Gravitational lensing is just optical lensing from refraction

[Marvas]

Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body — such as a galaxy cluster — causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for the path of light around it to be visibly bent, as if by a lens. The body causing the light to curve is accordingly called a gravitational lens.

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, time and space are fused together in a quantity known as spacetime. Within this theory, massive objects cause spacetime to curve, and gravity is simply the curvature of spacetime. As light travels through spacetime, the theory predicts that the path taken by the light will also be curved by an object’s mass. Gravitational lensing is a dramatic and observable example of Einstein’s theory in action. Extremely massive celestial bodies such as galaxy clusters cause spacetime to be significantly curved. In other words, they act as gravitational lenses. When light from a more distant light source passes by a gravitational lens, the path of the light is curved, and a distorted image of the distant object — maybe a ring or halo of light around the gravitational lens — can be observed.

An important consequence of this lensing distortion is magnification, allowing us to observe objects that would otherwise be too far away and too faint to be seen

Here we go again...these Einstein fanboys simply ignore the fact that light bending is caused by refraction, and that all those massive celestial bodies have atmospheres which bend light because of refraction.
The body causing light to bend is the atmosphere/gases which surrounds the massive celestial body, not the massive celestial body itself. In the case of galaxies, this:

Hubble Maps Giant Halo Around Andromeda Galaxy - NASA Science

In a landmark study, scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have mapped the immense envelope of gas, called a halo, surrounding the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor. Scientists were surprised to find that this tenuous, nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma extends...

science.nasa.gov

They simply ignore that there is a huge halo of plasma gas surrounding all galaxies, or galaxy clusters, which refracts light and distorts it. Just like it does in the sun's corona. There is no need to resort to space bending metaphysics to explain an effect which is easily explained by classical physics, especially when the explanations are so obvious and simple. Occam would twist in his grave if he knew what an insane mess has mainstream science become, mostly because of Einstien's metaphysics which replaced classical physics, with the help of geniuses like Eddington, Pound and Rebka, or Shapiro, who all confirmed his theory by ignoring refraction and basic logic, as its obvious that refraction causes light bending, redshift, and time delay. And lets not forget the Nobel Academy, who awarded them for their monumental stupidity and scientific ignorance, and derailled mainstream science on the path of pure pseudo science.

But following my discovery of refractional redshift, which has proved without a doubt that the 'gravitational redshift' in the Pound-Rebka experiment was in fact caused by refraction, which changes the wavelength of light, and not by Einstein's gravity, and the fact that the Shapiro time delay was also caused by refraction, which slows the radio waves in the sun's atmosphere or corona, which is also responsable for the bending of light near the sun, there simply is no way that general relativity can be considered a valid or confirmed scientific theory anymore. Because all that those expriments proved is the general stupidity of Einstein fanboys, who basically confuse all the known effects of refraction with the predictions of Einsteins theory of gravity- which are always 'experimentally proven' by refraction. The most obvious case being when they actually had to add a bag of Helium in order to prove 'gravitational' redshift.