Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān, by Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310 AH / 923 CE). The earliest of the great commentaries to survive whole. Al-Ṭabarī sets out every opinion he knows on a verse with its chain of transmission, then rules between them. His reports on 4:157 are the oldest record of how the substitution at the cross was understood.
The complete commentary on The good news of Aḥmad (61:6), covering 61:6.
On 61:6
On the interpretation of His words, Exalted: And when Jesus son of Mary said: O Children of Israel, indeed I am the Messenger of God to you, confirming what is before me of the Torah, and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me whose name is Aḥmad. But when he came to them with the clear proofs, they said: This is manifest sorcery. (6) (61:6)
He says, Exalted be His remembrance: And remember also, O Muḥammad, when Jesus son of Mary said to his people of the Children of Israel: O Children of Israel, indeed I am the Messenger of God to you, confirming what is before me of the Torah which was sent down upon Moses, and bringing good tidings — I give you good tidings — of a messenger to come after me whose name is Aḥmad.
Yūnus related to me: Ibn Wahb informed us: Muʿāwiyah ibn Ṣāliḥ informed me, from Saʿīd ibn Suwayd, from ʿAbd al-Aʿlā ibn Hilāl al-Sulamī, from ʿIrbāḍ ibn Sāriyah, who said: I heard the Messenger of God (peace and blessings be upon him) say: “I was, with God, written down as the Seal of the Prophets while Adam was still lying prostrate in his clay; and I shall tell you of the first of that: the prayer of my father Abraham, the good tidings of Jesus concerning me, and the vision which my mother saw — and so it is with the mothers of the prophets, they see visions — that she saw, when she gave birth to me, that there came forth from her a light by which the palaces of Syria were lit up.”
But when he came to them with the clear proofs: He says: but when Aḥmad came to them with the clear proofs — which are the indications that God gave him as proofs of his prophethood — they said: This is manifest sorcery: He says: what he has brought is nothing other than sorcery, and he is but a sorcerer.
About this text
This is a complete English rendering of Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān on these verses, prepared for this website from the public-domain Arabic text (tafsir.app, src=tabari). Nothing is abridged: every opinion, every report with its chain of transmission, every verse of poetry and every grammatical note is translated. Qur’anic quotations are in bold; the translator’s own notes are confined to the numbered footnotes and identify names, terms and variant readings only. A second translator has not checked the rendering, and the Arabic is linked so that any passage can be compared. The modern editors’ apparatus is not part of the classical text and is not translated.
The good news of Aḥmad (61:6): all commentaries · The classical commentaries