The Bible doesn’t say Jesus was nailed to a cross.
Telling the story of Christ’s death, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John simply say that Roman soldiers crucified him. They don’t say how. Each of the Gospels include specific detail about the soldiers’ method of dividing Jesus’ clothes—a lottery—but none describe how, exactly, the soldiers put him on the cross. There are no nails mentioned in any of the four accounts.
Jeffrey P. Arroyo García, an evangelical Bible scholar who teaches at Gordon College, thinks maybe there weren’t any nails.
“The word used there, stauroo, just means ‘to hang on a cross,’” García told Christianity Today. “But it doesn’t give the method of how they hang, right? Maybe the reticence is telling.”
Closely reading the Bible, looking at the long historical record of Roman crucifixion, and examining the archaeological evidence, García has come to the conclusion that the Crucifixion might have been done with ropes. While Christians from Emperor Constantine’s mother to documentary filmmakers today have searched for relics of the “true nails” and many have meditated on the iron piercing flesh, the nails might just be the stuff of legend.
García wrote about it for the spring issue of Biblical Archaeology Review in an article titled “Nails or Knots—How Was Jesus Crucified?”
“I don’t stand and say this, definitively, is how it happened,” García told CT. “I basically find it interesting. It could be there were nails, or it could be that there weren’t nails.”
Roman writers left behind lots of scraps and scribbles of writing about crucifixion. One scholar, counting up all the victims mentioned in ancient Latin texts, concluded the Romans crucified at least 30,000 people—an average of about five per month, every month, for 500 years. John Granger Cook, a professor of religion and philosophy at LaGrange College in Georgia, says in his book Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World that that’s a conservative estimate.
There’s lots of evidence of crucifixion and its “pervasive usage” in the Roman republic and empire, according to Cook. But “the authors do not often give lengthy descriptions of crucifixions.”
And in the oldest records, they don’t mention nails.
The Roman historian Livy, for example, recounts how an enemy general from North Africa, the famous Hannibal, once had a guide crucified after the man led Hannibal’s army to the Italian town of Casilinum instead of Casinum, where Hannibal wanted to go. Livy doesn’t say the guide was nailed to a cross, though, but “lifted” to one.
The Romans—perhaps borrowing the execution method from their ancient enemies in Carthage—started to crucify bandits, pirates, traitors, and slaves. People began using crucify as a curse and a crude thing to hurl at someone when they were mad.
“In malam crucem ire,” they would say. “Go to the evil cross.” Or sometimes, as it’s preserved in graffiti in the town of Pompeii, “in cruce figaris,” which means something like “get crucified.” Figaris can be translated as “nail,” but just means “fasten.”
In the many texts collected by Cook, Romans used words like fasten, fix, or fetter to describe crucifixion. When the politician Tiberius Gracchus said he would free enslaved people who fought for him bravely but crucify those who ran away, he said he would fix the cowards to crosses. When Julius Caesar recalled executing deserters in a civil war, he said he attached them.
The philosopher Seneca, contemplating death on a cross as an example of how people don’t like pain, asked, “Can any man be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree?”
Gracchus, Caesar, and Seneca don’t mention any nails. Maybe they’re implied. 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.
Scour the ancient texts on crucifixion, as García has done, and there are a few nails to be found. Nails from crosses are listed as ingredients for a magic potion, along with locust eggs and fox teeth. And there’s a law recorded in a port city that says the government will crucify enslaved people at their masters’ request, but the masters must provide the supplies. The list of hardware needed for crucifixion includes nails, along with wood, rope, chains, and pitch, which was used to burn the person being tortured.
It’s unclear if the nails in those texts were used to hold people on the crosses or just to hold the crosses together. Cook writes that the nails were probably “an element of the victim’s torment and not for the construction of the cross” but also says it isn’t clear.
Nails were not required to kill someone in a crucifixion. Death came through suffocation, caused by suspension. Ropes would work for that.
A crucifixion with ropes would still be incredibly painful and bloody. Victims were almost invariably whipped before being crucified, and when Romans mention the blood, as the politician Cicero does when complaining that a citizen was improperly crucified in one of the provinces, they talk about the scourging.
Christ was scourged, according to Matthew, Mark, and John. And John says Jesus was stabbed in the side with a spear after he died, “bringing a sudden flow of blood and water” (19:34), which is the one explicit mention of blood in the texts.
“Crucifixion is really about barbarity,” García said. “It’s barbarity, humiliation, and the psychological trauma that is inflicted on the people who have to witness this.”
Christian theologians rarely focus on the nails, even in extended discussions of the cross. When they do mention them, they typically don’t ascribe the nails any theological significance but just explain how crucifixion might have worked.
In Fleming Rutledge’s very widely praised book The Crucifixion, for example, she writes that “it is in the crucifixion that the nature of God is truly revealed” and that “the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.”
Nails only come up 50 pages later, in a physical description of the crucifixion methods. Rutledge mentions that Roman soldiers also might have used rope.
Scholars know that nails were used at least sometimes. In 1968, a Greek Orthodox monk turned archaeologist excavated a tomb in Jerusalem and found the remains of a Jewish man in his 20s. A nail—about seven inches long—held his heel bones together. It was the first time anyone had found anything like that.
“When I excavated the bones of this crucified man, I did not know how he had died,” Vassilios Tzaferis later wrote. “This was the tomb of a family of some wealth and perhaps even prominence. … The ossuaries were usually filled to the brim with bones, male and female, adult and child, interred together. One ossuary also held a bouquet of withered flowers.”
Archaeologists found another example of a crucified heel bone 49 years later in Cambridgeshire, England, in a grave in an ancient Roman settlement. A man in his late 20s or early 30s appears to have been buried with a dozen nails, and a 13th nail “passed horizontally through his right heel bone,” according to an official report.
“While this cannot be taken as incontrovertible proof that the man was crucified,” the archaeologists said, “it seems the only plausible explanation.”
There are a few other examples of nails found in tombs that are possibly connected with crucifixion. Archaeologists found skeletal remains in Italy and Egypt with holes in their heels, consistent with crucifixion by nails. And a few nails have been found in the bones of people killed in Greece, including one with a nail that was about four and a half inches long and one with a hole in the femur that “probably ruptured the femoral artery, resulting in a quick death,” according to an expert.
The Jewish writer Josephus, who was born around the time Jesus died, is also explicit about the Romans use of nails in crucifixion, García said. He emphasizes the horror of death on the cross. Unlike generations of Roman writers, he wasn’t vague about how it worked.
But García thinks it’s also possible that Josephus is describing an evolution in the practice of crucifixion. The shift in vocabulary could reflect a shift in real-world methods.
There are examples of Romans experimenting with cruelty. Across the empire, during the “peace of Rome,” soldiers found new, creative ways to torture their victims. Some people were crucified in papyrus shirts, for example, that were soaked in pitch, and then set on fire. That was never a common practice, but it did happen. Perhaps nails, similarly, were introduced to make crucifixion—already incredibly painful—even worse.
“We don’t really know,” García said. “We don’t really have a lot of evidence, and the evidence we do have, it involves interpretation.”
Going back to the Bible, Gracía said there is one place in the New Testament that mentions nails. In the Gospel of John, the doubting apostle Thomas says he would have to see and touch the “týpon tón ílon,” or “marks of the nails” (20:25), before he would believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
Two verses later, the resurrected Jesus says, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side” (v. 27).
Maybe that’s proof that Christ was crucified with nails, García said. But he isn’t completely convinced. 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.
And the point of the gospel passage, the Gordon professor points out, is that followers of the resurrected Christ shouldn’t actually need nail holes to affirm their faith.
“Blessed are those who have not seen,” Jesus says, “and yet have believed” (v. 29).
García told CT he is not going to forbid anyone from imagining nails in Jesus’ hands and feet. When the topic comes up in class, he tells students it would be silly to start protesting historic Christian paintings or fact-checking contemporary worship songs.
But he does encourage them to question tradition and what they think they know about Christ’s death and check it against Scripture.
“The most important thing for me is that we read the text,” García said. “And then 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.”
Answering the question of whether there were nails may not really matter. But asking it, García thinks, can turn our attention to the Word and the Cross.
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