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

The Bible came from Arabia

From the First chapter of the book “The Bible came from Arabia” of Kamal Salibi

Where the author explains why and how did he develop his theory

"The present study owes its origins to pure chance. I had been presented with a copy of a gazetteer of Saudi Arabia, published in Riyadh in 1977, and was examining it for place-names of non-Arabic origin in West Arabia, when gradually it dawned on me that I was looking not just at place-names in West Arabia but also at those of the Biblical Old Testament, or what I prefer to call the Hebrew Bible. At first, I thought I must be mistaken, but as the evidence accumulated, I was persuaded that I had stumbled upon a remarkable set of coincidences. Nearly all the Biblical place-names I could think of were concentrated in an area approximately 600 kilometres long and 200 kilometres wide, comprising what are today Asir (Arabic 'Asir) and the southern part of the Hijaz (al-Higaz). All the co-ordinates of the places involved, as described in the Hebrew Bible, were also traceable there — a fact of the first importance, as these co-ordinates have never really been identified in the countries hitherto believed to have been the lands of the Bible. Moreover, I could not find such a concentration of Biblical place-names, usually in their original Hebrew form, in any other part of the Near East. I was obliged to consider the breathtaking possibility that Judaism had originated not in Palestine but in West Arabia, and that the history of the ancient Israelites, as narrated in the Hebrew Bible, ran its full course there and nowhere else. O f course, assuming that my supposition is correct, this does not mean that no Jews lived in Palestine in Biblical times or in

other countries outside West Arabia. What it does mean is that the Hebrew Bible is principally a record of the Jewish historical experience in West Arabia. Unfortunately, how Judaism came to be established from an early time in Palestine, it is not possible to say, as no records exist which might provide an explanation. However, one can make an educated guess.

Among the known religions of the ancient Near East, Judaism stands in a category by itself; no attempt to explain its origins in terms of the religions of ancient Mesopotamia, Syria or Egypt has so far been truly successful, except at the level of mythical borrowings. One such example is the story of the Flood, which may also be found in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, not to mention other ancient folk myths, one of them Chinese. Yet, even in such instances, one cannot really tell where such myths originated, and who borrowed what from whom. However, as we shall see later in Chapter 12, it is reasonable to suppose that the true origins of Judaism may be sought in a trend towards monotheism in ancient Asir, where a number of mountain gods, such as Yahweh, El Sabaoth, El Shalom, El Shaddai, El Elyon and others, came to be identified with one another - how we do not know - and eventually recognised as one supreme deity, perhaps in connection with the amalgamation of some local tribes. Adopted by a local people called the Israelites, this rudimentary West Arabian monotheism eventually developed into a highly thoughtful religion with set scriptures, involving a sophisticated notion of divinity and an exceptionally refined social and ethical content. All things considered, such a religion must have been eminently capable of attracting converts from outside the vicinity of its origin, wherever a certain level of thoughtfulness and moral sensitivity existed. The fact that it was a religion with a book, developed by a literate people, must have facilitated its spread." (continues)