At what hour was Christ crucified?
From The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Archer.
There is an apparent discrepancy between Mark 15:25, which states that Jesus was crucified at the “third” hour on Good Friday, and John 19:14, which indicates that the trial of Jesus was still going on at the “sixth” hour, indicating that the time of His crucifixion was later yet.
John 19:14: “And it was the preparation [paraskeue] of the Passover, and it was about the sixth hour, and he [Pilate] says to the Jews, `Behold your king!'”
Obviously one of these Evangelists is in error, or else his text has been miscopied, or else the hours of the day have been numbered by John according to a different system from that followed by Mark.
It should be noted that Matthew and Luke both follow the same system as Mark; for all three indicate that as Jesus hung on the cross, a great and terrible darkness came on the earth at the sixth hour and lasted until the ninth hour, when Jesus breathed His last (Matt. 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44). It is universally agreed that in the Synoptics the hours were numbered from sunrise, approximately 6:00 A.M. This would mean that Christ was crucified at 9:00 A.M. and the preternatural darkness lasted from 12:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M.
This apparent contradiction was unsuccessfully handled by ancient commentators through textual correction. Eusebius pointed out that the numeral “three” was indicated by capital gamma, whereas “six” was indicated by a digamma (a letter resembling our F). The copyist thought he saw the extra horizontal stroke and changed “three” to “six.” But this does not really solve the problem at all, because John 19:14 does not indicate the time Christ was crucified but only the time of His appearance before Pilate’s judgment seat. And so even though many fine scholars have favored this textual-error theory (such as Beza, Bengel, Alford, and Farrar), it is basically unsound–and completely unnecessary.
There is no difficulty at all in the received textual reading, provided we understand that John was following the official numbering system of the Roman civil day. The evidence for a civil day that began numbering the hours right after midnight is quite decisive. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 2.77) makes the following observation: “The day itself has been differently observed in different countries: by the Babylonians between two sunrises; by the Athenians between two sunsets; by the Umbrians from noon to noon; by the Roman priests and those who have defined the civil day, as the Egyptians also and Hipparchus, from midnight to midnight.”
This is confirmed by Macrobius (Saturnalia 1.3): “the day, which the Romans have declared to begin at the sixth hour of the night.” (It should be explained that the ancients did not maintain hours of uniform length throughout the year but simply divided the interval between sunrise and sunset into twelve equal parts, known as horae–regardless of the season of the year.) So what would be 6:00 A.M. according to the Roman civil day (and likewise according to our modern practice) would be the first hour according to Athenian and Hebrew practice. Thus it was 9:00 A.M. when Christ’s trial was winding up, and He was led away to Golgotha to be crucified. This perception of a differing system of hour numbering removes all discrepancy between John and the Synoptics.
But we may very well ask, Why should John have followed the official Roman system when he had the same cultural background as the Synoptics?
The answer lies in the time and location of the composition of John’s gospel. As McClellan points out, “St. John wrote his Gospel in Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province of Asia, and therefore in regard to the civil day he would be likely to employ the Roman reckoning. And as a matter of fact, he does employ it, extending his day until midnight– John 12:1; John 20:19” (Christian Evidences, 1:741).
The point of the John 20:19 reference is that John reckons Christ’s first appearance to the disciples in the house of John Mark as occurring in the latter part of the first day of the week. This proves conclusively that John did not regard the second day of the week as having begun at sunset, as the Palestinian reckoning followed by the other Evangelists would have regarded the late supper hour. (We know from the return of the two disciples from the Emmaus journey at sundown that it was already well past sundown by the time they had delivered their report to the Eleven, and thus before Jesus Himself appeared to them all as a group.) The fact that John followed the Roman civil day is thus established; his reason for doing so is found in the probable place of composition of his gospel, presumably in Ephesus around A.D. 90 or shortly thereafter.
