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Joe looks at how Muslims interpret the Quran to explain how Jesus wasn’t really crucified.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, and today I wanna look at the Quran’s claims about Jesus and the crucifixion and explain why I think that those claims are false, and in fact, why I think they can be shown to be false. But I wanna start with first making sense of just what it is that the Qur’an claims happened to Jesus. In Sarah four, verses 157 to 158, Allah accuses the Jews of boasting, “We killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of Allah.” But Allah responds that they neither killed nor crucified him. It was only made to appear so. Even those who argue for this crucifixion are in doubt, they have no knowledge whatsoever, only making assumptions. They certainly did not kill him. Rather, Allah raised him up to himself, and Allah is almighty, all wise. Now, this is actually the only explicit reference to the crucifixion in the Quran, and it’s a little ambiguous as to what’s being said here.
The first ambiguity is this. Is the Quran claiming that the Jews are lying because Jesus was never really crucified, or is the Quran claiming that they’re lying about being the ones to have crucified him? As I say, it’s not entirely clear, but as Todd Lawson explains in his book, the crucifixion in the Quran, a study in the history of Muslim thought, by far the vast majority of the followers of Islam hold that Jesus in fact was not crucified, but remains alive with God in a spiritual realm from where he will descend at the end of time in an Islamic version of the second coming. Now, that’s a problem since even skeptical scholars acknowledge that Jesus was definitely crucified. His followers knew that he was crucified, his critics knew that he was crucified, non-Christians mentioned this crucifixion. It’s simply beyond any serious dispute. As the agnostic scholar, Bart Airman puts it, “The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans is one of the most secure facts we have about his life.” So how do Muslims get around this fact?
What exactly is the Muslim claim about what happened here? Because the truth is there isn’t any real clear explanation given in the Quran. This is what you might call the second ambiguity. Even if we are right in reading the Quran is saying that Jesus wasn’t really crucified, that doesn’t really tell us what did happen. How was it that so many people, both for Jesus and against him, came to believe that he had been crucified if he really wasn’t? Well, as Shabir Ali admits, Muslim commentators have gravitated towards a number of different theories, all of which contradict one another.
CLIP:
Alimamad Razi, having quote, uh, you know, um, combed all of the traditions about this, uh, you know, to see, uh, where did the classical Muslim commentators before him get the information from, tracing it all back and so on. Uh, he says in the end that, uh, all of these, uh, reports are contradictory one to another, because typically the commentators did was they went back to the gospel stories and they tried to find at which juncture in the story could we imagine somebody being switched, uh, to look like Jesus and, uh, taking his place while most of the people were unaware of this happening. Mm-hmm. And they, they arrived at different junctures. Like, uh, one said, for example, Jesus, uh, was in a room with his disciples and, uh, picked one of them, uh, by a volunteer to, uh, take his place. Another said that Judas Iscariot, who came to arrest him, was the one who was changed to look like Jesus.
Another, uh, report says that, uh, when Jesus was arrested and placed under a Roman guard, uh, the Roman guard was made to look like Jesus and then he was arrested and he was put on the cross.
Joe:
So the various Muslim claims about what really happened to Jesus and who really died on the cross are clearly contradictory, and there’s no one version that seems particularly plausible. Broadly speaking, we can put the theories into three groups, and I wanna show why I think none of them work. Now, before I do that, I wanna thank my patrons over at shamelessjoe.com and invite any of you who are interested to consider joining for as little as $5 a month. And that’s about the price of a 50 pound bag of sand, and hopefully you’ll get at least as much use out of this because I answer your questions directly in hour long Q&A live streams, plus it makes it possible for me not to have to take ads, and I think that’s pretty nice. Okay, so the first group of theories involve divine deception. It’s the idea that Allah picked somebody, made that person look like Jesus, and then got that person tortured and killed in Jesus’ place.
Now, depending upon which Muslim source you read, maybe the victim here was Judas, maybe it was Simon of Cyrene, maybe he was a Roman soldier, maybe Allah just picked some random unlucky guy. The different versions of the theory aren’t really consistent about who this happened to. They’re also not really consistent about when in the gospel story this is supposed to have happened, and they’re not even really clear about why Allah would have done this as opposed to, say, miraculously protecting Jesus in some other way. The second group of theories involve a disciple posing as Jesus and being crucified. The medieval Sunni commentator, Ibin Katir, claimed that when Jesus was aware that they were after him, he asked for a volunteer to take his place one step forward and was taken by the Jews and crucified while Jesus was himself raised through the roof of the house.
Now, you’ll notice the advantage of this second theory is that it seems less malicious because the victim here at least is a volunteer, but it still has a couple of pretty glaring plot holes. How did the volunteer convince everyone else that they were Jesus? Did Allah miraculously change their appearance or did he just put on a disguise or something? We’re gonna return to these plotholes in a moment, but while the second theory at least explains who the deceivers were, it was Jesus and the apostles, it doesn’t really explain how their deception worked. That then leaves a third group of theories, the idea that Pilate decided to despair Jesus by killing some other random person instead.
CLIP:
Nonetheless, uh, uh, the Mahmirazi says that, uh, the governor wanting to pacify the masses and got a person, dressed him up to look like Jesus and had that person, uh, crucified him because people were at a distance, it was a little dark, that they didn’t quite make out. Now, he’s obviously given a very naturalistic type of explanation here, but whether this fits the historical circumstances and what historians would agree with, this is, uh, now an issue.
Joe:
I appreciate Shabira Ali’s candor here. Historians certainly would raise some serious issues with his explanation because in fact, all three of the theories that we’ve looked at here are glaringly and pretty obviously false. I wanna start with the non-miraculous explanations, the idea that somebody either dressed up themselves to look like Jesus or was forcibly dressed up to look like Jesus by the Romans or somebody else. Now, the first problem with that explanation is an obvious one. Did nobody realize that it wasn’t Jesus on the cross? Remember that Jesus was a pretty well-known preacher, and he was a controversial figure at the time within Judaism. On the one hand, it’s not surprising that the Roman guards who went to arrest him didn’t seem to be sure what he looked like. The Roman guards were not from Galilee and they were not Jewish, but are we really to believe that the Jewish leaders didn’t know what Jesus looked like, that they couldn’t tell him from his disciples apart?
After all, Jesus even reminds the leaders at the time of his arrest, “Day after day, I was with you in the temple teaching and you did not seize me.” So he’s with them in the temple on a regular basis and they never got a glimpse of his face. They can’t tell him apart from one of his disciples or from Judas or from a random guy that punches Pilate kidnapped. Now, I’m admittedly pretty bad at recognizing faces myself, but I find this simply hard to believe. And that is just in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is then put on trial before Jewish and then Roman authorities. And again, are we to believe that nobody noticed this whole time while he’s on trial that this is a case of mistaken identity? In his trial, the high priest asks him, “Are you the Christ, the son of the blessed?” And the man on trial says, “I am.” And you will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.
Now at that answer, the high priest tears his robes and because he considers it blosphemous. And look, if Jesus isn’t who he claims to be, that answer would be blasphemous. But if the man on trial isn’t even Jesus, then clearly the answer is both a lie and a blasphemous one because he’s claiming to be both the Christ and the divine figure of Daniel chapter seven. Well, eventually, this person is crucified. And contrary to Shabirali’s description, it wasn’t a little dark, at least not at first. Eventually, it’s true, there is an eclipse, but Jesus carries the cross publicly on the morning of Good Friday, and then he’s on the cross for hours. Crucifixion was intentionally done in an open, public, humiliating way. That’s why the sign accusing the criminal of his crimes was written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was meant to be a deterrent to would be criminals.
They weren’t doing this in the dark somewhere out of the way. Now we know that many of the people who love Jesus and many of the people who hated Jesus were there. They were at the cross. They watched the crucifixion happen. That includes his own mother, as well as several of his other disciples who were at the foot of the cross. And some of his last words are him speaking to Mary, whom he addresses as mother. Now, are we to believe that she was right there next to him talking to him and Mary couldn’t tell whether she was speaking to her son Jesus or to a total stranger or one of Jesus’ friends? And what about whoever the victim themselves was if it wasn’t Jesus? Think about the fact that in the versions where he’s sent involuntarily against his will, either by a pilot or by a law, why is he not announcing that they’ve got the wrong guy?
He’s being tortured and killed in an excruciating manner. I mean that literally. The word excruciating comes from the Latin word for the cross. What does the man have to lose at this point by just telling the truth and revealing that he’s been framed either by pilate or by a law? And even in the versions of the story where this guy is a willing victim, doesn’t he have a family or friends or somebody who might wonder what happened to him or might, I don’t know, recognize him when they see him on the cross? Or we do believe that all of these people, the crowds, the disciples, the Virgin Mary, the victim, the victim’s family and so on, they’re all in on the coverup? Remember that in at least some versions of the story, Jesus asked a crowd of disciples who wants to volunteer to die for him?
That is a lot of people who would have to be in on this coverup because a lot of people would know about Jesus’ dishonesty here. Now, so far I’ve just looked at the naturalistic explanations and a Muslim could respond to that, “No, nobody recognized the victim because Allah supernaturally altered his appearance to look like Jesus.” That gets around many of the difficulties I’ve raised. I acknowledge that. And of the three theories, I think this is the one that most accurately reflects Muhammad’s own thinking because in Quran 3:54, it says that the disbelievers made a plan against Jesus, but Allah also planned and Allah is the best of planners. So that’s what the English says, planner. But the underlying Arabic there is Makara, which means to deceive, delude, cheat, dupe, goal or double cross. So a more literal translation might read that Allah is the best of deceivers.
He is the best of con men, seemingly because he outsmarted the enemies of Jesus with this bit of divine deception. Now, interestingly, one of the sharpest critiques of this idea of divine deception actually comes from the medieval Muslim commentator, Al-Razi, the same guy Shabir Ali mentioned earlier in the clips. And Al-Razi points out that a divine deception would bring into question the identity of the prophets themselves, which in turn would call into question the probity of the sources of religious knowledge, and then it would open the door to sophistry. Because once you begin to argue that God might be miraculously tricking people into believing that a non-prophet, a disciple, Judas, a Roman guard, Simon of Cyrene, whomever, that this non-prophet is Jesus, you’ve seriously undermined the trustworthiness of God. You certainly cannot say that we should listen to the teachings of the prophet sent from God because for all we know, those prophets might be wicked men in supernatural disguises.
So the argument for a divine deception ends up being self-refuting since it leaves us with no reason to trust that God or the alleged prophets are actually telling the truth. And it seems to me that Al-Razi is correct here. If Muslims can’t agree, even at which point in the gospel story we’re supposed to stop believing that it’s Jesus and start believing it’s his stunt double, then it raises serious questions as to when to stop believing the words coming out of the mouth of Jesus. Now, amazingly, this is actually just the tip of the iceberg because historical evidence, I have alluded to it, but it’s a lot more than I can go into here. I’ve mentioned in the past that one of the oldest parts of the New Testament is a passage that’s sometimes called the Corinthian Creed. Now that seems to date to just a few years after the death of Jesus.
And St. Paul talks about receiving it, seemingly when he converted. And this Corinthian Creed says that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and then it lists several different resurrection appearances, including one to 500 people. So this raises a couple of different problems. First, there are biblical passages which we know are much older than the first century, which seem to point to the fact that the coming Messiah is going to suffer and die and rise again. Second, we know that people not only claim to have seen Jesus die, hundreds of people claim to have seen him after he rose from the dead. Now, at first, that might sound like an easy detail to explain. Of course they saw him. He never died in the first place.
But then you read the actual accounts of these appearances from Jesus and realize that Jesus does things like he proves that it’s him by showing the disciples the wounds on his hands and his feet and his side. He even offers to let people touch the wounds. But finally, we know as a matter of historical record that there were early Christians who believed that Jesus rose from the dead and that this proved that he was in fact divine. Now this is actually the center of the Christian message from the very beginning. As St. Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” But of course, if Jesus never died on the cross, then he certainly wasn’t raised. The closest you get to Jesus being raised here is him being maybe taken out of the house by the roof to escape.
So are we to believe that Allah and Jesus and the disciples tricked the early Christians into believing these false things about Jesus, beliefs which according to Islam are not only false, they’re actually idolatrous, even contrary to the oneness of God. Why wouldn’t the apostles have just said what the Qur’an said? No, Jesus didn’t really die. No need to go get martyred for Christ. He wasn’t crucified. He didn’t rise from the dead. Your Christian faith is in vain. ‘Cause the reality is this. Muhammad’s story about Jesus avoiding the cross by being secretly taken up to the Father, that isn’t even an original story to the Quran. That idea doesn’t come from Christianity though. It seems to have originated in Gnostic mythology. We find St. Derenaeus of Leon debunking a version of it from Gnostic teachers back in about the year 180. And these Gnostic teachers claimed that Jesus tricked Simon of Cyrene into getting crucified in place of him while Jesus himself sat back and laughed.
And like many of the later Muslim theories, it’s based on the idea that Jesus’ appearance was supernaturally transfigured and that he ascended to the Father. Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least return here to the one final Islamic theory I alluded to it in the very beginning. Some Muslims are going to claim that when the Quran says the Jews are lying about crucifying and killing Jesus because Allah actually raised him up to himself, that the Qur’an simply means here that, yeah, sure, Jesus died on the cross, but this was Allah’s plan and so the Jews are lying by trying to take credit. Now I would say here simply that this reading allows Muslims to avoid the awkwardness of the Quran teaching something that is very obviously fictional, but I don’t think it suffices because I don’t think this is an intuitive reading of Surah four at all, and it’s not how virtually any Muslims throughout history have read the Quran.
Remember, the Quran claims repeatedly to be the clear Quran, claims to be an all clear text. So anytime you’re doing an awkward interpretation that requires assuming that nearly all Muslims have misread the text for centuries, I think that ends up undermining the Quran’s reliability in an attempt to try to salvage it. Now, as I’ve said before, the historical evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus is overwhelming. We find it referenced in Christian, Jewish, Roman pagan, and Syrian pagan sources. Unlike the various events recorded in the Quran, like Muhammad splitting the moon in half, there’s a great deal of historical evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus. So in rejecting the crucifixion in favor of Gnostic mythology, I think the Quran reveals itself to be both unreliable and untrue. But the Quran is not alone here. Many people cast out on whether Jesus really died on the cross and whether he really rose again.
And the agnostic Alex O’Connor has actually done a surprisingly good job of showing why so many of these objections to the death and resurrection of Christ are simply false. Take a closer look at those arguments right here. Firs Shamus Popourri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.