those nails that splinter the bones and tear the flesh apart, while he cried out, “O my people, have mercy on me!”—yet not a single one of them showed him any mercy.

All this, though he is—according to their doctrine—the very Governor (1) of the upper and lower realms, the One of whom all who are in the heavens and on earth ask; “every day He is engaged in some affair.” Then he died and was buried in the dust beneath unyielding boulders (2) and flint; afterward he rose from the grave and, after all that had taken place, ascended to his throne and dominion (3).

What, then, do you imagine the branches are like when this is the root upon which the entire structure stands?

Or consider a religion whose whole edifice is founded on the worship of a deity hewn (4) by human hands—after first being chiseled in human imagination—from every kind of earthly substance (5), in all its diverse types, classes, and colors. Before it they humble themselves, abase themselves, and fall upon their chins in prostration. Whoever follows such a faith believes neither in God nor His angels, neither in His Scriptures nor His messengers, nor in meeting Him on the Day when the evildoer will be repaid for his evil and the doer of good for his good (6).

Or ponder the religion of the nation upon whom wrath was loosed: they shed God’s good pleasure as a snake sloughs off its skin (7), and so returned laden with wrath, disgrace (8), and humiliation. They abandoned the rulings of the Torah, flung it behind their backs, and bartered it away for a paltry portion of