Jesus was not crucified

Here is the passage in full, in the Saheeh International translation:

“And [for] their saying, ‘Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, the messenger of Allāh.’ And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them… Rather, Allāh raised him to Himself” (4:157-158).

The words “[another] was made to resemble him” are in brackets because they are the translator’s interpretation. The Arabic, shubbiha lahum, says only that “it was made to appear so to them,” and does not say how. Most classical commentators filled that gap with a substitution: someone else was made to look like Jesus and was crucified in his place. Ibn Kathir, for example, relates that a young man among Jesus’ companions volunteered, was made to look exactly like him, and was crucified, while Jesus was raised to heaven. Other commentators named other people as the substitute.

Not every Muslim scholar has accepted this. The Lebanese-American scholar Mahmoud Ayoub, surveying the commentaries, argued that the verse denies that Jesus’ enemies had the final say over him, rather than denying that he died. Other verses add to the question: Jesus says, “peace is on me the day I was born and the day I will die” (19:33), and God says, “I will take you and raise you to Myself” (3:55).

The substitution account comes from commentators writing centuries after the Qur’an. The Qur’an does not spell it out, and no earlier historical source contains it.

Historians who reject almost everything Christians believe about Jesus still treat his execution as one of the firmest facts about him.

John Dominic Crossan, a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar who doubts much of the Gospel story, writes that “that he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.” Bart Ehrman, an agnostic who left the Christian faith, treats the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate as beyond serious dispute in his book Did Jesus Exist?. These scholars do not believe Jesus rose from the dead, and they have no reason to protect Christian teaching. They reach their conclusion by the ordinary methods historians use for any figure of the ancient world.

You do not have to accept the New Testament as Scripture to use it as historians do: as a set of first-century documents showing what Jesus’ followers said, and when.

The earliest of them are the letters of Paul, written in the AD 50s. In one, Paul passes on a short summary of belief that he says he had himself received: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Scholars across the spectrum date this formula to within a few years of Jesus’ death. Paul also writes that he spent fifteen days with Peter, one of Jesus’ closest companions, and met James, Jesus’ brother (Galatians 1:18-19). He was in a position to know how Jesus died.

The movement also began in Jerusalem, the city where the execution took place, among people who had seen it or knew those who had. A public Roman execution, announced in the city where it happened while witnesses were still living, is a hard thing to be mistaken about.

Non-Christian writers cannot tell you whether Jesus rose. They can tell you whether his execution was something only his followers believed.

• The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around AD 116, despised Christianity and called it a superstition. Explaining where the name came from, he says Christus “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus” (Annals 15.44).
• The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 90s AD, refers to Pilate condemning Jesus to the cross. His passage was later edited by Christian copyists, but most scholars accept that the report of Pilate’s sentence is his.
• The Babylonian Talmud, compiled centuries later, preserves a hostile Jewish tradition that a man it calls Jesus the Nazarene was executed on the eve of Passover for leading Israel astray.

The Talmud’s tradition had every reason to oppose the Christians, and it did not answer them by saying Jesus escaped. It said he was rightly executed. Opponents and followers disagreed about who he was, and agreed that he died.

Jesus’ first followers and their Jewish neighbors also felt that a crucifixion would dishonor God’s messenger. Crucifixion was the death Rome gave to slaves and rebels. The Torah says, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree,” a verse Paul himself quotes about Jesus (Galatians 3:13). To most Jews of the time, a crucified Messiah was a contradiction.

Historians weigh that. People who invent a story about their hero do not give him the death that most damages their case. The first Christians spent generations explaining the cross to people who found it shameful. The simplest reason they kept explaining it is that they could not deny it. It had happened in public, and everyone knew.

The instinct behind the Qur’anic denial is the same one that makes historians trust the event: nobody would have made up a death this hard to accept.

Historians weigh sources by how close they stand to the events and whether they had the means to know. On the question of how Jesus died, the historical sources from the first and second centuries agree, and the account that says otherwise comes about six hundred years later, from Arabia, with no earlier eyewitness or historical report behind it.

If you believe the Qur’an is the word of God, you may answer that God knows what happened better than any historian. That is a consistent position, and this page cannot disprove a hidden act of God. It does mean that the denial of the crucifixion rests on faith in the Qur’an alone, against the historical evidence, not on evidence that the event did not happen.

The substitution account raises a hard question of its own. If God made another man look like Jesus, then Jesus’ mother, his closest companions, and everyone who watched were led to believe something false, and the movement that followed was built on that belief. The Qur’an says God would make Jesus’ followers “superior to those who disbelieve until the Day of Resurrection” (3:55). The followers who carried his name through the following centuries were the ones who proclaimed his death on the cross.