By Pastor Alan Campbell
1992 marked the 500th Anniversary of Columbus’ voyage of discovery from Spain to what was then known as the New World in 1492. No doubt there were those who who exploited the celebration of this event to emphasize the Hispanic as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon element in American Culture and society. However it is becoming an increasingly well known and documented fact, that not only were there North Europeans on the American continent long before the voyage of Columbus, but also that Phoenicians/ Israelites sailed from the Middle East through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic to these shores centuries before the birth of Christ.
I became aware of these exciting facts of suppressed history during my first visit to the United States in 1984. While attending the AMERICA’S PROMISE MINISTRIES camp in New Mexico that year, I was able to visit the site at Los Lunas, near Albuquerque, and see the rock with the Ten Commandments carved in the ancient script.
My curiosity being aroused, I went on to study the books Saga America and America B.C. by Professor Barry Fell of Harvard University, also Cyrus Gordon’s Before Columbus and They All Discovered America by Charles Boreland; from these books and various other research items the following facts emerge:
THE PHOENICIANS CAME TO AMERICA
The term Phoenician is a general one, which covers not only the seafaring peoples based in the ancient cities of Tyre and Sidon (on the coast of modern Lebanon) but also the sea-roving Israelite tribes of Dan, Asher and Zebulon, whose tribal territories in Canaan were adjacent to these city states on the East Mediterranean coastline. These peoples planted trading posts and mercantile colonies along the shores of north Africa and Spain, and they engaged in a flourishing tin trade in the southwest corner of the British Isles, their ships passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, then known as the ‘Pillars of Hercules’.
As long ago as 1913, author T. C. Johnston in his book, Did The Phoenicians Discover America? claimed that the American continent was discovered and settled by Phoenicians and Hebrews who kept in contact with the Middle East for some three hundred years. He claimned that North America was the Biblical Ophir, visited by the fleets of King Solomon, and he outlined some twenty-six points of comparison between the civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean homelands of the Phoenicians and Hebrews and the Mayan, Inca and Aztec civilizations in the New World…




