Did Jesus Die on the Cross?

Muslims and Christians agree on a great deal about Jesus. He was born of a virgin, worked miracles, was called the Messiah, was taken up to God, and will return. But on one point the two roads part: Muslims are taught that Jesus was never crucified. Christians say His death on the cross is the center of everything. This study looks at the question fairly: what the Qur’an actually says, how Muslims read it, what history records, and why the death of the Son matters so much.

The one verse

The Muslim denial of the crucifixion rests mainly on one passage. In the Sahih International translation it reads:

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. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain. Rather, Allāh raised him to Himself. And ever is Allāh Exalted in Might and Wise.

Notice the word “[another]” in square brackets. It is not in the Arabic. The translators added it to show how they understand the verse. The Arabic phrase, shubbiha lahum, is shorter and less clear. Marmaduke Pickthall’s older translation renders it simply “but it appeared so unto them.” So the verse itself does not say who, if anyone, died in Jesus’ place. That is a matter of interpretation.

This is the only verse in the Qur’an that speaks directly of the crucifixion. It was given about six hundred years after the event, in Arabia, far from Jerusalem.

Three ways Muslims read it

Muslims do not all understand this verse the same way. There are three main readings.

• Substitution. The most common view, found in the classical commentaries, is that God made someone else look like Jesus, and that person was crucified instead. The commentators did not agree on who it was: Judas, a disciple who volunteered, a guard, or someone else.
• Swoon. Others, especially the Ahmadiyya movement and some popular debaters, teach that Jesus was put on the cross but did not die there. He fainted, was taken down alive, recovered, and later died a natural death.
• A denial of victory. A smaller number of modern Muslim scholars have argued that the verse answers the boast of Jesus’ enemies, “we have killed the Messiah,” by denying that they ever had the power to destroy Him, rather than denying that a crucifixion took place.

That last reading is closer to the Bible than many realize. Jesus said of His life, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). His enemies did not defeat Him. He gave Himself, and God raised Him. We will come back to this.

What else the Qur’an says

Other verses in the Qur’an speak of the end of Jesus’ life on earth, and they are worth reading closely.

[Mention] when Allāh said, “O Jesus, indeed I will take you and raise you to Myself and purify [i.e., free] you from those who disbelieve …”

The Arabic word translated “take you” is mutawaffika. The same verb is used in Sura 39:42, where “Allāh takes the souls at the time of their death.” And in Sahih al-Bukhari’s Book of Tafsir, Ibn Abbas, the cousin of Muhammad, is reported as saying that mutawaffika in 3:55 means “to make you die.” Muslims who hold the substitution view usually read the verse differently, as God taking Jesus up alive, but the plain sense of the word, as Ibn Abbas read it, is death.

In Sura 19:33, the infant Jesus says, “And peace is on me the day I was born and the day I will die and the day I am raised alive.” And in 5:117, Jesus says to God, “when You took me up,” using the same verb again.

Some Muslims say God would never allow His prophet to be killed in shame. But the Qur’an itself says prophets were killed. It tells the Children of Israel, “a party [of messengers] you denied and another party you killed” (Sura 2:87), and asks, “So why did you kill them, if you should be truthful?” (Sura 3:183). By the Qur’an’s own account, being killed by enemies does not make a man less a prophet.

The Qur’an speaks of God “taking” Jesus with a word used for death, and it says other prophets were killed. Death would not dishonor Him.

What history records

The crucifixion of Jesus is one of the best-attested events of the ancient world. Even scholars who doubt much of the Gospels treat it as one of the most certain facts about His life. Here is why.

Four independent accounts. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all record His crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, with details of time, place and people. John writes as one who stood there: “he that saw it bare record, and his record is true” (John 19:35).

The earliest written summary. Around AD 55, about twenty-five years after the event, Paul wrote down what he had himself received from those before him:

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:

Writers who were not Christians. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around AD 116 and no friend of the Christians, explained where their name came from:

Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out …

“The extreme penalty” was crucifixion. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the AD 90s, also mentions that Pilate condemned Jesus to the cross. To be fair, his paragraph about Jesus was expanded by later Christian copyists, and scholars bracket some phrases as additions. But most scholars hold that a core mention of Jesus and His execution under Pilate goes back to Josephus himself. The Greek writer Lucian, in the second century, mocked Christians for worshipping a man “crucified in Palestine.”

These writers had no reason to invent a crucified Messiah. For the Romans it was a shameful death for slaves and rebels. For many Jews, a crucified man looked cursed. No one inventing a religion would have chosen it. The followers of Jesus preached it anyway, because it happened.

Foretold by the prophets

Muslims honor the prophets of Israel. Centuries before Jesus, they described a Messiah who would suffer and die:

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Isaiah goes on to say that “he hath poured out his soul unto death” and “bare the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12). David wrote, “they pierced my hands and my feet” (Psalm 22:16). Daniel foretold that “Messiah be cut off, but not for himself” (Daniel 9:26). For many more of these prophecies, see The Foretold Messiah.

Jesus Himself foretold His death, many times and plainly:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Here is a question worth weighing carefully. Moses gave a test for a true prophet: “if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22). Jesus said He would be killed and rise again on the third day (Matthew 16:21). If He was not killed, His own prophecy failed. To deny the cross is, without meaning to, to make Jesus a prophet whose words did not come true.

Jesus foretold His own death and rising. If He did not die, His prophecy failed. If His prophecy came true, the cross is real.

Did He only faint?

The swoon theory says Jesus survived the cross. Consider what the Gospels record, and what that theory would need to overcome:

• Roman soldiers carried out executions as their trade. When they came to Jesus, they “saw that he was dead already,” and one of them pierced His side with a spear, “and forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:33–34).
• Pilate was surprised He had died so soon and checked with the centurion before releasing the body (Mark 15:44–45).
• Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes, and the body was wound in linen with them (John 19:39–40). It was then laid in a tomb sealed with a great stone.
• Even if a man survived all that, he would be a broken, bleeding invalid. He could not have convinced frightened followers that he had conquered death, nor turned them into men who would die preaching it.

Some point to Jesus’ words, “as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40), and argue that since Jonah was alive in the fish, Jesus must have been alive in the tomb. But Jesus explained the sign Himself: He would “be killed, and be raised again the third day” (Matthew 16:21). The sign of Jonah is a sign of coming back from the depths, not of never going down.

Was someone else made to look like Him?

The substitution view is held sincerely, and it is meant to honor Jesus. But think through what it would mean.

• It makes God the author of a deception. Mary, His mother, watched her son die. His friends buried Him, and His disciples went out to preach His death and resurrection, and many were killed for it. If someone else hung on the cross, God let all of them build their lives on an illusion and let the world believe it for six hundred years.
• The risen Jesus showed His wounds. He said, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself” (Luke 24:39), and told Thomas, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands” (John 20:27). A man who escaped the cross would have no nail wounds to show.
• Someone else would have died in silence. If it was Judas or a volunteer, he went to the cross without once crying out that he was not Jesus, and forgave his executioners in Jesus’ words.

Why the Son had to die

Many Muslims ask a fair question: why would God need Jesus to die? Can He not simply forgive?

Begin with a story we share. Abraham was asked to offer his son. At the last moment, God stopped him and provided a ram instead. The Qur’an tells it this way:

And We ransomed him with a great sacrifice,

A ransom, a life given in place of a life. Abraham had already told his son, “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:8). For centuries afterward, every sacrifice in Israel taught the same lesson: sin brings death, and “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). Those animals could not truly take sin away. They pointed forward. When John the Baptist saw Jesus, he said:

Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

God is both just and merciful. If He waved sin aside, His justice would mean nothing. If He only punished, no one would be saved. At the cross, the one true God, the Father, gave His own Son, and the sinless Son bore the sin of many in His own death (Isaiah 53:12). That is how God forgives without becoming unjust. It was not weakness. Jesus said He could have asked His Father for “more than twelve legions of angels” to rescue Him (Matthew 26:53). He chose the cross, so that we could be forgiven.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Abraham’s son was spared by a ransom God provided. On the cross, God provided the Lamb Himself: His own Son.

God raised Him

The Qur’an says, “Rather, Allāh raised him to Himself” (Sura 4:158). On this we agree more than many Muslims realize. The Bible says God raised Jesus too, but after His death, from the grave. Peter preached in Jerusalem, only weeks after the crucifixion, to the very crowds who had seen it:

Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.

Jesus’ enemies did not have the last word. They thought they had destroyed Him. God overturned their verdict and raised Him to life. The Son of God truly died. He did not merely seem to die. And He truly rose. Of Himself He says:

I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.

If you are a Muslim reading this, you already believe that Jesus is the Messiah, that God raised Him, and that He will return. We invite you to read the account of His death and rising for yourself, in any of the four Gospels, and to ask the God of Abraham to show you the truth. If you wonder whether those Gospels can be trusted, see Was the Bible Corrupted? For a fuller word on the Father and His Son, see A Letter to Our Muslim Friends.

The cross was not the defeat of the Messiah. It was the ransom God provided, and the resurrection was God’s answer to everyone who said they had killed Him.

Further reading