S.C.Carlson

Don't take my word for it. I gave the cite so you can read Chapman's argument for yourself and come to your own conclusion.

Stephen

MJ67

With all due respect, I don't know why for one, I would even read someone else's conclusions, when that someone else's word was written almost 1800 years later, and two; why I would entertain someone else's word when I am quite capable of analyzing the very same documentation as he, and did, and three; why anyone would be citing the conclusion of others as opposed to citing their own researched conclusions, i.e. forming their own opinion when the documentation is available for one's own research. These documents dating back to the second century are readily available for study; they contain no scientific or intellectual jargon or any material which would require a higher level of education to decipher what they say; and were written by men to whom we should grant no intellectual authority or capacity over our own.

Toto

That article is online, but not free: http://jts.oxfordjournals.org/content/volos-IX/issue33/

michael wellenberg

And right you are insofar differing results being possibly influenced by differing points of view.
But the centre of a possible critical comment on a result should not be the point of view. If the underlying method is an established one which can be expected to gain a scientifically sound result concerning a certain issue in a given text then a variety of results should primarily lead to questioning the "established" method.
A dependence of an investigator´s point of view should not be alleged to the conclusion as first or unique point of criticism. (But perhaps we are agreed on this point, anyway)

Michael

mikem

I don't know, but Umberto Eco based a whole novel around a (fictional?) mediaeval debate about whether Jesus laughed or not. The novel is called "The Name of The Rose (or via: amazon.co.uk)", and is a rollicking good intellectual murder mystery set in a monastery. It's got murdered monks, dastardly inquisitors, hidden manuscripts, and even a bit of sex. Highly recommended!

Jesse Leigh

G'morning!

If the crucifixion did not take place, why was there a worldwide darkness (recorded by the respective powers that were at that time) for a full three hours at the moment of Christ's death? Even in Rome they recorded it, and the records are still available today.

SOMETHING obviously happened - can anyone explain this?

FWIW - Jesse.

dongiovanni1976x

Buon Giorno Jesse,

I must assume you are refering to the historian, Thallus...?

Thallus was a Samaritan freedman of the Emperor Tiberius who wrote a history of Greece and Asia, and mentioned an eclipse of the sun. In 221 AD, a Christian writer, Sextus Julius Africanus notes that "Thallus, in the third book of his histories, explains away this darkness as an eclipse of the sun." Due to the geometrics of the moon, the earth and the sun, in any given year there will always be at least two solar eclipses. Thallus does not refer to a Jesus, only to an eclipse, and does not say this covered the whole earth. Since he was a freedman of the Emperor Tiberius (14-37AD) who was emperor when Jesus was crucified, his mention of an eclipse was used to bolster the Gospel's story.

If this "darkness" did in fact cover the entire world or last as long as it was suggested there most certainly would have been mention of it in many sources especially by someone like Pliny the Elder.
You are right...something DID in fact happen- a run of the mill solar eclipse.

Doug Shaver

I've never heard that before. Do you have a quotation for which you can identify the source?

dongiovanni1976x

Correction...I was speaking just from memory. According to F.R. Stephenson, in his work, Historical Eclipses and Earth's Rotation, "Total solar eclipses are rare events. Although they occur somewhere on Earth approximately every 18 months, it has been estimated that they recur at any given place only once every 370 years, on average." But the length of these eclipes are rather short due to the movement of the moon (approx 1700 km/h), so it is estimated that they can last for no more than about 7-8mins but usually much less than that. Therefore the darkness mentioned in the Christian story is a remarkable event that covered the entire earth for a much greater period of time and yet no one has ever recorded a solar eclipse as covering the entire earth.

Febble

Well, NASA lists two candidates:

• November 24th, 29 CE, over Palestine ( 1m 59 secs)
• March 19th, 33 CE, over the Indian Ocean (4 m 6 secs).

But if the crucifixion occurred at Passover, the moon would have been full - so the sun would have been on the wrong side of the earth for an eclipse.

So we have a choice of right month, right place, or right time of the lunar cycle, but not all at once. And the duration is wrong.