by Emmet Scott
The Ebionites were strongly Jewish, and Judaism in its origins, was a militant and even militaristic faith. Throughout the first centuries BC and AD leaders claiming to be the Messiah appeared regularly among the Jews, stirring up ruinous rebellions against the power of Rome. The idea that the Messiah would be a military commander was central to Jewish religious ideas of the time. A peaceful and suffering Messiah did not figure in their thinking. Even the disciples of Jesus, after his crucifixion, are said to have asked him when he would restore the kingdom of Israel to independence.
It is highly likely that these attitudes were shared by the Ebionites, who thus adhered to virtually all the beliefs and practices we now consider “Muslim.” Islamic tradition itself admits that the Ebionite Christians of Arabia were among the first and most fervent followers of the new faith, and the Arab historians name an Ebionite monk, Waraqah ibn Nawfal, as one of the earliest converts to Islam.[4]
But even admitting the strongly Jewish tone of Ebionitism or proto-Islam, how are we to account for the transformation of the Christian Jesus – the “honored one” or “Muhammad” among the Ebionites – into the violent and warlike prophet of the Islamic Qur’an? The answer to this, I believe, is found in the identity of the names “Jesus” and “Joshua.” In English, of course, these two look quite different; in Hebrew however they are one and the same – Yahoshua. “Jesus” is the English of the Greek transliteration of “Yahoshua” via Latin. Now Jesus of the New Testament may have been a complete pacifist, but Joshua of the Old Testament was anything but. He it was who became leader of the Israelite tribes after the death of Moses and subsequently led them across the River Jordan (from Arabia, no less) into the land of Canaan. In Canaan he prosecuted a war of extermination against the natives. In doing so, we are told, he was carrying out a divine injunction. The Arabs of the sixth and seventh centuries were almost entirely illiterate. In the minds of illiterates stories from one part of a book are easily conflated with stories from another. Since the Ebionite faith in any case stressed obedience to the Law of Moses, in its entirety (with such injunctions as “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” and the stoning of women to death for adultery), and since they also held that Jesus commanded obedience to these laws, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to confuse Jesus with Joshua, who also, remember, was an obedient follower of the Mosaic Code. And this surmise is startlingly confirmed by the fact that in the Qur'an Maryam, the mother of Isha (Jesus), is the sister of Moses and Aaron! In other words, it is beyond question that Islam has confused and conflated events of the Bible which are in fact separated from each other by many centuries.
What then of the origins of the Qur’an, the holy book supposed by Muslims to have been given to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel?
Anyone who has read the Muslim holy book will recognize at once that it is a puzzling document. It is not a story or a narrative in the normal sense, but a series of apparently unrelated incidents and statements. Muslims themselves only understand the Qur’an by allusion to the Hadiths, an enormous collection of “traditions” about the life of Muhammad which incidentally explain the obscure events and statements of the Qur’an. The hadiths however did not begin to appear until around a century after the supposed date of Muhammad’s death, and it is well-known that there existed for several centuries a veritable industry of hadith composition. Muslim scholars themselves admit that the vast majority of these were fakes. It would appear that the Abbasid Caliphs sponsored the production of hadiths during the eighth and ninth centuries for political reasons. Numerous of these hadiths actually contradict each other in treating of one and the same statement of the Qur’an.
But even with the help of the hadiths, the Qur’an remains a strange and puzzling text. Whole sentences and paragraphs seem to make no sense at all. Philologist Ger-R. Puin expressed a typical opinion when he stated that “every fifth sentence or so [of the Qur’an] simple doesn’t make sense.” Why? Could it be that it was originally composed in a language other than Arabic and imperfectly transcribed into the latter tongue? That is increasingly the position adopted by the scholarly community; and the suspicion is greatly strengthened by the discovery that “the names in the Qur’an consistently show signs of having been derived from Syriac …”[5] Syriac was the ancient language of large parts of the Middle East, a dialect of Aramaic, which had been the lingua franca of the region since the time of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Syriac was closely related to Arabic, but sufficiently different to cause confusion if not properly understood. The deeper scholars have examined the Qur’an the more clear its Syriac roots have become. Whole passages and incidents which have defied the best efforts of scholars throughout the centuries to comprehend suddenly make perfect sense if read as Syriac. Thus for example in Qur’an 19:24 we read: “Then (one) cried unto her from below her, saying: Grieve not! Thy Lord hath placed a rivulet beneath thee.” It is unclear from the text who is speaking, perhaps the newborn Jesus or someone else; and what the meaning of the “rivulet” is. However, read as a Syriac text we find that it refers to the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Thus the infant Jesus – who speaks elsewhere in the Qur’an – tells Mary: “Do not be sad, your Lord has made your delivery legitimate.”
Indeed, read as a Syriac document, the Qur’an not only loses its obscurity, but is rapidly revealed as a Christian devotional text, or lectionary. That, at least, is the opinion of two of the greatest philologists in the field, Gunter Lüling and Christoph Luxenberg. In the words of the latter, if Qur’an “really means lectionary, then one can assume that the Koran intended itself first of all to be understood as nothing more than a liturgical book with selected texts from the Scriptures (the Old and New Testament) and not at all as a substitute for the Scriptures themselves.”[6] Even events which have traditionally been understood by Muslims as referring to crucial events of the life of Muhammad reveal themselves, upon transcription into Syriac, as events of the life of Jesus. In the words of Robert Spencer, “Many of the Qur’an’s more obscure passages begin to make sense when read in the light of having a foundation in Christian theology. For example, there is an enigmatic sura on the Night of Power, al-Qadr (“Power”) [the night when Muhammad supposedly received the Qur’an from the Angel Gabriel]: ‘Behold, We sent it down on the Night of Power; and what shall teach thee what is the Night of Power? The Night of Power is better than a thousand months; in it the angles and the Spirit descend, by the leave of their Lord, upon every command. Peace it is, till the rising of dawn’ (97:1-5). Muslims associate the Night of Power with the first appearance of Gabriel to Muhammad and the first revelation of the Qur’an; they commemorate this night during the fasting month of Ramadan. But the Qur’an makes no explicit connection between the Night of Power and the revelation of the Qur’an. The book doesn’t explain what the Night of Power is, except to say it is the night on which the angels (not just one angel) and the Spirit descend and proclaim Peace.
In the light of the Qur’an’s Syriac Christian roots, there is another possible interpretation – that sura 97 refers to Christmas.
The Qur’anic scholar Richard Bell saw in the night, angels, Spirit, and peace of the sura a hint of the Nativity even without a detailed philological examination: ‘The origin of the idea of the Night of Power is unexplained. The only other passage in the Quran which has any bearing on it is XLIV, 2a, 3. In some ways what is here said of it suggests that some account of the Eve of the Nativity may have given rise to it.’
Luxenberg points out that because the Night of Power is associated with the revelation of the Qur’an, Muslims undertook vigils during Ramadan. ‘However,’ he notes, ‘with regard to the history of religions this fact is all the more remarkable since Islam does not have a nocturnal liturgy (apart from the tarawih, prayers offered during the nights of Ramadan). There is thus every reason to think that these vigils corresponded originally to a Christian liturgical practice connected to the birth of Jesus Christ, a
nd which was later adopted by Islam, but re-interpreted by Islamic theology to mean the descent of the Koran.’
A close textual analysis supports this argument. Al-qadr, the Arabic word for ‘power,’ also means ‘fate’ or ‘destiny.’ Luxenberg observes that the Syriac qaaf-daal-raa – the q-d-r root of the Arabic word al-qadr – has three meanings, designating ‘i) the birth (meaning the moment of birth); ii) the star under which one is born and which determines the fate of the newly born; iii) The Nativity, or Christmas.’ He continues: ‘Thus defined, the term al-qadr, “destiny,” is related to the star of birth, which the Koranic al qadr applies, in the context of this sure, to the Star of Christmas. As a result, a connection is found to be established with Matthew II.2, “Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and are come to worship him.”’ Then the verse ‘the Night of Power is better than a thousand months’ (97:4) would be rendered ‘Christmas night is better than a thousand vigils.’
The Qur’an concludes the Night of Power passage with ‘Peace it is, till the rising of dawn’ (97:5). Luxenberg notes that this verse ‘sends us back to the hymn of the Angels cited by Luke II.14: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.” This chant of the Angels has always constituted the principal theme of the Syriac vigils of the Nativity which lasts into Christmas night, with all sorts of hymns, more than all the other vigils.’ Indeed, in the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Divine Liturgy of the Nativity was traditionally celebrated at dawn, after a nightlong vigil – ‘Peace it is, till the rising of dawn.’[7]
If such crucial events of the Islamic faith as the Night of Power can so easily be interpreted in a Christian manner we will not then be surprised to find that even the Qur’an’s five references to “Muhammad” (the “chosen one” or “praised one”) could equally well refer to Jesus as to any supposed Arabian prophet.
The evidence then, taken together, would then suggest that no Arabian prophet named Muhammad existed, and that “Muhammad,” was originally a title of Jesus. This means that what we now call Islam did not exist until near the end of the seventh century or even into the first half of the eighth. What existed before was proto-Islam, a branch of the Jewish Christian sect otherwise known as Ebionitism.
That a Judaizing form of Christianity, with little love for Rome or Byzantium, had already spread throughout Arabia by the fourth or at least fifth century is well enough known. From about the third century onwards we hear of “Saracens” raiding along the borders of the Roman Empire in Syria. It is true that these earlier Saracens cannot have been Ebionites or proto-Muslims, but it seems likely that the militaristic spirit of Judaism would have appealed to the nomad Arabs. Certainly by the fourth and fifth centuries there are reports of Saracen groups ranging as far east as Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) that were involved in battles on both the Persian and Roman sides.[8] They are described in the Roman administrative document Notitia dignitatum—dating from the time of Theodosius I in the 4th century—as comprising distinctive units in the composition of the Roman army and they are distinguished in the document from Arabs and Iiluturaens.[9]
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Although Spencer does not go into the question of how the Arab empire came to exist in the first place, there are very good grounds for believing that it was not originally an Arab creation at all, and that the invention of an Arabian prophet as the spiritual fountain-head of this empire, was motivated by a desire to justify what was essentially the Arab takeover of an imperial machine that was not theirs.
The two greatest powers in the Middle East at the beginning of the seventh century were Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In 602 the Persian king Chosroes (Khosrau) II went to war against the Byzantine usurper Phocas, who had earlier murdered Chosroes' friend and father-in-law the Emperor Maurice. The war did not end with the death of Phocas (610), but continued into the reign of Heraclius, and was to prove ruinous to the Byzantines. Jerusalem was taken by the Persians in 614, a disaster which was quickly followed by the loss of most of Asia Minor between 616 and 618 and Egypt in 619/20. Chosroes II now equalled the achievements of his Persian predecessors in the sixth century BC, with his forces marching across North Africa to annex the Libyan province of Cyrenaea in 621. The story told by the Byzantines of how Heraclius, in the face of this overwhelming calamity, rallied his armies and reconquered all the lost territories – only to lose the same territories again to the Arabs from 632 onwards – has a ring of fantasy about it, and historians have long viewed it with scepticism. Certainly there is no doubting the power and influence of the Persians in this epoch.
The earliest Islam, as revealed by archaeology, is in fact profoundly Persian; and indeed the first trace of Islam recovered in excavation are coins of Sassanid Persian design bearing the image either of Chosroes II (d. 628) or of his grandson Yazdegerd III (d. 651). On one side we find the portrait of the king, on the reverse the picture of a Zoroastrian Fire Temple. The only thing that marks these out as Islamic is the legend besm Allah (in the name of God), written in the Syriac script, beside the Fire Temple. (The Arabic script did not then exist). According to the Encyclopdaedia Iranica:
These coins usually have a portrait of a Sasanian emperor with an honorific inscription and various ornaments. To the right of the portrait is a ruler’s or governor’s name written in Pahlavi script. On the reverse there is a Zoroastrian fire altar with attendants on either side. At the far left is the year of issue expressed in words, and at the right is the place of minting. In all these features, the Arab-Sasanian coinages are similar to Sasanian silver drahms. The major difference between the two series is the presence of some additional Arabic inscription on most coins issued under Muslim authority, but some coins with no Arabic can still be attributed to the Islamic period. The Arab-Sasanian coinages are not imitations, since they were surely designed and manufactured by the same people as the late Sasanian issues, illustrating the continuity of administration and economic life in the early years of Muslim rule in Iran.[10]
Note the remark: “The Arab-Sasanian coinages are not imitations,” but were “designed and manufactured by the same people as the late Sasanian issues.” We note also that the date provided on these artefacts is written in Persian script, and it would appear that those who minted the coins, native Persians, did not understand Arabic. We hear that under the Arabs the mints were “evidently allowed to go on as before,” and that there are “a small number of coins indistinguishable from the drahms of the last emperor, Yazdegerd III, dated during his reign but after the Arab capture of the cities of issue. It was only when Yazdegerd died (A.D. 651) [in the time of the Ummayad Caliph Muawiya] that some mark of Arab authority was added to the coinage.”[11] Even more puzzling is the fact that the most common coins during the first decades of Islamic rule were those of Yazdegerd's predecessor Chosroes II, and many of these too bear the Arabic inscription (written however, as we saw, in the Syriac script) besm Allah. Now, it is just conceivable that invading Arabs might have issued slightly amended coins of the last Sassanid monarch, Yazdegerd III, but why continue to issue money in the name of a previous Sassanid king (Chosroes II), one who, supposedly, had died ten years earlier? This surely stretches credulity.
The Persian-looking Islamic coins are of course believed to date from the time of Umar (d. 664), one of the “Rightly-guided Caliphs” who succeeded Muhammad and supposedly conquered what became the Islamic Empire. Yet it has to be stated that there is no direct archaeological evidence for the existence either of Umar or any of the other “Rightly-guided” caliphs – Abu Bakr, Uthman or Ali. None of these men left even a brick bearing his name.[12] Archaeologically, their existence is as unattested as Muhammad himself. The very first archaeological trace of the caliphs comes with Muawiya, who of course reigned after the death of the Persian Yazdegerd III.
Could it be then that these coins were minted not by conquering Arab caliphs but by the men wh
ose names and images appear on them – the Sassanid emperors Chosroes II and Yazdegerd III? Could it be that Chosroes II converted to the Arab version of Christianity, Ebionitism, and that it was he who built the “Islamic” empire?
The Persians, it should be noted, had a long history of religious antagonism towards Christianity and towards Byzantium. During the second half of the sixth century Chosroes II's grandfather Chosroes I had gone to the assistance of the southern Arabs whose country Yemen had been annexed by the Christian Abyssinians. And the Sassanids were extremely active during the fifth and sixth centuries building alliances with princes throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Amongst these were the Lakhmids, who occupied what would now be southern Iraq and north-east Arabia, and who converted to Christianity – presumably the Arab or Ebionite version – early in the seventh century. The war between Chosroes II and Heraclius which erupted in 602 had from the very beginning all the characteristics of a religious conflict – a veritable jihad, no less. The Persians, along with numerous contingents of Arab allies, who took Jerusalem in 614, carried out a general massacre of the Christian population;[13] after which they looted the churches and seized some of Christendom’s most sacred relics – including the Holy Cross upon which Christ was crucified. As we saw, the story told by the Byzantines of how Heraclius, against all the odds, turned the tide of war and won back the sacred relics, strikes one as fictitious. Persian sources make no mention of Chosroes’ supposed defeat at the hands of the Byzantines. On the contrary, he is known in Iranian tradition as Apervez, (later abbreviated to Pervez) “the undefeatable” or “ever-victorious.” The most important Iranian source, Firdausi's Shahnameh, merely records how Chosroes was killed by his son Shirouyeh, who desired his father’s beautiful wife Shirin.
