2012م - 1444هـ






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.