Sunday is, for them, the great feast on which they allege that the Messiah rose from the dead.

The Sunday after that they call the “New Sunday.” On it they put on new clothes and carry out assorted practices. All of those days count as feast days in their calendar, just as the Day of ʿArafah, the Day of Sacrifice, and the Days of Minā are feast days for us Muslims. During this period they fast from any kind of fat.

When their fast first ends, they— or at least some of them—break it with animal products such as milk, eggs, and meat; sometimes the very first thing they eat is an egg.

In their festivals and other religious affairs they engage in words and deeds too numerous and unstable to catalogue. For that reason you will find that the scholars’ reports about their doctrines and laws vary, though most of what they transmit is sound. The root of the matter is that these people claim that whatever their religious leaders among the rabbis and monks institute becomes binding upon them, turning into a law that Christ himself legislated in heaven. Thus, in every era they abrogate certain rulings and enact others—obligations, prohibitions, creedal formulations, and so forth—contradicting what they had held before, on the pretext that this is akin to God’s replacing one divinely revealed law with another.

In this respect, as in others, they and the Jews stand at opposite extremes. The Jews deny that God abrogates laws or sends a messenger with a law that differs from what came before, as God has told us about them: “The foolish among the people will say, ‘What has turned them away from the direction of prayer they used to face?’” (Qur’an 2:142). The Christians, however, allow their priests and monks to legislate and repeal laws; consequently no single, continuous law can be reliably reported for them over time.

Our aim does not depend on knowing the detailed particulars of their falsehood; it is enough for us to know