Years ago I sat for a day of interviews for a film by Marco Bazzi about a geologist obsessed with the alleged earthquake at the time of Christ’s death. The resulting movie is now available (you can find it in most of the usual places, including Amazon Prime or with commercials on Tubi or as a purchase or rental on YouTube and Google Play). And it has an IMDb page (and oh gosh, I hadn’t checked it in years, but so do I). I figure you might want to hear my thoughts and comments on this movie and its claims.

The Movie

The brief description of Crucifixion Quake on Prime reads “Geologist goes on a 20 year quest to determine if the physical events reported on the day of the Crucifixion happened as narrated” (and IMDb adds “or not”). That’s accurate. It’s mostly a pastiche of interview snippets of various theologians, scientists, and historians (myself included) and others interspersed with The Geologist as a narrator over various graphics, sometimes helpful sometimes just thematic filler. I must say as a film it’s pretty good. The cinematography, direction, and editing are top quality and its story will definitely keep you engaged throughout. Plus it’s filled with cool geology, astronomy, and history, some curious woo, and some critical knowledge about the Bible the average person doesn’t know (much like another fun film I’m in that is specifically about that fact: Cameron Reilly’s Marketing the Messiah, which I also highly recommend).

This film was spurred by the backlash faced by The Geologist for publishing a paper a decade ago attempting to link theological claims about Jesus with vague evidence of earthquake activity in ancient Judea. That paper led to widespread and sometimes crank coverage by “click bait” websites such as LiveScience (e.g. “Quake Reveals Day of Jesus’ Crucifixion” by Jennifer Viegas, 28 May 2012). Of course even just a little digging and you’ll quickly discover who The Geologist is: Jefferson Williams of Supersonic Geophysical, who with colleagues Markus Schwab and Achim Brauer of the German Research Center for Geosciences published “An Early First-Century Earthquake in the Dead Sea” in the International Geology Review in 2011—which did not “reveal day of Jesus’ crucifixion” (the viral stories his article spurred pretty much made shit up about what his paper said). Williams now has his own extensive webpage on the topic titled “Jerusalem Quake” (plus more throughout his website DeadSeaQuake.info).

General Take

Needless to say (and as the film does make clear) I don’t actually believe any earthquake coincided with the crucifixion of Jesus—even if Jesus existed. I doubt he did, but I also regard his existence as more than merely possible (in my peer reviewed work I find that has odds on present evidence of as much as 1 in 3). And here I’ll assume for convenience that he did exist, and was indeed crucified by Pontius Pilate—which means therefore sometime between 26 and 36 A.D. (the known tenure of Pilate over Judea).

I also don’t believe Matthew was retrofitting any real earthquake onto the date of the crucifixion either. This is one possibility mentioned in the film, as it is a well known ancient practice to do this: take some remarkable event (like an earthquake or an eclipse) that happened years before or later and “move” it to “exactly coincide” with some other event an author wants to make a point of; taking “mythic license” with historical facts, you might say. This is possible in this case, too, but unlikely. The only book to ever mention any such earthquake is Matthew, and he had demonstrable scriptural and mythographic reasons to invent it. All other references to it, e.g. in Julius Africanus centuries later, refer to this single claim in Matthew. All the other Gospels, including Matthew’s own source Mark, omit mention of it. It’s also not recorded in any other source whatever, which is inherently improbable. For instance, an earthquake that “split rocks” and “opened” many tombs (Matthew 27:51-52) could not have failed to have been recorded by Josephus, for example, who would have been born just a few years after that event and was very keen to document exactly such portents and disasters forty years later.

Such a quake would also have caused considerable death and civic damage, so it would be remarkable for it to escape the notice of any historian or chronologer of the period, and this is even more significant than you might think. Because not only does it not appear in any such sources that we have, we can be sure it did not appear in any such sources (for the significance of this see my discussion in Chapter 8.3 of On the Historicity of Jesus). Because Christians for three centuries scoured all sources they could find for this stuff, and didn’t find anything. Eusebius, and Julius Africanus before him, found only references to conjunctions that happened in different years in completely different regions. The chronologers Phlegon and Thallus, for example, both recorded a conjunction of a solar eclipse and an earthquake that damaged buildings in Nicea (modern Turkey), over a thousand kilometers away, in 31 or 32 A.D. (and even that report may have been retrofitted; we cannot confirm any such actual conjunction occurred). Even just lone earthquakes of such power in Jerusalem during the government of Pilate would have surely been touted widely—had any records mentioned one. So we can be sure none did.

It is therefore not plausible that Matthew “knew” of any such quake either, so as to retrofit it to the crucifixion, when he wrote a half century or more after the fact. He was therefore surely just making it up, just as he made up its effect of “raising the dead” from the tombs it opened, which miraculous revenants Matthew claims visited “many people” in the city (Matthew 27:52-53). It is more obvious that Matthew has added all this to Mark’s story by doing what Matthew often does throughout: borrowing prophetic ideas from the Scriptures and reifying them into fictional events surrounding Jesus. Early Christians routinely did this by pesher, a Jewish technique of combining several Scriptural passages together to signify a hidden meaning that informs them all.

This particular tale clearly derives from the Septuagint text of Zechariah 14:5, “when you flee from the earthquake . . . Jehovah my God shall come, and all the holy ones with him,” which Matthew would have read in conjunction with Amos 8:8-9 that similarly was thought to predict the messiah will come with the conjunction of a great earthquake and a blotting out of the sun. Mark borrowed the latter detail from Joel 2:31 (which we learn from Acts 2:20 the Christians deemed as having predicted); so when Matthew saw that Joel could be aligned with Amos and Zechariah, both of which add an earthquake, and the last of which conjoined that with a “raising of the saints,” Matthew chose to expand Mark’s myth with an earthquake and a “raising of the saints,” even causally linking them (the earthquake breaks open the tombs from which the saints arise). This is obvious myth, not history. As all external evidence confirms.

The Earthquake

The central MacGuffin of this film is Williams’ use of sedimentary evidence from the Dead Sea to try and identify the earthquake Matthew was talking about, which resulted in a peer reviewed paper on the “crucifixion quake” (or as he sometimes instead identifies it, for reasons explained in the film, the “Jerusalem quake”), which argued that the official earthquake catalogs should be corrected. They currently list an AD 33 quake solely on the evidence of the Gospel of Matthew combined with a series of historical “assumptions.” More on that later, but it’s quite clear these catalogs were created during a more gullible era of scholarship that this film shows definitely embarrasses geologists today (Williams is working on improving those catalogs). Williams’ research paper more or less indicates these should be revised to a less precise date and allow for the possibility the report is fiction (though the movie depicts Williams later trying to prove the original catalog date and assumptions). There is a lot that is interesting about this; but the one thing that isn’t really explained in the film is that the actual evidence is not quite what this sounds like.

In seismically active areas like the Middle East, earthquakes happen all the time—if by “earthquake” you mean any seismic event no matter how slight. For example, in just the last two months (really—just two months) there have been thirty (yes, thirty) earthquakes in Israel. Basically, there’s an earthquake literally every day. Needless to say, that an “earthquake” would correlate with any day on the calendar and thus with any event whatever is well near 100%. Such a coincidence is thus hardly a portent. Of those thirty earthquakes I just mentioned, only one was “felt.” Richter scale, 4.7. Which means it was only barely notable, causing “zero to minimal” damage. To “crack rocks” and “open tombs” requires a severity of at least 6.0. Below a 3.0 hardly anyone will even notice it.

Williams’ literature survey shows that only quakes of 5.9 or larger appear both in the historical and the Dead Sea sediment record. That means quakes of less than 5.9 tend not even to be noticed enough to be recorded. But quakes of nearly all intensities appear geologically as mixed layers of sediment, called “brecciated” layers or “seismites,” indicative of ground shaking. Williams also notes there is an observable correlation (as indeed one might expect) between earthquake intensity “and the thickness of the brecciated layers” indicating one. As Williams puts it, in a “brecciated” layer, “the entire interval appears to have been fluidized, brecciated, suspended, and then redeposited after the seismic shaking ended,” thus thoroughly mixing several years of deposits. The question is: how intense of an earthquake is indicated by a given thickness of an indicating layer?

Williams identifies a good test case: the Judean earthquake of 31 B.C. which was as destructive as the quake Matthew describes, and indeed was recorded by Josephus as one would expect. Experts estimate its intensity at somewhere between 6.0 and 7.0. In other words just barely above the “intense enough to enter the historical record” limit demonstrated across a two thousand year span. This means any seismite substantially smaller than what the 31 B.C. quake produced must have been substantially weaker, which means it will have been so slight an earthquake as to not even be recorded. Since the Dead Sea is only about twenty miles from Jerusalem, the epicenter distance will make only a small difference to these calculations. This is a problem.

One look at some of the sedimentary evidence cited in the movie (and in Williams’ published study) will make this problem clear:

Here you see the Dead Sea sediment layers accumulating over time from bottom to top. There were actually several sections taken from different Dead Sea locations examined. But this one illustrates the point. The seismite marked “Event B” represents all the layers mixed up into one by the 31 B.C. earthquake. The seismite marked “Event C” several centimeters above that then indicates the next most significant earthquake, which Williams believes correlates to the decade of Pontius Pilate’s tenure in Judea. All the layers in between alternate in color and composition year by year (as different deposits occur each Winter-Spring than in each Summer-Fall). However, repeated, smaller seismic events can have mixed any of these up in the interim, so it’s not really a simple matter of counting. But notice three crucial facts from this photograph:

1. If the layers between Events B and C represent 60 years of deposits (as Williams must assume to get the correlation he wants), Event B must have been so intense as to mix up decades of deposits; and Event C, years of deposits. This must necessarily completely hose any attempt to date Event C relative to Event B. You can’t just “count” layers to count years as Williams attempts, because many years have been erased; and not only by Event C, but a lot of other even smaller events. At most you can “guess” by measuring the depth, but as layers do not form consistent widths every year (not even close), this can only give a very crude measure.
2. In fact, Williams admits over half the layers in between B and C are too compromised to indicate precise durations (he counted using a different section than this one, but the point is the same). So the date he assigns to every layer is, actually, more conjecture than objective reality. He estimates the average error is +/-4.4 years (he rounds to 5) and arrives at a date for Event C of 31 A.D. by counting sedimentary layers alone. Then accounting for expected error, Event C dates from 26 to 36 A.D. Which means it could have happened literally anytime Pilate governed Judea.
3. The seismite of Event C is less than half the depth of the seismite of Event B, which means whatever quake correlates with C was very substantially weaker than the 31 B.C. quake. Williams finds nothing to suggest its intensity could be much more than 5.7, and even that is a stretch. For all we really know it could have been well below even a 5. But even 5.7 is below 6, the minimum intensity to create effects as Matthew describes, even below the 5.9 that would cause its notice in historical records (5.7 is about half as intense as a six; and ten times less intense than a 6.7, which is closer to the likely intensity of the 31 B.C. quake).

So Williams can only at best conclude an earthquake occurred sometime during the government of Pilate (a ten year span of time) that was so substantially weaker than the earthquake of 31 B.C. as to not have been capable of producing the effects Matthew describes (cracking rocks and dislodging tombs). His research paper thus admits it’s possible “the earthquake described in the Gospel of Mathew was in effect ‘borrowed’ from an earthquake that occurred” in some other year or “is allegorical fiction and the 26–36 AD seismite was caused by an earthquake” so mild as to not be recorded or even much remembered, and it’s just a coincidence that Matthew invented an earthquake during the same decade.

Which would not be a very improbable coincidence. Randomly picking a ten year span in a sixty year hiatus of medium-to-high seismic events and finding a medium-to-high seismic event within it is actually quite probable. Williams himself reports 28 larger seismic events occurred in that region in a span of about 1700 years, which is 170 decades; divided by 28, we can expect one such quake every 6 decades. Which is exactly the time lapse between Events B and C. Even picking a decade at random gives us a 1 in 6 chance of a coincidence. But those odds increase with every decade after an event, such that we already know we are highly likely to find one in the reign of Pilate even before anyone wanted to invent one.

Side Note: Wilson also thinks observed damage to Wilson’s Arch in the Temple Mount (whose construction began after the 31 B.C. quake and continued up to the 60s A.D.) is due to this earthquake under Pilate (as others have claimed), but that actually cannot be known. Earthquakes are not the only source of structural failure in ancient buildings, particularly ones continually stressed with new construction (as this was), and this damage to Wilson’s Arch can’t be dated anyway; it could date well after or even before Pilate (even dating the arch itself is a vexed question). So unless better evidence comes to light, I do not see this as usable data.

The Temple Curtain

You’ll see me in this film note that the Synoptic Gospels’ description of the “temple curtain” that tears “from top to bottom” at Jesus’s death certainly refers to the gigantic outer curtain visible to the public (especially perhaps from any hill near Jerusalem where a centurion overseeing a crucifixion would be standing). Of course I also do not believe any such event occurred. Josephus would again have mentioned it, as he did many other marvels involving the Temple preceding the Jewish War. The Talmud would surely preserve the legend as well. It appears in neither. And as an event, it is actually as historically impossible as Jesus walking on water or drowning thousands of pigs with an exorcism spell.

Right after my comment the movie has James Tabor appear and claim the only thing that could cause this curtain to tear “from top to bottom” as described would be “some kind of seismic event.” But honestly, I cannot even think of any way that would be possible. At most an earthquake would knock it down, not “tear” the cloth from top to bottom. Earthquakes are not Earth Giants that rise from the soil and rend bolts of cloth with gargantuan hands. In my book On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 422-23) you’ll find that the rending of the temple curtain is part of a whole sequence of deliberate fictional parallels Mark drew between his account of Jesus’s “birth” through baptism and Jesus’s “death” on the cross, including the Holy Spirit entering him at the one, and departing him at the other, during which “he saw the heavens torn asunder” (Mark 1:10), just as the Centurion “saw” the “veil of the temple torn in two from top to bottom” (Mark 15:38). The exact same word for “torn asunder” is used in both accounts, and in both the event “is seen,” in the one case by Jesus, in the other (or so it’s implied) by the Centurion.

Matthew removed this symmetry by changing the word used at the baptism and having it be a concrete event and not something merely “seen” by Jesus; which changes Luke would later preserve, with trivial variance. Otherwise Matthew mostly just duplicates Mark’s line about the curtain (Matthew 27:51; while Luke 23:45 shortens it to just “the veil of the temple was torn in the middle”). So Matthew is disinterested in keeping the original parallels that even motivated Mark’s fiction in the first place. Matthew likely just took it for granted that his Jewish audience would already know what Josephus likewise says about the outer veil of the temple: it was an enormous tapestry eighty feet high on which was depicted the heavens (Jewish War 5.212-14). Which means anyone witnessing it tearing would indeed be seeing the “heavens” torn, exactly as Mark said Jesus saw happen at his baptism, which is how and why Mark originally came up with the idea of this rended temple curtain. But for Matthew, all that mattered was the Jewish soteriological message that this myth conveyed directly in its imagery: that the barrier between heaven and earth is now broken. The Temple is therefore rendered obsolete. People now find salvation through sharing the death and rebirth of Jesus through baptism (“dying and rising” with him, as Paul put it). This is all symbolic myth, not factual history.

An Eclipse of What How?

The movie does admit that the claim that the crucifixion was accompanied by a solar eclipse is impossible as told (literally: the moon is always on the other side of the earth at Passover). Eclipses were often claimed to have occurred at the deaths of great kings, so making this detail up is expected, particularly as Mark (who invented this tall tale) could easily find it portended in scripture (see my peer reviewed article on Thallus in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). So other attempts to “reinterpret” what Mark meant are made instead.

First, it is claimed it “could have” been a local dust storm that blocked the sun. But that is not what Mark describes (a dust storm would have other notable effects), nor any subsequent author (Luke, the one author who claims to have researched his story, goes the other direction entirely and explicitly identifies the event as an eclipse of the sun, not a dust storm). So this is what we call in the history profession “making stuff up.” Yes, we can write more scientifically plausible fiction than Mark. But that’s still fiction. One of The Geologist’s quests in this film (which reaches no resolution—his research remains “ongoing”) is to see if evidence of a large dust storm event coincides with the “earthquake” layer he finds in the Dead Sea sediment. He even hints that somehow he might be able to prove from that sedimentary evidence the exact day of the storm and that it coincides with the same exact day of the earthquake.

I am quite certain that is scientifically impossible. Even this film makes clear that geologists struggle to pin sediments to even a quarter of a year, much less a specific day. Moreover, the very thing that makes earthquakes visible in this evidence is that they mix the layers. Thus several years worth of sediment get all jumbled by it. This means any evidence there might ever have been of a dust storm in the sediments of an earthquake year will almost certainly have been erased. Even if somehow one could extract evidence that “some” dust storm happened in those jumbled years of sediment, you won’t be able to peg it to even a single year, much less season, even less a day or week. So I’m pretty sure nothing will come of this. As experts even state in the film, we can expect an average of one such storm every year in ancient Palestine. So every year of sedimentary layers will exhibit evidence of one. So there certainly won’t be any way to show one occurred the same day as Jesus was killed (even if you knew the day Jesus was killed, which—contrary to what a good chunk of this film claims—we don’t, but more on that shortly).

At one point it is alleged there is evidence the event was a dust storm and not an eclipse because of a passage in the Sibylline Oracles that reads:

What signs shall precede this happy reign of Messiah? They are these: flaming swords in the sky seen by night in the east and west; storms of dust; the light of the sun failing in mid-day, and the moon’s rays falling on earth at unusual times; blood flowing from rocks; warriors and huntsmen appearing in the clouds of heaven.

The problem is that this is a medieval fabrication. It’s thus based on Matthew and (again) pre-Christian scripture (and possibly the works of Josephus), not an independent source. Note that it also mentions no earthquake, so if we are adducing this as evidence of what happened at the crucifixion, it would actually be evidence against an earthquake having then occurred. But it is not evidence of what happened at the crucifixion. It is not even a history, but a fake prophecy. Indeed it’s just a Medieval Christian fabrication, stitching together scriptural and Gospel data with unrelated legends (about bleeding rocks and visions in the sky, for example). By contrast, when the second century Christian apologist Athenagoras searched the Sibylline Books that existed then, he found no such passage. Likewise Justin, Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, and Augustine, all of whom quoted portentous Sibylline material—yet somehow never noticed this one. Because it hadn’t been fabricated yet. It therefore comes from no historical source. It’s late Christian fiction.

The movie then moves to the “lunar eclipse” theory, though it is not explained why. All the Gospels concur (except John, who removes all the portents at the death of Jesus from his account) that the darkness was of the sun and that it occurred at noon while Jesus was still dying; in fact, they have it end at the very moment he dies (Mark 15:33-37; Matthew 27:45-50; Luke 23:44-46). There is no logical way this could ever have referred to a lunar eclipse, which could never occur during the day (the Sun has to be behind the Earth, remember?), and thus could never have corresponded to the death of Jesus. So there is no logical sense in trying to “change the story” so that what the Gospels said was that a lunar eclipse coincided with the death of Jesus “and” an earthquake “and” a solar darkness, and so on. No source claims this. Not even mythical ones. That idea was completely made up by modern apologists.

This gets bizarrely conflated in the movie with evidence that Matthew is thereby proved reliable. By having said something he never said. Twist your mind around that. In any event, this lunar eclipse claim faces several other problems beyond that rather glaring one: (1) lunar eclipses during Passovers are inherently frequent (because they only and always occur during full moons, and Passovers always coincided with full moons), so finding one that occurred on any given Passover is not that surprising (and thus not indicative of anything remarkable); (2) we actually don’t have any real evidence Jesus was crucified at a Passover (and as we’ll see shortly, that’s actually historically impossible); and (3) as expert John Dvorak points out, “while there was a total lunar eclipse that night” (if we assume Jesus was killed during the Passover in 33 A.D., which thus occurred on 3 April by our calendar) “it likely was not visible from Jerusalem.”

That’s right. The film neglects to mention this little problem. In fact, that eclipse was only partial (it covered only half the moon, not all of it), it was visible at Jerusalem only on the horizon (at moonrise around seven at night), and from there only penumbral (the earth’s shadow actually didn’t touch the moon, just some solar light was blocked or diffracted). This is what a partial penumbral eclipse looks like:

Now imagine seeing this on the horizon; indeed, you should imagine half the moon is blocked by the horizon, the part covered by the penumbra is below the horizon, and as the moon rises even that slight penumbra over it fades. If you had not seen a side-by-side photograph, as here, showing what an unobscured full moon looks like, given all the actual conditions then (the shaded side below the horizon and fading as the moon rose above it) you are not likely to have even been able to tell any of the moon was in eclipse. In fact it’s generally recognized that any less than 70% of the moon in penumbra is not visible to the naked eye; so this penumbral eclipse would indeed have been invisible. Needless to say, this cannot by any stretch of the imagination have been considered a “darkness over the earth.” This is what we call a failed coincidence. Of all the lunar eclipses that could have remarkably attended a death at Passover, this is not one of them.

So, that doesn’t work either. The fact is, the Gospels did not imagine a dust storm or lunar eclipse. They imagined a miraculous solar eclipse lasting exactly a quarter of the day and coinciding exactly with the dying breath of Jesus. An event no other author noticed or recorded (Proving History, pp. 41-45, 54-60). That’s myth, not history. No such thing happened.

The Date

Although the film does a good job of explaining how the Gospels contradict each other on what year or date Jesus died, and determining what year they had in mind is a vexed question people have tried to solve in various ways, it never questions the most dubious of assumptions here: that the Gospels are even reporting any historical fact about this. They almost certainly are not. And this tanks the whole film’s thesis. Instead the Gospels are treated as reliable historical records of the date, day, and time of Jesus’s death and then a bunch of rigmarole is used to narrow Jesus’ death down to a “most likely” date of 3 April 33 A.D. Ironically, that’s a date that requires rejecting Matthew’s account—the only account claiming a coinciding earthquake!

And even this requires believing Jesus was executed on the eve of a Sabbath either on or immediately after a Passover, which means “on a Friday” either before the Passover meal (according to John) or after the Passover meal (Mark, Matthew, and Luke). Jewish days began at sunset, so in the “day” before Passover, which was the 14th day of the first month of the year, the lambs would be slain, then they would be eaten in the Passover meal after sunset, which began the 15th calendar “day.” The Synoptics thus have Jesus executed on what was technically the Passover holiday itself, the 15th, after the Passover meal. John relocates that death to the 14th, before the meal. John’s account is actually the last written, the least reliable, and the least likely to be based on any real information about Jesus (it also lacks any mention of an earthquake). The authors of John most likely moved the death of Jesus to before the Passover meal so Jesus would be literally killed at the same time as the Passover lambs were, perfecting his intended symbolism making Jesus the Passover lamb (hence his added mythology about Jesus’s bones not being broken).

When John did that, his narrative then limited the possible calendar years on which his new historical fiction could have occurred to either 30 or 33 A.D. Until John changed the story, the Synoptic narrative instead could only be fitted to either 27 or 34 A.D. In the movie they rule out 27 by claiming John the Baptist began his ministry in 29, but this assumes John the Baptist and Jesus ever really met (that is actually doubtable; there are several fairly obvious reasons why their interaction would have been mythically invented: see Proving History, index, “John the Baptist”) and it assumes Luke is telling the truth when he says John the Baptist began his ministry in the year 29 (but no one else tells us this, not even Josephus in his account of John the Baptist, and Luke is a known fabricator, and cites no source for how he supposedly even knows this). These are all highly dubious assumptions. And their improbabilities stack.

Likewise in the movie they rule out year 34 by claiming “it is known” that Paul converted in that year so that can’t be the year Jesus died, but in fact we have no reliable evidence regarding when Paul converted—at all, much less relative to when Jesus died. Paul could well have converted within the same year of Jesus’s death, or as late as 36 A.D., according to his own letters. Acts, by contrast, is wholly unreliable in its chronology—as we know because it egregiously contradicts Paul’s own testimony. So we actually have no secure data placing the conversion of Paul in 34, and no secure data ruling out his converting the same year Jesus died. So this notion that “it can’t be 34” is wholly insupportable.

The same can be said for their attempt to rule out the year 30, which the movie bases solely on a conversation with Jesus invented by John—in which reference is made to the temple’s construction lasting “forty six years,” so if its construction began in 16 B.C. this statement would have to have been uttered no earlier than 31 A.D. (15 years from 16 to 1 B.C., then 31 years from 1 to 31 A.D.). But Josephus reports the temple’s construction began in 19, not 16 B.C., which means this conversation could have been uttered anytime after 27 A.D. (18 years from 19 to 1 B.C., then 28 years from 1 to 28 A.D.). So someone made a mistake in the script here. Professional commenters have actually calculated years for this conversation ranging from 28 to 30 A.D., thus negating even the point of citing this verse. But since there is literally no reason whatever to believe that conversation even occurred—and as it manifestly embellishes material in the Synoptics that lacks that specific detail—this data simply can’t be used this way. And even if one did, their math is wrong. It does not rule out year 30.

So none of this really works. But the more devastating point is that none of these dates is even possibly true. Under Jewish and (governed by a local treaty) Roman law at the time, executions could not be performed on holy days. Trials for capital crimes by the Sanhedrin (as all the Gospels depict) had to be conducted over the course of two days and could not be conducted on or even interrupted by a Sabbath or holy day—nor ever conducted at night. The Gospel trial narratives violate every single one of these rules. Their authors thus did not even know (or didn’t care) how Jewish law in early Roman Judea worked, and can’t have been recording anything that actually happened. In historical reality had Jesus been arrested during or immediately before Passover he would have been held over in jail until Sunday morning, and could only have been convicted on a Monday evening at the earliest. Days after any Passover could have occurred. (On all this, with primary sources, see my chapter on the “Burial of Jesus” in The Empty Tomb; with Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4.1j-k and 5.5a).

The idea of having Jesus killed on a Passover Friday was entirely a mythical-theological contrivance (on the following see OHJ pp. 424-25). Mark constructed his myth to reify the teachings of Paul, and Paul tells us Jesus was known in Christian doctrine as both the Passover Lamb (1 Cor. 5:7) and the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20-23) and as having risen from the dead “on the third day” after his death (1 Cor. 15:3-4). The Torah commands that the Day of Firstfruits take place the day after the first Sabbath following the Passover (Lev. 23:5-11). In other words, on a Sunday. Thus Mark has Jesus rise from the dead on Sunday, the “firstftuits” of the resurrected, symbolically on the very Day of Firstfruits itself, and thus dying on Passover day, and rising the third day after (ancient Jews reckoned inclusively, so Passover is day 1, the Sabbath day 2, and the Day of Firstfruits day 3).

There were several other reasons Mark had to choose Sunday as the day of resurrection: Sunday was also traditionally the first day of creation (since God rested on the seventh day of creation, making that the Sabbath, hence Saturday; so creation began on a Sunday, the first day of the week: Gen. 1:5 and 2:2), and Jesus was also imagined as inaugurating a new creation (e.g. 2 Cor. 5:17), and thus logically had to rise on a Sunday. Mark also found this confirmed in the Psalms: scholars have long noted that he saw the crucifixion in Psalm 22, and then the sojourn among the dead in Psalm 23 (a rest, corresponding to a Sabbath), and then the resurrection in Psalm 24, which in the Septuagint text is ordered to be sung “on the first day of the week,” meaning—again—Sunday. That line is essentially directly quoted by Mark in 16:2, using the same distinctive idiom in the Greek. So we know this is what he was doing. When we combine all that with Paul’s Passover and Firstfruits and third-day doctrines, it becomes clear that Mark had to pick this arrangement of days and dates. Matthew and Luke simply copied him. And John made only a slight mythical adjustment to it.

So the whole choice of what day (and thus year) in which to have Jesus crucified is decided by literary symbolism, not historical plausibility. As history, the Gospel narrative makes zero sense. But as symbolic myth, every oddity is explained, and indeed expected. That John felt free to change the date (and thus the year) for the very same symbolic reasons only further proves how irrelevant historical facts were to constructing these narratives. They thus give us no usable data whatever regarding when Jesus really died.

This is particularly fatal to another finishing conceit of the film, which is The Geologist’s unfinished hope to check the pollen and sediment data to see if the “earthquake” in the decade of Pilate, Event C, occurred in Spring. Because pollen in the sediment directly above that seismite could conceivably show this. And also to see if there is any evidence of a great “dust storm” at exactly that same time, as that might have left detectable sediment directly above that seismite as well. Though really probably not, as he believes Matthew’s “second” earthquake at the opening of Jesus’s tomb is a real aftershock, which, one should presume, would have mixed that sediment up, thus concealing any evidence of a dust storm, if ever there had been one. And in both cases, he makes it sound like he can pinpoint this data down to a single day, but he could not possibly pinpoint even the month (Spring is months long, in case you forgot), so he couldn’t really show these things converged on the same day (even as each other, much less any other event), even if he could show they occurred in the same three-month time-span. In any event, he says this research is pending. (Yes, the movie leaves you hanging on both.)

But that is moot. It would not matter if there was a Spring dust storm immediately after seismic Event C—because we actually have no real evidence Jesus was killed in Spring! Having him die and rise in the Spring was entirely the invention of mythic reasoning, born from a narrative that has no historical plausibility at all.

Miscellaneous Stuff

That’s pretty much all the corrective needed should you watch this film. But besides those issues, here are various minor things to mention.

For example, at one point James Tabor is shown saying the Gospels got their titles in the fourth century. Concrete manuscript evidence predates that. Most likely they were assigned those titles in the mid-to-late second century, when the four Gospels were united into a single edition to compete with the original New Testament of Marcion (which we no longer have). The evidence for that conclusion is compelling, and is laid out by David Trobisch in The First Edition of the New Testament. Tabor’s overall point remains correct though—the names associated with the Gospels were assigned to them then, not by their original authors. Originally they just passed around unnamed, as simply “The Gospel.” Indeed, I think they were intended to be mistaken for each other; Matthew, for example, is not writing “his own Gospel,” he is literally rewriting Mark’s Gospel and passing it off as the original, just as Luke claims to be rewriting a “more precise” version of that selfsame singular “Gospel” that he says others before him had tried their hand at (“others” whom the author of Luke does not give the name of—because when he wrote, they had no names).

On a more trivial note, this film juxtaposes all its science and history and personal narrative with some mystic pronouncements of a Jungian therapist, which centers a lot around a kind of “theology of coincidences” (called “synchronicities”), whereby it is suggested “coincidences” entail the intervention of a benevolent spiritual power in the universe. In actuality, coincidences are simply the product of mathematics; that we think there is anything remarkable about them is caused by commonplace cognitive errors in human perception and reasoning, not any real causal power in the universe (see my article Everything You Need to Know about Coincidences).

Conclusion

Finally, I’ll be clear: Williams’ ideas are not credible as history, but they are interesting and worthwhile as science. He won’t really ever confirm anything about the life or death of Jesus, nor confirm any conjunction of events (there won’t be any evidence proving an earthquake, dust storm, and lunar eclipse all converged on the same day, or even shared the same month). But he will be producing a lot of valid information about Event C, and thus he will be adding to the scientific historical record of geological events regardless; and in the process, setting standards by which the same techniques and tools can be used to further study other seismic events in the Dead Sea sedimentary record. So I don’t want to give the impression that this movie sells anything as ridiculous as Magical Earthquake Ray Beams Caused the Shroud of Turin (yes, that’s a thing). To the contrary, this is a neat and interesting thing to watch. You’ll disagree with some parts, roll your eyes at others, but on balance it’s kind of cool.