Kapyong

I reckon there's a 'spectrum' of reality :

Adam / Eve / Noah - certainly mythical
Abraham - almost certainly mythical
Krishna - almost certainly mythical
Joshua - almost certainly mythical
Buddha - probably mythical
Lao Tzu - probably mythical
Jesus - probably mythical
Mohamed - probably historical


K.

Chocky

With the result that if the major Abrahamic prophets were mythical, it'd be unfortunate for the historical Muhammad, as his religion was dependent on them to lend it authority.

Huon

Not necessarily, all religions are based on myths.

Chocky

Sure, but some treat their myths as factual. Muslims would have a problem with the suggestion that Abraham and Jesus were entirely mythical, for instance.

Duvduv

From my first reading of Spencer's new book, "Did Muhammed Exist?" the sources he refers to suggest that virtually nothing was knowno about someone named Muhammed until the biography written over a century following Muhammed's date of death by Abu Itzhaq.

Prior to that there were a couple of brief references by Christians named Thomas and Sobeos to an Arabian named Memad or Mhmet. The emergence of the Quran itself is apparently as murky because it did not get codified for several decades (even after a number of conquests) by someone named Hajjaj Ibn Yusuf.

Chocky

Good to know, that has been on my reading list along with Gerd Puin's The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research Into Its Early History (or via: amazon.co.uk). Puin is one of the scholars working on the Sana'a manuscripts, which are palimpsests that might contain the earliest known text of the Qur'an but in variant forms. Interesting stuff.

Duvduv

Chocky, I watched a fascinating brief video on Youtube with Gerd Puin. Does he explain why the early Arabs would have written the Yemenite manuscript without using the diacritical marks distinguishing one letter from another? How else could anyone know for sure what the words were even in those days otherwise?

By way of example, just take the three letters ba-za-ra. Without dots no one would know whether it was na-ra-za or ya-ba-za or ta-ra-za.........

Chocky

Duvduv, I haven't read Puin's take on it, but as far as I know it's a case of the development of Arabic script. It was a very young language in Muhammad's time, so I suppose the ambiguous readings that were possible were part and parcel of the written language until diacritical marks gradually came in from the 7th century onwards.

They just had the effect of erasing possible alternative interpretations when they were added into the Uthmanic rescension, i.e. the never-changing supernaturally produced text which fell out the sky if you believe the sales spiel from Muslim apologists.

Duvduv

But then who would know what a particular word actually was and why bother even putting a text into such a script?!

Chocky

Beats me... doesn't seem like a good basis for a "scripture"-based religion if there's no way to know what was originally meant without the diacritics...