but no essence exists that is stripped of its attributes. A fuller treatment of these issues is set out elsewhere; we have touched on them here only because these people say, “We are astonished at those folk—they are persons of merit, decorum, and learning; someone of such stature, after having read a little of the philosophers’ and logicians’ works—what right has he to repudiate us in this matter?”

All the discourse of these Christians, then, amounts to exalting the philosophers and the practitioners of logic, and to claiming that whoever studies their books attains, through them, truths about divinity unknown to the rest of the religious communities. This alone reveals how ignorant these Christians are of what the messengers brought and of what can be known by pure reason.

As for the first point: it is because neither the Messiah nor his followers—the disciples and those who came after them—were