Did Mohammad even exist? Ancient documents leave scholars wondering

By Karine Keyser –

The problem with all the references to “Mohammad” in the 7th Century is the spelling.

The Arabic of the 7th Century had no vowels. So how do you know what vowels to insert in MHMD, written in the Koran?

A more logical option is “Mahmed” – a well known word used in a host of Semitic languages that gets employed also by Christians, Zoroastrians, even Ethiopians. It means Anointed One or Praiseworthy One.

The Qur’an itself uses the word “prophet” (43 times) more than “MHMD” (4 times). This appears consistent with the idea that MHMD is not a proper name but rather an honorary title. If it were his name, why not refer to him by his name more times than by his job description?

Of the outside references to the prophet of the Saracens (they weren’t called Muslims in the 7th Century), all of them reflect the vowel-less version MHMD except for the ones that betray later redaction.

Four of the 7th Century supposed outside references to the Mohammad are:

• Thomas the Presbyter (634 AD): Refers to MHMT (with a T following the Persian spelling). Mentions his battle in East Gaza, where supposedly Mohammad never went during his life according to the Qur’an the the hadiths. “He could be any MHMT or any priest,” Dr. Jay says. 

• Syriac Flyleaf (636 AD): Refers to MHMD of the Arabs who won the Battle of Yarmuk in 636, four years after Mohammad’s supposed death.

• The Doctrina Iocobi (circa 634 AD): Doesn’t mention MHMD. Says the “prophet of the Saracens” but identification is suspect since #1 Mohammed was dead by the time of its writing and the document reports him alive, #2 Describes he has the “keys to paradise,” a Christian reference, not a Muslim one, #3 he spoke Aramaic (the Muslim Mohammad didn’t speak). “There is no reference to the name Mohammad in this tract, no reference to this prophet being Muslim, nor any reference to the City of Mecca, nor of his book the Qur’an,” says Dr. Jay. “He could be anybody.”
• Christian Coptic Bishop John Nikiou (supposedly from the 690s AD, BUT only existing copy is from 1602 AD): This refers to Mohammad with the vowels. But since no actual copy from the 690s exists, it appears to be a later redaction.

“You have the Qur’an, you have Mohammad, and you have Mecca as the three legs. If you start to attack one of those legs and it finally collapses, the other two collapse as well,” says Dr. Jay. “All three are needed. You can’t have one without the other. One without the other two.”

Scholars are working on a hypothesis as to why Muslims, as they came to be called later, would construct a name and a story for their prophet. It is this: the Arabs crushed both the Christians and the Jews, but they lacked the legitimacy of having a prophet, a book and a city.

While the Jews had Moses, the Torah and Jerusalem, the Christians had Jesus, the New Testament and Rome. The Muslims, wanting to show themselves in no way inferior to the Christians and the Jews, invented and redacted back into history Mohammad, the Qur’an and Mecca.

That is the theory that academia is pursuing.

Related content: The biography of Mohammad was assembled by a German scholar in 1860, Muslim scholar admits the Qur’an is not perfectly preserved, Islamic hadiths lack academic credibility.