The bible came from Arabia,

Jesus, son of Mary (Issa, son of Marion) lived in the VI century b.c. and died near Medina where his grave was found and described. His teachings were followed during the following centuries by a christian sect called "the nazarens" who settled in west Arabia. In his many books Salibi explains his theory based on real documents.
D.A.

Kamal Salibi, a revolutionary thinker

From Tom Segev

Kamal Salibi was Lebanon's foremost historian. He described Lebanese society as a mosaic of myths, and he scrutinized each myth critically. Many praised not only his analytic powers, but also his courage.
Salibi was born in 1929 to a Greek Orthodox family which later joined the Anglican Church. He studied and lectured at the American University of Beirut. He completed his doctorate in London, under the prominent Near Eastern Studies expert Bernard Lewis. Now associated with conservative Zionism, Lewis is probably not so proud of his student any more: In 1982, as the Israel Defense Forces was invading Beirut, Salibi was working on the galley proofs of a book titled "The Bible Came from Arabia."
Jews praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City, December 25, 2009Emil Salman
It apparently all began when Salibi perused a gazetteer's description of the Arabian Peninsula and noticed that local settlements had names resembling biblical place names. Following linguistic, archaeological and geographic research, including field surveys, Salibi concluded that the biblical Land of Israel is actually located in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula - and not south of Lebanon, as people now believe. Nor is ancient Lebanon the same place as modern Lebanon; it, too, was in the southern Arabian Peninsula, as was David's Kingdom and Jerusalem. The biblical Jordan River is not actually a river, but rather a mountain slope located in the Asir belt of Saudi Arabia, Salibi concluded.
Salibi's book was originally published in Germany, and in 1985 it was distributed by a prestigious London publisher, Jonathan Cape. Naturally, the theory provoked a number of media headlines, and several scientific journals published academic articles refuting it. Now, the theory is discussed mainly online.
Salibi did not repudiate biblical stories themselves; instead, he contended that conventional readings of them were founded on a chain of errors. He believed that the Hebrews came from the Arabian Peninsula. They migrated to what is now known as Eretz Israel, and they established the Hasmonean kingdom here. When they left Arabia, they took their legends with them, written in Hebrew. In their new land, the immigrants stopped using Hebrew and took up Aramaic. The language switch distorted their stories, creating a mistaken version which held that the events had occured in the land now known as Eretz Israel.
Few fields of study are more political than the archaeology of the Land of Israel. Starting in the 19th century, Christian archaeologists from Europe and the United States came here to find evidence of biblical stories. And as modern Zionism took hold, it too made efforts to authenticate the Old Testament. Naturally, Arab archaeologists tried to do the opposite. The Lebanese historian's attempt to remove the people of Israel from the Land of Israel is not essentially different from efforts by the State of Israel to dig up parchments, clay fragments or stone inscriptions to try and prove that the Jewish people are indeed originally from Eretz Israel.
This competition represents an integral part of the Israeli-Arab conflict. For this reason, it would appear that archaeologists' jobs are guaranteed for the time being, even though after decades of searching, not a single biblical story has been verified - not Genesis, not the story of Abraham or Moses, not the Exodus from Egypt, not the tales of King David.
Salibi stressed that his own theory warrants consideration so long as no proof is found contradicting it, especially since there are contradictions in the Bible itself, and Israeli archaeologists have a wont for arguing about where biblical places are located. On this note, Salibi ridiculed the conventional reading of the inscription of Mesha.
Mesha was a Moabite king, and the memorial he built to commemorate his victory over the Kingdom of Israel was found in 1868, east of the Dead Sea. This was interpreted as verification of one of the Bible's stories. The inscription is incomplete, and its language necessitates interpretation and supplements. For instance, the words "south of Rabin," were conventionally taken to mean "many days." Salibi disputed this interpretation, arguing that the word in question, yemen, meant to the south, and that the word rabin referred to a village not far from Mecca where, he believed, the biblical Moab was located. Under this interpretation, Mesha fled the Arabian village and then established a new kingdom.
Salibi recently passed away. His website suggests he had many admirers.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-makings-of-history-myths-and-facts-1.384829

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-makings-of-history-myths-and-facts-1.384829

Who was Jesus?

Issa, Jeshu and the Gospel of the Nazarenes

Adapted from Kamal Salibi, Who was Jesus?

Apparently, there was a Christianity in Arabia, that of the Nasara, or 'Nazarenes', probably from the 6th century BC. that was several centuries older than the one related to the historical Jesus of the Gospels: it was a primordial Christianity that survived in its original homeland certainly until the arrival of Islam, that is, for more than 1,000 years between the sixth century BC. and the seventh century AD

The Koran assumes that this is true Christianity, and affirms that its founder, Issa Ibn Maryam (Jesus, son of Mary), was the true Jesus who did not die on the cross. '

Issa bin Maryam (meaning Jesus, son of Mary) lived in the 6th century a.c. and his lineage would last until the first century of the common era and even beyond

On the other hand, the authors of the Koran (Muhammad and his disciples) who knew Arab Nazarene Christianity very well recognize implicitly the existence of another type of Christianity, supposedly false. According to the Koran, the followers of that false Christianity, in grave error, worshiped the same "Jesus" as a god, maintaining that it is who he was who was crucified. This claim is dismissed outright in the Koran as a hoax.

However, we already know that there was a historical figure (Jesus?) Who died on the cross around 30 AD: a Jesus who was supposed to be descended from David, not from Aaron, and who therefore belonged to the Israelite tribe of Judah, not the tribe of Levi. This Jesus could not have been the son of a woman named Mary, and at the same time have a maternal aunt with the same name, as the Gospel of John affirms. Also, it was not called Jeshu, not Issa (Issa is the name of Jesus in Arabic), but Jeshu (which is a Greek version of the name that has lent itself to permanent confusion). The little that is known about this second person comes basically from the Christian Gospels.

In the Gospels this Jeshu is certainly given some of the attributes of ancient Issa. Matthew, Mark and Luke, for example, claim that their mother was named Mary, Matthew and Luke pointing out that this Mary was still a virgin when she conceived him. John gives man other important attributes of the Qur'an Issa, as we will soon discover; and so does Lucas. The four Gospels call him Son of God, a denomination that, according to the Qur'an, was attributed to Issa by his followers "in grave error." How much more do the Gospels confuse between the Jesus who was Jeshu and the one who was Issa? More importantly, what was the source of their information about the original and ancient 'Jesus', considering that it could not be the existing text of the Qur'an, but a text or tradition that was much older?

The Gospel that still existed in Arabia in the seventh century AD, was the one used by Waraqah Ibn Nawfal, probably written in Aramaic, not in Hebrew. From this lost Aramaic Gospel, nothing can be directly known unless its text is rediscovered one day; but one can safely assume that the story he told about Jesus was not very different from the one that was reconstructed in the previous chapter of the Qur'anic text. It must have been the Gospel of the Nazarenes, whose Jesus was the Issa of the Qur'an Issa, not the Jeshu of Paul and the Greek Gospels. Had it not been so, the Koran could not have claimed that his description of Issa's career was identical to that of the real Injil without exposing this claim to a serious challenge. Certainly, he would not have spoken of the Christian "priests and hermits" who recognize the truth of the Qur'an, and weeping to hear that they are recited (see chapter 4), unless there were known cases in which this happened. The Islamic traditions already recorded in the eighth century AD, and that claim to relate first-hand information, indicate that the same Gospel (in its original Aramaic? In translation?) Still existed in the time of Muhammad in Ethiopia (known by the Arabs as al- Habashah, or 'Abyssinia'). Several of the Prophet's early followers were persecuted in Mecca and fled across the Red Sea in search of refuge in that country. But his Mecca enemies immediately sent a message to warn the Ethiopian king (called Negus) that the Muslim fugitives had abandoned the faith of their ancestors and emigrated to their country without seeking to convert to their religion and become Christians, as was proper to they. do. According to Ibn Ishaq, who wrote the oldest known biography of Muhammad, the Negus summoned the fugitives to his presence and interrogated them on the matter, while his chief bishops attended armed with his writings. In response, the spokesman of the Muslim group recited the chapter of the Koran that speaks of Jesus as Issa Ibn Maryam.

The Koranic Jesus

Kamal Salibi

This Koranic information concerning the 'Jesus' who was Issa can be distilled into a coherent narrative. Originally, this narrative relates, the people of Israel were organized into a religious community by Moses, who gave them the Torah.  Later, two other apostles were sent to them, first Ezra, then Issa. The followers of the first became the Jews; the followers of the second the Nazarene Christians; and each of these two communities came to revere its special apostle as a son of God.  Among some 'Nazarenes' (here the Christians in general) Jesus even came to be worshipped as God himself. Born of a virgin, Issa was a miraculous being whose human person was a living manifestation of the Holy Spirit and the divine kalimah, or prophetic 'word'. He performed miracles, and was able to raise the dead back to life. As a man, he was a consecrated or ordained person, which implies an association with priesthood. While he accepted the essence of the Mosaic law, he made a point of alleviating some of its rigour in his own preaching, which was the Gospel. In life, he was surrounded by a select group of followers called al-Hawariyyun, apparently because they wore special white robes.  The Jews, however, opposed his mission and scoffed at his miracles, and there was a claim among them that they actually succeeded in putting him to death, either by crucifixion or in some other manner. There were even Christians who accepted this claim. The person who was really crucified, however, was not Issa himself but someone else with whom his identity was confused. The real Issa was assumed to heaven, regardless of whether or not he died a natural human death. Before leaving the earth, he prophesied the coming of another apostle called Ahmad. Ultimately, Issa was to return to life, to pass the final judgement on mankind on the day of the Resurrection. There are two points in this reconstructed Koranic story which are particularly remarkable. First, it makes the correct distinction between the Mosaic monotheism of the early Israelites, and the Jewish faith which began to evolve from it in post-exilic times – with the career of Ezra, by general reckoning. Second, the story clearly depicts Judaism and the original Christianity of the Nazarenes as different departures from the original religion of Israel, and thus suggests a new vision of the origins of Christianity as a sister religion to Judaism, rather than as a runaway Jewish sect, as has long been the common view

While the Koran does not fix a place or date for the mission of Issa, it does give the general impression that, as a latter-day prophet to Israel, he was active in the same environment where Islam was born, i.e. in Western Arabia; also, that Nazarene Christianity emerged at a time when the Israelites, as a people, as distinct from the Jews as a latter-day religious community, still existed – which implies a date for the mission of the Koranic 'Jesus' which is perhaps closer to the fifth century BC than to the first century AD. While there is nothing in Islamic literature to endorse such an early date for the career of Issa, there is at least one indication in this literature that Christianity (certainly, the religion of the Nasara) originated in Arabia rather than Palestine. Writing his geographical dictionary alRawd al-mi'tar fi khabar al-aqtar in the fourteenth century AD, Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Mun'im al-Himyari, a North African Arab originally from the Yemen, expanded on the history of pre-Islamic Christianity in the region of Najran, on the north-eastern peripheries of the Yemen, remarking unequivocally that 'the origin of this religion was in Najran' (wa-kan asl dhalik al-din bi-Najran).* That Christianity should have originated in Arabia before making a fresh start and assuming a new form in Palestine is not implausible. As indicated in the introduction, I remain personally convinced that the history of the Biblical Israelites ran its full course in Western Arabia, and that the original monotheism of Moses as well as the Judaism that evolved from it have their roots there, and not in Palestine. In terms of historical geography, Palestine can be viewed as a northward extension of Western Arabia, and some Arabian Israelites apparently did arrive to settle in that country in Biblical times. Later, during the Hellenistic period, Judaism under the Hasmonean dynasty came to have one of its main political centres in Palestine, where the principal Jewish city was called Jerusalem after the older, Israelite (and hence Biblical) Jerusalem of Arabia - probably the present village of Al Sharim in the Asir highlands, once referred to in ancient Arabi literature as Uri Shalim.

* See al-Rawd al-Mi'tar fi khabar al-aqtar, ed. Ihsan Abbas (Beirut, 1984), p. 573.)

From; "Who was Jesus?". Kamal Salibi