Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadows, keeping watch above his own
So runs a few lines from James Russell Lowell’s poem, The Present Crisis. In 2 Cor. 13:8 the apostle Paul said in another vein, We can do nothing against the truth but for the truth. We might say that Truth reigns supreme, but it sure does cop a hiding from time to time!
Who was Thallus? What we do know about him is quite meagre. Most of us know him from one statement. He was a Greek (?) historian who wrote a three-volume history of his world of the period before and after Christ. Sadly, like many others of his calling, his work has been lost. What snippets we do have are from others quoting his work as part of their source material. It is generally believed he wrote about 20 years after Christ’s death. What is of special interest to me is a statement in the writings of Sextus Julius Africanus who in 221 A.D. mentioned a statement from the third book of Thallus’ histories. Thallus, in commenting on the darkness that accompanied Jesus’ death on the cross, put said darkness down to an eclipse of the sun – unreasonably as it seems to me said Africanus. Certainly it would be unreasonable since Christ was crucified at the time of the Passover which was always at the period of the full moon when it is impossible for there to be an eclipse of the sun! Also the Bible says it went dark for three hours (Mk. 15:33), and no eclipse lasts that long.
So Thallus testifies that Christ was crucified and it went dark! Obviously in attributing the darkness to natural causes he was no believer in the enormity and significance of Christ’s death, but felt compelled to acknowledge the phenomena. Why feel compelled to give an explanation for something that didn’t occur?! So here we have an unbeliever agreeing with the believers, and the truth of Mark’s statement is upheld!
We can make some other observations as well, from the case of Thallus. The reason his work has been lost was essentially because Gutenberg hadn’t invented his printing press at that time. Any written work was written by hand, and any copies had to be made by hand. Writing material, whether papyrus, parchment or vellum, was labour-intensive and expensive to produce – you couldn’t simply go down to your local Officeworks and buy paper by the ream. So few copies of ancient writings exist. For example, I have copies of the histories written by Tacitus, Herodotus, Pliny and others on a shelf in my office. They have been translated into English from a handful of manuscript copies, the oldest copy being in some cases produced a thousand years after the original was written. Despite the textual differences in the copies, and the huge time gap between the original writing and the oldest extant copy, we tend to regard what we read to be a fair and accurate copy of those early historians.
By way of comparison, we have thousands of manuscript copies of the New Testament, some dating from as little as two hundred years after the original letters being penned. The consistency of these manuscripts, far exceeding those of the secular historians, indicates great care was taken in the copying process which would further indicate the copyists thought these writings were important. Also bear in mind that copies of the scriptures were regularly subject to confiscation and burnings, so one wonders just how many copies were made over the years seeing so many are still extant. To go to such trouble and expense indicates that scribes did not think these to be fairy tales.
So Thallus still speaks today, though the bulk of his work has been lost. In the providence of God we have an extra-scriptural attestation to the fact that when Mark wrote it went dark during the crucifixion of Christ, he told the truth. Thallus’ flippant lie told two thousand years ago bears witness that Truth does reign.
P.S. And what shall we say about modern liberal scholarship which says the darkness at Jesus’ death was a literary creation rather than an historical event? Why do they say this? Essentially because they are religious atheists and do not believe in anything miraculous. They are able to attribute a ‘literary creation’ to the New testament writers, but what will they do with Thallus?