Christianity Today Sows Doubt During Holy Week
Last week, while the rest of us were preparing to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, Christianity Today saw fit to tempt its readers to doubt the veracity of Scripture. Was Jesus Christ really pierced by nails when he was crucified? CT highlights new, cutting-edge “scholarship” that answers, no… just ropes, probably.
In case you’ve forgotten—it would be excusable given the once venerable magazine’s recent record—CT was founded by none other than Billy Graham. Carl F. H. Henry was its first editor. The whole point of the venture in 1956 was to combat The Christian Century, the standard bearer of liberal Protestantism. Between Henry and his successor, Harold Lindsell, the battle for biblical inerrancy dominated CT’s pages. They wanted to instill confidence in evangelicals in the face of the cultural onslaught against the Bible.
The very first CT editorial dedicated its editorial policy to unreserved acceptance of “the complete reliability and authority of the written Word of God.” In 1981, an editorial recounted a letter from a reader demanding the cancelation of his subscription because he had “heard enough about inerrancy.”
Speaking to Christian Century in 2012, David Hollinger perhaps triumphantly observed that despite the decline of the Protestant mainline, “the fact remains that the public life of the United States moved farther in the directions advocated in 1960 by the Christian Century than in the directions then advocated by Christianity Today.” The same year as the Hollinger interview, Christian Century ran a piece covering “fresh evidence” from a Harvard Divinity School professor that Jesus was married.
It’s not as if Henry, Graham, and Lindsell didn’t know what they were up against, but they stood athwart heterodoxy and liberalism all the same, stubbornly so. That Christianity Today of 2025 has effectively become Christian Century of 1965 surely has them spinning in their graves. That Richard John Neuhaus once, probably unwittingly, referred to CT as a “mainline evangelical publication” is more appropriate now than he could have imagined.
The article in question, published last Monday, “Was Jesus Crucified with Nails?” presents the theory of Jeffrey Garcia, who teaches at Gordon College, that neither the Bible nor historical evidence confirms that Jesus was hung on the cross by nails. Garcia thinks that, for example, Josephus is describing a later development when he refers to mass crucifixions involving nails.
That there is little extant source material describing crucifixions—Caesar had banned discussion of the affair amongst Romans in the first century B.C.—in detail at all is acknowledged by Garcia, but this just gives him room to cast more doubt on the Biblical narrative. “We don’t really know,” serves as the constant refrain in the piece. No matter too that crucifixions were at their height during the life of Christ even as Roman citizens were protected from the same—a detail that might have some bearing on the question here.
One problem: What to do with Thomas requesting to touch the marks of the nails in John 20:25 and Jesus responding in verse 27 by telling him to examine his hands? No problem.
“Jesus doesn’t explicitly say “nails,” and the Bible does not say Thomas touches Christ’s hands or his feet. Many scholars think John was written later—perhaps after crucifixion with nails had become more common, García said.”
This is the only subtle admission in the article that the “research” in view is entirely predicated on a late publication date of the Gospel of John. Unmentioned is that John was the only apostle present at the crucifixion. Did he confuse later practice with his own observations at the most pivotal point in his life? Or did the Holy Spirit just fail him in this regard? Further, did Jesus fail to deliver the proof sufficient to shame Thomas for his doubt? Scripture doesn’t tell us that Thomas had good eyesight, nor does it confirm that the nerve endings in his fingers were undamaged. Did Romans suddenly discover the utility of nails four decades after the crucifixion of Christ? Is Luke 24:39 equally suspect? Perhaps, the physician turned evangelist had forgotten his ability to distinguish between holes bored by a seven-inch spike and rope burns.
What about Colossians 2:14 (conveniently not quoted in the CT article) where Paul writes that Jesus nailed (προσηλώσας, having nailed; from προσελόω, to fasten with nails) our transgressions against the law to the cross? Certainly, the Epistle to the Colossians was written prior to A.D. 70 and in Rome. Was Paul unfamiliar with contemporary Roman technique? Maybe he didn’t pay attention when Peter and James were getting him up to speed in Jerusalem.
Psalm 22:16 says that Christ’s hands and feet are pierced (lit: bored through). Or are we to believe that the Psalms speak of another since Christ’s name is not referenced or that whether his bones were broken on the cross is inconclusive (Ps. 34:20)? Zechariah 13:6 reads, “And they shall say to him: What are these wounds in the midst of thy hands? And he shall say: with these I was wounded in the house of them that loved me.” Did God really say?
Note too that the skeleton discovered in Britain four years back had a nail hammered through his heel bone. The archeologists concluded that this was rare physical evidence of Roman crucifixion (circa 130-360 A.D.). There was no evidence of nails being driven through the victim’s hands. Fair enough. Sometimes the Romans did, indeed, tie their arms and nail their feet.
But why would Thomas, in the accounts of both Luke and John, refer to nail piercings in both hands and feet? Had he never witnessed this very public and ubiquitous form of execution in the province? Garcia implies that there may have been a nail shortage in first century Judea, but the archaeological evidence from the British site shows that Romans, ingenious as they were, had solved for that problem: the nails feature a double head for easy extraction and reuse, just like wooden planks were typically reused. In any case, it is not as if Romans were particularly bothered by difficulties owed to shortage of resources. Josephus says that because sufficient timber was scarce in Jerusalem the Romans would travel ten miles to find wood for their siege.
It is not like the question CT presents as somehow novel and groundbreaking—are you shocked yet, you folksy evangelical? —is new. As one recent study in Studia Antiqua notes, Joseph Hewitt’s survey of artistic representation throughout church history concluded that ropes were of predominate usage in Roman crucifixion, but “he devoted less than a third of his work to written sources.” Yet, Hewitt’s theory “became the standard source… for the next four decades, and it still remains a prominent source today.” That same study concludes that, in fact, “nailing is much more well attested in the written record than is tying… [and] nailing is most frequently mentioned during the time and in the place where Jesus lived—in the first century A.D.” Thus, substantiated is Martin Hengel’s claim that “It should be noted that in Roman times [it was] the rule to nail the victim by both hands and feet.”
In the end, Garcia insists that the answer to the nails question doesn’t really matter. Just academic curiosity and all that. But, of course, it does matter. It’s not just about nails or diminishing the suffering of Christ as such. It is about the veracity and inerrancy of Scripture and the interest of the church in confidence therein.
We might pause here to remember that artistic representation of the crucifixion has always contained symbolic, theological purpose. If ropes were included, they were in addition to nails or reserved only for the thieves. Three nails are typically shown—a trinitarian reference. The motive for these elements is devotion, to emphasize Christ’s agony and divinity simultaneously. Likewise, Christian scholarship, whilst lacking the liberty of the artist, should be truly theological, that is, devotional and doxological, and in service to the church. “Theology is the doctrine or teaching of living to God,” William Ames famously said. Lies cannot enter this teaching, but neither should search for doubt in the word of God animate “scholarship.” Nor can such a weighty subject as biblical studies be directed by vain curiosities, not, that is, if it is to serve the church. This is weighty stuff. Choose a different discipline or profession if you cannot endure it.
Disciplines like archeology may be useful to biblical scholars but they cannot drive the ship, as it were. What did Christians before 1968, when the first archeological evidence of crucifixion was discovered, do anyway? Until about a decade ago, we weren’t even sure kings David and Solomon actually existed. We still don’t know where exactly the Garden of Eden was, nor do we know exactly where Christ was crucified. What to do? We must come back to Scripture, much of which becomes internally nonsensical and downright contradictory if the hands and feet of Jesus were not pierced by nails to affix him to the cross (see above).
Garcia is grasping for any reason to sow doubt, and Christianity Today is complicit in spreading said doubt. A reader must ask, what is the point of this article, especially during Holy Week? Who is served by it? It’s anyone’s guess, and I won’t speculate about editorial motives. What I can say is that it’s a slippery slope CT is on. Questioning details of the life and death of Christ, explicit in Scripture or implied by good and necessary consequence, leads almost invariably to questioning details of his resurrection and ascension. The worst heresies are couched in smug hyper-biblicism (e.g., Socinianism). That tendency was first workshopped in the Garden and has plagued the church ever since.
Carl Henry had his critiques of fundamentalism but dogged (and public) commitment to Scripture as plainly and historically understood was not one of them. A Christianity Today that expressed that kind of boldness and churchmanship, that wasn’t the poster child for the evangelical embarrassment reflex, might actually serve a purpose again.
Editor’s note: The author of the piece at CT has since apologized for implicitly questioning the inerrancy of Scripture, saying that John 20:25 did not come to mind when writing the article. “My curiosity took me to the descriptions of Christ’s death and the details in those accounts. I didn’t think about John 20:25 and the implication of the idea that Thomas was mistaken to think the resurrected Jesus would have nail marks in his hands. Thomas clearly would not have said that if the Romans at that time used ropes.”
