his remarks elsewhere.
Among them are those who proclaim, “Mary is God’s spouse,” and others who make her a separate deity like the Christ. Still others assert that the Christ is the Son of God through a literal, intelligible birth of the sort familiar among living creatures.
The creed that they adopted as their doctrine and cornerstone of faith in the era of Constantine—more than 300 years after Christ—together with their other explicit statements, plainly points to these reprehensible and repugnant notions. Their scholars, however, reinterpret those texts with explanations that overturn their clear sense, even though the meanings they impose are corrupt both rationally and scripturally.
Nor are these phrases the words of any prophet, such that one might claim the judgment concerning them in this matter is the same as that concerning other Muslim and non-Muslim sects. Those groups say of what they deem obscure in prophetic speech, “The prophets spoke in terms whose meaning no one knows,” or, “They addressed the masses with expressions aimed only at conveying benefits, even though those expressions are, in reality, false and baseless.”
These sects—although they contain their own share of error and ignorance, as explained elsewhere—have confined such treatment to the words of the prophets, words that enjoy the sanctity of prophethood.