52 OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE GENUINESS OF

published in A.D. 436, just 186 years before the Hijrah 1.

(6) The Gothic, made by Ulphilas, who died A.D. 381. The MSS. 2 of it date from the end of the fifth to the middle of the sixth century.

(7) The Æthiopic, made by Frumentius in the fourth century 3.

(8) Several Aramaic versions of the Old Testament made by Jews in the second and third centuries. The Targum of Onkelos, the most famous of these, dates from the end of the third century.

21. M. How do you know all these dates?

C. From history in many cases, and in others from finding quotations from these versions in writers who lived at the periods we have mentioned. No one can quote a book before it is written 4.

22. M. Have you any further proofs?

C. Only two more that need be mentioned. One, the third proof, is, that we have a vast number of verses quoted from the Bible in the works of early Greek, Latin 5, Syrian, and even Armenian

1 See my Conversion of Armenia, Chapter xiii.
2 The Codex Argenteus, in the library at Upsala, "written in the fifth or sixth century." (Nestle, p. 138.)
3 Previous to the fifth century according to tradition, which Dillmann accepts (Nestle gives other opinions, p. 140).
4 Though the Qur'an (Surah XXI, Al Anbiya') quotes Ps. xxxvii. 29, and yet the Muslim belief is that the Qur'an was composed in heaven before the creation of the world!
5 Nestle (pp. 336, sqq.) gives lists of the Greek and Latin writers referred to.
THE BIBLE AS IT NOW EXISTS 53

writers, all of whom lived before Muhammad's time, and whose dates are perfectly well known. These quotations are so numerous that we could reconstruct nearly the whole New Testament and much of the Old from them, if we had lost all our ancient MSS. and versions. The fourth proof is afforded by ancient catalogues of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Six of these, all drawn up before Muhammad's time and some many centuries before him, contain the names of all the books of the Bible that we now have. The most ancient of all, the Muratorian Fragment on the Canon, is torn at both ends, but it contains just the same list of books that our present Bibles do, as far as it goes. It dates from the second century 1.

23. M. You Christians seem to have taken a lot of trouble in order to refute our objections.

C. No amount of trouble would be too much to take in order to remove the prejudices which prevent men, for whom Christ died, from coming to Him for salvation. But it was not to refute Muslim objections that we made all these investigations and many more. We made them, in the first place, to satisfy ourselves, lest we should have been led astray in religion. We did not wish to be in any uncertainty about the Bible, upon which our religion is founded; and we are told in the Bible to "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thess. v. 21).

1 See Westcott's Canon of the New Testament.