or, “O Gospel,” or, “O Quran, forgive me and have mercy on me,” he would have uttered sheer falsehood in the eyes of every religious community and of all rational people.

Yet you maintain that the Messiah is a divine Creator, invoked and worshipped. How, then, can you liken him to the written word of God that is committed to parchments?

Second: The written word is, according to the early authorities and the great majority of every faith-community, an attribute of the Speaker; it inheres in Him and is then inscribed on parchment. Some hold it to be a created accident that He brings into existence in something other than Himself. In all cases, everyone agrees that speech is an attribute that subsists in something else, not a self-subsistent substance.

Whereas the Messiah—in your doctrine—possesses a divinity that is a self-subsistent essence: he is true God from true God, and, in your view, fully God and fully man. How, then, can you treat a deity who is an independent reality as though he were an attribute that cannot exist except in another?

Third: You say, “A man’s word is begotten of his intellect.” Even if that were correct, such begetting can occur only as something newly originated. Yet you also claim, “The eternal, pre-existent Word of God is begotten of Him before…"