Who was Jesus?  (5)

The tomb of the koranic Jesus

According to a story originally told by an Arabian notable from Medina, in the Hijaz, and quoted by the great Arab scholar al-Tabari (d. AD 923) in his major historical work Tarikh al-rusul wal-muluk (Cairo edition, 1967, vol.1, pp.603-4) the tomb of the koranic Jesus was on a hill near Medina.:

According to a story originally told by an Arabian notable from Medina, in the    Hijaz, and quoted by the great Arab scholar al-Tabari (d. AD 923) in his major     historical work Tarikh al-rusul wal-muluk (Cairo edition, 1967, vol.1, pp.603-4):

One of our womenfolk had made a vow to climb to the peak of al-Jamma', a mountain in al-Aqiq, [south of] Medina. So I climbed with her until we reached the mountain top. There stood an enormous sarcophagus with two huge tombstones, one [at each end], which bore inscriptions in a writing unknown to me. I carried the two stones back with me. But as I was crossing a passage down the mountainside, the two of them became too difficult for me to carry; so I dropped one and descended with the other. I asked people who knew Syriac if they could read [the inscription on that stone], but they could not. Then I showed it to people from the Yemen who could write [Hebrew], or who wrote the South Arabian script, and they could not read it. So, when I found no one who could make sense of [the inscription], I put it away at home under a chest, where it remained for years. Then some Persians arrived [in Medina] from [the town of]Maha to buy beads. I asked them: “Do you have a written language?” They answered: “We do.” So I brought out the [inscription] for them [to see] and, behold, they were reading it, as it was in their script: “This is the grave of Issa ibn Maryam, the messenger of God to the people of this land.” It turned out that [Persians] had inhabited the area at that time, and [Issa] died in their midst, so they buried him on top of the mountain.

This story not only confirms the location of the career of Issa ibn Maryam in the Arabian province of the Hijaz, but also relates it to the period of Persian rule in the lands of the Near East (535-330 BC). More interesting, however, is the fact that ¤abar• was aware that the Issa who was buried on top of Mount Jamma', south of Medina, was a person entirely different from the Jesus who was crucified by the Jews in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius. “I have been told,” he says, “that the man taken to be Issa and crucified in his place was an Israelite called Ishubin Fandara” (Tabari, vol.1, p.605). This name is none other than the pejorative name Yeshu' ben Panthera, or ben Pandera (see chapter three), by which the Jewish Talmud refers to the Davidic Jesus who was crucified in the Palestinian Jerusalem, and whom we have agreed to call Jeshu bar Nagara (see chapter seven).

With respect to the dating of the career of the Koranic Jesus who was Issa ibn Maryam, the Damascene Muslim historian, Abul-Qasim Ibn Asakir, writing in the twelfth century AD (Sirat al-Sayyid al-Masih, Suleiman Murad, ed., Amman, 1996, par.10), cites a tradition related by an early Muslim authority who died in AD 721 which asserts that the “ascension” of Issa to God’s presence occurred 933 years before the start of the Muslim era (AD 622). Unless another explanation can be given to this tradition, it means that the “ascension” of Issa (possibly to mean his canonization or apotheosis) occurred is 311 BC, and that his career as a prophet and Aaronic Messiah belonged to the late fourth century BC, and not to the late fifth or early fourth centurs earlier surmised