At what time was Jesus crucified?
Posted on Apr.17, 2009. Filed in John, Luke, Mark. Average rating: 5.0 / 10 (Rate It).
Both Mark and John indicate the approximate time at which Jesus was crucified. Unfortunately, their accounts don’t agree on when this was.
The Jews measured time by counting the hours from dawn (roughly 6am). The third hour was thus about 9am, the fourth hour about 10am, and so on.
Mark gives the time of the crucifixion as the “third hour”, helpfully translated by the NRSV as “nine o’clock in the morning”:
It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. [Mark 15:25 (NRSV)]
According to John, it wasn’t until the sixth hour (or “noon” in the NRSV) that Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified, suggesting that Jesus was crucified some time after midday:
Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’ They cried out, ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but the emperor.’ Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. [John 19:14-16a (NRSV)]
The only other indication of the time of the crucifixion we get is in Luke. Luke describes the crowd mocking Jesus on the cross, and then says that a darkness fell from 12 noon to 3pm:
It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon… [Luke 23:44 (NRSV)]
As in this account Jesus is already on the cross when the darkness falls, Luke’s timing seems to fit with Mark’s and conflict with John’s.
So at what time was Jesus crucified, at 9am or some time after noon?
N.B. All posts are written in a style sympathetic to the claim of Biblical error, even in cases where the author ("Errancy") disagrees with the claim. See the About page for the site's philosophy.
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April 17th, 2009 on 4:21 pm
This is one case where it might be better to use (e.g.) the ESV for the quotes; since it allows for interpretation.
April 17th, 2009 on 4:46 pm
Yes, a more literal translation might be better for our purposes here. That said, it’s easy enough to explain the underlying Greek, and there’s value in using one translation consistently.
April 17th, 2009 on 5:32 pm
I don’t think that the Romans measured from midnight. Do you have a reference on that?
This is actually one where I’m flummoxed (there you go Amtiskaw).
I suppose it might be a copyist’s error. Especially if we assume that the copyist was keeping time in the same way that we do.
It also might be that there was another way, neither Jewish nor Roman (Greek? Babylonian?), of keeping time and that John was using that. But what could it be?
April 17th, 2009 on 6:33 pm
I’m not sure where I first heard the suggestion that John was using the Roman method of counting the hours from midnight; I just know it as the standard answer to this claimed contradiction.
To see whether it holds up, I’ve been looking for other occasions where John counts the hours. The most interesting case is the woman at the well in John 4:
The NRSV’s “noon” here is “the sixth hour” in the Greek.
The first point of interest is that every sermon I’ve ever heard preached on this has made a big deal out of the fact that the Samaritan woman was drawing water at noon, the hottest part of the day, suggesting that she was a social outcast avoiding other people. If John counted the hours from midnight, she was actually drawing water at 6am.
The second point of interest is that v6 says that Jesus was “tired out by his journey”. If John counted the hours from midnight, then Jesus was tired at 6am, before he’d had time to do any journeying (although I suppose he could have been tired from the day before).
There’s nothing conclusive here, but noon does seem to have the edge as the more plausible time in John 4:6, and it would be odd if “the sixth hour” meant noon in John 4:6 but 6am in John 19:14.
April 17th, 2009 on 10:03 pm
As for sources, the NIV study Bible gives the “6 am” reading a mention, as does the NASB notes:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2019:14;&version=49;
April 18th, 2009 on 7:52 am
Re the woman at the well: It seems that the Roman system could give 6pm, as well as 6am. 6pm would fit with Jesus being tired from travelling (and would fit better than noon), so contrary to what I originally said, perhaps John 4:6 actually supports the idea that John was on Roman time.
April 23rd, 2009 on 12:40 am
OK, I’m more-or-less certain that the Roman day was driven by the sundial, and it began with the first hour at sunrise + 1 and ended at sunrise + 12 which was always sunset. (Because the interval between sunrise and sunset varies in length, so do hours.)
The Romans did develop the terminology “Post Meridiem” and “Ante Meridiem” that we still use today. But counting from midday (and, by extension, from midnight) appears to be an innovation of Ptolemy who was born in AD 90.
So the standard harmonization won’t fly.
However, there is a very satisfactory answer to this problem.
According to Strong’s, the third meaning of “hora” is “hour”. It could also refer to any naturally recurring interval (meaning #1). And, in particular, it could refer to a day (meaning #2). The word “hos”, translated above as “about” can have a lot of different meanings. We need not assume that John is approximating the time.
John is not referring here to the sixth hour in the day, but to the sixth day (a day of preparation) in the seven-day Passover celebration. Pilate’s “Ecce Homo” happened on the sixth day of the Passover, perhaps just as the morning was breaking (though the sixth day would have begun at the prior sunset).
This leaves plenty of time for Jesus to be on the cross by about 9 o’clock. He hung there for three hours, it got dark for another three hours. He died and was taken down before sunset, i.e. before the beginning of the seventh and final day of the Passover celebration.
April 23rd, 2009 on 12:44 am
BTW, if I am right about Roman (and John’s) timekeeping, I think this means that Jesus met the woman at the well in the heat of the day at noon after all.
April 23rd, 2009 on 10:30 am
So what’s the correct translation of John 19:14?
“It was about the sixth day”?
April 23rd, 2009 on 10:31 am
Sorry, missed the bit where you mention that. Still, every Bible that I know of thinks that John is giving the time.
April 23rd, 2009 on 1:39 pm
I’m skeptical about ‘ωρα meaning “day” here; can you give any other examples of the word being used in this way?
April 23rd, 2009 on 1:39 pm
The point about translations is a good one. The translators know Greek. I don’t.
“Hora” does have a range of meanings, but the translators, no doubt, had their reasons. I suppose that one of them was this: When you say “It was the sixth {time period}”, you kind of expect that the time period in question is part of some contextually relevant, well-known sequence of time periods where it makes sense to talk of a sixth. If no sequence is mentioned, the time of day seems to be the default. Thus, in the absence of any other indicator of the sequence, it makes sense to think that “the sixth hora” refers to a time of day.
Also, the day was technically divided into 12 hours, but in practice things broke down a little differently. There was the stuff that happened right after sunrise. That was said to have happened at about the 1st hour. Likewise the 11th hour referred to the stuff shortly before sunset. In between you basically either spoke of the the 3rd, the 6th or the 9th hours. Here we have John using one of the common numbers for referring to the hours (1, 3, 6, 9, 11).
But in John 19, we are given an alternate sequence that “the sixth hora” could refer to: the days of the Passover. And, while 6 is one of the magic numbers for referring to hours, that alone cannot imply that “hora” means “hour” here.
Two other reasons that the translators might have for translating “hora” as “hour”: tradition and the fact that the synoptics are clearly referencing hours in the day in describing the events. But again, neither of these bear much weight if you think that John’s reference to the Passover provides an alternate sequence for “sixth hora” to refer to.
With that said, I’m now less happy with my account than I was before. I may have been conflating the feast of the Passover with the feast of Unleavened Bread. In Leviticus 23, the feasts seem to be sharply distinguished the first being a 1 day feast and the second immediately following it and being a seven day feast (though it may also be that Leviticus is describing a 7-day Feast of Unleavened Bread, the first day of which is referred to as Passover).
Still, in Deuteronomy 16, the distinction is less clear. The term “Passover” may be a lot like “Christmas”. The term can refer to many different time periods. Even in Leviticus, you have multiple contiguous days of feasting. Today, it seems to refer to 7 contiguous days of feasting.
And of course, what’s really relevant to my untangling these verses, is what Jewish practices were at the time of the crucifixion. By then you probably already had a melding of the two festivals into a single multi-day period.
John, at least, seems to be using “Passover” to refer to a multi-day period of feasting. Why? The disciples had already eaten a Passover meal. Yet in the passage above he describes the day as a day of preparation for Passover. This makes sense if you bear in mind that it is a multi-day festival and some days are high (no-labor) days that need to be prepared for.
April 23rd, 2009 on 10:48 pm
Well. There are a whole host of cases where “hora” should definitely be translated “hour”. Where the author is clearly just calling off the marks on the sundial. The Mark and Luke references above clearly fall into this category.
There is another host of cases where “hour”, “day”, “season”, “second”, “moment” or “time” would all work equally well: “In that hour”, “In that day”, “In that moment”, “In that time”, etc….they all just mean “then”.
These two categories comprise the vast majority of New Testament uses of “hora”. In the first category of uses, the translators say “hour” because they must do so. In the second category of uses, the translators say “hour” because they might just as well do so. Had they used “day” instead, nothing would be any different except that my outlandish theory might not seem so outlandish.
There are a few cases in the Bible where “hora” is translated as “day” by some translators.
In the KJV, for Mark 6:35 the translator translated “hora” once as “day” and then as “time”:
And when the day (hora) was now far spent, his disciples came unto him, and said, This is a desert place, and now the time (hora) is far passed.
In contrast, the NASB doesn’t translate the word at all, but just the gist:
When it was already quite late, His disciples came to Him and said, “This place is desolate and it is already quite late
Matt. 14:15 is similar. Some translations, for example the ESV, say “day”:
Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day (hora) is now over…”
Matt 24:42 reads “hora” for “day” in both the Textus Receptus and in the 1991 Byzantine, but the more common “hemera” for “day” in the Nestle-Aland.
Strong’s says that the word “hora” is a primary word, but that “hemera” is derived from “hemai” and “hora” (that “hora” is somehow implied in the origin of “hemera”). You might think, that that just makes the “hour” reading all the more obvious. “Hora” is implied in the origin of “hemera” because the hours of the day are implied in the day (because a day is a collection of hours).
But it really does the opposite. The concept of the hour was a later concept than that of the day. This is because the hour was a (somewhat nebulous) division of the day based on sundials. The day was the evident passage of time marked by the rising and setting of the sun. So if “hemera” meant “day” before the concept of an hour existed, and “hemera” is derived from “hora”, then “hora” had some meaning prior to the concept of the hour. What was that?
April 24th, 2009 on 3:06 am
OK. Pliny the elder confutes my near certainty that the Romans didn’t count from midnight. Once again, the internet proves that it is sometimes a really unreliable echo chamber:
Here’s the ‘money’ quote from Pliny:
The days have been computed by different people in different ways. The Babylonians reckoned from one sunrise to the next; the Athenians from one sunset to the next; the Umbrians from noon to noon; the multitude, universally, from light to darkness; the Roman priests and those who presided over the civil day, also the Egyptians and Hipparchus, from midnight to midnight. It appears that the interval from one sunrise to the next is less near the solstices than near the equinoxes, because the position of the zodiac is more oblique about its middle part, and more straight near the solstice.
So the standard defense will fly. I suppose that those sources I read that claimed the Romans numbered from sunrise to sunset were referring to what the Roman multitudes did (which Pliny acknowledges is universal for multitudes).
With that said, I still like my hora-day theory for two reasons:
1. John was of the multitudes. We’d have to assume that he was going by Pilate’s clock, which might have been on civil time. BTW, if we assume that, we would still not need to assume that the Jesus met the woman at the well at 6PM…John wasn’t consulting Pilate’s clock on that occasion.
2. Assuming that the Sabbath that forced Jesus off of the cross was the final day of Passover, and not a weekly Sabbath, would help to resolve other apparent inconsistencies in the timeline (e.g. we could argue that Jesus died on Good Wednesday and rose just before the end of the Weekly Sabbath…but was still discovered by the women at about sunrise on Sunday.) Of course, you might hold this theory without John 19:14. It’s just that John 19:14 would add a little bit to it.
But if my pet theory is wrong as an account of John 19:14 (nothing is more likely), the standard defense turns out to be tenable after all.
April 29th, 2009 on 3:24 pm
John wrote his gospel in Ephesus which was a Roman province and he was writing to a Hellenistic audience.
“…the Romans had always two modes of reckoning the day, one which agreed with the primitive, from evening to morning and morning to evening and was permitted at least by the law while it did not interfere with legal or religious purposes; and another prescribed by the law for the courts of justice, and for the offices and services of religion, and for public purposes in general, from midnight to midnight.”
(fasti temporis catholici and orgines kalendariae by Edward Greswell, pp. 215 – 216)
At the beginning of Chapter 6 John says Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee, which was what it was called by the Jews. He then clarifies it to those he’s writing by saying “that is, the Sea of Tiberias.” That’s a clear indication that he had the audience in mind. In the gospels the phrase “the Jews” is found many times. Excluding the eighteen times Jesus is called the “king of the Jews” the phrase “the Jews” is found once in Matthew, once in Mark, twice in Luke and more than sixty times in the gospel of John. John was speaking about a people who were of a different nationality than those to whom he was writing. That is why he mentioned ceremonial washing (2:6), a Jewish feast (5:1, 7:11), the Jewish Passover (2:13, 6:4, 11:55), defined the words Rabbi (1:38), Rabboni (20:16) and Siloam (9:7), gave the Greek equivalent for Thomas as Didymus (11:16, 20:24, 21:2) and commented on Jewish burial customs (John 19:40; cf. 2 Chron. 16:14). John also stated that the Feast of Dedication, or Hannakah, was in winter (John 10:22); a fact which would have been known to the Jews.
The Romans did not use the midnight to midnight mode of timekeeping at the beginning of the Roman empire but, in the second century A.D., Aulus Gellius said the duration and limits of the days that were termed “civil” were reckoned differently all over the world (Attic Nights by Gellius, 3.2). He also quoted a lost work from Marcus Varro called “Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum” in which Varro said “Persons who are born during the twenty-four hours between one midnight and the next midnight are considered to have been born on one and the same day.” Marcus Varro lived from 116 – 27 B.C.
There is historical evidence that the Romans reckoned the hours in a day from midnight to midnight in the writings of Pliny the Elder:
“Different peoples measure the actual unit called ‘a day’ in different ways. The Babylonians reckon this as the interval between two sunrises; the Athenians, that between two sunsets; the Umbrians that from midday to midday; ordinary people everywhere, from dawn to dark. Roman priests and those who- fix the ‘civil day’, likewise the Egyptians and Hipparchus, reckon the day from midnight to midnight.”
(Natural History: A Selection by Pliny the Elder, translated by John F. Healy, 1991, p. 35)
Gleason Archer gives the reference as Natural History, 2.77. Pliny the Elder wrote Natural History about 77 A.D, very close to the time that John wrote his account of the gospel. Hipparchus was a Greek astronomer, geographer and mathematician who lived from 190 to 120 B.C., during the Hellenistic period. Roman Historian Seneca lived in the first century and wrote this:
“I shall make myself better understood, if I say the month was October, the day was the thirteenth. What hour it was I cannot certainly tell; philosophers will agree more often than clocks; but it was between midday and one after noon.”
(Seneca, Apocolocyntosis, chapter 2)
“One after noon” would not refer to the first hour of the night or Seneca would have said it was between sunset and the first hour of the evening. Seneca was speaking of one o’clock in the afternoon. In the fourth century the Roman grammarian Macrobius said the Romans had declared the day began at the sixth hour of the night (Saturnalia 1:3). There is also evidence from the deaths of Polycarp and Pionius as well:
“Polycarp was martyred ‘at the eighth hour’ (Mart. Pol. XXL), Pionius at ‘the tenth hour’ (Acta Marl. p. 137); both at Smyrna. Such exhibitions commonly took place in the morning (Philo, II. 519); so that 8.0 and 10.0 A.M. are more probable than 2.0 and 4.0.”
(The Gospel According to St. John: With Maps, Notes and Introduction by Alfred Plummer, 1902 ed., p. 341)
April 30th, 2009 on 11:15 pm
Thanks for the discussion Crispus. You’ve completely overthrown any lingering doubts about whether the Romans followed a midnight-to-midnight schedule. It seems that Pilate surely would have. The Aulus Gellius quote of Marcus Varro seems especially probative since, as you point out, Varro was a Roman who lived well before the events under consideration. Pliny did live later, but he seemd to be writing about an established custom, so the Pliny quote is also pretty important.
All in all, since Pilate’s timekeeping was reckoned from midnight to midnight, and because John, of all the disciples was the only one near Jesus when he was tried, he may well have reported the time as it was called out in the proceedings. This supposition alone seems to be enough to meet the charge of error.
As you suggest, he may have been writing to a Roman audience and thus used the timekeeping they would be familiar with. Against this is the fact that the Roman multitudes would still have used primitive sunrise-to-sunset timekeeping. So John’s Roman audience would have to be pretty focused indeed. Wouldn’t it?
BTW. When do you think, then, that Jesus met the woman at the well? Noon, or 6:00 PM?
March 13th, 2010 on 11:09 pm
I know this discussion is a year old, but I want to add something. When Pliny was talking about “computing the day” or “measuring the unit of a day” from midnight to midnight, why is it that we automatically assume that he was talking about where we start counting the hours, considering that he specifically said “compute the days” and not “compute the hours”?
Before I ever saw any discussion of Biblical inerrancy I was taught that Romans, as did pretty much all people at that time, counted hours from sunrise using a sundial, or approximately where the sun is in the sky. Since neither method worked at night, only people who had access to a water clock would be able to “reckon hours” in the night, and they were very few.
When Pliny and others talk about midnight-to-midnight I always thought they were talking about what we might call “the calendar day”. That is, the day of the week, the week of the year, and so on, especially considering the importance of the moon in the ancient lunar-solar calendars.
This has almost nothing to do with how the hours are counted in a day. If we say that the authorities who calculated the calendar day also started counting the hours of the day from the sixth hour of the night, we need to describe how they did so and why.
Again, under this understanding, “reckoning the day” from midnight does not change how the hours are reckoned. You say “Monday, the sixth hour” – you are referring to noon whether the day starts at sunrise or at midnight – it’s still Monday. Under the Jewish system “the sixth hour” technically refers to the eighteenth hour of the day, as their day is reckoned from sunset to sunset.
If for some reason you decide to start counting 12 hours from midnight, then you need to differentiate between midnight and noon, and I see no language in John to indicate that he was doing this.
The problem I think is that because WE start counting from midnight, it is intuitive for us to think this way. But the ancients didn’t have atomic clocks, the only regular repeating pattern that they could base their hourly systems on was sunrise and sundown.
I do think John was writing to a non-Jewish audience, but the claim that they would only understand hours counted from the sixth hour of the night I find to have very little support. If we are looking for inerrancy, I think copy/error is a far more plausible explanation.
May 19th, 2010 on 11:43 pm
The Holman Christian Standard Bible [which, if I understand correctly, is a very conservative translation] all but takes for granted that John is counting from midnight.
1:39 ["the tenth hour"] is translated “It was about 10 in the morning.” with the footnote: Lit about the tenth hour. Various methods of reckoning time were used in the ancient world. John probably used a different method from the other 3 Gospels. If John used the same method of time reckoning as the other 3 Gospels, the translation would be: It was about four in the afternoon.
They translate 4:6 and 19:14 in a similar fashion.
I only mention this because, again, I believe the HCSB is one of the more “reliable” translations, from comparisions I’ve made. That doesn’t mean it might not be taking liberties here [who knows?] but I have observed that it rarely “smooths” the text of difficult passages the ways many other translations do. It also has significantly more text-critical notes than any other major translation I am aware of, but that is another topic :-P
June 4th, 2010 on 5:49 pm
I’m not sure we’ve mentioned the author of John’s motives for the timing of Passover. As Clement of Alexandria said, the author was not all that concerned about historical accuracy, having written John much later than the other Gospels, which laid the facts plain. Thus he leapt at the chance to move the Crucifixion back a day to the time of the slaughter of the Passover lambs. This very obvious piece of Christological symbolism is at odds with the Synoptics, which all see him crucified on Passover. John’s Gospel certainly is not historically inerrant in this case.