Mohammed's fragmentary and unsystematic accounts of sacred history were freely drawn from Jewish and Christian sources and covered the whole period from the creation of the world until the first centuries of the Christian era. Of course, features shocking to the Moslim mind were dropped and the whole adapted to the monotonous conception of the Qorân. With ever greater boldness the story of Mohammed's own life was exalted to the sphere of the supernatural; here the Gospel served as example. Though Mohammed had repeatedly declared himself to be an ordinary man chosen by Allah as the organ of His revelation, and whose only miracle was the Qorân, posterity ascribed to him a whole series of wonders, evidently invented in emulation of the wonders of Christ. The reason for this seems to have been the idea that none of the older prophets, not even Jesus, of whom the Qorân tells the greatest wonders, could have worked a miracle without Mohammed, the Seal of the prophets, having rivalled or surpassed him in this respect. Only Jesus was the Messiah; but this title did not exceed in value different titles of other prophets, and Mohammed's special epithets were of a higher order. A relative sinlessness Mohammed shared with Jesus; the acceptance of this doctrine, contradictory to the original spirit of the Qorân, had moreover a dogmatic motive: it was considered indispensable to raise the text of the Qorân above all suspicion of corruption, which suspicion would not be excluded if the organ of the Revelation were fallible. This period of naively adopting institutions, doctrines, and traditions was soon followed by an awakening to the consciousness that Islâm could not well absorb any more of such foreign elements without endangering its independent character. Then a sorting began; and the assimilation of the vast amount of borrowed matter, that had already become an integral part of Islâm, was completed by submitting the whole to a peculiar treatment. It was carefully divested of all marks of origin and labelled _hadîth_,[1] so that henceforth it was regarded as emanations from the wisdom of the Arabian Prophet, for which his followers owed no thanks to foreigners. [Footnote 1: _Hadîth_, the Arabic word for record, story, has assumed the technical meaning of "tradition" concerning the words and deeds of Mohammed. It is used as well in the sense of a single record of this sort as in that of the whole body of sacred traditions.]