People who disagree with the historical investigations discussed in Did Muhammad Exist? have not infrequently sent me this 2008 article by Patricia Crone (who died in 2015), who was one of the pioneering scholars of historical revisionism regarding the standard account of Muhammad’s life, and yet in this article seems to retreat from her previous views and accept the canonical Islamic depiction of Muhammad and Islam’s origins. Since Crone appears to present a formidable case against the points raised in Did Muhammad Exist?, it seemed prudent to me to answer them. Here is the first part of her article, followed by my response. More to come.
Order the new revised and expanded version of Did Muhammad Exist? here.
“What do we actually know about Mohammed?,” by Patricia Crone, Open Democracy, June 10, 2008:
It is notoriously difficult to know anything for sure about the founder of a world religion. Just as one shrine after the other obliterates the contours of the localities in which he was active, so one doctrine after another reshapes him as a figure for veneration and imitation for a vast number of people in times and places that he never knew.
In the case of Mohammed, Muslim literary sources for his life only begin around 750-800 CE (common era), some four to five generations after his death, and few Islamicists (specialists in the history and study of Islam) these days assume them to be straightforward historical accounts. For all that, we probably know more about Mohammed than we do about Jesus (let alone Moses or the Buddha), and we certainly have the potential to know a great deal more.
There is no doubt that Mohammed existed, occasional attempts to deny it notwithstanding. His neighbours in Byzantine Syria got to hear of him within two years of his death at the latest; a Greek text written during the Arab invasion of Syria between 632 and 634 mentions that “a false prophet has appeared among the Saracens” and dismisses him as an impostor on the ground that prophets do not come “with sword and chariot”. It thus conveys the impression that he was actually leading the invasions.
Mohammed’s death is normally placed in 632, but the possibility that it should be placed two or three years later cannot be completely excluded. The Muslim calendar was instituted after Mohammed’s death, with a starting-point of his emigration (hijra) to Medina (then Yathrib) ten years earlier. Some Muslims, however, seem to have correlated this point of origin with the year which came to span 624-5 in the Gregorian calendar rather than the canonical year of 622.
If such a revised date is accurate, the evidence of the Greek text would mean that Mohammed is the only founder of a world religion who is attested in a contemporary source. But in any case, this source gives us pretty irrefutable evidence that he was an historical figure. Moreover, an Armenian document probably written shortly after 661 identifies him by name and gives a recognisable account of his monotheist preaching….
To say that “in the case of Mohammed, Muslim literary sources for his life only begin around 750-800 CE (common era), some four to five generations after his death” is to drastically overstate the case. There are Islamic accounts of early historians of Muhammad such as Urwa ibn al-Zubayr (who died in 712) and Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (who died in 741). Some Western historians, notably Gregor Schoeler, take this as evidence that material attributed to them is trustworthy and goes back to people who actually knew and interacted with Muhammad. The problem with this is that we actually don’t have the writings of either man; we only have ninth-century traditions that are attributed to them. There is no possible guarantee that material attributed to them did not undergo legendary elaboration in the intervening period.
As for the claim that “we probably know more about Mohammed than we do about Jesus,” there is virtually no doubt that the four Gospels date from the first century, that is, within 60 to 70 years of the life of Jesus. Within 60 to 70 years of the life of Muhammad, we have nothing about him except a few bare mentions of the name, which may not actually refer to him at all.
It is likewise false that Muhammad’s “neighbours in Byzantine Syria got to hear of him within two years of his death at the latest; a Greek text written during the Arab invasion of Syria between 632 and 634 mentions that ‘a false prophet has appeared among the Saracens’ and dismisses him as an impostor on the ground that prophets do not come ‘with sword and chariot.'” Crone here is referring to the Doctrina Jacobi, which speaks of an unnamed Arab prophet. One thing that can be established from this document is that the Arabian invaders who conquered Palestine in 635 (the “Saracens”) came bearing news of a new prophet, one who was “armed with a sword.” But in the Doctrina Jacobi this unnamed prophet is still alive, traveling with his armies, whereas Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632. What’s more, this Saracen prophet, rather than proclaiming that he was Allah’s last prophet (cf. Qur’an 33:40), was “proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come.” This was a reference to an expected Jewish Messiah, not to the Jesus Christ of Christianity (“Christ” is “Messiah” in Greek).
The Doctrina Jacobi could still be referring to Muhammad. Or it could be referring to a figure whose stories were incorporated into the Muhammad legend. The fact that the details of this unnamed prophet don’t coincide with what Islamic tradition says about Muhammad strongly suggests that it would be hasty to assume that a one-to-one identity between the Saracen prophet and Muhammad. If Muhammad existed and the stories about him recorded in the ninth-century hadiths were circulating in the 630s, why did the Doctrina Jacobi get it all wrong? Maybe he was just stupid, or ill-informed; or maybe many traditions were circulating, some of which became part of the Muhammad legend, and some did not.
The “Armenian document probably written shortly after 661” is a chronicle attributed to the Armenian bishop Sebeos. It portrays a “Mahmet” as a merchant and preacher from among the Ishmaelites who taught his followers to worship the only true God, the God of Abraham. So far, so good: that sounds exactly like the prophet of Islam. But other elements of Sebeos’s account have no trace in Islamic tradition. It depicts “Mahmet” as insisting on the Jews’ right to the Holy Land—in the context of claiming that land for the Ishmaelites, acting in conjunction with the Jews. Many elements in Islamic tradition do show Muhammad proclaiming himself a prophet in the line of the Jewish prophets and enjoining various observances adapted from Jewish law upon his new community. He even originally had the Muslims praying toward the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, before the revelation came from Allah that they should face Mecca instead. It is odd, however, that this account gives no hint of any of the antagonism toward the Jews that came to characterize Muhammad and the Muslims’ posture toward them; the Qur’an characterizes Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (5:82).
Sebeos’s account is also wildly unhistorical. There is no record of twelve thousand Jews partnering with Arabians to invade Byzantine holdings, as he describes. And from Sebeos’s account, one gets the impression that as late as the 660s, the Muslims and the Jews were spiritual kin and political allies. This doesn’t correspond to anything in Islamic tradition or the conventional account, and the divergence suggests that Sebeos was writing about traditions that differed from those that coalesced into the canonical Islamic story. If Muhammad were a historical figure who said and did the things the Hadith depict him saying and doing, this divergence becomes hard to explain: either Sebeos had a wildly inaccurate view of those he was writing about, or the codification of Islamic tradition came later.
Find out more in Did Muhammad Exist?.
gravenimage says
Patricia Crone: ‘There is no doubt that Mohammed existed.’ Here’s why she’s wrong.
…………….
Excellent rejoinders from Robert Spencer.
The odd thing is that Patricia Crone herself actually questioned the historicity of many of the early Islamic sources–why she would nonetheless be so adamant about Mohammed having existed is unclear.
mortimer says
Good questions from GI.
Patricia Crone based a lot of her idea on the words of Armenian bishop Sebeos. I wonder what she said in private to Dr. Jay Smith (PhD) when he was her student. It may have been very different. Crone may have reserved her true impressions of Mohammed for a small coterie of students.
Please, everyone, note that Patricia Crone was receiving DEATH THREATS FROM JIHADISTS in Britain before moving to the United States where freedom of expression is more valued. Her fear of assassination may have been a ‘muffler’ for her public comments.
gregbeetham says
I think it is dangerous to assume anything originating from the Arab side of the account is accurate when you take their propensity to re-arrange history to suit the latest narrative on board especially when there is evidence of their earliest texts and manuscripts being erased and re-written over with altered text.
That by itself should relegate anything they say as being unreliable and untrustworthy.
Then there is the issue of diacritical marks which didn’t exist until they made their way into northern Arabic from Yemen at a later stage which meant that for those early manuscripts that do exist there is no guarantee that anyone reading from them at a later time would be reciting what was originally spoken at the time it was transcribed.
mortimer says
Agree with GB: taqiyya is sacred prevarication and Muslims use it whenever they want to uphold or increase the supremacism of Islam.
Even if Muslims tell the truth, we must logically suspect that their motive is a supremacist one.
Michael Copeland says
Arab sources are 98% unreliable. That is what Bukhari found.
Wellington says
I’ve often found it odd that if God exists why would He choose obscure times of long ago to announce the “true faith,” times when magic and medicine were often indistinguishable from one another, when dreams were considered as real if not more real than waking life, when superstitions of all kinds existed, all this before modern science began and before modern technology existed which could actually record events that function as the basis of some “true faith?” And why such an emphasis on faith as opposed to pure reason? And why punishment of one kind or another if faith is absent and “only” reason is invoked and which leads to skepticism of the religious doctrines propounded?
Just wondering. In any case, it is fascinating to read about the origins of Islam, so divergent are the views. I opt for reason being applied to such investigations of the origins of Mohammedanism with faith a distant second factor if a factor at all.
mortimer says
Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Zakariya ar Razi (865-925) was one of the greatest freethinkers in the whole of Islam and he concurred with Wellington.
“The prophets-these billy goats with long beards,” as Ar Razi disdainfully describes them, “cannot claim any intellectual or spiritual superiority. These billy goats pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves in spouting their lies, and imposing on the masses blind obedience to the “words of the master.” The miracles of the prophets are impostures, based on trickery, or the stories regarding them are lies. The falseness of what all the prophets say is evident in the fact that they contradict one another: one affirms what the other denies, and yet each claims to be the sole depository of the truth; thus the New Testament contradicts the Torah, the Koran the New Testament. As for the Koran, it is but an assorted mixture of “absurd and inconsistent fables,” which has ridiculously been judged inimitable, when, in fact, its language, style, and its much vaunted “eloquence” are far from being faultless. Custom, tradition, and intellectual laziness lead men to follow their religious leaders blindly. Religions have been the sole cause of the bloody wars that have ravaged mankind. Religions have also been resolutely hostile to philosophical speculation and to scientific research. The so-called holy scriptures are worthless and have done more harm than good, whereas the “writings of the ancients like Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Hippocrates have rendered much greater service to humanity.”
His conclusion: any scientific book written with care by humans is far more helpful than the spurious nonsense of ‘Allah’.
gregbeetham says
Exactly but unfortunately due to the stagnation imposed by Islam Muslims never actually read or composed anything scientific to compare with the mumblings of an illiterate 7th century caravan robber.
gregbeetham says
Yes, and all religions seem to ignore the millions of people who existed prior to the true religion (whichever that might currently be) seeing as mankind according to archaeology has been around for approximately 200,000 years in a similar form as of today.
One has to ask these ‘believers’ of today; what happened to all those who lived before and obviously never heard of and didn’t believe in your fake prophet?
mortimer says
Since the sad death of the great Patricia Crone in 2015, there has been a further 5 1/2 years of research, much of which she would be astounded to see. The Standard Islamic Narrative (SIN) is being challenged much more than ever.
If there was a ‘real’ Mohammed, it would have been ‘several’ Mohammeds who were edited together to make a single Arabian hero figure similar to the stories about Robin Hood or King Arthur.
I believe that ‘muhammad’ is actually an honorific epithet similar to ‘augustus’ or ‘sebastos’ applied to the Roman emperors. There may have been a number of persons honored by the epithet ‘muhammad’ (the praised one … praised by the gods).
Sabri S. says
Allah U Akbar! The history of the beloved Prophet Muhammad, and his many battles, conquests and glorious spread of Islam through religiosity and trade says it all. There is no low level of stooping to the level of jealousy of your infidels, is there? Now, you are lying about his very existence when every second of his existence is recorded in thousands of hadiths…The USA can’t become muslim fast enough for the true believers…..
mortimer says
Sabri, what do you have besides writings that are 200 years too late and written by Persians living in Baghdad?
The hadiths are obviously unreliable and most Muslims are embarrassed to quote the Sira, the earliest-dated stories of Mohammed.
You are like a poker player who has no cards and is bluffing. We have observed you. We have done our homework, but you have skipped all the classes.
mortimer says
By the way, Sabri, you embarrass yourself when you incorrectly write “Allah U Akbar”. The correct NOMINATIVE SINGULAR is ‘Allahu’ … it is one word. The ‘u’ is the old Arabic masculine singular ending. You haven’t mastered even the most basic Arabic words and you want to teach us. Tsk, tsk.
Wellington says
A fine zinger, mortimer.
James Lincoln says
mortimer,
It will be interesting to see if Sabri S. corrects it on his next post…
gregbeetham says
Some contributions to the Hadith stories came not only much too late but came from as far away as Afghanistan, as if someone living there would know of Muhammad’s life in Mecca from a camel’s ass.
Wellington says
Sabri S. Whether Mohammed existed or not is, in a way, of secondary importance (though still a fascinating matter) since the character of this man named Mohammed is that of a delusional, brutal, narcissistic psychopath and the fact that Muslims look upon such character as laudatory in the extreme is highly dispositive of how warped the Islamic faith is at its core.
P.S. I predict you will miss this but then you miss a lot.
Alfredo says
What a joke!
Accepting the Hadith as fact is like accepting the tooth fairy as fact. Didn’t Bukhari have to whittle them down from over 600 thousand to 7563 with repetitions? Why is that so? Because they’re as reliable as fact as Mickey mouse Sabri. LOL!
gravenimage says
The vicious Sabri S. wrote:
Allah U Akbar! The history of the beloved Prophet Muhammad, and his many battles, conquests and glorious spread of Islam through religiosity and trade says it all.
………………………….
Firstly, the only early sources for the historicity of Muhammad are Islamic ones. This is exactly the same as Muslims saying that the Qur’an is the word of Allah, and that we know that because the Qur’an says so. Islam is rife with this sort of circular “logic”.
Then, even the texts of Islam say that the “Prophet” was no longer involved in trade once he began his bloody career of conquest–unless, of course, Sabri S. is talking about the slave trade, which is quite possible. Slavery is orthodox Islam.
More:
There is no low level of stooping to the level of jealousy of your infidels, is there? Now, you are lying about his very existence when every second of his existence is recorded in thousands of hadiths…The USA can’t become muslim fast enough for the true believers…..
………………………….
Actually, this book just looks into the histortical record–again, alll of these Hadiths are written by Muslims. One might just as well point to a Star Trek “slash” site as proof that Captain Kirk and Spock exist.
Note the pious Muslims cannot take Islam being criticized or even questioned, and become murderous at the very thought. Members of no other major faith act like this. Islam is both ugly and brittle.
Then, the idea that any civilized person would be “jealous” over a figure described as a warlord, pedophile, caravan-raider, slaver, rapist, and mass murderer is just bizarre. I think the word Sabri S. is looking for is “disgusted”.
Then, anyone actually feeling “jealous” of this kind of psychopath can just convert to Islam–as some violent felons in prison do. That most men in the west who convert to Islam are themselves violent psychopaths is no surprise–Islam just vindicates most of the criminal behavior they were already engaged in.
And of course Sabri S. and those like him want to see the civilized United States and the rest of the west overrun by Muslim hordes–then he can just murder people who question Islam–after all, it’s not as though he actually has any rational arguments.
gravenimage says
Lots of fine replies to Sabri S. here.
mortimer says
Was Islam ‘spread by the sword’?? The death toll from JIHAD gives us the answer.
The death toll from jihad consists of: 120 million Africans; 60 million Christians; 80 million Hindus; 10 million Buddhists; as many as 500,000 Jews.
This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad. Jihad is Islam’s divinely mandated method of establishing Islam’s political, global supremacy through warfare, subjugation, enslavement and genocide.
Some estimates of the tears of jihad go as high as 300 or 400 million, showing Islam is the greatest genocidal force in history and that it was spread by exterminating millions of Europeans, Africans and Asians.
gravenimage says
+1
Mike Ramirez says
(Excerpts from speech by Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, co-founder of terror group Hamas, speaking at Jerusalem Post Conference, May 2016)
“We cannot fool ourselves. There is an Islamic problem. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, ISIS, Boko Haram, all of them are killing by the name of Allah.”
“There is an Islamic problem and I think humanity needs to stand against this danger. Because this danger is not only against the State of Israel, this danger is against the evolvement of mankind… The Muslim people have a problem. And their problem is in their belief system.”
“When the president of the Free World stands and says that Islam is a religion of peace, he creates the climate, he provides the climate, the perfect climate to create more terrorism.”
“I don’t want to create more chaos, but there is no other way… What is the alternative for Israel and for Democracy, or for the American Constitution? It’s the darkness of the 6th Century. This is what’s the alternative.”
(14 min -52 sec) https://youtu.be/tZ7vCXPo-VI
Mike Ramirez says
Note: When Mosab Hassan Yousef, aka Son of Hamas, references “6th Century,” he corrects shortly afterward to say “7th Century.”
James Lincoln says
Thanks for the YouTube link, Mike.
Here’s another one featuring Mosab Hassan Yousef at the United Nations. He starts at about the one minute mark.
Priceless!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2NaiX-hvVQ
gravenimage says
Good quotes.
Alfredo says
Mossab Hassan Youssef is quite right. The fundamental problem with Islam is the core immutable belief that it is Allah’s will a.k.a Muhammad’s to spread it globally as the bloodshed and destruction left in its wake irrefutably demonstrates.
It has been its legacy right from the very beginning and it continues till this very day, as the news attest daily.
Francis says
A useful article to read to get a different picture and the historical context is Robert Hoyland’s ‘Reflections on the identity of the Arabian conquerors’ (available on his academia.edu page). I note that a lot of ‘revisionists’ reference Hoyland’s ‘Seeing Islam as others saw it’-unsurprisingly, as it is a seminal work. He brings together a lot of useful ancient sources but he also includes two methodology chapters on how to use them and if the revisionists have read them, they give little sign that they understand and use them. Of course RS is a skilled polemicist and is not engaged with the academic mainstream as a result. But in historical enquiry it is always necessary (in J. S. Mill’s words) to ‘look for objection’-to test to destructions one’s hypotheses and DME is (understandably) one-sided. Debate and engagement are better than being on the fringe.
Where the revisionists stray over the line concerns what use Jay Smith & others make of this material. Of course they are missionaries so they are free to do so. They have done a service by focusing on the 30+ Quranic qira’ats (recitations) which actually are different consonantal texts not different dialects-and in exposing the execrable Mohammad Hijab & Ali Dawah (Brits I’m afraid) and the tragic figure of Shekh Yasir Qadhi (one of yours I believe). But they play fast & lose with the methods of historical enquiry. Just as the Muslim dawah teams have come a cropper over ‘perfect preservation,’ they risk the same kind of accusation being levelled at them. See my book ‘Did Muhammad Exist? A counterblast to the revisionists.’
Robert Spencer says
If you had actually read my book, you’d know that I use Hoyland’s book extensively and also point out its flaws.
Francis says
I certainly have read both editions with interest and concur with the criticism of the translation of ‘Arabs’ & ‘Muslims’ in Hoyland’s publication-and on occasion he has acknowledged this in later years. The Doctrina Jacobi is often cited and the text selected has many problems, not least because the extract is about 15 lines and the whole is about 1500, so only 1% is usually discussed. The DJ consists of a lot of proof texts intended to demonstrate to the Jews Heraclius forced to convert that they are now in the right faith, so it’s an artificial construction and the narrative about a prophet appearing amongst the Saracens is almost incidental to it. That he foretells the Christ to come looks like an attempt to fasify the allegedly stubborn Jews’ beliefs as you are quite right that this cannot be an accurately reported Islamic idea.
Demsci says
No Francis,
The “revisionists are not fringe, and willing to use the scientific method and open to new facts and much more flexible than their academic and Islamic counterparts who have the more vested interests and are the likelier propagandists. The “revisionists” take more risks, and that’s in their favor IMO
And they wouldn’t care to be corrected and are more eager to debate than their counterparts.
gravenimage says
I notice that Francis does not cite anything that Robert Spencer has actually gotten wrong.
Stanley Parker says
Practically every male Muslim has Muhammad in their name so it would have been impossible to verify anything attributed to the same man!
marc says
Nice idea, but I think they are all named after this likely mythical figure, the fact there are so many (mis)spellings might be telling,
sammy says
Sabri S
“The history of the beloved Prophet Muhammad, and his many battles, conquests and glorious spread of Islam through religiosity and trade says it all….”
It certainly does.
It proves beyond doubt Mohammed was a false prophet, as no true prophet of God i.e.YHWH ever preached to fight anyone to bring them to faith in God.
Mohammed changed what God revealed through His true prophets to a message of warfare against unbelievers, who must be fought into submission, thereby diametrically opposing the commandments of God who’s laws rest on love for God and all people regardless of faith, and the one who opposes God is Satan.
The god of Islam is proved not to be the God of Abraham, the god of Islam proves to be a counterfeit.
Stanley Parker says
I Muhammad did not exist then Islam should be redesignated a Militancy!
Kepha says
It makes perfect sense to believe these two things simultaneously:
1. In the early 7th century, there arose a successful Arabian warlord named Muhammad ibn Abdallah, who proclaimed a new religion containing bits and pieces of Jewish, Christian, and pagan Arab lore.
2. This Muhammad ibn Abdallah was not a true prophet of God.
This is where Uncle Kepha stands on the issue. You simply can’t have smoke without a fire.
I’ll go one further: If some Hadiths seem to favor Abu Bakr as the successor to Muhammad and others Ali, this is no proof of their ahistoricity, but rather prove that early Islam had factions and divisions that go back to Muhammad’s own lifetime, and that the historical Muhammad had to keep a delicate balance between the factions as long as he was alive. In this, he resembles the leaders of many other movements that have arisen in both ancient and modern history, including some that arose within the last three centuries. Do such Hadith prove that early Muslim collectors of Hadith had political agendae? Yes. But even political agendae have their roots in the real history of a movement.
As for religions arising in “obscure” times and places, and being something other than the “pure reason” demanded by logical positivists, there are a number of things to observe about this. One is that some of the major prophets of the logical positivist synthetic cult of reason and science–Moritz Schlick, Josef Schaechter, and Friedrich Waisman–noted that their system offers no way to get from the empirical “is” to the ethical “ought” (rough quote from _Ethics and the Will_, not Uncle Kepha’s deduction therefrom). But any form of human association requires some kind of ethical underpinning. These members of the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle) mentioned earlier, on seeing the oncoming Nazi Anschluss, bewail the absence of “the Socratic man” to show the way out. Yet Socrates, that father of the Western rational tradition, when confronted by Callicles’ insistence that the tyrant is the happiest of men (in Gorgias) ends up falling back on a judgment we face after death. If we go back to the enlightenment, Alasdair MacIntyre noted that the supposed “natural ethics” of Diderot resembled Catholicism, those of Kant resembled Lutheranism, and those of Hume resembled Calvinism (perhaps we might say those of Spinoza looked a lot like Judaism, too). Hence, these rationalists “cheat”.
Further, things arising among the obscure should warn us to see that there’s more than money and power driving history. That such movements from below take hold warn that the state cults and their reasons for being can and do lose their hold. “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” (I Cor. 1:27). And is this quote from Paul, perhaps, a precursor of the modern interest in things like social history?
As for traditional theologies and rationality, I cannot ignore the long line of Christian theologians from Augustine through Thomas through Calvin who made exemplary use of this divine gift. As for the rift between reason and revelation, it is extremely telling that this rift was discovered on Islamic soil by such as al_Razi and Ibn Roshd.
Also, it is most ignorant and unwise for any informed by either Judaism or Christianity to fall for the foolish and cynical adage that history is written by the winners–especially if we live where there is freedom of speech and the press and a modicum of academic freedom. Go to the books of Samuel and Kings and you will see an enduring, lasting history written by the losers–and it shall endure long after the boasts and sycophancies written to please tyrants are mere puzzles for archaeologists.
As for Crone’s repeating the uneasy compromise of modern NT scholarship that the Gospels are around 50-70 years after the event,it flies in the face of the internal evidence (even if it is a good compromise between the early 19th century Hegelian radical who believed the Synoptic Synthesis needed more than a century to evolve and others, who noted both the internal evidence and the early citations). Mark writes to people who don’t need explanations as to who the Herodians are, and who are expected to know the sons of Simon of Cyrene. Luke, dependent on Mark and Matthew, ends Acts on an upbeat note, with no hint of the impending death of his protagonist, necessitating Matthew and Mark in use prior to 62 A.D. Where archaeology digs up pre-70 A.D. places in Judaea and Jerusalem, they tend to have uncanny resemblances to things and places mentioned by John. Better scholarship has come to recognize that the Gospels–all four–are another useful source for looking at Second Temple Judaism.
While I RESPECTFULLY disagree with the idea that Muhammad did not exist, I am glad that people like Mr. Spencer (and earlier, Ms. Crone) raised this question.