Jesus in Christianity and Islam: Where the Two Faiths Agree and Where They Divide

Ask a Christian and a Muslim about Jesus and you will hear a good deal of shared language. Both call him the Messiah. Both say he was born of the Virgin Mary, healed the sick and raised the dead, and both expect him to return before the end of the age. Muslims add a blessing when they speak his name, and the Qur’an names him twenty-five times as ʿĪsā and eleven times by the title al-Masīḥ, the Messiah.¹

Yet the Jesus who joins the two faiths also separates them. The Qur’an denies that he is the Son of God and contains a verse (4:157) that most Muslims have read as denying that he was crucified. The New Testament, written within living memory of the events, proclaims his death and resurrection as the heart of its message. Jesus once asked his disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15). Christians and Muslims answer differently, and the difference cannot be split down the middle.

This article sets out both answers in each faith’s own texts, asks what history can and cannot settle, gives the strongest Muslim objections a fair hearing, and closes with the faith of the Nicene Creed as the Orthodox Church confesses it.²

In brief

Christianity and Islam agree on more about Jesus than many people expect. The Qur’an affirms his virginal conception, calls him the Messiah, credits him with miracles performed “by permission of Allāh,” and calls him a word from God and a spirit from him. Muslim tradition also expects his return, and Muslims honor him and his mother deeply. The two faiths divide on three questions. The first is who he is: the Qur’an treats Jesus as a created servant and messenger and rejects the claim that God has a son, while the Church confesses him as the eternal Son, “true God of true God,” who became man. The second is the cross: most Muslim interpreters have read Qur’an 4:157 as saying that Jesus was neither killed nor crucified, though Muslim readings of the verse have varied more than is often realized. The third is the Gospel: the Qur’an honors the Gospel given to Jesus, while later Muslim thought charged Christians with corrupting its meaning or its text. On the historical question the evidence is unusually clear. The crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is attested by Paul’s letters, the four Gospels, Tacitus and Josephus, and virtually all historians of antiquity accept it. Whether Jesus understood himself as the “Son of Man” of Daniel 7 is more debated, but the earliest sources point that way.

Thesis: Christians and Muslims honor the same historical figure but give two different accounts of who he is, and on the one point where history can judge between them, the crucifixion, the evidence strongly supports the Christian account.

Where the two faiths agree

Born of a virgin

Both Scriptures say that Mary conceived Jesus without a human father. In Luke, Mary asks, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” and the angel answers, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:34–35).

The Qur’an tells the annunciation twice. In Surah 3, Mary asks, “My Lord, how will I have a child when no man has touched me?” and is told, “Such is Allāh; He creates what He wills” (3:47). In Surah 19, which bears her name, God promises to make the child “a sign to the people and a mercy from Us” (19:21). Mary is named thirty-four times in the Qur’an, and the angels tell her that God has “chosen you above the women of the worlds” (3:42).

The two faiths draw different conclusions from the same miracle. For Luke, the virginal conception is why the child “will be called the Son of God.” For the Qur’an, it shows God’s power to create at will: “the example of Jesus to Allāh is like that of Adam. He created him from dust; then He said to him, ‘Be,’ and he was” (3:59). A Muslim who rejects the divinity of Christ is not rejecting the virgin birth. He accepts the miracle and reads it as a sign of creative power rather than of incarnation.

The Messiah

The Qur’an gives Jesus a title it gives no one else, al-Masīḥ, usually joined to “son of Mary,” as in “the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary” (3:45). The shared word carries different meanings. In the Gospels the title belongs to Israel’s hope for the anointed son of David, and Jesus reshapes it around his own suffering: “the Son of Man must suffer many things … and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). The Qur’an uses “Messiah” as an honored name without connecting it to David’s throne or to a death for others. When Muslims say “Messiah,” they do not mean what Peter meant by “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).

Miracles “by permission of Allāh”

Both faiths remember a worker of wonders. In the Qur’an, Jesus says, “I cure the blind [from birth] and the leper, and I give life to the dead - by permission of Allāh” (3:49), and 5:110 repeats the list, each miracle performed “with My permission.” He even speaks as an infant in the cradle (19:29–33). The repeated phrase about God’s permission honors the miracles while making sure they point past Jesus to God.

One Qur’anic miracle is not in the four Gospels. Jesus shapes a bird from clay, breathes into it, “and it becomes a bird by permission of Allāh” (3:49). A close parallel appears in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a Christian apocryphal work in which the five-year-old Jesus takes soft clay and “fashioned out of it twelve sparrows,” then tells them to fly.³ The story is older than Islam: in 2024 two papyrologists identified a Greek fragment of this very episode in Hamburg and dated it to the fourth or fifth century.⁴ Muslims understand the Qur’an as confirming a true event the canonical Gospels did not record; historians usually see it drawing on stories already told among Christians in late antiquity. Either way, the Qur’anic portrait of Jesus was not formed from the four Gospels alone, a pattern we discuss in The Qur’an and Late Antique Legends.

“A word from Him” and “a spirit from Him”

The most striking titles come in 4:171. Saheeh International translates, “The Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allāh and His word which He directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from Him.” Abdel Haleem has “His word, directed to Mary, a spirit from Him.”⁵ The bracketed words show how Muslims have usually read the verse: Jesus is God’s “word” because he came to be at God’s command, “Be” (3:47; 3:59), and a “spirit from Him” because God gave him life.

Christians often hear an echo of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The echo was noticed early. St. John of Damascus, in the eighth century, summarized what he took to be Muhammad’s teaching this way: “He says that the Christ is the Word of God and His Spirit, but a creature and a servant.”⁶ The last clause matters. The verse that calls Jesus God’s word goes on to say, “Exalted is He above having a son.” Christians weaken their case when they present 4:171 as a hidden confession of the Trinity. It is a meeting point, where both faiths use the language of Word and Spirit and then part ways over its meaning.

He will come again

Both faiths look for Jesus to return. The Qur’an’s references are brief and their reading is debated: Saheeh International translates 43:61 as “he [i.e., Jesus] will be [a sign for] knowledge of the Hour,” with the bracketed words supplied by the translator, while Abdel Haleem takes the same verse to refer to the Qur’an itself.⁷ The hadith are explicit. In Sahih al-Bukhari, Muhammad says that “(Jesus,) the son of Mary will soon descend amongst you and will judge mankind justly (as a Just Ruler); he will break the Cross and kill the pigs and there will be no Jizya.”⁸

The Creed likewise says that Christ “shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.” But in Christian faith the one who returns is the crucified and risen Lord, while in Islamic tradition he is a prophet who returns to confirm Islam and to “break the Cross.” The hope is shared; the Jesus expected is not.

A Jesus Muslims love

None of this should be heard as a complaint against Muslims, who sincerely honor Jesus. In one hadith Muhammad says, “Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all the people to Jesus, the son of Mary. The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.”⁹ Another teaches that every child is touched by Satan at birth “except Mary and her child.”¹⁰ Muslim writers, especially ascetics and mystics, collected sayings and stories of Jesus for centuries; Tarif Khalidi gathered some three hundred of them in The Muslim Jesus.¹¹ The Muslim scholar Mona Siddiqui has written a careful study of Christian and Muslim thinking about Jesus, closing with her own reflections, as a Muslim, on the cross.¹² Christians who want to speak honestly with Muslim neighbors should begin here, with respect for a reverence that is real.

Where the two faiths divide

Is Jesus the Son of God?

On this question the Qur’an speaks plainly. “It is not [befitting] for Allāh to take a son” (19:35). God “neither begets nor is born” (112:3). “They have certainly disbelieved who say, ‘Allāh is the Messiah, the son of Mary’” (5:72). The Qur’an stresses Jesus’ ordinary humanity: Jesus and his mother “both used to eat food” (5:75), and the infant Jesus says, “Indeed, I am the servant of Allāh. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet” (19:30).

Some of what the Qur’an rejects, Christians reject too. The Church has never taught that God fathered a son by a woman or that Mary is a goddess (compare 5:116, where God asks Jesus whether he told people, “Take me and my mother as deities besides Allāh”). The Orthodox faith confesses one God: the Father, who is the one source of the Son, eternally begotten, and of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father. The Creed calls the Son “begotten of the Father before all ages,” “begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father.”¹³ “Begotten” names an eternal relation within the one God, not a birth in time. Our companion cornerstone, Does the Qur’an Misunderstand the Trinity?, asks how closely the Qur’an’s criticisms match what Christians actually believe.

Clearing away misunderstanding does not remove the disagreement. Christians confess that the Word who “was God” also “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14), and that Thomas spoke truly when he said to the risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Islam regards that confession as the gravest of errors, the association of a creature with God. Each faith holds that the other is mistaken about the most important thing it says about God.

Was Jesus crucified?

The decisive passage is 4:157–158. Saheeh International renders the central words, “And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them,” and continues, “Rather, Allāh raised him to Himself.” Abdel Haleem translates the same clause, “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, though it was made to appear like that to them.”¹⁴ The comparison is instructive. The Arabic does not say what or who “was made to appear.” Saheeh International supplies “[another],” building the most common interpretation into a bracket; Abdel Haleem leaves the subject open, as the Arabic does.

Readings of the verse, by Muslims and by academic scholars, fall into four broad groups.

• Substitution. Most classical commentators held that God cast Jesus’ likeness onto someone else, who was crucified in his place, while Jesus was raised alive to heaven. They disagreed about who the substitute was; the Qur’an names no one. The Muslim scholar Louay Fatoohi, who defends the majority view that the Qur’an denies the crucifixion, describes that denial as “the established Islamic view” and a “centuries-long semi-consensus.”¹⁵ Todd Lawson, who argues for a more open reading of the verse, acknowledges, in one reviewer’s summary, that “the great majority of views deny that it was Jesus on the cross.”¹⁶
• A real crucifixion that did not defeat Jesus. Some early Ismaili Shi‘i thinkers, including Abu Hatim al-Razi (d. c. 934) and Nasir Khusraw (d. between 1072 and 1088), held that the Qur’an “only denies that the People of the Book crucified him” in the sense they boasted of.¹⁷
• Jesus died, but not as his enemies claimed. This is an academic reading rather than a traditional Muslim one. The Notre Dame scholar Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that the Qur’an “rather accepts that Jesus died,” noting that it “states explicitly only that the Jews did not kill Jesus.”¹⁸ He points to verses that seem to assume Jesus’ death: “O Jesus, indeed I will take you and raise you to Myself” (3:55); “when You took me up” (5:117); “the day I will die and the day I am raised alive” (19:33). Most Muslim interpreters read these verses in harmony with the belief that Jesus was taken up alive.
• Jesus survived the cross. The Ahmadiyya movement, founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in nineteenth-century India, teaches that Jesus was put on the cross but did not die there, recovered, travelled east and died a natural death in Kashmir. Other Muslims reject this view.¹⁹

Christians should report this range accurately and not pretend that the minority readings are the norm. Fatoohi argues with real force that the verse “cannot be reasonably read to mean anything other than rejecting that Jesus was crucified,” and that is how most Muslims understand it.²⁰ In mainstream Islam, then, Jesus did not die on a cross and did not rise on the third day. Here Islam parts from the earliest Christian preaching, which said that Jesus was “crucified, and put to death; whom God raised up” (Acts 2:23–24). How Islam understands sin and salvation without the cross is taken up in How Does Islam Save You Without the Cross?

What happened to the Gospel?

The Qur’an speaks warmly of the Injil, the Gospel. God “gave him the Gospel, in which was guidance and light,” and the Qur’an says, “let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allāh has revealed therein” (5:46–47). The Qur’an speaks of one Gospel given to Jesus; the Church received four, written by apostles and their companions. If those Gospels affirm Jesus’ crucifixion and divine sonship, and the Qur’an denies both, something has to give. The usual Muslim answer is taḥrīf, “distortion.”

Scholars distinguish two kinds: taḥrīf al-naṣṣ, alteration of the text itself, and taḥrīf al-maʿānī, twisting of its meaning. Muslim writers have used the charge in both senses. The Qur’an condemns “those who write the ‘scripture’ with their own hands, then say, ‘This is from Allāh’” (2:79), and some “who distort words from their [proper] places” (4:46). In context both passages are aimed at some among the Jews, not at Christians, and the Qur’an’s verb for this distortion is never used of Christians.²¹ The stronger claim, that the Gospels Christians read today are a corrupted version of a lost original, is a reading of such verses rather than something they plainly state. It also faces a historical difficulty: the doctrines Islam rejects stand in Christian manuscripts and writers from centuries before Muhammad. We examine the verses and the manuscript record in Does the Qur’an Say the Bible Was Corrupted?

What history can say

Here the tools change. Whether Jesus is God’s eternal Son, or whether the Qur’an is revelation, cannot be decided by historical method alone. But whether a man was crucified in Roman Judea in the first century is a question historians can weigh like any other.

The crucifixion is among the best-attested facts about Jesus

The earliest evidence comes from Paul. Writing to the Corinthians in the 50s, he reminds them of what he had “received” and passed on: “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” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). The tradition is older than the letter that preserves it. Paul also admits how hard his message was to hear: “we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23). A crucified Messiah was not a story anyone would invent to win converts. All four Gospels then narrate the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

Two writers outside the Church mention Jesus’ execution. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing early in the second century and openly hostile to Christians, explains their name: “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.”²² Tacitus does not say “cross,” but a Roman governor’s “extreme penalty” for a provincial fits crucifixion. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing about AD 93, says in the text as we have it that “Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross,” and elsewhere mentions “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James.”²³ The first passage was expanded by Christian copyists; it says, for example, “He was [the] Christ,” which Josephus would not have written. Many scholars, among them the agnostic Bart Ehrman, judge that its core goes back to Josephus, though they disagree about exactly which words are his.²⁴

Scholars who do not share the Church’s faith agree. John Dominic Crossan, whose portrait of Jesus is far from traditional, wrote, “That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”²⁵ Ehrman, who calls himself “an agnostic with atheist leanings,” lists the crucifixion in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate among the points “on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree.”²⁶ {{very-strong: Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem on the orders of Pontius Pilate.}}

Early Christian writers insisted on the reality of the cross because some already denied it. Early in the second century, St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote that Jesus “was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate; He was truly crucified, and [truly] died,” against teachers who said “He only seemed to suffer.”²⁷ Later in that century St. Irenaeus reported that the teacher Basilides claimed that Simon of Cyrene “was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them.”²⁸ Stories of a substitute on the cross are therefore older than Islam, but they arose among teachers the Church rejected and never displaced the earlier testimony. When St. John of Damascus described the Qur’an’s teaching in the eighth century, he reported it this way: the Jews, he writes, “seized His shadow and crucified this. But the Christ Himself was not crucified, he says, nor did He die.”²⁹ {{strong: Stories of a substitute on the cross circulated in the second century among teachers the Church rejected, centuries before the Qur’an.}}

Six centuries later

The Qur’an was proclaimed between about 610 and 632, some six hundred years after the crucifixion. It names no eyewitness and gives no alternative account of who was crucified or how. By ordinary historical method, a brief statement from six centuries later cannot outweigh multiple sources from the first and early second centuries, some of them hostile. Our article Was Jesus Really Crucified? and the infographic Islam Denies the Cross. History Affirms It. set out the evidence in more detail.

Fairness requires one qualification. Muslims do not regard the Qur’an as a historian’s source but as the speech of God, and a Muslim can consistently say that God knows what happened better than any human witness. That is a coherent religious position. It is not a historical argument, and it should not be presented as one. Stated clearly, the question becomes whether the Qur’an’s claim to be revelation is strong enough to overturn the first-century record.

Who did Jesus say he was?

The disagreement over Jesus’ identity reaches back into the Gospels. Jesus’ most frequent way of speaking of himself was as “the Son of Man,” recalling Daniel’s vision of “One like the Son of Man, Coming with the clouds of heaven,” who receives “dominion and glory and a kingdom” (Daniel 7:13–14). In the Gospels the phrase is almost always on Jesus’ own lips, which suggests it was remembered as his way of speaking rather than a title the early Church preferred. The Son of Man also claims what belongs to God, as when Jesus forgives sins and his critics ask, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7–10).

At his trial the high priest asks, “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus answers, “I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61–62). The answer joins Daniel 7:13 to Psalm 110:1, “Sit at My right hand.” The high priest calls it blasphemy, and the council condemns Jesus “to be deserving of death” (Mark 14:63–64). On this account Jesus was handed over to Pilate because of who he claimed to be. For the background in Daniel, see Daniel 7’s “One Like a Son of Man”.

Historians debate how much of this goes back to Jesus himself. Ehrman argues that Jesus did not claim to be God and that belief in his divinity arose after his followers became convinced God had raised him.³⁰ The Church reads the trial scene as Jesus’ own claim, consistent with how he speaks throughout the Gospels. {{debated: Jesus identified himself with the heavenly Son of Man of Daniel 7.}} This debate, however, is not between Christianity and Islam. Neither side of it supports a Jesus who was never crucified, and the earliest sources consistently show a Jesus who expected to suffer: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Objections and responses

A fair comparison has to meet the best Muslim arguments, not the weakest. Here are three that thoughtful Muslims make.

“The evidence is exactly what the Qur’an predicts”

Objection. The Qur’an says the matter “was made to appear” so to those who saw it. If God made it appear that Jesus was crucified, then of course the disciples, Paul, the Gospel writers, Tacitus and Josephus all reported a crucifixion. The historical evidence is what the Qur’an leads us to expect.

Response. This is the strongest Muslim reply, and it is logically consistent. But notice what it concedes. It grants that every early witness, friendly and hostile, reported a crucifixion, and it places the truth beyond the reach of any possible evidence. A claim that no evidence could count against is not a historical claim, so the dispute has moved from history to theology. There it carries a cost. On this view God allowed Jesus’ own disciples, who suffered for their testimony, to found a worldwide faith on an appearance he had created, and left the truth hidden for six centuries. Christians will ask whether that fits the God whom both faiths call just and merciful. Muslims answer from within their own theology, and the conversation is worth having, but it concerns the character of God rather than the evidence.

“Revelation outranks history”

Objection. Christians also believe things historians cannot prove, such as the virgin birth and the incarnation. Why should Muslims let historians overrule the Qur’an when Christians do not let them overrule the Creed?

Response. The point is fair. The historian’s method cannot prove the incarnation. But the Christian faith rests its central claims on public events reported by people who knew Jesus, and it invites testing where it touches history: Paul names those who saw the risen Christ, beginning with Cephas and the twelve (1 Corinthians 15:5). The disagreement over the cross is not between faith and history in general. It is between an early, multiply attested record and a much later text that asks us to set that record aside. Each reader must decide which claim to revelation is better supported, and the evidence of history is a fair part of that decision.

“Paul and the early Church changed Jesus’ message”

Objection. Jesus preached the oneness of God and obedience to God’s law. Paul turned him into a dying and rising divine savior, and the Gospels were written by a Church that had already accepted Paul’s religion. The Qur’an restores the true Jesus.

Response. Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian documents we have, and they show that Jesus’ death and resurrection were proclaimed before Paul wrote; he says he “received” the tradition (1 Corinthians 15:3). He also says the other apostles preached the same message: “whether it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed” (1 Corinthians 15:11). If the message was changed, it was changed within a few years of the crucifixion by the people who knew Jesus best, and no earlier record of a different Jesus survives. As far as our sources show, the picture of a Jesus who was not crucified first appears among second-century teachers the Church rejected, and then in the Qur’an six centuries after the events. A theory that requires the earliest evidence to be wrong, with no earlier evidence to put in its place, is hard to sustain on historical grounds.

What we can say confidently

• The Qur’an affirms Jesus’ virginal conception, calls him the Messiah, credits him with miracles, and calls him God’s word and a spirit from God; Muslim tradition, above all the hadith, expects his return. Muslims honor him as one of the greatest prophets.
• The Qur’an explicitly denies that God has a son and that Jesus is God (5:72; 19:35; 112:3), while the Nicene faith confesses him as the eternal Son, “true God of true God,” who became man.
• Most Muslim interpreters, past and present, have read 4:157 as denying that Jesus was crucified, and most classical commentators held that another man died in his place.
• Jesus’ crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is attested by Paul, the four Gospels, Tacitus and Josephus, and virtually all historians of antiquity, religious or not, accept it.
• The Qur’an came about six centuries after Jesus and offers no named witness or alternative account of his death.
• Stories of a substitute on the cross existed before Islam, among second-century teachers the Church rejected.

What remains disputed

• What 4:157 originally meant: the majority substitution reading, the Ismaili reading, the view of Lawson and Younes that the verse itself neither affirms nor denies the crucifixion, or Reynolds’ view that the Qur’an accepts Jesus’ death. Muslim scholars such as Fatoohi argue strongly for the majority view.
• Whether the Qur’an’s criticisms of “three” (4:171; 5:73) and of Jesus and Mary as deities (5:116) describe orthodox Christian belief or ideas the Church itself rejected.
• How much of the Gospel material about the Son of Man, including Mark 14:62, records Jesus’ own words.
• How stories also found in Christian apocrypha, such as the clay birds, came into the Qur’an.
• Exactly which words of Josephus’ passage on Jesus are original.
• Whether the Qur’an’s charges of distortion concern the biblical text, its interpretation, or both.

Conclusion: the Word made flesh

Christians and Muslims both speak the name of Jesus with love. That shared reverence is a gift, and Christians should never treat it lightly. But love for the same name is not agreement about the person. The Qur’an, as most Muslims read it, honors Jesus as a prophet whom God rescued from the cross. The Church confesses, in the words of the Creed, that he is “the Son of God, the only-begotten,” who “for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven,” and that “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures.”³¹

For the Orthodox Church the cross is not an embarrassment to be explained away. It is where God, in the flesh he made his own, enters death and defeats it. St. Athanasius wrote that the Word, seeing that “no otherwise could the corruption of men be undone save by death,” “takes to Himself a body capable of death,” so that corruption might be “stayed from all by the Grace of the Resurrection.”³² A Christ who never died could not have done this, because he would not have entered the death from which he came to free us. That is why every Pascha the Church sings, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!”³³

To Muslim readers we offer this as an invitation, not a victory claimed. You already honor Jesus as the Messiah, born of the Virgin, the word God sent to Mary. The earliest witnesses to his life say that he went willingly to the cross and that God raised him on the third day. We ask that you weigh their testimony, and the question Jesus still asks each of us: “But who do you say that I am?” For a side-by-side summary of the two faiths, see our Christianity vs. Islam comparison guide.

Notes

1. Counted in the Arabic text of the Qur’an as published by Quran.com (all 6,236 verses): the name ʿĪsā occurs 25 times; al-Masīḥ 11 times, in nine verses (3:45; 4:157; 4:171; 4:172; 5:17 twice; 5:72 twice; 5:75; 9:30; 9:31); Maryam 34 times. Surah 19 is titled Maryam. ↩
2. Qur’an: The Qur’an, Saheeh International translation (1997), as published on Quran.com; where marked, M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an: A New Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Oxford World’s Classics, 2005), also on Quran.com. Words in square brackets in Saheeh International quotations belong to that translation. Bible: The Holy Bible, New King James Version (Thomas Nelson, 1982). ↩
3. Infancy Gospel of Thomas (First Greek Form) 2, trans. Alexander Walker, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1886). ↩
4. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, “Earliest manuscript of Gospel about Jesus’s childhood discovered,” press release, 4 June 2024, reporting the identification of P.Hamb.Graec. 1011 by Lajos Berkes and Gabriel Nocchi Macedo in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 229 (2024): 68–74. ↩
5. Qur’an 4:171, Saheeh International and Abdel Haleem translations. ↩
6. John of Damascus, On Heresies 100 (numbered 101 in older editions), in Saint John of Damascus: Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase Jr., The Fathers of the Church 37 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958; later reprinted by the Catholic University of America Press), 153–160. Some scholars have questioned whether John himself wrote this chapter, but manuscript evidence places it no later than the eighth or ninth century. John writes as a polemicist, and we do not adopt his tone. ↩
7. Qur’an 43:61, Saheeh International and Abdel Haleem. Many commentators also read 4:159, which says that each of the People of the Scripture will believe in Jesus “before his death,” as referring to his return; the bracketed words in both verses reflect the translator’s reading. ↩
8. Sahih al-Bukhari 3448 (Book 60, Hadith 118), trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, as published by Sunnah.com. A parallel report is Sahih al-Bukhari 2222. ↩
9. Sahih al-Bukhari 3443 (Book 60, Hadith 113), trans. Muhsin Khan. ↩
10. Sahih al-Bukhari 3431 (Book 60, Hadith 102), trans. Muhsin Khan. ↩
11. Tarif Khalidi, ed. and trans., The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). ↩
12. Mona Siddiqui, Christians, Muslims, and Jesus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). ↩
13. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, in the translation of the Orthodox Church in America, “The Creed: The Symbol of Faith.” The Orthodox Church recites the Creed without the later Western addition (the Filioque) to the article on the Holy Spirit. ↩
14. Qur’an 4:157–158, Saheeh International; 4:157, Abdel Haleem. ↩
15. Louay Fatoohi, “The Non-Crucifixion Verse: A Historical, Contextual, and Linguistic Analysis,” American Journal of Islam and Society 40, no. 1–2 (2023): 39–76, doi:10.35632/ajis.v40i1-2.3143. ↩
16. The quoted words are the reviewer’s summary of Lawson’s position, not Lawson’s own: Martin Whittingham, review of Todd Lawson, The Crucifixion and the Qur’an: A Study in the History of Muslim Thought (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford. ↩
17. Mohamad Younes, “Revisiting the Crucifixion of Jesus within Islam,” Australian Journal of Islamic Studies 9, no. 1 (2024): 104–121, doi:10.55831/ajis.v9i1.585. From the Ismaili perspective, he writes, the Qur’an “only denies that the People of the Book crucified him, in apparent response to their boasting.” Younes himself argues that 4:157 neither clearly affirms nor clearly denies the crucifixion. ↩
18. Gabriel Said Reynolds, “The Muslim Jesus: Dead or Alive?” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 2 (2009): 237–258, doi:10.1017/S0041977X09000500, quoted from the article’s abstract. Reynolds also notes that most classical Muslim commentators read the verse as teaching that another man, “whether his disciple or his betrayer,” was transformed to look like Jesus and crucified, and that most critical scholars accept this as the Qur’an’s teaching. ↩
19. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India (written 1899), English edition published by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community at alislam.org, with the community’s introduction. ↩
20. Fatoohi, “The Non-Crucifixion Verse,” abstract (see note 15). ↩
21. Gabriel Said Reynolds, “On the Qur’anic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (taḥrīf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 2 (2010): 189–202, at 189 (the two kinds of taḥrīf) and 194, where Reynolds observes that the Qur’an’s verb for this distortion “is always used against the Jews and never against the Christians.” ↩
22. Tacitus, Annals 15.44, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (1876). ↩
23. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.3.3 (18.63–64) and 20.9.1 (20.200), trans. William Whiston. ↩
24. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne, 2012), ch. 2: “It is far more likely that the core of the passage actually does go back to Josephus himself.” ↩
25. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 145. ↩
26. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, introduction. ↩
27. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Trallians 9–10, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885), as revised for New Advent by Kevin Knight. ↩
28. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 1.24.4, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885). ↩
29. John of Damascus, On Heresies 100, trans. Chase (see note 6). ↩
30. Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014). ↩
31. Orthodox Church in America, “The Creed: The Symbol of Faith” (see note 13). ↩
32. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word 9.1, trans. Archibald Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4 (1892). ↩
33. The Paschal troparion, in the translation of the Orthodox Church in America, “Selected Liturgical Hymns.” ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• The Qur’an. Saheeh International translation. Jeddah: Abul-Qasim Publishing House, 1997. Online at Quran.com.
• The Qur’an: A New Translation. Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Oxford World’s Classics, 2005. Online at Quran.com.
• Tacitus. The Annals. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, 1876. Online at Wikisource and the Perseus Digital Library.
• Josephus. The Antiquities of the Jews. Translated by William Whiston. Project Gutenberg eBook 2848.
• The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Translated by Alexander Walker. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1886.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Ignatius of Antioch. Epistle to the Trallians. Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation of the Word. Translated by Archibald Robertson. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1892.
• John of Damascus. Saint John of Damascus: Writings. Translated by Frederic H. Chase Jr. The Fathers of the Church 37. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958; later reprinted by the Catholic University of America Press.
• Orthodox Church in America. “The Creed: The Symbol of Faith” and “Selected Liturgical Hymns” (the Paschal troparion). oca.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
• Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: HarperOne, 2012.
• Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. New York: HarperOne, 2014.
• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. “Earliest manuscript of Gospel about Jesus’s childhood discovered.” Press release, 4 June 2024 (on P.Hamb.Graec. 1011, published by Lajos Berkes and Gabriel Nocchi Macedo in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 229, 2024, 68–74).
• Lawson, Todd. The Crucifixion and the Qur’an: A Study in the History of Muslim Thought. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. (Consulted through Martin Whittingham’s review for the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford.)
• Reynolds, Gabriel Said. “The Muslim Jesus: Dead or Alive?” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 2 (2009): 237–258.
• Reynolds, Gabriel Said. “On the Qur’anic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (taḥrīf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 2 (2010): 189–202.

Sources from the Islamic tradition

• Sahih al-Bukhari. Translated by Muhammad Muhsin Khan. Online at Sunnah.com.
• Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam. Jesus in India. Written 1899. English edition, Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, alislam.org.
• Fatoohi, Louay. “The Non-Crucifixion Verse: A Historical, Contextual, and Linguistic Analysis.” American Journal of Islam and Society 40, no. 1–2 (2023): 39–76.
• Khalidi, Tarif, ed. and trans. The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Siddiqui, Mona. Christians, Muslims, and Jesus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Younes, Mohamad. “Revisiting the Crucifixion of Jesus within Islam.” Australian Journal of Islamic Studies 9, no. 1 (2024): 104–121.