THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN WRITINGS ON MU\AMMAD: AN APPRAISAL 1 Robert G. Hoyland I. Introduction When Blaise Pascal (1623-62) wrote that since MuÈammad “worked no miracles and was not foretold” he could not be a true prophet, he was simply echoing the judgment of John of Damascus (wr. ca. 730) passed more than 900 years earlier. 2 Similarly, the explanation of MuÈammad’s revelation as the result of epileptic fits, found in numer- ous thirteenth-century and later texts, was already given by the Byzantine monk and chronicler Theophanes the Confessor (d. 818). 3 The same is true for various other attributes, deeds and doctrines of MuÈammad, which recur for centuries in European polemical tracts and all of which have their roots in the very earliest Eastern Christian writings about the Prophet. That makes these earliest accounts of interest, since, as well as revealing to us what were the initial reactions of the inhabitants of the Near East to Islam and its founder, they can in addition help to elucidate the provenance of medieval and even contemporary Western (mis)conceptions. But is this the limit of their worth? Can such writings not tell us anything about what the Muslims themselves said and did, rather than just how such sayings and actions were regarded? In his “Note 1 All the Christian sources used in this article were first used in a systematic way for Islamic history by P. Crone and M. Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge, 1977. All receive full discussion in my Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13, Princeton, 1997, from which I draw in this article. 2 John of Damascus, De haeresibus, in PG, XCIV, 765C, 768A, and in a “Refutation against the Saracens” transmitted dia phÙn¿s IÙannou Damask¿nou by Theodore Abå Qurra (d. ca. 825), PG, XCIV, 1596-97; B. Pascal, Oeuvres, ed. L. Brunschvig, Paris, 1921, XIV, 37-38. John of Damascus was particularly important as a source for Byzantine and Western Christian views of MuÈammad, being the first to speak of MuÈammad’s revelation and legislation, portrayal of Christ, carnal vision of Para- dise, his many wives and his instruction by a monk. 3 Norman Daniel, Islam and the West. The Making of an Image, Edinburgh, 1966, 27- 28, citing, amongst others, Vincent of Beauvais, Alexandre du Pont and Ricoldo da Monte Cruce, all of the second half of the thirteenth century; Theophanes, Chrono- graphia, 334.