And the alleged union is false, as has been shown time and again; indeed, were it even possible, its effects would necessarily be evident. When Allah spoke to Moses from the bush, unmistakable signs and overwhelming majesty appeared to attest to it, and whenever He conversed with Moses, those signs were manifest. The same is true of what He reported in the Torah and elsewhere about His accompanying the Children of Israel—its effects were visible, even though He was in no way united with, or indwelling in, any of those places.

Likewise, when He revealed Himself at Mount Sinai, shone forth from Seir, and was made manifest from the mountains of Paran through the scriptures He sent down, the traces of that disclosure were plain, although—by the unanimous agreement of all nations—His very essence was neither united with nor indwelling in Paran or Mount Sinai. How, then, could His essence be united with, or indwelling in, what was in Mary’s womb, yet no sign of that be observed?

It may further be said to him: the Nestorians might contend that the human nature was “a Messiah” from the moment of conception only in the sense of being pure and sanctified, not in the sense of any union with the divine nature. And if they say, “Messiah is the name for the divine and the human natures together,” we reply: nothing in the prophetic books requires this, and the Nestorians themselves grant the point. They may, however, argue that “Messiah” applies to both natures just as “human being” applies to both soul and body. Thus one may say of a corpse, “this is the human being,” and while he is still in his mother Mary’s womb before the spirit is breathed into him, one may say, “this embryo, this fetus.” In the same way, therefore, one may speak of him as “a Messiah” without reference to the divine nature.

Moreover, the Nestorians may claim that the divine nature accompanied him from the instant of conception, yet this does not entail that she gave birth to a god, for they do not posit a union; rather, they say the two