THALLUS (Thallos, Thallus, but in Jacoby, Fragm. d. Gr. Historiker, Allos). - Historian, a native of Samaria, a freedman of Tiberius, author of a Greek Chronography in three books, narrating events from King Belus of Assyria to the beginning of the imperial era. In a passage of the 3rd book of his history, reported by Julius Africanus (PG 17, 309), he calls the darkening of the sun that occurred at the death of Jesus an eclipse. Here is how Julius Africanus puts it: "This darkness, T., in the third book of his Histories interprets as an eclipse of the sun, unreasonably in my opinion." If one accepts that T. wrote in Rome around 50, this text acquires notable importance since it becomes known that, at that date, "in Rome, in circles close to the imperial Court, people spoke of Christ and polemicized in writing against the Christians, on account of the accounts of the Passion" (Tondelli).
The impossibility that an eclipse could occur on the day of a full moon, such as the Jewish Passover was, provided the anti-Christian polemicists, especially Celsus, with an argument to attack Christianity, but Origen, St. Jerome, and St. John Chrysostom had an easy time rebutting that it was not an eclipse but an extraordinary and supernatural darkening (ἀναστίσθη ὁ ἥλιος; Lk. 22, 45) which, together with other phenomena, followed the death of the Redeemer.
As for the eclipse that according to Phlegon of Tralles, a freedman of the age of Hadrian (author of a Chronicle in 16 books divided by Olympiads), would have occurred in the third year of the 202nd Olympiad, that is, in 32 A.D., it does not refer to the episode that followed the death of Jesus, and in fact neither St. Justin, nor Tatian, nor Arnobius, nor Lactantius, nor St. Jerome (except insofar as he translates the Chronicle of Eusebius) mention the Chronicle of Phlegon.
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Nicola Turchi