus. What Jesus really said and did is of monumental importance to me.
For over 200 years, critical scholars from Bultmann to the Jesus Seminar have submitted every detail of Jesus’ canonical biographies to meticulous scrutiny to determine which details are historical bedrock, and which details are fictional creations of the early church.
Now, to my surprise, someone has finally applied the same critical tests of historicity to the life of Muhammad. I am amazed at the contrast in the scanty quality of the evidence to back up Muhammad’s story, compared to the strength of the evidence for what Jesus said and did.
I have always assumed that the facts about Muhammad’s life and legacy, and the facts about the birth of Islam, were not in great doubt, other than over questions about the extent to which God may have been involved. Even Robert Spencer, who just got through writing a skeptical biography of Muhammad, had assumed until recently that Muhammad really existed, and that at least some of his story is fact.
Now, he’s not so sure. Applying the same standards of historical evidence to the topics of Muhammad and early Islam that have been applied to Jesus, Muhammad comes to resemble a legendary Robin Hood or King Arthur, whose Quran and whose Islam only begin to appear in recognizable form around 700 A.D., 70 years after his reported death.
And when we consider that Muhammad’s earliest biography (on which all his other biographies depend) dates from 125 years after his death, and that all the other historical traditions (hadith) about him date from 180 years after his death, we wonder: how would the historical Jesus have survived with such shaky evidence to support him? We have less hard, reliable evidence for Muhummad than we do for David and Solomon.
Spencer does not claim to be doing original research. He seeks to bring wider public attention to the academic work of others, including Ibn Warraq, Günter Lüling, Christoph Luxenberg and Patricia Crone, some of whom must ironically work under pseudonyms.
What a surprise to look at the earliest coins discovered from the Islamic empire, and find the inscription “Muhammad” on one side, and a leader holding up a cross on the other side! Images and crosses only disappear from early Islamic inscriptions toward the end of the seventh century A.D. And what are we to make of the juxtaposition of “Muhammad” into such a context? Judging from the context, perhaps the word is to be read, not as a proper noun, but as a participial epithet, literally, “the one who is praised.” If one does this with these coins and with other early Islamic material, we find that perhaps the “one who is praised” is actually not Islam’s prophet, but the one who came before him, namely, Jesus.
Perhaps the biggest surprise reported in the book is the discovery that the Quran appears to have a Christian substratum. We can see it in two large inscriptions from the Dome of the Rock which date to approximately 690 A.D. These inscriptions are composed of quotes from the Quran and from the shahada (the classic Islamic creed), stitched together. These quotes focus almost exclusively on Jesus. The only exceptions are a few references to Muhammad as “the messenger of Allah.” But since the Quran also refers to Jesus as the “messenger of Allah” (Sura 61:6), one could easily read these words from the Dome of the Rock as “Praised be the messenger of Allah,” meaning Jesus.
Spencer sees a non-Trinitarian form of Christianity among the conquering Arabs as the best explanation for many of the unusual phenomena found in the Quran and in other early evidence. For instance, almost all of the religious terms in the Quran appear to be borrowed from Syriac. These include Allah, salat (“prayer”), kaffir (“infidel”), jannah (“Paradise”), Masih (“Christ”), Nasara (“Christian”), and even possibly Quran (“lectionary”), as well as some secular terms such as the jizya, the submission tax levied on non-Muslims by the Quran. Such borrowing seems to point an original Syriac semi-Christian source or sources.
Entire suras of the Quran appear to be possibly reworked Christian compositions. For instance, Sura 97 is about the enigmatic “Night of Power” (al-Qadr). If qadr is read as a Syriac root rather than an Arabic root, it refers to either a birth, the star under which one was born, or the Christian Nativity. Sura 97 says that in the Night of Power, “the angels and the Spirit descend…Peace it is, till the rising of dawn.” What is this, if not Christmas?
It is around 700 A.D. when both inside and outside sources reveal both a Muhammad who is God’s final prophet, references to his followers as “Muslims,” and the collection of the Quran into a single document. While one hadith declares that the Quran was collected by Uthman around 650 AD, other traditions attribute the same act to Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj ibn Yusuf 50 years later. Tradition is unanimous that all of the original source material was burned, and there are numerous mentions of verses that were never recorded and were thereby lost.
I find Spencer’s case on Muhammad to be more than plausible as an explanation that accounts for the evidence. But I do confess that it throws me off balance. I find it almost too much to accept, that a movement as huge as Islam could have been launched by a quasi-legendary figure. It is much easier for me to operate on the assumption that 20 percent (or more) of Muhammad’s story must be true; we just don’t know which 20 percent.
I must also say that while I find all this information personally helpful, it does not belong in our public debate about Islam, or in our outreach to Muslims. We can’t win the hearts of Muslims by deconstructing Muhammad. Our outreach to Muslims should be based on the core of our Gospel: Jesus’ divinity, atoning death and victorious resurrection. Spencer’s material is more helpful to us personally as a point of comparison to help us appreciate the strength of the historical evidence for the life that God incarnate lived in our midst.
TOM HOBSON of Belleville, Ill., a PC(USA) pastor for 29 years, is adjunct professor at Morthland College, West Frankfort, Ill. and is currently seeking a call. He is author of “What’s on God’s Sin List for Today?” (Wipf and Stock, 2011).
