Is Jesus’s Resurrection in the Qur’an?
An Analysis of the Qur’an’s Ambiguities About the Fate of Jesus
(avg. read time: 4–8 mins.)
One subject that I addressed in my dissertation which I would like to expand on more than I could at the time is the matter of what the Qur’an says about Jesus’s fate. Much has been written about the Qur’an’s distinct Christology, including what it says about what ultimately happened to Jesus.1 Of course, the majority of the christological texts in the Qur’an attests to his virgin birth, and others attest to his reputation as a miracle-worker. As for Jesus’s fate, the key texts and interrelations of Q 3:54–55, 4:157–158, 5:117, and 19:33 are ambiguous, and the history of interpretation attests to significant variety.2 The majority tradition in Islam has held that the texts signify that Jesus never died, much less by crucifixion, that he ascended into heaven, but that he will yet be resurrected, and that resurrection will be part of the general resurrection.3 By contrast, some scholars argue that the Qur’an does at least imply that Jesus died by crucifixion, and thus the texts can also be read to imply his resurrection.4 Indeed, the fate of Jesus was one of the major points of contention in the earliest recorded encounters of Christian and Muslim leaders (John of Damascus, Fountain of Knowledge 2.101; ‘Ammar al-Basri, Book of Questions and Answers Q.32–39; Peter the Venerable, A Summary of the Entire Heresy of the Saracens 2).5 In fact, Timothy the Patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon used the key texts from the Qur’an to argue that it was either inconsistent with itself or with Muslim teaching on the subject (in favor of his argument, he cites Q 3:55 and 19:33).6
Issues with the Texts
According to Q Ali ‘Imran 3:54–55, the plan/scheme of the disbelievers against Isa/Jesus was undermined, because Allah is the best planner/schemer. Then Allah’s promise to Jesus is quoted as “I will take you [mutawaffîka] and raise you up to myself,” which is also summarized as “I will free you from the disbelievers.” Although the noted term is often translated in a euphemistic fashion because of the controversy surrounding it, it is notable that in most cases the reference of the verb is to dying or causing to die (for examples, see Q 3:193; 7:126; 10:46, 104; 12:101; 13:40; 16:28, 70; 40:77).7 As Tafsir al-Tabari notes, there have been some interpretations favoring the notion that the verb refers to Jesus’s death. Another understands it as referring to God taking Jesus in the sense of extracting him from among the unbelievers. But the majority tradition is that God caused Jesus to sleep (as sleep was associated with death; cf. Q 6:60; 39:42) before he raised him to himself.
According to Q An-Nisa 4:157–158, the Jews are said to have boasted that they killed the Messiah—Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah—but it is said that they neither killed nor crucified him, but something was made to appear so. There is even supposed to be doubt about it, for, in any case, Allah raised him up to himself. The denial of Jesus’s crucifixion seems straightforward, but it is not clear what was made to appear like what. The most popular theory among Muslims is that some substitution was made, so that someone else died in Jesus’s place and was made to appear like Jesus, whether that person was a faithful disciple, Simon of Cyrene, Judas, or some unknown person that may or may not have been innocent. However, the statement could also simply be an impersonal passive stating that it appeared to the Jews that they killed Jesus, but they in fact did not (such is the reading of Tafsir al-Razi/Tafsir al-Kabir). The doubt about having killed him may be attributed (as Ibn Qutayba supposed) to this text implying that they only conjectured that they killed him; they did not actually know that they had done so.
But the popular substitutionist idea, however exactly one articulates it, has nevertheless been seen as problematic. After all, it makes Allah a deceiver, and it undermines important principles of law and epistemology for Muslims, per Tafsir al-Razi, “First, it would open the gate of sophistry so that no social norm such as marriage or ownership rights could be ascertained. Further, this would lead to doubt in historical testimony, that is, the ongoing transmission of historical reports (tawātur).”8 If Allah had done this in this case, no reason has been given for why he would not do so in other cases and thus why witness testimony would not be rendered utterly worthless. That such an idea would be unworthy of God was a point Timothy appealed to in his recorded dispute, it is a point to which later Christian apologists would return (and still do return in disputes with Muslims), and it is a point that clearly resonated with al-Razi. Still, al-Razi could not ultimately resolve this problem in favor of a view other than the traditional one that Jesus did not die: “Since the veracity of Muḥammad in all that he reported has been established by unquestionable miracles, it is impossible that these objections be taken as evidence against the incontrovertible truth of the text.”9
The ambivalence and ambiguity characterizing this text and its treatment among commentators is likely caused by difficulty with trying to fit Jesus to a pattern that he does not easily fit. As Gordon Nickel observes:
The stories of many prophets seem to follow a repeated pattern. In this “prophetic pattern,” God sends a messenger to a particular people with his message. The messenger delivers the message faithfully, but the people do not listen. The messenger then warns the people about the consequences of not listening, and in response the people begin to manhandle the messenger. God then intervenes, delivering his messenger from danger and destroying the people who resisted the messenger.10
Of course, it could be, according to the minority view represented by Suleiman Mourad, that “the denial in the Qur’an is not made to the reality of the crucifixion and death of Jesus, but rather to their theological implications. In other words, the Qur’an is looking beyond the crucifixion. Jesus’ end was not death on the cross, but rather resurrection from death to eternal life.”11 This would make sense of the fact that 4:155 accuses the Jews of killing the prophets, but no example is ever cited, unless Jesus’s death is taken as the evidence supporting this assertion.
According to Q Al-Ma’idah 5:117, Jesus attests that he was a witness among his people for as long as he remained with them, and that Allah “took” him, once again using the same verb tawaffa as in Q Ali ‘Imran 3:55. On this point, Gabriel Said Reynolds notes,
The verb tawaffā (verbal noun: tawaffī) that appears here causes significant confusion among Muslim exegetes. Yet the Quran itself offers no cause for confusion. Tawaffā appears in twenty-five passages in the Quran, and twice in relation to Jesus (here and Q 3.55). For twenty-three of those passages the Muslim commentators generally follow the standard definition of this term, namely God’s act of separating the soul from the body, or making someone die. In fact, Muslims often pray the concluding words of sūrat al-aʿrāf (7) 126: rabbanā afrigh ʿalaynā ṣabran wa-tawaffanā muslimīn, “O our Lord, fill us with patience and make us die Muslims.”12
Finally, Q Maryam 19:33 throws one more complication into the proceedings when the baby Jesus says, “Peace be upon me the day I was born, the day I die, and the day I will be raised alive.” Now, obviously, this text could be read consistently with the view that the Qur’an attests to Jesus already being resurrected, as the text operates from the perspective that Jesus’s death is impending, much as in the same statement of peace by Zechariah on John the Baptist in 19:15. But again, traditional Muslim exegetes tend to present this text as referring to Jesus’s future death after his return, followed by his sharing in the general resurrection.
What Then?
I do think it is more likely than not that Muhammad accepted Jesus’s resurrection after his death, but that he decoupled it from so many other points it was connected with in the NT and subsequent Christian theology. As David Marshall astutely observes,
Even if this argument [for Jesus’s implied crucifixion death] were accepted, however, it is clear that this sequence of genuine death followed by some kind of resurrection (scarcely expressed with great clarity) would still belong to the Qur’anic scheme of things; it would still be an instance of the specifically Qur’anic paradigm of rejection and vindication, rather than the central drama in God’s saving activity for the whole of humanity. Hence, from a Christian standpoint, it would still be accurate to speak of the absence of the resurrection of Jesus from the Qur’an.13
His resurrection would simply be another sign of the eschatological resurrection, on par with the sign of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in Q Al-Kahf 18:9–26.14
The reason Jesus’s resurrection is so deemphasized in the Qur’an, even if Muhammad might have been inclined to accept that it happened, is ultimately because of the connections of Jesus’s resurrection to larger Christian theology, especially triune/Trinitarian theology (as shown in 1 Cor 15). Such a connection is characteristic of what I call “Christomorphic resurrection belief,” in that it is resurrection belief shaped around Jesus’s resurrection at the center. The rejection of a Trinitarian theology of Allah is more likely to have been a cause than an effect in the relationship between these two beliefs—rejection of Trinitarian theology is a matter of explicit polemics in the Qur’an, as opposed to rejection of Christomorphic resurrection belief—but the effect of the overall relationship remains clear. Given the importance of Christomorphic resurrection belief to Christian triune theology, the rejection or acceptance of one goes hand-in-hand with the other. As such, this factor, more than any other, necessitates that there can be no Christomorphic resurrection belief in the Qur’an (and thus in Islam) if there can be no triune theology.
Martin Accad, Sacred Misinterpretation: Reaching Across the Christian-Muslim Divide (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), 107–87; Mahmoud Ayoub, A Muslim View of Christianity: Essays on Dialogue by Mahmoud Ayoub, ed. Irfan A. Omar (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007), esp. 160–70; Patricia Crone, “Jewish Christianity and the Qur’ān (Part Two),” JNES 75 (2016): 1–20; Waryono Abdul Ghafur, Zaenuddin Huddi Prasojo, and Mohammed Sahrin bin Haji Masri, “The Qur’anic Jesus: Isa al-Masih in the Qur’an,” Epistemé 14 (2019): 349–73; Suleiman A. Mourad, “The Death of Jesus in Islam,” in Engaging the Passion: Perspectives on the Death of Jesus, ed. Oliver Larry Yarbrough (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 359–81; Brent Neely and Peter Riddell, “Familiar Signs, Altered Concepts: Jesus, Messiah and Resurrection in Islam,” in Jesus and the Resurrection: Reflections of Christians from Islamic Contexts, ed. David Emmanuel Singh (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 43–64; Gordon D. Nickel, “Jesus,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, 2nd ed., ed. Andrew Rippin and Jawid Mojaddedi (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2017), 288–302; Neal Robinson, Christ in Islam and Christianity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991); Zeki Saritoprak, Islam’s Jesus (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2014); Muhammad ‘Ata ur-Rahim, Jesus: Prophet of Islam (Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, 1991), 206–20.
Accad, Sacred Misinterpretation, 130–38; Ayoub, Muslim View, 160–66; Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Qur’ānic Christians: An Analysis of Classical and Modern Exegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129–59; Mourad, “Death of Jesus,” 364–68; Gabriel Said Reynolds, “The Muslim Jesus: Dead or Alive?” BSOAS 72 (2009): 241–49; Robinson, Christ in Islam, esp. 117–40. For a good summary of the issues, see Nickel, “Jesus,” 290–91, 297.
Accad, Sacred Misinterpretation, 132–37; Mark Beaumont, “Ascension without Resurrection? Muslim and Christian Debate on the Ending of Jesus’ Life in the Early Islamic Period,” in Jesus and the Resurrection: Reflections of Christians from Islamic Contexts, ed. David Emmanuel Singh (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 130–32; Crone, “Jewish Christianity,” 1–9; Ghafur, Prasojo, and Masri, “Qur’anic Jesus,” 367–68; Robinson, Christ in Islam, esp. 113–14, 141; ur-Rahim, Jesus, 35–38.
Accad, Sacred Misinterpretation, 137–38; Ayoub, Muslim View, 166–70; Mourad, “Death of Jesus,” 359–81; Mourad, “Does the Qur’ān Deny or Assert Jesus’ Crucifixion and Death?” in New Perspectives on the Qur’ān, ed. Gabriel Said Reynolds, vol. 2 of The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 349–57; Reynolds, “Muslim Jesus,” 237–58.
Petrus Alfonsi, Dialogue Against the Jews, trans. Irven M. Resnick, FC: Mediaeval Continuation 8 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2006), 163; Beaumont, “Ascension without Resurrection,” 132–44; Alphonse Mingana, The Apology of Timothy the Patriarch before the Caliph Mahdi, Woodbroke Studies 2 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2009); Mark N. Swanson, “Folly to the ḥunafā’: The Crucifixion in Early Christian-Muslim Controversy,” in The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam, ed. Emmanouela Grypeou, Mark Swanson, and David Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 237–56. For more on early Christian encounters with Muslims, see Emmanouela Grypeou, “‘A People Will Emerge from The Desert’: Apocalyptic Perceptions of The Early Muslim Conquests in Contemporary Eastern Christian Literature,” in Apocalypticism and Eschatology in Late Antiquity: Encounters in the Abrahamic Religions, 6th-8th Century, ed. Hagit Amirav, Emmanouela Grypeou, and Guy Strousma, Late Antique History and Religion 17 (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 291–309; Gordon D. Nickel, “‘Our Friendly Strife’: Eastern Christianity Engaging the Qur’an,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 15: Thematic Essays (600–1600), ed. Douglas Pratt and Charles L. Tieszen (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 255–79.
Mingana, Apology of Timothy, 40–46.
Ayoub, Muslim View, 169.
Ayoub, Muslim View, 164.
Translated by Nickel, “Jesus,” 297.
Nickel, “Jesus,” 291.
Mourad, “Death of Jesus,” 364.
Reynolds, “Muslim Jesus,” 239–40.
David Marshall, “The Resurrection of Jesus and the Qur’an,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 171–72 (emphasis original).
Cf. Neely and Riddell, “Familiar Signs,” 59–64.