Isa (Jesus): Raised Alive, and Returning

Stage 2/7 · The Qur’anic case· ayah by ayah, with tafsir

The raising: “they did not kill him” (an-Nisa 4:157-158)

The central text is an-Nisa 4:157-158. It denies the killing and the crucifixion, then affirms the raising:

وَقَوْلِهِمْ إِنَّا قَتَلْنَا الْمَسِيحَ عِيسَى ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ رَسُولَ اللَّهِ وَمَا قَتَلُوهُ وَمَا صَلَبُوهُ وَلَٰكِن شُبِّهَ لَهُمْ“And for their saying, We killed the Messiah, Isa son of Maryam, the messenger of Allah, though they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them.” (an-Nisa 4:157)

بَل رَّفَعَهُ اللَّهُ إِلَيْهِ ۚ وَكَانَ اللَّهُ عَزِيزًا حَكِيمًا“Rather, Allah raised him up to Himself. And Allah is ever Mighty, Wise.” (an-Nisa 4:158)

Ibn Kathir on 4:157-158

In his tafsir on an-Nisa 4:157, Ibn Kathir affirms that the Jews did not kill or crucify Isa; a substitute was made to resemble him (shubbiha lahum), so those who claimed to have killed him were left in doubt and confusion about whom they had actually killed. He writes that they “are not sure that Isa was the one whom they killed; rather, they are in doubt and confusion.” On 4:158 he states plainly that Allah “raised him up unto Himself” alive.

Ibn Kathir also relates the well-known narrative of the substitution: on the night the enemies came for him, a young companion volunteered, and “Allah made the young man look exactly like Isa, while a hole opened in the roof of the house, and Isa was made to sleep and ascended to heaven,” so the likeness, not Isa, was taken and crucified.

The taking and the raising (Aal Imran 3:55)

The second pillar text is Aal Imran 3:55, where Allah addresses Isa directly:

إِذْ قَالَ اللَّهُ يَا عِيسَىٰ إِنِّي مُتَوَفِّيكَ وَرَافِعُكَ إِلَيَّ وَمُطَهِّرُكَ مِنَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا“When Allah said: O Isa, I am going to take you (mutawaffika) and raise you (rafi‘uka) to Myself, and purify you from those who disbelieved.” (Aal Imran 3:55)

What does “mutawaffika” mean?

The verb tawaffa is the hinge of the whole debate, because it can mean “to take fully.” As the Ma‘arif al-Qur’an commentary explains on 3:55, “al-tawaffi, in the Arabic language, means to exact fully or take in full. It takes three forms: to take in sleep; to take in death; and to take the soul and the body all together.” On this reading, Allah did not let the Jews kill Isa; He “took him in full,” soul and body together, and raised him. So mutawaffika here is not death at their hands but a complete taking-up.

On the second verb, the same tafsir holds that “rafi‘uka ilayya” (raising you to Me) is a bodily raising, spirit and body together, not a mere elevation of rank or honour. The word “to Me” (ilayya), it argues, rules out the figurative reading, because a raising “toward Allah” is a real lifting-up, not a promotion in status. This is the exact point the dissenting views contest, so it is worth marking clearly.

The return foretold (az-Zukhruf 43:61 and an-Nisa 4:159)

Isa as a sign of the Hour

The Qur’anic anchor for the return is az-Zukhruf 43:61:

وَإِنَّهُ لَعِلْمٌ لِّلسَّاعَةِ فَلَا تَمْتَرُنَّ بِهَا وَاتَّبِعُونِ ۚ هَٰذَا صِرَاطٌ مُّسْتَقِيمٌ“And indeed, he is a sign (or: knowledge) of the Hour, so do not doubt it, and follow Me. This is a straight path.” (az-Zukhruf 43:61)

Commenting on 43:61, Ibn Kathir states that the phrase “wa innahu la-‘ilmun li’s-sa‘ah” refers to the descent of Isa before the Day of Resurrection, and he calls this “the correct view concerning this phrase.” In other words, the coming-down of Isa is itself one of the marks by which people will know the Hour is near. Ibn Kathir supports this by noting that “many mutawatir hadiths report that the Messenger of Allah said that Isa will descend before the Day of Resurrection as a just ruler and fair judge.” (A minority variant reading of the verse, la-‘alamun, “a sign,” carries the same sense.)

Belief before his death

A second return-text is an-Nisa 4:159:

وَإِن مِّنْ أَهْلِ الْكِتَابِ إِلَّا لَيُؤْمِنَنَّ بِهِ قَبْلَ مَوْتِهِ ۖ وَيَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ يَكُونُ عَلَيْهِمْ شَهِيدًا“And there is none of the People of the Scripture but will surely believe in him before his death, and on the Day of Resurrection he will be a witness against them.” (an-Nisa 4:159)

Ibn Kathir reads “before his death” as “before the death of Isa, son of Maryam,” not before each person’s own death. Citing Abu Malik, he explains that this belief occurs after Isa returns and before he dies, “as then all of the People of the Scriptures will believe in him.” On this reading the verse only makes full sense if Isa has a future death still to come, which is exactly what the return doctrine holds: he was raised alive, will return, will be believed in, and will then die.

The wider Qur’anic portrait (Maryam, al-Ma’idah, Aal Imran)

These proof-texts sit inside a fuller Qur’anic account of Isa that shapes how the tradition reads them:

• Miraculous birth and mission (Aal Imran 3:45-49, Maryam 19:16-34): Isa is announced to Maryam as “a word from Him, whose name is the Messiah,” born without a father, speaking in the cradle, and given clear signs.
• His own words at birth (Maryam 19:33): “Peace be upon me the day I was born, the day I die, and the day I am raised alive.” The tradition takes “the day I die” as a still-future death, after the return, consistent with the raising.
• His witness on Judgment Day (al-Ma’idah 5:116-117): Isa disowns any claim to divinity and says, “I was a witness over them as long as I remained among them; but when You took me up (tawaffaytani), You were the Watcher over them.” Here again tawaffa is used, and the mainstream reading is “when You raised me,” marking the end of his presence among them, not a death at the cross.
• Not the son of God, not killed as an atonement: the Qur’an’s denial of the crucifixion is bound up with its denial that God has a son and that anyone can bear another’s sin. The raising is, in this frame, Allah’s rescue and vindication of His prophet.

Stage 3/7 · The linguistic debate· every word through grammar and semantics

Reading a word to its root: the tools of the debate

The disagreements over Isa are not, in the end, about which verses exist. Both sides quote the same verses. The dispute is decided one layer down, in the Arabic itself: in sarf (morphology, how a word is built from its root and pattern), nahw (syntax, how words govern one another), dalalah (semantics, the range a word can carry), and isti‘mal (attested usage, how the Qur’an and the Arabs actually used the word). This section is the debate proper: it puts each disputed word on the table and reads it through those four lenses, giving both the mainstream and the dissenting case, then weighing where the grammar leans.

A pattern to watch: the mainstream case tends to argue from usage (how the Qur’an itself uses a word elsewhere), while the dissenting case tends to argue from the default dictionary sense (the single most common meaning). Much of the debate is really a contest between those two methods.

تَوَفَّى (tawaffa): the verb that carries the whole case

Morphology (sarf)

The root is و-ف-ي. The verb تَوَفَّى is Form V (تَفَعَّلَ). The family shares a core of wafa’, completeness and fulfilment: وَفَّى (Form II) is “to pay in full,” أَوْفَى (Form IV) is “to fulfil, discharge in full.” Form V adds a reflexive, appropriative sense: to take a thing to oneself completely. So the bare morphological skeleton of تَوَفَّى is “to take in full,” not “to kill.” Death is one way Allah “takes a soul in full,” which is why the word so frequently means death in context, but that is an implication supplied by the context, not by the pattern.

In Aal Imran 3:55 the exact form is مُتَوَفِّيكَ: an ism fa‘il (active participle) from تَوَفَّى, plus the object pronoun ـكَ, “the One who takes you in full.” Grammatically it names Allah as the taker and Isa as the taken; it does not, by itself, specify the manner of the taking.

Usage (isti‘mal): the Qur’an’s own witness

The decisive mainstream evidence is that the Qur’an uses this very verb for a taking that is explicitly not death, the taking of the soul in sleep:

اللَّهُ يَتَوَفَّى الْأَنفُسَ حِينَ مَوْتِهَا وَالَّتِي لَمْ تَمُتْ فِي مَنَامِهَا“Allah takes the souls (yatawaffa) at the time of their death, and those that have not died, in their sleep.” (az-Zumar 39:42)

Here تَوَفَّى is applied to souls “that have not died,” during sleep. Likewise al-An‘am 6:60: “He is the One who takes you (yatawaffakum) by night.” So by the Qur’an’s own usage a tawaffi need not be a death at all; it can be a taking-up that is afterward returned. On that basis the mainstream reads مُتَوَفِّيكَ in 3:55 as “I will take you up (alive),” fitting the raising named in the very same verse.

The counter-reading

The Ahmadiyya reply that the primary, literal sense (haqiqa) of تَوَفَّى, when its object is a person rather than merely “the soul,” is death, and that the sleep-sense is figurative (majaz) or elliptical (it is really “the soul” that is taken). On their reading 3:55 and al-Ma’idah 5:117 mean “I caused you to die,” and the accompanying raising is then a raising of rank.

Grammatical weighing

Two things count against making death the forced meaning here. First, in tafsir a sense the Qur’an itself employs cannot be ruled impossible in a parallel verse: since the Book uses tawaffi for the non-fatal taking of the soul in sleep, that reading is available for Isa. Second, the immediate syntax joins مُتَوَفِّيكَ to وَرَافِعُكَ إِلَيَّ with the plain connective وَ; reading the two as one act of rescue (taken up, and raised), whether simultaneous or by taqdim/ta’khir, mentioning-out-of-order, is the lighter assumption, while the death reading must place the two verbs far apart in time. As Ma‘arif al-Qur’an sums up the morphology, tawaffi “means to take in full,” in three forms: taking in sleep, taking in death, or taking soul and body together.

رَافِعُكَ إِلَيَّ (rafi‘uka ilayya): the preposition that fixes the meaning

The word and the particle

رَفَعَ (root ر-ف-ع, Form I) means to raise, lift, elevate. Standing alone it can be literal (lifting a thing) or figurative (raising in honour). What disambiguates it in 3:55 and an-Nisa 4:158 is the particle attached to it: إِلَيَّ (ilayya) = إِلَى (“to, toward”) + the pronoun “Me.” The preposition إِلَى marks intiha’ al-ghayah, the end-point of a motion. “Raising X to Me” is therefore the language of a real elevation toward Allah, not merely “I raised his standing.”

The contrast the Qur’an itself supplies

When the Qur’an means raising in rank, it phrases it differently. Of Idris: Maryam 19:57, وَرَفَعْنَاهُ مَكَانًا عَلِيًّا, “We raised him to a high station,” where the object of the raising is a makan (station). Of the martyrs it does not use rafa‘a-ilayya at all, but says Aal Imran 3:169, بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ عِندَ رَبِّهِمْ, “rather, they are alive, with their Lord.” The construction رَفَعَهُ اللَّهُ إِلَيْهِ, Allah raising a person to Himself, is simply not the Qur’an’s idiom for a promotion in grade.

بَل: the particle of retraction in 4:158

an-Nisa 4:158 opens with بَل (bal), a harf idrab, a particle of retraction that turns from what precedes to affirm a contrary reality. Here it pivots from the denial of the killing to its positive counterpart: rather, Allah raised him. In the science of balagha this instance is classed as idrab ibtali, invalidating-and-correcting: it nullifies the enemies’ boast that they killed the Messiah (an-Nisa 4:157, “we killed the Messiah, Isa son of Maryam”) and sets the raising in its place as the truth. The contrast the particle draws is therefore between killed (their claim) and alive-and-raised (the reality); a raising merely “in honour” would not answer that contrast.

The counter-reading

The dissent holds that “raising to Me / to Him” denotes spiritual nearness, just as the martyrs are “with their Lord,” and that a body has no place “near” Allah, who is not in a location; therefore the raising must be of the soul, or of rank.

Grammatical weighing

The force of إِلَيَّ and of the بَل-contrast both pull toward a real raising; the counter-reading has to import a theological premise (no body ascends) into the grammar from outside the verse. The mainstream answers that “to Him” marks honour and direction without implying Allah occupies a place, exactly as deeds ascending “to Him” (Fatir 35:10, إِلَيْهِ يَصْعَدُ الْكَلِمُ الطَّيِّبُ) are a real ascent that locates nothing. On the language alone, the literal raising is the more natural reading.

شُبِّهَ لَهُمْ (shubbiha lahum): a passive with a hidden subject

The syntax of a majhul verb

شُبِّهَ is Form II of ش-ب-ه (“to make resemble”), built mabni li’l-majhul, passive. A passive verb states no doer; it takes a na’ib al-fa‘il, a deputy-subject standing in for the missing agent’s object. The whole interpretive question is: what is that deputy-subject? The verse does not say. This deliberate terseness (ijaz) is precisely why the tradition generated more than one theory.

• A concealed man: “[another] was made to resemble [Isa] for them”, the substitution reading: someone was crucified in his place.
• The matter/affair (al-amr): “the affair was made dubious to them”, the confusion reading: they were left unsure whom they had killed.
• The event itself: “it only appeared so to them”, the appearance reading: the crucifixion seemed to happen but did not, to Isa.

an-Nisa 4:157 supplies grammatical support for at least the confusion: it continues, وَإِنَّ الَّذِينَ اخْتَلَفُوا فِيهِ لَفِي شَكٍّ مِّنْهُ, “those who differ over it are in doubt about it,” a description of exactly the uncertainty the passive leaves open.

The academic observation

Here the modern academic point (Lawson; the RTS study) bites at the level of syntax. The Qur’an’s explicit denial is وَمَا صَلَبُوهُ, “they did not crucify him,” a denial about the agents and the object, not the bare proposition “a crucifixion occurred.” The sweeping form “he was not crucified at all” (ma suliba) is a conclusion of tafsir drawn from shubbiha lahum; that exact wording appears nowhere in the verse.

Grammatical weighing

The syntax firmly denies that the Jews killed or crucified Isa; it is deliberately silent on the mechanism, which is why substitution, confusion, and appearance all remain grammatically open. What the passive cannot be made to yield is the claim that the Jews succeeded in killing Isa: the negation وَمَا قَتَلُوهُ (“they did not kill him”) is explicit and unconditional.

قَبْلَ مَوْتِهِ (qabla mawtihi): whose death?

In an-Nisa 4:159, وَإِن مِّنْ أَهْلِ الْكِتَابِ إِلَّا لَيُؤْمِنَنَّ بِهِ قَبْلَ مَوْتِهِ, everything turns on one pronoun: the ـهِ in مَوْتِهِ, “his death.” Whose death?

• Reading A (Isa’s death): the ـهِ refers to Isa. Meaning: before Isa dies, after his return, all the People of the Book will believe in him. This is Ibn Kathir’s reading, on the authority of Abu Malik.
• Reading B (each individual’s death): the ـهِ refers to the implied kitabi, the member of ahl al-kitab. Meaning: every Jew or Christian, at the moment of his own death, comes to believe, when belief no longer profits.

The grammar of pronoun reference (marja‘ al-damir)

A pronoun attaches to the most salient available antecedent. Reading B has an antecedent close at hand (the generic “none of the People of the Book but…”). Reading A leans on the following clause, وَيَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ يَكُونُ عَلَيْهِمْ شَهِيدًا, “and on the Day of Resurrection he will be a witness against them,” where “he” is unmistakably Isa. Consistency of reference, the same pronoun-referent across a single ayah, favours taking مَوْتِهِ as Isa’s death too, which is why Ibn Kathir and the mainstream prefer Reading A and read the verse as a proof of the return.

Grammatical weighing

Both readings are grammatically licit; this is a genuine ambiguity, and the classical exegetes list both. The tarjih (preference) for Isa rests on (a) the parallel pronoun in the next clause, and (b) the external support of az-Zukhruf 43:61 and the mutawatir hadith, which give the return independent grounding. Reading B is not a grammatical error; it is the weaker reading once the surrounding evidence is admitted.

لَعِلْمٌ لِّلسَّاعَةِ (la-‘ilmun li’s-sa‘ah): knowledge, or a marker?

az-Zukhruf 43:61: وَإِنَّهُ لَعِلْمٌ لِّلسَّاعَةِ. Three grammatical points decide the sense.

• The pronoun إِنَّهُ: the ـهُ refers back to Isa, named in the verses just before (az-Zukhruf 43:57-59 speak of ibn Maryam). Referring it instead to the Qur’an is possible but strains the flow of the passage.
• عِلْم vs the variant عَلَم: the standard reading is عِلْمٌ, “knowledge, a means of knowing”; a well-attested variant reported from Ibn ‘Abbas and others is عَلَمٌ, “a sign, a marker.” Both converge on one point: Isa is that by which the nearness of the Hour is known, his descent is a portent.
• The lam of emphasis: لَعِلْمٌ carries the lam al-ibtida’ (the lam al-muzahlaqa after إِنَّ), stressing the predicate. The sentence is an emphatic identification: “he is indeed a knowledge/sign of the Hour.”

This is why Ibn Kathir calls the descent-of-Isa reading “the correct view concerning this phrase,” tying it to the many mutawatir reports of the descent. The grammar and the variant reading push the same way.

كَانَا يَأْكُلَانِ الطَّعَامَ (kana ya’kulani): does a past tense bury him?

The Ahmadiyya draw a proof of Isa’s death from al-Ma’idah 5:75: مَّا الْمَسِيحُ ابْنُ مَرْيَمَ إِلَّا رَسُولٌ ... كَانَا يَأْكُلَانِ الطَّعَامَ, “The Messiah, son of Maryam, was but a messenger ... they both used to eat food.” The argument: the past-tense frame كَانَا يَأْكُلَانِ (“used to eat”) implies they no longer eat, and therefore both are dead.

The grammar of كَانَ + muḍari‘

كَانَ followed by a present-tense verb (يَأْكُلَانِ) is the standard Arabic construction for habitual or continuous action in past time: “they used to eat / were eating.” Crucially, this form characterises a past state; it does not, of itself, assert that the state has ended, let alone that the subjects have died. “Zayd used to pray” does not entail that Zayd is dead.

The semantic and contextual point (siyaq)

The verse’s purpose is a refutation of Isa’s divinity: a being who eats, who has bodily needs, cannot be God. The past habitual simply reports the well-known fact of his earthly life, that he ate, as evidence of his humanity and dependence, set against the self-sufficient Creator. To convert a statement about dependence into a statement about death is to load the tense with a meaning the grammar does not carry. And the same verb governs Maryam, whose ordinary death no one disputes: the sentence is about their shared human nature, not a coded death-notice for Isa.

Grammatical weighing

The past-habitual entails the past-ness of the habit as described, not the demise of the one described. This is the weakest of the dissenting linguistic moves: it infers a strong metaphysical claim, that Isa is dead, from a tense that in Arabic (as in English) does no such work.

The language of the descent-hadith

The dispute also runs through the wording of the prophetic reports, and the vocabulary resists a purely metaphorical reading.

• يَنْزِلُ (yanzilu): the reports say Isa yanzilu, “descends, comes down” (root ن-ز-ل, a concrete verb of downward motion). Paired with a place (near a white minaret east of Damascus) and a manner (his hands resting on the wings of two angels), the language is that of a bodily arrival, not an abstract appearance of his “spirit” in another person.
• يُوشِكُ / لَيُوشِكَنَّ: several reports use verbs of imminence (yushiku, “it is soon to be that…”), framing a future event, not a standing symbolic truth.
• ابْنُ مَرْيَمَ (ibn Maryam): the descender is named “the son of Maryam,” the same historical individual, which is exactly what a metaphorical “a messiah-like reformer” reading must explain away.
• حَكَمًا عَدْلًا / مُقْسِطًا: he comes “as a just judge/arbiter” (a hal, a circumstantial description). He rules by an existing law; the wording does not make him a bringer of new revelation, which safeguards the finality of prophethood.
• يَكْسِرُ الصَّلِيبَ, يَقْتُلُ الْخِنزِيرَ, يَضَعُ الْجِزْيَةَ: “breaks the cross, kills the swine, lays down the jizya,” concrete acts. The tradition reads kasr al-salib (“breaking the cross”) as an attested figurative extension, abolishing the doctrine built on the crucifixion, but one anchored to a literal, embodied agent performing it.

Grammatical weighing

A metaphor can stretch a single word (kasr al-salib for ending a creed), but it strains to convert an entire cluster, descends, near Damascus, on the angels’ wings, leads the prayer, kills the Dajjal at the gate of Ludd, then dies and is buried, into a wholly non-bodily allegory. The mainstream case is that the haqiqa (plain sense) is the default, and nothing in the wording forces the shift to majaz (figurative sense).

The linguistic scorecard

Reading the disputed words to their roots does not make the theological choice for anyone, but it does show where each side is strong and where it is stretched.

The pattern matches what the whole dossier found. The dissent’s strongest ground is the single word تَوَفَّى, where usage really is divided; its weakest is كَانَا يَأْكُلَانِ, where a tense is asked to prove a death. And the mainstream reading is not merely inherited: on إِلَيَّ, on بَل, on the pronoun chains, and on the concrete verbs of the hadith, it is the reading the Arabic most naturally supports.

Stage 4/7 · The prophetic reports· the hadith of the descent

The descent: Bukhari 3448 and Muslim 2897

Where the Qur’an points to the return, the hadith describe it in detail. The single most-cited proof-text is Sahih al-Bukhari 3448, narrated by Abu Hurayra:

“By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, surely the son of Maryam will soon descend amongst you and will judge mankind justly, as a just ruler; he will break the cross, kill the pigs, and there will be no jizya.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 3448)

“Breaking the cross” and “killing the pigs” are read as Isa abolishing the false doctrines built around his crucifixion and abrogating the rulings that no longer apply once the final Prophet’s law prevails; “no jizya” signals that, in his time, the whole world submits to the truth so the protective tax on non-Muslims has no one left to levy.

The companion text is Sahih Muslim 2897, which places the descent in a vivid end-times scene: “the time of prayer shall come, and then Isa son of Maryam would descend and would lead them.” When the enemy of Allah, the Dajjal, sees him, “it would dissolve just as salt dissolves itself in water,” yet Allah “would kill them by his hand, and he would show them their blood on his lance.”

Killing the Dajjal, and the shape of the return

Across the hadith corpus, the return of Isa is tied to the defeat of the Dajjal (the false messiah) and a period of justice and plenty. Many of the vivid details below come from the long hadith of an-Nawwas ibn Sam‘an in Sahih Muslim 2937. The recurring elements, drawn from Bukhari, Muslim, and the Sunan collections, are:

• Isa descends near the white minaret east of Damascus, resting his hands on the wings of two angels (Sahih Muslim 2937).
• He joins the Muslims already fighting the Dajjal, and it is by his hand that Allah kills the Dajjal, catching him at the gate of Ludd, Bab Ludd (Sahih Muslim 2937).
• He rules by the Shari‘ah of Muhammad (peace be upon him), not as a bringer of a new law; he is a follower of the final Prophet, not a rival to him.
• His era sees the destruction of Gog and Magog (Ya’juj and Ma’juj), an age of security and abundance, and the spread of true worship.
• After a period of years he dies a natural death, the Muslims pray over him, and he is buried; he is a man and a prophet, not immortal.

How strong is the evidence? The tawatur claim

In hadith science, a report transmitted by so many independent chains that collusion on a lie is impossible is called mutawatir, and it yields certain knowledge, on a par with an established Qur’anic ruling. The mainstream case for the return rests on the claim that the descent-hadith reach exactly this level.

Leading authorities across the centuries, including Ibn Kathir, al-Shawkani, and others, declared the hadith of the descent of Isa to be mutawatir. Ibn Kathir, as noted, wrote that “many mutawatir hadiths” report the descent. Later scholars such as al-Kattani and, in the modern period, al-Albani, catalogued the many companions who narrated it. The number of distinct narrating companions commonly cited runs into the dozens, which is what places the reports, in the Sunni assessment, beyond reasonable doubt as to their origin.

Stage 5/7 · Scholarly consensus· why it is treated as certain

The consensus of Ahl al-Sunnah

Taken together, the ayat of raising, the ayat of return, and the mutawatir descent-hadith produced an early and durable consensus. The orthodox Sunni creed states it without hedging: Isa “was not killed or crucified, nor did he die; on the contrary, Allah raised him body and soul into heaven,” and he “will descend at the end of time, break the cross, kill the swine, and call people to believe in the message of Muhammad” (peace be upon him).

In Sunni legal theory, a sound ijma‘ (scholarly consensus) is an independent and binding proof, grounded in the promise that the community will not agree upon an error. The raising and return of Isa are routinely listed among the beliefs on which the salaf and the imams of the four schools did not differ. This is why classical creeds (from the ‘aqidah literature onward) treat denial of the return not as a minor interpretive slip but as a departure from an established article of faith.

• The raising (raf‘) is affirmed directly from 4:158 and 3:55: a bodily lifting-up, alive.
• The denial of the crucifixion-death is affirmed from 4:157: not killed, not crucified.
• The return (nuzul) is affirmed from 43:61 and 4:159 as read through the mutawatir hadith.
• His eventual human death after the return is affirmed from 19:33, 3:55, and 4:159.

Stage 6/7 · What others claim· the competing positions

The Ahmadiyya (Qadiani) view: a natural death

The most developed dissent from within the Muslim world is that of the Ahmadiyya movement, founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908). It rejects both halves of the mainstream doctrine: it holds that Isa was not raised alive to heaven and will not physically return. Instead, on this view, Isa survived the crucifixion, recovered, and later died an ordinary human death, with the “second coming” fulfilled metaphorically in the person of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad himself.

The Ahmadiyya arguments

• The tawaffa argument: the Qur’an’s use of mutawaffika in 3:55 means “I will cause you to die a natural death,” God taking the soul, not raising a living body. (Al Islam, the movement’s official site, presents this as its central lexical claim.)
• The “used to eat” argument: al-Ma’idah 5:75-76 says of Isa and Maryam that “they both used to eat food.” The Ahmadiyya read the past tense (kana) as implying they no longer eat, and therefore are both dead, and Maryam is agreed to have died a natural death.
• The “no bodies to heaven” argument: citing al-Isra 17:93-94, they argue it is “not the way of God to raise a human body to heaven,” so the raising of Isa must be spiritual, and he must have died naturally.
• The swoon theory: in the movement’s literature, Isa “only fell into a swoon on the cross, but when he was taken down from it, he recovered,” then journeyed east and “died a natural death at the good old age of 120.” The tomb of “Yuz Asaf” in Srinagar, Kashmir, is identified as his grave.
• Raf‘ as rank: the raising in 4:158 is read as an exaltation of spiritual status (as said of the martyrs and of Idris), not a bodily ascension.

The mainstream reply

• On tawaffa, the mainstream answer is that the verb’s core sense is “to take in full,” which includes taking soul and body together (Ma‘arif al-Qur’an on 3:55); the death reading is one of three, not the only one, and the phrase “to Me” (ilayya) in the same verse points to a real lifting-up.
• On raf‘, critics note that when the Qur’an means elevation of rank it says so contextually; the pairing of raf‘ with the explicit denial of killing in 4:157-158 is about physical rescue, not honour.
• On the swoon and the Kashmir tomb, critics document that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad gave shifting, mutually inconsistent accounts of where Jesus died and was buried, first Galilee, then Syria, then Kashmir, which they treat as evidence that the location was reverse-engineered rather than known.
• On the descent-hadith, the mainstream holds these are mutawatir and speak of a bodily return, so reinterpreting them as fulfilled in a 19th-century claimant contradicts both their wording and the consensus.

Modernist and academic readings: is it the Qur’an, or the tafsir?

A different kind of dissent comes from some modernist Muslim thinkers and from academic scholars of the Qur’an. They do not necessarily deny the raising or the return; rather, they argue that the bare Qur’anic text is more restrained than the later interpretive tradition made it, and that much of the doctrine is carried by tafsir and hadith rather than by the verses alone.

• The grammatical point (Todd Lawson): the Qur’an says “they did not crucify him” (wa ma salabuhu), which is not the same statement as “he was not crucified” (wa ma suliba). The first is Qur’anic; the second “is found nowhere in the Book.” On this reading it is the tafsir, not the Qur’an itself, that categorically denies the crucifixion.
• The range of classical opinion: even within the tradition, interpretations of 4:157 run from an outright denial of the crucifixion to a plain affirmation of its historicity, with the “substitution” reading being the most common. Muslim exegesis on this verse was never fully unanimous in its mechanism.
• The tawaffa question (RTS analysis): looking at 3:55, 5:117, and 19:33, some scholars conclude that “on the whole the Qur’an does not explicitly deny the possibility of Jesus’ death in principle,” and that the firm denial belongs to the dogmatic tradition defending orthodoxy.

The mainstream Christian view: crucified, risen, ascended, returning

The Christian position is the mirror-image of the Islamic denial on the crucifixion, yet it shares the belief in an ascension and a return. Mainstream (Nicene) Christianity holds that Jesus:

• was truly crucified and died under Pontius Pilate, was buried, and this death is understood as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of humanity;
• rose bodily from the dead on the third day (the Resurrection), the central claim of the Christian faith;
• ascended bodily into heaven forty days later, seated “at the right hand of the Father”;
• will return in glory at the end of the age to judge the living and the dead (the Second Coming).

The overlap is real but partial. Both faiths affirm a heavenly Jesus and a future return; they divide sharply on whether he died (Christianity: yes, and salvifically; mainstream Islam: no), on his nature (Christianity: divine, the Son; Islam: a human prophet), and on the meaning of the return (in Islam, to affirm the finality of Muhammad’s message, not to complete a redemptive death).

The secular and historical-critical view

Academic historians who bracket questions of faith reach yet another position. Working from the earliest sources and standard historical method, most conclude that:

• the crucifixion of Jesus under Pilate is one of the most securely attested events of his life, accepted by the large majority of historians of all backgrounds, on the basis of multiple early and independent references;
• the resurrection, the bodily ascension, and any future return are theological claims that lie outside what historical method can confirm or deny, since they concern the supernatural;
• the Qur’anic denial of the crucifixion is read by these scholars as a later theological development (the Qur’an dates to the 7th century), sometimes connected to earlier Docetic currents that also denied a real crucifixion.

Stage 7/7 · Reference· compare, verses, sources

The four views at a glance

The same four questions, answered four ways:

Read down the columns and the logic of each position is visible. The mainstream Sunni case rests on three joined legs: the raising-verses read literally with the tafsir tradition, the return-verses, and the mutawatir descent-hadith. Every dissent works by re-reading two words, tawaffa (take, or cause to die) and raf‘ (raise bodily, or exalt in rank), or by relocating the burden of proof from creed to documentary history.

The key verses in Arabic

The primary Qur’anic texts, gathered for reference. Each links to its exact ayah in the Word Explorer.

Frequently asked questions

Qur’anic references

• Qur’an 4:157-158, Surah an-Nisa: neither killed nor crucified, but raised
• Qur’an 3:55, Surah Aal Imran: “I am taking you and raising you to Me”
• Qur’an 3:45-49, Surah Aal Imran: the annunciation and mission of Isa
• Qur’an 43:61, Surah az-Zukhruf: “he is a sign of the Hour”
• Qur’an 4:159, Surah an-Nisa: belief in him before his death
• Qur’an 19:16-34, Surah Maryam: the birth of Isa and his words
• Qur’an 5:116-117, Surah al-Ma’idah: Isa disowns divinity, “when You took me up”