It is written:
“Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land.” (Matthew 27:45)
The Bible account describes a great darkness which covered the whole Earth when Jesus Christ died on Calvary. There are several sources outside of the Bible which confirm this event.
Thallus, who wrote around A.D. 52, and was quoted by a Christian apologist named Juilius Africanus in about 221 A.D, makes this comment:
“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.”
Another pagan historian, named Dionysius, discusses this darkness. Commentator John Gill writes:
“Dionysius the Areopagite, then an Heathen, saw it in Egypt; and said “either the, divine being suffers, or suffers with him that suffers, or the frame of the world is dissolving.”
The Mayans and the Aztec civilizations also contain written references to this terrible darkness and the horrible earthquakes which transpired when Christ died on the Cross. Don Mariano Fernandez de Echevarria y Veytia wrote a two volume work entitled Historia Antigua de Mexico.
He chronicles:
“These natives indicate another singular event in their histories with great exactness, which later served them as a fixed era for their chronological calculations. They say that 166 years after the correction of their calendar, at the beginning of the year that was indicated with the hieroglyph of the House in the number ten, being a full moon, the sun was eclipsed at midday, the solar body being totally covered, such that the earth became darkened so much that the stars appeared and it seemed like night, and at the same time an earthquake was felt as horrible as they had ever experienced, because the stones crashing against one another were broken into pieces, and the earth opened up in many parts…Following these calculations, and adjusted to the comparison of the tables, this event should be placed in the year 4066 of the world, which was indicated with this character as can be seen in the tables, and precisely 166 after the adjustment of the calendar; and because of the circumstances surrounding this eclipse and earthquake, it was impossible for it to be any other than that which was observed at the death of Jesus Christ our Lord, having suffered it in the thirty-third year of his age, and so it seems that the incarnation of the Word should be placed in the year 4034 of the world, which the Indians indicated with the same hieroglyph of the House in the number 4, and I have noted it that way in the tables, and with this calculation following the chronological order they observed, counting the years from one memorable event to another with the assignment of the hieroglyph of the year in which they fell, I have been able to coordinate it perfectly with our years in the year 1519, in which Cortez landed at Veracruz, as will be seen in the discourse of this history.” ( Donald W. Hemingway and W. David Hemingway, The Bearded White God Of Ancient America: The Legend Of Quetzalcoatl, 50-51; Cedar Fort, Inc.)
The Bible is continually confirmed as reliable history.
Leave a Reply