Having introduced the subject of comparing religions, we will now analyze the first question:

1. Has the religion persuaded a significant fraction of the world population, outside a single ethnic group, to believe in it?

One of the reasons for this question is that few people have time to investigate all of the numerous religions that exist.  (I’ve done more than most people ever will, but there are still huge gaps in my knowledge.)  Since it is not possible to do a complete analysis of every religious tradition, one must have some way of sifting out the more likely candidates from the less likely ones.  Whatever criterion one uses for this sifting, it has to be something which can be measured prior to doing an in-depth investigation.

In persuasive writing, it is generally considered most rhetorically effective to lead with one of your stronger arguments, so that people don’t dismiss your case out of hand.  But here, the nature of the subject requires me to lead with one of the weaker arguments for a religion, namely its popularity.  But it is not so weak that it doesn’t deserve careful consideration.  Later on, we will discuss some more dispositive tests.

Ad populum (appeal to mass belief) is not necessarily a fallacy, when it is used only as a probability argument rather than a deductive argument.  I would never say that a large number of adherents guarantees that a religion is correct; obviously not.  Many completely wrong beliefs (e.g. homeopathy and astrology) still have lots of people who swear by them.  There are, however, some cogent reasons why a true religion is likely to have more adherents than it would if it were false.  So while the fact that a significant fraction of the world population believes in something cannot (taken by itself) be enough reason to accept it, I do think it justifies taking it seriously enough to investigate its truth.

All Else being Equal, Truth is More Convincing

Presumably a true religion is more likely than a false one to be found convincing by a broad range of people.  It is also more likely to be regarded as important enough to share with others.  While human beings are far from infallible, it says something good about a religion if it can pick up a large number of voluntary converts.  At least some people take into account reason and evidence (and any “signs” they may happen to witness) when deciding what to believe; so all else being equal, truth should provide a religion with a survival advantage.  (If this were not true, then there would be very little point in writing blog posts analysing the evidence for or against religion, because nobody would take them into account.)

It is especially impressive if a religion has been found plausible by people from many different cultures and backgrounds.  A religion might take off in a single ethnic group because of some fluke of history.  On the other hand, a multicultural distribution suggests that perhaps the religion contains something true to life, that it is in some way suited to the human condition at large, not just one cultural milieu.  If it has seemed insightful to many kinds of poets, philosophers, and peasants, then it probably contains at least some element of universally valid truth.

A Census of World Religions

If even 1 in a thousand people (worldwide) investigate religions in a sufficiently sensible and open-minded way to identify the truth (whatever it is), then it would follow that the true religion must have at least 7 million adherents or so, which would narrow us down to about a dozen possibilities (according to the website adherents.com in 2014.)  If you scroll down past the pie chart of the first link, you’ll come to the following list:

1. Christianity (2.1 billion)
2. Islam (1.5 billion)
3. Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist (1.1 billion)
4. Hinduism (900 million)
5. Chinese traditional religion (394 million)
6. Buddhism (376 million)
7. primal-indigenous (300 million)
8. African Traditional and Diasporic (100 million)
9. Sikhism (23 million)
10. Juche (19 million)
11. Spiritism (15 million)
12. Judaism (14 million)
13. Baha’i (7 million)
    [+additional religions with 4.2 million religions or fewer]

Of course, many of these categorization decisions are questionable.  Nonreligious is by definition the absence of a religious commitment (although Communism might be regarded as a religious substitute for a substantial minority of these people); Chinese traditional represents various admixtures of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and ancestor worship; indiginous or African traditional are umbrella terms for thousands of different pagan religious traditions (most of which would have less adherents than Baha’i if taken individually); while Juche is just the state ideology of the North Korean dictatorship (which has approximately the same moral credibility as Nazism).  Fringe Christian or Islamic cults might be better regarded as separate religions, and some of them (like Mormonism) I will be treating as separate religions in subsequent posts.  But the exact division is not very important.  The point is that there are really only a small number of options on the table, if you use the rest of humanity to sift out the options that have been found most plausible.

(That being said, if there is some particular religion with fewer adherents that you have some reason to think is specially promising, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t investigate it.  But it is reasonable to start with more popular religions.)

Another Reason to Consider Popularity: Divine Favor

A true religion is also more likely to have divine favor assisting its spread across the world (assuming of course that the religion is theistic).  I don’t want to put too much emphasis on this, since the worship of strength and worldly success is one of the crudest of all religions.  My own religion centers around the Cross, therefore it is (or ought to be) on the side of the unjustly persecuted everywhere.  Might does not make right.  Yet sometimes, when human hearts are receptive, right makes for might.  Truth may be weak, but sometimes this weakness is itself a paradoxical form of strength, as Gandhi showed in India, and the Civil Rights Movement showed in America.

If there is a religion revealed by God, then it is an obvious sociological fact that not everyone on earth has accepted the message.  For whatever reason, it is not the divine will to overawe everyone into accepting it (at least, not yet).  But if it is a genuine revelation, one expects that he would protect and defend it to some extent, at least enough to accomplish whatever goals he has in revealing the message.

At the very least, extinct religions like e.g. Greek or Egyptian polytheism are probably not worth taking very seriously—if those gods are at all real, why would they have allowed their names to be completely forgotten, except as fodder for dissertations, garden statuary, and comic books? It took a lot of kahunas for the prophet Jeremiah, way back in the 600s BC when the Jews were surrounded by polytheists, to taunt the followers of other gods by telling them (in Aramaic, the international language):

“These gods, who did not make the heavens and the earth, will perish from the earth and from under the heavens” (Jer 10:11).

But in quite a large portion of the globe, including of course the Middle East where Jeremiah was prophesying, this is exactly what has happened.  (This process is not yet complete, but if a prophet had predicted that all the world would one day consist of blue-skinned people, and then over the next few centuries half of the people on the planet had turned blue, I would start taking the rest of what he said more seriously, even if it hadn’t yet happened to everyone!)

The Jewish Origins of the Idea of Progress

Historically, it was extremely unusual, in the pre-Christian world, for a religion to predict its own global dominance.  As moderns we think that every ideology should predict a future in which it is more widely successful, but that’s not how most people thought back then.  The ancients usually expected that the world would keep on going more or less as it was before, or maybe keep getting gradually worse.  As Westerners we are used to ideologies having an eschatological aspect—looking forward to a future utopian society that is a radical improvement on the present—but the reason we think this way is precisely because of the influence of Judaism!  (The only other eschatological pre-Christian religion I know of is Zoroastrianism, which presumably either got it from Judaism, or else influenced Judaism in this respect.)

Universal vs. Ethnic Religions

The Jews did not (and still do not) regard it as necessary for pagans to become Israelites in order to be saved.  The Hebrew prophets spoke against idolatry and polytheism, but they foresaw the worldwide acceptance of pure Monotheism as a sign of the future Messianic Era, not as a realistic goal for the present day.

However, at the time of the Roman Empire, there were a large group of “God-fearers”, who came to believe in the truth of Judaism, but did not formally convert due to the burdensome nature of Jewish ritual.  A lot of these people later became Christians, once it became clear that you didn’t have to become a Jew in order to be a full member of the Christian Church.

If this model is right, then God cultivated an ethnic religion for a limited period of time, in order to produce the right circumstances in which the Messiah could come.  But now that he has come, Christianity is a religion for all people, in fulfilment of God’s promises:

“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
to restore the tribes of Jacob
and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
(Isaiah 49:6)

Hence, if we wish to find a worthy rival to Christianity, it should probably be a universal religion, i.e. its message should be sufficiently relevant to the perennial human condition, that it can be adopted by people from every culture and tribe, without completely wrenching them out of their social context.  A religion cannot really be considered cosmic in scope, if it isn’t even able to be cosmopolitan.  This criterion rules out a large number of purely ethnic and tribal religions.

If God were still restricting his message primarily to a single ethnic group, presumably the rest of us would not be judged too harshly for not being in on the program.  Even the insiders might not think you have a moral obligation to join their group.  This makes it a lower priority to investigate ethnic religions such as Judaism or Hinduism (unless of course you happen to belong to one of these groups already).

As the most extreme case of ethnic exclusion, some religions currently forbid conversion altogether, for example traditional Parsees (Zoroastrians in India), and the Druze (in the Middle East).  These religions also forbid their adherents to marry outsiders.  There’s just no way to get in, even if you wanted to!

Other religious traditions teach that God reveals himself through all cultures and therefore it is counterproductive to cast aside your ancestral teachings in favor of theirs.  These religions may discourage converts: for example, a woman from the church I grew up in became interested in Hinduism, and went to India to study under a guru.  He told her to go back to the USA, saying that she wasn’t done being a Christian yet!  I’ve heard other anecdotes along similar lines, so apparently this attitude is fairly common among Hindu teachers.

Then there are various small religions (such as Baha’i, which is right on the edge of my somewhat arbitrary 1/1000 threshold) that are clearly intended to be international in scope, but have failed to achieve a very large number of converts to their cause.

(In some cases this might be because the religion is new.  Of course all religious movements start out small, so we can’t place too much weight on this criterion or it would imply that nobody should have followed Jesus at the beginning, when he only had a few disciples.  At the same time, it seems reasonable to say that an untested charismatic cult leader needs to clear a higher bar than a well-established religious tradition.)

Hence, to score top points on this criterion, it is best to have already convinced a significant fraction of the world.

The Three Big Evangelical Religions

These considerations suggest we should focus the most attention on Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.  These are the 3 world religions which have had the most success in gaining converts even in radically different cultures, the ones whose message has been perceived as “Good News” to numerous people groups around the world.  (But I will still try to say some things about other religions as well, to the extent that my limited knowledge allows.)  To what extent their religious teachings actually are good news—well, that is a subject for the later posts!

Of these three “evangelical” religions, the spread of Islam is somewhat marred by the fact that the early spread of Islam, starting during Mohammad’s lifetime and continuing for several centuries thereafter, was largely due to military action and subsequent cultural imperialism.  Although obviously Muslims would attribute this rapid spread to God’s will, from a human point of view it seems that the sword discriminates among truths far more clumsily than rational discourse does.  (There are however a few countries, such as Indonesia, where the spread of Islam seems to have largely occurred through peaceful means such as trade.)

Of course some Muslim historians will insist that each of these conquests was morally justified by various particular circumstances.  But, to paraphrase a bit of popular wisdom: anyone might meet one or two jerks, but if everyone you meet seems to be a jerk, then you should consider the possibility that you might be the jerk, and they’re just reacting to your personality.  In particular, any group that tries to conquer large parts of the world by the sword, should not be too surprised when the other countries look on with dismay and try to fight back.  (Here I am speaking historically, and not attempting to justify any particular modern wars.)

It actually took several centuries for these conquests to result in a majority for Islam in the Middle East and North Africa.  At first it was mainly the rulers of the conquered lands who were Muslims.  While pagans were required to convert at swordpoint, monotheistic groups such as Jews, Christians, Mandaeans (yes, there still exist followers of John the Baptist who never converted to Christianity!—although by now they have become very gnostic and reject even Moses), and Zoroastrians were generally tolerated, so long as they accepted second-class citizenship (dhimma), paid extra taxes (jizya), and did not try to convert Muslims to their religion.  Over the long run these legal disadvantages gave Islam a decisive advantage.

Mind you, at times the situation for Jews or “heretics” in medieval Europe was even worse than this.  It is easy to find examples of persecution of religious minorities in Christian history.  (Officially speaking, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy only asserted authority over baptized individuals, but sometimes local rulers would impose Christianity on their domains, and then later the Church would try to enforce orthodoxy in these populations since they were now “Christians”.)

Even Buddhists have sometimes engaged in religious persecution, e.g. historically in Japan, and at the present in Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma).  A college friend once tried to argue to me that anyone who persecuted other people wasn’t a real Buddhist and therefore didn’t count.  But this was an obvious use of the No True Scotsman ploy.  In my opinion the Christians who persecuted people weren’t in that respect very good examples of Christianity either, but they still existed.

However, I think it is fair to say that both Christianity and Buddhism usually spread to new cultures primarily through evangelism.  This is especially true in their early years, and also in the contemporary world.

For example, after converting to Buddhism, the Indian king Ashoka (formerly a cruel tyrant) seems to have become a pacifist who promoted religious toleration (although there are some contrary traditions whose accuracy is disputed); his support for missionary activity in other countries helped spread Buddhism to many other nations.  And for the first 3 centuries the Christian Church rapidly expanded, even though it had no control over the government and intermittently went through periods of severe persecution, prior to its legalization by the first Christian Emperor, Constantine.

Of course there were plenty of instances of persecuting others which occurred after these religions were well-established.  But it is open to both Buddhists and Christians to claim that the persecutors were bad examples, that they were ignoring the explicit instructions of their own sacred texts, and ought to have known better.  And perhaps that, in the long run, their religion would have advanced just as well or even better, without the aid of violent support.  It is not really open for a Muslim to say the same thing, because then they would have to disown their own Prophet and his immediate followers.  Of course they can still renounce particular instances of expansion through warfare, as being done in an inappropriate time or manner, but they cannot renounce it on principle.

(Christians do have to deal with divinely commanded warfare in the Old Testament, although this was not for evangelical purposes and was geographically limited.  There was no command to spread Judaism to other nations by conquest!  I will reserve discussion of the ethics of this violence until later, but it does introduce our next topic, namely continuity with other religions.)

Next: Ancient Roots

A while back, a reader named “Martin B” once asked me this question about other religions:

May I ask what it is that makes you think Christianity stands out and is more believable than other religions and faiths on this planet?

In my previous response, I came up with a list of questions to ask to compare religions.  Here they are again:

1. Has the religion persuaded a significant fraction of the world population, outside a single ethnic group, to believe in it?
2. How does the religion relate to previous and subsequent religions?
3. Did the religious founder claim his message came from supernatural revelation, or is it only the reflections of some wise philosopher who didn’t claim to have divine sanction for their teaching?
4. Are the primary texts describing some sort of mythological pre-history, or are they set in historical times?
5. Related, does it sound like fiction, or does it sound like history?
6. How long was it between the time when the supposed supernatural events took place, and when they were first written down (in a document that has had copies of it preserved).  Is it early enough to suggest the text is based on testimony rather than later legends?
7. What are the odds that the purported supernatural events could have occurred for non-supernatural reasons?
8. Did the main witnesses benefit materially from their testimony, or did they suffer for it?
9. Is there significant evidence of fraud among the originators of the religion?
10. What is the general moral character of the religious teaching?
11. Do people who are serious about this religion generally feel that they are put into an actual relationship with the divine?

I will now attempt to answer these questions, both for Christianity and its competitors.

Some disclaimers are probably appropriate.  Obviously there are some religions I know more about than others, and I apologize in advance to any member of another religion if I’ve gotten anything factually wrong.  Corrections are welcome in the comments.

Obviously, in order to say why I think Christianity is more plausible than other religions, I will have to be honest about what I think the shortcomings of other religions are.  In doing this, I do not intend to communicate any disrespect to the adherents of these religions.  I would like to believe as well of everyone as I can, but I am constrained by the truth to give my honest opinion.  I will try to do my best to highlight the good aspects of other religions as well as the problematic aspects.

I do not aim to write from a “neutral” viewpoint (nor do I think there is any such thing on this subject), but I do think I’m fair-minded enough to explore things from other perspectives, yet also—and this is equally important—interested in identifying actual evidence and truth, unlike supposedly “objective” scholars of comparative religion.

Not being interested in the truth of the underlying claims (or at least, interested in imagining what it would be like to care about the truth claims) is actually one of the most subjective ways to study a religion, in my opinion.  Because it sidesteps or brackets the thing most essential to most actual religious believers, it has a tendency to end up comparing superficial cultural similarities and differences, rather than getting to the heart of the matter.

And I am certainly not trying to evangelize my own culture.  I do not want everyone to share my own culture, but Christ.  Christian missionary work is not about the Imperial impulse, getting other people to give up their own culture, in order to learn Greek or English and become Europeans or Americans; no, it is about bringing Christ into every culture, to transform it into what God created it to be.  Certain specific cultural traditions may need to be changed because they are unjust or idolatrous—but that applies to Western culture as well!  The point of missionary work is to introduce other cultures to Jesus and let him show them what needs to change so that they can truly be themselves, not to make them over into the image of another group of people.

Some Christian missionaries have made the Imperial mistake in the past, but I think they’ve mostly figured it out by now.  I have seen many missionaries give presentations at churches about their foreign work, and almost down to the last man and woman, they have all seemed far more excited to share what they’ve learned about foreign cultures with Americans, then to spread American culture anywhere.  It is Jesus and the Gospel which they want to share, not Western culture in general.  (The one major exception is Western medicine, another type of “good news” which is beneficial to everyone, and which most missionaries are also very interested in sharing with other cultures.)

Please bear in mind that I’m trying to paint in really broad strokes here, because otherwise each of these questions would have to be a book in its own right.  So if I say that a religion is “primarily based” on something or other, or I summarize its teachings very briefly, I expect that there are plenty of nuances which I’m glossing over; due to my misperceptions as an outsider, different sects adopting different interpretations, and so on.  There is certainly potential for bias in my descriptions, but I still think these comparisons are worth doing.  Even near-sighted people can usually tell the difference between an elephant, a dog, and a rat.

While I may occasionally mention them, I will not be too concerned with the theological differences between different Christian denominations in this series.  I believe that what Christians share in common is far more important than what separates us.  (Here I am referring to geoups that actually believe in the supernatural claims of the New Testament, and have the mainstream Christian view about the basic nature of God and Jesus.  Fringe groups like Mormonism are probably better thought of as separate religions.)

In some ways, the internal differences within non-Christian religions are actually more significant for this project, because when a dispute between Christians is important, if need be I can simply defend the viewpoint I find most plausible.  But if there is a division inside of a non-Christian religion, in priciple one would need to investigate every possible permutation of the other religion to find the most plausible version.  This task is particularly vexatious in the case of Hinduism, which I am not sure should even be regarded as a single religion!  (Since you can find Hindu sects with basically all possible positions on the nature of divinity and its relation to the world.)  In other cases, I am going to try to keep things simple by focussing on the religious founder and trying to identify what form of the religion he (or she) taught, even though it’s conceivable that the version that is most “authentic” to the founders intentions might not always be the version that is most true or beneficial.

Note that I will be discussing a fairly large number of criteria in the blog posts that follow, and it is not necessarily obvious which criteria are the most important.  Hence, even if I seem to “eliminate” a religion from consideration in one blog post, I may nevertheless continue to discuss that religion in future blog posts.

I am particularly grateful to my friend and fellow physicist Ahmed (of firewalls fame) for several conversations on Islam which have significantly benefitted my understanding.  I consider myself to have much more important things in common with him, than with any of the run-of-the-mill irreligious physicists I know.  Of course the views I express are my own, and so are any mistakes!

When irreligious skeptics in America bring up other religions as an objection to Christianity, it seems to me that they are quite frequently arguing in obvious bad faith.  When they look for parallels to the claims of Christ in some other religion, it is really to argue against Christ, and not because they actually take seriously, for one minute, the idea that some exotic foreign cult leader might actually turn out to be the true prophet sent by God.  If they did take these other religions seriously as rivals to Christianity, I think they would approach the question with far more caution, and would inevitably find themselves making distinctions between the plausibility of different ideas.

(Surely it is horrendously unlikely that all religions would have exactly equal plausibility.  Even if they were all fake, some fakes are a lot more convincing than others!  And you can’t possibly know they’re all fake, until you’ve investigated them carefully.)

At this point I should also mention another “skeptical” approach to evaluating religions which I think has very little merit, just to get it out of the way.  And that is to read the scriptures of a religion solely for the purpose of compiling a long list of “contradictions” that supposely disprove the books in question.  The main problem with this approach is that, generally speaking, the “worse” of a reader you are (i.e. superficial, hostile, and literal-minded) the more seeming contradictions you will find.  In other words, this is an approach which rewards poor reading.  And as St. Lewis remarked in one of his Narnia books, “the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”  (Of course, this approach is even sillier when done by followers of another religion, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their own holy book might be subjected to the same treatment.)

You have to give a text an chance, “suspending your disbelief” and savoring its taste on your tongue, even in order to find out what it is really saying.  Only then can you judge whether the ideas in it are sound or not.  This goes doubly for texts that were written a long time ago, where the authors lived in a completely different cultural milieu from our own.  Any historian worth his salt knows that even very accurate historical texts can contain puzzling statements, which may be difficult for us to reconcile with the rest of our knowledge about the period (but the resolution might have been transparently obvious to those who lived through the events, perhaps so obvious that they didn’t bother explaining it).

And when it comes to the more intangible spiritual or ethical truths, only a fool would automatically reject any hint of paradox or tension between opposing ideas.  That’s like saying that because your left eye and your right eye show slightly different images, you have to disbelieve either the one or the other, or both.  The better option is to combine both images, and then you can see in 3D!

This does not imply that all religious ideas are equally valid, either historically or philosophically.  At the end of the day, there might be irresolvable contradictions in a putative religious system.  But you should always make sure to criticize the essence of what is being said, rather than sniping at superficial “gotchas”.

For these reasons, I find it’s usually far more interesting and productive to have conversations about religious disagreements with an actual believer of another religion.  In this case, neither participant can “win” simply by retreating into a bottomless pit of endless skepticism, since each person also has something they wish to defend!

Next: World Evangelism

[Warning: this post is longer than usual…]

Some readers left some comments about the 3 hour midday darkness which the Gospels report happened during the Crucifixion of Jesus.

St Andy:

I believe God uses natural processes to do His work. Actually, He defines those processes!  This means that when a blood moon rose at Christ’s crucifixion, God planned it billions of years ago as rocks and plasma tumbled through space, so the moon would rise in an eclipse on 1 special day.

St. James:

Andy wrote about the crucifixion and the described eclipse; I believe 3 of the gospels state that the sun darkened. Historical records outside of the gospels do not mention an eclipse. It seems that an eclipse during a full moon would be something that would be recorded somewhere. I understand that sky darkening may be attributed to literary technique. There seems to be alot of conflicting information within the bible, how does one know when a conflict is important or when information is symbolic? (in regards to an eclipse, if that happened and that was a recorded event around the world it would be amazing)

It’s natural to wonder about this sort of thing, but one shouldn’t presuppose a given conclusion in advance!  Wikipedia says in a peremptory way that “Modern scholars see the darkness as a literary creation rather than a historical event,” but this might tell us more about modern scholars’ attitudes towards miracle claims then it tells us about the actual historical evidence…

I. Some dogs that didn’t bark

Let’s start with the obvious negative.  The Chinese were much more meticulous than the West in recording astronomical phenomena such as eclipses (their records being very accurate but not perfect).  China is about 4-6 timezone-hours east of Jerusalem so if the Darkness had been worldwide (as opposed to say, just Jerusalem or just the Roman empire) they should have been able to notice and record it!   So this probably means that the Darkness could not have extended all the way to China.

[Update: there is discussion of potentially confirming Chinese evidence in the comments section starting here, although I don’t think I buy it because the relevant texts refer to AD 31, which is a problematic date for the Crucifixion due to the timing of Passover.  The discussion also indicates that there were, in fact, records of eclipses being kept during the relevant time period.  I am grateful to commenter St. Zion for providing this information.]

The Darkness is also not mentioned by any contemporary Roman historians in surviving works.  Which ones might reasonably have mentioned it, given the nature of their works and the degree to which they have been preserved?  Consulting Wikipedia’s List of Historians, I think the only historians on this list with sufficient scope, writing at the correct time period, are Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus.  (And if the Darkness were confined to Jerusalem, perhaps it falls only within the potential scope of Josepehus’ work.)

The fact that these historians didn’t mention the event provides some evidence that the event didn’t happen.  But not an enormous amount—this is the infamously dangerous Argument from Silence, after all.

You might ask: “But if there were a huge miracle refuting Naturalism and proving Christianity to be true, why wouldn’t everyone write extensively about it?”  But that’s a very modernish thing to say.  The ancients were not as aware of all possible causes of climate phenomena as we are, and they also mostly thought that supernatural omens did occur from time to time for various reasons.  They were generally not philosophical Naturalists in the modern sense, and even those that were (like the Epicureans) probably thought a great many things possible which we now believe to be impossible.

Most people, hearing about the Darkness, probably would have said something like: “Huh, that’s weird” and then went and thought about something else, more politically interesting.  You know, like people do.  Except for those who later read the Gospels, there would not necessarily be any particular reason to connect the event to the crucifixion of a Jewish prophet occurring elsewhere at the same time.

Pliny the Elder (23-79) was not a historian, but he was a naturalist (in the other sense, a keen observer of nature) who was interested in astronomical events, and what he wrote about the subject is telling:

Eclipses of the sun also take place which are portentous and unusually long, such as occurred when Cæsar the Dictator was slain, and in the war against Antony, the sun remained dim for almost a whole year.

Apparently this event was also recorded by Plutarch, Tibullus, and Suetonius, so it seems likely this account is based on some real phenomenon.  It was obviously not an actual solar eclipse, but rather some meteorological phenomenon, perhaps related to vulcanism.  Anyway, far from denying the existence of the Darkness at Calvary, he makes it sound like he was aware of additional examples of strange eclipses, and quotes this one as just the most notable example.

So at this point skeptics need to choose their tactic: one cannot consistently argue both (a) that various pagan parallels to the Darkness show that this is the sort of unreliable story the ancients made up all the time, and (b) that the Darkness would have been so amazing to the ancients, that it would have been mentioned by all of them as one of the most notable events to have ever occurred.

II. The positive historical sources

On the other hand, it is also not true that “Historical records outside of the gospels do not mention an eclipse.”  Actually, two different early non-Christian Roman historians, Thallus (1st or 2nd century AD) and Phlegon of Tralles (2nd century AD) both appear to have mentioned the Darkness.  In addition, Tertullian claims that the Darkness was noted in the official Roman annals.

Unfortunately, like many other ancient books, these writings have not survived, but they are referenced or quoted by other sources.  These later sources are Christian authors, so a skeptic might accuse them of simply making up these other sources.  That seems implausible to me in this case, but the possibility must be taken into account.  Obviously this evidence would be more impressive if the original works had actually survived, but it is wrong to say that there are no historical records which mention the event.  So the evidence is not as strong as it might be, but it is there.

In addition, we have the evidence of the Gospels themselves, which are after all historical documents with actual historical data, and which scholars with no bone to pick often use to establish facts about first century Judaism.  Skeptics often mock when Christians say things like “X is true because the Bible says so”, saying that this is circular reasoning.  But they don’t seem to have problems with arguments like “X is true because Josephus says so”, and nobody thinks Josephus was divinely inspired.  Even if we decide to treat the Bible just like we treat any other historical sources, we still have to go and do that!  A demand by skeptics that events should be believed in only if they are mentioned by nonbiblical sources, is just as unreasonable as when Christians expect those not yet converted to Christianity to accept things just because they are in the Bible.

For example, when people say “Luke must be wrong about the timing of the Census of Quirinius, because it disagrees with Josephus”, it never seems to occur to them that Josephus might be wrong, when he disagrees with St. Luke.  If it were two secular historians, both of these scenarios would presumably be considered equally likely.  (Or more likely still, if we knew everything that both historians knew, we would see how the contradiction could be resolved with both of them being right somehow).

II.A. Biblical Sources

Let’s back up a bit and look at our earliest Biblical documentation for this event:

“I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight.
I will turn your religious festivals into mourning
and all your singing into weeping.
I will make all of you wear sackcloth
and shave your heads.
I will make that time like mourning for an only son
and the end of it like a bitter day.” (Amos 8:9-10)

Oops!  We seem to have backed up a bit too far.  This is actually a prophecy from the 8th century BC prophet Amos.  Some skeptical scholars are happy to accuse the Gospel writers of just putting in fulfilled prophecies without regard to whether they actually happened.  But we can’t just decide in advance it didn’t happen, we need to decide based on the evidence.

The earliest Gospel, that of St. Mark, says:

It was the third hour [9 am] when they crucified him…

At the sixth hour [noon], darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour [3 pm].  And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”(which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”…

With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.  The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.  And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:25, 33-34, 38-39)

Apart from not telling us when the Crucifixion began, the Gospel of St. Matthew is similar but adds that there was an Earthquake and also a mini-Resurrection:

The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.  They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.  (Matt 27:51-53)

We can tell that this account isn’t based solely on copying Mark, because more details are added.  While the curtain being torn, and the account of other dead people besides Jesus being resurrected and appearing to people (presumably only to certain people and only temporarily, as in the case of Jesus) are remarkable, we will primarily be focussing on the Darkness and the Earthquake as the two signs which might have been observable to those outside the city.  St. Luke has:

It was now about the sixth hour [noon], and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour [3 pm], for the sun stopped shining.  And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.  (Luke 23:44-46)

Apparently there is some textual discrepancy concerning the bold piece: in some early manuscripts St. Luke says that the “sun was eclipsed“.  But in any case the event couldn’t possibly have been a normal solar eclipse, since these always occur at a New Moon while Passover (being the 15th of Nisan on a lunar calendar) always occurs during a full moon.

Furthermore, a total solar eclipse lasts for at most 7-and-a-half minutes, while this event is stated to have occurred over 3 hours.  (Ancient people, not having watches, generally were not nearly so precise about time measurements as we are, but you’d think they could tell the difference between minutes and hours.)

From other biblical data, we know that the two possible years for Jesus’ death were AD 30 and 33.  (It can’t have been 31 or 32 seeing that Jesus was crucified on a Friday on or just before Passover.)  But according to NASA, there was no total (or annular) solar eclipse scheduled on either year anywhere in the Roman world (the nearest being in November, AD 29; in the right place and the wrong time).   Hence, if the Gospel accounts (or the extrabiblical sources reviewed below) are accurate, it can only have been a miraculous and/or meteorological phenomenon, not a true solar eclipse of the type that always takes place at the new moon.

There may possibly also be a reference to the Darkness in the book of Acts, also by St. Luke.  In his first sermon preaching the Resurrection on the Jewish Feast of Pentecost 50 days after Jesus’ Resurrection, St. Peter quoted from the prophet St. Joel:

Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose.  It’s only nine in the morning!  No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

 ‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood
before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.
And everyone who calls
on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

“Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.  This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.  But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.  (Acts 2:14-24)

The quotation from Joel is all about how God is going to pour out the Spirit, in a way that transcends gender and class divisions, but it also has this suggestive bit about the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood.  Presumably if the sun actually had been darkened at the Crucifixion, this would help explain why Peter chose this passage and why a lot of people responded.

On the other hand, there isn’t any documented evidence of a blood moon (a moon with a reddish appearance) around the time of the Crucifixion.  Apparently there was a partial eclipse that evening, which some claim could have resulted in the moon appearing red, however, this does not seem terribly plausible.  The most apparently sober-minded refutation of this claim I could easily find is from Answers in Genesis of all places, a Young Earth Creationist (i.e. crazy science) website which I cannot recommend getting any scientific fact from.  But if even they think the Blood-Moon/Lunar-eclipse theory is implausible, it probably is.  Which is not to say there couldn’t have been a red-colored moon (for any number of atmospheric reasons, not to mention miracles) but we have no historical evidence for this.

[Update 5/27/16: I feel slightly differently about this now, than when I wrote that paragraph.  There’s no particular astronomical reason I know of to think the moon would have appeared red, but there are a variety of reasons why it might have.  And it is somewhat striking that there was a regularly scheduled partial lunar eclipse on the same night as the miraculous solar “eclipse” that is the main subject of this post.]

II.B. Thallus

Now for the nonbiblical sources.  First, Thallus, as referenced by St. Sextus Julius Africanus, as quoted in turn by St. George Syncellus.  This third-hand reference is obviously not ideal in terms of evidence, but as far as I can tell ancient historians are willing to take this type of historical evidence seriously in non-supernatural contexts.

Now Thallus was a historian who wrote a series of history books in Greek.  Unfortunately these books are lost and we only have fragments recorded by other authors, but there’s enough of those to make it clear he was a real and respected historian.  Some people identify him with a Samaritan “Thallus” which would place him in the first century, but apparently the evidence for this is weak.  As his Wikipedia article says:

The identification sometimes made with a certain Thallus of Samaria who is mentioned in some editions of Josephus‘ Antiquities (18.167) fails because that name only appears in those editions because of an idiosyncratic alteration of the text by John Hudson in 1720. Until Hudson’s time all texts had ALLOS (meaning “another”) not THALLOS.

On the other hand, he can be no later than the 2nd century since he is quoted in Tertullian’s Apologeticus (197 AD).

There is also a question about when Thallus’ history actually ended.  Again Wikipedia informs us:

Eusebius of Caesarea in a list of sources mentions his work:

From the three books of Thallus, in which he collects (events) briefly from the fall of Ilion to the 167th Olympiad.

However the text is preserved in an Armenian translation where many of the numerals are corrupt. The fall of Troy is 1184 BC, but the editors, Petermann and Karst, highlight that the end-date of the 167th Olympiad (109 BC) is contradicted by George Syncellus, who quotes Julius Africanus, and suggest that the end-date should read “217th Olympiad”, a change of one character in Armenian.

So we have a bit of an issue in that, on the one hand the supposed quote from Thallus seems to be later than when St. Eusebius said the book ended; on the other hand this could easily have been a numerical corruption.  And obviously the end date has to be later, if people are quoting stuff from the book coming from after 109 BC.

Since Syncellus’s text also mentions Phlegon, I’ll introduce him before providing the quote.

II.C. Phlegon

Second, Phlegon of Tralles.  He was a a freedman of the emperor Hadrian and a historian who lived during the 2nd century, who seems to have been particularly interested in marvels and rare events, his two extant works being On Marvels and On Long-Lived Persons.  I haven’t read through either of them, but if you look at the blurb for this modern translation of the Marvels book, I think you’ll get the idea:

The Book of Marvels, a compilation of marvellous events of a grotesque, bizarre or sensational nature, was composed in the second century A.D. by Phlegon of Tralles, a Greek freedman of the Roman emperor Hadrian. This remarkable text is the earliest surviving work of pure sensationalism in Western literature. The Book is arranged thematically: Ghosts; Sex-Changers and Hermaphrodites; Finds of Giant Bones; Monstrous Births; Births from Males; Amazing Multiple Births; Abnormally Rapid Development of Human Beings; Discoveries of Live Centaurs.

While it might be a bit embarrassing to Christians that the Darkness ended up being written up by the Roman equivalent of a tabloid author, you might also ask, what other type of Roman genre would it end up in?

Well, actually it seems to have ended up, not in the tabloid book but in his (presumably more serious, but who can say?) Collection of Chronicles and List of Olympian Victors instead (a book reviewed here by Photius I, Bishop of Constantinople).  Phlegon’s discussion of the Darkness and the Earthquake is quoted/paraphrased by at least 8 different later authors (Sts. Africanus, Origen, Eusebius, Apollinaris—yes the heretical one, Philopon, Malalas, Agapius, and Michael the Syrian).  The variety of authors quoting him, with broad consistency about certain details, makes it highly probable that he wrote something very similar to what is attributed to him.

Phlegon seems to have mentioned both the Darkness and the Earthquake.  (St. Michael, the latest of these authors, claims that Phlegon also mentioned the Resurrection of the Dead in Jerusalem, but I think this is very suspicious and should probably be discounted.)

Assessing the relevance of this evidence from a Bayesian perspective, I think it is highly relevant that Phlegon added additional material, which cannot have come from the Gospels, e.g. buildings toppling in Nicea (same town where the deity of Christ was affirmed in the Nicene Creed).  This indicates that he had some other source for the Darkness, besides simply believing whatever was related in the Christian Gospels.  Indeed, it is unclear if the original Phlegon text actually mentioned Jesus or the Gospels as being connected with the Darkness and Earthquake (although St. Origen tells us that Phlegon did write about Jesus in his Chronicles).

II.D. Enough stalling, show me the quotes!

Now for the actual money quotes, the first several of which can be found at this online compilation at textexcavation.com, but I found some more, which were missed by that guy.  Roughly in chronological order of the primary Christian source:

1. St. George Syncellus (9th century) quotes this except from St. Sextus Julius Africanus (c. 160 – c. 240) which mentions both Thallus and Phlegon:

On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down.  This darkness Thallus in the third book of his History, calls, as appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun.  For the Hebrews celebrate the Passover on the 14th day according to the moon, and the passion of our Saviour falls on the day before the Passover; but an eclipse of the sun takes place only when the moon comes under the sun.  And it cannot happen at any other time but in the interval between the first day of the new moon and the last of the old, that is, at their junction: how then should an eclipse be supposed to happen when the moon is almost diametrically opposite the sun?  Let that opinion pass however; let it carry the majority with it; and let this portent of the world be deemed an eclipse of the sun, like others a portent only to the eye. Phlegon records that, in the time of Tiberius Caesar, at full moon, there was a full eclipse of the sun from the sixth hour [noon] to the ninth [3:00]—manifestly that one of which we speak.  But what has an eclipse in common with an earthquake, the rending of rocks, and the resurrection of the dead, and so great a perturbation throughout the universe?  Surely no such event as this is recorded for a long period.  But it was a darkness induced by God, because the Lord happened then to suffer.

Some points to notice here are that:

a) Thallus is not directly quoted but is merely mentioned as having tried to explain the Darkness as a solar eclipse (which is obviously wrong).  Now people don’t usually insert totally fake critical arguments into their works in order to refute them.  Unfair caricatures and straw man arguments, sure.  But that’s different from totally making up a counter-argument and stuffing it into somebody’s mouth.  So Thallus very probably said something along these lines.

b) We don’t know for sure whether Thallus obtained the information about the eclipse independently or was just responding to the Gospels.  But given his attempt to explain it as a solar eclipse, he seems to have believed the Darkness was a real event, not an invention of the Christians.

c) Information from Phlegon is also mentioned, but it does not seem to be a direct quote.  Some of the quotes below mention the 6th hour but not the 9th hour, so it is possible that Africanus got carried away and interpolated that information from the Gospels.

[Another discussion of this passage is by St. William Lane Craig here.  I cribbed the translation from his website but there’s an alternate translation at texcavation.]

2. St. Origen, in his book (248) arguing against the 2nd century anti-Christian writer Celsus, writes that:

And with regard to the eclipse in the time of Tiberius Caesar, in whose kingship Jesus appears to have been crucified, and the great earthquakes which then took place, Phlegon too, I think, has written in the thirteenth or fourteenth book of his Chronicles.

Previously, in the same book, he tells us Phlegon mentioned Christ in another context:

Now Phlegon, in the thirteenth or fourteenth book, I think, of his Chronicles, not only ascribed to Jesus a knowledge of future events (although falling into confusion about some things which refer to Peter, as if they referred to Jesus), but also testified that the result corresponded to His predictions.

and he later summarizes by saying that

He imagines also that both the earthquake and the darkness were an invention; but regarding these, we have in the preceding pages, made our defence, according to our ability, adducing the testimony of Phlegon, who relates that these events took place at the time when our Saviour suffered.

The most natural construction of the last sentence is that Phlegon said the Darkness occurred during Christ’s Crucifixion, but it is possible that Origen merely means that Phlegon gave the time, and it happens to agree.

But Origen’s testimony regarding Phlegon cuts both ways, because in his commentary on Matthew (available in bad pdf scans of the Latin here), he also says that

Phlegon indeed has given some account in his Chronicles, of an eclipse that was in the reign of Tiberius Caesar, but he never intimated that this was at the full moon.

and in this commentary he argues that the events at the passion had to be localized in Jerusalem, in order to account for it not being noticed elsewhere!

It’s unclear why Origen took such radically different tactics in these two books (and we don’t know which he wrote first).  But if we accept his statement that Phlegon didn’t write about it taking place at the full moon, this would impeach the reliability of Syncellus/Africanus (#1) as well as that of Apollinaris (#4), both of whom assert that Phlegon did say it happened at the full moon.

If only we had somebody who had preserved the actual quote… oh wait, it seems we just might:

3. St. Jerome‘s Latin translation of St. Eusebius‘ Chronicle (c. 380), which appears to include a direct quote from Phlegon, says that:

Jesus Christ, according to the prophecies which had been foretold about him beforehand, came to his passion in the eighteenth year of Tiberius, at which time also we find these things written verbatim in other commentaries of the gentiles, that an eclipse of the sun happened, Bithynia was shaken by earthquake, and in the city of Nicaea many buildings collapsed, all of which agree with what occurred in the passion of the savior. Indeed Phlegon, who is an excellent calculator of Olympiads, also writes about these things, writing thus in his thirteenth book:

In the fourth year, however, of Olympiad 202 [32-33 AD]  an eclipse of the sun happened, greater and more excellent than any that had happened before it; at the sixth hour, day turned into dark night, so that the stars were seen in the sky, and an earthquake in Bithynia toppled many buildings of the city of Nicaea.

These things [are according to] the aforementioned man.

a) The Phlegon quote seems to show no familiarity with the Gospels, instead adding detail from Bithynia (now in Turkey).  Nicea is 670 miles away from Jerusalem, but it is only 22 minutes west as the sun travels, making the change in time zone unimportant.

b) Note that the Olympics took place in the summer, and Passover was in the Spring, so 32-33 matches one of the two possible years for Jesus’ death.  So if Phlegon’s date is correct, the event described cannot in any case have been a normal solar eclipse.

c) This version does not say anything about the full moon or the ninth hour, but it does say that the Darkness began at noon, and that the eclipse was notable, being greater and darker than any other on record, and that there was also an earthquake, albeit one whose epicenter was hundreds of miles away.  (I suppose this could just mean an unrelated earthquake taking place in the same year, but their placement in the same sentence suggests that the events were related.)  A major earthquake can be felt hundreds of miles away, the exact distance depending on the area.

d) By pluralizing “commentaries of the gentiles”, St. Eusebius indicates that he has access to other sources besides Phlegon (perhaps Thallus?).

e) Eusebius’ Chronicles were also translated into Armenian, but I was unable to find an English translation of the relevant portion online.

4. (St?) Apollinaris of Laodicea (c. 315-c. 390), commenting on Matthew in a work preserved only in fragments [missed by texcavation.com], as quoted in this book, says that:

Now a certain Phlegon, a philosopher among the Greeks, recollects this darkness as an incredible occurrence in the fourteenth [night] of the moon, when an eclipse should not have appeared . . . for eclipses occur at the time when the two stars [the sun and the moon] draw near to one another.   An eclipse of the sun happens at the conjunction of the sun and the moon as it runs into its way.  This is not the time of the full moon, when the sun is diametrically opposite to the moon.  But the eclipse occurred as creation mourned over what had happened, signifying that the drunken behavior of the Jews was linked to a darkened mind.

5. St. John Philoponus (490 – 570), notable for his physics work contributing towards a theory of inertia, wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s view that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, saying:

But this view is completely erroneous, and our view may be completely corroborated by actual observation more effectively than by any sort of verbal argument. For if you let fall from the same height two weights, one many times heavier than the other you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend on the weights, but that the difference in time is very small.

Ahem!  What I actually meant to tell you, is that in a different book “On the Creation of the World”, he wrote:

And of this darkness… Phlegon also made mention in the [book of] Olympiads.  For he says that in the fourth year of Olympiad 202 an eclipse of the sun happened, of a greatness never formerly known, and at the sixth hour of the day it was night, so that even the stars in heaven appeared.  And it is clear that it was the eclipse of the sun that happened while Christ the master was on the cross that Phlegon mentioned, and not another, first from his saying that such an eclipse was not known in former times, …and also [because] it is shown from the history itself concerning Tiberius Caesar.  For Phlegon says that he became king in the second year of Olympiad 19{8}, but the eclipse happened in the fourth year of Olympiad 202.

a) The first mention of “fourth” is really just a δ (the letter delta) in the Greek text, which was the standard way of writing the numeral “4” in Greek.  According to textcavation, one translator thought this was short for δευτερω (second), but this contradicts the later part of the text (not to mention the other versions of the Phlegon passage).

6.  St. John Malalas (c. 491 – 578), an unreliable historian (apparently he often reports legends), offers in his Chronographia the following version of the Phlegon quotation:

The most learned Phlegon of Athens has written about this darkness as follows:

“In the 18th year of the reign of Tiberius Caeser, there was a very great eclipse of the sun, greater than any that had been known before.  Night prevailed at the sixth hour of the day so that even the stars appeared.”

a) Malalas’ has written “18th year of Tiberius” into the text even though the others generally indicate that Phlegon dated using Olympiads.  So this does not appear to be an exact quotation despite its form.

b) The text reads like a slightly abridged version of Jerome/Eusebius (#3 above).  It is quite possible that Malalas copied it directly from there without consulting Phlegon himself.

[Added Malalas 5/30/16, numbering of subsequent items increased accordingly.]

Now for some later (perhaps less reliable) sources:

7.  St. Agapius of Hierapolis (10th century), an Arabic Christian, writes (texcavation took the translation from this book):

We have found in many books of the philosophers that they refer to the day of crucifixion of Christ, and that they marvel thereat.  The first of them is the philosopher Inflātūn, who says in the thirteenth chapter of the book he has written on the kings: In the reign of Caesar, the sun was darkened and there was night in [for?] nine hours; and the stars appeared.  And there was a great and violent earthquake in Nicea and in all the towns that surround it.  And strange things happened.

a) Inflātūn is apparently the standard Arabic for “Plato”, presumably a mistaken rendering of Plegon’s name.

b) If the Darkness lasted nine hours, that would be a discrepancy with the other accounts (and the Gospels).  Could this be a misinterpretation of something like “until the ninth hour”?

8.  St. Michael the Syrian (12th century) tells us that

Phlegon, a secular philosopher, has written thus: The sun grew dark, and the earth trembled; the dead resurrected and entered into Jerusalem and cursed the Jews.  In the work which he wrote concerning the time of the Olympiads, he said in the thirteenth book: In the fourth year of the third [?] Olympiad, there was a darkness at the sixth hour of the day, a Friday, and the stars appeared.  Nicea and the entire region of Bithynia were shaken, and many other places were overturned.

a) The “third” Olympiad must be an error, since that would be 764-763 BC.

b) St. Michael mentions that it occurred on a Friday (the day of the week when Jesus was crucified), which if taken from Phlegon’s account would be an additional compatibility with the Gospels.

c) His account also mentions the dead coming out of their tombs in Jerusalem.  But if this was really in Phlegon, it is highly surprising that none of the other authors mention this confirmation of St. Matthew’s Gospel!  (Africanus mentions it, but it seems to be his own statement.)  The bit where they proceed to curse the Jews also seems over the top, and my guess is that this indicates a certain amount of distortion from the original text, indicating the presence of some telephone-game type additions.  But some of the other details are similar to the other texts.

d) Apparently this work is also notable for describing two other Darknesses, which occurred in 536 and 626 AD.  These were qualitatively different phenomena (partial obscurement of the sun lasting for months) and seem to have been correlated with volcanic eruptions occurring in those years.

II.E. The Roman annals

For completeness, I should also mention an additional possible reference to the Darkness, as related by St. Tertullian (160-220), in his Apology addressed to the “rulers of the Roman Empire”, also writes of the Darkness at Christ’s Crucifixion:

And yet, nailed upon the cross, He exhibited many notable signs, by which His death was distinguished from all others. At His own free-will, He with a word dismissed from Him His spirit, anticipating the executioner’s work. In the same hour, too, the light of day was withdrawn, when the sun at the very time was in his meridian blaze. Those who were not aware that this had been predicted about Christ, no doubt thought it an eclipse. You yourselves have the account of the world-portent still in your archives.

Tertullian writes with confidence, apparently believing that those he writes to would be able to look it up for themselves.  (This appeal is similar to that of St. Justin Martyr, who claims that the miracles of Christ were documented in the “Acts of Pontius Pilate”, although Justin makes no reference to the Darkness.)  Unsurprisingly, these Roman records have no longer been preserved.

By the 4th century, various fake accounts from Pontius Pilate began to circulate to meet the needs of Christian (and anti-Christian) apologetics.  These are all forgeries; they show obvious dependence on the Gospels and read more like biblical fan-fiction than what a neutral observer might be expected to write.  However, none of the currently extant Acts of Pontius Pilate seems to be the document Tertullian was referring to.

Thus there is a possibility that legitimate government records of these events were still in existence at the time Tertullian wrote.  (However, there are other claims Tertullian makes, about the report Pilate sent to Tiberius Caesar and its reception in Rome, which are sufficiently implausible to cast some doubt on the accuracy of Tertullian’s sources.)

III. Carrier essay

There is a widely circulated essay on the Darkness by the atheist activist Richard Carrier, which you can find here.  [There also exists a peer-reviewed version which is substantially different.]

(As an aside, I have difficulty respecting the historical judgement of anyone capable of doubting the historical existence of Jesus—I don’t mean his miracles and divinity and so on, I mean the existence of a man named Jesus who started the Christian movement.  Even skeptical New Testament scholars like Bart Ehrman think this “Jesus myth” idea is totally bonkers.  Note that, consulting Wikipedia’s List of Historians again, of the near-contemporary historians with completely extant works covering the right place and time (Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, the 4 Gospels, and Acts), all but one of them mentions Jesus!

Even if you think that the references to Jesus by the historians Josephus and Tacitus were interpolations by Christians, here’s a little hint: if there were no Jesus, where did all of those Christian followers making these interpolations come from???  Did a bunch of Jews and Greeks start a club to eat bread together for no reason, and then just woke up one day and spontaneously said to each other, let’s invent a Founder?  And, just to offend everyone and get made fun of, let’s say that he was crucified by the Romans on behest of the Jews!)

In his essay on the Darkness, Carrier makes several good points, which I have incorporated into my analysis above, about the dating of Thallus and the relevance of St. Origen’s comments.

However, he combines this with some dubious textual reconstructions of the texts above.  For example, after condemning another scholar’s substitution of THALLOS for ALLOS as being too speculative, he makes the same substitution himself elsewhere (but in the opposite direction) to get the result he wants!

In another place, he writes that:

This quotation [of Eusebius, #3 above] shows that Phlegon did not mention Jesus in this context at all (he may still have mentioned him in some other obscure context, if we believe Origen). Rather, Phlegon merely recorded a great earthquake in Bithynia, which is on the coast of the Black Sea, more than 500 miles away from Jerusalem–so there is no way this quake would have been felt near the crucifixion–and a magnificent noontime eclipse, whose location is not clear. If the eclipse was also in Bithynia, as the Phlegon quote implies but does not entail, it also could not have been seen in Jerusalem, any more than partially, since the track of a total eclipse spans only 100 miles and runs from west to east (Jerusalem is due south).

In fact, the only coincidence with the gospel story is the year (although some modern scholars calculate the eclipse in question to have actually occurred in 29 AD) and time: it began at the sixth hour. Prigent suspects this last detail is a corruption by another scribe drawing from the gospel stories, although a noon eclipse is particularly startling and might get special mention (although the total eclipse would only occur at noon in one location–are we to suppose it was in Nicaea?). What is most important, however, is that Phlegon says nothing about the eclipse occuring during a full moon or lasting three hours (both physical impossibilities), yet these details are attributed to him in the lines added to Africanus. Clearly the quote has been altered over time.

In addition to what appears to be an error about how far away earthquakes can be felt (as discussed above), these paragraphs suffer from an acute case of “methodological naturalism”, a presupposition that all historical texts should be interpreted without making reference to anything supernatural.  Carrier assumes throughout that the eclipse recorded by Phlegon was an ordinary one, despite the fact that Phlegon presented it as a highly unusual event, more notable than any other recorded eclipse.  If we want to know whether a miracle in the Gospels was noticed by other people, it is counterproductive simply to point out that the event could not have happened naturally.  That would be making the Christians’ own case for us, that God was at work.

And the fact that the Phlegon quote doesn’t mention Jesus at all makes it stronger evidence of the Gospel record, not weaker!  That’s because it makes it more likely that Phlegon was relying on independent reports, rather than simply repeating the claims of early Christians.  However well this fits in with Carrier’s later project of trying to delete Jesus from the records of history, I think he’s missed the point here.

Furthermore, there was no ordinary solar eclipse in the year mentioned by Phlegon.  Carrier mentions the possibility of redating the Phlegon event to AD 29 (which would be the first year of the 202nd Olympiad) in a parenthesis as a belief of “some modern scholars”.  Yet hypothesizing that the date needs correction is hardly a side issue; it is critical for his interpretation to work!  And presumably the only reason those scholars advocate redating the eclipse is that the astronomical tables have no solar eclipse in AD 32-33, which is circular reasoning if we are considering the possibility of a supernatural Darkness.

IV. Conclusion

I’ve tried to provide all of the relevant data, both the good and the bad, so that readers can decide for themselves what they think.  But my own personal conclusion is that this adds up to a weak argument in favor of the accuracy of the Gospels.

There is a significant amount of testimony for non-Christian sources (Thallus, Phlegon, and possibly the Roman archives) mentioning the Crucifixion Darkness, but it is all filtered through Christian writings.  Quite a few authors note Phlegon’s report; not all of their descriptions are plausible or consistent with each other, but the main details tend to agree.

The coincidence with the Gospel Darkness and Earthquake, down to a specification of the year, and starting hour, is impressive, especially in light of the fact that no ordinary solar eclipse can fit the description.  From a Bayesian point of view, this would provide at least 2-3 orders of magnitude worth of evidence for the accuracy of the Gospels, if only we could be sure that Phlegon’s account were truly independent of Christianity and yet got these details the same.  But we simply can’t know this for sure, given that the original manuscript was lost and what we have was filtered through Christian sources.   This makes the evidence a lot weaker than it otherwise would be.

Still, it provides a nice corroboration of the Gospels at a point where many readers are particularly likely to be skeptical, when they report that the sun refused to shine upon our Savior as he suffered for our sins.  At the very least, it defeats the argument that the Darkness counts as evidence against Christianity, due to nobody else having noticed this public and obvious spectacle.