Islamic position
One verse of the Qur’an, 4:157, is the point at which the Muslim and Christian accounts of Jesus part for good. Everything else can be read as difference of emphasis; this is contradiction. The Christian gospel is that Christ died on the cross and rose. The Qur’an says that he was not killed and not crucified, and that God raised him to Himself. This page gives the verses, how Muslims have read them, and what the historians say.
The verses
“And for their saying, ‘We killed the Messiah, ʿĪsā son of Maryam, the messenger of God.’ They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them (shubbiha lahum). Those who differ about it are in doubt about it; they have no knowledge of it, only the following of conjecture. They certainly did not kill him. Rather, God raised him to Himself. God is Mighty, Wise. There is none of the People of the Book but will believe in him before his death, and on the Day of Resurrection he will be a witness against them” (4:157-159).
The verse answers a boast. The subject is the Jews who rejected him, and the Qur’an denies them the killing: they did not do it, whatever they said. It is in the middle of a list of their offences (4:153-161), and the point is that God protected His messenger from them.
Related verses
- 3:54-55: “They plotted, and God plotted, and God is the best of plotters. When God said, ‘O ʿĪsā, I will take you (mutawaffīka) and raise you to Myself, and purify you from those who disbelieve, and set those who follow you above those who disbelieve until the Day of Resurrection.’”
- 5:117: “When You took me (tawaffaytanī), You were the watcher over them.”
- 19:33: “Peace be upon me the day I was born, the day I die, and the day I am raised alive”, the infant’s own words, in which death and resurrection are in the future and are his own.
- 4:159, above, read by most commentators as a prophecy of his return before the end, when the People of the Book will believe in him as he is.
How Muslims have read it
The majority view of the classical commentators, from al-Ṭabarī onwards, is that God raised ʿĪsā to heaven alive, that another man was made to look like him and was crucified in his place, and that he will return before the Day of Judgement, as the ḥadīth also say. Who the substitute was, the Qur’an does not say, and the answers have a history of their own, set out below. The verb tawaffā in 3:55 and 5:117, which usually means “cause to die”, they read as “take up” or as a sleep. A minority of early commentators, and some modern ones, read tawaffā as death: God caused him to die a natural death, at a time of His choosing, and raised him; what the Jews did not do was kill him. Both readings agree on the one thing the verse states: he was not killed by his enemies and not crucified. The substitution story is an explanation of “it was made to appear so to them”, not a statement of the Qur’an, which names no substitute and describes no scene. Some have noted that early Christian groups said the same thing: Basilides, according to Irenaeus (Against Heresies 1.24.4), taught that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus’s form, and the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Peter and Second Treatise of the Great Seth have the living Jesus laughing above the cross while another suffers. The Qur’an may be answering a boast with a memory the church had suppressed. Basilides’ account and the crucifixion passages of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth and the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter are woven into section 26 of the gospel on this website, with the measure applied to each.
How the substitute was identified, and when
The Qur’an names no one, and neither does the ḥadīth. The earliest reports, preserved by al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) on 4:157, make the substitute one of the disciples, who volunteered to take on his likeness and be killed in his place; a second set of reports makes him the man sent into the house to seize Jesus, who came out wearing his face. Both are Muslim stories of the first two centuries, and both honour the substitute as a believer or treat him as a culprit caught in his own trap. Judas Iscariot as the man on the cross belongs to later writing and is above all the plot of the Gospel of Barnabas, a work of Muslim colour that survives only in Italian and Spanish manuscripts of the sixteenth century and has no claim to antiquity. Simon of Cyrene is named by no classical Muslim scholar at all; that identification is Christian, taught by Basilides in the second century and known through Irenaeus, and it entered Muslim apologetics only in modern times, when Muslim writers found it in the church fathers. This website uses it as what it is, an early Christian witness that the one on the cross was another, and not as a Muslim tradition. A fourth reading, that Jesus was nailed to the cross but did not die on it and was revived in the tomb, was argued by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1899 and popularised by Ahmed Deedat in the 1980s; most Muslim scholars reject it, because the verse denies the crucifixion as well as the killing, and this website does not use it.
The historical question
Scholarly consensus
That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate is accepted by nearly all historians of the period, including those with no Christian commitment, as one of the few secure facts about him. It is attested by Paul of Tarsus within twenty-five years (1 Corinthians 2:2; Galatians 3:1), by all four gospels, by Josephus (Antiquities 18.64, in the part of the passage most scholars accept as genuine) and by Tacitus (Annals 15.44), and it is the kind of fact no follower would have invented, since a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms to Jews and an absurdity to Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23). This website states that consensus plainly, and does not pretend that it is weaker than it is.
Where this page stands
The two claims are of different kinds. The historian says that a man was nailed to a cross in Jerusalem in about 30 CE and that the people who were there believed him to be Jesus. The Qur’an says that whatever they believed, God did not let His messenger be killed by his enemies, and that the matter was made to appear otherwise to them. The second claim is not open to the historian’s methods, because it concerns what God did, and the Qur’an says in the same verse that those who argue about it are following conjecture. Muslims hold it as revelation. This website sets the two side by side without blending them and without weakening either, and asks the reader only to notice what the Qur’an has done: it has refused the event on which the whole of Pauline theology is built, the atoning death, and it has done so in a book that confirms almost everything else the gospels say about him. The Gospel According to Islam tells the arrest, the trial and the aftermath in sections 25 to 27, with the Qur’anic text standing in the story where the gospels have the cross.
Sources
- Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, on 3:55 and 4:157-159.
- Mahmoud Ayoub, “Towards an Islamic Christology II: The Death of Jesus, Reality or Delusion?”, The Muslim World 70 (1980).
- Todd Lawson, The Crucifixion and the Qur’an: A Study in the History of Muslim Thought.
- Gabriel Said Reynolds, “The Muslim Jesus: Dead or Alive?”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72 (2009).
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.4, on Basilides; J. Arendzen, “Basilides”, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (1907), for the sources and dates.
- Lonsdale and Laura Ragg (eds.), The Gospel of Barnabas (Oxford, 1907), with the editors’ introduction on the date and provenance of the work.