Christianity Today (CT) Senior News Editor Daniel Silliman issued an apology earlier this week (April 22) for an article he wrote and published the Monday before Easter titled: “Was Jesus Crucified with Nails?“
In the article, Silliman shared how Bible scholar Jeffrey P. Arroyo García believes that it is plausible that Roman soldiers tied Jesus to the cross using ropes instead of using nails.
“The Bible doesn’t describe Jesus being nailed to a cross,” Silliman said as he began his article. “Telling the story of Christ’s death, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John simply say that Roman soldiers crucified him. They don’t say how.” CT’s editor then said that “each of the Gospels include specific detail about the soldiers’ method of dividing Jesus’ clothes—a lottery—but none describe the way the soldiers put him on the cross. There are no nails mentioned in any of the four accounts of Christ’s death.”
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García shared with CT that he was led to explore how Jesus was crucified because “it’s good to question tradition and people can benefit from closer scrutiny of history.”
“We don’t really know,” García later explained. “We don’t really have a lot of evidence, and the evidence we do have, it involves interpretation.”
The Bible scholar mentioned that nails were not required for one to die during a crucifixion because the cross bearer died of suffocation from hanging.
He then argued that although John 20:25 says the Apostle Thomas tells Jesus, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe,” Garcia said that he isn’t completely convinced. He said many scholars believe the Gospel of John was written at a later time when crucifixion with nails were a more common activity.
García told CT that there is a “world lying behind the text—but it takes some work for us as moderns to get to the point where we know something about that world, and for me, that deepens, that broadens and focuses how you read the text, how you understand it.”
And although García demonstrated he doesn’t completely agree that nails were used in the crucifixion of Jesus, he said that the “most important thing for me is that we read the text.”
 Senior News Editor Daniel Silliman issued an apology earlier this week (April 22) for an article he wrote and published the Monday before Easter titled: “Was Jesus Crucified with Nails?“){kind=link}