On February 28, 2017, Jan van Reeth, a senior lecturer from the Faculty for Comparative Study of Religion and Humanism (Antwerp FVG) in Antwerp and the secretary of the Royal Belgian Society of Oriental Studies, was a guest at our Institute. van Reeth received his doctorate from the Catholic University of Leuven after completing his university studies in Classical and Semitic Philology. His research areas include Hellenistic religious syncretism, Eastern Christianity and Islamic speculative theology (kalām). In his lecture entitled The Tree of Paradise, the Birthplace of Jesus in Apocryphal Literature and Qur’ân, and the Transitus Mariae, he examined the palm tree motif, which appears in the Quran when Jesus is conceived and in the apocryphal documents when Mary is asleep. Another tradition associates it with a tree in the middle of Paradise. The source of these texts was provided by Gnostic groups in the Arabian Peninsula during the lifetime of Muhammad.

The works of Professor Jan M. F. van Reeth that have been published so far can be accessed from this link:
http://www.antwerpfvg.org/docenten-fvg-antwerp/jan-m.f.-van-reeth.html