The Quran was written in Arabic in the late 6th and early 7th centuries and
is considered by Muslims to be a direct revelation from God to the Prophet
Muhammad. The similarities of concepts between the Quran and the Bible
are so numerous that no one doubts that the Quran was written in
continuation of Judeo-Christian tradition. Nevertheless, the denominations
of Islam living today differ from Christian denominations in fundamental
beliefs, of which the crucifixion of Jesus is one of the most significant. The
most important document of this belief is verse 157 of Sura Nisa in the
Quran, which is very open to interpretation.
After the Prophet died, Arab Muslims attacked their northern neighbor, the
Sassanid Empire, in 633. They were victorious, and since then, Persians
adopted Islam as the state religion. Therefore, it was necessary to translate
the Quran into Persian. To the extent that they have survived to the present
day, these translations provide valuable insights into the early phase of
Islamic culture. The analysis of translations into Persian will show that in all
of the surviving six translations up to the 11th century, the death of Jesus
was accepted, but later theological developments in the central area of the
Islamic world led to a different interpretation of verse 157 of Sura Nisa, and
this new interpretation was able to establish itself as the standard
interpretation. The theological controversies are left aside here, and this
article deals with the issue of the presentation and analysis of the Old
Persian translations of this verse. These syntactic and pragmatic analyses
show that in the ancient translations of the Quran into Persian, the death of
Christ was accepted.