The question again arises where did Al-Ghazali gain this knowledge of the Gospel? Did he have access to a Persian or Arabic translation; or was all this material which we have collated, the result of hearsay, gathered from the lips of Christian monks and Jewish rabbis? It is perfectly clear that he was acquainted with Old Testament tradition even more than with that of the New Testament. There are scores of passages in which he refers to the teachings of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the lives of the Old Testament Prophets. We have already referred to translations of the Bible into Arabic before the time of Al-Ghazali in our first chapter. There is a tradition that “the People of the Book used to read the Torah in Hebrew and interpret it in Arabic to the followers of Islam.” Another tradition says that “Kaʾab the Rabbi brought a book to Omar the Caliph and said, ‘Here is the Torah, read it.’”[84] We learn from the Jewish Encyclopædia that “The _fihrist_ of al-Nadim mentions an Ahmed ibn Abd Allah ibn Salam who translated the Bible into Arabic, at the time of Haroun ar-Rashîd, and that _Fahr ud-Din ar-Razi_ mentions a translation of Habbakuk by the son of _Rabban At-Tabari_. Many of the Arabic Historians as At-Tabari, Masʾudi, Hamza, and Biruni cite passages and recount the early history of the Jews in a most circumstantial manner. Ibn Kutaibah, the historian (d. 889), says that he read the Bible; and he even made a collection of Biblical passages in a work which has been preserved by Ibn Jauzi of the twelfth century.” The first important Arabic translation is that of Saʾadia Gaon (892-942). The influence of this translation was in its way as great as that of Gaon’s philosophical work. A version of the Psalms was made by Hafiz al-Quti in the tenth century and from internal evidence we know that the author had been Christian. Another translation of the Old Testament in Arabic was made by the Jews in Cairo in the middle of the eleventh century. The translation of Saʾadia had become a standard work in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, by the end of the tenth century, and it was revised about A. D. 1070.[85] As regards Persian translations of the Bible we learn from the Jewish Encyclopædia that according to Maimonides, the Pentateuch was translated into Persian many hundred years previous to Mohammed. But this statement cannot be further substantiated. In regard to Arabic versions of the Gospels we have already given Dr. Kilgour’s statement.