The Eclipse of Matthew 27 ?

Amir Brooks

In the arti­cle His­tor­i­cal Errors in the Qur’an ? I briefly touched upon the events men­tioned in the Gospel of Matthew sur­round­ing the cru­ci­fix­ion of the Prophet Isa(P). With regards to the cru­ci­fix­ion of Isa(P), it is record­ed in the Gospel of Matthew :

Matthew 27:4
From the sixth hour until the ninth hour dark­ness came over all the land.”

With most ancient events, it is often dif­fi­cult to ver­i­fy whether an event actu­al­ly hap­pened or not. Thanks to mod­ern astron­o­my, how­ev­er, this has become rel­a­tive­ly easy.

Accord­ing to NASA, two solar eclipses occurred dur­ing the peri­od of Isa’s min­istry — on the 19th of March 33AD, and the 24th of Novem­ber 29AD.

19th March 33AD

The Eclipse of Matthew 27? 1

As we can see here, the only way Jerusalem could be plunged into dark­ness is if it were sit­u­at­ed in the Indi­an Ocean !

24th Novem­ber 29AD

The Eclipse of Matthew 27? 2

On clos­er study, and by com­par­ing this with a map of Jor­dan, the path of total eclipse pass­es through Lebanon, south­ern Syr­ia and north­ern Jor­dan, but not Jerusalem. Judg­ing by the above dia­gram, I would esti­mate that Jerusalem expe­ri­enced about 98% of the total eclipse — this prob­a­bly would have caused a very slight dim­ming of the sun and a dis­tinct chill in the air, but no darkness.

Fur­ther­more, in quot­ing Matthew 27:45, some ver­sions of the Bible (name­ly The Mes­sage, The Ampli­fied Bible, New Liv­ing Trans­la­tion, Con­tem­po­rary Eng­lish Ver­sion, World­wide Eng­lish) spec­i­fy the time of the eclipse as being from noon to 3:00 pm, with the New Amer­i­can Stan­dard Bible and Eng­lish Stan­dard Ver­sion quot­ing these times as a footnote.

Giv­en that the coor­di­nates for Jerusalem are lat­i­tude 31° 4800″ N, lon­gi­tude 35° 1200″ E, it is pos­si­ble to work out from NASA’s infor­ma­tion table for this eclipse exact­ly what time of day the total eclipse would have been vis­i­ble, and for how long ?

The Eclipse of Matthew 27? 3

Times above giv­en in what NASA refers to as Uni­ver­sal Time’ — this is equal to GMT, as explained in NASA’s Def­i­n­i­tion of Uni­ver­sal Time. Jerusalem is two hours ahead of GMT. There­fore, the time at which Total Eclipse occurred in the near­est area north of Jerusalem was around five min­utes to eleven in the morn­ing, for approx­i­mate­ly 1 minute 40 seconds.

So there is no doubt that the solar eclipse could not have hap­pened as writ­ten in Matthew 27:45, there­fore mod­ern astron­o­my has proven that at least this part of the Gospel of Matthew is incor­rect. And if it undis­put­ed­ly incor­rect, how can we Mus­lims accept it as the Word of God ?

And only God knows best ! The Eclipse of Matthew 27? 4

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