the ancient exemplar taken directly from the disciples, and then set that copy against the manuscripts in every single tongue. Such a feat is possible only for someone who possesses full mastery of all seventy-two languages—and no human being is capable of that. Even if such a person did exist, we have no record that he has ever undertaken the task and reported to us that the texts are indeed in agreement.

Were someone to do so, it would still amount to a lone report. The only alternative would be for each language’s text to be rendered by a translator whose accuracy is beyond doubt, until all the versions are finally brought into one language—Arabic, for example—so that their concord could beverified. Failing that, if this scripture is translated into one, two, or several tongues, and other copies are likewise translated, their agreement cannot be known unless it is first established that the meaning conveyed in one language is exactly the same as that in the other. This, however, can be judged only by a person who knows both languages himself, or to whom both are translated into a language he understands.

It is obvious that no one has ever had all seventy-two languages translated for him into a single tongue—or into tongues he already knows—and no individual is known to command all seventy-two languages.

Accordingly, to assert categorically that every book written in the seventy-two tongues is mutually consistent, or that all the manuscripts within each language are identical, is to make a claim whose soundness cannot be verified. Even if, hypothetically, the full set of seventy-two versions handed down by the disciples were still extant today, unmingled with later translations, the matter would remain uncertain—let alone now, when most of the copies in people’s hands are translations produced long afterward in Arabic and other languages.

And all this, remember, assumes that the disciples really did transmit the scriptures in seventy-two languages and that those originals have survived