Justified True Belief

(●) The first Christian whose name we know who argued for the faith in Arabic, the language of the men who were arguing back. + Picture a man in Edessa, in what is now south-eastern Turkey, walking into the church he has prayed in since he was a boy. On the wall is a painted panel of Christ, and all his life he has bowed in front of it when he came in. Lately he has stopped. Nobody threatened him. His neighbours simply asked him, pleasantly enough and more than once, why a man who says God has no body bows down to wood and coloured paint, and he found he had no answer he wanted to give out loud. So he keeps his head up now, and walks past. That small, quiet erosion is the kind of problem Theodore Abu Qurrah spent his life on. He was a Melkite bishop, which is to say a Chalcedonian: one of the Christians of the East who held to the Council of Chalcedon of 451 and its formula that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human, and who were nicknamed the king’s men because that was also the emperor’s faith. His see, meaning the town a bishop is named for and the district he answers for, was Harran in northern Mesopotamia. He is the earliest Christian we can name by name who wrote theology in Arabic, and he was among the last Melkites who could still write it in Greek as well. Arabic was not a concession on his part; it was where the argument had moved. The Muslim theologians of Baghdad, the mutakallimun, practitioners of kalam (the word means speech, and came to mean the discipline of arguing about God from premises both sides grant), were asking the sharpest questions Christians had faced in centuries, and Abu Qurrah answered them in their own vocabulary. Sidney Griffith, the modern scholar who has done most to recover him, calls him a Christian mutakallim. The signature fact is one treatise. In it he lists nine religious communities of his world, sets out for each one what it says God is like, what it permits and forbids, and what it promises or threatens, and then invites the reader to leave every scripture aside and decide by reason alone which description is true. Griffith knows of no comparable attempt to make the rational case for Christianity until the schoolmen of thirteenth-century Europe, the university theologians of Aquinas’s generation, four centuries later. His dates are conventions, not records. No source gives the year of his birth or of his death. Scholars have proposed birth dates from about 725 to about 755 and death dates from about 820 to about 830; c. 750 and c. 825 are the common reckoning, and any date wearing a "c." is an estimate rather than a record.

(●) c. 750 AD: Born at Edessa, in a Christian city that had lived under Muslim rule for a hundred years. + The reason scholars put his birth at Edessa is a phrase in his own hand. Writing about icons years later, he singles out the icon of Christ because it is honoured, as he puts it, "in our city, Edessa." A man writes "our city" about one place. Edessa, the modern Urfa, was an old Christian town with a long memory. It told the story of King Abgar, who was said to have written to Jesus and received an answer, and it kept an image of Christ that pilgrims came a long way to see. By the time Theodore was a boy the caliphs had ruled there for a century, the tax collector worked in Arabic, and Greek was quietly retreating from public life. His name carries both worlds at once. Theodore is Greek, theodoros, the gift of God. Abu Qurrah is an Arabic kunya, the by-name that identifies a man as the father of somebody: Abu Qurrah, father of Qurrah. The people who wrote about him, Christian and Muslim alike, used the Arabic. Of his upbringing and schooling nothing at all is known, which has not stopped the gap being filled. For most of the last century nearly every account of his life had him trained as a monk at Mar Sabas, the great monastery in the Judaean desert, and formed there as the pupil and successor of John of Damascus, the great Greek theologian of the generation before him, a man who had also lived his whole life under Muslim rule and who had written the standard defence of icons. You can see the appeal of the story. The two most famous Christian minds of the Muslim east, teacher and pupil, one desert monastery, one unbroken line. It made a tidy story and it is almost certainly not true. John Lamoreaux went through the evidence in 2002 and found that it came down to two things: one hagiography, meaning a saint’s life written to edify rather than to inform, composed long after the fact and of doubtful history, plus a heading in a Greek manuscript that turned out to name a different John altogether. What the sources actually say about Theodore, over and over, is that he was bishop of Harran.

(●) Before 812 AD: He was made bishop of Harran, a town where the old moon god still had worshippers. + Harran sits about twenty-five miles south of Edessa, and a reader of the Bible has met it already. It is the Haran where Terah settled with Abram on the road out of Ur, and the town Abram left at seventy-five when God sent him on to Canaan (Genesis 11:31; 12:4). By the ninth century it was a caravan town on the road between Syria and Asia Minor, and it was famous for something else: the moon god Sin had been worshipped there since before Abraham, and a pagan community was still there, still worshipping, in Abu Qurrah’s lifetime. Greek church writers called the place Hellenopolis, the city of the pagans. So his congregation lived among Muslims, Jews, pagans, Manichaeans (the followers of a Persian teacher who held that light and darkness are two eternal powers locked in a war), and Christians of two other kinds who thought his Chalcedonian formula was a betrayal. Every one of those neighbours had an answer ready for the question of who God is, and none of the answers was his. That is the whole explanation of what he wrote and how he wrote it. A bishop in Constantinople could assume his reader. A bishop in Harran could assume nothing, and had to argue from the ground up. Exactly when he took the see is not recorded. He held it at some point while Theodoret was patriarch of Antioch, the senior bishop with all the bishops of that region under him, between 795 and 812. Michael the Syrian, a Syriac Orthodox chronicler writing nearly four centuries later who thoroughly disliked him, says Theodoret deposed him for heresy. Modern scholars think that unlikely, and the manuscripts are against it: from the icon treatise to the Greek dialogues to the lost collections listed by catalogue, the copyists go on calling him Theodore Abu Qurrah, bishop of Harran.

(●) c. 814 AD: He travelled down to Egypt, where his own church was a minority inside a minority, and stopped at Sinai to write a book for a man named Abu al-Tufayl. + The second half of his life is a series of journeys, and they all have the same errand: go where Chalcedonians are outnumbered and argue. In Egypt they were outnumbered badly. The great body of Egyptian Christians rejected Chalcedon, and the Melkites there were a minority inside a minority. He went by way of Sinai, the monastery out in the desert where the burning bush was remembered, and he did not spend the stop resting. While he was there he wrote a treatise for one Abu al-Tufayl, a work called the Book of Master and Disciple. Then the strange thing happened to it that keeps happening to his writings. For centuries the book travelled under somebody else’s name, a shadowy "Thaddeus of Edessa," and only in 2016 did Alexander Treiger argue that the work is Abu Qurrah’s. That is worth holding on to, because a good deal of this literature is still being sorted out. A treatise can sit on a shelf for a thousand years with the wrong man’s name on the spine, and the man who wrote it goes on looking less productive than he was.

(●) c. 815 AD: In Armenia he argued the Chalcedonian case before a prince, and lost the room. + Sometime between 813 and 817 he went north to the court of Ashot Msaker, the Bagratid prince of Armenia. The Armenian church was miaphysite, holding that in Christ the divine and human are united in one nature rather than two, and the question in the room was whether Armenia would come over to Chalcedon. Abu Qurrah did not travel on his own authority alone. He had composed, in Arabic, a letter that Thomas, the patriarch of Jerusalem, sent to the Armenians; Michael the Synkellos turned it into Greek and went along with it. The other side was ready for him. Abu Raita of Takrit, the ablest theologian the Syriac Orthodox had in those years and, like Abu Qurrah, a man who made his case in Arabic, could not come in person, so he sent his kinsman Nonnus, the archdeacon of Nisibis, to speak for the miaphysite case instead. Nonnus carried the day. Armenia stayed where it was, later chroniclers credited Nonnus with keeping it there, and Abu Raita called Abu Qurrah a sophist, a man whose cleverness was bent on winning. It is worth sitting with that for a moment. The most inventive Christian apologist of his generation, an apologist being someone whose work is arguing the case for the faith with the people who reject it, travelled north to make his case in person, in front of a ruler who could have decided the question there and then, and he was beaten by a stand-in, an archdeacon sent because the bishop himself could not come. Losing an argument in front of a prince is a public thing, and there is no record that he took it well or badly. What the record shows is only that nothing in his later writing concedes the point. He went on arguing for Chalcedon for the rest of his life.

(●) c. 816 AD: He turned a Greek book on the soul into Arabic for a Muslim general. + Tahir ibn al-Husayn was the commander whose armies had just put the caliph al-Mamun on the throne, and he wanted a Greek book. Abu Qurrah translated it for him: On the Virtues of the Soul, a short work that circulated under Aristotle’s name and was almost certainly not his. Small as the job was, it puts him inside one of the great transfers of learning in history. Over the next two centuries Baghdad had Aristotle, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy rendered into Arabic, and the men who did most of that work were Christians, because they were the ones who still read Greek. Abu Qurrah stands near the beginning of it, a bishop doing a commission for a general, and the transaction says something about the world he lived in that no treatise says as plainly. The same Muslim elite that pressed his congregation about their icons also wanted his Greek. It is the last thing in his life that can be given a date with any confidence.

(●) c. 825 AD: He died with nobody recording it, and the last story told about him is an argument before a caliph. + No source gives the year, the place, or the manner of his death. The usual reckoning puts it somewhere between 820 and 830, which is a way of saying that he stops appearing in the record and nobody wrote down why. There is one story after that, and it does not fit. An anonymous Syriac chronicle compiled at Edessa, known from its closing year as the Chronicle to the Year 1234, reports that Abu Qurrah, bishop of Harran, debated the caliph al-Mamun, and the debate has been dated to 829, when al-Mamun’s campaign against the Byzantines brought him through Harran. If the chronicle is right, Abu Qurrah outlived the dates usually given him. Several Arabic manuscripts claim to preserve that exchange, and they are the reason for the caution. They are late copies, the Muslim theologians in them bear names that turn up nowhere in Islamic records, the caliph keeps siding with the bishop, and one manuscript closes with hidden treasure and an invading king, reading, as Wafik Nasry puts it, like a tale out of the Thousand and One Nights. Scholars are divided about whether any authentic core survives inside them. What the story does confirm, whatever its history, is the shape of the man in other people’s memories. Long after he was dead, when someone wanted to imagine a Christian holding his own in front of the most powerful man on earth, the Christian they reached for was Abu Qurrah.

What He Taught

(T1) The world tells anyone who looks that it was made, and tells him something about what its maker is like. + He begins, of all places, with a bad drink of water. One day, he writes, he was thirsty, and he scooped up a mouthful of sea water. It disagreed with him, he spat it out, and he watched it run down and settle on the ground. From that one mouthful he drew conclusions about every sea he had never seen: that none of it can be drunk, that all of it can be held in a cup, and that it will not stay put until something underneath is holding it up. That mouthful is his whole method in miniature, and he builds everything else on it. The senses only ever hand us one thing at a time: this cup, this stone, this bad swallow of water. The mind takes those single things and sorts them into kinds, which is how one taste tells a man something true about an ocean he will never see the far side of. And from what a thing does, the mind works out what the thing is. Now apply that to the stuff the world is made of. Everything around us, he says, is built out of the elements, which for him and for every educated man of his century meant earth, water, air and fire. The striking thing about them is that they do not get along. Hot pulls against cold and wet against dry, and left to themselves these contraries would fly apart rather than settle down together into a sea, or a body, or a man. Yet here they are, holding in one arrangement, year after year. Something is holding them there, and whatever that something is, it is beyond comparison stronger than the whole quarrelsome heap. Then he does something a modern reader may not expect. He goes on from the fact of a maker to a list of things the maker must be like, inferred from how the world is run and from how patiently its maker puts up with the people in it: wise, generous, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, patient, gentle, just. Anyone who had heard the Qur’an recited would know most of those words, because they stand among what it calls the beautiful names of God, al-asma al-husna. He is not borrowing carelessly. He is showing his Muslim readers that reason arrives at the God they already confess. And then he stops, on purpose, at the point where he cannot see further. Nothing in creation, he says, shows whether the creator is one in person or more than one. The effects simply will not settle it, any more than a well-built house tells you whether one carpenter put it up or three worked on it together. That honest limit is the hinge of everything that follows (T2, T3), and it is also the ordinary Christian claim about what he called, without ever using the term, general revelation: the knowledge of God that creation gives to anyone at all, believer or not, with no Bible in his hands. "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20).

(Q) "Since there is only an uncreated creator, and a non-creating creation, and nothing else between them, ... we know that he is an eternal God, uncreated, the creator of everything from nothing. There is no creator other than he." + Source: Theodore Abu Qurrah, On the Existence of the Creator and the True Religion, in Ignace Dick’s Arabic edition p. 195, translated by Sidney Griffith. The ellipsis is Griffith’s; his bracketed gloss identifying "he" as the creator, and his transliteration of the Arabic behind "an eternal God," have been left out. The conclusion of the first half of the treatise. Note the last phrase in particular: creation from nothing, which is the line Greek philosophy never managed to cross and which Abu Qurrah takes as settled before the argument about religions even begins (T2).

(T2) With nine religions calling at once, the true one is the one whose account of God matches what a man can already work out. + Halfway through the treatise Abu Qurrah puts down the voice of a bishop and picks up the voice of a stranger. Suppose, he says, that I grew up in the mountains and never learned how people live. Something drives me down into the cities, and what I find there is men in different religions, each of them turning to me and asking me to join. Nine communities come forward, roughly in the order they appeared in the world: the old pagans, the Zoroastrians, the Samaritans, the Jews, the Christians, the Manichaeans, the Marcionites, the followers of Bardaisan, and the Muslims. Three of those names may need a word. Mani, a third-century Persian, taught that light and darkness are two eternal powers at war, and that the soul is a spark of light trapped in matter. Marcion, in the second century, kept Christ but threw out the Old Testament and the Creator it describes. Bardaisan, at Edessa around the year 200, blended Christian faith with astrology and fate. All three were still live options in ninth-century Mesopotamia, which is why a Muslim writer of the same period would have listed them too. Of each one Abu Qurrah asks the same three questions: what do you say God is like, what do you permit and forbid, and what do you promise or threaten at the end? Then he notices that they all claim the same three things and disagree about all three, and he asks the only question that matters. What is the trick for telling which one is telling the truth? His answer is to set every scripture aside and ask the mind first. Work out from your own nature what God must be like, and what is actually good for a creature such as you, and what could possibly satisfy you forever. Then pick up the books and see which one matches. The one that matches is from God. Two things are true of that proposal at once, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is that it is genuinely original, original enough that his own side distrusted it. Ammar al-Basri, writing for the Church of the East in the same years, opposed the sort of programme Abu Qurrah was advancing and held that only the miracles are proof enough of God’s approval, and Abu Raita of Takrit called him a sophist. The second is that it has a flaw he never saw. Set out nine religions and ask reason to choose, and everything depends on how the nine were described. The man setting the exam also wrote the other candidates’ answers.

(Q) "Let me say I grew up in the mountains; I had not learned how it was with people. One day, because of a need which occurred to me, I went down to the cities, to the society of men, and I saw them in different religions." + Source: Theodore Abu Qurrah, On the Existence of the Creator and the True Religion, Dick’s edition p. 200, translated by Sidney Griffith. The opening of the thought experiment. Three and a half centuries later Muslim writers would build whole philosophical novels on the same premise, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan being the famous one; Abu Qurrah gets there first, in two sentences, and then gets on with the argument.

(T3) God must be three, because the perfections he put into Adam cannot be missing from himself. + The Muslim theologians of Baghdad were in the middle of a long argument of their own about the sifat Allah, the attributes of God: whether God’s knowledge, life and power are somehow distinct in him or merely names for the one simple God. It mattered to them partly because a wrong answer sounded Christian. Abu Qurrah walked straight into that argument and made his case there. His method he took from John of Damascus, and it is worth having the name for it. Apophatic theology, from the Greek for denial, says that our words for God work in two steps: first we affirm some good thing we find in creatures, and then we deny the limits that good thing comes wrapped in down here. God is wise, yes, but not wise the way a clever man is wise, having learned it slowly and able to forget it. Abu Qurrah gives the homely version. What you see in a mirror is genuinely you and genuinely not you, and you can still learn true things about yourself by looking. So look at Adam, he says, the one creature Scripture says God made in his own image (Genesis 1:27), a verse he expected his readers to grant him. Adam is living, knowing and wise, and a Christian will happily say that God is all three. But run down the list again, because there are three more perfections in Adam that nobody ever thinks to count. He begets a son of his own kind. Eve comes out of him without being begotten, and she is of his kind too. And he stands as head of both of them, the one they each come from. None of those three is a defect. Nobody has ever looked at a man who has fathered a child and thought less of him for it. And if they are perfections, you cannot allow that the creature has them and the Creator does not. So the same three must be true in God: one who generates, as Adam begets, and who is therefore Father; one who is generated by him; and one who proceeds, which is the old word for coming from another without being born of him, as Eve came from Adam and not from a birth. One God in three, which is what Christians had been saying all along. The argument did real work. It gave Arabic-speaking Christians a way to talk about the Trinity in the exact vocabulary their neighbours were using, and later Arab Christian apologists followed him into it for centuries. It also claims too much. Adam’s fatherhood is a fact about a creature in time, and the step from there to the inner life of God is a step reason cannot take on its own. The church has not generally followed him in thinking the Trinity provable from nature, and Paul had already said why: "no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God" (1 Corinthians 2:11).

(Q) "From what the intellect deduces from the similitude of Adam’s nature, God is three persons: one generating, and one being generated, and one emanating." + Source: Theodore Abu Qurrah, On the Existence of the Creator and the True Religion, Dick’s edition p. 228, translated by Sidney Griffith. The word behind "persons" is the Arabic wujuh, faces, which he chose to render the Greek prosopon, one of the words the church councils had used of the three who are one God. Other Arabic Christian writers of his century chose other words, and the choosing was itself part of the work. There was no settled Christian Arabic yet. Men like Abu Qurrah were making one, a sentence at a time, and a bad choice of word could hand an opponent the argument.

(T4) Bowing in front of a painted panel is not worshipping paint, and the reason there is a panel at all is that God took a body. + The treatise on icons begins with a letter. An Abba Yannah wrote to him from Edessa to say that many Christians there were giving up the bow before the icon of Christ, and before the icons of the saints too, because outsiders were reprimanding them for it and sneering. Not a persecution. A drip of mockery, which is harder to stand under. Abu Qurrah’s answer turns on something anyone can check for himself. The same physical act means different things depending on what the person doing it has in mind. A man goes down on one knee to a king and he is a subject; he goes down on one knee to the woman he loves and he is asking her to marry him. Bending the knee, putting the forehead to the ground, facing a particular direction: none of these carries its meaning on the outside, and all of them take it from the intention of the man performing them. Then he reaches for two cases his readers already accepted. There is Jacob first, dying, blessing Joseph’s two sons, bowing over the head of a staff (Hebrews 11:21). On the reading Abu Qurrah had inherited, the staff was Joseph’s, so the bow went through the wood to the man who owned it, and nobody in the long history of reading that verse has supposed Jacob was worshipping a stick. And there is Adam. His Muslim readers held that God commanded the angels to bow before Adam, and none of them thought that made Adam a god. So bowing is not automatically worship. The whole objection rests on pretending that it is. Underneath the argument about gestures sits the real point, which is the Incarnation, the Christian claim that God the Son took a human body and a human life and lived one. God as God cannot be painted, and Abu Qurrah never suggests otherwise; there is nothing there for a brush to catch. But the invisible God took flesh from the Virgin Mary, and a face that could be seen by the people in the room with it is a face that can be depicted. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and therefore, as Paul had already written of Christ, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Colossians 1:15). Follow that through and the panel on the church wall is a copy of a copy: the painting images Christ, and Christ images the Father. The honour paid in front of it does not stop at the wood. It runs through to the person. Notice where the treatise is aimed. He is not writing to convert the mockers. He is writing to Christians who have gone quiet, and his sharpest sentences are for the shame rather than for the sneer.

(Q) "So too we Christians, when we make prostration in front of an icon of Christ or of the saints, our prostration is certainly not to the panels or to the colors. Rather, it is only to Christ, to whom every kind of act of prostration is due, and to the saints to whom it is due by way of honor." + Source: Theodore Abu Qurrah, A Treatise on the Veneration of the Holy Icons, chapter XI, translated by Sidney Griffith (Peeters, 1997). The word Griffith renders "prostration" is the Arabic sujud, the same word a Muslim uses for the act of bowing to the ground in prayer, which is exactly why the accusation had force and exactly why Abu Qurrah had to answer it in Arabic rather than in Greek.

(Q) "The aggrieved king is God, be He blessed and exalted; His son is Adam and his seed, whom He created; the physician is the intellect which he was given, with which to know God, to know the good and to do it, to know evil and to avoid it." + Source: Theodore Abu Qurrah, On the Existence of the Creator and the True Religion, Dick’s edition p. 216, translated by Sidney Griffith. Griffith’s parenthesis giving the Arabic word behind "the intellect," al-aql, has been left out. He has just told a story. A king sends his beloved son on a long journey with a trusted physician for company. The son falls ill; the father hears of it and sends a messenger with the prescription that will cure him. The king’s enemies hear of it too, and send their own messengers with their own prescriptions, written to do harm. The physician tells the young man to read every letter and find the one that describes his illness correctly, because the letter that gets the illness right is the letter with the cure in it. Then Abu Qurrah says what the story means, and the answer is that the physician is your own mind. Few Christian writers of his century put the point so high, and it is the claim his fellow Christians were quickest to challenge.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He gave Arabic-speaking Christians a theology in their own language, and the other side answered him by name. + Before Abu Qurrah, a Christian in Mesopotamia who wanted to think carefully about his faith did it in Greek or in Syriac, and by the ninth century a great many Christians no longer had either. Think of what that means on the ground. A man haggles in Arabic, pays his tax in Arabic, is asked about the Trinity in Arabic in the market, and then has to go looking for an answer in a language he cannot read. Within a generation of Abu Qurrah there were three substantial Arabic theologians at work, one from each of the divided churches: Abu Qurrah himself for the Chalcedonians, Abu Raita of Takrit for the Syriac Orthodox, and Ammar al-Basri for the Church of the East. He was first, and the vocabulary he hammered out was still being reused two centuries later by writers such as Sulayman al-Ghazzi. The clearest measure of how seriously he was taken comes from the other side. Ibn al-Nadim, the Baghdad bookseller and bibliographer who catalogued the written world around 987, lists among the works of the Mutazilite theologian Isa ibn Sabih al-Murdar, who died in 840, a book called Against Abu Qurrah the Christian. The Mutazilites were the rationalist school of Muslim theology, the most formidable debaters in the caliphate, and one of them thought a Christian bishop of Harran worth a book of refutation. His trinitarian argument from the divine attributes (T3) set the pattern. Arab Christian apologists for centuries afterwards made their case for the Trinity in the language of the sifat, which is to say in the language of the people they were talking to, and that habit begins with him.

(†) Byzantium read him in Greek, and his defence of images came from a place with no emperor to appeal to. + Forty-three short Greek pieces circulate under his name, and they can all be read in one place, the ninety-seventh volume of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, the great nineteenth-century printing of the Greek Fathers. Some of the forty-three are his own writing. Others are the record a deacon named John kept of debates the bishop held with Muslim questioners, which is a different sort of document and worth keeping distinct from the rest. His Arabic letter for Thomas of Jerusalem, meanwhile, was turned into Greek by Michael the Synkellos and carried north to Armenia, and by that road his name and some of his arguments passed into the Byzantine world. That matters most for the icons. The empire spent the eighth and ninth centuries tearing itself apart over images, and in Constantinople the argument was never quite separable from imperial politics: emperors banned icons, emperors restored them, and a churchman could appeal to the throne. Abu Qurrah had no throne to appeal to. His objectors were Muslims and Jews, his congregation was a taxed minority, and the only thing that could possibly help was an argument that stood up on its own. So he made one: about intention, about what an image is, and about the Incarnation as the thing that makes any image of God possible at all (T4). It is a version of the case that has no politics in it anywhere. The wider method had to wait much longer for company. Setting nine religions side by side, describing each on its own terms, and proposing a rational test to choose between them is not the way Christians wrote in the ninth century, and Sidney Griffith knows of no comparable attempt to demonstrate the rational claims of Christianity until the schoolmen of thirteenth-century Europe.

(†) Where he fell short: the comparison he called fair was not, and he asked of reason more than reason can carry. + Both charges come from his own pages, and the second one was made to his face by fellow Christians while he was alive. - He wrote the other side’s answers. The great claim of the true-religion treatise is even-handedness: here are nine accounts of God, judge between them by reason. But he summarises the other eight himself, and by the end he can write that every religion except his own thinks of nothing but "eating, drinking, bloodshed and bodily pleasure," and that its adherents are "like animals, which have no ambition for anything else." No Muslim, Jew or Manichaean would have recognised his own faith in that. In the icon treatise the objectors are simply the outsiders, the people of error. A test in which the examiner also writes the wrong answers is not a test, and the failure lands precisely where he claimed his strength was. Peter had set the standard for this work: make the defence, "yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). - He overdrew on reason. He held that a man reasoning from Adam’s nature can arrive at the Trinity (T3), and that the mind by itself can identify God’s true religion among nine claimants. His own contemporaries said no at the time. Ammar al-Basri opposed that whole way of arguing and held that only the miracles are proof enough of God’s approval; Abu Raita called him a sophist. Later Christian thought went with them. Thomas Aquinas, four centuries on, would treat the Trinity as known by revelation and not demonstrable from creatures, and Paul had drawn the same line first (1 Corinthians 2:11). The fair counterweight is that his instinct was not wrong about everything. That an honest mind looking at the world can get as far as a Creator, and as far as the Creator’s goodness, is Paul’s own claim (Romans 1:20), and that half of Abu Qurrah has worn extremely well. He was writing for people who were being asked hard questions in the street and had stopped answering. Whatever else he got wrong, he never stopped answering.