Bahira Apocalypse

Sergius or Georgius (Jarjis) known as Monk Bahira (Boheiry), is said to have been a rich Greek priest, or Syriac excommunicated Monk, a Jewish scholar that accepted Christianity (Sirah, 1.191 footnote:1) an ‘Ebionite’, ‘Nestorian’ or possibly ‘Gnostic Nasorean’ Monk, a hermit, who, according to Islamic tradition, foretold to the adolescent Muhammad his future as Prophet. His appellation could have been derived from (Syriac: b?īrā), meaning “tested (by God) and approved” or by the sheer nature of his dwelling next to a waterhole or pond (Arabic: buhayra).

Syriac Church or Syrian Church may refer to any Christian Church in Syria using the Syriac language and Syriac liturgical tradition, including among others the Eastern Catholic, and Oriental Orthodox Churches.

Ebionites is a patristic term referring to a Jewish Christian movement that existed during the early centuries of the Christian era. They regarded Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah while rejecting his divinity and his virgin birth and insisted on the necessity of following Jewish law and rites.

Nestorianism is a Christian theological doctrine that upholds several distinctive teachings in the fields of Christology and Mariology. It opposes the concept of hypostatic union and emphasizes that the two natures of Jesus Christ were joined by will rather than personhood.

Nasor?ans are pagan Gnostics who shortly before the rise of Christianity, formed a sect which flourished in Mesopotamia and Babylonia, and which was one of the foremost religions in Western Asia in the early years of Mohammedanism. Though some 2000 families strong in the seventeenth century, they have dwindled at the present day to some 1500 adherents living on the Shat-el-Arab near the Persian Gulf. It is the only Gnostic sect that has survived and the sacred writings of which are still extant; a few remnants excepted, most writings of the so-called Christian Gnostics have perished.

Gnosticism is a collection of ancient religious ideas and systems which originated in the first century AD among early Christian and Jewish sects. These various groups, labelled "gnostics" by their opponents, emphasized personal spiritual knowledge over orthodox teachings, traditions, and ecclesiastical authority.

Monk Bahira was in (Boszra or Busra al-Sham) Bosra, living near a Church known today as ‘Monastery of Bahira the Monk’, an oblong square building, called by the natives Deir Boheiry, or the Monastery of the priest Boheiry.

The story of Muhammad's encounter with Bahira occurs in the works of the early Muslim historians Ibn Hisham (died 833 CE), Ibn Saad al-Baghdadi (784-855 CE), and Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839-923 CE), whose versions differ in some details.

The young Muhammad, then either nine or twelve years old, met Monk Bahira in the town of Bosra in Syria while travelling with a Meccan caravan, accompanying his uncle Abu Talib ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib. When the caravan passed by his cell near the church, the monk invited the merchants to a feast. They accepted the invitation, leaving the boy to guard the camels. Bahira, however, insisted that everyone in the caravan should come to him.

Then legend has is that a miraculous occurrence indicated to the monk that Muhammad would become a prophet. The movement of a cloud that kept shadowing Muhammad regardless of the time of the day drew Bahira's attention. The monk foretold the advent of the new Prophet and revealed his visions of Muhammad's future to the boy's uncle (Abu Talib), warning him to preserve the child from the Jews (in Ibn Saad's version) or from the Byzantines (in al-Tabari's version). Both Ibn Saad and al-Tabari write that Bahira found the announcement of the coming of Muhammad in the original, unadulterated gospel, which he possessed.

A similar tradition is attributed (to Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri’s siyar), from the works of the early ahadith compiler ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-San‘ani, in which Bahira was a rabbi with the Jews of Tayma' instead of a Christian Syrian monk. The rabbi warns Abu Talib against bringing Muhammad to Syria, as he predicts that Muhammad will be killed by the Syrian Jews if they proceed. Abu Talib returns back to Mecca with his nephew in the company of the rabbi. Later Islamic writers gave the Monk or Rabbi the name of Bahira.

In the Christian tradition Bahira became a heretical monk, whose errant views inspired the Quran. Bahira is at the center of the Apocalypse of Bahira, which exists in Syriac and Arabic which makes the case for an origin of the Quran from Christian Apocrypha.

Certain Arabist authors maintain that Bahira's works formed the basis of those parts of the Quran that conform to the principles of Christianity, while the rest was introduced either by subsequent compilers such as Uthman Ibn Affan, a son-in-law and notable companion of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the third of the Rashidun, or "Rightly Guided Caliphs".or contemporary Jews and Arabs.

The names and religious affiliations of the monk vary in different Christian sources. For example, John of Damascus (d.749), a Christian writer, states that Muhammad "having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an ‘Arian’ monk, devised his own heresy."

Arianism is a non-Trinitarian Christological doctrine which asserts the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who was begotten by God the Father at a point in time, a creature distinct from the Father and is therefore subordinate to him, but the Son is also God.

For Abd-al-Masih al-Kindi, who calls him Sergius and writes that he later called himself Nestorius, Bahira was a Nasorean, a group usually conflated with the Nestorians.

After the 9th century, Byzantine polemicists refer to him as Baeira or Pakhyras, both being derivatives of the name Bahira, and describe him as an iconoclast. Sometimes Bahira is called a Syrian Jacobite (Orthodox Christian Church also known as the Malankara Jacobite Syrian Christian Church) or an Arian (a nontrinitarian Christological doctrine which asserts the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who was begotten by God the Father at a point in time, a creature distinct from the Father and is therefore subordinate to him, but the Son is also God.)

The early Christian polemical biographies of Muhammad share in claiming that any supposed illiteracy of Muhammad did not imply that he received religious instruction solely from the Angel Gabriel, but often identified Bahira as the undisclosed, religious mentor of Muhammad.

Many people think of the Quran as a radically different book from the Bible. Moreover, according to this view, even though Muslims, Christians,and Jews, all believe in the same God, these religions are different, distinct traditions.

An argument can be made, however, that the similarities between the Bible and the Quran are actually much more intimate than one might think, and that Islam, Judaism and Christianity are closer to being different interpretations of a shared religious culture than totally distinct traditions.

Angel Gabriel is, of course, an important character in the Hebrew Bible (where he appears to and explains visions to the prophet Daniel) and the New Testament (where he appears to Zecharia, telling him of his son-to-be, John the Baptist).

Beyond Angel Gabriel, the Quran is filled with characters from the Hebrew Bible: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David and Goliath, Jonah, Mary, and John the Baptist all appear, among others,including Jesus.

Those shared characters also participate in many shared narratives between the Quran and the Bible. Among them are the Garden of Eden, the Flood, the choice of Abraham and the creation of the people of Israel, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of one of his sons, Moses and the liberation of Israel from Egypt, the life and death of Jesus, and the idea that God repeatedly sends prophets to humanity to warn and instruct them.

As similar as all these stories and characters are, many fascinating differences exist among the texts. These differences appear to have two explanations:

• Prophet Muhammad could not actually read the texts of the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament (Islamic tradition claims he was illiterate). Instead, he memorized interpretations of Monk Bahira, His wife, as well as overheard traveling Jews and Christians tell oral renditions of Biblical stories, liberally mixed with folklore.
• Prophet Muhammad altered some of the stories’ details to fit his own cultural and theological perspective as did later Caliph Uthman and his scribes.

The Hebrew Bible in English mentions 133 women by name in its approximately 1,000 pages; the New Testament mentions 33 in around 300 pages; the Quran, at around 500 pages, names only one: Mary (Mariam), the mother of Jesus.

Women in the Quran generally play a smaller role than in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. For example, in the Hebrew Bible, several women converse directly with God: Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebecca, Hannah, and Deborah. In the New Testament, several named women have close relationships with Jesus, and several are described as leaders and “prophetesses” in the early Church. However, the Quran depicts Mary as the only woman who talks to the divine, when she speaks to Angel Gabriel before her conception of Jesus through “the divine breath” (Quran 66:12)...

Food for thought!