“The Bible doesn’t say Jesus was nailed to a cross,” the official X account for Christianity Today (CT) posted the day after Good Friday. “One evangelical Bible scholar thinks the crucifixion may have been done with ropes.” It wasn’t a hack. CT was tweeting out an article by Senior News Editor Daniel Silliman, which sympathetically platformed Gordon College Professor Jeffrey Arroyo García, a Bible scholar who recently argued that Jesus’s crucifixion may have been done without nails.

But never fear, faithful Christian. The old-time religion in which you have long believed is in no danger of crumbling before this new-fangled nail notion. It wasn’t long before Community Notes set the record straight.

“The Bible says explicitly that Jesus had wounds in His hands and side following His crucifixion, burial, and resurrection,” ran the note. It quoted John 20:27, where Jesus tells his doubting disciple Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Just before in the narrative, Thomas specifically mentions “the mark of the nails” in John 20:25.

In fairness to Silliman and García, the tweet went further astray than the claims made in the article itself. There, Silliman merely points out, “There are no nails mentioned in any of the four accounts of Christ’s death.” And García makes the more modest claim, “I don’t stand and say this, definitively, is how it happened. I basically find it interesting. It could be there were nails, or it could be that there weren’t nails.”

The thrust of García’s argument is that explicit references to nails in crucifixion accounts are infrequent. For instance, he argues that the word used in the gospel narratives of the crucifixion “just means ‘to hang on a cross,’ but it doesn’t give the method of how they hang, right? Maybe the reticence is telling.” Additionally, Roman writers like Gracchus, Caesar, and Seneca prefer verbs like “fix” or “attach” rather than “nail.”

Says Silliman, “Maybe Romans found their frequent method of execution to be so horrific and shameful that they just skipped over that detail, leaving it vague. Or maybe, García argues, the Romans weren’t using nails.” This brilliant logical trick is sure to become the next golden goose for historians: maybe the Romans found their bodily functions too vulgar or embarrassing to discuss in “polite company,” or maybe Romans simply never pooped.

There are numerous problems with García’s argument. First, he makes an argument from silence, in the face of a credible, alternative explanation. Second, he admits that there is archaeological and literary evidence of nail use in crucifixion. Third, it ignores the witness of the early church, which universally accepted that Jesus was nailed to the cross, argued Benjamin Gladd, executive director of The Carson Center for Theological Renewal.

Fourth, and certainly not least, García’s “idiosyncratic” theory forces him to compromise the authority of the gospel account in John 20:25, where Thomas mentions the nail marks in Jesus’s hands. “García said that is proof that Christ was crucified with nails, but he isn’t completely convinced,” CT related in an “update and clarification” issued on Tuesday, April 22. “García said many scholars also think John was written later — perhaps after crucifixion with nails had become more common.”

This last detail refers to a theory García has spent a lot of time developing: that Romans increased their use of nails in crucifixion over the early church period. But the issue here is not the general practice of crucifixion or a story invented by later writers to sound reliable by its correspondence to known practices of crucifixion. The Gospel of John claims to present eyewitness testimony (John 20:30-31) to one particular crucifixion. This crucifixion concluded in an astonishing — and utterly unique — event, when the executed man was brought back to life and walked out of his tomb. If that account is not 100% historical and 100% reliable, then the entire Christian message is a worthless lie.

I’m happy to report that CT and Silliman both recanted of this error after Community Notes pointed it out. CT editors affixed a correction to the original article, stating, “This article has been revised to clarify that Scripture, including the Gospel of John, indicates that Jesus was crucified with nails and that Christianity Today, along with Christian scholars and theologians throughout church history, affirms that account.”

Silliman wrote an entire piece “apologizing for what I got wrong reporting on an idiosyncratic view on how Jesus died.” He admits that he “didn’t think about John 20:25” and thought García’s “idiosyncratic view” seemed “interesting” but “almost certainly wrong” when he first reported on it. “My article implicitly called into question the inerrancy of Scripture,” he concluded. “In my eagerness to explore the historical context of Christ’s death, I missed that, and I’m sorry.”

Still, this lamentable episode illustrates how far CT has strayed from its former position as the flagship publication for evangelicalism. Instead of affirming what Christians believe, CT now runs articles challenging the positions most Christians have long held. This may be provocative, but it can also be dangerous. To consciously ask the question, “Did God really say?” is to adopt the words and attitude of the serpent in the garden.

Somehow, this article went live without one reviewing editor recalling the Thomas story from John 20 — or, for that matter, searching any Bible application for the word “nail.” As in this case, on closer examination, it often turns out that Christians have solid, biblical warrants for the positions they hold.

García said he was motivated to question tradition as a way to send people back to the Bible. While that honorable objective has motivated evangelical Christians since at least the Reformation, it also requires that the searcher submit his own ideas and theories to what he finds in the text. In this case, Scripture clearly testifies that Jesus was nailed to the cross.

The good news is that following Christ does not require perfection but repentance, because Jesus Christ was crucified to forgive our sins.

Decades before John’s gospel, Paul wrote to Christians he had never met, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13-14).