Deliverance from the Cross — Page 98
Those Muslims who mistakenly think that Jesus was raised bodily to heaven profess to find the authority for their mistaken belief in the divine promise set out in this verse: And shall exalt thee to Myself. " There can, however, not be the least doubt that this exaltation means spiritual exaltation which would follow the natural death of Jesus. The context of the verse is that God Almighty sets forth that the enemies of Jesus had devised a plan to bring about the death of Jesus upon the cross, which would make him accursed, according to the Mosaic pronouncement in Deut. 21:23 and God devised His plan to deliver Jesus from such a death so that on his natural death, far from becoming accursed, and thus being cast away from God, he would, like all the righteous, be exalted towards God. There is no indication here whatever of his being raised bodily to heaven. Such an interpretation of the verse would amount to doing violence to the context and idiom of the expression exaltation, and would be contradictory of the clear pronouncements of the Holy Quran that the earth is the natural and determined habitat of man and that man cannot exist in conditions that do not correspond to the conditions of the earth. There are also instances in the Quran which make it clear that exaltation, in the context in which it has been used in this verse, connotes spiritual exaltation and not raising the physical body to heaven. Besides, in this verse the 98