66 January/February 2018center in discussions of Jewish-Christi-
anity, the Matthean Gospel community,
anti-Paulinism, and a host of other topics.
Tony Burke is Associate Professor in
the Department of Humanities at York
University in Toronto, Canada. He is the
author of Secret Scriptures Revealed: A
New Introduction to the Christian Apoc-
rypha (Grand Rapids, MI, and London:
Eerdmans and SPCK, 2013) and co-editor
(with Brent Landau) of New Testament
Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scrip-
tures (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016).(^1) The contributing authors are D. Jeffrey
Bingham, E. Bruce Brooks, John J. Clabeaux,
Stephen Finlan, Alan J.P. Garrow, Andrew
Gregory, Taras Khomych, Matthew Larsen,
Aaron Milavec, Joseph G. Mueller (S.J.), Matti
Myllykoski, Perttu Nikander, Nancy Pardee,
Huub van de Sandt, Jonathan Schwiebert,
Murray J. Smith, Michael Svigel, Peter J. Tom-
son, Joseph Verheyden, and John W. Welch.
Footnote 4 refers to the passage in Pro-
copius where Alaric is indeed mentioned.
But then, I go into far greater detail
when describing the sack of Rome by the
Vandals in 455 C.E.
Why did I choose the Vandals over the
Goths? Why is Alaric in a footnote, and
Geiseric, the Vandal leader, in the body of
the article? I made that choice because
that is the choice Procopius himself made.
With regard to the Temple treasures, in
Procopius, Alaric is little more than a
footnote, while Geiseric and Belisarius are
main characters.
CRUCIFIXION
DARKNESS
Metaphor or Solar Eclipse?
I usually find BAR interesting, but the
Classical Corner: “A Comet Gives Birth
to an Empire” by Sarah K. Yeomans
(BAR, September/October 2017) is
especially intriguing. I live in the 99.2+
shadow of the recent eclipse that passed
across the United States. It brought to
mind a line from the Gospel of Mat-
thew 27:45: “From noon until three in
the afternoon darkness came over all the
Q&C
continued from page 10
land.” Are there any records that might
include an eclipse in Jerusalem?
MARYANN WHARTON
ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA
Sarah Yeomans responds: The passage
you refer to pertains to Jesus’s crucifixion,
which the Gospels indicate took place dur-
ing the Jewish festival of Passover—cel-
ebrated during a full moon in spring. A
new moon is needed for a solar eclipse to
occur, making it precisely the wrong phase
of the moon for a total eclipse. If we accept
that the Gospels give us the correct date
for Jesus’s crucifixion, a solar eclipse would
have been impossible. Furthermore, accord-
ing to Brother Guy Consolmagno, a noted
astronomer and director of the Vatican
Observatory, the darkness described during
the crucifixion was too long to be a solar
eclipse. While a partial eclipse can take sev-
eral hours, the period of total darkness only
lasts a few minutes at most.
NASA has a handy database that tracks
solar and lunar eclipse events going back
thousands of years (eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov).
There was a total solar eclipse on March
19 in 33 C.E. that could be seen in Antarc-
tica—not Jerusalem.
On April 3, 33 C.E., there was a partial
lunar eclipse that would have been vis-
ible from Jerusalem, but if we are to take
the passage in Matthew literally in terms
of the timing during afternoon hours, we
cannot point to either type of eclipse as
an explanation.
There may have been cloud coverage, or
the ancient authors may have combined
separate events as a literary device to
underscore the significance of the event.
PUZZLING POINT
Storage Amphora Bottoms
I enjoyed the piece in Strata, “Containers
of the Ancient World” (BAR, September/
October 2017), but I am puzzled about
the shape of the amphorae. They seem
difficult to store with their pointed ends.
Why were they constructed in such a
strange way?
RALPH MADISON
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
BAS Staff responds: Amphorae were
formed to best serve their purpose. A
Within a Christian
environment that was
dominantly Paul’s,
it is striking that Gospel authors not
only did not support Paul but subtly, yet
comprehensively, rejected his theology.
This places the Gospels in an entirely
different light and surfaces Christians’
most glaring misreading of the New
Testament. The author contends with the
“new consensus” scholarship of the Jesus
Seminar. He provides a compelling case
against the prominent reconstruction of
the hypothetical document Q and isolates
the origin of the “Son of Man” identity for
Jesus. Paperback, 316 pages. ISBN 978-
1-4917-9376-3. Available at iUniverse, a
print-on-demand company, and Amazon.
com. Electronic version available.
Jesus, Joshua,
Yeshua
of Nazareth
Concluding Edition
By Gordon Clouser
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