Page 11 - Demo

Foreword [1]7The Prophet (pbuh) of Arabia, as described in the Bible“The Burden upon Arabia”- Isaiah XXI.13.The present barren period of classical scholarship, together with the increasing paucity of our knowledge of ancient languages, has crippled modern taste in its efforts toappreciate any such attempts as I intend to make in that direction. The following pages have produced a series of most able articles from the pen of the Rev. Professor Abdulahad Dāwūd, but I wonder if there are many, even among the hierarchy of the Christian Church, who could follow the erudite exposition of the learned Professor. Even more, do I wonder when he seeks to carry his readers into a labyrinth of languages, dead and done with thousands of years ago! What about Aramaic, when very few even among the Clergy are able to understand the Vulgate and the original Greek version of the New Testament? More especially when our studies are based simply on Greek and Latin etymology! Whatever may be the value of such dissertations in the enemy’s eye we, nowadays, are absolutely incapable of appreciating them from the angle of erudition; for the oracular ambiguity attached to the propheticutterances to which I allude makes them elastic enough to cover any case. The “least” in the prophecy of St. John the Baptist (pbuh) may not be the son of Mary, though he was looked upon as such contemptuously by his own tribe. The Holy Carpenter came from humble parentage. He was hooted down, mockedand discredited; he was belittled and made to appear the “least” in the public estimation by the Scribes and Pharisees. The excess of zeal displayed by his followers in the second and third centuries A.D., which was ever prone to jump at anything in the form of a prophecy in the Bible,would[1] This forward is taken from the Qatari edition.