The Time of the Crucifixion

DEFENSE

John uses a different way of reckoning hours than the synoptics.

There are four natural points where one could begin counting hours: midnight, sunrise, noon, and sunset. Each has been used by different cultures. In America, we use midnight and noon (thus “one o’clock” is the first hour to strike after both).

In first-century Judaea, the custom was to count twelve hours from sunrise, as illustrated in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20:1–16, where a man hires workers at the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hours. The last group are said to work “only one hour,” while those hired earlier bore “the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”

The Roman practice, however, was to reckon the day as beginning at midnight (cf. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2:79[77]). We can show that John was using this method in his Gospel and counting the hours from midnight: “For example, in John 1:39 a reckoning from the morning would make the ‘tenth hour’ four o’clock in the afternoon, but a reckoning from midnight would make it ten o’clock in the morning, the latter being more appropriate to the fact that the two disciples then stayed with Jesus ‘that day’” (Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., §19; Finegan also offers additional examples).

The timing of the Crucifixion is thus described in the synoptics using the Jewish system of counting hours and in John by the Roman system. Thus in John, Pilate brings Jesus out to the crowd at “about the sixth hour” after midnight (around 6 a.m.). According to Mark he is then crucified at “the third hour” after dawn (around 9 a.m.). And according to all three synoptics, darkness covered the land from the sixth to the ninth hours after dawn (from around 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.).

TIP

See also Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul, 10, 293–96.