—say, “When the Messiah—or anyone else—is beaten, slapped, and crucified so that his body feels pain, his soul feels pain as well. If pain is experienced by both the Messiah’s soul and body in the same way that the soul accompanies the body, then the Lord must suffer when the human nature suffers, hunger when it hungers, and be satisfied when it is satisfied, for the torment of hunger and the delight of satiety are felt by the soul whenever the body hungers and is filled.

Moreover, according to them the Messiah is a perfect God and a perfect man: the God was God before the union, and the man was man before the union. They therefore maintain that after the union He is still perfect God, just as before, and perfect man, just as before.

This is like saying that a human being composed of body and soul is at once a complete soul and a complete body, or that a piece of red-hot iron is simultaneously complete iron and complete fire—yet that is false. A human being is a composite of soul and body, and the word “human being” refers to the totality; the human being is not simply a soul, nor is the human being simply a body.

If the union were in fact real, one would have to say that the Messiah is half divine nature (lāhūt) and half human nature (nāsūt), a composite of both. One would not say that the Messiah himself is a complete man and that the Messiah himself is a complete God, for fully conceiving this assertion yields self-evident knowledge—since they have made