The second view holds that God is truly a Speaker, yet that His speech is created—He brings it into existence in something other than Himself. This is the position of the Muʿtazilah and others, and it is the other opinion ascribed to the Jahmiyyah.
On these two views, then, no speech subsists in God’s own Essence that could be united with the Messiah or indwell in him; whatever is created is merely an accident among accidents and can never be a creating deity.
Many from the People of the Book—both Jews and Christians—side with one or the other of these two notions.
As for the first view—embraced by the early generations of this community, its leading imams, the great majority of Muslims, and by many of the earlier People of the Book as well as most of them—it is said in one of two ways:
- God’s speech is eternal in kind, meaning that He has never ceased speaking by His will; or
- it is eternal in its very entity.
Others, however, say that it is not eternal but originated. The first of these explanations is the well-known stance reported from the imams of the Sunnah and the hadith scholars.
Those who assert that it is eternal in its entity argue that His speech is not connected to His will and power, for they maintain that no happenings can occur within Him and that whatever comes about through His will and power must necessarily be originated.
Within this group there are two sub-opinions:
• Some say that the eternal reality is a single meaning—or five meanings—and that this reality takes the form of command, prohibition, and report. These are all qualities of that one reality, not divisions within it. When expressed in Arabic it is the Quran, and when expressed in Hebrew it is the Torah.
• Others say that it consists of letters—or letters and sounds—each one eternal in its very substance.
A third view maintains that He speaks by His will and power with speech that subsists in His Essence. They declare that this speech is originated and that it is impossible for it to be eternal, for it is inconceivable that that which is brought into existence by His power