Was Jesus crucified at the third hour, or was he still before Pilate at about the sixth hour?

The answer most often given by Christian scholars today starts from how people told the time without clocks. The day was counted in twelve hours from sunrise (John 11:9), but in everyday speech it was marked off in blocks named by the third, sixth and ninth hours, as in Jesus’ parable of the labourers (Matthew 20:3–5). Mark keeps to these markers throughout his account: third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour (Mark 15:25, 33, 34). ‘The third hour’ can therefore stand for the whole mid-morning period from about nine until noon, which is how Gill explains it. John, for his part, is careful to say only “about” (Greek hōs) the sixth hour.

On this reading the events fit together: Pilate gave his verdict in the late morning, which John, rounding upwards, calls about the sixth hour; Jesus was crucified soon afterwards, still within what Mark calls the third hour; and at noon darkness fell (Mark 15:33). Two witnesses judging the time of a morning’s events by the sun, one naming the block the events fell in and the other the hour they were nearing, would differ in just this way. Mark may also be dating the whole process that began when Jesus was handed over, rather than the moment he was nailed to the cross, as Barnes suggests.

Roman reckoning in John

Some, notably B. F. Westcott, have held that John counted the hours from midnight, as Roman law counted the civil day, so that his ‘sixth hour’ is about six in the morning. Pilate’s verdict would then come early (John 18:28 says “it was early”) and the crucifixion at nine. Others reply that the Romans, too, usually counted the hours of daylight from sunrise, and that John’s other times read naturally that way (John 1:39; 4:6).

A copyist’s slip

Greek numbers were often written as letters, and the letter for three (Γ, gamma) could be mistaken for the sign for six (Ϛ). Adam Clarke and Jamieson-Fausset-Brown held that John originally wrote ‘third hour’, a reading found in some manuscripts and early writers (see the textual note).

Augustine’s answer

Augustine suggested that Mark’s ‘third hour’ marks the time when the crowd cried “Crucify him”, so that they, more than the soldiers, were the real crucifiers; John’s ‘about the sixth hour’ is when Pilate handed Jesus over.

Christian scholars are still divided between these explanations. The approximate-time answer is the most widely held today, but none of them can be shown to be the right one.