The swoon hypothesis is any of a number of ideas that aim to explain the resurrection of Jesus, proposing that Jesus did not die on the cross, but merely fell unconscious ("swooned"), and was later revived in the tomb in the same mortal body. This 200-year-old hypothesis is still the subject of debate in popular circles but the scholarly literature considers it uncontroversial that Jesus died during the process of crucifixion. 18th and 19th centuries Early proponents of this hypothesis include German Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, who suggested in around 1780 that Jesus deliberately feigned his death, using drugs provided by the physician Luke to appear as a spiritual messiah and get Israel to abandon the idea of a political messiah. In this interpretation of the events described in the Gospels, Jesus was resuscitated by Joseph of Arimathea, with whom he shared a connection through a secret order of the Essenes. Around 1800, Karl Venturini proposed that a group of supporters dressed in white—who were, with Jesus, members of a "secret society"—had not expected him to survive the crucifixion, but heard groaning from inside the tomb, where Jesus had regained consciousness in the cool, damp air. They then frightened away the guards and rescued him. A third rationalist theologian, Heinrich Paulus, wrote in works from 1802 onwards that he believed that Jesus had fallen into a temporary coma and somehow revived without help in the tomb. He was critical of the vision hypothesis and argued that the disciples must have believed that God had resurrected Jesus. Friedrich Schleiermacher endorsed a form of Paulus' hypothesis in the early 1830s. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Movement, proposed a hypothesis in his 1899 book Jesus in India that Jesus traveled to India after surviving the crucifixion. 20th century Though abandoned by modern scholars as a fringe theory, the hypothesis has remained popular in various works of pseudohistory, such as Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln's 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Barbara Thiering's 1992 Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Michael Baigent's 2006 The Jesus Papers. A fuller list of proponents of various swoon hypotheses: Rajneesh movement Indian Philosopher Rajneesh has also argued that Jesus survived the crucifixion and his argument is similar to the swoon hypothesis. Islamic perspectives A big proponent of the swoon hypothesis in the modern era would be Muslim preacher Ahmed