[squirt]

one of the most problematic references in the New Testament is where the Gospel writers claim that the earth went dark during part of the time that Jesus hung on the cross, wasn't this merely a literary device to stress the significance of the Crucifixion and not a reference to an actual historical occurrence? after all, if darkness had fallen over the earth, wouldn't there be at least some mention of this extraordinary event outside the bible? Dr Gary Habermas has written about a historian named Thallus, who in AD 52 wrote a history of the eastern Mediterranean world since the Trojan War, although Thallus's work has been lost, it was quoted by Julius Africanus in about AD 221 - and it made reference to the darkness that the gospels had written about, could this be independent corroboration of this biblical claim? in this passage Julius Africanus says, "Thallus, in the third book of his histories, explains away the darkness as an eclipse of the sun - unreasonably as it seems to me" so Thallus apparently was saying yes, there had been darkness at the time of the Crucifixion, and he speculated it had been caused by an eclipse, Africanus then agrees that it couldn't have been an eclipse, given when the Crucifixion occurred, quoting what scholar Paul Maier said about the darkness in a footnote in his 1968 book Pontius Pilate, he said ...

this phenomenon, evidently, was visible in Rome, Athens, and other Mediterranean cities, according to Tertullian ... it was a "cosmic" or "world event" Phlegon, a Greek author from Caria writing a chronology soon after AD 137 reported that in the 4th year of the 202nd Olypiad (ie AD 33) there was "the greatest eclipse of the sun" and that "it became night in the 6th hour of the day (ie noon) so that stars even appeared in the heavens, there was a great earthquake in Bithynia and many things were overturned in Nicaea ...

so there is, as Paul Maier points out, non-biblical attestation of the darkness that occurred at the time of Jesus' crucifixion