This is a fact acknowledged by all Christians and everyone else: from the age of the Apostles onward there has never been, in any language, a body of memorizers large enough to constitute mass transmission who knew the Scriptures by heart in their entirety—nor has such a body existed in any subsequent age. Indeed, after the Christians had spread far and wide, grown in number, and dispersed across the seven regions of the world, one can scarcely find among them anyone who has memorised the whole corpus, whereas Muslim schoolchildren commit the entire Qur’an to memory. How, then, could a text be preserved in every age by a group large enough for mass transmission? And how, among the seventy-two languages, could each language have its own mass of transmitters?

Since the Christians rely solely on written codices, and since it is impossible for them to verify that all the manuscripts agree even in a single language—let alone across all languages—their claim that the Scriptures have always remained uniform, one text, one wording, and that all existing copies agree now as well as in former times, is nothing but reckless speech: a man speaking without knowledge, indeed uttering what he knows to be false.

Eighth point: even if, hypothetically, such uniformity were possible, the claim would carry weight only if it were not already known to be false—so what can be said when we do know it is false? For today we find copies of the Torah, the Gospels, the Psalms, and the prophetic books that differ and contradict one another. The manuscripts held by the Christians differ among themselves, and they also conflict in many places with the manuscripts of the Jews and the Samaritans. Thus, when the Christians say, “Our copies are the accurate ones,” their assertion is no stronger than the Jews’ claim, “Our copies are the accurate ones.” In fact, it is well known that the Jews have shown far greater care for the Torah than the Christians have.

(Furthermore, even after all this, what the Christians put forward is insufficient unless it is established that their manuscripts correspond to those owned by the Jews—including the Samaritans—and this is not known.)

And if they say, “Whenever the Jews’ transmission conflicts with that of the Apostles, it is to be ignored…”