The Darkness at Golgotha (Mark 15.33): Exorcizing the Demonic From the Evangelist’s Imagery

The Biblical Background: Amos 8:9–10

The evocation of Amos 8:9–10 in our episode is not explicit. The reader is not presented with a formula for quoting scripture. Nevertheless, as observed by Marcus (2009: 1062), the intertextual link between Mark 15:33–39 and Amos 8:9–10 “has been noted by commentators since the second century” (Irenaeus, Haer. 4.33.12). The list of scholars who have affirmed this link more recently is a lengthy one. It is worth listing here the recent commentators and household names from the previous century, to illustrate just how wide the agreement has been: Holtzmann 1901: 180; Lohmeyer 1937: 345; Klostermann 1950: 166; Taylor 1952: 593; Schweizer 1970: 352; Gnilka 1978: 2.321; Schmithals 1979: 694; Lührmann 1987: 262; Hooker 1991: 376; Kertelge 1994: 158; Edwards 2002: 475; France 2002: 651; Boring 2006: 430; Yarbro Collins 2007: 751; Dschulnigg 2007: 399; Black 2011: 328; Focant 2011: 640; Gutten-berger 2017: 352. Although one objection will be discussed below, it seems reasonable to speak of a consensus. The key feature shared by the two texts is the hourly indication: the darkness begins at noon (Amos 8:9, Hebrew and LXX).

In LXX Amos 8:9 the prophet states: “And it will be on that day, says the Lord God, that the sun will set at noon and the daylight will darken upon the earth”. In the following verse (LXX Amos 8:10), “that day” is described as similar in its horror to “mourning for an only son” (cf. LXX Gen 22:2; Jer 6:26; Zech 12:10). Following a number of scholars, Marcus (2009: 1062) references a potential subsidiary background in Exod 10:21–22 (Hebrew and LXX) which, however, has the darkness lasting three days rather than hours and makes no mention of noon as the starting time:

people will not only mourn for an “only son” but will also find it impossible to hear the word of God (Amos 8:11-12). The darkness, then, is not just a freak of nature but a judgment like that described in the plague narrative of Exod 10:21, “a darkness that can be felt” – and Jesus feels it. … The judgment predicted by the Prophets has fallen on the crucified Jesus.

Guttenberger (2017: 352) also observes the judgment motif and its background in Amos 8:

In the [Markan] narrative, the darkening of the sun points back to the depiction of the world’s end (13,24). For the reader, this end of the world is realized symbolically with Jesus’ death. Those who know the Scriptures are reminded of Amos 8,9: the darkness at noon is a sign of God’s judgment.

However, while Marcus suggests that the prophetic judgment falls on Jesus, Guttenberger (352) connects the darkness of Amos 8:9 with the other external accompanying circumstance of the protagonist’s death, the tearing of the temple’s curtain. As a result, the drama of the last three hours of the cross becomes – without depriving it of its reality – also a foreshadowing of future events, including the temple’s destruction (the judgment represented by the darkness falls on the temple):

It is to be assumed that the tearing of the Temple’s curtain symbolically prefugures its coming destruction and is connected to the idea of God abandoning the Temple. Thus the accompanying circumstances indicate that the events of the final phase preceding and overlapping with “the world’s end” occur symbolically at the time of Jesus’ death.

As we can see, the solar disturbance before Jesus’ death could be interpreted very differently by two scholars both of whom see Amos 8:9–10 as part of the back-ground. The darkness can be taken as indicating God’s judgment falling on Jesus or on the temple and its apparatus. Which of these positions is more likely to be correct? Let us take a closer look at the OT intertext.

Let us begin with the reference to an only son (Amos 8:10) in its original context. It is not the evildoers whom the prophetic author compares to an only child. The only son does not receive judgment in Amos 8:9–10. Rather, it is implied that following the coming catastrophe the mourning on the part of those who are left alive will be so intense as to rival the feeling of a loss experienced when losing an only child. The idea is to illustrate the emotional horror of the coming tribulation. Therefore, while it cannot be ruled out that Mark referenced Amos 8:10 atomistically and intended the narratee to understand the only son Jesus as receiving punishment, it is probably wise to at least proceed with caution.

Amos 8:9–10 (Hebrew and LXX) is surrounded by explicit cultic and political references. The prophet can hardly be accused of subtlety. In Amos 8:2 he states: “The end has come for my people Israel”, the Northern kingdom. A verse later, the following ominous prediction concludes Amos’ fourth vision: “The temple singers will wail on that day … Many shall be the corpses, strewn everywhere – Silence!” (8:3). The command to be silent, in combination with the reference to haphazardly strewn bodies, indicates improper burial. As noted by Shalom M. Paul (1991: 255), “under such dire circumstances one must be extremely careful not to mention the name of God (see 6:10)”. A terrible carnage, then, appears to be envisioned. The immediate context reveals that it comes as a consequence of the predatory behavior of the upper classes of the Northern society (Amos 8:4–8).

One may recall here the accusation of Mark 12:40, directed against the scribes in Jerusalem: “They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation”. This statement is immediately followed by the widow’s mite (12:41–44) and the apocalyptic discourse, which opens with an allusion to the temple’s destruction (13:2). While Jesus is in Jerusalem, Mark frequently associates the scribes with the chief priests (11:18, 27; 14:43, 53; 15:1, 31). They appear to belong to the temple apparatus and likely represent its scribes. After Jesus is crucified, in the final narrative sequence before the darkness arrives, the chief priests and the scribes collectively mock Jesus (15:31). On the other side of the cover of darkness, at the moment of Jesus’ death, the temple curtain is torn (15:38). From this sequence one could reasonably infer – in light of Amos’ context – that the judgment that fell on a lawless generation in the days of old (722 BCE) is foreshadowed as about to fall again – on a lawless group that similarly tramples the poor and commits evil acts. The biblical background, then, seems to lend some support for Guttenberger’s position.

This background has not gone completely unchallenged, however. Let us consider one of the few authors objecting to Mark referencing Amos 8:9–10, Robert H. Gundry (1993: 964). He makes three points:

But [compared to Amos 8:9] the sun does not go down in Mark 15:33, the judgmental character of Amos 8:9 has no counterpart in Mark, and the phraseology of neither the Hebrew nor the LXX of Amos 8:9 carries over.

I will begin with Gundry’s second point, the argument from Mark 15:33–39 lacking an explicit reference to judgment. This objection holds only if one assesses Mark 15:33–39 atomistically, without taking into consideration the context of the entire gospel. It is not clear that one must approach allusions in this manner, i.e., as informed only by the pericopes in which they are featured. The allusion to Amos 8:9–10 makes the most sense at this particular juncture because the darkness in Mark’s story is a feature of the death scene. But could not this intertext be linked to Mark 15:33–39 with the expectation that the narratee would assess the allusion in light of the entire preceding story? Judgment is a prominent theme in Mark’s gospel and it may be reflected in the tearing of the temple’s curtain (although this detail is admittedly ambiguous). Irenaeus, one of the early commentators on our passage, understood the allusion to Amos in just such a manner (Haer. 4.33.12): after the crucifixion, “those days which were their festivals according to the law, and their songs, should be changed into grief and lamentation when they were handed over to the Gentiles”.

Zooming out to the bigger picture, all three of Gundry’s points share a certain key premise. Namely, there is an expectation of a somewhat wooden allusionary practice; text A can only utilize motif X from text B in the same manner as text B utilized motif X. But if this were granted, there could be no indebtedness to previous models within new narrative frameworks, since the latter tend to invite (and, in some cases, demand) recontextualization of borrowed motifs. In our text, Mark appears to be interested in a temporary cover of darkness, from noon until three in the afternoon. Is it a reasonable expectation that the evangelist, if he wished to link the narratee to Amos 8:9–10, should have depicted the sun as going down at noon and as rising again three hours later? Gundry would probably not have been pleased with this outcome either; the sun does not reemerge three hours later in Amos. Gundry’s criterion of an exact or near-exact resemblance between the texts in an allusion can find further refutation in the network of Greco-Roman accounts relevant to Mark 15:33–39. It is to these accounts that we now turn.

The (Mainly) Greco-Roman Background: Anguish of the Sun

In connection with Mark 15:33–39, commentators observe that in antiquity “eclipses and other unusual astronomical events were often associated with the death of great people” (Marcus 2009: 1061). The list of Markan specialists making his observation would be as long as the one offered earlier for Amos 8:9–10, featuring many of the same names, and there is probably no need to reproduce it here. Nevertheless, others have suggested that the “familiar OT motif” of an unnatural darkness “makes it unnecessary to search for a background in (mainly) Greek and Roman accounts of eclipses … marking the deaths of great men” (France 2002: 651 n. 40; cf. Grández 1989: 220; Gundry 1993: 963–64, 968; Focant 2011: 640–41). While necessity can seldom be proven in historical investigations, to see whether such parallels provide a likely background for Mark 15:33–39, let us examine the principal accounts in question.

I would like to propose the following interpretation of the motif under discussion: anguish of the sun. The context for unusual solar obscurations in surviving Greco-Roman literature was typically the death of a dignitary or a particularly horrifying murder (see Table 1 below). Sometimes – and this will be key for our analysis – the context allowed for a convergence of these two threads. Such was the case of Julius Caesar. In what follows, I use the term ‘death’ somewhat broadly as denoting departure from this world. As we shall see, pertinent solar disturbances were not necessarily limited to the protagonist’s physical death but included other types of permanent departure (e.g., the heavenly translation of Romulus in multiple authors listed below; Enoch in 2 Enoch). The dying person could be a king (most Greco-Roman examples of-fered below), a sage (Enoch), a statesperson (Pelopidas), etc. In a popular mythological thread, the murdered persons are the cannibalized sons of the Mycenaean king Thyestes. The solar disturbance could be an omen or posthumous.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Author	Protagonist	Work/Passage	Action
Classical Athens
Euripedes	Oresetes	Iph. taur. 178–202	□
Sophocles Sons of	Thyestes	A.P. 9.98 (LCL 84: 53)	□
2nd century BCE
Accius	Sons of Thestes	Atreus (LCL 314: 381)	□
1st century BCE
Cicero	Romulus*	Rep. 2.10 (2.17)	*
Diodorus Siculus	Pelopidas	Bib. hist. 15.80	**
Virgil	Julius Caesar	Georg. 1.466–68	□
Late 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE
Dionysius Halicarnassensis	Romulus	Ant. rom. 2.56	** ***
Hyginus	Sons of Thyestes	Fab. 88	□
Livy	Romulus	Hist. 1.16	***
Ovid	Sons of Thyestes	Am. 3.12.39	□
	Romulus *	Fast. 2.491–99	***
	Julius Caesar	Metam. 15.781–99	***
The first two thirds of the 1st century CE
Unknown Author	Sons of Thyestes	Aetna 20	□
Lucan	Victims of the civil war // Sons of Thyestes	Bell. 1.535–44	□
Manilius	Sons of Thyestes	Astr. 3.18–19; 5.461–63	□
Philo	kings (in general)	Prov. 2.50	**
Seneca	Sons of Thyestes	Thy. 635–38, 776–901, 983–96, 1035–36	□
	Children of Medea	Med. 26–30	□
Second half of the 1st century CE
Flaccus	Colaxes	Argon. 6.621–29	* †
Josephus	Julius Caesar	Ant. 14.309	□
Pliny the Elder	Julius Caesar	Nat. 2.30	**
Late 1st – early 2nd century CE
Florus	Romulus *?	Ep. 1.1.17–18	** ***
Plutarch	Romulus *	Rom. 27.6–8	* ***
	Pelopidas	Pel. 31.1–32.7	**
	Julius Caesar	Caes. 69.2–5	*
1st – 3rd century CE
Unknown Author	Adam	L.A.E. 45–46	*
Unknown Author	Adam	T. Adam 3.6	*
2nd – early 3rd century CE
Dio Cassius	Augustus	56.29	**
2nd century CE or later (potentially later than the 3rd century CE)
Unknown Author	Enoch *	2 Enoch 67:1–2	* †
3rd to 5th centuries CE
Ambrose	Theodosius I	Ob. Theo. 1	*
Augustine	Romulus	Civ. 3.15	** ***
Claudian	Sons of Thyestes	Bell. Gild. 395–401	*
Marinus of Neapolis	Proclus	Proc. 37	**
Servius	Sons of Thyestes	Comm. Aen. 1.568	**
	Julius Caesar	Comm. Georg. 1.466	*
Victor	Julius Caesar	Vir. ill. 78	□

The most thorough lists of relevant accounts, to the best of my knowledge, have been compiled by Rufino María Grández (1989: 199–200) and Davies-Allison (1997: 622–23, footnotes 61 and 62). Grández’s list is more extensive but contains notable omissions. Below, Table 1 combines both lists, excludes lunar disturbances (Mark says nothing about the moon in 15:33–39), excludes the accounts where the focus is not on a particular individual’s (or individuals’) death, offers a few corrections, arranges the authors chronologically (to the degree possible), and provides an indication of the nature of the phenomenon. A few notes: Grández (200) classifies Diodorus Siculus’ and Plutarch’s similar accounts only under “eclipses históricos”, but the focus in both accounts is on Pelopidas’ demise. It is similarly worth paying attention to the big picture with Flaccus: described in the account of Colaxes’ death is no less a departure than of a son of Zeus. Euripides’ Orestes belongs to the same category.

A few comments should be made here regarding the Adamic traditions preserved in the Life of Adam and Eve (L.A.E.) 45–46 (Charles 1913: 149–50) and T. Adam 3.6. It is rather difficult to reliably date these works and the potentially earlier traditions they may contain. While T. Adam has a Jewish core, the document we have represents the work of “a Christian redactor in the 2d or 3d century” and the section containing the death of Adam features numerous Christian motifs (Robinson 1992: 68). For the clearly composite L.A.E., it has been noted that “the traditions embodied in [it] fit well into the 1st and early 2d centuries C.E.” (Levison 1992: 65). The situation with 2 Enoch is similarly complicated (Andersen 1992: 520–21). I therefore leave open the question of the origin of the traditions concerning the darkness as accompanying the death of Adam and the heavenly translation of Enoch, and include all three of the above works in Table 1.

Sigla in Table 1. An asterisk next to a protagonist’s name in the middle column indicates heavenly translation rather than death. Death can be real (e.g., Caesar) or wrongly assumed (Orestes); this distinction does not affect the author’s or characters’ interpretation of the sun’s obscuration. In the right-hand column, the signs next to the passage indicate the nature of the darkness phenomenon in each instance: single asterisk* for an unspecified obscuration of the sun (no further explanation is given); double asterisk** for a solar eclipse; triple asterisk*** for a storm; raised square⸋ for an action performed by the sun. If the darkness is explicitly said to be caused by God or gods, a cross† is added to the appropriate sign from the above list.

As Table 1 shows, the earliest authors on the list are Euripides (Iphigenia Taurica) and Sophocles (the latter according to Statyllius Flaccus [epigrammatist, 1^st century BCE]; cf. Boyle 2017: 359). The motif thus appears to be popular already in the classical period. Sophocles’ use of it in the context of Thyestes’ feast was destined to become one of antiquity’s most beloved mythological references: ten authors in Table 1 (the list is not intended to be exhaustive). Beginning with classical Athens, the sun’s obscuration was thereby imbued with a strong sense of tragedy and a capacity to convey the notion of some egregious transgression which essentially compelled the sun to look away. While the motif could function in a somewhat more limited context of a great individual’s death, the undercurrent of a transgression in the form of a particularly heinous murder accounts for roughly half of the entries in Table 1: Sophocles, Accius, Virgil, Hyginus, Ovid, the author of Aetna, Lucan, Manilius, Seneca, Josephus, Pliny, Plutarch, Claudian, Servius, Victor. As noted earlier, the two threads converge in Caesar’s death: here the sun appears to mourn what is at once a blatant criminal act and the passing of a great individual (Virgil, Ovid, Josephus, Pliny, Plutarch, Servius, Victor). The analogy with the death of Jesus seems apropos.

The obscuration of the sun at the death of Caesar likely has its antecedents in the legend of Romulus’ departure. Cicero writes (Rep. 2.10 // 2.17; for the two referencing systems [chapter, e.g., 2.10; section, e.g., 2.17] and our passage, see Müller 1881: 311):

When Romulus had reigned thirty-seven years, and had established those two excellent foundations of the state, the auspices and the senate, he obtained this great meed: for when he had disappeared upon a sudden obscuration of the sun, he was deemed to have been placed among the number of the gods.

Livy, Ovid, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus offer more detailed treatments of the same myth. Writing in Greek, Dionysius (Ant. rom. 2.56) notes the availability of many different stories regarding Romulus’ end. He derides the heavenly translation myth as belonging to the domain of fables and juxtaposes it with “more plausible accounts”. The latter involve Romulus being murdered by his own people (for a variety of reasons), in a manner highly reminiscent of the death of Julius Caesar. One suspects that the growing mythology of Caesar’s death begins around this time to bleed back into the mythology of the ‘parent’ story (Romulus). A lively debate then ensued between the authors who sided with the more realistic, Caesar-esque, version (Dionysius, Livy, probably Florus, and, much later, Augustine) and those who supported the myth of Romulus’ heavenly translation (Ovid, Plutarch).

The solar eclipse that came to be associated with the assassination of Julius Caesar could further be seen as not only signifying the violent crime of his death but also as portending a war. After Pax Romana was implemented, Virgil reflected on the recent events as follows (Georg. 1.466–68):

He [the sun] too it was, when Caesar’s light was quenched, for Rome had pity, when his bright head he veiled in iron-hued darkness, till a godless age trembled for night eternal.

Virgil was followed shortly after the turn of the era by Ovid (Metam. 15.781–99), in whose account the solar disturbance became an omen of Caesar’s death. We can see that the sun’s temporal position with respect to the object of its anguish does not materially affect the interpretation of the heavenly phenomena. The desperate attempts by Cytherea (Aphrodite) to prevent the assassination are said to be behind the portents, but ultimately Jupiter informs her that Caesar’s time is over and that his departure must make room for Augustus, among whose many accomplishments will be to become “the most valiant avenger of his father’s murder” (15.823–24). Not too long after the currently accepted range for the publication of Mark’s gospel, further related accounts would appear in Pliny, Plutarch, and Josephus.

In terms of potential influences on Mark, then, the motif of vengeance and war appears to enter the myth of Caesar’s death with Ovid. While Marcan commentators frequently reference Plutarch and Josephus at Mark 15:33, these accounts (and Pliny’s brief note) are almost certainly published in the decades following Mark’s gospel. Meanwhile, Ovid’s account predates Mark. My objective is not necessarily to suggest a direct dependence; it was probably common knowledge that Caesar’s killers perished in the Wars of the Second Triumvirate. Accordingly, the sun’s obscuration could already prior to the publication of Mark’s gospel, as summarized by Philo, be interpreted as at once a reaction to a great individual’s death and a portent of a future war (see also Lucan, who ingeniously fuses the sun’s disgust over Thyestes’ feast with the Roman civil war). Last but not least, if the traditional date of Mark’s publication during the Jewish War should be accepted, Seneca’s Thyestes and Medea were published before the gospel (note the clever play on Thyestes’ feast in Med. 26–30, where the sun must flee from the horror of her actions). Once again, my intention here is not necessarily to suggest a direct dependence: as shown in Table 1, in the first century CE at least Ovid, Lucan, Manilius, and the poet of Aetna were familiar with the myth epitomized by Seneca, indicating the scope of its popularity. Note especially the casual manner in which this myth is referenced in Aetna 20: “the day that turned its course in horror” – nothing further was apparently deemed necessary by the author to trigger the allusion.

The classical tragedians, Cicero, Diodorus, Virgil, Dionysius, Livy, Ovid, Lucan, Manilius, Philo, Seneca, and Aetna combine to sketch out a plausible Greco-Roman background for the Markan darkness. This potential background scarcely requires that an obscuration of the sun could not have actually happened at Golgotha. It merely shows that there existed an established mythological category in which such an event could be understood by a narratee familiar with (some of) the accounts in question. When the above authors are combined with those listed in Table 1 beginning with the second half of the 1^st century CE, the evangelist can be located in a steady stream of recurring imagery spanning all of antiquity. While only five authors located upstream of Mark wrote in Greek (Euripides, Sophocles, Diodorus, Dionysius, and Philo), the proliferation of the solar disturbance motif shortly after the gospel’s publication in three more Greek authors (Pliny, Plutarch, and Josephus) highlights its bilingual spread. Of course, it also remains an open question whether Mark knew Latin. A number of scholars do not rule out the possibility, even as a definitive conclusion remains out of reach (for the linguistic data, see Marcus 2000: 32; Focant 2011: 8 and n. 3). For what it is worth, Mark uses a Latinism in our pericope: the centurion is described with the loanword kentyriōn (a NT hapax) rather than the normal Greek term hekatontarchēs (Matt 27:54; Luke 23:47).

The timeline of the motif’s development and its accompanying circumstances in Mark recommend an allusion specifically to the mythology that had formed around Caesar’s death. As noted earlier, the same convergence of a dignitary’s death and heinous murder is found in both stories, supplemented with a possible hint of war. Of particular significance are the identification of Jesus as king (Mark 15:2, 9, 12, 18, 26, 32) and the acclamation by the centurion stationed at the cross (15:39). In reality, this individual may or may not have been a Roman citizen (e.g., France 2002: 637, 658–59; compare Yarbro Collins 2007: 764–65, 768), but it appears fairly certain that he was intended to be perceived by the narratee as, at minimum, a Gentile soldier in the Roman auxiliary forces (e.g., Hooker 1991: 378–79; France 2002: 637, 658–59; Boring 2006: 432; Yarbro Collins 2007: 764–65, 768; Focant 2011: 644–45; Guttenberger 2017: 349). For a bolder assessment, see Lührmann 1987: 264: the Latinism kentyriōn identifies the centurion as a Roman!

It is probably too much of a coincidence that the soldier stationed at the cross, witnessing the solar disturbance, and acclaiming Jesus as God’s son (on which see the following paragraph) should happen to be a legionnaire in the Roman army. One is inclined to agree with Marcus (2009: 1061): “The supernatural darkness, therefore, may be one of the reasons that the centurion acclaims Jesus as God’s son”. The Roman soldier’s participation in the events of Mark 15:33–39, addressing the man identified as king and characterizing him as divine, recommends a deliberate allusion by the evangelist to the myth of Caesar’s death. In other words, the centurion recognizes in the solar disturbance a sign that one could expect him to know, one that was believed to have accompanied the departure of the Republic’s founder and, centuries later, of the man standing at the transition from the Republic to Empire.

A brief syntactic excursus must enter our discussion here. While the NAB reads “the Son of God” in Mark 15:39, the definite article is absent in the Greek text. Some scholars have pressed for the definite character of the expression, which is normal grammatically under the circumstances present in this sentence (e.g., Edwards 2002: 480; cf. France 2002: 660). It is not necessary, however, to approach the situation as a choice. That the undetermined form is not accidental is indicated by the acclamation’s past tense (“this was [God’s Son]”; cf. Pesch 1977: 500; Guttenberger 2017: 349). As Focant (2011: 645) notes, “the genius of the narrator is to leave to the reader the concern to interpret the passage”. Guttenberger (2017: 349) adds that the statement as phrased is plausible for a Roman character in the story: the emperors as “sons of a deified father (divi filius) died and could (subsequently) themselves become deified” (see also Yarbro Collins 2007: 768). The narratee, of course, is not expected to stop at the centurion’s stage of belief (e.g., Pesch 1977: 500; France 2002: 660; Focant 2011: 645; Guttenberger 2017: 349). The NAB’s translation of the acclamation therefore conveys the sense with which the narratee is expected to read Mark 15:39, a step ahead of the centurion.

Finally, let us consider the few objections raised against the probability of the Greco-Roman background in Mark 15:33–39. The maverick of Markan studies, Gundry (1993: 963) once again leads the charge: “Mark speaks only about darkness, not also about an eclipse”. But so do Livy and Ovid (Fast. 2.491–94), and Ovid’s other account (Metam. 15.781–99) does not explicitly refer to an eclipse either (contrast Dionysius). Table 1 illustrates the degree to which generic darkness, eclipses, and storms were interchangeable within the overarching category of the sun’s anguish, frequently in describing the death of the same individual. Gundry’s (964) second objection is that “darkness preceded the death of Jesus and ceased before it (as implied by the centurion’s seeing the expiration of Jesus)”. We have seen, however, that Ovid turned the sun’s posthumous obscuration into an omen (Metam. 15.781–99); the same occurs in Diodorus’ account of Pelopidas’ final campaign (subsequently rerecorded by Plutarch). Philo (Prov. 2.50) speaks of the “impending death[s]” of kings. And in Plutarch, who features the motif on three separate occasions in his Lives, the obscuration occurs after Caesar’s death, preceding that of Pelopidas (Pel. 31.1–32.7), and during the translation of Romulus (Rom. 27.6–8). Thus, there does not appear to have existed a uniformly fixed pattern for such events. The motif of darkness was ‘plug-and-play’ depending on the needs of the story and the author’s choice. Gundry himself thinks that God has shielded his son [1993: 964], in which regard he seems indebted to Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha 97. This interpretation of the darkness appears to have been chosen almost of necessity, without any specific signals in the text, as a result of Gundry’s rejection of the biblical and Greco-Roman backgrounds. In light of the validity of these backgrounds, I wonder if it is necessary

On his part, Grández (1989: 220) characterizes the Greco-Roman parallels as “puramente exteriores” and as devoid of substance. He thinks that valid parallels would need to exhibit an eschatological conception of history. This brings to mind Gundry’s earlier objection against Amos 8:9–10 as the biblical background of Mark 15:33–39, which, as the reader will recall, looked for a similarly rigid correspondence between a text and its intertext or mythological parallel. In attempting to categorize the vast collection of accounts under review, Grández tends to overlook the most important motif, that of the sun’s anguish over the death of a great individual or in the face of a particularly abhorrent murder. This leads to an underappreciation of the convergence of these two threads in the accounts of Caesar’s death and their relevance to Mark’s darkness over Golgotha.

Other authors maintain that the availability of biblical motifs renders an extra-biblical background unnecessary (France 2002: 651 n. 40; Focant 2011: 640–41). I find this view somewhat reductive. There is no obvious reason to deny Mark the ability and intention to communicate with the narratee via both Jewish and pagan symbols. I would like to suggest that additional considerations (the popularity of the Greco-Roman motif; the recurring identification of Jesus as king; the convergence of the same two factors as in the death of Caesar; and, above all, the acclamation by the Roman legionnaire at the cross) all speak of favor of such an intention. This position is certainly not controversial with the majority of Markan commentators.