Section: Demonstrating that most of the Christians’ religion is not taken from the Messiah.

What this patriarch, Saʿīd ibn al-Bitriq, has reported—he who is highly esteemed by the Christians, devoted to them and fiercely partisan in recounting their history, extolling their religion—contains, in some of its narratives, embellishments that cast their deeds in a favorable light. Many people, however, reject and refute those accounts, such as his story of the appearance of the cross and the debate with Arius and other matters, for a great number disagree with him in what he has related. Those who dispute his account say that the emergence of the cross was the result of fraud, deception, stratagem, and guile, and that Arius never once claimed the Messiah to be the Creator.

The point, then, is this: if Saʿīd ibn al-Bitriq is telling the truth, he has shown that the bulk of the religion to which the Christians adhere was not received from the Messiah, but is an innovation introduced by a faction among them, while others opposed them in it. Among them there has existed such mutual enmity and disagreement over their creed and their laws as to confirm the saying of the Almighty:

“And from those who say, ‘We are Christians,’ We took their covenant; yet they forgot a portion of what they were reminded of, so We stirred up among them enmity and hatred until the Day of Resurrection, and Allah will inform them of what they used to do.” (al-Māʾidah 5:14)