opsia

At heart this is the adjective "late" doing duty as a noun. Mark keeps the fuller expression once, saying that "the hour was already late" as Jesus leaves the temple; everywhere else the hour drops out of sight and the word by itself means "evening." It appears most often in a set phrase the Gospel writers use to move a scene along: "and when evening had come."

The evening it names is wider than ours. In the day-reckoning behind the Gospels the calendar turned over at sunset rather than at midnight, and people spoke of two evenings: an earlier one running from the middle of the afternoon to sundown, and a later one from sundown on into the dark. This one word covers both, and the sentence around it usually shows which is meant.

• When the crowd needs feeding, evening comes early enough that the disciples can still send people off to the villages to buy food.
• When the vineyard owner settles up at evening, the workday has ended and the wages are due before the sun sets.
• When Mark reports an evening of healings, he adds "when the sun had set," putting it on the far side of that line.
• When the disciples put out to sea at evening, John notes two lines later that darkness had already fallen.

So evening is rarely a throwaway time stamp here. It is the hinge of the day, the point where one day closes and the next begins, and a striking number of the Gospels' turning points hang on it: the burial that had to be finished before the Sabbath, the Passover meal, the crossing into the storm, the locked room on the first Easter. Luke and Acts reach for a different word for evening (ἑσπέρα), and the matching adverb from the same root (ὀψέ) means simply "late" or "after."