Jesus in Ahmadiyya
Ahmadiyya Muslims consider Jesus (ʿĪsā) as a mortal man, entirely human, and a prophet of God born to the Virgin Mary (Maryam).
Jesus is understood to have survived the crucifixion based on the account of the canonical Gospels, the Qurʾān, hadith literature, and revelations (waḥy and kašf) to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.
[1][3][5][6][7][8] Ahmadis believe the prophecies surrounding the second advent of the messiah Jesus were fulfilled in the likeness and personality of Mīrzā G̲h̲ulām Aḥmad, who initiated the foundation of the Ahmadiyya movement.
Ahmadiyya believes that both the terms, Jesus Son of Mary and Mahdi (as used in Islamic hadith and eschatological literature), designate two titles for the same person.
The views of Jesus having travelled to India had been put forth prior to Mirza Ghulam Ahmed's publication, most notably by Nicolas Notovitch in 1894.
[10][11] Mirza Ghulam Ahmad expressly rejected the theory of a pre-crucifixion visit that Notovitch had proposed, arguing instead that Jesus's travels to India took place after surviving crucifixion.
[12][13] The first response in English to Ahmad's writings came in a book by Howard Walter, an Urdu-speaking American pastor in Lahore, The Ahmadiyya Movement (1918).
[15][16] Although the material of Notovitch and Ahmad has been refuted by notable historians, such as the Indologist Günter Grönbold (1985)[17] and Norbert Klatt (1988),[18] it has been supported by others such as the archaeologist Fida Hassnain and the writer Holger Kersten.
Ahmadi Muslims have published extensively on the topic of Jesus' natural death expanding upon Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's work in light of newer archeological discoveries and historical research.
In 1978, Mirza Nasir, the third Khalifa of the Ahmadiyya movement, travelled to London where the international conference of Jesus' Deliverance from the cross was held at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington.
Nasir Ahmad's lecture discussed the subject of Jesus' survival from death upon the cross, his travel to the east, the Unity of God and the status of Muhammad.
In other words, Jesus' spiritual rank and status was raised to come closer to God as opposed to him dying the accursed death which his adversaries had wished for.
[Kathir vol II, p 245 and al yawaqit wal Jawahir, part 2, page 24]Jesus son of Mary lived for 120 years, and I see myself as only entering upon the beginning of the sixties.
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad professed that the prophecy in traditional religious texts were greatly misunderstood to interpret that Jesus of Nazareth himself would return.
[14] Contemporary Muslim scholars argue that no prophet can come after Muhammed based upon abstractions from the hadith and this is the principal reason for rejecting and advocating persecution against the movement.
The claim that Mirza Ghulam was a prophet forms a point of contention with mainstream Islam, as it is considered a violation of the quranic and hadith teachings of Muhammad.
In the manner that the Islamic mainstream views that Jesus himself is expected to physically return in the latter days from Heaven, it becomes implausible to also presume that it is absolutely impossible for any prophet to come after Muhammad.
As an example, in his publication, Izala-e-Auham Mirza Ghulam Ahmad stated: The second special aspect of the prophecy, which relates to the advent of the Promised Messiah, is that he will break the cross, slaughter the swine and kill the one-eyed Antichrist.
The spiritual interpretation of this special aspect is that the Promised Messiah will crush under his feet all the glory of the religion of the cross, that he will destroy with the weapon of conclusive arguments those who are afflicted with shamelessness like swine, and who devour filth like pigs, and that he will wipe out with the sword of clear proofs the opposition of those who possess only the eye of the world and are bereft of the eye of the faith in place of which they have only an unsightly taint.
(Izala-e-Auham, Volume 3, Pages 141-143) Mirza Ghulam Ahmad elaborated on the depictions of Antichrist as prophecised in the Bible and the hadith concerning the emergence of the Dajjal.
Ghulam Ahmad's teachings of Jesus, being a mortal man who survived crucifixion and died a natural death upon earth, is considered as a testimony of the prophecy being fulfilled.
Ahmadis believe the followers of Christianity will gradually come to accept the same teaching and this will repeal the central doctrines of the divinity of Jesus, Atonement and Resurrection.
In 1894, Ghulam Ahmad had declared that the contemporary Islamists views of Jihad of the sword and Holy War was a fundamental misrepresentation of Islam, that was invented during the Dark Ages.
As a result, early Ahmadis had faced virulent opposition from extremist groups, some of whom protested a conspiracy that Ghulam Ahmad had been put in place as a pacifist by the British Government to appease Muslims.
Ahmadis believe that in the modern era, the "Jihad of the pen" (peaceful intellectual reasoning) is the only potent way of espousing and spreading the Islamic teaching.
According to Ahmadiyya sources (Islam International Publications Ltd.) the Tribes of Israel who had migrated to eastern countries seeing the attraction in Hinduism and Buddhism had themselves become Hindus and Buddhists.
The king along with his companions went to the peak of the Himalayas to meet a man who was a dignified person of fair complexion in white clothes sitting in the mountain.
Ghulam Ahmad, and later Ahmadi writers have cited various evidences for identifying the grave as that of Jesus: The Bhavishya Purana Official Decree, The Glass Mirror, Tarikh-i-Kashmir, Qisa-shazada, The Garden of Solomon (Bagh-i-Sulaiman) by Mir Saadullah Shahabadi (1780 A.D.), Wajeez-ut-Tawarikh, Ikmal-ud-Din (962 AD), Ain-ul-Hayat, The Acts of Thomas, Takhat Sulaiman (Throne of Solomon, a hill in Kashmir), Tarikh-i-Kabir, and Rauzat-us-Safa.
Haji Mohi-ud-din Miskin, writing in 1902, three years after Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1899, is the first historian to mention that "some" connect the shrine of Yuz Asaf as the grave of Hazrat Isa Rooh-Allah (Jesus the Spirit of God).
The majority Srinagar Sunni Muslim community reject the Ahmadiyya claims that the tomb is that of Jesus and consider this viewpoint as blasphemous.
