Post Author: Bill Pratt

It may surprise some Christians that the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, speaks about Jesus.  In fact, the Qur’an speaks of Jesus as a great prophet of God and records some of the miracles that Jesus performed.

However, the Qur’an denies one important event in the life of Jesus, his crucifixion.  According to the Qur’an, Jesus was never crucified by the Romans.  He was taken straight to heaven without being executed.

Herein lies a couple of significant problems, it seems, for Islam.  First, virtually every professional historian who has studied the events of Jesus’ life agrees that he was killed by crucifixion.  This fact is just not debated by any reputable scholars, as far as I am aware.

Second, we have another problem, what Jesus scholar Mike Licona calls the “Islamic catch-22.”  You see, Jesus predicted that he would die a violent death, predicted it several times.  According to Licona, “We find this reported in Mark, which is the earliest Gospel, and it’s multiply attested in different literary forms, which is really strong evidence in the eyes of historians.”

So what?  How is that a problem for Muslims?  Licona explains:

If Jesus did not die a violent and imminent death, then that makes him a false prophet.  But the Qur’an says that he’s a great prophet, and so the Qur’an would be wrong and thus discredited.  On the other hand, if Jesus did die a violent and imminent death as he predicted, then he is indeed a great prophet – but this would contradict the Qur’an, which says he didn’t die on the cross.  So either way, the Qur’an is discredited.

If the Qur’an, which Muslims claim is perfect, contains an error as egregious as denying the crucifixion of Jesus, it simply cannot be trusted to be a reliable historical document.