Could Not Answer

took for granted. Their successors, because of the respect they felt
for them, unanimously accepted their writings without even
considering whether they were true or not. Thus, all these careless
and superficial transmissions passed from one scribe to another,
from one version to another, and reached our time. And now,
after so many centuries, it is very difficult to purify the Gospels of
wrong tranmissions.” He says in the same volume, “The first
Gospel, i.e. Matthew’s Gospel, was edited in the thirty-seventh,
thirty-eighth, forty-first, forty-seventh, sixty-first, sixty-second,
sixty-third, sixty-fourth or sixty-fifth years of the Christian era,
and the second Gospel, i.e. the Gospel of Mark, was edited in the
fifty-sixth year of the Christian era or in some year before the
sixty-fifth year. According to a more dependable view, it was
edited in the sixtieth or sixty-third year. The third Gospel, the
Gospel of Luke, was edited in the fifty-third, sixty-third or sixtyfourth
years of the Christian era, and the Gospel of John in the
sixty-eighth, sixty-ninth, seventieth or ninety-eighth years.” There
is no document or proof to testify that the epistle to the Hebrews
and the second epistle of Peter and the second and third epistles
of John and the epistle of Jacob and the epistle of Judah and the
Revelation of John were transmitted by the Apostles. Their
soundness was doubtful until the year 365. Some of their parts
were rejected as erroneous by Christian religious scholars
preceding that time. In fact, the versions translated into the Syrian
language do not contain those parts. All the Arab churches
rejected the soundness [authenticity] of the second epistle of
Peter, the second and third epistles of John, the epistle of Judah
and the Revelation of John. Horn, a Biblical scholar, says in the
two hundred and sixth and two hundred and seventh pages of the
second book of his interpretation, “Peter’s epistle, Judah’s epistle,
the second and the third epistles and the Revelation of John, the
nine verses from the second verse to the eleventh verse of the
eighth chapter of the Gospel of John and the seventh verse of the
fifth chapter of the first book of John never existed in the Syriac
copies of the Bible.” This means to say that the translator, who
wrote the Syriac version, knew that the sections we have just
mentioned could not be documents for an authentic religious
principle, and did not translate these parts which he noticed
during translation. Ward, a Catholic, in the thirty-seventh page of
his book published in 1841, quotes Rogers, a Protestant, as saying,
“Because the Hebrew epistle contradicted the creed taught in the
epistle of Jacob, in the second and third epistles of John and in his
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