identical in their contents, differing only in the place where, the time wherein, and the messenger of God by whom they came to man; this idea, which runs like a crimson thread through all the revelations of the first twelve years of Mohammed’s prophecy, could not have existed if he had had an intimate acquaintance with Jewish or Christian men of letters.  Moreover, the many post-biblical features and stories which the Qoran contains concerning the past of mankind, indicate a vulgar origin, and especially as regards the Christian legends, communications from people who lived outside the communion of the great Christian churches; this is sufficiently proved by the docetical representation of the death of Jesus and the many stories about his life, taken from apocryphal sources or from popular oral legends.

Mohammed’s unlearned imagination worked all such material together into a religious history of mankind, in which Adam’s descendants had become divided into innumerable groups of peoples differing in speech and place of abode, whose aim in life at one period or another came to resemble wonderfully that of the inhabitants of West- and Central-Arabia in the seventh century A.D.  Hereby they strayed from the true path, in strife with the commands given by Allah.  The whole of history, therefore, was for him a long series of repetitions of the antithesis between the foolishness of men, as this was now embodied in the social state of Mecca, and the wisdom of God, as known to the “People of the Scripture.”  To bring the erring ones back to the true path, it was Allah’s plan to send them messengers from out of their midst, who delivered His ritual and His moral directions to them in His own words, who demanded the acknowledgment of Allah’s omnipotence, and if they refused to follow the true guidance, threatened them with Allah’s temporary or, even more, with His eternal punishment.

The antithesis is always the same, from Adam to Jesus, and the enumeration of the scenes is therefore rather monotonous; the only variety is in the detail, borrowed from biblical and apocryphal legends.  In all the thousands of years the messengers of Allah play the same part as Mohammed finally saw himself called upon to play towards his people.

Mohammed’s account of the past contains more elements of Jewish than of Christian origin, and he ignores the principal dogmas of the Christian Church.  In spite of his supernatural birth, Jesus is only a prophet like Moses and others; and although his miracles surpass those of other messengers, Mohammed at a later period of his life is inclined to place Abraham above Jesus in certain respects.  Yet the influence of Christianity upon Mohammed’s vocation was very great; without the Christian idea of the final scene of human history, of the Resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment, Mohammed’s mission would have no meaning.  It is true, monotheism, in the Jewish sense, and after the contrast had become clear