Note 4 — Chapter XII · FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY

Even self-contradictions, it may be argued, do not negate the authenticity of a teaching. Carlyle and Buskin abound in them; who escapes them? Many passages in the Koran are contradicted or abrogated by others, 225 verses being cancelled by later ones.4 Here indeed there is plain ground for critical doubt; and some of us must emphatically decline to accept Muir’s verdict, endorsing Von Hammer’s, that “we may upon the strongest presumption affirm that every verse in the Koran is the genuine and unaltered composition of Mohammed himself.”5 But even if we are satisfied that Mohammed in his long life deliberately modified his doctrine, there is no room for such an explanation in the case of a teacher who is never once said to avow modification, and whose whole teaching career ostensibly covers but a year in the synoptic record.