by
Damien F. Mackey
Human history is in need of a massive renovation!
I already knew this as far as BC time was concerned, having written two postgraduate theses; the one towards dismantling (http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1632) the conventional system, and then my effort later towards the reconstruction (http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5973) of BC time.
So, why should I now presume that AD time has been solidly established?
Most assuredly, I do not. Had I not written in my:
Osman's ‘Osmosis’ of Moses
that: “… one should nevertheless expect the chronological earthquake caused by [Dr. Immanuel] Velikovsky to be still transmitting aftershocks right down the line, so as to plunge late BC events into an AD time frame”.
And, indeed, a start has already been made to apply a Velikovskian revolution to AD time as well. Thus certain Velikovskians, acutely aware of the problems posed by convention for the securing of BC time, have now begun also to question the AD matrix, especially the so-called ‘Dark Age’ period.
To my mind, one of the great achievements of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky in his pioneering Ages in Chaos series – {his system of revision is far from perfect, however} - was to have exposed the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ of antiquity (c. 1200-700 BC) as being an artificial padding to enable for an over-extended (Sothic-based) Egyptian chronology to harmonise with the shorter Greek (and other) chronologies.
See my summary of Sothic theory, in:
The Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited
Now some, mainly German, Velikovskians (e.g. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, Heribert Illig, Uwe Topper) have applied the same sort of revisionist principles (e.g. real history’s need for an underlying stratigraphy) to the presumed Dark Age phase of AD 614–911 - in the early part of which the prophet Mohammed (c. 570-632) is supposed to have lived. Interested readers might like to peruse - for a handy summary of this revolutionary new approach to AD time - Jan Beaufort’s article, “Illig's Hypothesis on Phantom Times – FAQ” (http://www.cybis.se/forfun/dendro/hollstein/hollstein0/beaufort/index.htm).
Whilst some, or most, of this new research may turn out to be just as extreme and flawed as was much of Dr. Velikovsky’s, I must agree with it at least in principle, that something is seriously wrong with many aspects of the received AD history. I, trying to make some sense of this, looking to find a reliable golden thread, so to speak – and especially interested in the case of the Prophet Mohammed who had begun to seem to me like something of a composite Israelite (or Jewish) holy man (traces there of Moses; Tobit; Job; Jeremiah; and Jesus Christ) – nearly fell off my chair when I read for the first time that there was a “Nehemiah” contemporaneous with said Prophet Mohammed.
OK, no big deal with that, insofar as there are, even today, people named “Nehemiah”.
But a “Nehemiah” doing just what the biblical Nehemiah had done?
I have previously written about this:
Now this is a very strange Afterglow of BC in AD time!
There is a strange interfacing (mirroring) of c. 600 BC [I picked this round figure for purposes of symmetry only] events with c. 600 AD events, particularly the appearance of [a] Nehemiah in both cases, serving the Persians in both cases, in relation to Jerusalem in both cases.
600 BC, approximately, has been sucked all the way forward to 600 AD!
…. One extraordinary case [reference to the Velikovskian aftershocks as quoted above] that has just come to light for me concerns Nehemiah (thought to be a Jew) of c. 600 BC.
Now I find that there was a Nehemiah, a Jew, supposedly in 614 AD (the era of Mohammed), to whom a Persian general had entrusted the city of Jerusalem (just as “Artaxerxes”, thought to have been an ancient Persian king, had allowed Nehemiah his cupbearer, the governor, to return to Jerusalem and to restore the damaged city). This supposedly later Nehemiah “offers a sacrifice on the site of the Temple”, according to Étienne Couvert (La Vérité sur les Manuscripts de la Mer Morte, 2nd ed, Éditions de Chiré, p. 98. My translation). “He even seems to have attempted to restore the Jewish cult of sacrifice”, says Maxine Lenôtre (Mahomet Fondateur de L’Islam, Publications MC, p. 111, quoting from S.W. Baron’s, Histoire d’Israël, T. III, p. 187. My translation), who then adds (quoting from the same source): “Without any doubt, a number of Jews saw in these events a repetition of the re-establishment of the Jewish State by Cyrus and Darius [C6th BC kings of ancient Persia] and behaved as the rulers of the city and of the country”.
Whilst this is quite a penetrating observation as far as it goes, I think that the conclusion ought actually to go far deeper even than this. This “Nehemiah, a Jew”, I now suggest, was none other than the original Nehemiah himself, “the governor”, of the OT Book of Nehemiah. He was not ‘repeating the re-establishment of the Jewish state by Cyrus and Darius’, but was the very one who had prophetically envisioned it!
He has been sucked all the way forward to 600 AD!
And Mohammed, orginally an Old Testament prophet, has been curiously metamorphosised into a C7th AD Arabian prophet.
[End of article]
A “Nehemiah” practically mirror-imaging the Nehemiah of about a millennium earlier!
And, what was the Persian empire doing there all over again about a millennium after it had been overrun by that irresistible conqueror Alexander the Great?
The incredible irony of it all, I believe, is that Islam does not know who its Prophet Mohammed really was!
The truth about the “Prophet Mohammed” is that he was originally a BC character of the era of the Chaldean and Persian empires, whose person and era have somehow (and the ‘mechanism’ whereby this has happened must await a proper understanding and revision of AD history) been projected into a (perhaps not inappropriately called) ‘Dark Age’, supposedly in AD time.
And the same comment applies to the biblical Nehemiah. (And to who knows who else?).
Down through the centuries (depending upon how many there actually are in real AD time), the Prophet, and the religion that he originally espoused - pure Yahwism, for sure - and the Bible, have filtered through Arabia (with its own unique flavours and interpretations), picked up Samaritan - and even, anachronistically, Christian - elements. Correspondingly, with the Hebrew Scriptures, that have re-emerged, metamorphosised and quite transformed, as the Koran (Qur’an) of Islam.
I intend to write much more about all of this.
