Jesus from Arabia?

According to Kamal Salibi, for many years, Paul known as the Apolstle of the Gentiles, he had a dissenting relationship with Jesus original followers from Jerusalem, and when he had the religious revelation,  the first thing he did was to travel to Arabia, not to Jerusalem,  It is known that at that time there were important jewish communities, in Arabia, including Medina, Mecca and Najarn.
These communities had strong relationship with the “legitime” priestly lineage of Issa (Jesus?), the son of Mariam (Mary), as it is described in the Koran, whixh Salibi dats around the sixth century B.C. and that perhaps were also related with Jesus, who might have been descendent of this ancient lineage. Perhaps Jesus was a descendant of Issa and somehow both persons were syncretized in the early Christians jew communities of Arabia.  It is importante to remember thatKoran was written in the VII century A.D. when Christian traditions werel alive and there were organized Christian communities (the Nazarens)..  

“Once Paul received the revelation the first thing he did was to go 'at once' (Greek eutheos) to Arabia, and not to Jerusalem; also, that he only went to Jerusalem 'three years' (not merely 'many days') later, where he only met Peter and James, staying no more than two weeks in Peter's house. Paul further points out that he did not visit Jerusalem again until fourteen years later (Galatians 2:1). This was the time he met Peter and the other apostles, who finally agreed to recognize his apostleship to the Gentiles, then immediately asked him for money. Three questions arise here. First, why did Paul, having experienced his revelation of Jesus as the Son of God, decide to go at once to Arabia instead of Jerusalem, although he was fully aware that the apostles who had known Jesus were in Jerusalem? Second, why did the book of Acts omit all reference to Paul's Arabian visit, although Paul himself appears to have regarded it as highly important, since he decided to go immediately after his conversion? Third, why does Paul nowhere explain exactly why he went to Arabia – at least nowhere in his available writings?

… Clearly, the voyage which Paul hastened to undertake immediately following his conversion was to a place that lay beyond Roman Arabia, in the peninsula: probably the Hijaz, or the Yemen. There was an old-established and known community of Jews there at that time, and it is quite possible that Paul went to visit them. These Arabian Jews were important enough to be included among the Jewish communities of the world mentioned by Josephus in the opening passages of his book, The Jewish Wars, which he wrote shortly after the Roman sack of Jerusalem in AD 70. Possibly, they knew something extremely important about Jesus himself and his mission which Paul wanted to learn from them first-hand before embarking on his own apostolic work. In Jerusalem, he could only acquire this information secondhand – and perhaps in a highly edited fashion – from the followers of Jesus. Paul must have had a strong suspicion that James, Peter, John and their party were covering up some secret, and certainly not telling the full truth about the origins of their mission. Having become an apostle in his own

What  Acts  does  not  say  about  Paul right by virtue of the independent revelation he had received, Paul may have felt entitled to discover for himself what this secret was. If there was a secret about Jesus which could only be directly learnt in Arabia, and not in Palestine, then the Jerusalem apostles, and also Jesus himself, must have been in Arabia at some point. Perhaps they were Arabian Israelites who came from there. Is it for this reason that the Gospels, apart from the different infancy narratives given by Matthew and Luke, only speak of the last three years – possibly the last months or even weeks – of the career of Jesus, without saying anything about his earlier life and activity? As the self-appointed guardians of the secret of their Way (hodos) outside Arabia, the original disciples of Jesus must have been gravely disturbed to discover that Paul, who was not one of their number, had undertaken a journey to Arabia to find out what they knew and so, as an outside party, learn their secret. They certainly did not wish the knowledge of Paul's visit to Arabia to spread. It must have been for this reason that they deliberately suppressed all mention of this visit in accounts of Paul's early career which they fabricated and circulated. In these accounts, they claimed instead that Paul was first baptized and introduced to their Way in Damascus by Ananias who, if he was not a fictitious character, was presumably one of their own followers. After that, they claimed, Paul came to seek further instruction in Jerusalem, directly from themselves, thereby alleging that his apostleship was not independent of their own, but derived from it. Once he had gone to Arabia and gained a direct knowledge of the secret origins of the Nazarene Way, Paul was in a position to challenge the Jerusalem apostles on their own grounds, even to the extent of standing up to James, the 'Lord's brother'. He could undermine the religious authority which these apostles were determined to keep as their special preserve. The question, however, remains: if Paul did not go to Arabia to meditate, preach or reconnoitre, but to learn something, what was it that he learnt? Was it something concerning the life of Jesus of which the Jerusalem apostles never spoke? Was it a special Israelite theology or cult from which the mission of Jesus and the apostles derived?"

(to be continued)

From  the book   “Who was Jesus? Conspiracy in Jerusalem”, Kamal Salibi