Precisely the same distinction is intended when reference is made here to the “historical Muhammad.” While the Prophet's person is not the object of Muslims' faith, as Jesus' is for Christians, his prophethood is, and thus both the person and the role of “the historic Prophet,” to adapt Kähler's expression to the Islamic situation, have had an enormous and continuous influence on Islamic piety, practice, and beliefs (cf.

) Google Scholar, between the “historical Jesus” and the “historic Christ,” the latter being the continuous subject of Christian preaching and the object of both Christian faith and Christian piety. Kähler, Martin, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, trans. Neill's widely read book was revised in 1988, and though his optimism was here and there tempered by what had been said and thought in the twenty-five years since the first edition, 2 there was still good reason to think that historians were by and large on the right track in pursuing what Albert Schweitzer described in 1906 as “the quest of the historical Jesus.” 3ģ I use this latter expression in the sense isolated by Martin Kähler's famous distinction, first made in 1892 (cf. Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What was his message? Why was he put to death? Why did his few followers become, in effect, the nucleus of the powerful and widespread community called Christianity? These were the enormously difficult questions that had begun to be posed in a critical-historical way in the mid-19th century, and some of the answers Bishop Neill discerned, though by no means final, represented ground gained and truths won. 1 As an affirmation of progress in a notoriously difficult field of investigation, they make satisfying and even cheerful reading for the historian. Writing in 1962 Stephen Neill listed twelve of what he regarded as “positive achievements of New Testament studies” over the past century.

The people vs muhammad pdf