—namely, his further statement: “God appears on earth and moves about (1) among humankind” (2).

You are told: This passage—quite apart from the fact that you must first establish the prophethood of those two men, then authenticate that this wording was actually transmitted from them, and finally show that the translation conforms to the original without alteration, three stages (3) that will be extremely hard for you to substantiate—still does not prove (4) that the Messiah is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, that he is a true god, uncreated and not fashioned. The Torah contains statements of the same sort and even stronger, yet no one has inferred from them that Moses was a god or that he stood outside the circle of servants.

His phrase “appears” (5) is like saying “revealed Himself,” “manifested,” “made Himself known,” and similar expressions used in the Torah and the other divine scriptures. The Torah, for instance, states that God revealed Himself and appeared to Abraham and other prophets, but that was never understood to ascribe divinity to any of them.

Moreover, it remains common in everyday speech for people to say, “So-and-so is with us; he is in our midst and has not died,” when his deeds, practice, conduct, and counsels are still observed among them. Likewise, one may say to someone whose father has died, “He has not died so long as he has left a son like you; I am your father.” And when they see a scholar’s disciple who has mastered his teacher’s knowledge, they say, “This is So-and-so in his teacher’s name”—as they would say of ʿIkrimah, “This is Ibn ʿAbbās,” and of Abū Ḥāmid, “This is al-Shāfiʿī.” In the same way, when a king sends a deputy to act on his behalf in a land, the people say, “The king has come, the king has judged, the king has decreed.”