كتاب منهج دراسة الأديان بين الشيخ رحمت الله الهندي والقس فندر

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moral support, the latter including such influential government officials as Sir William Muir, secretary of the local CMS Association, and Judge Mosley Smith. Before the debate, the subjects for discussion were agreed by both sides: the abrogation and corruption of the Christian Scriptures, the doctrine of the Trinity, Muhammad's claim to prophethood, and the inspiration of the Qur'an. Pfander thought he was on familiar ground, since these were the subjects addressed in his apologetics. What he was not prepared for, though perhaps he should have been from the contents of Kitab-i-istifsar, one of the more scholarly replies to his writing, was his opponents' use of European biblical critics to impugn the integrity and historicity of Christian Scripture. Wazir Khan, while a medical student in London in the ١٨٤٠ s, came "into contact with European works of Biblical criticism . . . and studied Hebrew and Greek."]٢١[He read T. H. Home (١٧٨٠ - ١٨٦٢), J. G. Eichorn (١٧٥٢ - ١٨٢٧), and N. Lardner (١٦٤٨ - ١٧٦٨) and brought some of their books with him to the debate, including George Elliot's ١٨٤٧ translation of D. F. Strauss's Das Leben Jesus, of which Pfander knew nothing. During the debate, Pfander found it impossible not to admit to more discrepancies between the four Gospels than could be explained (as in his writing) by mere copyist error, but he continued to insist that "the essential doctrines,.including the Trinity, and those concerning divinity, atonement and intercession, were unharmed by such an admission." His disputants found Pfander's argument that the New Testament had not abrogated but fulfilled the Old Testament by transforming its Hebrew ritual into inner principles quite untenable. This "only struck his audience as mere evasion of an unpalatable fact"--that, in its turn, the New Testament had been replaced by the Qur'an.]٢٢[

Pfander accused Roman Catholic missionaries of sabotaging the proceedings by supplying his opponents with these works, which he, and a whole subsequent generation of evangelical missionaries, continued to dismiss as infidel. E. M. Wherry (١٨٤٣ - ١٩٢٧) wrote, "The Muslims were obliged to abandon their own works and endeavoured to save the day by a