30 OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE GENUINESS OF

carried off the New Testament with Him into heaven 1! "Hence it logically follows," they argue, "that the Gospel which Christians now have cannot be the original one which descended (from heaven) upon Jesus, the Son of Mary."

In reply it may be said: (1) The Qur'an nowhere states that Jesus took the Gospel up to Heaven with Him, nor does any reliable tradition. (2) This statement therefore rests upon nothing but your mere assertion, and as you were not present at the time you cannot give evidence. (3) The "Gospel" that the Lord Jesus preached and taught by His whole life was not fully written down then, just as the Qur'an was not "collected" into a fixed form until after Muhammad's death. To say that the Gospel was carried off to heaven is therefore absurd, just as it would be to say that the Qur'an was. If we asserted the same fact regarding the Qur'an, you would laugh, and confute us by producing a copy in the original Arabic. So we refute your statement by showing you a copy in the original Greek. (I have often done so and found it quite sufficient to settle the question, for "seeing is believing," and, on the other

1 The Rev. T. Grahame Bailey says that some Muslims hold that the Gospel was carried away by Satan. I have never met this argument myself. In reply, the Muslim should be asked to quote his authority for the statement. He might be shown that, since the Gospel which we have is the one acknowledged in the Qur'an (§§ 3 sqq.), his objection lands him in considerable difficulty.
THE BIBLE AS IT NOW EXISTS 31

hand, as Horace says, "Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem, Quam quae sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus."1) (4) Just as Muhammad's disciples (ashab) remembered his words and so the Qur'an was afterwards put together (majmu) by Zaid ibn Thabit, so the Gospel in its four forms was written down after and not before Christ's Ascension. (5) The meaning of Gospel (Εναγγελιον, corrupted into انجيل ) is good news, and this is contained in an epitome in John iii. 16. (6) We are glad to know that Muslims confess that "the Gospel 2 descended on Jesus," and the Qur'an states that it was given by God "for a light 3 and a guidance to men." This fact refutes your assertion, for the All-wise God surely knows that men are on earth, not in the heavens: hence He would not make such a mistake as to send the Gospel up to the sky and leave men, for whose guidance it was sent, on the earth. (7) At any rate, the Qur'an shows that it was still on the earth in Muhammad's time, else the Qur'an would not have appealed to it so frequently.

2. Turning now to the assertion that the Bible

1 Photographs of passages in the oldest Greek MSS. of the New Testament (such as are given by Nestle in his Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament, in Paterson Smyth's How we got our Bible, and Merrill's Parchments of the Faith) will be found useful in this way.
2 Though of course this does not express the matter from the Christian point of view. (Vide §§ 37 and 79.)
3 Cf. Surahs V., Al Maidah, 50; and III., Al 'Imran, 2.