yet you yourselves do not accept that outward sense at all; on the contrary, you excommunicate anyone who affirms it, just as Muslims declare a person to be an unbeliever if he takes the superficial wording that implies corporealism and anthropomorphism.

Such reasoning necessarily implies that the Messiah’s statements, on their face, affirm three gods, three compounded persons, three disparate parts, and three composite beings. You have further claimed that the plain sense of the Quran is corporealism, and that you therefore turned away from that sense to uphold the three hypostases in which, according to you, God’s Word is His Son—a creating essence equal to Him in substance; that the Messiah is this Son, equal to the Father in essence, Creator of the worlds, Judge on the Day of Judgment, seated above the Throne at the right hand of the Lord; that he is “true God from true God”; that the Spirit is likewise a third god; and that these three gods are nevertheless one God.

What you have thus alleged in your censure and disparagement of the Messiah is precisely what Allah will use to defend the Messiah and to vindicate him against the slanders you and others have concocted.

For, by your own account, the Messiah—peace be upon him—did not clearly convey to you the creed you profess, nor the monotheism by which you might know your Lord, Mighty and Majestic. Rather, he spoke in words whose apparent meaning is the affirmation of three gods, three composite bodies, and three separate parts, while you claim that you yourselves corrected all of this until you fashioned it into three hypostases and laid down that “creed” which contradicts the intellect of every rational person and every scripture brought by a messenger. All the while, the Messiah never once spoke of a trinity, or a union, or anything that even hints at such a doctrine.

You have built your position solely on what Matthew—without support from the other three—reported from him: “Baptize the people in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”