A:Scholars have never found a satifactory explanation for the darkness that fell at exactly 12 noon while Jesus was crucified. We could regard it as a miracle, as with the curtain in the Temple tearing from top to bottom, but none of the scribes, writing at the time about every natural event of significance, ever mentions any strange darkness on the land.
The explanation is to be found in Mark's Gospel, the original New Testament gospel on which we now know Matthew, Luke and John's accounts were based. This Gospel contains a very elegant structure for the last twenty four hours to the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, dividing it into eight intervals of just three hours each.
- It starts with the Last Supper, which began "when it was evening" (Mark 14:17), or when the sun went down: approximately 6 pm.
- Mark knew that the duration of the Passover meal was three hours and that it concluded with the singing of a hymn, so the first thing Jesus did was to sing a hymn with his disciples. Then Mark says, "And when they had sung a hymn they went out to the Mount of Olives". It was about 9 p.m.
- Mark then has Jesus and the disciples go to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus went to pray. His disciples, Peter, James and John, were not able to remain awake. "Could you not watch one hour?" Jesus asked. The process was repeated two more times. The disciples could not watch one, two or three hours. It was now midnight.
- The act of betrayal, the darkest deed in human history, came next, occurring at the stroke of midnight.
- At 3:00 a.m., Jesus was led away for a trial before the high priest and other senior priests and elders. This governing body then judged him, on the basis of his messianic claim, to be worthy of death.
- The watch of the night between 3 am and 6 am was called cockcrow. Peter's threefold denial of Jesus, once each hour until the cock crowed, marked the end of that phase of the night. That makes it 6 am.
- "As soon as it was morning", which would be 6 am, Jesus was led by the chief priests, scribes and elders to Pontius Pilate for judgement.
- "It was the third hour when they crucified him," that is, 9 o'clock.
- When "the sixth hour had come" (12 noon), darkness covered the whole earth. As part of the chiastic structure, this mirrors the betrayal at 12 midnight.
- After three hours of darkness, at 3 pm, Jesus cried out and gave up the ghost.
- Joseph of Arimathea then asked Pilate for the body of Jesus, so that he could be buried before the Sabbath began. Jesus was buried in the final period from 3 to 6 pm, before the sun went down.
Thus we have an explanation for the darkness from 12 noon to 3 pm. A chiastic structure is a circular sequence in which an opening set of events is contrasted with another set of events that mirrors the first. Mark's Gospel as a whole consists of a chiastic structure and then contains this smaller chiastic structure around the last day and the crucifixion.
