A claimed manuscript provenance could be a rhetorical shield

Evidence

Manuel Diaz y Diaz (“La circulation des manuscrits dans le Péninsule ibérique du VIIIe au XIe siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 12 :219–41, 383–92; here 229) observes that Eulogius could be claiming to have found the text in Navarre in order to avoid inculpating Christians closer to home. The author of the biography seems originally to have lived in the region around Seville in the eighth or early ninth century (Wolf, “Christian Views,” 93ff.; Wolf, “The Earliest Latin Lives of Muhammad,” esp. 90–91). — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1628

Categorization

• QUESTION: Eulogius’s alleged discovery of an anti-Islamic life of Muhammad in Navarre may be a fiction to distance the polemic from local Christians — worth flagging that Eulogius’s source location is a rhetorical move.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”