Medieval Christian polemic schematized prophecy tests to reject Muhammad empirically, not by definition

Evidence

This wider view of prophethood, within which it was not possible to exclude Muhammad by definition, indicated another and more effective direction of attack, which brought Peter the Venerable’s thought closer to that of his contemporaries and successors, and to an argument more securely set in Christian tradition. It proceeded, he himself said, from a ‘new starting-point’. This was to classify prophets as good and bad; the good as either universal or particular, the bad as either true or false. Universal prophets are those who foretold Christ; their supply was now naturally dried up. Particular or personal prophets foretell particular things, but the Qur’an contains no such prophecy. Bad prophets were those whose life was reprobate, their teaching false, like the prophets of Baal. It is obvious where Muhammad was to fit into this classification, although the author failed to develop this part of his argument. Peter’s attack on Muhammad as wicked and as false thus represents two elements in the systematic attack put forward by Pedro de Alfonso. A great deal of Peter’s argument consisted in setting the claims of Islam beside the story of the Hebrew prophets, to show the two to be inconsistent; this was also in line with the Risadlah, with Pedro de Alfonso and with the wide Christian tradition, and excluded Muhammad’s claims, not by definition, but by requiring particular qualities in the prophet and his prophecies. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 402

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s construction-of-Islam thread: here ‘the false prophet’ is built categorially out of Christian prophetic criteria, an instance of defining the religious other through a putatively neutral standard that is in fact tailored in advance.
• DEFINE: The classification of prophets (universal/particular, good/bad) is a conceptual framework worth preserving against the broader Christian-theological background.