Answering some Anti-Crucifixion Arguments

Recently, I was directed to a presentation that Muslim apologist Ijaz Ahmad gave on the EF Dawah YouTube channel on April 22nd, where he presents arguments against the Passion narratives in the Gospels from an Islamic perspective:

As I watched the video, I took down notes of the various arguments being presented. At the 40 minute mark, I’ve made note of no less than ten arguments. As I analyzed those arguments and wrote my rebuttals of them, I found that none of them actually disproved the Passion accounts per se. At most, the arguments seem more weighted towards disinclining the listener from trusting the Gospel accounts. Be that as it may, here are the ten arguments I made note of, and my rebuttals to them:

1. Archaeological Evidence for the Crucifixion

The first argument Ijaz puts forward is the fact that there’s no archaeological evidence for the Crucifixion. Now, this argument strikes me as odd, if only because it’s not entirely clear to me what would count as “archaeological evidence” in his view. Are we talking about a piece of the true cross? How about the Shroud of Turin? If we can demonstrate that the Shroud of Turin is authentic (there’s quite a bit of evidence that points both directions), would that count as archaeological evidence?

Also, what about the the sites where the event happened? We know where Golgotha is, as there is a rocky outcropping outside Jerusalem that does resemble a skull. We also have a fairly good idea of where the Tomb was, as it has traditionally been regarded as being at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Do we know with 100% certainty that that is the precise site of the Tomb? Perhaps not. But there’s nothing inherently implausible about it being the correct site either. The geography certainly checks out.

2. On Tacitus

Next, Ijaz talks a little bit about the Tacitus (d. 120). Before diving in, it’s first worth looking at the text where he mentions Jesus and the Christians. This is taken from Annals 15.44, with the complete text as follows:

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called “Chrestians” by the populace.

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 Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.

Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.

Ijaz makes two basic points about this text: 1) That Tacitus isn’t claiming as a fact that Jesus was crucified, but merely saying this is what the Christians believed, and 2) Tacitus is not an eyewitness to the events, which nullifies the historical value of his testimony.

To the first point, it should suffice to note that in the text itself, Tacitus doesn’t merely say this is the belief of the Christians. He is presenting it as if it were historical fact. Now, it’s quite possible that he derived his information from Christian sources, but if that is the case, then it is notable that Tacitus feels at ease to report that same information without having to put in qualifiers such as “believed to be” or “alleged to be.”

The second point, regarding Tacitus not being an eyewitness, perhaps carries more weight. After all, Tacitus is writing in the early second century. By this time, most of the people who would have been present at the events he describes have since passed. I should note that the Annals begins with the reign of Caesar Tiberius at AD 14, so he describes events that are up to a century before his time. Does this mean Tacitus’ work is useless? No, of course not. Tacitus is a historian, and his work operates according to the historiography of his day. To the extent that he works according to that historiography, he is generally a trustworthy author.

All that being said, I would not base the Christian case too heavily upon Tacitus. At best, his work gives us an idea of how the Gospel narratives were received by the Pagans of that day. It also tells us that the events have begun to seep into the public consciousness of the larger Roman world, enough that a Pagan historian would take note of them.

3. Origenistic Exegesis

The next point Ijaz brings up has to do with the idea of “spiritual truth” versus “material falsehood.” It must be said at the outset that the use of the term “material falsehood” is a very loaded term, and the use of it invariably predisposes the reader against what is being described. It implies that Gospel writers are deliberately creating stories that are false, which is an unsubstantiated accusation.

Ijaz briefly refers to Origen as someone who holds to this sort of understanding, but this is distortion of how Origen viewed Scripture. If one reads Origen’s Bible commentaries and homilies, he never denies that the events described in the Bible are historical events. What he asserts, however, is that the true spiritual value of the Scriptures come from the allegorical meaning of the text, which is another layer of meaning beyond the literal meaning (the Catechism of the Catholic Church still endorses this method of interpretation to this day).

I should add at this point that accusing the church fathers of promoting falsehood is not new. Others have done it before, particularly in the case of Eusebius. Needless to say, the claim is unfounded, as anyone who takes the time to look up the original quote should realize.

4. On Josephus

The next point Ijaz makes has to do with Josephus’ Antiquities (AD 93). There are two relevant passages here. The first one, which gets a lot more interpretation, is the one about Jesus. Now, the majority view among scholars regarding this passage is that it is at least partly interpolated. A small minority go further and say the entire passage is an interpolation. The full text (with the interpolations) is as follows:

About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was the achiever of extraordinary deeds and was a teacher of those who accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When he was indicted by the principal men among us and Pilate condemned him to be crucified, those who had come to love him originally did not cease to do so; for he appeared to them on the third day restored to life, as the prophets of the Deity had foretold these and countless other marvelous things about him, and the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day. (Josephus, Antiquities 18.63)

The main clues that indicate that not all of this comes from Josephus are the statements “He was the Messiah,” and “for he appeared to them on the third day restored to life, as the prophets of the Deity had foretold these and countless other marvelous things about him.” Ijaz is right to point out that it is improbable that Josephus would have written this and not become a Christian.

However, we do have another manuscript of the Antiquities in Arabic, which contains a shorter text without the interpolations. This shorter text is much less susceptible to the objection mentioned above, as it could have been written by someone who remained a non-believer in the Christian faith all his life. The text reads as follows:

At this time there was a wise man called Jesus, and his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. Many people among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive. Accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have reported wonders. And the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day.

Because of its shorter nature, and the lack of elevated statements about Christ, this shorter version is more likely to be authentic. This is compounded by the fact that Josephus elsewhere talks about James, the brother of Jesus. That section reads:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned. (Josephus, Antiquities 20.200)

If Josephus could write about James and make brief mention of Jesus in the process, it becomes much more plausible that he would speak about Jesus elsewhere in the Antiquities. As for where Josephus obtained this information, it should be noted that the Antiquities was completed in AD 93, and because of its length, he was likely writing the text for many years before that. There would still have been eyewitnesses living at the time who could corroborate the events being described, so Josephus could not have been more than once removed the eyewitnesses to the events.

5. Dating the Gospels

The next section of Ijaz’s presentation has to do with textual criticism of the Gospels. Here, he makes much of the fact that our earliest extant manuscripts of the Gospels come one or two centuries after the original date of composition. I have to say, it is difficult to see why it matters for purposes of verifying the Crucifixion when the earliest extant manuscripts of the four Gospels are. After all, we know that the original autographs were composed in the first century. In order for this discussion of manuscripts to be relevant, one would have to infer that the Passion narratives were not originally in the four Gospels (at least, not in the form that we have them in the earliest extant manuscripts). But no textual critic believes this. It’s fairly unanimously held that the Gospels from the very outset always had the Passion narratives. They’re not ancillary details to the story either, as the entire Gospel narrative leads up to the Passion. The Gospels even tell us that Jesus prophesied about them multiple times before they actually happen (eg. Mark 8:37, 9:37, 10:45, etc.)

Of course, Ijaz never goes so far as to say that the Passion narratives are added in, or that they were edited in between the original composition and the earliest manuscripts. That would, of course, be going beyond the evidence. There’s no indication that such an addition was ever made, and if there was, sure literary analysis of the text would have uncovered it. But the way the information is presented, one can’t help but feel that this is the impression we’re being left with, and without further clarification, I would say this is not an unreasonable conclusion to arrive at.

6. Yielding the Spirit

The next argument is kind of an odd one, and it has to do with the fact that text of Matthew 27:50 in the Greek does not use the word “died. ” The Greek text states as follows:

Ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς πάλιν κράξας φωνῇ μεγάλῃ ἀφῆκεν τὸ πνεῦμα.

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. (ESV)

The argument here seems to be straining at gnats, since it should be clear to anyone reading the text that “yielding the spirit” is a euphemism for death. The surrounding context makes it abundantly clear, and it’s hard to arrive at any other conclusion. One doensn’t have to do any special  One wonders what exactly is Ijaz trying to insinuate that the verse is actually saying. Was Jesus just comatose?

He then tries to make the same argument from Mark 15:37. Here, the Greek text has ἐξέπνευσεν (lit. “expired”). This shouldn’t be a hard verse to interpret. We use the term “expire” even in English to indicate that someone died. Even the Greek lexicons agree with this. For example, Louw-Nida states:

23.103 ἐκπνέω: (a figurative extension of meaning of ἐκπνέω ‘to breathe out,’ not occurring in the NT) to engage in the final act of dying—‘to die, to breathe out one’s last.’ ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἀφεὶς φωνὴν μεγάλην ἐξέπνευσεν ‘then Jesus gave a loud cry and died’ Mk 15:37. (Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 264. Emphasis mine.)

Undeterred, Ijaz points to the LXX text of 1 Kings 17:17, where it states the following:

Καὶ ἐγένετο μετὰ ταῦτα καὶ ἠρρώστησεν ὁ υἱὸς τῆς γυναικὸς τῆς κυρίας τοῦ οἴκου, καὶ ἦν ἡ ἀρρωστία αὐτοῦ κραταιὰ σφόδρα, ἕως οὗ οὐχ ὑπελείφθη ἐν αὐτῷ πνεῦμα.

It came about after these things that the son of the woman who was the mistress of the house became ill. His illness was very strong until the point when no breath remained in him. (LES)

There are two problems with Ijaz’s argument at this point. The first is that the word ἐκπνέω is not used in the LXX. But this is the lesser problem with this argument. The greater problem is that if you look at the context of the passage, it is quite clear that the son died. Verses 18-24 make that abundantly clear (emphases mine):

And she said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” ¹⁹ And he said to her, “Give me your son.” And he took him from her arms and carried him up into the upper chamber where he lodged, and laid him on his own bed. ²⁰ And he cried to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by killing her son?” ²¹ Then he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” ²² And the Lord listened to the voice of Elijah. And the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. ²³ And Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper chamber into the house and delivered him to his mother. And Elijah said, “See, your son lives.” ²⁴ And the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”

When context is taken into consideration, then the citation of 1 Kings 17 actually backfires on Ijaz, since it unambiguously equates the cessation of breath with death.

7. The Details of the Crucifixion

The next section of Ijaz’s presentation has to do with the amount of details of the Crucifixion. There are two sides of this claim. One is that the Gospels do not give us much of a theology of the Crucifixion and what it entails (in other words, there isn’t much of a detailed atonement theory). The other side is that the Gospels are lacking in detail as to what happened at the Crucifixion.

The claim itself, in both its details, is rather odd. What level of detail are we supposed to expect from the Gospel accounts? Would it be better if we knew what the names of the two thieves were? Or how many thorns were on Jesus’ crown? Or which direction the cross faced? In fact, we look at how most histories written in early Antiquity are written, the amount of detail with which they describe events isn’t necessarily more than what the Gospels give us for the Passion. The level of detail that we have in the Passion narratives is fairly standard as far as historical accounts go.

As for the theology of the Crucifixion, the Gospels are not so concerned this, because they’re not written to give us a theory of atonement. We do have other books in the New Testament for that. But I fail to see why the Gospels ought to give us a theology of the Crucifixion in order to be accepted as authentic.

8. The High Priest Tearing His Clothes

The next section of the critique has Ijaz pointing to minute details of the text to see if there are any incongruities in them. One that he mentions is the fact that the High Priest tears his clothes (Mark 14:63). Ijaz rightly points out that Jewish Law forbids the High Priest from doing this (Leviticus 10:6, 21:10), but the makes the leap of saying that since the High Priest broke the Law, he should have been tried and executed as well. Since that didn’t happen, that constitutes a historical incongruity that undermines the historicity of  the Passion narrative.

Now, this is a non-sequitur for the simple reason that we can’t expect that just because the Sanhedrin isn’t acting strictly according to the Law, then the story must be false. Jesus routinely accuses his opponents of disregarding the Law (e.g. Mark 7:1-13). Why should we expect their actions in the Passion to be any different?

9. Releasing Barabbas

The next argument has to do Pilate releasing Barabbas, as recorded in Mark 15:6-15. There are two points made here. First is that there is no evidence for the custom of releasing prisoners on special days. However, the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible does have the following note: “Customs similar to this one existed in various locations; although governors were not bound by law to follow these customs, they often chose to honor the precedents set by their predecessors.” So on the face of it, there’s nothing implausible about Pilate performing this custom.

The other point is that a Roman governor would not release a rebel leader just to appease a crowd. The first point that ought to be made is that the text doesn’t clearly state that Barabbas was a rebel leader. Verse 7 says he “committed murder in the insurrection” (ἐν τῇ στάσει φόνον πεποιήκεισαν), however the word στάσις can refer to any public disturbance, from a riot to a full-scale revolution. Even if it was a revolution, there’s no indication that Barabbas was a leader in that revolution. And even if he was a leader, that still doesn’t make the situation implausible. These sorts of events happen all the time. Just last year, we have a number of news articles to that effect. For example: “Sudan’s military council releases 3 rebel leaders” (Oct. 6), and: “Cameroon releases 333 prisoners amid national dialogue” (Oct. 3). These two recent news headlines should suffice to show that what Pilate did is a real tactic that governments use to pacify rebellious populations.

10. Opening Tombs

The last point I want to discuss is worth discussing because it’s something that actually comes up quite often among skeptics of the Bible, and that is the account of the dead being raised from their tombs in Matthew 27:52-53. As is often pointed out, it is odd that such an event would only be recorded by Matthew and nobody else, whether it be other Gospel writers or secular authors. Because of the difficulty most people have with explaining this text, some apologists such as Michael Licona have suggested it was just a vision and not a real event.

While the vision explanation is not impossible, it’s also not necessary to make sense of the passage. The first thing I want to make note of this passage is that it actually fits the Criterion of Dissimilarity. The incident doesn’t figure in traditional tellings of the Passion. It is never made much of in theological explanations of the Crucifixion or Resurrection. As N.T. Wright notes: “This story was not written in order to embody or express the theology of Paul or the other New Testament writers.” Finally, it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than to give Christian apologists something to exercise their mental abilities on. On the face of it, there’s no reason for this incident to be fabricated if it’s not a true event.

The fact that no other Gospel writer picks up on this event is not a major issue, since all of the Gospel writers record events that are unique to their account. Perhaps the bigger question is why secular authors do not notice this. Catholic apologist Trent Horn in Hard Sayings suggests that this may be because the number of those who resurrected was not significant enough to be noticed. Although the text says “many” were raised from their tombs, that. Horn writes:

Most critics assume that the description of “many” raised saints implies a veritable army of the recently deceased that other writers could not have missed. But the text never says how many there were. Could it have been a dozen? A handful? If you saw the starting lineup of the 1923 New York Yankees walk into Yankee Stadium, you’d probably say that “many” raised baseball players were there (it doesn’t take that many to get one’s attention!). That’s assuming, of course, that you are a baseball aficionado who could recognize these men.

Matthew’s saints may not have been recognized by most of the small population in Jerusalem who saw them, which would explain why the other evangelists did not report this episode. They simply may not have had access to the source or person who described this event to Matthew. And since Josephus tells us hardly anything about the events surrounding Jesus’ Crucifixion, why should we expect him to have known about this event? There is nothing implausible in Matthew being the only evangelist to have preserved this account, or, if he wrote his Gospel first, being the only one who thought this story would be beneficial to his audience. (Trent Horn, Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties (Catholic Answers Press, 2016), Kindle Edition, location 1954.)

Ultimately, despite the enigmatic nature of the passage at first glance, it is not an inexplicable text, and certainly doesn’t need to be explained away as just a vision. I agree with Wright when he says that accepting the event as it stands (with all the difficulties that might entail) is better than the “easy way out” of dismissing it as a vision:

But it remains the case that the events Matthew describes in 27:51–3, as well as being without parallel in other early Christian sources, are without precedent in second-Temple expectation, and we may doubt whether stories such as this would have been invented simply to ‘fulfil’ prophecies that nobody had understood this way before. This is hardly a satisfactory conclusion, but it is better to remain puzzled than to settle for either a difficult argument for probable historicity or a cheap and cheerful rationalistic dismissal of the possibility. Some stories are so odd that they may just have happened. This may be one of them, but in historical terms there is no way of finding out. (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2003), 636.)

A Final Note: The Qur’an on the Crucifixion

So far, I’ve enumerated a number of key problems with the arguments Ijaz presents in his case against the Crucifixion. As I said at the beginning, if one looks carefully at the arguments, none of them–even when taken together–actually disprove the Crucifixion. Of course, disproving the Crucifixion ultimately can’t be done. There’s a reason why Christian and non-Christian historians alike are unanimous on the Crucifixion.

In fact, even from an Islamic perspective, this should be what we would expect. Surah 4:157 has been interpreted in many different ways by different commentators, but the one thing every interpretation of this verse agrees on is that something happened. Whether the Muslim believes that someone was crucified in Jesus place (as most Sunnis and Twelver Shi’is do), or that Jesus swooned on the cross (as Ahmadis do), or that Jesus did die, but not through the agency of the Jews (as Shabir Ally has suggested as a possibility twice now, as has my Isma’ili colleague Khalil Andani), they all agree that an event took place, and that event lead directly or indirectly to the narratives we find in the Gospels. In fact, it would be an ironic disproof of the Qur’an if nothing actually happened, since Q 4:157 would then have no historical referent.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what Ijaz actually hoped to demonstrate from his presentation. He doesn’t tell us what really happened, nor does he tell us how the Passion narratives came to be the way they are, or why everyone ended up accepting them. To the extent that these questions remain unanswered, I have to say that I found this presentation quite unhelpful.

Suggested Further Reading

For readers who are interested in knowing more about the reliability of the Gospels in general, and the Passion narratives in particular, I recommend the following resources.

Richard Bauckham. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. 2nd edition. Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2017.

Craig Blomberg. The Historical Reliability of the New Testament. B&H Academic, 2016.

Darrell Bock. Jesus according to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels. 2nd edition. Baker Academic, 2017.

Gary Habermas. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Kregel Publications, 2004.

Michael Licona. The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. IVP Academic, 2010.

N.T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3. Fortress Press, 2003.