A Question about the historicity of Muhammad

[Visaki]

We've all seen the discussions about the historicity of Jesus I presume, but today I bumped into a short text about the historicity of Muhammad. It's in finnish so I won't link it here but basically the case looks somewhat similar to that of Jesus (we don't have contemporary texts or witnesses or archeological evidence, the biography of Muhammad was written 160 years later, Quran and Hadiths are not realible etc). The article itself refers to a 2012 book By Robert Spencer (who, as I understand, has a few books on the subject of islam) called "Did Muhammad exist? An inquiry into Islam's obscure origins", though I have no idea if that's worth looking up.

Does anyone have any idea if a mythisist view of Muhammad has any merit? Because it's kinda hard to find anything resembling a neutral view on the matter in the net, I mostly find anti-islam websites or muslim apologetics.

 

[Laurens]

A quick glance at the Wiki page says this:

There are also non-Muslim sources written in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew by the Jewish and Christian communities. These non-Muslim written sources go back to about 636 AD and many of the interesting ones date to within some decades later. One, attributed to a 7th-century Armenian scholar Sebeos, states that Muhammad was a merchant and that his preaching revolved around the figure of Abraham. However, they also contain some essential differences with regard to Muslim sources and in particular about chronology and about Muhammad's attitude towards the Jews and Palestine.

Taking that at face value it looks like we have everything about Muhammad that we don't have for Jesus.

EDIT: also this Robert Spencer guy sounds like he has an axe to grind

 

[Collecemall]

Richard Carrier recently wrote a post about the subject and the difficulties.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/8574

 

[Visaki]

Richard Carrier recently wrote a post about the subject and the difficulties.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/8574

Thanks for the link, it was a good read. I have to bookmark it for future reference since I'm sure I'll bump into some people who will take the historicity of Muhammad up in one way or another.

Funny how Carrier first explain how the subject doesn't interest him and then takes page after page to examine it. The lenght some people go to help others, eh?