2بَل عَجِبوا أَن جاءَهُم مُنذِرٌ مِنهُم فَقالَ الكافِرونَ هٰذا شَيءٌ عَجيبٌMuhammad AsadBut nay - they deem it strange that a warner should have come unto them from their own midst;1 and so these deniers of the truth are saying, "A strange thing is this!This is the earliest Qur'anic mention - repeated again and again in other places of people's "deeming it strange" that a purportedly divine message should have been delivered by someone "from their own midst", i.e., a mortal like themselves. Although it is undoubtedly, in the first instance, a reference to the negative attitude of the Meccan pagans to Muhammad's call, its frequent repetition throughout the Qur'an has obviously an implication going far beyond that historical reference: it points to the tendency common to many people, at all stages of human development, to distrust any religious statement that is devoid of all exoticism inasmuch as it is enunciated by a person sharing the social and cultural background of those whom he addresses, and because the message itself relies exclusively - as the Qur'an does - on an appeal to man's reason and moral sense. Hence, the Qur'an explicitly mentions people's "objections" to a prophet "who eats food [like ordinary mortals] and goes about in the market-places" (25:7; see also note 16 on 25:20).