Evidence · Case 10 · Islam
The Qur’an, Surah An-Nisa 4:157
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
The Qur’an states of Jesus, “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him,” adding that it only appeared so. This is the text at the center of the disagreement. It was written in the seventh century, roughly six hundred years after Jesus lived, and it offers no first century sources to weigh against the earlier evidence. Muslim scholars explain it in different ways, but the mainstream position denies the crucifixion as Christians understand it.
Sources
Objections & responses
- Doesn’t a minority of Muslim scholars read Surah 4:157 differently, without denying the crucifixion happened?
A minority of Muslim scholars, and some academics, read Surah 4:157 as denying that Jesus’s enemies truly defeated or killed him, since God raised and vindicated him, rather than as denying the physical event of the crucifixion itself. Stated fairly, this reading would soften, or even dissolve, the contradiction with the historical record above.
That said, this remains a minority position. The mainstream Islamic view, reflected in the traditional ‘substitution’ interpretation, still holds that someone was made to appear in Jesus’s place, and does deny the crucifixion as Christians understand it (see the fuller overview of interpretive positions on this question). So the historical tension stands for the position most Muslims actually hold: a seventh century text set against first century Christian, Roman, and Jewish sources. Naming the minority reading here is what keeps the case honest, not what undoes it.
- The Qur’an is revelation from the God who was there, which is a better source than any human record. Doesn’t saying it offers no first-century sources assume it’s a seventh-century human text, which is the point in dispute?
This is the crux, and it should be said openly. From a historian’s standpoint, the Qur’an is a seventh-century document and its claims about first-century events are assessed as such; from a Muslim standpoint, it is divine testimony. The argument here is historical and cannot settle the question of the Qur’an’s inspiration. What it can do is show that if you ask the historical question, the earlier evidence points one way. A Muslim who accepts the Qur’an’s inspiration on other grounds is not refuted by history alone, and the force of this claim depends on a willingness to weigh historical evidence about what the Qur’an asserts.
- A Muslim doesn’t deny that a crucifixion occurred. The traditional view is that someone else was crucified in Jesus’s place and made to look like him. So the historical evidence for a crucifixion doesn’t refute the Qur’an.
The substitution theory concedes that observers saw a crucifixion and therefore concedes the historical data; what it adds is a divine deception no witness could detect. The historian’s objection is not that this is impossible but that it is unfalsifiable and explains the evidence only by positing that the evidence is misleading by design. Christians also raise a theological objection: a God who deceives the disciples, the Jews, and the Romans into founding a religion on a false crucifixion, and lets it stand for six centuries, is hard to reconcile with the Qur’an’s own portrait of God as truthful. That exchange is the real debate.