Deliverance from the Cross — Page 127
regard to the appearance of a great divinely inspired teacher in the latter days. While in his writings and speeches he set forth a comparative exposition of the weakness of the doctrines and teachings of every one of the great faiths that flourished in his time, wherever they differed from the teachings of Islam, his analysis and exposition of the then current doctrines and teachings of the Christian Church was devastating and shattering. As early as 1890 he had announced that Jesus did not die on the cross and in 1899 he published a book: Jesus in India, which is a thesis on the subject of the deliverance of Jesus from death on the cross and his journey thereafter through the countries in which the lost tribes ocf Israel were scattered and his final sojourn and death in Kashmir. The publication of this book created a great stir in religious circles and came as a severe shock to the Christian church. It aroused a great clamour and the thesis that it set forth was contemptuously ridiculed by Christian missionaries. Hazrat Ahmad maintained that his thesis had been divinely inspired and now that it had been set forth publicly, God, in His wisdom, would bring to light historical evidence to prove the correctness of the conclusions set forth in the thesis. It is true that eminent writers on the life of Jesus had already expressed grave doubts concerning the expiry of Jesus on the cross, but no one had set forth the deliverance of Jesus from the cross with such definiteness and certainty as was done by Hazrat 127