The Qur'anic Denial, and a Contested Comparative Category

The Qur'an addresses the crucifixion directly and denies it. In a passage rebuking those who boasted of killing the Messiah, it states that they did not kill him and did not crucify him, but that it was made to appear so to them, that those who differ about it are in doubt and follow only conjecture, and that God raised him to himself. Classical Islamic exegesis developed several readings of what appeared to happen, most commonly that another was made to resemble him and was taken in his place, and the Qur'an elsewhere has Isa speak of the day he was born, the day he dies and the day he is raised alive, which commentators relate to a return before the end. The result is that the same narrative stands as the foundation of one tradition and is explicitly denied by another, without the two disputing the existence of the figure at all.

The classification of the narrative is itself contested in scholarship. Comparative work from the late nineteenth century, above all Frazer's The Golden Bough, grouped a set of ancient figures who die and return under a single heading, and set the Christian material against them. That category has been heavily criticised since, most influentially by Jonathan Z. Smith, who argued that the ancient cases were far less alike than the grouping implied and that several of them did not involve a resurrection at all, and the debate is live rather than settled. The atlas classes this entry as it classes the others of that shape, and records here that the shared type is disputed for every entry in it, not only for this one.