copy in the world, in every language, is verbally identical to every other copy in every other language—save one who possessed exhaustive knowledge of them all; and they themselves concede that no such person exists.
As for those who say that the alteration occurred at the very outset, they maintain that the Gospels were taken from four men, two of whom had never seen the Messiah; only two of the evangelists—Matthew and John—actually saw him. Under such circumstances, the possibility of change is self-evident.
With respect to their claim that the Scripture is written in seventy-two tongues, the Christians themselves unanimously affirm that the Messiah spoke only Hebrew, like all the prophets of the Children of Israel; that he was circumcised on the eighth day as they are; and that he prayed facing their qiblah, never toward the east, nor did he enjoin prayer toward the east.
Whoever asserts—as some people imagine—that his language was Syriac is mistaken. The words attributed to him in the Gospels were originally spoken in Hebrew and were then translated into other languages. Translation, however, is a domain in which error frequently occurs, as we have witnessed in our own time when the Torah is rendered from Hebrew into Arabic; the mistakes that appear in such translations are attested by competent, truthful experts versed in both tongues.
The Christians themselves say that it was written only in four languages: