After thirty years of research and publishing on the monotheistic faiths, the author turns here to a comparative study of the founders of Christianity and Islam. Jesus and Muhammad, as two of the most important figures in human history, have also been among the most studied. Their followers “found” both men in their lifetimes, but it was only in the nineteenth century that the search for the “historical Jesus” and, soon after, for the Prophet of Islam began. The resultant “quest,” as it was called, has proven to be a virtual laboratory for Western historiography. This book looks into that labo ... More

After thirty years of research and publishing on the monotheistic faiths, the author turns here to a comparative study of the founders of Christianity and Islam. Jesus and Muhammad, as two of the most important figures in human history, have also been among the most studied. Their followers “found” both men in their lifetimes, but it was only in the nineteenth century that the search for the “historical Jesus” and, soon after, for the Prophet of Islam began. The resultant “quest,” as it was called, has proven to be a virtual laboratory for Western historiography. This book looks into that laboratory. First it puts the sources for the two side by side and traces the historians’ parallel efforts to understand the men behind the sources. But comparative historiography leads inevitably to comparative history, and the bulk of the work is devoted to a side-by-side study of the remarkable careers of Jesus of Nazareth and Muhammad of Mecca.