Did an Earthquake Happen When Christ was Crucified?

Biblical Earthquakes Recorded in Dead Sea Sediment

We are back with Dr. Steve Austin. We're talking about biblical earthquakes, the earthquakes that are recorded in the Bible. And Dr. Austin, you've had the opportunity now to do some special digs in the Dead Sea.

Tell us why digging. There is a great place to find out about earthquakes.

Yeah. Now, take a look at some sediment layers. You can see in the mud from the Dead Sea, the kind of gray layers, which is clay mud. There we see clay mud. We see clay mud here. And then we see the white layers, which are calcium carbonate mud.

And that's a different kind of mud than the clay mud. And it creates this alternating light and dark layering that is very evident in the sediment layers and is undisturbed. Now, what is interesting about that is how little disturbance there is except for the earthquakes.

And this graphic shows the idea of how earthquakes create a record within the sediment layers of the Dead Sea. So you have laminated sediment, as shown here, in the pre-seismic situation, pre-seismic Dead Sea sediment.

And it's laminated. It's laminated right here. Now, what happens is an earthquake occurs and it shakes the sediment and the upper part of the sediment liquefies or becomes lofted during the earthquake and then recompacts to make a disturbed layer.

And then post-seismic, after the earthquake, that layer is buried. And so you have a record inside of the sediment layers of the earthquake. And it allows the, basically, it's like a seismograph. It creates a record, a clear record for me to study.

Here we can see some of the Dead Sea mud exposed. And here I'm looking at the layer from 31 B .C., right here. Right here. That's 31 B .C., the disturbance layer.

So you can actually look at that and date it because it's undisturbed and see where earthquakes occurred. It's a historical record of the earthquakes right there for you.

Right there for study. And then, interesting, because that's a big earthquake that hit Qumran, just next door to where this earthquake sediment is seen, we can see the laminated sediment right here, up to that level, perfectly displayed, undisturbed.

And then we see a thin layer, only about three inches thick, right there. That's the earthquake of 33 A .D.

Right there. And from this, you would say that the earthquake in 31 B .C. is a bigger earthquake.

Comparing the 31 B.C. and 33 A.D. Earthquake Layers

Than the one in 31 A .D.? 33 A .D. is bigger. 33 A .D., excuse me. Yes. So 31 B .C. is a much bigger earthquake in the sediment layers than 33 A .D. But we can see 33 A .D. That's about 64 years of sediment there in just a few feet.

That's amazing how that just lines up perfectly with the chronological record in God's Word. Yeah. So the question is, what earthquake are we looking at at 33 A .D.? Well, it's when the earth shook when Jesus died.

When Jesus died on the cross, according to the Gospels, there was a great earthquake.

The Earthquake at Christ's Crucifixion in the Gospels

And there it is recorded in the sand of the Dead Sea.

In the mud layers of Dead Sea, we see the evidence of that big earthquake. Take a look at the detail of 33 A .D. You can see the thin layer running right along here, and then you can see the post-disturbance layer.

And all that wrinkling going on there is the effects of the earthquake wave impacting that sediment. The light layers are the chemical carbonate layers, and the gray layers are the clay layers. And it looks like an earthquake of about magnitude 5 .5, maybe magnitude 6, shook the bottom of the lake.

It's amazing. There.