The Bible Came from Arabia
It’s not me that’s saying that, but it is the title of a book by Kamal Salibi¹, and I’m hoping that this possibly provocative title has attracted the attention of anyone interested in Christianity and its origins. His third book is the best I’ve ever read on that subject, which is why I’ve devoted a long article to his work. I’m hoping readers won’t be daunted by the length but, if it seems too much for one sitting, I invite you to return to it as and when you can.
This is the latest in a series, which began as a conversation between Benjamin Cain and myself about the controversial subject of whether there ever was a Historical Jesus, or whether the portrayal in the gospels is of a mythical figure. Here is a summary of what has preceded for anyone who is joining the discussion now. (Please feel free to jump ahead to the next section if you’ve been reading so far.)
Cain gave an account of the mythicist position in this article, one claim being that the figure of Jesus was more of a type, rather than a specific individual. I did not think that this did justice to the gospel accounts, in that it missed out much information, namely that the gospels claim that Jesus was a unique individual, the legitimate heir to the throne of Israel, being the descendant of King David. I therefore wrote this article in response, presenting a possible Historical Jesus, based upon the surface level of the gospels. There were then a few more exchanges between Cain and myself, not directly relevant to the current main theme, which is Paul’s supernatural Christ-figure, and how credible that is. According to the modern scientific approach to history, in Cain’s words, this can be “swiftly eliminated”. I am arguing that this is not the case. Before getting round to my defence of Paul’s theology, I am writing some articles going into the relevant background, trying to establish exactly who or what Paul’s Christ-figure is. This has meant asking the related questions:
- Who founded Christianity, Jesus or Paul?
- To what extent were the four canonical gospels written under Paul’s influence?
(The first question was discussed specifically in this article. The second has been an ongoing theme.)
In the light of all this, in the most recent article, I argued that the most significant verse in the New Testament was Paul’s statement, which he swears as an oath, that he went immediately to Arabia following his conversion. This meant that the account in Acts, which includes his vision on the road to Damascus, was a lie. Christians find that hard to countenance, if they believe in Bible infallibility, as they do Paul’s statement that he needed to go to Arabia, presumably in order to find out about the religion to which he had been converted.
The mythicist claim is that there almost certainly was no Historical Jesus, because the story in the gospels is purely that of the god of the various pagan Mystery traditions. (That claim will be examined, and perhaps challenged, below.) Also, as noted earlier, Marcion and Valentinus, two Gnostic teachers, considered Paul to be the one true apostle, Valentinus going so far as to say that Paul was the actual source of his tradition. If all this is true, then logic suggests that Paul must have been initiated into a Gnostic tradition, steeped in the Mysteries of the ancient world, somewhere in what he called Arabia.
This brings us to the work of Salibi. He was a Lebanese professor of history, with a special interest in biblical studies, who understood Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek, and had an in-depth knowledge of comparative phonology and morphology. He was therefore eminently qualified for his project, to understand the Bible, and the history hidden within it beneath the surface. He describes himself as a Christian but, unlike the Christians I discussed in the previous article, who tried to avoid the issue, he took Paul’s statement about Arabia seriously and decided to investigate. He is also willing to consider all available sources of information, including the Koran, which Christian scholars may think unnecessary, or even irrelevant. So my purpose now is to explore what Salibi found, and assess to what extent it is consistent with what I have said about Paul so far.
His book most relevant to my theme is Conspiracy in Jerusalem: The Hidden Origins of Jesus². However, his first book The Bible Came from Arabia¹, which argued that the location of the Old Testament’s stories was not in Palestine but in Arabia, provides essential background information. In the light of these findings, he went on to write Secrets of the Bible People³, which dealt with material from the Old Testament, and is therefore not directly relevant to the current discussion. Conspiracy in Jerusalem then followed.
Even though I’ve owned copies of the three books for several years, I hadn’t read them before writing the previous article. Since then I’ve read the first and the third. I was very pleased to discover that Salibi’s starting point was the same as my own conclusion, that Paul is rejecting outright the account of his conversion in Acts, including the road-to-Damascus incident; Salibi calls it “an obvious lie” (CIJ, p187). He had earlier said: “The Jerusalem apostles were circulating a different account of the start of his apostolic career — one in which they falsely gave themselves, or at least a man of their party, the major credit for introducing Paul to the new faith” (p25). Their possible motives for doing this, according to Salibi, are interesting and will be mentioned later.
For the purposes of this article and the ongoing discussion about Paul, it is important to accept merely:
- that Arabia was the location of the earliest Old Testament stories
- that the Israelites were originally a local people there, but there was a later migration, not necessarily all at once, to the area of modern Palestine/ Israel
- that some Israelites were still in Arabia, even in the early first century AD.
If you are willing to accept this, even if only for the sake of the argument, and don’t want to explore Salibi’s reasoning for coming to these conclusions, then please jump ahead by one section. Otherwise, please read on.
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THE BIBLE CAME FROM ARABIA
In the introduction to his first book, Salibi makes the bold statement: “the Bible came from West Arabia and not from Palestine”. In order to come to this conclusion, he had noted:
- “how perfectly the geography of the Hebrew Bible matches that of West Arabia and how dubiously it matches that of Palestine” (p47).
- “Of the thousands of place-names mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, only a handful have been linguistically identified with place-names in Palestine”. This is remarkable given that “the place-names (in the Bible) are for the most part of immemorial antiquity, being overwhelmingly Canaanite and Aramaic rather than Arabic in structure. Even in cases where Palestinian locations carry Biblical names, the co-ordinates given… do not readily fit the Palestine sites” (p23).
- “The famed ‘Tables of Nations’ in Genesis 10… are actually lists of ancient West Arabian tribes and communities”. “Genesis is, in fact, no more than a narrative of ancient West Arabian legend” (p158).
He says that the evidence is overwhelming, which means that he is in almost total disagreement with what is written by others on the geography in the Hebrew Bible (p1).
The Arabian area in question is “approximately 600 kilometres long and 200 kilometres wide, comprising what are today Asir and the southern part of the Hijaz”. (This is about two-thirds down the East coast of the Red Sea, quite near the water, just north of modern-day Yemen.) This is the Biblical Judah, which suggests the possibility “that the history of the ancient Israelites… ran its full course there and nowhere else” (p7). (For convenience, in all of what follows, when I say ‘Arabia’ or ‘Arabian’, please understand this to refer to this specific area.)
Here is a brief description of Salibi’s method. His argument rests mainly “on a linguistic analysis of Biblical place-names which… have until now been consistently mistranslated” (p1). It is therefore within the field of toponymy — the study of the origins, meanings, use and typology of place-names. Because of problems with the Hebrew language, in order to understand the Bible, he prefers to “seek guidance from closely related Semitic languages which are still alive today, such as Arabic or Syriac”. His argument is therefore based on “the comparative phonology and morphology of these languages” (p3). During the course of the book he gives numerous examples of place-names mentioned in the Old Testament, which make much more sense if located in West Arabia.
The problems with the Hebrew language are as follows. It “passed out of common usage some time after the sixth or fifth centuries BC”. It is therefore “impossible to know how it was originally pronounced and vocalised by the ancient people or peoples who spoke it. Nor do we know anything of its orthography, grammar, syntax or idiom”. He has therefore “treated Hebrew as a virtually unknown language to be deciphered afresh” (p27).
He says that the language traditionally called Hebrew would appear to have been originally “a dialect of a Semitic language commonly spoken in various parts of South Arabia, West Arabia and Syria (including Palestine) during Biblical times”, and that this ancient language is today called Canaanite (p8). “Another Semitic language spoken in peninsular Arabia and Syria was Aramaic, so called after the Biblical Aramaeans” (p9). “Such being the proximity between Canaanite-speakers and Aramaic-speakers in Biblical West Arabia” he thinks that the Israelites “were at a loss to decide to which group they originally belonged”. As evidence Salibi refers to Deuteronomy 26:5, where this instruction is given: “You shall make this response before the LORD your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor’ ”. Since they normally considered themselves Hebrews, “this apparent contradiction has long puzzled Biblical scholars”, but makes eminent sense if his theory is correct. (The use of the word ‘wandering’ seems highly significant in the light of Salibi’s theory.)
The historical details of the migration to Palestine, and the reasons for it, have been lost. However, Salibi speculates that the revival of the imperial power of Egypt, and new Egyptian interventions, “caused the Israelite kingdom to split between the rival dynasties of ‘Judah’ and ‘Israel’. The civil wars which followed among the Israelites… could well have triggered off the first large-scale migrations to other countries, notably Palestine” (p15). This idea will be highly significant when we discuss the Historical Jesus.
Significant for the same reason are his statements that:
- “The Hebrew Bible as we know it is essentially the product of the kingdom of Judah, rather than that of the rival kingdom of Israel. After the destruction of both kingdoms, it was Judah which was better remembered. …the name Judah was assigned to all the former territory of the Israelites in Achaemenid times. It was from Judah, not Israel, that the Jews as a religious community got the name by which they are still known” (p98).
- “There appears to have been a religious schism which pitted the orthodoxy of ‘Judah’, which survives as Judaism, against the heterodoxy of ‘Israel’…” (p130).
…and his speculation that “the Hasmonaeans may have deliberately encouraged the reinterpretation of Biblical geography in terms of Palestine rather than Arabia to promote their own Judaic legitimacy, assuming that it could have been challenged by Arabian Jewish kings in Himyar” (p22). This would be an example of the well-known saying, it is the winners who rewrite history.
Some surprising claims, shocking in the light of the conventional understanding, are:
- “The name ‘Israel’ formerly referred to a West Arabian kingdom” (p15). It is a place-name meaning “the height of God”, and can be found in southern Hijaz and Asir (p124).
- King David was from the Arabian Judah. His home town Bethlehem was “a village known today as Umm Lahm” (p97).
- Jerusalem is the Holy City, but “there was another Jerusalem in West Arabia, whose existence pre-dates that of the one in Palestine” (p110).
- The Judah where the twelve tribes settled was in Arabia. There “ ‘Israel’ did have its original centres of power to the north of ‘Judah’. Theirs, however, were not territories with clear boundaries between them. Rather they involved a political division within the same territory, based on rival loyalties reinforced by religious schism” (p126).
- His identification in Arabia of the location of the Garden of Eden, as described in the Old Testament (p173–5).
- The Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon, surprisingly included in the Bible since it is a collection of erotic poetry) is an “example of the folklore of the Jizan mountains”, and not the only one to be found in the Hebrew Bible (p186). Even if the style does not give the game away, as it should, then the place-names “must have come originally from the mountains of the Jizan hinterland” (p182).
In his book The Pagan Christ⁴, Tom Harpur, has a chapter called ‘The Bible — History or Myth?’ He is arguing strongly for the mythicist case, and this chapter goes into detail about the claim that there is no archaeological evidence for the stories of the Old Testament. As one of his epigrams he quotes Alvin Boyd Kuhn: “There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible!”
Harpur begins by referring to scholarly conferences which have disputed biblical historicity, and four articles in significant newspapers and journals. He focuses, however, on the lead article in Harper’s magazine March 2002, ‘False Testament’ by Daniel Lazare, which stated that “archaeology now refutes the Bible’s claim to history”. Harpur describes that as “the most trenchant, current account” he has seen. “Citing the most recent evidence (or rather, for the most part, the lack of it), Lazare pulled the foundation out from under almost every major historical beam in the edifice of accepted wisdom about everything from the existence of Abraham and the other biblical patriarchs to the Exodus from Egypt, the supposed glories of Kings David and Solomon, and even the reputed conquest of the Promised Land (Canaan)”.
The chapter continues with much more in the same vein, but you get the general idea. Salibi would agree with these conclusions if one assumes that Palestine was the location. However, as he says, these archaeologists are all looking in the wrong place! He notes that scholars frequently question the historicity of the Old Testament but never the geography (p23). He says that they have all got this the wrong way round, and that his conclusions will make a difference to the Bible as a book of religion, since they “will establish the veracity of Biblical history to a degree that no one has so far suspected” (p189).
He says that his conclusions will remain “theoretical until confirmed by archaeological investigation” (p1). As just noted, however, archaeological investigations in Palestine have so far led nowhere. There is a good chance, therefore, that investigations in Arabia might prove more fruitful. However, according to an anonymous online source: “The Saudi government did in fact bulldoze entire villages after the publication of Salibi’s first book; to this day the Saudis refuse to allow any scientific digging in Asir”. This suggests that he might well have been on the right track.
Salibi’s theory is undoubtedly controversial. He later noted: “My proposition elicited angry responses and indignant condemnations from Old Testament specialists. However, none of these scholars has so far advanced a single item of direct or even circumstantial evidence to prove me wrong” (CIJ, p4). I imagine that this is often what happens when someone gets dangerously close to the truth!
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CONSPIRACY IN JERUSALEM
I’ll now turn to the discussion about Paul, and his reason for going to Arabia. The reasonable assumption is that it was to learn about the new religion to which he had recently been converted. This is the theme of Salibi’s third book.
Firstly, for those of you who have read the previous section, here’s a reminder of what it is necessary to accept:
- Arabia was the location of the earliest Old Testament stories.
- the Israelites/Hebrews were originally a local people there, but there was some kind of later transfer/migration by many of them to the area of modern Palestine/Israel.
- Some descendants of the original people remained in Arabia even in the early first century.
If anyone finds this difficult to believe, Salibi argues that many place-names with which we are familiar in the Bible, and which we assume are located in Palestine, had earlier versions in Arabia, for example Jerusalem, Galilee, Judah, Samaria. (If this seems strange, it can be noted that exactly the same thing happens in modern times; when people move to, or discover, a new country, they use names with which they are already familiar: New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, New Zealand, and so on.) Because we are unaware of the earlier locations, we mistakenly assume that some events which are said to have happened in ‘Galilee’ took place in Palestine, when they actually took place in Arabia.
Even though the West Arabian origins of Judaism were apparently forgotten, there are various clues in the Old Testament which suggest that some writers knew the truth. For example, there are several references to the “daughter of Jerusalem”, the most striking of which is “The former dominion shall come, The kingdom of the daughter of Jerusalem” (Micah 4:9). (See also Isaiah 37:22, 2 Kings 19:21 and 30–31). There was also the reference in Deuteronomy to the ancestor being a wandering Aramean, as noted in the previous section.
Salibi’s theory helps to address one of the frequent complaints of scholars, that the gospel writers had a very poor knowledge of Palestinian geography. The usual explanation given is that they had never been to Palestine. Salibi suggests again that the scholars are looking in the wrong place, and that the relevant locations can be found in Arabia.
Nazareth is the most striking example, given its importance in the conventional narrative. You frequently read in books of New Testament criticism that at the time of Jesus, even though he is said to have lived there, there is no evidence of a town called Nazareth. (This does not prevent some second-rate authors producing maps of ‘Palestine at the time of Jesus’ which include it!) The usual explanation offered is that the real meaning is that Jesus was a Nazarene or Nazarite, thus part of a religious tradition (which seems to be true, as discussed below), and that Matthew and Luke simply misunderstood, thinking that the word referred to a town.
Salibi agrees with the original complaint, saying that “the earliest possible mention of its name in a known archaeological record actually dates from no earlier than the third century AD” (p83). Since he believes that the historical Jesus came from the Galilee in Arabia, he suggests that we should look there to find Nazareth. The Arabic for Galilee is Jalil, and at his time of writing (and presumably even later) there was a valley in Arabia called Wadi Jalil, thus precisely the same name. Furthermore, “the tribe inhabiting this valley are called to this day the Nasirah (spelt nsrt), which is exactly the name of the town of Nazareth (Arabic Nasirah, also nsrt) in the Palestinian Galilee” (p82). He mentions some known migrations which used former names upon arrival, and says therefore that it is perfectly plausible to suggest that the names of Galilee and Nazareth were introduced to northern Palestine by similar migrations at some earlier time.
Further evidence that some of the gospel accounts takes place in Arabian Galilee is that:
- “the Gospels completely fail to mention the most important towns which did exist in the Palestinian Galilee in early Roman times”. The most obvious example would be the significant town of Sepphoris, which would have been near the supposed location of Nazareth (p83). (Several scholars have noted this strange omission.)
- “Some of the Galilean places which the Gospels do mention in connection with the early career of their Jesus have not been satisfactorily located by their names in the Palestinian Galilee. Some of these names, however, certainly do exist to this day in the Hijaz”, for example, Bethsaida (which means the ‘house’ or ‘temple’ of syd) corresponds to the present village of Sayadah (exactly syd) (p83).
Elaborating on the second point, Salibi notes: “In two instances where Matthew (11:21) and Luke (10:13) speak of this Bethsaida, they associate it with another place called Chorazin (Semitic original qrzn), which has equally defied identification in the Palestinian Galilee”. Near the Arabian Bethsaida, however, “stands the village called today Qurazimah (qrzm)” (p83–4). (The difference in the final letter is insignificant, because the suffixes m and n “in the Semitic languages normally indicate the masculine plural, and are interchangeable”.)
Yet more evidence is that Jesus’s disciples, as named in the gospels, appear to come from Arabian villages. Thus James and John, ‘the sons of Zebedee’, would seem to have come from Zbida (Aramaic, modern-day Zubaydah). The sons of Alphaeus (Levi and James) would have come from the modern-day ‘Allaf. Judas Iscariot would have been a native of the village of Iskar. Simon Zelotes, should be interpreted as Ze’lota (Greek form Zelotes) which means a person from the village of Zu’lah. All these places were, or still are, close to each other in the Arabian Galilee, as described by Salibi.
We are therefore led to conclude that the gospels are telling the story the wrong way round. They say that Jesus’s mission began with his baptism in Palestinian Galilee, after which he began to attract followers there. In the light of Salibi’s analysis, it would seem clear that Jesus first enlisted some followers in Arabian Galilee, and then set off for Palestine. Were the gospel writers innocently ignorant of the true story, copying from earlier sources which they did not understand, or were they deliberately concealing what they knew? It is hard to believe that they were completely ignorant. The reasons why they might have been trying to conceal the true facts will be explored later.
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Preliminary Thoughts on the Historical Jesus According to Salibi
These interesting details are already leading me to wonder whether they might be historical. The mythicist claim is that the writers in their ‘biographies’ wrote myth as if it were history. If that is the case, why would they have added these strange details, which surely could not have appeared in any mythical story? Why would they suggest that certain villages were in Palestine, when they knew full well that they were actually in Arabia? Even if they were ignorantly copying earlier sources, which seems unlikely, the writers of these sources must have known that they were writing about Arabia.
Let’s pursue the Historical Jesus question further. Salibi agrees with one of the mythicists’ observations, that much of the material in the gospels is an “exegetical elaboration of Old Testament material” (p35), and that if one removes the exegetical material from Matthew’s Christmas story, for example, then nothing of it remains”. Also, “the whole story of the passion and death of Jesus, as told in the Gospels, is replete with direct or cryptic references to Old Testament prophecies” (p37, p38). He believes, however, that once all the Old Testament material is removed, “what is left are a few items of fortuitous information, which there is no reason to consider untrue” (p39):
- the reference to Jesus as a carpenter or carpenter’s son, even if this is merely a surname
- Jesus’s father is called Joseph in all four gospels
- Jesus had brothers and sisters
- the well known historical details as recorded in the gospels — the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, Herod as Tetrarch, Pontius Pilate as procurator
- Jesus had named disciples and friends
- He led a disturbance in the Jerusalem temple, which led to his trial and execution.
He adds that “there is the clear fact that Gospel Jesus in his time was commonly accepted as a descendant of David, which gives a total of seven items” (p48). (These are therefore clues to the possibility of a historical Jesus, and the significance of these seven will become clear shortly.)
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What Did Paul Discover in Arabia?
Paul does not reveal in so many words what he found, since he never again refers directly to his journey. It is not hard to work out some of what he found, and what happened to him, however, when one reads his epistles. Salibi says that there must have been Christian scriptures older than the canonical gospels, written in Aramaic: “Paul occasionally mentioned such scriptures and sometimes quoted from them in his epistles… Indeed, in one epistle, he referred to his ‘books… and especially the ones made of parchment (2 Timothy 4:13)”. Salibi thinks that “some of these books were perhaps the sources of his Christian scriptural quotations — sources which no longer exist” (p10).
It is interesting that Paul sometimes says “according to the scriptures”, and scholars scratch their heads because they cannot find the reference in the Old Testament and known related sources. Here is one example : “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures… he was buried, and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15: 3-4). He does not reveal which scriptures he is referring to. One scholar therefore concludes that “it is quite likely that he… is referring to allegorical interpretations of Bible passages”⁵. Salibi offers us a more credible explanation; Paul was quoting now lost scriptures that do not occur in the Bible. The quotes in Corinthians are far more likely to have come from those texts.
In Arabia Paul must have discovered that an earlier prophet by the name of Jesus had lived there a long time previously. (His actual name was Issa, which looks nothing like Jesus to us, or even in the original Aramaic but, as Salibi explains, both names can be rendered as Iesous for ‘Jesus’ in Greek transliteration (p49) — Greek being the language of the gospels.) One text he must have discovered was the Aramaic Gospel of this Issa. Much of its contents found its way into the canonical gospels. (Whether he was directly responsible for this is a question which will be discussed later.) This gospel is now lost, but Salibi believes it was still in existence in the seventh century AD. A copy of it was in the possession of Waraqah Ibn Nawfal, a Christian who was a mentor to Muhammad. (This explains how some of its contents appear in the Koran, where this Issa is mentioned at some length.)
Salibi is happy to use the Koran as source material. He does not make any rash claims to divine revelation, but says that most of the Koran material is highly original. “It is therefore reasonable, at least tentatively, to proceed on the assumption that the Koranic story of Issa preserves an independent tradition concerning the origins of Christianity — a tradition which was still current in Arabia in the seventh century, when Islam was born” (p47).
Of this Issa, the Koran has the following to say:
- He was the son of the virgin Mary, and by implication her only child
- He was the Arabic equivalent of the Greek logos (the ‘Word’ of John’s gospel)
- He was born in the Arabian land of the Hijaz
- He was a man of God to whom a special ‘book’ was divinely delivered, which was the Gospel, in the singular (presumably the Gospel mentioned above, a copy of which Paul acquired)
- He was endowed with the Holy Spirit
- He was (or was called) the Christ, “an appellation which the Koran cites but neither explains nor disputes”
- He was born pure, and was not the product of human procreation
- He worked miracles, and could bring the dead back to life
- He confirmed the contents of the Torah, but permitted some forbidden things
- Some people, in error, considered him to be the son of God. Others, also in error, considered Issa to be God in person, although he was, in fact, human and mortal
- God made Issa ascend to him
- He was to be brought to life again, to bear witness against unbelievers on the day of the Resurrection.
(p49–51. Salibi cites even more. I’ve selected those with an especially Christian flavour.)
It is significant that Salibi’s six items of fortuitous information, plus the belief in the descent from David, are not to be found in this list, nor anywhere else in the Koran (p48), thus do not figure in the life of the earlier Jesus, known as Issa. Salibi thinks it reasonable to assume, therefore, that they are probably true facts, albeit relatively insignificant apart from the last one, about the Historical Jesus; if there were no such figure, why would they appear so frequently in the gospels? As Salibi says: “They do not appear to involve any special pleading (the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy)” (p48). He therefore concludes that “the Jesus of the Koran, who was Issa, has nothing in common with the Jesus of the Gospels, who was Jeshu, except that their different historical identities came somehow to be confused” (p49). (That is another puzzle to be addressed later.)
Perhaps the most surprising conclusion for Christians is that there is no reason to believe that Jesus’s mother’s name was Mary. Mary was the mother of the earlier Issa, and the appearance of this name in the synoptic gospels is probably a result of the confusion just referred to. Interestingly, while all four gospels insist that Jesus’s father was called Joseph (not true of Issa), only three say that his mother’s name was Mary. John omits this from his narrative, and Salibi believes that this was deliberate because he was aware of the true story, having the Aramaic Gospel available to him as a source. (He also seems the most knowledgeable of the four about the historical Jesus, which will be discussed below.) Also, in Paul’s epistles, in the one instance where Jesus’s mother is mentioned (Galatians 4.4), she is left unnamed. This suggests that Paul may also have known the truth.
According to Salibi, Luke must have had a copy of the Gospel of Issa in front of him, since “the story told by Luke concerning the virgin pregnancy of Mary and the birth of Jeshu is identical with the one which the Koran relates concerning Issa in a number of essential respects”:
- “in his own story of the so-called ‘Annunciation’ to Mary, (Luke) repeats this information almost word for word” (p68).
- The same is true of “the story of the miraculous birth of the prophet Yahya to the aged priest Zechariah and his old and barren wife. The same must have been the case in the lost Nazarene Gospel” (p68).
- John the Baptist is prominent in all four gospels, and is also mentioned by the contemporary historian Josephus. However, only Luke says that John is the son of a priest called Zechariah. The Koran, also depending on the Gospel of Issa as a source, “speaks of Zechariah as the father of the prophet Yahya, who was an older contemporary of the prophet Issa. Luke… presents the same Zechariah as the father of John the Baptist — an older contemporary of Jeshu” (p69)
Salibi concludes that Luke, in his Christmas (I think he means Annunciation) story, “must have taken his information directly from the lost Nazarene Gospel, including the special information he gives concerning the identity and lineage of Elizabeth, who is left unnamed in the Koran” (p69). Circumstantial but persuasive evidence in support of this argument is that Luke begins his gospel in fluent Greek. “Then quite suddenly the fluency ends and a more fumbling style begins as Luke starts to relate his Christmas story. This less eloquent style continues to the end of the Christmas narrative when the fluency of the introduction is resumed. Judging solely by the change of style, some scholars have suggested that the Christmas story in Luke must be a translation from a written source which was probably in Aramaic” (p70). Salibi agrees, and specifies this as the now lost Gospel of Issa (although the story remains in the Koran). His argument is based on the content in this passage, rather than the style. From both angles, however, it seems clear that Luke was indeed using the Aramaic Gospel of Issa as a source. For some reason, unlike John and Paul, he chose to use the material relating to the birth of Issa to portray the birth of Jesus. There is therefore no reason to believe that Jesus’s mother was called Mary, since this was the name of Issa’s mother. Luke, most obviously, and perhaps Matthew and Mark also, merely copied the name from the earlier gospel.
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The Gospels According to Salibi
Salibi says that there were “three Jesuses whose identities are confused and conflated in the Gospels”:
- a historical Jesus, whom he calls Jeshu Bar Nagara.
- “an Arabian prophet called Jesus… whose career antedated that of the Palestinian Jesus by about four centuries” (p188). As noted above, this earlier Jesus was called Issa.
- “The third Jesus was an Arabian fertility god called Issa, worshipped also as the ‘Redeemer God’ Dhu Khalasah, whose cult involved a mystery of death and resurrection” (p188). (This sounds something like the pagan Mystery traditions.)
Important questions, to be considered later, are whether we can attribute the second and third to Paul’s visit to Arabia and, if so, whether that is enough to account for Paul’s theology.
Evidence to support the third point is that:
- “According to the Koran, some of the followers of Issa, the Jesus of the Nazarene Gospel, used to worship him in error as a god. This could mean that the identity of Issa came to be confused in some Nazarene circles with that of a deity by the same name” (p142).
- “In the West Arabian regions of the Hijaz and Asir, no less than seven villages are called Al Issa (literally the ‘God Issa’), thus immortalizing the name ‘Jesus’ as that of a deity”. “Of the seven villages called exactly Al Issa, three are found in the Taif region of the Hijaz, and four in Asir” (p143), which is, of course, the area identified by Salibi as the original location of the Bible.
In the light of the third point, it is easy to see how the mythicist argument gained ground. However, even the life of the supposedly human prophet Issa, described above, seemed to contain some mythical elements, for example, the Annunciation to Mary by angels, and the virgin birth (p68).
Salibi says that these conclusions are not new; it is only the details which differ: “The resemblances between Christianity and the numerous fertility cults of the ancient Near East have long been recognized; it is only the historical connection involved which has eluded detection” (p188).
In the light of his analysis, we should consider whether any conventional scholarly understandings need re-assessing.
The most obvious candidate is the Gospel of John. One opinion which has been frequently expressed is that it must have been the last of the gospels to be written, on the grounds that it presented the most theologically developed version of Jesus, in accordance with later Christianity. As Salibi says, it was thought to be “a relatively late Greek tradition, bearing the strong marks of Hellenistic gnosticism” (p66), or “a fusion between Semitic religious traditions and Hellenistic thinking” (p189). This was primarily because “the concept of the ‘Word’, as elaborated in the Gospel of John, appeared in a special way to reflect a Greek influence: the concept of the logos among the Stoic philosophers, standing for ultimate reason” (p189). Once its later date was assumed, it was considered likely to be the least authoritative of the gospels in relation to the historical details. However, as Salibi notes, more recently “a number of scholars have come to view it, even with its gnostic content, as the most ‘Aramaic’ of the Gospels, and the one preserving the oldest traditions” (p66). (Unfortunately he doesn’t name the scholars.)
A similar observation has been made by:
- Laurence Gardner, who says that John’s gospel is “far from naïve in its accounts of Jesus’s story”. There are “countless small details which do not appear elsewhere: a factor that has led many scholars to conclude that it is a more accurate testimony in general terms”⁶.
- Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, who say that the Gospel of John does provide significant details not found in the other gospels, and “on the basis of such factors modern scholars have suggested that the Gospel of John, despite its late composition, may well be the most reliable and historically accurate of the four”. Also, “there is consensus among modern scholars that only the Fourth Gospel rests on an eyewitness account of the Crucifixion”⁷.
If you think that these are ‘alternative’ writers, not professional scholars, and therefore not to be taken seriously, it is worth noting that the second book quotes professional scholars who are of the same opinion:
- C. H. Dodd: “Behind the Fourth Gospel lies an ancient tradition independent of the other Gospels”⁸.
- S. G. F. Brandon: “The Gospel of John… appears to know a tradition concerning Jesus that must be primitive and authentic”⁹.
These may be the scholars that Salibi is referring to. The last quote sounds remarkably like how he describes the lost Gospel of Issa. It’s also worth noting that the “small details” to which Gardner refers tend to be about John’s apparently historical Jesus, and reveal that John, although he does not say so in so many words, according to Salibi knows that Jesus came from Arabian Galilee. It’s interesting that all the above think that John is the most authentic historically, despite not knowing this.
I’ve laboured this point to try to convince you that John is the most important gospel in the search for a historical Jesus. Salibi’s explanation for the superiority of John is that the author was not necessarily directly influenced by Hellenistic Gnosticism, even if this seems superficially to be the case. We may think, when we read various statements attributed to Jesus by John, that he is speaking as God incarnate, and John apparently does nothing to dissuade us. However, as Salibi points out, these statements are typical of an Arabian fertility god, not the ultimate God: “The person of the ‘I am’ statements of the Fourth Gospel was definitely not a human being. He was a god. More than that, he was a god of fertility: ‘I have come in order that you might have life’; ‘Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me’ ” (p142). Note also: “I am the bread of life… He who comes to me will never be hungry” etc.
Perhaps less obvious as a fertility-god statement is “My Father and I are one”. However, Salibi points out that, in the Arabian fertility cult, “as the ultimate source of life, Al Issa was conceived of as being his own father” (p145). (This may seem disappointing to those who see in John’s Gospel references to the ideas of the Perennial Philosophy.)
If this seems difficult to accept in modern times, that may be because we assume that a ‘fertility god’ is some minor deity in an outdated polytheistic system, related to agriculture and crops. This is not necessarily the case; Salibi’s phrase ‘the ultimate source of life’ suggests that Al Issa was perhaps considered to be one of the higher gods in the pantheon of the time.
Salibi argues that John was working from the original Aramaic Gospel of Issa as a source, which was far more important than any Hellenistic influence. The most relevant piece of information is that in this gospel Issa is considered to be “the Arabic equivalent of the Greek logos, meaning the ‘word’ ”. That means that we should not jump to the conclusion that John was referring directly to the Greek concept.
In earlier articles (well before the current series) I have noted that the scholar Bart Ehrman thinks that the prologue in John (which includes the reference to the logos) may have been a later addition to the original text, because “the opening verses… appear to be different from the rest… The passage is written in a highly poetic style not found in the rest of the Gospel… Some of its most important vocabulary is not (repeated)… Never is (Jesus) called the Word elsewhere in the Gospel”¹⁰. In the light of Salibi’s analysis, however, an alternative explanation for these differences in style and vocabulary might be found, if John is translating a passage from the earlier, but now lost, Aramaic Gospel of Issa.
The writers and scholars quoted above, despite thinking that John was the most authentic of the gospels, still believed that it was late. In the light of Salibi’s analysis, however, which seems to have identified the authentic sources in question, it is possible, if John was not writing under direct Hellenistic influence, that his gospel was written earlier than thought, which would even further enhance its credibility on historical details which, of course, would not be found in the Gospel of Issa.
In addition to familiarity with the Gospel of Issa, in the light of the ‘I am’ statements discussed above, it seems obvious that John also had access to material relating to the fertility god Al Issa with whom, according to the Koran, the prophet Issa (Jesus) had been confused and conflated. Even more obvious evidence is the story of the woman at the well (beginning 4:5). This takes place in a town called Sychar in Samaria which, as Salibi demonstrates by his usual methods, is nowhere near Palestine, but in Arabian Samaria. He notes that “the ‘Jesus’ of this story was the Arabian fertility-god Al Issa. This god alone had the Power to provide ‘life-giving water…” (p145). (Christians would find the underlying meaning of this story quite surprising, should anyone wish to consult Salibi’s book.)
Given that both John and Paul had these Aramaic texts available to them as source material, interesting questions are:
- What is the relationship between them? Did John think he was following in Paul’s footsteps, a disciple of his, or did he consider himself independent, perhaps even arguing against him?
- Since the Jerusalem Church was so opposed to the teaching of Paul, did he discover something radically new in Arabia?
Seeking to answer such questions will require some further investigation of the gospels, and who the writers might have been. Before attempting that, some exploration of the relevant background history will be necessary.
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The Problems That Salibi’s Analysis Helps to Resolve
The scholar Robert Eisenman, having researched extensively and written a book almost 1,000 pages long about Jesus’s brother James, says that “the Historical James will turn out to be zealous for the Law”¹¹. We could easily assume, therefore, that he was a conventional Jew. However, Paul uses a very similar phrase to explain why he, who said he was brought up in the Pharisaic tradition, is persecuting the followers of Jesus; he says that he was “zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (Galatians 1:14). There must therefore have been a fundamental difference between them, not obvious on the basis of those two statements. How did the beliefs of Jesus’s followers differ so drastically from the Pharisaic Paul? Salibi’s analysis helps to make the situation much clearer.
Modern readers, unfamiliar with the history, may assume that the terms Israelites and Jews are more or less synonymous. At the time in question, however, there were serious differences between them. Salibi reports that in the Koran “a clear distinction is made between the Israelites (Banu Isra’il) and the Jews (al-Yahud). The Israelites are depicted as the historical ‘chosen’ people who were the ‘preferred’ of God in their time… The Jews, on the other hand, are spoken of as an existing religious community (by implication, of Israelite origin) which pays special deference to Ezra” (p46).
The Koran says that originally “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” (p52) (which, it should be noted, the Koran describes as a grave error). Salibi then goes on to describe Issa, whose story sounds remarkably like that of the Jesus of the gospels.
Ezra therefore appears to be the founder of Judaism (in its post-exilic form). It is therefore interesting to note that the scholar Richard Friedman, having done extensive research, came to the conclusion that Ezra was the compiler/ final editor of the Old Testament¹². Further circumstantial evidence which might lead to the same conclusion is the quote from Salibi earlier: “The Hebrew Bible as we know it is essentially the product of the kingdom of Judah, rather than that of the rival kingdom of Israel… It was from Judah, not Israel, that the Jews as a religious community got the name by which they are still known” (BCFA, p98).
Putting all this information together, it seems clear that Judaism, with Ezra as its figurehead, was merely one tradition, albeit dominant, within this culture. And, to repeat Salibi: “There appears to have been a religious schism which pitted the orthodoxy of ‘Judah’, which survives as Judaism, against the heterodoxy of ‘Israel’ ” (BCFA, p130). We therefore see that, far from being united, as Jews may wish to claim, there was a massive religious divide in the ‘Jewish’ culture of the time; there was a significant opposition movement, one group of which may have been biding its time remotely in Arabia.
It is now much clearer why Paul might want to oppose the followers of Jesus. He says that he had been brought up as a Jew, and was now persecuting members of the rival Nazarene sect, followers of Issa. Salibi says that “the original followers of Jesus in Jerusalem used to be called ‘Nazarenes’, referring to their special faith or cult as ‘the Way’ ” (p8). In Acts, Paul uses exactly this term: “I persecuted this Way up to the point of death…” (22:4).
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What are the Gospels?
If we assume that the writers were intelligent, knew exactly what they were doing, and were not making elementary errors, then we have to ask why the gospels are what they are, and how some obviously mythical elements managed to be included in a story which appears to have been intended as a biography.
I’ll begin with what I consider to be facts, based upon Salibi’s analysis:
- Paul, in Arabia, became aware of the scriptures relating to the prophet Issa, and the god Al Issa.
- Luke had access to the original Aramaic Gospel of Issa (some contents of which survive in the Koran). This is indisputable because of his account of the circumstances surrounding the birth of John the Baptist.
- John must have had access to at least some of the scriptures concerning the Arabian fertility-god Al Issa, since his (allegedly historical) Jesus speaks as that god.
Probably a fact is that Matthew also had the Gospel of Issa, but in a Greek translation. Salibi argues this, based upon a comparison of various places in the texts where the same material is described with different words. His reasonable conclusion is that Matthew did not know Aramaic, but Luke and John did.
Whether John has the Gospel of (the prophet) Issa as a source is less clear, although Salibi believes he does. Unlike Luke and Matthew, he avoids all mention of the early life of Jesus, which he could have included if he had access to that text.
The obvious question to ask is, how did Luke and John acquire these texts? Simple logic would suggest, if the texts were previously unknown in Palestine, and Paul had to go to Arabia to find them, then they must have acquired them from him, therefore that they were following in his footsteps. We would conclude that they were followers of Paul, and therefore that their gospels were written under his influence.
An alternative scenario is possible, however. (These are not Salibi’s words, rather something I’ve put together, although it is obviously heavily influenced by everything Salibi has said.)
There was a centre of Jesus’s religious tradition in or near Jerusalem. This must have existed before his arrival on the scene, since he was not a new phenomenon, appearing mysteriously out of nowhere, as the gospels seem to suggest. The members were Nazarene Israelites, followers of the prophet Issa, and therefore opposed to the Judaism of Ezra, which is why Paul subsequently persecuted them. (Salibi calls them “the self-appointed guardians of the secret of their Way outside Arabia” [p29].) Since they were living in an area where Judaism was dominant, they had to lie low, remain secretive about who they really were, maybe even to the extent of pretending to be followers of Judaism. (This is perhaps why James appeared ‘zealous for the Law’.) When they became aware that Paul, their arch-enemy, whom they obviously could not trust, had said that he had been converted to their cause, they were horrified. When they heard that he was intending to travel to Arabia, they realised that he was seeking the origins of their tradition, and were disturbed that he might discover their secrets. They didn’t want anyone else to know he had been there.
They therefore circulated a fabricated story, that following his conversion Paul went “to seek further instruction in Jerusalem, directly from themselves, thereby alleging that his apostleship was not independent of their own, but derived from it” (p29). This story ended up in Acts (9:1–30), and explains why there is no mention in that book of Paul’s journey to Arabia. Paul, as we know, swears on oath in God’s name that this story is false (Galatians 1:20).
If they believed that what Paul would discover was derived from their tradition, and therefore essentially the same teaching, this would suggest that the issue was merely a power struggle: “He could undermine the religious authority which these apostles were determined to keep as their special preserve” (p29). Alternatively, they might have been afraid that he would discover something different from, or beyond what they normally believed and taught.
Much later, Paul had returned from Arabia, had begun his evangelical mission, had written his epistles which were presumably being circulated. This seemed to cause confusion about the ‘true’ teaching among the various groups of followers: “Clearly, the preaching of Paul, though done with great conviction and with the best intentions, had resulted in considerable confusion among the early followers of the Christian faith. This confusion is amply attested to in the book of Acts, and also in the writings of Paul himself (see 1 Corinthians 1:10–13). After the death of Paul, there was obviously an urgent need to restore unity in the Christian ranks; and this, it appears, was what the authors of the four canonical Gospels intended to do, as they set out to construct accounts of the earthly mission of the Christ Jesus which reconciled different views of his historical and metaphysical identity” (p75-76).
This opens up the possibility that Luke and John had copies of the Arabian scriptures, not because they had obtained them from Paul, and were therefore his followers, but because they were members of the Israelite Nazarene sect, which already had copies of these texts. If that is the case, they may have thought either that Paul had to some extent revealed their secrets, so that they were secrets no longer, or that he had come back with a false teaching. In either case, the gospels can be seen as an attempt to limit the damage, perhaps to tell their side of the story, and regain control of the narrative in opposition to Paul. This is obviously speculation, since nobody knows for certain who the authors of the gospels were, but it is perhaps being hinted at by Salibi in the quote in the previous paragraph. Also, we do know for a fact that the Jerusalem Church led by James was bitterly opposed to Paul’s teaching.
This brings us to the question, are the gospels truly Pauline, or are the resemblances merely superficial? If the latter, are they merely just a combination of the Gospel of Issa (Luke), and the scriptures of Al Issa (John)?
Because we know that they both had direct access to the Arabian scriptures, and because, according to Salibi, their authors both understood Aramaic, unlike Matthew and Mark, these are the two most important gospels. Paul’s Jesus is the Cosmic Christ. Can we say with any degree of certainty that this figure can be found in the four canonical gospels? Some of the ‘biographical’ details in the synoptic gospels may give the impression that Jesus has something of the supernatural about him, but is that enough to elevate him to the status of Paul’s Christos? Or do Christians merely assume that, in the light of later theology?
Some Christians may assume, and therefore argue, that the gospels and Paul’s epistles are consistent with each other, and are giving the same message. The gospels may give the impression that Jesus was born ‘the Son of God’, or God (the Logos) incarnate. We know, however, that the gospels as we have them have been edited later to give that impression. There were earlier versions which believed that Jesus became the ‘Son of God’ at his baptism. (This idea is called Adoptionism, which I have discussed in detail in this article.)
Luke’s account seems, for the most part, to be a retelling of the life of the Arabian prophet Issa, as narrated in the Koran, mixed with the death-and-resurrection story found so frequently in stories of pagan saviour-gods, although perhaps specifically in this case of the Arabian redeemer god. John’s gospel seems to be an account of the life of the Arabian fertility-god Al Issa speaking through the mouth of a supposedly historical figure Jesus. The only elements in the gospels which do not obviously fit into this picture are Matthew’s and Luke’s Christmas stories (birth in a manger, the star, the three wise men, the angels, the shepherds), all of which can be found in the ancient Egyptian story/myth of Horus¹³, and there is therefore no reason to believe they were true of a historical Jesus. Based on what we have discussed so far, why Matthew and Luke included these is something of a mystery, unless these elements were also part of the Arabian tradition.
None of this necessarily suggests Paul’s Cosmic Christ-figure. So we have to ask how Paul discovered it. Were there deeper, more esoteric, levels to the Arabian tradition of Al Issa, or did he find it somewhere else? Or was this perhaps something revealed to him in his personal visions?
Salibi assumes that Luke and John got the texts from Paul. He seems, however, to make two contradictory suggestions in regard to this. On the one hand he says:
- “The conclusion is inescapable: the composite Jesus of Paul who was betrayed and died on the cross, then rose from death to bring salvation to the world, was none other than the Arabian god Jesus. The risen ‘Lord’ of the Gospels is the same person”.
- “The original sophisticated fusion between the historical Bar Nagara (Salibi’s Jesus) and the mythological Al Issa, or Dhu Khalasah, must have been the work of Paul” (both p146).
So here he is favouring the first hypothesis, that Luke and John were following in Paul’s footsteps. Later in the book, however, he says: “Apparently seduced by the concept of the resurrected Christ that was central to this heresy and having gone to Arabia to trace its origins, Paul spotted its component elements in two sets of scriptures he discovered there: the Nazarene Gospel of Jesus the prophet, and the mythology of Jesus the fertility god. Having no special use for the Nazarene Gospel, he simply ignored it, leaving it to be used after his death by Luke and John. What fascinated him was the rich and highly meaningful recorded lore concerning the Jesus who was a god and also the son of god, capable of assuming human form to die as men do, yet rise from the dead. By a highly sophisticated use of this lore, he succeeded in transforming the primitive heresy of the Nazarene Way into a great faith whose central figure, Jesus Christ, was identified as Jeshu Bar Nagara” (p157).
Earlier Salibi had also said that Luke and John didn’t realise that Paul wasn’t using the texts much himself, “having noticed that the Issa it spoke of — the son of Mary — was not the Jeshu whose gospel he wanted to preach” (p76).
I don’t think that Salibi can have it both ways; either Paul was heavily responsible for the content of the gospels, or he wasn’t.
The second two statements lead to an interesting question. Salibi says that Paul “succeeded in transforming”. Was this something he did on his own initiative, based upon his revelations? Or was it derived from some teaching he received while in Arabia?
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The Historical Jesus According to Salibi
Salibi does not dispute that many mythological elements have been incorporated into the gospel stories. He nevertheless believes that, hidden somewhere beneath the surface, there is a historical Jesus. One could argue that he is merely speculating, since his narrative is based upon material from the gospel texts, which some claim are exclusively mythical. He does make a good case, however, making some interesting points that I’ve never seen before in other authors. One especially persuasive piece of evidence, as discussed above, is that Jesus’s apostles, given that they have specific names in the gospels, came from real towns and villages in Arabia.
Also, John clearly knows that the Jesus he is portraying journeyed from Arabia to Palestine, but never explicitly says so, and on the whole seems to be trying to conceal this, at least to the poorly informed reader. Why on earth would he do this, if the figure were merely mythical?
Salibi calls his historical Jesus Jeshua Bar Nagara, meaning ‘son of Carpenter’, which could be taken to be a surname, or from a certain village. “Several places called Nagara or ‘Carpenter’, have existed or still exist in the Hijaz, after any of which Jeshu and his father Joseph before him could have been called Bar Nagara in literal translation” (p93). Perhaps the surname explanation is more likely, however, given that Jesus is said to have lived in Nazareth. As noted earlier, there is a local valley where the tribe inhabiting it “are called to this day the Nasirah, which is exactly the name of the town of Nazareth in the Palestinian Galilee” (p82).
Jesus (Jeshua) was therefore from Arabian Galilee. This does not necessarily mean that he was an Arab (although he might have had more connections with that community than we might expect — see below), but he was presumably born and certainly brought up there. He was not, however, a Jew; he was an Israelite, of a Nazarene religious persuasion. Furthermore, he was “a descendant of David, with a legitimate claim to the historical throne of the Biblical kingdom of Judah, which had ceased to exist in Arabia since the sixth century BC” (p88). He (or perhaps his family) decided that the time was right to claim his throne, (or perhaps there was a more religious motive, see below.) He therefore found some followers, with whom he travelled to Palestine, where he acquired further disciples.
Evidence that Jesus started in Arabia, then moved to Palestine, or more accurately started by moving backwards and forwards between the two, can be found in the Gospel of John. As noted above, this seems to be the most historically accurate of the gospels. More important here is the well-known fact that in it the itinerary and geography of Jesus’s mission are completely different from those found in the Synoptics. Salibi’s analysis of this is detailed, involving a precise understanding of the Greek vocabulary, and far too long to go into all his points here. (Please see p79–82 of his book, if interested.) I’ll focus here on just one striking piece of his argument.
According to John, Jesus arrived in Judea where he started to baptize (3:22), (or perhaps it was just his disciples [4:1] ). Then he went back to ‘Galilee’ (4:3), and along the way he stopped for two days in Samaria in a city called Sychar (4:5). Salibi points out that “to go from the Palestinian Judea to the Palestinian Galilee, Jeshua would certainly have had to pass through Samaria”, yet “the plain fact is that no place by the name Sychar is historically attested for the Palestinian Samaria” (p81), but there is a place by the identical name in Arabian Samaria (p145). Jesus must therefore be returning from Palestinian Judea to his home in Arabian Galilee.
The context for this journey is also important. When Jesus, or his disciples, began to baptize in Judea, the Baptist’s disciples clearly objected and complained to their master (3:26). This was what prompted Jesus to return to ‘Galilee’ via Samaria, where he said “A prophet is not respected in his own country”. “When he arrived in Galilee, the people there welcomed him” (4: 44–5). (It is interesting to note that Jesus considered Palestinian Judea to be his “own country”, presumably because this was the place where he was claiming his throne. Arabian Galilee was his true country.)
That is what Salibi has to say, but there is more that can be added. Anyone familiar with the gospels will know that the most striking discrepancy between the account of Jesus’s mission in John and the Synoptics, is that the latter say that the money-changers-in-the-Temple incident — one of Salibi’s seven likely historical details — occurred soon after Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, in the final week of his life. This is apparently a provocative act which attracts the attention of the authorities, and leads to his arrest and execution. In John, however, this incident occurs right at the start of Jesus’s mission, and even precedes the baptising just mentioned. It is possible (but probably unlikely?) that Jesus did this twice. If we assume, as argued above, that John is the most authentic gospel, and therefore has got this right, then this adds further ammunition to the argument. John the Baptist’s followers were critical, but in addition the people in the Temple did not respect him and his religious ideas. That is why he said that a prophet is not respected in his own country, but he was welcomed when he returned to Arabian Galilee, a centre of the Nazarene Way.
Further evidence in John that Jesus had come originally from Arabia can be found in the following incident. Having attracted his first followers, “Jesus decided to go to Galilee” (1:43), the Palestinian Galilee, we must assume. He first found Philip, who was from Bethsaida (which is in Arabia), who introduced him to Nathanael. Then, “when Jesus first caught sight of Nathanael, he said: ‘Here is a real Israelite; there is nothing false in him’ ”. If Salibi’s theory is correct “Jeshu should have had little difficulty finding a ‘real Israelite’ in the Hijaz, where most of the Nazarenes and Jews would have been of Israelite tribal extraction. It was different in Palestine, where the Jewish population included large numbers of Idumeans, Galileans and others whose connection with Judaism was barely two centuries old, and where ‘real Israelites’, as distinct from other Jews who falsely claimed Israelite descent, must have been a small minority. For Jeshu to have been so obviously delighted to meet a ‘real’ Israelite in whom there was ‘nothing false’, such as Nathanael, it is far more likely that he met him in Palestine rather than in the Hijaz” (p96). He must clearly have been in what for him was a foreign country, not his place of origin. (This is an interesting historical detail for the mythicists to explain!) It is also evidence that Jesus disapproved of the religion and/or political situation in Judaea.
The details of this meeting then become stranger. Nathanael asks Jesus how he came to recognise him as a true Israelite, and Jesus replies “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you”. This response allows Nathanael to recognise immediately that Jesus is the Son of God, the King of Israel. Jesus surely does not mean that anyone seen standing under a fig tree is a true Israelite; there must be an allegorical meaning. The fig tree is an image used elsewhere in the gospels, and it is always barren, and Jesus curses or condemns it (Mark 11:12–14, Matthew 21:18–19, and Luke 13:6–9). It is not difficult to work out that Jesus is referring to the religion that he is seeking to overturn, and replace with the Nazarene ‘Way’. Salibi says that “as a tree, the fig is not only prolific in highly nutritious fruit, but also exhibits a remarkable capacity to resist drought and flourish indefinitely in sparse soil — even in rock fissures — without human attention and care. What better symbol could there be of miraculous fertility?” (p175). If such a tree has become barren, there is obviously no hope for it¹⁴. In the context of the meeting with Nathanael, it would seem that the ‘fig tree’ was some kind of code word which enabled Nazarenes to recognise each other.
We can assume that at some point Jesus remained in Palestine. Others may have joined him from Arabian Galilee later. He started to campaign and to preach. The execution of John the Baptist made him realise that his own life was in danger, so that his immediate reaction was to take his disciples and go into hiding. However, he could not keep his movements secret. He was warned that Herod had decided to kill him. He remained determined to pursue his mission, and was willing to risk execution. He therefore entered Jerusalem and immediately caused trouble in the Temple. (Salibi does not take into account the alternative account of this incident in John. Is it possible that Jesus repeated his earlier action?) To the Jews this was a sacrilege, and he could no longer be endured. They therefore demanded his execution, which Pilate allowed, even though he believed him innocent, since he thought that this might temporarily allay Jewish opposition to Roman rule (p115–117).
In support of this interpretation, Salibi says that about 200 years earlier “a Jewish kingdom had been established in central Palestine under the local priestly house of the Hasmoneans, then expanded by conquest to include Galilee in the north, and Idumea in the south. In both these conquered regions, Judaism was forcibly imposed on the local Arameo-Arab inhabitants” (p88). If that is true, it is obvious that their religion could not have been Judaism. In that context, given everything Salibi has said so far, it is easy to see how Jesus (Jeshu Bar Nagara) might have seen it as his mission to liberate these people, not necessarily from the Roman occupation, but from the religious oppression of the Hasmoneans. He was possibly a defender of these peoples’ original religion.
It is interesting to note in this context that the Koran says that Issa (the original Jesus) “was an apostle to the ‘people of Israel’. The Koran nowhere indicates that he was ‘Jewish’, or a prophet to the ‘Jews’ ” (p50). It is safe to conclude therefore that his successor Jesus was also a prophet to the people of Israel, and would therefore be in conflict with Ezra’s post-exilic Judaism. Interestingly, John’s Gospel (8:48) records that “the Jews mistook Bar Nagara for a ‘Samaritan’, which is another Israelite sect which rejected the authority of Ezra” (p100) . (This follows a very feisty confrontation with these Jews, whom Jesus accuses of following the wrong religion, and not recognising him as a true prophet.)
This analysis suggests a solution to the enigma of why in the gospels the Jews seem responsible for Jesus’s demise. If he were merely a descendant of David, and claimant to the throne, one might assume that the Romans would be more concerned. According to Salibi, however, it was the Jews who were more threatened by his religious and political ambitions. This therefore explains the hostility of the Pharisees to Jesus — their desire to kill him and their frequent attempts to catch him out — given that some claim Jesus to be a Jew. It also suggests that Jesus might have been more of a religious leader, rather than a political activist, therefore more in accordance with what is portrayed in the gospels.
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How Credible is This Historical Jesus?
Tom Harpur, a strong advocate for mythicism, says: “Without exception, every element of the allegedly ‘new,’ uniquely revealed religion was extant before the first Christian century in the traditions, practices, and literature of many other lands and people”.
While not disagreeing with what he says, it should be pointed out that this is not evidence for mythicism; it is rather a criticism of the later Catholic Church’s claim that its Christianity was a new, uniquely revealed religion. As mentioned earlier in the series, some early Church Fathers, notably Augustine, and other contemporary religious figures, said that there was nothing new in Christianity.
While accepting what Harpur says about the ‘new’ religion, on the question of the Historical Jesus, we have to ask whether every apparently factual detail in the New Testament accounts is prefigured in earlier traditions. Let’s also remember the quote above from Alvin Boyd Kuhn: “There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible!” Is that really true, or has he too hastily rushed to that conclusion? Salibi makes some very interesting observations on that theme. Here I’ll focus on just one.
He gives a lengthy commentary on Acts 1:18–19, where Peter recounts what Judas Iscariot did after ‘betraying’ Jesus. “He bought a field where he fell to his death: All the people living in Jerusalem heard about it, and so in their own language (Greek dialektos, correctly ‘dialect’) they call the field Akeldama, which means ‘Field of Blood’ ”.
Salibi’s forensic analysis is far too long to refer to all its details here, but this is his conclusion. Because he says “in their own dialect”, Peter “was not referring to the dialect of Jerusalem, where he was making his address… The Akeldama in question was nowhere close to Jerusalem, and the dialect in which the name was so pronounced was not the Jerusalem dialect” (p182). “No place called Akeldama or Dama can be found anywhere in Palestine. In the Hijaz, however, there does exist a valley called Dama… in the same Taif region where Wadi Jalil (the Arabian Galilee) and the village of Iskar (today ‘Askar) are located” (p183). (It should be remembered that Salibi believes, as mentioned above, that Judas is called Iscariot because he was a native of this village of Iskar in Arabian Galilee, not, as some including myself have in the past suggested, that he might be a sicarii, part of a militant faction of the Zealots.)
On the basis of this analysis, and assuming that the New Testament material is approximately correct, Salibi reconstructs this historical scenario. Following Jesus’s arrest, Judas saw no point in remaining in Jerusalem, and returned to his homeland in Arabian Galilee, probably absconding with the money — he was apparently the treasurer of the apostles, since he “had the common purse” (John 13:29). There he bought this piece of land, where he later had an accident and died. The rest of the story as found in the Christian tradition is mythical addition.
I don’t suppose that any of the above will persuade hardened mythicists, so I leave it to the reader to decide whether all these interesting details in John and elsewhere in the New Testament can be dismissed as mythicism, or whether they suggest a historical Jesus.
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How Does Paul’s Mission to Arabia Fit Into All This? How Is He Relevant?
That will be the subject of further articles. In the meantime, here is a thought to ponder.
Salibi’s conclusion is that “Christianity is clearly a latter-day form of a Semitic tradition of immemorial antiquity” (p191). He would appear to be on the right track here. However, the fourth century BC, when the prophet Issa lived, does not qualify as immemorial antiquity. He must be speaking of something much earlier. What might that be?
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, more on Christianity, psychology, science, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. originally Jonathan Cape 1985, my copy Pan Books 1987
2. I. B. Tauris & Co., 1988
3. Saqi Books, 1988
4.Thomas Allen, 2004
5 Alvar Ellegård, Jesus — One Hundred Years Before Christ, Century, 1999, p246
6. Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Element, 2002, p27
7. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Arrow, 1996, p345, p372
8. Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, Cambridge, 1963, p423
9. Jesus and the Zealots, Manchester, 1967, p16
10. Misquoting Jesus, HarperOne, 2005, p61
11. James the Brother of Jesus, Watkins Publishing, 2002, Pxxxiii
12. Who Wrote the Bible?, Jonathan Cape, 1988
13. see, for example, The Pagan Christ, as footnote 4, p80, p83
14. Salibi speculates that the origins of this image lie in the Arabian fertility cult of Al Issa.
