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.