Islamic views on Jesus's death
The biblical account of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus (ʿĪsā) recorded in the Christian New Testament is traditionally rejected by the major branches of Islam,[1][2][3][4][5] but like Christians they believe that Jesus ascended to heaven and he will, according to Islamic literary sources,[6][7][8]: 9–25 return before the end of time.
[1][3][4][5][6][8]: 14–15, 25 The various sects of Islam have different views regarding this topic;[3][4][9]: 430–431 traditionally, mainstream Muslims believe that Jesus was not crucified but was bodily raised up to heaven by God,[2][3][4][5][8]: 14–15 [10]: 41 while Ahmadi Muslims reject this belief[3][6][7][9]: 430–431 and instead contend that Jesus survived the crucifixion,[6][7][9]: 430–431 [11]: 129–132 was taken off the cross alive and continued to preach in India until his natural death.
A third explanation could be that Jesus was nailed to a cross, but as his soul is immortal he did not "die" or was not "crucified" [to death]; it only appeared so.
By "God raised him up to himself" and "You took me to Yourself" it can be assumed, based on a cursory reading of the plain text, that Jesus ascended to Heaven rather than dying.
[14]: 106 The belief that Jesus only appeared to be crucified and did not actually die predates Islam and is found in several New Testament apocrypha and Gnostic Gospels.
[8]: 12 The Greek Father of the Church and bishop Irenaeus in his heresiological treatise Against Heresies (180 CE) described early Gnostic beliefs regarding the crucifixion and death of Jesus[19]: 918 that bear remarkable resemblance with the Islamic views, expounding on the hypothesis of substitution:[17]: 111 He [Christ] appeared on earth as a man and performed miracles (apparuisse eum ... virtutes perfecisse).
The British biblical scholar F. F. Bruce wrote in a commentary about this text:[22]: 93 The docetic note in this narrative appears in the statement that Jesus, while being crucified, 'remained silent, as though he felt no pain', and in the account of his death.
Then the cry of dereliction is reproduced in a form which suggests that, at that moment, his divine power left the bodily shell in which it had taken up temporary residence.
[22]: 93 John of Damascus, a Syrian Eastern Orthodox monk, Christian theologian, and apologist that lived under the Umayyad Caliphate, reported in his heresiological treatise De Haeresibus (8th century) the Islamic denial of Jesus' crucifixion and his alleged substitution on the cross, attributing the origin of these doctrines to Muhammad:[17]: 106–107 [23]: 115–116 And the Jews, having themselves violated the Law, wanted to crucify him, but having arrested him they crucified his shadow.
And Jesus, they say, answered: "Be merciful to me, Lord; you know that I did not say so, nor will I boast that I am your servant; but men who have gone astray wrote that I said this and they said lies concerning me and they have been in error".
[17]: 110–111 If the substitutionist interpretation of 4:157 (that Christ was replaced on the cross) is taken as a valid reading of the Qurʾānic text, the question arises of whether this idea is represented in Christian sources.
According to Irenaeus' Adversus Haereses, the Egyptian Gnostic Christian Basilides (of the second century) held the view that Christ (the divine nous, intelligence) was not crucified, but was replaced by Simon of Cyrene.
But the substitutionist idea in a general form is quite clearly expressed in the Gnostic Nag Hammadi documents Apocalypse of Peter and The Second Treatise of the Great Seth.
Since Manichaeism was still prevailing in Arabia during the 6th century, just alike prohibition against wine and fasting rules, Islamic views on Jesus' death might have been influenced by it.
[24][25][26] Similar reservations regarding the appearance of Manichaeism, Gnosticism, and Mazdakism in pre-Islamic Mecca are offered by Trompf & Mikkelsen et al. in their latest work (2018).
Rather, it challenges human beings who in their folly have deluded themselves into believing that they would vanquish the divine Word, Jesus Christ the Messenger of God.
[28]: 39 Muslim historian al-Tabari (d. 923 CE/310 AH) records an interpretation transmitted from Ibn Ishaq Bishr: "God caused Jesus to die for seven hours".
[28]: 47 10th and 11th-century Ismaili Shia scholars Ja'far ibn Mansur al-Yaman, Abu Hatim Ahmad ibn Hamdan al-Razi, Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani, Mu'ayyad fi'l-Din al-Shirazi and the group Ikhwan al-Safa affirm the historicity of the crucifixion, reporting Jesus was crucified and not substituted by another man as maintained by many other popular Qur'anic commentators and Tafsir.
[3] Simon of Cyrene is the person most commonly accepted to have done it, perhaps because according to the Synoptic Gospels he was compelled by the Romans to carry Jesus' cross for him.
[35] Nonetheless, some scholars suggest that it may contain some remnants of an earlier, apocryphal work (perhaps Gnostic,[36] Ebionite,[37] or Diatessaronic[38]), redacted to bring it more in line with Islamic doctrine.
The narrative states this transformation of appearance not only fooled the Romans, but the Pharisees, the High Priest, the followers of Christ, and his mother Mary.
The Gospel of Barnabas then mentions that after three days since burial, Judas' body was stolen from his grave with rumors spreading of Jesus being risen from the dead.
He then ascended back to the heavens, with the narrative continuing Islamic legend mirroring Christian doctrine of returning at the end of times as a just king.
[44] This and other similar theories about the resurrection of Jesus and witnesses to his resurrection became popular in the Western world after they were first proposed by some 18th–19th century Western authors and philosophers, including Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Schleiermacher; however, since the last decade of the 19th century all of them have been discarded as baseless and unacceptable by the majority of biblical scholars and academics.
[44] This 200-year-old hypothesis continues to be the subject of debate in popular circles, but the scholarly literature considers it uncontroversial that Jesus died during the process of crucifixion.
[6][7][9]: 431–436 [46] Ahmadis believe that Jesus, having survived the crucifixion, later migrated to India to escape persecution in Judea and to further spread his message to the Lost Tribes of Israel.
[6][7] The viewpoint of Jesus's migration to India had also been independently researched in the literature of authors prior to the foundation of the movement, for example most notably by the Russian historian Nicolas Notovitch in 1894.
Ayoub continues highlighting the denial of the killing of Jesus as God denying men such power to vanquish and destroy the divine Word.
The words, "they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him" speaks to the profound events of ephemeral human history, exposing mankind's heart and conscience towards God's will.
"They did not slay him...but it seemed so to them" speaks to the imaginations of mankind, not the denial of the actual event of Jesus dying physically on the cross.
