Sūrat an-Nisā’ (Surah 4) verse 157 in the Qur’ān rejects the death of Jesus by crucifixion. The Sahih International translation reads:
And [for] their saying, "Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah ." 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.
Sidney H. Griffith offered the following about the passage’s possible background and interaction with then-contemporary debates within the Christianity in Arabia:
Even in the notoriously difficult case of the Qur’ān’s seeming denial of Jesus’ death on the cross in sūrat an-Nisā’ 157, the text can be seen to be echoing the language of contemporary Christian controversy within the context of the Qur’ān’s criticism of the Jews. The passage upbraids the Jews for, among other things, allegedly claiming to have crucified and killed “the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary.” The Qur’ān says: “They did not kill him and they did not crucify him, but it was made to seem so to them (shubbiha lahum). Those who differ about it are certainly in doubt of it; they have no knowledge of it except the following of opinion. They certainly did not kill him. Rather, God raised him up to Himself; God is mightily wise” (IV an-Nisā’ 157-158).
While on the face of it the Qur’ānic passage would seem only to be denying that the Jews crucified and killed Jesus, in the Islamic interpretive tradition the verse is widely taken to deny that Jesus died by crucifixion at all. But what has long attracted the attention of Western commentators to the passage is the ‘docetic’ sense of the enigmatic phrase, “it was made to seem so to them (shubbiha lahum).” More or less ignoring the Qur’ān’s reference here to the alleged Jewish claim to have been responsible for Jesus’ execution, many scholars have found in this phrase an echo of the beliefs of those Christian thinkers called ‘Docetists’ by their adversaries because they taught that Jesus’ sufferings during his passion and crucifixion were not really affecting him but were made to seem so to the onlookers. And indeed it is the case that among the Jacobites of the Qur’ān’s day, Syriac-speaking theologians in the tradition of Severus of Antioch (c. 465-538) were still condemning the thought of Julian of Halicarnassus (d.c. 518) and his followers, whose teachings about Christ’s body, they charged, were of a ‘docetic’, ‘phantasiast’ character, claiming that the body of Christ, in accord with his single divine nature, was divine and therefore naturally incorruptible. And it is certainly possible that the views of the so-called ‘Julianists’ were known among Arabic-speaking Christians, giving their reported presence in Najrān and elsewhere on the Arabian periphery. But it seems more likely that these Christian themes would have influenced the later Muslim exegetes of the Qur’ān, who seem to have espoused a certain kind of Docetism of their own with regard to the crucifixion of Jesus, rather than to have influenced the Qur’ān itself, busy as it was in this passage with its critique of what it took as an unwarranted claim about the death of Jesus on the part of the Jews in its milieu. Nevertheless, it was indeed about the case that this matter of a docetic Christology was of interest to the Jacobite Christians, who were in all likelihood within the Qur’ān’s purview. Furthermore, the death of Jesus at the instigation of the community to which he was sent as God’s messenger is notably at variance with the Qur’ān’s own typology of prophecy and messenger-ship . . . (Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015], 37-39)
