The present barren period of classical scholarship, together
with the increasing paucity of our knowledge of ancient languages,
has crippled modern taste in its efforts to appreciate any such attempts
as I intend to make in that direction. The following pages have
produced a series of most able articles from the pen of the Rev .
Professor ‘Abdu’ I-Ahad Dāwūd, but I wonder if there are many, even
among the hierarchy of the Christian Church, who could follow the
erudite exposition of the learned Professor. All the more do I wonder
when he seeks to carry his readers into a labyrinth of languages, dead
and done with thousands of years ago. What about Aramaic, when
very few even among the Clergy are able to understand the Vulgate
and the original Greek version of the New Testament? More
especially when our researches are based simply upon Greek and
Latin etymology! Whatever may be the value of such dissertations in
the enemy’s eye we, nowadays, are absolutely incapable of
appreciating them from the angle of erudition; for the oracular
ambiguity attached to the prophetic utterances to which I allude makes
them elastic enough to cover any case. The “least” in the prophecy of
St. John the Baptist may not be the son of Mary(pbuh), though he was
looked upon as such contemptuously by his own tribe. The Holy
Carpenter came from humble parentage. He was hooted down,
mocked and discredited; he was belittled and made to appear the
“least” in the public estimation by the Scribes and Pharisees.The
excess of zeal displayed by his followers in the second and third
centuries A.D., which was ever prone to jump at anything in the form
of a prophecy in the Bible, would naturally induce them to believe that
their Lord was the person alluded to by the Baptist.
However, there is another difficulty in the way. How can a person
rely on the testimony of a book admittedly filled up with folk-lore?
The genuineness of the Bible has universally been questioned.
Without going into the question of its genuineness, we may at least
say that we cannot depend on its statements concerning Jesus(pbuh) and
his miracles. Some even go so far as to assert that his existence as an
historical person is questionable, and that on the authority of the
Gospels it would be dangerous to arrive at any apparently safe


conclusion in this matter. A Christian of the Fundamentalist type
cannot well say anything against my statement of the case. If “stray
sentence” and detached words in the Old Testament can be singled out
by synoptic writers as applicable to Jesus(pbuh), the comments of the
learned writer of these erudite and absorbing articles must command
every respect and appreciation even from the Clergy. I write in the
same strain, but I have tried to base my arguments on portions of the
Bible which hardly allow of any linguistic dispute. I would not go to
Latin, Greek, or Aramaic, for that would be useless: I just give the
following quotation in the very words of the Revised Version as
published by the British and Foreign Bible Society.







in Three versions has produced a series of most able articles from the pen of Professor
David Benjamin Keldani who said: I propose through this article and the ones which will follow to show that the doctrine of Islam concerning the Deity and the Last Great Messenger of Allah is perfectly true and conforms to the teachings of the Bible.