the passion of our Saviour falls on the day before the passover; but an eclipse of the sun takes place only when the moon comes under the sun." Christian apologist Tertullian believed the event was documented in the Roman archives. Colin Humphreys and W. G. Waddington of Oxford University considered the possibility that a lunar, rather than solar, eclipse might have taken place. They concluded that such an eclipse would have been visible for 30 minutes in Jerusalem and suggested the gospel reference to a solar eclipse was the result of a scribe wrongly amending a text. Historian David Henige dismisses this explanation as 'indefensible' and astronomer Bradley Schaefer points out that the lunar eclipse would not have been visible during daylight hours. In an edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time entitled Eclipses, Frank Close, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, stated that certain historical sources say that on the night of the Crucifixion "the moon had risen blood red," which indicates a lunar eclipse. He went on to confirm that as Passover takes place on the full moon calculating back shows that a lunar eclipse did in fact take place on the night of Passover on Friday 3 April 33AD which would have been visible in the area of modern Israel, ancient Judea, just after sunset. Modern biblical scholarship treats the account in the synoptic gospels as a literary creation by the author of the Mark Gospel, amended in the Luke and Matthew accounts, intended to heighten the importance of what they saw as a theologically significant event, and not intended to be taken literally. This image of darkness over the land would have been understood by ancient readers, a typical element in the description of the death of kings and other major figures by writers such as Philo, Dio Cassius, Virgil, Plutarch and Josephus. Géza Vermes describes the darkness account as typical of "Jewish eschatological imagery of the day of the Lord", and says that those interpreting it as a datable eclipse are "barking up the wrong tree". Temple veil, earthquake and resurrection of dead saints The synoptic gospels state that the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom. The Gospel of Matthew mentions an account of earthquakes, rocks splitting, and the opening of the graves of dead saints, and describes how these resurrected saints went into the