A CONSPIRACY IN JERUSALEM
Abu-Alwafa
By Khaled Ahmed
Book Reviews
WHO WAS JESUS? A CONSPIRACY IN JERUSALEM
by Kamal Salibi
Kamal Salibi is a Lebanese-Christian scholar who first became known for his
book The Bible Came from Arabia in 1985.
His expertise lies in knowing the towns and villages of Saudi Arabia and
Yemen closely enough to equate them with the place-names featuring in the
Bible. He repeats his claim once again in the present book based on St
Paul's Epistle to the Galatians in which Paul writes that, after converting
miraculously from a Christian-baiting Jew, the first place he visited was
Arabia and not Jerusalem. Salibi claims that he went to Hijaz in Saudi
Arabia to consult the single Aramaic injil (Gospel) mentioned in the Quran
and noted by Hadith as being in the possession of Varaqah bin Nawfal in the
times of Muhammad PBUH 500 years later.
This happened 500 years before the advent of Islam. It is known that the
language spoken by Christ was Aramaic which
was the idiom then current in Arabia. The Bible says that Jesus or Jeshu
came from Galilee (al-Jalil in Arabic) which is
located by the Jews in Israel. According to Salibi, al-Jalil is a town in
present-day Taif in Hijaz, and this is where Jeshu was born as a Jew. From
here he went to Jerusalem to announce his prophethood among the Jewish
nation awaiting their Messiah. Salibi examines the verses of the Quran to
conclude that the prophet Issa mentioned in the Quran was not Jeshu of the
Bible but another prophet who proclaimed himself 400 years earlier than
Jeshu. The Quran described Issa as a virgin-born prophet who liberalised the
strict faith of the Torah and fell foul of the Jews. It was Issa who also
predicted the coming of Ahmad, the other name of Muhammad PBUH.
The book is a fascinating examination of the four Gospels of the New
Testament. It relies on modern Christian scholarship to point out the
contradictions contained in them. It analyses the contents of the Acts of
the Apostles and Epistles of Paul to conclude that the New Testament
'joined' the two narratives of Jeshu and Issa for reasons of politics among
the disciples of Christ. It is well known that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John are not compatible in their detail and that the first three
are called Synoptic because of their minimal concordance while the Gospel of
John is treated separately because of its radical departure. The Gospels mix
Jeshu, who has a father and brothers, with Issa, who has no father and no
brothers. John goes so far as to not even mention the name of Maryam as
Jeshu's mother while others admit his carpenter father while bowing to the
Quranic version of the virgin birth.
The Issa of Varaqah bin Nawfal was the one known to Muhammad PBUH, and the
injil mentioned in the Quran was a single document. The other source
confirming the presence of this injil was the Negus of Ethiopia who
recognised Muhammad as the new Prophet on the basis of its text. The
reference in the Quran to the changing of injil by Christians is actually a
reference to the fusion of Jeshu and Issa in the four Gospels of the New
Testament. This has resulted in the Muslim faith in the one injil (no longer
extant) mentioned in the Quran and narrated to Muhammad PBUH by Varaqah bin
Nawfal, a close relative of his wife
Khadija. This injil was written in Aramaic, the mother tongue of Christ, and
was relied upon by Varaqah in lieu of the four originally Greek injils then
followed in Hijaz among orthodox Christians. Salibi thinks that unless one
separates the two persons known as Jeshu and Issa the problem of the double
narrative in the Gospels cannot be resolved.
Christ is also called Nazarene connecting him to Nazereth in present-day
Israel. Salibi thinks that Issa and his followers were called Nazerenes
because of the town in Hijaz they came from, al-Nasira, which still exists
in Saudi Arabia. Jeshu is claimed to be from the line of David and therefore
entitled to be the king-prophet of Israel. Internal evidence also suggests
that he was from the tribe of Levi. In the post-crucifixion politics that
developed between Paul on the one hand and James the brother of Jeshu and
the disciples on the other, royal descent became an important factor. Since
Paul was spreading the message
among the Gentiles of the West, his thinking was different from James and
the apostles of Jerusalem. One difference that became marked in later times
was Paul's refusal to accept circumcision for his Western converts insisted
upon by James. Paul states in Epistle to the Galatians that the apostles in
Jerusalem composed their differences with him only after he offered them the
much-needed funds he had collected in the West.
According to Salibi, Paul's journey to Arabia acquainted him not only with
the Aramaic gospel which talked of Issa but also other scriptures that had
elevated Issa to the level of God. The Quran points to this cult when it
says that some followers of Issa had started worshipping him as god. The
Quran also develops the doctrines of wahdat and shirk against this
apotheosis. It condemns the designation of Issa as Son of God. Paul is
supposed to have used Arabian-Aramaic scriptures to invent his composite
personality of Christ. The cult of Issa the God developed in Arabia as a
fertility rite. Al-Issa the god was
developed from the ancient divinity of Al-Ais which means 'semen'. His
temple was in the south at Tubalah in the province of Asir and was called
Kaaba al-Yamaniya (the southern Kaaba). The divinity was called Dhu Khalasah
(redeemer) and was a sculpture of white stone representing a phallus topped
with a crown. Prophet Muhammad PBUH is said to have sent his
warriors to destroy the 'second Kaaba' after coming to power. But the cult
was resurrected later and the 'second Kaaba' in Asir was finally destroyed
by the Wahabi warriors in 1815.
It was not only Paul who could read Aramaic. John, Luke and Matthew too
could read the Aramaic scriptures. They too are supposed to have benefited
from these scriptures in the fusion of the three identities they produced in
the person of Christ in their Gospels. Matthew's concept of Jesus as a
repository of Kingdom, Power and the Glory is supposed to have been derived
from Dhu Khalasah's attributes of marut (dominion) hayl (power) and misbah
(glory). His adoption of the Trinity is also taken by Salibi to be a
borrowing from the cult of Al-Issa or Dhu Khalasah.
But while these borrowings were against the Quran, there were many elements
the Apostles took from the Aramaic injil that the Quran supports. John for
instance, whose Gospel is considered 'gnostic' and set apart from the other
three, took the Quranic word used to describe Issa, kalimah (speech), and
translated it as Greek logos (word), thus cleverly linking up with the Old
Testament symbol of pre-creation. This means that the Quran had used some of
the words contained in the Aramaic injil it considered authentic. Salibi has
not pointed this out but one can explain the famous phrase used by Luke:24:
'Indeed it is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than someone who is
rich to enter the Kingdom of God'. The Quran, which came 500 years later,
used the same camel simile to describe the fate of the arrogant (the rich
can be arrogant?) in Aaraf:40: 'Nor will they enter the Garden until the
camel can pass through the eye of the needle'. Some scholars have marvelled
at the Quranic borrowing from Luke, but Salibi's research offers a good
explanation. It is quite possible that Luke's borrowing of the phrase comes
from the same early source as the Quran's, the Quran of course being a
continuation of the authentic injil (Gospel) in which Prophet Issa had
predicted the coming of Prophet Muhammad PBUH.
As explained by Salibi, the Jesus or Jeshu of the Gospels is a composite
figure which contains the attributes of the Jeshu of Arabia, fused with the
Issa of the Aramaic injil, and Al-Issa the god. All the three arose in
Arabia, which is sought to be proved on the basis of Salibi's research into
the place-names of Saudi Arabia. His linking of the Torah geography to that
of present-day Saudi Arabia has upset the Christian narrative as well as the
post-Quranic Muslim narrative. His earlier book explained even the Old
Testament references to misr (Egypt) as references to locations in Arabia
which the Christian and
Muslim orthodoxy will find difficult to accept, but his work will always
continue to arouse interest. Much of his present book is based on earlier
investigation of the Gospels, but much of it is also based on plausible
constructs. As a Christian he believes
in the historical Christ but his effort at reconciliation of Biblical
contradictions has made the present work possible.