Bible chapter guide

Mark 15

Pilate questions Jesus and, to satisfy the crowd, releases Barabbas. Soldiers crown him with thorns; Simon of Cyrene carries his cross to Golgotha. At the ninth hour Jesus cries out and dies, the veil of the temple is torn, and Joseph of Arimathea buries him.

Summary written for the Labs; read the chapter itself for the full text.

What happens in this chapter

At dawn the council binds Jesus and hands him to Pilate, who asks whether he is the King of the Jews and, faced with a crowd stirred up by the chief priests, releases Barabbas, a man held with rebels who had done murder in an uprising. The soldiers take Jesus into the courtyard of the praetorium, mock him with purple and a crown of thorns, and lead him out, pressing into service Simon of Cyrene, whom Mark alone calls the father of Alexander and Rufus, as if his readers knew them. Mark alone gives the third hour for the crucifixion; darkness falls at the sixth hour, and at the ninth Jesus cries out in Aramaic and dies as the veil of the temple is torn. Women watch from a distance, Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the council, asks for the body, and Pilate, surprised that Jesus is already dead, checks with the centurion before granting it.

What the lab shows, and where to look

The Holy Week lab's Friday follows this chapter. 'Before Pilate' shows the judgment seat in the early morning, set by default at Herod's palace, where most scholars now place the praetorium; Herod's palace in Jerusalem through the Ages shows the palace and its towers on the western hill. At 'The crucifixion' the procession leaves the city by the gate at the third hour, Simon carrying the cross behind Jesus; the figures are stylized and seen from a distance, with no wounds shown. Step to 'The darkness'. The stop also asks where it happened and lets you switch between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Garden Tomb, with the evidence for each.

Questions people ask

Where was Jesus crucified?

The Gospels say near the city, outside its gate, by a road, with a garden and a new rock-cut tomb close by. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre covers a rock outcrop remembered as Golgotha and a tomb; in AD 30 the area lay just outside the city wall, in an old quarry with Jewish tombs of the period, and the Christians of Jerusalem pointed it out to Constantine's builders in the 320s. The Garden Tomb north of the Damascus Gate, proposed in the 19th century, has a garden and a skull-like cliff, but its tomb was cut in the 8th to 7th centuries BC, so it was not new in Jesus' day. Most archaeologists regard the Holy Sepulchre as the likely site, though it cannot be proven; the lab shows both.

Plausible

What time was Jesus crucified?

Mark says it was the third hour, mid-morning (15:25); John says Pilate's verdict came at about the sixth hour, around noon (John 19:14). Proposed answers: people reckoned time loosely in blocks of three hours, so a mid-morning event could be named by either; John counts from midnight in the Roman way; or an early copyist confused the Greek numerals. The first is the most widely held of these; many scholars also see a deliberate point in John's timing, which places the verdict as the Passover lambs were being prepared.

Plausible

Was the darkness at the crucifixion an eclipse?

It cannot have been an eclipse of the sun. Passover fell at the full moon, when the moon is on the far side of the earth from the sun and a solar eclipse is impossible; such an eclipse also lasts minutes, not three hours. The Gospels present the darkness as a sign, and do not explain how it came about.

Strongly supported

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Also in this chapter

Trials before the high priest and Pilate Before Pilate The crucifixion Burial in a new tomb The tomb and the resurrection morning The crucifixion Herod's palace

How sure can we be?

Textually stated
Golgotha was near the city and outside its gate, by a road where people passed by.
Textually stated
In the place where Jesus was crucified there was a garden, and in it a new tomb where no one had yet been laid, cut in the rock.
Textually stated
When Jesus died, the veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom.
Stated in the Gospels. That veil hung in Herod's Temple in Jerusalem, not in the wilderness Tabernacle, so the tearing shown in this lab is a reflection rather than a scene from the Tabernacle's history. Hebrews reads the veil as Christ's flesh, through which…
Strongly supported
The darkness cannot have been a solar eclipse: Passover fell at the full moon, when an eclipse of the sun is impossible. The Gospels present it as a sign.
Strongly supported
It was the day of Preparation, the day before the Sabbath: a Friday. The year was most likely AD 30 or AD 33, when the 14th of Nisan fell on a Friday (plausible).
Strongly supported
The third hour or the sixth?: KJV keeps the Greek hours ("third", "sixth"); the 和合本 turns them into Chinese double-hours, 巳初 (about 9 a.m.) and 午正 (noon), which already assumes how they were counted. Eusebius thought a copyist had changed the Greek numeral Γ (3) into ϛ (6); others think John counted hours the Roman way, from midnight.

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King James Version (KJV) Chinese Union Version, 1919 (Wikisource)