and Luke and Mark, and they are all agreed that Luke and Mark never saw the Messiah, whereas Matthew and John did. These four treatises that they call “the Gospel”—and they sometimes refer to each individual one as a “gospel”—were written by those men only after the Messiah had been raised up. Nowhere in them do they state that they are the word of God, nor that the Messiah conveyed them from God. Rather, they merely transmitted in them certain sayings of the Messiah along with some of his deeds and miracles.

They also acknowledge that they did not record everything they heard from him or witnessed, so the material is of the same kind as that which the scholars of hadith, prophetic biography and military expeditions relate from the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—of his words and actions that are not Qur’an.

Accordingly, the Gospels now in their possession resemble a book of sīra (prophetic biography) or the hadith collections, or works of that sort, even though most of what they contain may be sound.

Whatever the Messiah—peace be upon him—actually said he conveyed from God; his reports must therefore be believed and his commands obeyed. In this respect it is akin to what the Messenger conveys in the sunnah, for within the sunnah there are instances in which the Messenger declares that the statement is God’s own utterance, such as his words:

“Allah, Exalted is He, says: ‘Whoever shows hostility to a friend of Mine, I have declared war upon him,’” and the like.