The Early Aramaic Toledot Yeshu and the End of Jesus’s Earthly Mission in the Qur’an Available to Purchase

This article revisits a leitmotif of modern Western scholarship on the Qur’an: the historical-critical appraisal of its accounts of the end of Jesus’s earthly mission and its apparent denial of his crucifixion. Whereas most modern studies have sought to contextualize these passages by reading them in light of late ancient Christianity, especially its heresiology, this study adopts a different approach. These qur’anic narratives are read not against the backdrop of Christian sectarianism in Late Antiquity but rather as a response to late ancient Jewish polemics against, and parodies of, the life of Jesus of Nazareth.