Ep.5: Was the 7th c. Proto-Muhammad a Christian?

Every once-in-a-while we introduce a "white paper". These are 'what-if' scenarios, where we put out new material which we have come across that has not yet been substantiated, to see how you the reader will react. This episode then is one of those 'white papers', which has to do with the question concerning who could have created the original nascent Qur'an, and whether that person was living in the 7th century? To understand who could have been this original Muhammad, or, in-other-words the first ‘Muhammad’ to receive a revelation which later became the Qur’an, we need to return to the 7th century and look at a Jewish king from the city of Hira (today’s Kufa, in Iraq) who was called Umar (that was a common name in the 7th century), but introduced the name MHMD. This is obviously not the Umar of the Standard Islamic Traditions, who was the 2nd caliph of Islam and ruled from 634 – 644 AD in Medina, Arabia, because that Umar did not come from Iraq. So, we're talking about someone else completely different. In fact this 7th century northern Umar from Hira, was a Jew, and not a Muslim, yet later on became a Christian. So, once again, we're not talking about the 2nd Islamic caliph with the same name. We have a coin which is dated to 647 AD with the image of Umar on it, and the word ‘Mhmd’, which is written on the left side (see the photo above), yet the person whose image is on the coin is holding a cross. If this was the Islamic Umar, why is he holding a cross, and why does this coin come from Iraq, and not from Arabia? This Umar, in 638 AD went to Jerusalem and conquered it. Sophroneus, the bishop of Jerusalem at that time asked Umar to pray at the Church of the Sepulchre, which Umar refuses to do, but instead marches up to the temple mount (Mt. Moriah) and builds a wooden structure there, as a commemoration of King David’s temple, which had been situated there. Today, the Dome of the Rock is located there, having been built on that spot in 691 AD by Abd al-Malik. Later, in 644 AD Umar had a debate with John the Sedder about the 2nd century Syriac document called the Diatessaron, which was written by Tatian as a harmony of the 4 gospels. Umar lost the debate, but then met a Christian priest named Gabriel at the debate, and they became close friends. Gabriel offered him a book which included part of the Syriac Diatessaron, which possibly became the later Qur’an. We also know that the ‘Birmingham folios’ made famous in 2015, include 33 verses from Surahs 18-20 and are dated by carbon dating to 568 AD – 645 AD, thus spanning this same time period. Yet, notice that the 3 stories in these 2 folios have nothing to do with Islam or Muhammad but are stories borrowed from earlier Christian and Jewish texts. Umar, who is given the book in 638 AD mints the coin with the word MHMD in 647 AD, so what happened in between? It seems that he was converted to Christianity, possibly by the influence of his friend, the priest Gabriel, who had offered him the book earlier, and now as a Christian mints the coin with the reference to MHMD, which means "the praised one" in Arabic. Could he be referring to Jesus as the praised one? When we go to the 9th-10th century Standard Islamic Narratives, they tell us that their Abbasid Muhammad received a text or revelation from another Gabriel, the angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic). Could it be that the earlier 7th century Umar, who refers to himself as MHMD and receives his revelation from Gabriel the priest, is now retold in the 9th – 10th centuries as the prophet Muhammad who receives his revelation from Gabriel the angel? The former MHMD lived much further north in Iraq, but conquered Jerusalem, while the later Muhammad lived much further south, in central Arabia, and never went to Jerusalem. So, it could well be that we’re starting to see kernels of truth from the 7th century that are then embellished and changed over the subsequent decades and centuries, using often the same name, by the compilers of the Standard Islamic Narrative of the 9th and 10th centuries. Tell us what you think? © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2022 (67,580) Music: "Feeling the Caribbean Sun" by Horst Hoffman, from filmmusic-io