his fellow messengers, confirming those who had come before him and giving glad tidings of the one who would come after him. The Children of Israel had grown insolent and rebellious, while his approach was chiefly marked by gentleness, mercy, forgiveness, and pardon. Allah placed compassion and mercy in the hearts of those who followed him, and made some of them priests and monks.

People divided into three groups concerning the Messiah—peace be upon him—and the disciples who followed him:

One group rejected him and disbelieved in him. They claimed that he was the son of a prostitute, slandered his mother, and attributed his paternity to Joseph the carpenter. They maintained that none of the Torah’s law had been abrogated, and that Allah had not abrogated what He had prescribed following their treatment of the prophets, including the burdens imposed upon them concerning impurities and foods.

Another group went to excess concerning him, claiming that he was Allah or the son of Allah, that divinity had clothed itself in humanity, and that the Lord of all worlds had descended and sent down His son to be crucified and killed as a ransom for the sin of Adam—peace be upon him. They claimed that the One God, the Eternal Refuge, who neither begets nor is born, and to whom none is comparable, had begotten and taken a son. They also claimed that He is a living, knowing, powerful God: one substance, three hypostases; and that one of these is the hypostasis of the Word, which is knowledge, [and] (1) that it clothed itself in human nature—even though it is known that one of the two cannot be separated from the others unless they were to make Him three distinct gods. Yet this is something they do not profess.