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Is this scientific proof of the authenticity of the Bible!? There is a scripture in Luke that describes the moment Jesus was crucified and passed away:” It was now about noon and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon because of an eclipse of the sun.” -Luke 23:44-45 NASA has confirmed there was a solar eclipse in 33 A.D, the year when Jesus was crucified! Furthermore I checked out some information on solar eclipses and they tend to last about 3 hours, with the totality (the total blockage of the sun) lasting about 2 minutes, this agrees with the description of the solar eclipse in the scripture!
I also did some research on the chances of a solar eclipse occurring at any given place on the earth and it is only once every 100 years! The odds of a solar eclipse occurring at the exact place and time that Jesus was on the cross are astronomical, way too high to be a freak thing! It was clearly supernatural! The bible described the eclipse as lasting 3 hours which points to a complete solar eclipse which is very rare and only cover about a 50 mile radius on the earth and only occurs once every 100 years.
This is an interesting suggestion, but there are some serious problems with it.
For one thing, the length of the darkness was too long for a solar eclipse. The partial phases are not really “dark” – in fact, the eye adapts to the reduced sunlight and hardly notices the “twilight” phase, making the few minutes of near-total darkness at totality even more dramatic.
But an even more serious problem relates to the time of the Crucifixion. This happened at Passover, which is celebrated on the night of the first FULL moon following the northern vernal equinox. That makes a solar eclipse impossible at that time.
There are three main explanations for the darkness mentioned in the Gospels.
1.) A supernatural/miraculous happening.
2.) A meteorological phenomenon (high-altitude dust or smoke as evidenced in other “dark day” and “dry fog” events or even a very deep storm cloud blocking out the Sun).
3.) A non-literal account referring to spiritual darkness rather than physical darkness.
For what it is worth, my guess is a meteorological phenomenon, albeit providentially times (like the earthquake also mentioned in Scripture) to coincide with the death of Jesus.
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