The Dark Hours

“Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land…” (Mt 27:45). Some skeptics claim that there are no non-Christian accounts of Christ and the early Christians. This is patently false. Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus and the Jewish Mishnah, among others, speak of Him. One of the most interesting citations attests to the great darkness at noon when our Lord hung on the cross. Paul L. Maier writes: “This phenomenon, evidently, was visible in Rome, Athens, and other Mediterranean cities. According to Tertullian…it was a “cosmic” or “world event.” Phlegon, a Greek author from Caria writing a chronology soon after 137 a.d., reported that in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (i.e., 33 a.d.) there was the “greatest eclipse of the sun” and that “it became night in the sixth hour of the day [i.e., noon] so that stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were overturned in Nicaea” (Pontius Pilate, p. 101).

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