Revelation!: The Single Story of Divine Prophecy to Abraham and His Descendants - the Jews, Christians and Muslims

By Jane M McCabe

REVELATION! The Single Story of Divine Prophecy to Abraham and His Descendants–the Jews, Christians and Muslims tells the story of prophecy as ONE story, recognizing Mohammad as a prophet in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and comparing stories from the Koran with their biblical versions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664135741

Jane M McCabe

Jane Madson McCabe is a writer, painter, and teacher. She developed an interest in Islam when she was a seminary student at Luther/Northwestern Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota during the 1970’s and has studied it ever since. She has written several novels, poetry, and numerous children’s stories. Currently she lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Miss Clara.

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Copyright © 2020 by Jane McCabe.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

Just as all the quotes from the Koran in this text come from The Meaning of The Glorious Koran, translated by Marmaduke Pickthall and published for Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., first in 1930 and again in 1992, so, all biblical quotes, unless otherwise stated, come from the Revised Standard Version, an authorized revision of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which is was a revision of the King James Version, published in 1611.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/15/2020

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 From the Beginning of Time to the Time of Abraham, about 2000 BC

Chapter 2 Revelation to the Ancient Hebrews, from Abraham to the Birth of Jesus, from About 2000 BC to AD 1

Chapter 3 Revelation to Jesus and the Early Christians, from AD 1 to AD 320

Chapter 4 The Conversion of Constantine and the Nicene Council, from AD 320 to AD 570

Chapter 5 Revelation to Mohammed, from AD 570 to AD 632

Chapter 6 The Koran, Part 1: Old Testament References

Chapter 7 The Koran, Part 2: New Testament References

Conclusions

Addendum

INTRODUCTION

T HIS IS THE narrative of a personal journey. It is not a physical journey, but rather a journey of the mind and heart. It is, in a real sense, a religious pilgrimage. I suppose it began in 1973 when my mother and I went on a church-sponsored tour of the Middle East. In Israel, I experienced a strong sense of déjà vu . The trip prompted me to learn more about the Middle East and religion. After receiving a master’s degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, I decided to go to a Lutheran seminary. I chose a Lutheran seminary simply because I had been raised a Lutheran. This move baffled friends, but it had its own interior logic. My aim was not to become a pastor but, as I blithely told them, to study God.

In 1976, while I was a student at Luther/Northwestern Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I chose to write a paper on Islam. A fifth of the world’s people are Muslims, yet I knew almost nothing about what they believed. Like most of us, I am hostile toward that which I do not understand; and thus, I was hostile toward Islam. What began with suspicion and lack of comprehension became over the years, as my knowledge and understanding increased, a love affair, nearly an obsession.

I have written this book based on the conviction that the truth is one, no matter how imprecise our understanding of it. Much of what we think is invented is not so much invented as discovered: it was there all the time just waiting for someone with eyes to see it. So if I say that I made some exciting discoveries along the way, they were things that have been there all the time. I now believe this journey will not end until I die, but I have the essence of what I want to say as a result of my study and my having brought things together in a slightly different fashion.

Two keys to this exposition were given to me in my student days when I began to study the early history of the Christian church. A third key arrived when I began a careful study of the Koran twenty years later.

A part of any study of the early church involves the study of heresy. Heresy can be defined as an opinion or doctrine at variance with established religious belief, especially dissension from or denial of Roman Catholic dogma by a professed believer or baptized church member. The early church was plagued by many heresies, but none more difficult to eradicate than the Arian heresy to be taken up more fully in this book. Briefly, it is the heresy that claims that Jesus is not fully God as God is God. Because I was required to write a paper on heresy, I thought more deeply about Arianism than I might otherwise have.

The line of my thinking went something like this: as a human being living in the twentieth century, I had two sources of knowledge—that which I gained from study and that which I knew from my own experience. When I thought about Jesus from my own experience, I could believe that he was a human being, just as I am a human being. I could believe that he was an especially anointed human being who was designated to be the Messiah, one who had closer contact with God than any other person who has lived, but I could not believe he was God in the same way that God is God. I could believe that Jesus performed miracles—to heal the sick, to turn water into wine, to walk on water, even to raise Lazarus from the dead—but I believed this was because he was empowered by God, not because he was God. I could identify with him more closely if I viewed him as a frail human being, as I knew myself to be, if he were entrusted with his mission as the Messiah, the Savior, but if he did not know whether he would be able to complete it, just as none of us know whether we have really done the things we have been set on this earth to do.

When one reads history, as I have done for the last ten years, one often finds that the people who contributed significantly to our society died in poverty not knowing entirely what they had achieved. Ferdinand Magellan died before his men completed their circumnavigation of the world. Christopher Columbus died not really knowing what he had discovered. Johannes Gutenberg died impoverished and without seeing his invention of the printing press flourish. Galileo died without knowing the entire significance of his discoveries. On and on the list goes—the people who have made the great contributions to our world usually had a strong inclination of the importance of their activities but did not live to see them come to fruition.

Therefore, I saw Jesus as a man who completely submitted himself to the will of God (which, by the way, is the definition of a Muslim) and in so doing grew into the man he was designated to be. But finding myself in agreement with Arius’s view of Jesus was not something I wanted to go around shouting.

I left the seminary without graduating after my mother died, and I returned to Montana to live in our family home until my siblings and I could decide what to do with it. I did not seek ordination as a pastor partly because secretly I considered myself a heretic—an Arian.

The second key came when I read the fascinating account of the first Nicene Council held in AD 325 during the time when the nature of Jesus was being hotly debated and the doctrine of the Trinity as stated in the Nicene Creed was established. This creed has dominated Christian orthodoxy ever since. Prior to reading this account, I assumed, like most Christians, that the Nicene Creed was somehow divined by the church and was true: why else would Christians throughout the centuries recite it? When I learned that it was the result of a vote after considerable fighting and intrigue by the three hundred bishops who attended the council, I was scandalized. On too many occasions I had watched people vote for things that I felt were wrong or misguided to trust that something as important as the nature of Jesus could be established by voting. Again, I kept my ideas to myself, as I did not want to further alienate myself from orthodox Christianity.

The third key came from my continuing study of Islam after I left the seminary. When I carefully studied the Koran many years later, I had no idea that these three keys would come together to perhaps unlock the doors that have divided Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries.

For the next almost twenty years, from 1977 to 1997, I studied Islam the way a person studies something that interests him or her, not because I thought I was on any particular quest. I did it merely because it interested me. After reading several biographies on the life of Mohammed, I was no closer to revering him than before. How, I thought, could someone who was as much involved with warfare and killing as Mohammed be of the stature of Jesus? A rapid reading of the Koran only accentuated its strangeness to me, and I considered it inferior to the Bible.

In 1980, when I was living in California, I met my first Muslim, a woman from Morocco, who was a friend of a friend. This will probably sound naive, but I was delighted to find that she was as human and as moral a person as I considered myself to be. I pestered her with so many questions about Muslims and the politics of the Middle East, what little I knew of them then, that she finally stiffened and said she hoped the next time she saw me, we would not discuss politics!

In that same year, I wrote a paper that I never tried to publish, for obvious reasons, which I called Is Mohammed a True Prophet? Admiration for Malcolm X had contributed to my interest in Islam. I was particularly impressed by the description in his autobiography of the fellowship of men from all races that he encountered when he went on his hajj to Mecca.

Recently, I pulled the paper from my file to look it over and was amused by much of it; but unwittingly, in asking the question Is Mohammed a true prophet? I had put my finger on something I believe to be of vital importance. In the paper, I begged the question—obviously, I was not knowledgeable enough then to answer it. Nevertheless, it is a question that I believe must be answered by non-Muslims, particularly by Jews and Christians.

One of the problems I had when I wrote that paper was that I did not yet have a clear definition of what I meant by revelation. Revelation with a small r can mean the kind of enlightenment any individual might have in the course of his or her life with respect to any subject. Revelation as it is used in this study is spelled with a capital R and means information from God imparted to mankind through a chosen prophet.

Jews and Christians today will not come out and say they think Mohammed was an impostor who devised Islam from his imagination and had a rudimentary knowledge of the Old and New Testaments; but they treat him, as they have done historically, as if he were. They conclude, therefore, that Islam is a counterfeit religion. This is because if they were to recognize Mohammed as an authentic prophet of God within the Judeo-Christian heritage and the Koran as much a record of actual Revelation as are the Old and New Testaments (something Muslims, of course, believe without question!), the implications would be disturbing.

Christians would then be required to adjust their beliefs and subsequent dogma to correspond to the Koran’s commentary, and this would require them to cease their recitation of the Nicene Creed with its Trinitarian formula of God.

I could not answer the question for myself until 1996, when I bought a copy of the Everyman’s Library edition of The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, an explanatory translation by Marmaduke Pickthall, and began to study it carefully, verse by verse, surah by surah, making notations and comparing passages with comparable passages from the Bible. But before I relate what I experienced then, I shall mention a few other things that happened before this time.

In 1981, I moved to New York City. At that time, it was common to see black Muslims riding on the subways, handing out tracts to whoever would accept them. I found their tracts nearly unintelligible, but I was always struck by how pristine and proud these men were. How they managed to keep their white robes immaculate when they spent their days walking up and down in trains in the New York City subway system handing out tracts was beyond me. When I learned their headquarters were in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, I rode the train there to look them over. Again, I was impressed by the cleanliness and orderliness in a neighborhood known mostly for decline and crime.

An inveterate reader, I read travel books the way other people read murder mysteries, but the ones I particularly sought out were travel books about the Middle East. Some of my favorites are Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village, published in 1965, and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, published in 1959. Through my reading, I was increasing my understanding of Muslims and furthering my love affair with Islam. As I became more familiar with the Islamic way of life, what had been a cursory interest gathered force.

By 1996, a beautiful new mosque was completed in Manhattan at the corner of Ninety-Sixth Street and Third Avenue. That summer, I decided to visit it for the Friday prayer service. The men who greeted me when I entered the mosque were careful to conceal the degree to which they were probably shocked by my appearance, for it was a hot summer day, and I was dressed accordingly. Graciously they conducted me to the lower level and turned me over to some women, who soon corrected my attire. I could no longer recognize myself, for I was covered from head to foot, and the ladies were trying to tuck my unruly short hair beneath the scarf they had placed over my head. Leaving my shoes near the entrance to the mosque, I went up a short flight of stairs to join the other women there for the service. The railing that separated us from the main area made it almost impossible to see into the men’s section where an imam mounted the lector to give a sermon first in Arabic and then in English.

On September 7 of that year, I bought my copy of the Koran and began my study. I felt that the book was holy from the outset and that I should wrap it in a special cloth and keep it in a special place on my bookshelf. For the next six months or so, on the mornings when I did not have to be somewhere early, I would take it down; and for a half hour to an hour, I would study it. Inexplicably, my study made me happy. When I mentioned this to a Muslim friend, he said yes, Muslims believe that the study of the Koran will make the day go well for a believer. It was during this time that I was finally able to answer my question, Is Mohammed a true prophet? with a resounding yes. If one thinks as I did when I started my study that the Koran is right when it says that the Christians exaggerated their religion by calling Jesus God, then everything in the Koran seems to be true.

One day, a sentence came to mind, and it was My God, it’s all of one fabric! This would mean that the stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were not three separate stories of three separate religions, but a single story of God’s Revelation to Jews, Gentiles, and Muslims. I wondered what would happen if it were told as ONE STORY. It was then that I decided to try to tell that story, and this book is a result of that decision.

It should be understood at the outset that in this study I am presenting revelatory texts from the Old and New Testament and the Koran and taking them at face value. I am therefore not engaging in the numerous discussions concerning the validity of these texts, apropos modern biblical criticism. To do so would only mean that I would become bogged down in arguments concerning when these texts were finalized into their present form and by whom.

Birth was given to this book when I wondered what would happen if the Revelation, found in the Old Testament, the New Testament and Koran, were compiled into one book. It is written from the standpoint of a belief in God, and a belief that he has periodically communicated with us through Revelation to various prophets. I do not therefore indulge in debates concerning the existence of God and the veracity of Revelation lest I be required to prove things I cannot prove. What I have tried to do, as best I could, was to compile Revelation as it has been handed down to us in its present form in these three books that we might see where it corresponds and where it differs.

Some Jews and Christians who read it may find some of the precepts of their faith challenged, and some Muslims may, likewise, dispute various interpretations. In writing this book, it is not my intention to increase the chasms that divide Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but rather to bridge those chasms with something more than mere tolerance. To do so it is necessary to say things that some might find disturbing.

As a child of a Lutheran family, I had been indoctrinated into the faith as a child, but during the years when I was married to a man who was an agnostic, I had strayed from it. After the trip my mother and I took to the Middle East, I returned to Christianity. Then I thought it was the one true faith of the world and that all other religions were, therefore, misguided, incomplete or false. In other words, I was exclusive in my view of the truth, and I was hoping for the day when others would see the error in their views and convert to Christianity. Along the way, as I began to believe the truths I found in the Koran and to believe that it is authentic Revelation, and began to think that Judaism, Christianity and Islam as all of one fabric, I was liberated from my previous prejudice. Because the Koran teaches that prophets have been sent to all peoples, I became more receptive to what the other religions of the world have to offer. The experience has been deeply enriching and personally satisfying.

I have written this book with a sense of urgency. Call it apocalyptic fever, a sense of the disease that has gripped the world as we approach the 21st Century, a feeling that things are out of balance and that we human beings are to blame for what ails the planet. Everywhere, the world over, the cancer has spread. Call it over-commercialization. It is our failure as the stewards of the planet to preserve its resources and distribute them fairly among all people, and it is our failure to build peace. We seem to have found ourselves guilty and await our punishment. This sense of a shortness of time until the long awaited Judgment Day has caused me not to view this book as something I might write ten years from now and take ten years to write (the amount of time it would likely take to do justice to my topic,) but a book that I needed to write as quickly as possible.

The Koran says: Say: O People of the Scripture! Come to an agreement between us and you: that we shall worship none but Allah, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside Allah. And if they turn away, then say: Bear witness that we are they who have surrendered (unto Him). (Surah 3: 64) and And argue not with the People of Scripture unless it be in (a way) that is better, save with such of them as do wrong; and say: We believe in that which hath been revealed unto us and revealed unto you; our God and your God is One, and unto Him we surrender. (Surah 29: 46) The time has come when a new attitude has formed among people of integrity. They believe that if people of differing persuasions engage in dialogue with one another, they will come to understand the obvious: that we are all brothers and sisters living on the same planet, governed by One God.

Like any strenuous physical journey, this one has not always been comfortable. At times I felt as precarious as if hiking over rocky terrain or attempting to scale a sheer cliff. Sometimes I wondered if I had lost my way and if what I was attempting to articulate made any sense at all, if anyone would find what I had to say of interest, but it was never been dull, especially when I did not know what would greet me at the next turn in the road. Now that I have come to the end of this study, I must warn the reader that I did not reach the conclusions that I expected when I began, but that is okay. After all, when does a journey turn out exactly the way we anticipate?

I invite the reader who finds this of interest to come along with me now as I try to tell the single story of Revelation as given to Abraham and his descendants—the Jews, Christians & the Muslims.

JMM

June 22, 2000

Brooklyn, New York

CHAPTER 1

From the Beginning of Time to the Time

of Abraham, about 2000 BC

T HE WORLD IS very, very old. The Arizona Desert Museum, about fifteen miles southwest of Tucson, constructed a walkway, fifty-two and a half feet long, called Life Zones. It represents the evolution of life on earth since it began as a molten mass four billion years ago. One can walk along it and view each stage in the development of life, from primitive cells to human beings. (The difference between a million [1,000,000] and a billion is beyond the comprehension of many people—a billion is a thousand million, or 1,000,000,000; thus, 4 billion is 4, 000,000,000 years.)

The longer people have lived here on the earth, the more they have learned of the universe and its history. Prior to the nineteenth century, people believed that the earth had existed for a much shorter length of time than it actually has, because they assumed the creation stories in the Bible were literally true when they said God created the world in week.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light was good; and God separated the light from darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth. And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens. So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day. And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day. (Genesis 1:1–31)

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation. These are the generation of the heavens and the earth when they were created. (Genesis 2:1–4)

The disturbing notion that it took ages for life to evolve on the planet (and that mankind has existed long before the Jewish date for Creation in 4004 BC) was accepted only when overwhelming scientific evidence proved the world was much older than six thousand years old. Actually, the Creation story in Genesis is an excellent synopsis of evolution if we think of a day as hundreds of thousands of years. The Koran comes closer to affirming the actual length time Creation took. Verse 38 of the fiftieth surah says, And verily We created the heavens and the earth, and all that is between them, in six Days, and naught of weariness touched Us, but verse 4 of the seventieth surah says that a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years. We can assume that fifty thousand years is a symbolic number.

The earth was lifeless as the moon, or, as we now know, Mars is, for three-quarters of its existence. The fifty-two-and-a-half-foot walkway at the Arizona Desert Museum shows that the earth existed for three billion years without any form of life on it. The first cells appeared one billion years ago, and eight hundred million years ago, algae appeared. Six hundred million years ago, simple animals—jellyfish and sea worms—evolved; and five hundred million years ago, mollusks, dragonflies, and conifers emerged.

The first forms of life on the planet were primitive prototypes. The first plants, for example, were conifers, ferns, and pines that reproduce themselves through sporing (by producing spores that give rise to new plants) rather than through seeds. Seed-bearing plants have a more sophisticated method of reproduction: seeds must be fertilized before they can sprout new plants, whereas spores do not. It took another three and a half hundred million years, 150 million years ago, before flowering (seed-bearing) plants appeared. Their advent is significant: without seed-bearing plants, there would not have been sufficient food on the planet to support its emerging forms of life.

Dinosaurs are relative latecomers in the history of the earth, appearing about one hundred million years ago—in terms of the life of the earth, they evolved during the last 1/40,000th of its age. We now believe that their extinction mostly likely was caused by sudden changes in atmospheric conditions wrought by a meteorite or comet hitting the earth.

It seems that God had to work at creation through trial and error, improving the species as He went along, at times eradicating awkward and inefficient types to make way for improved species. Perhaps He was not happy with the large cold-blooded creatures He had created and decided to do away with them so He could make way for mammals, which, in comparison, are graceful, efficient, and warm-blooded. (Recent studies of dinosaur skeletons show they were riddled with arthritis, so perhaps they can be excused for their bad temper.) The era of the dinosaurs lasted about 90 million years. The rise of primates and mammals began a mere two million years ago.

Insects developed before mammals. In the fall of 1996, the New York Museum of Natural History gave an exhibit on amber, the translucent, golden resin that seeps from trees, like maple syrup, and solidifies. Insects had been trapped in some of the pieces on display. They had been encased there for over 25 million years. One could see the delicate remains of a damselfly or a praying mantis and imagine all the time that had passed since the creature had lived—long before people had evolved.

The Koran says that all Allah has to do to bring forth life is to say, Be! and it is. While this is no doubt true, an examination of life around us suggests that a great deal of trial and error went into the design and functions of each earthly creature and plant that exists today. The perfection of all living things suggests they must have taken millions of the years to evolve.

Fifty-five million or so years ago, primitive mammals were of two main sorts. One took to the trees; the other rodent-like mammals remained on the ground. The competition of the two types for resources was thus lessened. Strains of each have survived to become the creatures we know today. The second group is now called prosimians. We are among their descendants, for they are the ancestors of the first primates.

Man Is Created in Diverse Stages—From Primates to Homo sapiens

Most creatures alive today evolved from simpler forms, but none took longer or more steps to evolve into its present form than mankind. This is no doubt due to our complexity. The Koran says, What aileth you that ye hope not toward Allah for dignity. When He created you by (diverse) stages? (Surah 71:13–14). The first apes and monkeys—the more developed primates—appeared 25 million or so years ago. From them evolved the hominids. Fossil remains suggest that some who can be reckoned among our ancestors appeared between three and four million years ago.

The Australopithecus, as the apelike creatures have been named, were about four feet tall and had thighs, legs, and feet more like those of humans than those of apes. Their skull was fairly apelike but held a brain about as big as that of a gorilla and had massive jaws. Scholars think they provide the first evidence of building—they built windbreaks of stone. They were toolmakers, as they made crude choppers and cutting tools. With the Australopithecus, about two million years ago, technology began.

About the same time, different strains of hominids evolved. The biological strain leading to humanity showed its superiority by surviving climatic ups and down spanning millions of years. They adapted to such trying conditions as the Ice Ages lasting between fifty and a hundred thousand years. Other species did not.

About eight hundred thousand years ago, another important step in human evolution was taken: a creature of a new physical type spread gradually over the whole world. Its earliest forms are called Homo habilis, clever man or handyman. Later, this strain developed into a species, called Homo erectus, or upright man. Homo erectus was