My apologies once again for the late reply. I was really caught up in my work and have to work even during weekends.
My reply to Liberate:
1. Please read Tisdall message carefully. First, he said the Gospel of Infancy could not have dated from the Prophet's time
2. If he would believe that the the Gospel has been translated before the Prophet's time, he would have clearly said so. The man was so much against Islam he would not miss to make the outright claim. Strangely, he did not do that. But I have here Mr Liberate who interpreted Tisdall in another way.
3. He went on to say "that there seems little room for doubt that it has been translated into Arabic from the Coptic, in which language it may have been composed." So what? That is not the issue. The onus is on christians like Liberate to PROVE that the Arabic Gospel of Infancy was available during the Prophet's time. I have not seen that evidence yet.
4. Modern scholars (Tisdall wrote this in 1900 and is ourdated) who have studied the Arabic Gospels have a different view of the earliest available Arabic Gospels (the NT or the Gnostics):
Moreover, if Judeo-Christian thought had really made inroads into Jahiliyyan society and culture, the absence of an Arabic translation of the Bible could not be explained. As for the New Testament, it is certain that no Arabic translation of it existed in the fourth century of Hijrah. This is evident from the reference by Ghazzali, who had to resort to a Coptic manuscript to write his Rad, a respectable refutation of the divinity of Jesus according to the Gospel. In translating the work of the Arab philosopher, Rev. Fr. Chidiac searched everywhere for Gospel sources which could have served at the time of the composition of Rad. He finally found a manuscript in the library of Leningrad written about 1060 by a certain Ibn al-Assal as the first edition of a Christian text in Arabic. Thus, there did not exist an Arabic edition of the Gospels at the time of Ghazzali, and, a fortiori, it did not exist during the Pre-Islamic period.
Malik BenNabi, The Qur'ânic Phenomenon, 1983, American Trust Publications, pp 154.
Also:
The oldest known, dated manuscripts containing Arabic translations of the New Testament are in the collections of St. Catherine's monastery at Mt. Sinai. Sinai Arabic MS 151 contains an Arabic version of the Epistles of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Catholic Epistles. It is the oldest dated New Testament manuscripts. The colophon of this MS informs us that one Bisr Ibn as-Sirri made the translation from Syriac in Damascus during Ramadan of the Higrah year 253, i.e., 867 AD.[11]
Sidney H Griffith, "The Gospel In Arabic: An Enquiry Into Its Appearance In The First Abbasid Century", Oriens Christianus, Volume 69, p. 131-132.
5. Tisdall was probably aware of the difficulty of making his claim that the Arabic Gospel of Infancy was available during the Prophet's time. Liberate was not so careful.
6. Tisdall tried to circumvent his lost cause by resorting to another mean. He said the Prophet might have learn it from Mary the Copt. I have already shown that the verses on the childhood of Jesus were revealed before Mary came.
salam