Today I Learned

Saying this as an atheist: we do know that this person existed. He's been named Jesus Christ, do not know if that was his actual name.

In fact there hundreds of Messias in those days, some more popular then others.

We also know that not all the stories we have was linked to this one dude. Probably not. Probably multiple different messias-sayings have been attributed to him

Nothing proves the existence of a god though. Just a couple of people back then wanting people to not be dicks and don't get rich (that's not a good person they said).. and somehow THOSE stories have not been followed...

Or better still 3BCE

The theorem to do that was not yet proven.

Everything about the Holy Roman Empire was a clusterfuck

And its pretty much impossible to pin all the stories in the various gospels to any single individual reliably. And the younger he gets, the more nebulous and fuzzy the stories are.

Historians also have a rule for any historical figure that we are unsure if they really existed, if that person also has lots of stories about him involving magic or him personally doing anything supernatural, ya that guy is probably a myth.

TIL Jesus was real and he was a combination of mystics and prophets and other holy men that were all transmutated into an evil chimera homonculus with alchemy and he had 8 arms and 7 legs and 3 heads and it was really gross and creepy.

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.

• NASA lunar eclipses 1st century table
• Antikythera mechanism
• Lucretius book 5 (it's right at line 750)

"Just rose from the dead, feeling kinda zombie, might delete later."

Turned his hair into weed and then did the fish trick on it.

Roman: Dude it's 3BC, you can't be born yet, look at the calendar! It is quite clear, 3 more years. I swear to gods, Augustus will hear of this.