A man ahead of his time. source
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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Oh, and a fun story about the crucifixion darkness.
So in Luke, the easiest copies described as the sun being eclipsed. Which was a huge controversy. Origen claimed it was the work of "agents of Satan."
Why? Because the Passover occurs on a full moon and solar eclipses cannot happen at those times.
What can happen are lunar eclipses. In fact they are pretty common on Passover. And those actually match a lot of the details. Last for hours and not minutes. Seen around the world vs a small band.
The problem is that this was in the middle of the day, so it would not have been visible in the area.
What a lot of people don't know is that at the time this was written, people knew how to calculate eclipses in the same Saros cycle. The Greeks even built a clockwork computer centuries earlier that did so.
As well, at the time the leading explanation was the (correct) one that lunar eclipses occurred because the Earth eclipsed the sun. Lucretius in 50 BCE wrote that it was so common it was basically presumed and he was encouraging keeping a more open mind for alternative explanations.
And there was a historical lunar eclipse on Passover in 33 CE, which would not have been visible in Judea. But importantly, this eclipse was in the same Saros cycle as visible lunar eclipses before and after.
It is not all that implausible that people, particularly Greek or Chaldean astronomers, would have known that there was a several hour long eclipse of the sun during the day on Passover in 33 CE.
My guess is that knowledge of a calculated lunar eclipse ended up incorporated into the early Synoptic circles (potentially even by the author of Luke given the mention of the Joel blood moon prophecy in Acts) and then further mythologized having lost the original context as if an eyewitness event like in Matthew where the author added earthquakes and zombies.
TL;DR: There probably was a daytime lunar eclipse on a Passover around that time which would have been fairly trivially calculable as having occurred given its earlier and later 51 CE visible occurrences in the cycle.
Edit: Some relevant links.
Soooo flat earthers wrote our dominant religious texts?
This is very interesting, thank you. Any links would be appreciated, I love this kind of weirdness.
Added links!
Thank you! Learn something new every day