Mel, the 'Myth Buster' Demythologizes the Hadith

David really helped the discussion on whether Muhammad existed or not by insisting that those of us who believed he didn't exist were mere 'Myth Makers' and 'Conspirators'. This permitted us the perfect platform to turn the tables on him and others who choose to believe in Muhammad (including almost the entire Muslim world) by proving that it is they who are the 'Myth Makers' since they cannot find one shred of evidence for Muhammad in the century he supposedly lived, nor in the country he supposedly came from. So, it turns out that we aren't Myth Makers at all, but Myth breakers, or Myth Busters. It is we who restore history, and spend our time debunking the myths, by pointing to the facts. To underline this problem for Muslims, Mel decided to prove just how mythical the Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) really were. He began by quoting a number of reputable scholars on the subject, Dr John Wansbrough, Dr Gunther Luling, Caetani and Henri Lammens. He then pointed to 11 common 'red flags' concerning the problems with the Hadith: 1) Previous Umayyad laws (including many borrowed from Byzantine Christianity and Judaism) needed to be 'Islamicized' by the later Abbasids (post 749 AD), thus the hadith were used to explain and defend them. Interestingly, most of these were introduced in Kufa, Iraq, where the Muslims would have had contact with the Jewish seminaries, underlining why they were then borrowed so easily. 2) The Sira (biography of Muhammad) evolved between what Ibn Ishaq wrote down in 765 AD, and that which Hisham wrote down 70 years later in 833 AD. The earlier biography probably had many faults included in Muhammad's character, which were then thrown out to create a more perfect 9th century model. 3) There is evidence of these fabrications of many of the Hadith by contemporaries in that time, a number of which are quoted by Hoyland. 4) © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (42,280) (Music: 'Small Adventure' by Rafael Krux, from filmmusic-io License CC BY)