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was using the Roman system of counting hours from midnight. The problem is that although the Romans' civil day went from midnight to midnight, they counted their hours from sunrise to sunset and from sunset to sunrise. No one counted hours from midnight. To do so would assume 24 hours of equal length all year round, and clocks simply weren't accurate or practical enough for this to happen. Daytime was divided into 12 equal hours that varied in length according to the time of year. Thus when Mark said the third hour and John said the sixth hour, they were both counting hours in the usual way and meant early to mid morning and middle of the day respectively. Whoever wrote this part of John, 60 or so years after the crucifixion, probably thought the death occurred early during the alleged eclipse, whereas Mark believed the eclipse came about three hours after Jesus' death.

Is the Old Testament any more trustworthy? It probably is, but not greatly so. The earliest Old Testament writings probably date to c. 1200 BCE. Yet the reference period goes several thousand years further back. Accurate accounts of the period would have been impossible. Writings would have been based on oral stories handed down over generations, complete with embellishments, gaps, and errors increasing with each generation. But people wanted answers such as where did they come from. An author who was able to reduce this to a manageable number of generations had more credence. Thus there are tall stories of people living many hundreds of years.

One of my favorite Old Testament stories is Noah's Ark and how the earth was covered in water to a depth of twenty feet above the highest mountain after forty days of rain. Let's stop to think what this means. Coastal plains would be under about five and a half miles of water, and the oceans and seas would be five and a half miles deeper than usual. Five and a half miles is 348,480 inches. If this amount of rain fell in 40 days, that would be an average of 8712 inches a day, 363 inches an hour and 6.05 inches a minute, worldwide. Rainfall intensity records as at 2006 are given as 73.62 inches in a day at Reunion Island in 1952, 15.78 inches in an hour at Shangdi, China in 1975, and 1.50 inches in one minute at Guadeloupe in 1970 (see www.weatherrecords.owlinc.org/ RainfallRecords1.html). This means that rain resulting in the biblical flood would have been four times the intensity of the heaviest rainfall ever recorded over one minute and this had to last

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