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On the other hand, the proselytes from the non-Semitic
“Gentiles” to the “new way” read the Old Testament in its
Greek Version of the “Seventy.” As a matter of course, the
scholars of the Greek philosophy and the ex-ministers of
the Greek mythology, once converted to the new faith and
with the Septuagint before them, could have no difficulty
in the production of a “New Testament” as a completion
or a continuation of the old one.
How the simple Gospel of the Nazarene Messenger of Allah
became a source of two mighty currents of the Semitic
and the Hellenic thought; and how the Greek polytheistic
thought finally overpowered the monotheistic Semitic creed
under the most tyrannical Greco-Latin Emperors, and under
the most intolerant and superstitious Trinitarian Bishops of
Byzantium and Rome, are points of extreme moment for a
profound study by the Muslim Unitarian savants.
Then there are the questions of the unity of faith, of
doctrine, and of the revealed text. For more than three
centuries, the Christian Church had no New Testament
as we see it in its present shape. None of the Semitic or
Greek Churches, nor did Antioch, Edessa, Byzantium,
and Rome possess all the books of the New Testament,
nor even the four Gospels before the Nicene Council.
I wonder what was or could be the belief of those
Christians who were only in possession of the Gospel
of St. Luke, or of St. Mark, or of St. John, concerning
the dogmas of the Eucharist, Baptism, the Trinity, the
miraculous conception of Christ, and of dozens of
other dogmas and doctrines! The Syriac Version of the
pshittha does not contain the so-called “Essential” or
“Institutional Words,” now extant in St. Luke (xxii. 17,
18, 19). The last twelve verse of the sixteenth chapter
of the Second Gospel are not to be found in the old
Greek manuscripts. The so-called “Lord’s prayer”
(Matt. vi. 9; Luke xi. 2) is unknown to the authors