| Ideally, one would like to be able to check such accounts against contemporary evidence | |
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| The Bustan al-Ukul, by Nathanael ibn al-Fayyumi, edited and translated by David Levine, Columbia University Oriental Studies Vol |
These sources contain internal complexities, anachronisms, discrepancies, and contradictions.
5| Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th edition 1970 , p | 597, which notes that many of the details surrounding Muhammad's life as given in the biographies, are "problematic in certain respects, the most important of which is that they represent a tradition of living narrative that is likely to have developed orally for a considerable period before it was given even a relatively fixed written form |
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| 137 Netanel's work was virtually unknown beyond his native Yemen until modern times, so had little influence on later Jewish thought• Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic | See, for example, Bowersock, Glen Warren, Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Oleg Grabar Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World 1999, Harvard University Press p |