Composing a mab'ath

I am trying, one more time, to read John Wansbrough - here, the "Historiography" essay which opens The Sectarian Milieu. Wansbrough is analysing, exhaustively, where the Ibn Hishâm sîra meets the Qurân.

Th.S.M. p. 4 starts with IH 204-32, wherein four groups first hear of an Arabian prophet. Next up pp. 7-11 is IH, 354-64; here the Makkis (mostly pagans) debate the Prophet directly. Then pp. 12-14 is IH, 519-27 on the munâfiqs. Fourth pp. 14-22: IH, 530-72, moving from Arab mockery to Jewish rejection. Wansbrough uses the Saqqâ edition. If you speak English, which I'm unsure for Wansbrough, Guillaume has this fourth block pp. 252-70.

What Wansbrough brought to this mâida is that all these pericopae act as cohesive unities. He also mused that they be ancient. If so, someone or someones collected these variations-on-a-theme and presented them to Ibn Ishâq (or whomever), whose collation nobody since then much bothered to break up until Ibn Hishâm. Wansbrough will rather undercut this case where he doubts Ibn Hishâm's claim to have Ibn Ishâq. (Bringing to mind Douglas Hofstadter's joke about whether Shakespeare's plays were composed by someone else of the same name, which I assume he'd borrowed from someone else himself. Note Motzki, 24 cites the wrong Wansbrough skepticism; p. 58 goes against third-party witness and assumes Ibn Ishaq as a real figure. Motzki would be better off citing Juynboll on Zuhri.)

I bring here Harald Motzki's (pbuh) Reconstruction of Muhammad Ibn Abî Muhammad, which intersects the fourth Wansbrough pericope at Narrations #3-5 from Saqqâ 538f. If Motzki was right, which he usually was, MiaM had earlier Ibn Hishâm ed. Saqqâ 270-2 / Guillaume 121-2 and then S 294-314 / G 133-41; next #6 pipes up Saqqâ 2.47 / 1.552; and #7 is last 2.174. Motzki argued that Ibn Hishâm has taken Ibn Ishâq's narrations near-wholesale and that Ibn Ishâq had done likewise for MiaM. Motzki oddly doesn't cite Wansbrough's textual arguments in the footnotes here, although they could well have served his own argument.

By extension, the same should be assumed for the first three pericopae, that they were late-Umayyad-era collections which Ibn Ishâq packaged into a narratio, Gospel style.

At this point I suppose we have to ask, why. Wansbrough thinks the impetus came from outside. Jews and Christians were asking pointed questions about the new faith. Local Muslim sermonisers also needed a context for that most eminently context-resistant Scripture, the Qurân. Luckily, they had a God who could do that for them. God inspired the first Islamophobesskeptics to utter the veriest words of Qurân, which the Prophet - God's mouthpiece - could easily confute, with no real effort on the Prophet's own part.

This sort of collection could be adapted into sermons, sent out against Christians like John in Damascus, read out for amusement and edification... anything the young Muslim could want, really. It would prove that the maba'th was the genre's best home and that is how Ibn Ishâq passed it on.