The Whole Substitution Process

[Claudia]

I have something new to share. There is this conspiracy theory in the Koran called the “substitution Process” that states the historical Jesus escaped and was only thought to have been crucified. Totally a delight.


I love conspiracy theories – It is imagination going astray. The asking of purely speculative questions is etched indelibly in every human mind. But the title of this article may raise the question: Has God made a person to look like another? The answer is that God wouldn’t have let his Messenger be killed. In letting the mind goes another reality breaks in on the old tradition, and radical interpretations are made manifested between the wisdom of God (Allah), concealed until now, and the unbelievers’ contention that the crucifixion has been a victory for them. Looking at the event of Jesus’ last week from the divine side, God triumphs over human evil, bringing disaster for the latter, but for those who believe, salvation. Indeed, conspiracy theories are beautiful.
Both Christianity and Islam consider Jesus to be the Messiah, but Muslims reject the cross because they believe that God who sends prophets would not abandon Jesus to such a horrendous death. But what if the cross is simply affirming that God will turn it around into an ultimate triumph? Muslims had insisted with uncompromising seriousness that because of the exactness and preservation of the Koran, the crucifixion and killing of Jesus has not occurred to the mind of any Muslim. Instead, God outsmarted those who would have done in God’s Messiah by substituting someone else for him on the cross.

According to the standard commentaries, the Koran denies emphatically that the Jews crucified Jesus:

“That they said, “We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah.” – But they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them. And those who differ there in are full of doubts, with no knowledge at all, but only conjecture to follow. For of a surety they killed him not.”

It is not an unfair request, for when similarity arises, Christians might consider the Koran a Word from God, if interpreted in the light of the New Testament. As it appears to me, the Koran does not deny Jesus’ death. Rather it presents Jesus as a challenge not only to human folly and unbelief but equally to human ignorance and reliance on mere conjecture. The crucifixion was made to look to the Jews like an ultimate victory for them over Jesus – but of course it was not.
But it is the enormous divergence between a religion and its founder that now claims my attention. Mohammad was amiable and enlightened, but the body of experts who interpreted his teachings was over literalist and confident in their own ability to know God’s providential wisdom. These experts, inevitably, acquired power since they hold the key to truth and like any other privileged caste, they used their power for their own advantage. A fearful possibility is that Mohammad was a mystic addicted to contradictions as the form necessary to transmit meaning. Subsequently, his expressions are never completely comprehended by others. He is still trying to express the truth, even when close followers cannot tell whether he is being literal or speaking in metaphor.
Odd as it is, Mohammad’s metaphors embody his meaning whether or not this meaning is available to someone reading the Koran today. The prophet might have had several or all these in mind. He will develop the image of the divine word and its triumph over evil, and later interpretations were introduced to indicate that something happened affecting their perception of an event to the extent that the Jews honestly thought they had crucified Jesus.



Awesome & Disorientating
Who was this substitute? This question is not clarified by the Koran’s experts, but there are numerous hypotheses which support the possibility of substitution. I bring them here:

• God created humankind and all the constituents of the world. If God can create a likeness to everything in the world, then all the features of the body of Jesus have counterparts in the realm of possibility – in non-being – that God can create somewhere other than in the body of the Messiah.
• The Gospels give ample evidence that Jesus was well known in his context; why, then, did they have to pay one of his disciples 30 dirhams to lead them to him if not that his likeness had been cast on someone else?
• Jesus was arrested on a dark night among dark nights in a situation where his form would be distorted. Under such circumstances, something could easily be confused with something very different from it – how much more between something and its likeness?
• His face and handsome features and bodily frame were disfigured by beating, dragging, and other physical abuses. Such punishment would necessitate confusion between one thing and another – especially between a thing and something resembling it.
• The chief priest summoned the person thought to be Jesus and even made him swear whether he was Jesus the Messiah and Son of God. But he received no answer.
• When Pilate said to him, “Are you he?” he returned no answer. If he had truly been Jesus, he would have acknowledged it and confessed it.
• When the Jews came to arrest Jesus, he went out and asked the Jews twice, “Whom do you want?” They said twice, “Jesus, the Nazarean.” But they did not know him, even though he answered them, “I am.” Yet they did not recognize his form – another indication of the casting of a likeness and the taking up of Jesus.
• Judas was bribed to lead them to him, making kissing his hand the sign of identification. If they had known Jesus, they would have recognized him without any guidance and without any question, given the fact that he had been among them for the majority of the time in the Temple.
• Judas could have lied to the Jews in stating, “He is the one.”
• One of the followers of Christ could have ensured his salvation with God by voluntarily claiming that he was Jesus.
• The guards may have taken a bribe from him, let him go, and arrested someone else just as Judas lied to the Jews in identifying him.
• God may have sent a demon in Jesus’ image to be crucified.
• For Saint Paul, crucifixion serves merely as a metaphor for the death of Christians to self.
• Jesus would not have thirsted on the cross. Since Jesus went without food and drink for forty days and forty nights in the desert, he could not have showed weakness before his enemies by asking the Jews for a drink.
• Jesus would not have questioned his destiny. In the statement, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the crucified one evidences dissatisfaction with his destiny as well as a lack of submission to God’s command. Since Jesus could hardly have been guilty of dissatisfaction and lack of submission, the crucified one must have been someone else.
• Peter denied him. Since Peter was among the greatest of his messengers and denial of Jesus would have amounted to unbelief, Peter could not possibly have denied Jesus.

It is grindingly, creakingly, crushingly obvious that if you take God out of the plot, it could not work. However, if Muslims must believe that Jesus was neither killed nor crucified, but he did, indeed, die, what happened to the real Jesus? To quote the words of a Muslim scholar, Qasimi, the transfiguration was the time God raised Jesus:

“Clearly the Jews had heard Jesus say Elijah would come. This is why, when they raised him up on the cross, according to the Gospels, they said, “Call on him so that we can see if Elijah will come and rescue him.” In other words, while the Apostles slept, Moses and Elijah came and took Jesus to God. The one the Apostles saw after they awoke could have been one of the manifestations of his spirit, since Jesus surely had the power to change states. After all, he raised the dead, multiplied the loaves and fish, and healed the blind and lepers.”



Ascending into Heaven
While his plot turns out for human benefits, the chain of events does not hold an inner logic. It describes a kind of “decisiveness” about God’s influence, which overwhelms Muslim’s judgment. The obvious association is with substitution, with a manipulation of outcomes, in which constructed fantasies are masked in captivating but treacherous language. Now, that God took Jesus up to heaven – which is, by the way, quite implausibly – and rescued him from death, I speculate why this version has not been circulated among early Christianity. Would it not have been the greater reason to think that Jesus was God? In a separate tradition, God couldn’t have simply taken Jesus to heaven because it would have been such a great miracle that Christians would have been subject to even greater error about his identity than they are now is subject to. Is this faith or constructed fantasy?


When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong." – Richard Dawkins.