indwells every prophet; consequently, you are forced to maintain that every prophet is a composite of divinity and humanity—a perfect God and a perfect man—exactly as you have claimed for the Messiah, for there is no difference between the indwelling of the Word and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit: each is a hypostasis.

Moreover, it is impossible for one of the two attributes to indwell without the other, or for an attribute to indwell apart from the very essence. Hence it necessarily follows that the living, speaking God, together with His three hypostases, must reside in every prophet, so that each prophet would in fact be the Lord of all realms; and, in addition, one would have to say of him, “He is His son.” The enormity of the unbelief and the glaring contradiction in this are self-evident. Yet it is an inescapable consequence for the Christians, for whatever is affirmed of one thing must likewise be affirmed of its equal, and one may not differentiate between two identical cases.

Nor do they have the right to say, “The indwelling or the union in the Messiah is established by explicit text, whereas there is no such text concerning anyone else,” for several reasons:

First: the texts do not indicate any such thing, as has already been clarified.

Second: there are passages about persons other than the Messiah that resemble those cited for him—such as the term “son,” the statement that the Holy Spirit indwelt him, and the like.

Third: proof does not work in reverse; the absence of a particular proof does not entail the absence of the thing proved. Not everything that Allah knows or with which He has honored His prophets has been conveyed to creation by an explicit text; among the valid modes of indication is that of necessary implication.

Accordingly, if the indwelling and the union are confirmed in the case of one prophet on the basis of a meaning he shares with another prophet, then equal treatment of the two identical cases becomes obligatory—just as, if it were established that the prophet