1500 Year Old Bible Predicted the Coming of Prophet Mohammed

A 1,500-year-old Bible in which Jesus is believed to have foretold the coming of the Prophet Mohammed to Earth has attracted attention from the Vatican this week.

Pope Benedict XVI has reportedly requested to see the book, which has been hidden in Turkey for the last 12 years, according to the Daily Mail. 

The text, reportedly worth $22 million, is said to contain Jesus’ prediction of the Prophet’s coming but was suppressed by the Christian Church for years for its strong resemblance to the Islamic view of Jesus, Turkish culture and tourism minister Ertugrul Gunay told the newspaper.

“In line with Islamic belief, the Gospel treats Jesus as a human being and not a God. It rejects the ideas of the Holy Trinity and the Crucifixion and reveals that Jesus predicted the coming of the Prophet Mohammed,” the newspaper reported. 

“In one version of the gospel, he is said to have told a priest: ‘How shall the Messiah be called? Mohammed is his blessed name.’

“And in another, Jesus denied being the Messiah, claiming that he or she would be Ishmaelite, the term used for an Arab,” the newspaper added.

According to the report, Muslims claim the text, which many say is the Gospel of Barnabas, is an addition to the original gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

St. Barnabas is traditionally identified as the founder of the Cypriot Church, an early Christian later named an apostle.

Gunay said the Vatican has officially requested to see the book, which Turkey had discovered during a police anti-smuggling operation in 2000. 

The gang was reportedly convicted of smuggling various items seized during the operation, including the Bible, and all the artifacts were kept in a safe at an Ankara courthouse. 

It remained closely guarded by authorities before being handed over to the Ankara Ethnography Museum where it will soon be put on show.

A photocopy of a single page from the leather-bound, gold-lettered book, penned in Jesus’ native Aramaic language is reportedly worth about $2.4 million.

But skepticism over the authenticity of the ancient handwritten manuscript has arisen. 

Protestant pastor İhsan Özbek has said this version of the book is said to come from the fifth or sixth century, while St. Barnabas had lived in the first century as one of the Apostles of Jesus.

“The copy in Ankara might have been written by one of the followers of St. Barnabas,” he told the Today Zaman newspaper.

“Since there is around 500 years in between St. Barnabas and the writing of the Bible copy, Muslims may be disappointed to see that this copy does not include things they would like to see … It might have no relation with the content of the Gospel of Barnabas,” Özbek added.

But suspicions could soon be laid to rest. 

The real age of the Bible could soon be determined by a scientific scan, theology professor Ömer Faruk Harman told the Daily Mail, possibly clarifying whether it was written by St. Barnabas or a follower of his. 

Zakaria: Israel, don't strike Iran

We are hearing a new concept these days in discussions about Iran — the zone of immunity. The idea, often explained by Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, is that soon Iran will have enough nuclear capability that Israel would not be able to inflict a crippling blow to its program.

Israeli officials explain that we Americans cannot understand their fears, that Iran is an existential threat to them. But in fact we can understand because we have gone through a very similar experience ourselves. After World War II, as the Soviet Union approached a nuclear capability, the United States was seized by a panic that lasted for years.Everything that Israel says about Iran now, we said about the Soviet Union.

We saw it as a radical, revolutionary regime, opposed to every value we held dear, determined to overthrow the governments of the Western world in order to establish global communism. We saw Moscow as irrational, aggressive and utterly unconcerned with human life. After all, Joseph Stalin had just sacrificed a mind-boggling 26 million Soviet lives in his country’s struggle against Nazi Germany.

 

Just as Israel is openly considering preemptive strikes against Iran, many in the West urged such strikes against Moscow in the late 1940s. The calls came not just from hawks but even from lifelong pacifists such as the public intellectual Bertrand Russell.

To get a sense of the mood of the times, consider this entry from the Nov. 29, 1948, diary of Harold Nicolson, one of the coolest and most sober British diplomats of his generation: “[I]t is probably true that Russia is preparing for the final battle for world mastery and that once she has enough bombs she will destroy Western Europe, occupy Asia, and have a final death struggle with America. If that happens and we are wiped out over here, the survivors in New Zealand may say that we were mad not to have prevented this. . . . There is a chance that the danger may pass and peace can be secured with peace. I admit it is a frail chance, not one in ninety.”

In a speech at the Boston Navy Yard in August 1950, Navy Secretary Francis Matthews argued that, in being “an initiator of a war of aggression,” the United States “would become the first aggressors for peace.”

In the end, however, the global revolutionaries in Moscow, the mad autocrats in Pyongyang and the terrorist-supporting military in Pakistan have all been deterred by mutual fears of destruction. While the Iranian regime is often called crazy, it has done much less to merit the term than did a regime such as Mao’s China. Over the past decade, there have been thousands of suicide bombings by Saudis, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Pakistanis, but not been a single suicide attack by an Iranian. Is the Iranian regime — even if it got one crude device in a few years — likely to launch the first?

The efforts to delay and disrupt Iran's nuclear program are working. But even if one day Tehran manages to build a few crude bombs, a policy of robust containment and deterrence is better to contemplate than a preemptive war.

For more of my thoughts throughout the week, I invite you to follow me on Facebook and Twitter and to visit the Global Public Square every day. Be sure to catch GPS every Sunday at 10a.m. and 1p.m. EST. If you miss it, you can buy the show on iTunes. For more of my takes, click here.

GPS web extra: Dempsey skeptical about

On GPS this week, Fareed had an exclusive interview with the top-ranking military officer in the U.S., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey. Here's an additional, web-only excerpt with Dempsey's thoughts on the Taliban and closing Guantanamo Bay:

Fareed Zakaria: You said in Congressional testimony this week that you had some doubts about the reconciliation process in Afghanistan, with the Taliban. Elaborate on that. Why do you have doubts at it? Everyone says we should be trying to get some kind of political deal with the Taliban so that we can stabilize the country and draw down forces.

Martin Dempsey: Well, I concede and am supportive of the effort, because I concede that most every conflict that anyone has ever been involved with ends with some kind of political settlement.

I think there's no one Taliban. You know, there's big T and little T.

So to the extent that we can separate the - let's call them, maybe more precisely, the reconcilable aspects of the Taliban, with those who are irreconcilable, I think it's effort well taken.

If I'm worried about the immediate idea, it's because we might be addressing the ideological side of the Taliban before we get to those that might be a little bit less ideological. It's just not clear to me.

So it's not that I'm reluctant to try this. But it's pretty hard to be optimistic about it.

Fareed Zakaria: So - so it's a - it's a kind of practical concern that we might be talking to the wrong people?

Martin Dempsey: Well, that's my concern. And - and, you know, in support of the secretary of Defense, who, by law, has to certify that this first tranche or whatever we end up agreeing to release, that they won't be recidivist, to the extent that he has to certify that they won't return to the fight, you know, I think he shares my concerns.

Fareed Zakaria: So now this is about the proposal that five prisoners from Guantanamo be released in a good faith effort...

Martin Dempsey: That's right.

Fareed Zakaria: Right. And I understand your concern is that these people will go right back and start doing terrorism? Let's use that as a way of talking about Guantanamo...

Martin Dempsey: OK.

Fareed Zakaria: This is a place the president promised he was going to close. In fact, even President Bush talked about how he wished he'd be able to close it. But this has been the concern, has it not, which is that if you release these - these prisoners and you don't have some - some way of handling them, some other country that is willing to take them, they'll go back and start engaging in terrorist activities. Why is that a problem that isn't soluble? Why is it that, three years in, it hasn't been possible to close Guantanamo?

Martin Dempsey: Well, we haven't found a community of nations eager to have this particular population. And so, you know, from our perspective as the military, we don't necessarily care where we hold people in detention, just that we have to have the capability to do that.

And I don't think that the current policy of including all possibilities, meaning domestically and internationally, is the right policy - as many tools in the toolbox as we can place.

But to your point about why is it so hard to close Guantanamo, I mean this is the same fears playing out that have played out about what to do with this population of radicalized individuals.

Fareed Zakaria: And it doesn't feel like much progress has been made in terms of either finding homes for them, finding a process by which they can be moved out of this kind of legally ambiguous status of being at Guantanamo.

Martin Dempsey: I mean I share your feeling that there doesn't feel like we've made much progress. I don't think that's from lack of effort. I think it's just, there are problems that we confront that are harder than others. And this may be as hard as it gets.

Fareed Zakaria: So you don't see - foresee any near-term solution to the Guantanamo problem?

Martin Dempsey: No, I wouldn't - I wouldn't say it that starkly. I mean I - I don't see - I guess I would, if you said near-term. I think this will take time to resolve.

Will post-Assad Syria look like Iraq?

Editor’s Note: Professor Eyal Zisser is the head of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History and a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center, both at Tel Aviv University.

By Eyal Zisser - Special to CNN

In an interview that Bashar al-Assad gave to the Wall Street Journal in January 2011 before the Syrian protests broke out, he assured his interviewers that the Arab Spring would not reach Damascus. Al-Assad was mistaken, of course, for within a month of the interview protests broke out across the country. But al-Assad had a point, Syria is different from the other countries of the Arab Spring such as Egypt and Tunisia.  Syria possesses qualities that protect it better from the storm.

Nearly 40% of Syria's population consists of members of minority communities. There are the Alawites (about 12%), from among whom come the ruling al-Assad family. In addition to this community, there are the Christians (12%), the Kurds (10%), and the Druze (5%). Many within minority communities worry that radical Islam will replace al-Assad and have been reluctant to join the protests against Bashar al-Assad.

In addition, the revolution in Syria is not driven by the “Facebook” youth - offspring of the big city middle and upper classes - as they were in Egypt and Tunisia. Syria's revolution is a peasants' revolution. It broke out in the rural periphery, away from Damascus.

The residents of Syria's big cities, including the members of the Sunni community, are still sitting on the fence. They see Iraq - Syria's neighbor to the east - as a possible scenario for post-al-Assad Syria. Iraq was liberated by the Americans from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein but instead of stability and prosperity, the dictator's fall brought on a bloody civil war between Iraq's different religious and ethnic communities.  Indiscriminate terror resulted, along with the gradual disintegration of the country into its regional components - Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center, and Shiites in the south.

What to watch

The Syrian regime is bleeding. Of this there is no doubt. The question is: Will it continue to bleed until it finally falls, or will Bashar al-Assad somehow be able to maintain power. To answer this question, one must look for the “game-changers” - those major developments that could bring about a dramatic and quick collapse of the al-Assad regime.

First, one must pay attention to the cohesion of the Syrian army and government apparatuses. These have so far maintained their cohesion, continuing to support the al-Assad regime. There have not been any major desertions from the army. No army unit or high-ranking general has deserted its ranks for the opposition.

Most of the Syrian Army's high-ranking officers come from the al-Assad family or the Alawite community. They know that - in contrast to their counterparts in Egypt - the end of the al-Assad regime also means their end. Even the Syrian state bureaucracy stands firmly behind Bashar al-Assad. Thus, for example, not one Syrian diplomat has defected even though there are hundreds of diplomats in the Syrian Foreign Service stationed in more than a hundred embassies around the world. This fact stands in complete contrast to Libya where most of the Libyan diplomatic corps defected to the opposition within days of the outbreak of the violence there.

Next, one must pay attention to the communities currently sitting on the fence - the residents of the big cities such as Damascus and Aleppo - along with members of the various minority groups such as the Druze and Christians. As long as the residents of the big cities, mostly Sunnis, refrain from joining the demonstrations against the regime, the opposition, which is in any case divided, will find it even more difficult to garner enough power to bring down the al-Assad regime. On the other hand, if the Druze on Jabal al-Druze (Druze Mountain) decide to join the demonstrations against the regime - something that has not yet happened - this will signal their belief that the Syrian regime has come to the end of the road.

Given this situation, it is no wonder that the world has been careful about intervening militarily in Syria. The Syrian army, which still stands behind al-Assad, could fight back. It is a strong and powerful army. It is most likely that the world will let the Syrian struggle continue until the regime weakens and collapses by itself, or until those who are sitting on the fence in Syria join the protests and thereby signal the nearing end of al-Assad. At most, other states will continue to supply the insurgents in Syria with money and weapons with the aim of bleeding the Syrian regime until it collapses.

The Syrian regime has enough strength to survive for some time absent a game-changing event such as defections of entire army units or high-ranking officers, a sudden change of heart in the international community followed by substantial intervention, or massive demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo.

Absent these events, the struggle for Syria is likely to be long and bloody, without a decisive outcome on the horizon.

Life resurrected from prehistoric seeds

Russian scientists say they've grown a flowering plant from material extracted from seeds deposited in the Siberian permafrost 30,000 years ago.

The work of the scientists at the Institute of Cell Biophysics in Russia is creating a worldwide buzz after being published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

Previously, the oldest known seed material that has been able to produce life was from about 2,000 years ago, science writer Ed Yong reports in a Discover magazine blog giving details of the work of the Russian breakthrough.

The plants, named silene stenophylla, are from a time when wooly mammoths and saber-tooth cats lived in Siberia. Their 300-century path to life began when squirrels brought the fruit of the plant and the immature seeds the fruit contained into a riverbank burrow. As the climate cooled, the burrow was covered with layers of ice and the seeds were preserved by temperatures of minus-7 degrees Celsius (19.4 degrees Fahrenheit), according to Yong's report.

The immature seeds were extracted from the burrow along the banks of the Kolyma River more than five years ago.

The Russian scientists were able to take what is called "placenta tissue" from the immature seeds, grow that tissue into mature seeds in a lab environment, and then plant those seeds in normal soil and watch them grow into the blossoming plants, according to a report from the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

Those plants have now produced their own seeds and fruits, establishing a whole new generation of the ancient plant, the reports said.

The ancient plants differ only slightly from their modern descendants in the shape of their petals and sex of the flowers, the RIA Novosti report said.

The news of the ancient plants brought to life immediately brought speculation about whether other life forms might be resurrected from the permafrost, which James Haile, a scientist at Murdoch University in Australia, said earlier this year was "a giant molecular freezer" preserving the DNA of a thriving Pleistocene ecosystem.

"Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon could act as one massive freezer, where ancient life has been stored, waiting to greet the world again," Yong wrote on his blog.

"The success of the Russian scientists may open a door to a whole new area of experiments in reviving extinct plants buried under layers of soil, especially in the Arctic zone, for thousands of years," the RIA Novosti article said.

The new findings may give hope to a team of Russian, Japanese and American scientists who reported a year ago that within six years they hope to produce baby mammoth from DNA extracted from a Pleistocene mammoth carcass.

Alibaba wants to take Web unit private

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, which has been in the headlines lately for its tussles with stakeholder Yahoo, wants to take its publicly traded Web portal private.

Alibaba Group said Tuesday that it made an offer to Alibaba.com's board of directors.

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Alibaba Group owns about 73.5% of e-commerce leader Alibaba.com, which is the company's only publicly traded subsidiary. Under the terms of the deal, Alibaba Group would buy the other 26.5% of the company for 13.50 Hong Kong dollars ($1.74 U.S.) per share in cash.

That's a 55.3% premium above Alibaba.com's average closing price over the last 10 days -- but it's the exact same price the company fetched in its initial public offering in November 2007.

Taking the web portal private "will allow our company to make long-term decisions that are in the best interest of our customers and that are also free from the pressures that come from having a publicly listed company," Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma said in a prepared statement.

Alibaba has been in the news frequently over the past year for its contentious relationship with Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500).

Yahoo owns about a 40% stake in Alibaba, which is considered one of its most valuable assets. But Ma and former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had a public dispute over ownership of Alipay, an online payment unit similar to eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500)-owned PayPal.

The companies reached an agreement in July 2011, but tensions continued. Ma said at a conference in late September that Alibaba would be "interested" in buying all of Yahoo -- a purchase that would essentially allow Ma to buy back control of that 40% Alibaba stake.

According to media reports, Yahoo had been in advanced talks with Alibaba and Japan-based Softbank to discuss selling its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. But those talks reportedly collapsed earlier this month. 

Tibetans cancel New Year celebrations

(CNN) -- Wednesday marks Losar, or the Tibetan New Year, but there will be no music, chanting, spectacular costumes or pageantry this year.

Instead, Tibetans across the world plan to observe Losar with the solemnity their government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, has proclaimed it deserves.

Lobsang Sangay, the Tibetan prime minister-in-exile, issued a statement asking Tibetans to refrain from celebration.

"But do observe traditional and spiritual rituals by going to the monastery, making offerings and lighting butter lamps for all those who have sacrificed and suffered under the repressive policies of Chinese government," Sangay said.

Sangay asked for a somber New Year because of the "grim news" that continues to stream out of Tibet, he said.

In the past year, 22 monks, nuns and other Tibetans set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule, according to the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet.

The latest incident occurred Saturday when an 18-year-old monk self-immolated in front of a monastery in the village of Barma village in China's Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, according to a statement from the government-in-exile.

He apparently died shouting, "May His Holiness the Dalai Lama live 10,000 years!" and "Freedom for Tibet," the International Campaign for Tibet said.

The government-in-exile also said it has had news of arrests of Tibetan writers and intellectuals.

China accuses Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, for inciting unrest and trying to divide China.

But monks who spoke secretly to CNN said they want China to allow the Dalai Lama to return to a free Tibet. In their pouch, they carry a sacred keepsake of their leader.

In 1950, Chinese troops occupied Tibet, enforcing what Beijing says is a centuries-old claim over the region. Nine years later, the Dalai Lama fled to India after a failed uprising in Lhasa left 85,000 people dead.

Pro-Tibetan groups say Chinese persecution and torture has killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetans over the years. They also say Han Chinese, China's main ethnic group, have migrated to the region and turned Tibetans into a minority in their homeland.

Sangay urged Tibetans to protest non-violently and legally, especially on March 10, the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

"We once again fervently urge the Chinese government to give serious consideration to our legitimate demands and appeals we have made so far," the government statement said.

Sangay said he wanted to make sure Tibetan voices were heard loud and clear in Beijing.

Tibetans all over the world began posting Sangay's message on websites. In the United States, several Tibetan associations canceled Losar celebrations, one of the biggest annual festivities for Tibetans.

"It means much more than Losar," said Tsepak Rigzin, program director at the Drepung Loseling center in Atlanta.

This year, he said, Losar would truly signify unity, solidarity, compassion.

"It's a symbol of our integrity," said Rigzin, 51, who has lived in the United States since 2005. "It means sharing the suffering and pain of our brothers and sisters of Tibet."

He, like Tibetans everywhere, will begin the year 2139 with quiet contemplation -- and dreams of a homeland.