Over the weekend on Holy Week, Christianity Today published a near universally hated article about Jesus not being crucified with nails but rather with rope. The backlash was inevitable because of how bad the article was, and the so-called expert who used to posit the theory willfully ignored both the Scriptural accounts and primary sources and archeological evidence. Now, Christianity Today is in full retreat from this blunder.
Dan Silliman, the editor of news content, writes a follow-up apology:
Like so many Christians, I spent a lot of time before Easter thinking about the Crucifixion: how it must have felt for Jesus to die that way, how God chose this particular device of Roman terror to accomplish our salvation, and how it worked practically to kill someone on a cross.
An article in Biblical Archaeology Review piqued my reporting curiosity. A Bible professor suggested it was possible that crucifixions at the time of Christ’s death used ropes rather than nails. That’s obviously an idiosyncratic view—and almost certainly wrong, it seemed to me. But I thought it was interesting.
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.
My article implicitly called into question the inerrancy of Scripture. In my eagerness to explore the historical context of Christ’s death, I missed that, and I’m sorry.
Silliman shows remorse, but this is not repentance, as Christianity Today is still a propaganda outlet for secular liberals to undermine Evangelical Christianity. At the time, Sulliman was apparently unfamiliar with the Doubting Thomas story or other biblical references to crucifixion. Perhaps his lack of Bible knowledge shone through, but it is nevertheless unbecoming of an editor of a Christian news outlet to be so biblically illiterate.
Theological liberals love testing the waters with how much they can get away with, and apparently, the backlash Christianity Today received by everyday Christians was too much for them to handle. But will this be a wake-up call for broader Evangelicalism to condemn Russell Moore, the man ultimately in responsible for the content of Christianity Today these days? That is what we must ensure.
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He should just admit that either (1) he denies the crucifixion, or (2) he used AI to write the article and didn’t bother to read it before publishing it. Most their article look like AI.