The Holy War — Page 36
36 Remaining Answer of h a d rat Mirza [Ghulam Ahmad] sahib I shall now dictate the rest of my answer that was left incomplete. Mr. Abdullah Atham states, ‘We do not believe a physical thing that is a man- ifestation of Allah, to be Allah, and we have not believed in the Son of Allah having a body. We believe Allah to be a spirit. ’ This statement of the aforenamed gentleman is immensely contorted and deceptive. The aforementioned gentleman should have stated in clear words that we rec- ognize Jesus as to be God and believe him to be the Son of Allah because every single person understands and knows that there is no mutually necessary association between the body and the spirit so that the body should be declared to be a part of some person. For example, when we know some human being to be a human being, do we consider him to be a human being because of a certain special body that he possesses? Clearly, this thought is patently false since the body is constantly in a state of dissolution and renewal and in a few years, it is as if the previ- ous body has been replaced by a new one. So what is the special pecu- liarity of the Messiah as in this context? No human being is a human being by virtue of the body he possesses; rather, it is by virtue of his spirit or soul that he is called a human being. If the body was necessary for a person to be who he is, then a person, upon reaching the age of 60, for example, should no longer be considered to be the same per- son, but someone completely different, because in the sixty years he has changed his body many times. This is exactly the case of the Messiah as. The blessed body that he was given in the beginning, with which he was born, could not be offered in atonement nor be of any use. Instead, by age thirty he had acquired a new body, and it is with this body that it is thought that he