More than seven centuries ago, Imām Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī recorded almost this exact objection to the Qurʾān's account of the Crucifixion and answered both parts of it.
The objection today is essentially:
1. The Crucifixion is established by history; Islam only denied it centuries later.
2. If someone else was made to resemble Jesus, then God deceived people and destroyed the reliability of human perception.
Remarkably, these are precisely the first two questions al-Qarāfī treats in this section of al-Ajwibah al-Fākhirah.
He first records the Christian argument:
“They said: The Jews and Christians are two immense nations spread throughout the eastern and western regions of the earth, and all of them report that the Messiah was crucified. They are of such number that their collusion upon a lie is impossible; and the Gospel likewise reports the Crucifixion…” (al-Ajwibah al-Fākhirah, p. 179)
Their argument is if Muslims dismiss testimony of this magnitude, then the very principle of tawātur, mass transmission yielding certainty, collapses. One could then deny reports about places such as Baghdad or Damascus and ultimately undermine even Muslim appeals to mass transmission themselves (pp. 179–180).
He distinguishes the enormous number of people who eventually believe and repeat a report from the number and independence of those from whom the report actually originated.
For genuine tawātur, he writes, the condition must exist not merely at the end of the chain but at both ends and throughout its intermediary stages:
“The second condition: that the two ends and the intermediary stages be equivalent [in satisfying the conditions of mass transmission].” (p. 181)
If millions of later believers ultimately depend upon a small or non-mutawātir originating body, their later multiplication does not travel backward in time and transform the original report into mass eyewitness testimony.
His principle is simple:
A million repetitions of a report are not a million independent witnesses to the event.
Or, put differently:
the size of a belief’s descendants cannot automatically be transferred to the strength of its ancestral evidence.
That is why al-Qarāfī insists that if the evidentiary condition fails at the root, multiplying the branches cannot retroactively repair it (pp. 181, 184–185).
He then makes another important distinction.
What does sight itself establish?
Al-Qarāfī argues that perception may establish:
“A man is being crucified upon this cross.”
But the further proposition:
“This particular man is certainly Jesus son of Mary.”
is an additional judgment of identity. The event perceived and the identification of its subject are logically distinguishable (pp. 182–184).
So even before debating the miracle itself, al-Qarāfī separates two propositions that are often collapsed into one:
someone was crucified
≠
it has therefore been established with infallible certainty that the crucified individual was Jesus.
One may still construct a historical argument for the Crucifixion using other evidence; al-Qarāfī’s point is more precise, which is that the later numerical universality of Christian belief cannot simply be projected backward and called continuous independent eyewitness tawātur.
Then al-Qarāfī records the second objection and it is astonishingly close to the modern “Allah is a deceiver” argument:
“They said: To affirm that the likeness was cast upon someone other than Jesus leads to sophistry, to falling into ignorance, and to conclusions unworthy of rational people.” (p. 190)
The objection then argues:
If God can make another person resemble Jesus, how can I know that my son is really my son? My wife is really my wife? My friend is really my friend? Perhaps another person has been given precisely their appearance.
In other words:
If miraculous misidentification is possible once, has God destroyed the reliability of sight altogether?
Al-Qarāfī answers:
“This is mere rhetorical exaggeration upon which no reliance can be placed.” (p. 190)
Why?
Because the objection illegitimately moves from:
God can exceptionally create a miraculous resemblance
to:
therefore every ordinary perception must permanently be doubted.
Those propositions do not follow from one another.
An extraordinary divine act does not abolish the ordinary course of the world.
And al-Qarāfī turns the argument directly back upon his Christian interlocutors: their own scriptures affirm transformations more extraordinary than one human being resembling another such as Moses’s staff becoming a serpent and other miraculous alterations of created things (pp. 190–191).
If accepting a single miraculous transformation destroyed all empirical knowledge, then Biblical miracles would produce exactly the same skepticism.
Yet no Christian reasons:
“Moses’s staff became a serpent; therefore I can never again know whether the stick in my hand is really a stick.”
The possibility of a miracle is not the presumption of a miracle.
Al-Qarāfī therefore distinguishes:
what ordinarily occurs
from
what God may exceptionally bring about as a miracle.
And, crucially, he does not frame the event as God maliciously manufacturing Christianity.
He frames it as God rescuing Jesus from enemies who intended to seize, humiliate, and kill him, describing such deliverance as:
“that which befits the generosity of His favors in His beneficence toward His chosen prophets and saints.” (p. 184)
So the Qurʾān's narrative is not:
“God wanted mankind to believe a false religion.”
It is:
Jesus’s enemies plotted to kill God’s messenger; God frustrated their plot and rescued him.
Everything later inferred by human beings from the event is not thereby transformed into something God Himself asserted.
Indeed, Qurʾān 4:157 does not say, “God revealed to mankind that Jesus had been crucified.”
It says:
“Rather, it was made confused/resembling to them,”
and immediately adds:
“They possess no knowledge concerning it except the following of conjecture; and they certainly did not kill him.”
So the Qurʾān’s own argument is precisely about the difference between appearance, inference, and certain knowledge.
The irony is that what is presented today as an obvious modern objection
“History says Jesus was crucified, and substitution would make God a deceiver”
was already formulated in a considerably more sophisticated form by al-Qarāfī’s Christian interlocutors over seven centuries ago.
And al-Qarāfī did not answer it with “trust me.”
He answered it by asking what historians and philosophers of testimony still have to ask:
What exactly was observed?
Who observed it?
How independent were the original witnesses?
How was the report transmitted?
When does later consensus constitute evidence for the event itself?
And why should the possibility of an exceptional miracle annihilate the reliability of ordinary perception?
Those are epistemological arguments.
Calling the Qurʾān “a guy 600 years later saying trust me bro” does not answer them.
[Imām Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī, al-Ajwibah al-Fākhirah, pp. 179–185, 190–191.]
Muslims think Jesus wasn't crucified because a guy 600 years after the fact said "trust me bro", which not only contradicts history but also makes Allah a deceiver.