An Eclipse at Jesus' Death?
The darkness that covered the land
Today one of my dear friends joined the ranks of the ‘eclipse chasers’, travelling to Villalibado (Burgos, Spain) to see the much anticipated solar eclipse. This morning he texted me to write something on the eclipse at Jesus’ crucifixion – a topic I touched on in my undergraduate thesis on the date of Jesus’ death. So while my memory of the subject is a little foggy, I offer here a few thoughts to commemorate the occasion.
The passage my friend had in mind is found in all three Synoptic gospels, with its source in Mark. During Jesus’ crucifixion, Mark tells us that ‘from noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon’ (15:33). Matthew copies out Mark, but Luke seems to bring out the ecliptic resonances of this event further.
Luke’s version states: ‘It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.’ What is fascinating is that if we inspect Luke’s Greek here, he uses the phrase tou héliou eklipontos, with ‘eklipontos’ giving us our English word ‘eclipse.’
So what’s going on? Is an astronomical eclipse obscuring light from the earth? To get to grips with the subject, we need to consider the main two types of eclipse.
The event we celebrate today is a solar eclipse, with the moon passing between the earth and the sun. This event requires a new moon. But according to the gospels, Jesus’ death took place around Passover, which required a full moon. What’s more, the darkness that covers earth in a solar eclipse lasts a matter of minutes – not three hours. So the phenomenon does not map on nicely onto our gospel texts.
What may be slightly more relevant to the gospels is the second type of eclipse – a lunar eclipse – where the earth moves between the sun and the moon. This sort of eclipse can take place around the full moon required for Passover, and might also produce a blood-red effect. Some have therefore tied the event to Acts 2:20, with its quotation of the prophet Joel: ‘The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day’ (2:31).
Again, the lunar eclipse does not fit snugly with the darkness described in the gospels. For a lunar eclipse takes place when the moon is above the horizon – usually the evening or at night – and is short-lived, but the gospels describe the darkness as occurring for three hours from noon. Yet since red lunar eclipses are referred to in ancient texts as the moon ‘turning to blood’, some have wondered whether an (evening) lunar eclipse might account for the language used in Acts’ quotation of Joel.
Most famously, Sir Colin Humphreys, a scientist at Cambridge, noted that Jesus’ death on a Friday on the day before Passover gives us a very narrow window of possible dates for Jesus’ death.1 If Jesus died on 14th Nisan, then there are two main days on which he could have died: Friday 7th April AD 30, and Friday 3rd April AD 33. (This is why you may have heard these years as familiar dates for Jesus’ death).
To adjudicate between these dates, Humphreys notes that a partial lunar eclipse would have been visible from Jerusalem on Friday 3rd April AD 33. This had the potential to create the blood-red effect of the moon in the evening, following the darkness covering the land. So according to Humphreys, there was a partial lunar eclipse on the evening of Jesus’ death, but not during the crucifixion itself. The fact of the eclipse helps us to date Jesus’ death more precisely than we otherwise would.
But what then caused the darkness? According to Humphreys, the effect of darkness might have been produced by a khamsin – a dusty desert wind that blows across the Levant, including regions like Jerusalem, which could easily last a few hours. This is not contradicted by Luke’s ‘eclipse’ language, which could refer to an actual eclipse, but could also refer to a general faltering. For example, in Luke, Jesus also says: ‘I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail (ekleipē)’ – using the same ‘eclipse’ verb.
Humphreys’ solution is ingenious, but it relies on the argument that Jesus died on 14th Nisan, the eve of Passover. The problem is that this flatly contradicts the earlier Synoptic account that Jesus died on the 15th Nisan. As I have argued elsewhere, following many others, I think there is a very strong case that John moved the date to 14th Nisan, so that Jesus could die on the same day that the Passover lambs were slaughtered, thus presenting Jesus as the paschal lamb.2
Where then does this leave us with the darkness that covered the land? As Humphreys observes, there are genuine reasons to think that a darkness could have a natural explanation, even if it has nothing to do with an eclipse. Yet we must also note that the omen of darkness are scattered throughout ancient literature. Thus, if we want to know the meaning of the gospels’ darkness, it is to this that we must take heed.
In the Hebrew Bible, darkness often has strong apocalyptic edge. In texts like Joel 2 and Amos 5, it is used as a symbol of God’s divine judgement. Perhaps in this case then, it is the judgement over Israel for putting God’s anointed one to death. (For a fuller explanation of this motif with respect to Mark, see The Destruction of Jerusalem).
For a more direct parallel, however, we might turn to Graeco-Roman literature, where eclipses could portend a King’s death (Philo, Prov. 2.50). This is illustrated by Virgil’s poetic account of the death of Julius Caesar, which precipitated sixteen unusual phenomena, including prolonged darkness (Georg. 1.466-488). On this reading, the darkness that covered the land fits well with Jesus’ death as ‘King of the Jews’. There, it serves to confirm that Jesus truly is – as the centurion says – the ‘son of God.’
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See Colin J. Humphreys, W. Graeme Waddington. “The Jewish Calendar, a Lunar Eclipse and the Date of Christ’s Crucifixion.” Tyndale Bulletin 43, no. 2 (1992): 331–351; see also Humphreys, Colin J., and W. Graeme Waddington. “Dating the Crucifixion.” Nature 306 (1983): 743–746; Colin J. Humphreys, The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
I wonder if we should also question Humphreys’ argument concerning the blood-red moon. Humphreys relates this to a lunar eclipse, but a reddish moon hardly necessitates an eclipse. In my (limited) understanding, the moon can appear red when it is low on the horizon, affected by factors such as dust. Indeed, if Humphreys is right that a dust storm blotted out the sun, might the same particles have also affected the moon’s colouration? This throws a spanner in the works for dating Jesus’ death using an eclipse.