Annotation CXXIV

”But from the sixth hour there was darkness over the whole earth, until the ninth hour.” — Matthew 27:45

Whether the darkness, at Christ's death, happened over the whole world.

Origen, treatise 35 on Matthew, reports that the darkness which happened while Christ suffered was not made over the whole globe of the lands, but only over the whole land of Judaea; and, again, that that darkness was not an eclipse, but an obscuration and hiding [of the sun] by clouds set before the Sun. This opinion he expresses in these words: “As the other signs, which were made in the Passion of the Lord, were made only in Jerusalem, so also the darkness was made only over the whole land of Judaea, until the ninth hour. But [as to] what I say, that in Jerusalem only these [things] were done — that the veil of the temple was rent, that the earth quaked, that the rocks were split, that the tombs were opened: for neither outside Judaea were rocks split, nor other tombs opened, save only those which were in Jerusalem, or perhaps in the land of Judaea. Nor did any other land tremble then, save the land of Jerusalem. For it is not related anywhere that every element of the earth trembled in that time, so that they should feel [it] — for example, those who were in Ethiopia, and in India, and in Scythia. And if it had been done, without doubt it would be found in some of the histories of those who wrote in [their] chronicles any new events.” And a little after he adds: “The darkness was not made by a failing [eclipse] of the Sun then over all Judaea; for the Evangelists did not name the Sun in this place, but only [say] that darkness was made, the Sun not being named. It is consequent [therefore] to understand that certain most dark clouds ran together over the land of Judaea to cover the rays of the Sun.”

Bede the Younger [Bede of the Nativity], in the volume of his Annotations, condemned this opinion in Erasmus, as adverse to the judgment of Augustine and of Dionysius the Areopagite — of whom the former, in book 2 On the Marvels of Divine Scripture, relates that in the earthquake of the Lord’s Passion eleven cities in Thrace fell; but the latter, in the epistle to Polycarp, testifies that he, at Heliopolis, a city of Egypt, together with the philosopher Apollophanes, beheld, at midday of the Lord’s Passion, horrible darkness poured around the globe of the Sun.