Page 162 - Demo

158On 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