 Beginning around 200 bce, Hindu ritualists (Mīmāṃsakas) and logicians (Naiyāyikas and Vaiśeṣikas) began to defend their religious faith in the Vedas and in the Brahmanical religion with specific arguments. Some of these arguments have precursors in the discussions of the early Sanskrit grammarians, Kātyāyana and Patañjali. The Mīmāṃsakas accepted the arguments of the Buddhists and the Jains that one need not accept the notion of a creator-controller God. However, the Mīmāṃsakas attempted to defend the Vedas against the criticism that the ancient human sages who authored the hymns of the Vedas were ignorant, while the figures like the Buddha and Mahāvīra were omniscient. They contested the notion of an omniscient person (sarvajña), and argued that no humans could be omniscient and free from ignorance, passion, and deceit. Therefore, the Buddha and Mahāvīra could not be free from these faults either, and hence their words cannot be trusted. On the other hand, the Vedas were claimed to be eternal and intrinsically meaningful words, uncreated by any human being (apauruṣeya). Since they were not created by human beings, they were free from the limitations and faults of human beings. Yet the Vedas were meaningful, because the relationship between words and meanings was claimed to be innate. The Vedas were ultimately seen as ordaining the performance of sacrifices. The Mīmāṃsakas developed a theory of sentence-meaning which claimed that the meaning of a sentence centers around some specific action denoted by a verb-root and an injunction expressed by the verbal terminations. Thus, language, especially the scriptural language, primarily orders us to engage in appropriate actions.