RE:
Mark 15:25: “Now, it was the third hour when they crucified him”
And John. 19:14: “Now, it was the Preparation for the Passover, about the sixth hour, and Pilate said to the Jews, “Behold, your king!”
Greetings, everyone!
There has been confusion for the past 2,000 years concerning the difference between Mark’s statement that Jesus was a crucified “the third hour” and John’s statement that Jesus was still standing before Pilate at “the sixth hour”.
Here is the best article I have found on the subject:
https://bible.org/article/time-jesus-death-and-inerrancy-harmonization-plausible
This article shows that there is no agreement among scholars (surprise, surprise) on how to resolve the apparent contradiction. Some devout Christian scholars strain to make those two hours the same, while devout anti-Christian scholars such as Bart Ehrman jump at the chance to say, “Aha! See? I told you that the Bible is untrustworthy!”
The issue is no big deal, whatever the case may be. It could simply be that either Mark or John wrote a sloppy Greek “third”, which would look very much like a Greek “sixth”, or vice versa. Who knows? Or maybe, as some scholars contend, Mark and John were using different methods of telling time, one, the Jewish method, and the other, Roman.
Anyway, if you are interested in seeing how Christians and others have tried over the past 2,000 years to explain the apparent conflict in those verses, you can read the article I offer here, and others on line.
Pastor John