Are God’s Messengers Real or Imaginary?

We know that information about Gautama Buddha, Chanakya, and Shankaracharya come from textual sources that were composed centuries after their supposed lifetimes.

- Devdutt Pattanaik

There is no material proof of their existence. But they are assumed to be historical figures. The same holds true for religious leaders like Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhmmad. Believers insist they are historical. Historians are more skeptical.

Words like ‘christ’ and ‘prophet’ are mythic ideas, not historical facts, because God is not a historical figure, hence ideas like son of God, anointed by God, and messenger of God cannot be historical concepts. But they are used as if they are truisms even in history textbooks. Tribal leaders and gods are meanwhile dismissed as fictions, as they are not aligned to a monotheistic framework. This discriminatory approach is one of the reasons why historians are increasingly being challenged for their version of what is fact and what is not.

A few historians since the 1970s are now rethinking how Islam began. Rather than dismissing the traditional Islamic narrative outright, as some extremist thinkers do, they are placing it under historical scrutiny by reading literary sources alongside coins, inscriptions, papyri, and early non-Muslim accounts. ‘The result is not a rejection of the tradition, but a reframing of it. In this approach, context is given more importance than texts.