the Messiah, the disciples, or any other prophet. What they do have in their books are a mixture of ambiguous and clear passages, and they quarrel over how to read them. Those who profess the so-called Creed—today the great majority of Christians, namely the Melkites, Nestorians, and Jacobites—cannot even agree on how to explain it, while the Creed itself is so self-contradictory that a sound conception of it is impossible.

For this reason each group says whatever it imagines brings it closer to the truth than the others. Some—such as the Jacobites—cling to the very wording of the Creed, even though it openly proclaims unbelief whose falsehood is obvious to everyone. Others, like the Nestorians, hide part of that doctrine. Many more, the Melkites in particular, hover between these two positions. Once they had invented their notions of Trinity and indwelling, dissenters arose among them to oppose those innovations.

Reports of their doctrines therefore vary, in line with the views of whichever faction the reporter happened to consult. Much of what many Muslim theologians recount about Christian belief is rejected by large numbers of Christians themselves—as in the material cited from them by Abū al-Maʿālī and his colleague Abū al-Qāsim