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).