Queries & Comments

More Queries and Comments Fall 2025

Nails or Knots?

I ENJOYED READING Jeffrey P. Arroyo García’s article “Nails or Knots—How Was Jesus Crucified?” but believe there are several things that need clarification. Cassius Dio (49.22.6), for example, does not say that Antigonus was crucified, only that Antony bound him to a stake and scourged him before he beheaded him. Binding a criminal to a stake and scourging them before execution was a common Roman practice for which one of the Latin phrases was deligare ad palum (“bind to a post”). This we can find in Roman authors, such as Livy (28.29.11) and Suetonius (Claudius 34.1).

My colleague Gunnar Samuelsson has justifiably insisted that the Greek word stauros (used by Cassius Dio in the text I just cited) does not mean “cross” in every occurrence (Crucifixion in Antiquity: An Inquiry into the Background of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion [Mohr Siebeck, 2013]). It can also mean “post” or “stake.” In this regard, I think it is important to note that Yoel Elitzur (“The Abba Cave: Unpublished Findings and a New Proposal Regarding Abba’s Identity,” Israel Exploration Journal 63 [2013], pp. 83–102, esp. 91) does not argue that Antigonus was crucified. Since the Antigonus episode was not a crucifixion, no conclusions can be made from it concerning the use of nails in Judean crucifixions. The question whether the individual in the Abba cave is Antigonus is a separate one, and I do not wish to argue that here (I discuss it a bit in my own book Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World [Mohr Siebeck, 2018], pp. 463–469).

The Romans were certainly using nails for crucified individuals from the Republican period throughout the imperial era. A slave in one of Plautus’s (d. 184 BCE) comedies (The Ghost 355, 359–360) says, “Who could bear to be tortured instead of me today? I’ll give a talent to the chap who first makes a sally onto the cross [crux]; but on this condition: that his feet and arms are nailed down double.” Such evidence can be multiplied at length. Consequently, I see no good reason why one needs to doubt the Gospel of John’s (20:25) insistence that nails were used in Jesus’s crucifixion. Nor is it clear to me that Luke 24:39 as intending “to prove merely the resurrection of the body.” While that is possible, it can just as likely be read to indicate that Luke envisions the use of nails by the Roman executioners. I do not doubt, however, that the Romans often used ropes to attach bodies to crosses, as García suggests.

John Granger Cook
Professor of Religion
LaGrange College

Jeffrey P. Arroyo Garcia responds:

In my article, I did not mean to refute the findings of your book (Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World [Mohr Siebeck, 2018]) that both nails and ropes were used in the larger Roman world. I only argue that the convergence of the linguistic and archaeological evidence from Judea—the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus’s shift in crucifixion terminology just prior to the Great Revolt, the Gospels’ indefinite terminology, and minimal archaeological sources—might indicate a different method of fastening in Judea prior to the revolt than has been generally assumed.

My understanding of Luke 24:39 hinges on the disciples’ fear that a spirit had entered the room. Jesus’s statement about his hands and feet thus appears to substantiate corporeality: “for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”

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I READ WITH DISAPPOINTMENT Jeffrey P. Arroyo García’s article “Nails or Knots?” Those who believe that the Bible is God’s inerrant and inspired word would hope, if not expect, that a publication called “Biblical Archaeology Review” would focus on how new discoveries corroborate or help to explain what the Bible teaches, or both. García’s article not only did neither, but it reduced John’s eyewitness testimony of Jesus having been nailed to the cross to nothing more than a “tradition” based on an “assumption.” This is a poor excuse for biblical scholarship. Jesus would certainly know whether his being nailed to a cross was merely a “probable” experience, or whether he had been “roped” to a cross.

In Luke 24:39, Jesus appeared to all of his disciples except Thomas. On that occasion, he said, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.” Thomas wanted to see what the others had seen, but he did not demand to see rope burns in order to believe. He said, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).

The apostle John was at the cross and in the room on both occasions that Jesus offered the evidence of having been nailed to the cross. John’s gospel account was personal, eyewitness testimony, not based on the laws of “probability,” an “assumption,” or on “Christian tradition.” He reported what he had seen, himself.

In Psalm 22, David penned an amazingly vivid prophetic account of Jesus’s crucifixion. One of the things that David prophesied about Jesus was, “They pierced my hands and my feet” (Psalm 22:16). David did not base his words on any “assumption” or “longstanding tradition.”

To question and dismiss the consistent prophetic and multiple eyewitness references to Jesus having been nailed to the cross, rendering it “probably” incorrect, undermines the inspiration of the Word of God. It is not biblical archaeology, it is biblical subversion. I will be canceling my BAR subscription.

Anthony R. Vacanti
Danville, Virginia

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“NAILS OR KNOTS”—an article full of amazing gymnastics to deny the scriptural truth. There is much more evidence of Jesus having wounds in his hands and feet than the author’s multitude of “maybe” and “might have” speculations. For example, the image of wounds in the Shroud of Turin, and accounts of the resurrected Jesus appearing to his “other sheep” in the Americas, where multitudes of people repeated the Doubting Thomas experience of feeling the wounds in Christ’s hands and feet.

Robert Starling
Riverton, Utah

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THIS ARTICLE was at the very least misleading, as the author omitted some critical points for the reader to consider. It is troublesome to understand his conclusion. García neglects to tell the reader that there is very little ancient literature describing crucifixion. Tom Holland, the author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [Basic Books, 2019], states: “The surprise, then, is less that we should have so few detailed descriptions in ancient literature of what a crucifixion might actually involve, than that we should have any at all.” As a matter of fact, he references Gunnar Samuelson—one of García’s sources as well.

García seems convinced, “The nails of the cross are stuff of legend,” due to Josephus changing his descriptions of crucifixion over time, as well as undermining the inspired words of the Gospel of John. García neglects to inform the reader that most crucifixion victims were just tossed into a common grave. This is most likely the reason we do not have any earlier examples.

Perhaps the crucifixion accounts describing Jesus’s death in the Gospels are not explicit in details, because first-century audiences were familiar with how brutal, degrading, shameful, and painful a death by crucifixion was. Many must have witnessed several in their lifetime.

García seems to ignore the fact that John was an eyewitness to the crucifixion: “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to His mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” (John 19:26–27). The inclusion of biblical verses is to illustrate that García came up with his own interpretation of the Gospel of John.

As a secular, non-denominational publication, please insist that your New Testament scholars present the reader with all relevant information regarding the topics they are discussing for future articles.

Katherine Benedict
Midlothian, Virginia

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Biblical Archaeology’s Old Testament Fixation

IN HER ARTICLE “Why Is Biblical Archaeology So Focused on the Old Testament?” Jodi Magness wonders why biblical archaeology is fundamentally synonymous with the Old Testament (OT) or Hebrew Bible (HB). To most practitioners, however, there is little mystery to this.

Length and content has a lot to do with why HB or OT archaeology is established as a discipline with far more to contribute to understanding this canon than NT archaeology does for the NT. First, the HB is nearly four times as long in raw word count alone. In actuality, however, it is much longer, given that the substance of the Gospels can effectively be accounted for alone by Luke’s, the longest of them. Compare then the more than 610,000 words in the OT to 122,000 words in the NT and you have one metric.

Second, let us consider the historical scope of these canons. For the sake of reducing the comparison to the absurd (and a good laugh), the OT accounts for millennia (the stories of Genesis through the early Hellenistic period) but, more accurately, a period of writing spanning nearly 700 years, while the NT represents less than a century.

Third, let us add variegated historical settings, which compare the ministry of Jesus and the earliest days of the church (less than a 75-year period) in the NT to Bronze Age Canaan and Egypt, the Iron Age southern Levant, Mesopotamia during the exile, and Yehud during the Achaemenid to early Hellenistic periods.

Fourth, related to this is the geographic diversity of locations within the text tradition itself, whether measured in regions or towns. This is far more variegated in the HB, while primarily restricted to the eastern Galilee and Judah in the NT, with letters written to a number of churches abroad, to which archaeology has almost nothing to contribute (unless you didn’t believe these places existed).

Fifth is the nature of the genres of the literature. In both canons, certain genres hardly lend themselves to archaeological inquiry, such as the HB’s wisdom literature and the NT’s epistles and revelations, but this is a further handicap to the short NT canon when compared to the OT.

Finally, there is the issue that much of what we have learned regarding first-century Palestine that assists us in illuminating the NT comes from historical sources and not archaeology (which has focused in an outsized way on synagogue archaeology). This is hardly the case for the HB, where the HB plays a leading role as a source, and archaeology has played an indispensable role in identifying the location of the many more sites mentioned therein (we could compare that metric, too), the plans of these towns, their neighborhoods, households, and even confirmed the historicity of many individuals mentioned throughout the HB, as well as materially contributed to our understandings of the diachronic development of the region over nearly a millennium of history. It has, in a nutshell, allowed us to sort fact from myth and cultural memory. Old Testament archaeology, if then we should call it by some other name than “biblical archaeology,” has provided many more clarifications of the text than have been or can be set forth in New Testament archaeology. It’s time to face the cold, hard facts. These are two different animals and complaining about it won’t change it or put them on the same level.

Aaron A. Burke
Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant
University of California, Los Angeles

Jodi Magness responds:

While I thank Aaron Burke for his response, he seems to have missed the point of my article, which demonstrates that the current definition of biblical archaeology stems from the Christian supersessionist views that drove the research agendas of William F. Albright and others. In fact, Burke repeats some of Albright’s own points: “It is much more difficult to apply the results of archaeological research in Palestine to the New Testament than to the Old Testament. In the first place, the latter spans a period of over a millennium and a half, whereas the New Testament covers less than a century…” (The Archaeology of Palestine, 1949, p. 238). Certainly, when compared to the Old Testament period, archaeology plays no less important a role than written sources in understanding first-century Palestine, including (as Burke puts it), “sort[ing] fact from myth.” Finally, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that the very distinction between the periods of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament is a modern scholarly construct that artificially separates what should be one field and values one above the other.

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I THOUGHT Jodi Magness’s piece about William Foxwell Albright and George Wright was provocative and well reasoned. Of course, BAR readers want to know the latest about New Testament archaeology! I am personally curious about the Roman destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 CE. So the legions carted off the treasures to Rome (as immortalized on the Arch of Titus) and then broke the Temple apart, pitching the 2.5-ton ashlars (quarried nearby at Har Hotzvim) into the Kidron Valley? What happened between then and now?

Kennedy Gammage
San Diego, California

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THE VERY EXISTENCE of biblical archaeology is a testament to the fact that in the West, all three Abrahamic religions are informed by the ancient sites in Israel. The Hebrew Bible is just as Christian as it is Jewish, because the Hebrew scriptures are part of the Christian canon. Funding for excavations rightly prioritizes contributions to science and what Western society finds interesting and relevant. Excavating ancient biblical sites satisfies both of these priorities.

Kenyon Miller
Falls Church, Virginia

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Teacher of Righteousness

I WOULD LIKE to report a probable error and to give an opinion on the article “Are We Still Searching for the Teacher of Righteousness?” by Angela Kim Harkins.

The statement that John Hyrcanus has been proposed as the Teacher is evidently a mistake; it was, rather, Hyrcanus II who was suggested by André Dupont-Sommer and others.

Hyrcanus II likely served later than the relevant chronological data from context, paleography, and radiocarbon dating. This leads to my opinion. We have learned a lot over the decades that helps us eliminate many guesses. And, positively, considering the Teacher together with his contemporaries narrows the field further, given that more is known about the Hasmonean high priests, one of whom was the Wicked Priest. 

Harkins is free to pursue her interesting research of those aspects of the scrolls she finds most rewarding, but does not speak for all scholars in the article’s counsel of despair.

Stephen Goranson
Durham, North Carolina

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Speculative Moses

IN HIS ARTICLE “Between Moses and the Ancestors: Israelite Religion in Egypt,” author Ralph K. Hawkins asserts that “There does not seem to have been an emphasis on holiness” in the ancestral pre-Mosaic period.

Although there is no list of commandments recorded in scripture from the period, I would argue that holiness, defined as conformity with God’s moral will, which is an expression of God’s nature, is deeply emphasized throughout the pre-Mosaic period. Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden due to disobedience, a deviation from holiness. Cain was condemned for murder, a deviation from holiness. Seth’s holiness is asserted throughout scripture. Enoch walked with God, and the Enochian literature emphasizes reward of the righteous and judgment of the wicked. Christ is said to be a priest after the order of Melchizedek. Noah’s family was saved on account of their holiness, and the rest of the earth was destroyed on account of wickedness. Abraham found favor with God and was given the promise. Lot was saved while Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for their wickedness. Although there might not have been a lot of virtue among Joseph’s brothers in their youth, when they sold Joseph into slavery, they later repented.

The entire Genesis account is rooted in an understanding that Adam’s fall from holiness separated men from God and those who found favor with God deviated from that trend and submitted to God’s moral will.

Kenyon Miller
Falls Church, Virginia

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THE ARTICLE BY HAWKINS opens by pointing out the “stark difference between Israelite religion in the ancestral period of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, described in Genesis, and that of the Mosaic period across the rest of the Pentateuch.”

It is stark. Almost as if one day the Hebrew people simply have a tribal identity through ancestry with the belief in their ancestor Abraham’s single revealed God at its core, and the next day they are receiving 613 statutes and instructions establishing everything from personal rules of conduct to complete and detailed processes for community law and worship, establishment of a priesthood and its duties, even construction of a house of worship along with altars and implements.

Of course, that “one day” was approximately four centuries of life at various social levels within Egyptian civilization. The mentality and sophistication of the people would naturally have evolved from a nomadic agrarian tribal society to that of people within a much larger society with structured institutions and laws. The Hebrew people were then distilled out of Egyptian civilization to find themselves on their own as essentially a whole nation of people in the wilderness. There must have been an urgent need to formally restructure in all aspects of life, including religion, as evidenced by the incident with the golden calf.

Jesse Brumberger
Tehachapi, California

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THE HAWKINS’S EPISTLE piece should have opened with its close: “This is not a tremendous amount of data,” since it ignores a substantial portion of the data. I will only focus on two items.

First, Hawkins ponders whether Exodus 3:6 links Moses’s family tree with “faithfulness to Yahweh.” The verse does not mention Yahweh but Elohim, which Hawkins conflates. If we grant that Moses did exist, Hawkins cherry-picks the singular (“your father”) as possible evidence for a familial relationship. However, he excludes the rest of the declaration, in which God attaches himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In its full sense, the statement does not demonstrate familial God adherence but assigns Moses’s communal affiliation with the patriarchal God. It is not a singularity but a communal marker. At Exodus 3:15, God self-identifies as “the God of your ancestors,” to wit: the God of the Patriarchs, demonstrating the communal vector of Exodus 3:6.

Hawkins also avoids the Documentary Hypothesis, a backbone of modern biblical scholarship. These data show that Exodus 3:6 and 3:15 share the same Elohist (E) source, affirming intended demonstration of communality in Exodus 3:6.

Second, Hawkins applies Driver’s speculative “emphatic imperative” to assert that “if Driver is correct,” Exodus 6:3 is proof of ancestral knowledge of Yahweh. He cites several verses as verification of Driver; however, there is more doubt than agreement on Driver’s assumption. Moreover, the Hebrew syntax of the Hawkins-cited verses do not require a Driver-type translation, nor do they (like Exodus 6:3) have a contrastive “but” to tie them up. The negation in Exodus 6:3 and the others is declarative, not rhetorical. Again, rather than straining with Driver, Hawkins could have benefited from Documentary Hypothesis evidence, which shows ancestral awareness of Yahweh at several (Jahwist, J) points in Genesis.

Craig B. Miller
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina