Sahih al-Bukhari, number 5134

Sources

• Sahih al-Bukhari 5134, Sunnah.com. (opens in a new tab)

Objections & responses

The hadith literature was compiled two centuries after Muhammad. You can’t treat the hadith as unreliable when convenient and reliable when not.

Consistency matters here. The hadith is used because Sunni Islam itself treats Bukhari as the most authoritative source after the Qur’an, so the consistency question is internal to Sunni Islam and does not depend on a Christian accepting the hadith’s reliability. The framing is by the standards Islam itself applies to these sources. A Muslim who rejects the reliability of Bukhari has a different problem, since the Sunnah, and with it much of Islamic law, rests on the same literature.

Isn’t this a double standard? The Bible’s heroes took concubines and war captives as wives with no stated age limits, and Mary was likely a young teenager when betrothed. If “customs of the time” is no defense for Muhammad, it’s no defense for Scripture.

This is the objection a fair reader raises first. The Christian reply has two parts. The Bible does not present those practices as the timeless perfect model; it records them, regulates them, and in places condemns the figures involved, and Christians do not hold David or Moses to be sinless exemplars whose conduct binds all ages. The Islamic claim about Muhammad is specifically that he is the excellent example whose Sunnah is normative, which is what makes the consistency question sharper. Second, Christian ethics has hard texts of its own to reckon with, and they are not addressed here. Raising the question about one founder and not the other’s Scripture would be exactly the double standard you name.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• Traditional Islamic sources report that Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine, and a life presented as the timeless example cannot be defended by the customs of its time.