Sort of implies a teacher to some extent.
This is because you are working within the assumption that the Islamic tradition broadly reflects actual history.
I have given you 30+ links to credible scholarship that open up a whole range of possibilities that you are currently unaware of.
In fact, you dismissed them without reading them and remarked:
None of which says anything of value.
And then went back to peddling this:
Waraka does have historicity as a heretic priest writing perverted Christian text in Arabic who had a life long relationship with his cousin muhammad.
It is not certain he taught muhammad, but the obvious is pretty obvious despite it not being certain.
As I have mentioned, he could just as easily be there to serve a theological purpose: a learned, non-trinitarian 'Abrahamic' who recognised Muhammed's gift of prophecy.
In post 18 I discussed the '4 hanifs' from tradition, of whom Waraqa is one. I pointed out about how their stories seem to suggest that a lot of significant information is missing from the tradition which should have a major impact on your way of thinking.
The idea that much knowledge of this period was forgotten/lost is very important.
The questions of the Sitz im Leben of the Quran and what happened in the period after Muhammed are much more important than looking for a 'smoking gun' that can be used in 2 sentence long polemics
What our other friend refuses to do is look at who these teachers might have been, and offered we don't know as his best explanation.
Assuming this means me, what I refuse to do is be trapped within a narrow paradigm that doesn't appear to be supported by a more systematic analysis of the available evidence and is far less interesting or relevant than the issues that scholars actually focus on.
You are looking at a specific named individual as a sort of 'smoking gun'. The problems with this are 1) lack of meaningful evidence for a scholar to be able to see it as anything other than speculative 2) an assumption that the Islamic tradition is broadly correct, an assumption which few scholars make.
I just find having a heretic in walking distance of a 5 year old, very strong things the ancient historians recorded who were biased.
You are assuming that Waraqa meets the criteria of embarrassment, a big assumption.
You also need to realise the extent that medieval theologians didn't seem to understand much of the material and engaged in post hoc speculations and exegeses that often appear to miss the point.
And when we look at the very limited history on this, one figure more then any other is standing out.
When we look at the substantial body of scholarship, the importance of one figure of dubious historicity is far less than it is to you. I have provided at least 5 sources that comment on this, none of them particularly positively 'poorly documented', 'circular reasoning', etc.
Seriously, why don't you actually read a few of my articles? It is fair to say that you are not well read on this subject, that's not an insult just the truth. There's no shame in it, although I find it strange that despite your apparent interest in the topic and willingness to invest your time in discussing it, you seem strangely resistant to actually trying to learn anything scholarly about it and even display an overt hostility to critical scholarship that I post.
The true history of the koran is that Arabic people wanted to change the biblical text because they did not believe in all the rhetorical text as written. The contradictions and rhetoric is pretty obvious, and not starting with a strong orthodox faith, and living in a place where no one really cared off the beaten path so to speak.
It was easy to create new text based on previous traditions
This favours Islamic theology over academic history again.
The idea of Arabia as being 'off the beaten path' is a misnomer. This was the borderlands between 2 superpowers and of great strategic interest. Much of the defence of the Roman and Persian Empires had also been outsourced to powerful Christian Arab tribes. That Arabs didn't have a strong faith isn't supported by religious conflicts in the 6th C between Christian Axum and Jewish Himyar.
If we make the assumption that religions reflect the environment in which the evolved, then this appears to be an environment very much aware of contemporary religious issues and a strong attitude towards them.
What was the Sitz im Leben of the Quran? What was the influence of Syriac religious beliefs? What was the nature of the Arab conquests? The first fitnah also seems to be a 'civil war' between Hijazi and Syrian Arab factions, the significance of this is also of great interest as is the question of how much the Islam of the 8th C reflected the (proto)Islam of the 7th C.
These are just some of the questions that Islamicists are interested in. They also offer a lot more potential for discovery and genuine scholarship than Waraqa.
Your purpose seems to be to attack and discredit Muhammed rather than to engage in genuine historical enquiry. This is not the purpose of academic history though which is why you won't find what you are looking for in scholarly journals. If you take a step back from this perspective and start thinking about what, given the evidence, scholars can possibly work out it becomes a far more interesting subject.
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