or Greek, or any other tongue into Arabic. Had every nation truly possessed a Torah, a Gospel, and books of prophecy in its own language, the Arab Christians would have been more entitled to them than the Christians of Abyssinia, the Slavs, or India—for the Arabs are the neighbors of the Holy House and the descendants of Ishmael, peace be upon him.

The Gospels in their hands are four. They claim that each evangelist wrote his Gospel in a language—Hebrew, Roman, or Greek—although some Gospels contain material absent from the others, such as the statement:

“ʿammidū al-nāsa bi-smi al-Ābi wa-l-Ibni wa-Rūḥi al-Qudus” (baptize the people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit),

a phrase they have made the foundation of their religion, yet it appears only in the Gospel of Matthew. If each of the four authors had indeed written a Gospel in his own language, there would be no single, original Gospel to which all the others could be traced.

Nevertheless, they further claim that these Gospels were translated into seventy-two languages. This assertion is fraught with falsehood and contradiction—some aspects of which, God willing, we shall soon expose. At most, they can say it was rendered into seventy-two tongues, while it is well known that the number of languages spoken by humankind throughout the inhabited world, both in our time and before, far exceeds that, as anyone acquainted with world affairs realizes. Even a single language—such as Arabic, Persian, or Turkish—is but a general label beneath which lie diverse dialects whose speakers often cannot understand one another’s speech.