[Christ Our Passover…..
Hanne Rylaarsdam
Daylight hours were measured from sunrise (6 a.m.). The third hour was 9 a.m.; the sixth hour, 12 noon; and the ninth hour, 3 p.m. An event that occurred before sunset (the twelfth hour, 6 p.m.) was counted as taking place on that day and, after sunset, the next. Even if moments old, a portion of a day counted as the wholeand so in the Jerusalem Talmud "day and night each are a term, and part of a term is like the whole" (Shabbat, IX.3). Days, too, were counted inclusively (most notably in the Roman calendar) and both the first and last day were included in their calculationwhich added a day to the sum.
This was the Passover feast commemorating the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, who had marked their doorposts with the blood of a lamb so God would pass over them. A moveable feast, Passover was especially sacred when it coincided with the Sabbath, another holy convocation (Leviticus 23:34)as was the first day of the ensuing week-long Feast of Unleavened Bread that followed the Passover (Leviticus 23:7, Deuteronomy16:3). And, just as God had "rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made" (Genesis 2:2), so too the Sabbath was to be a day in which "thou shalt not do any work" (Exodus 20:10, 12:16; Leviticus 23:3, 7).
For a Passover meal to be celebrated on the Sabbath, it therefore had to be prepared well before sunset, while it still was Friday. This was the Day of Preparation, in which the lamb sacrificed on the afternoon of Nisan 14 was eaten later that eveningin the twilight after sundown and the rising of the full moon on what then was Saturday, Nisan 15, the Day of Passover. Twilight itself was that period between sunset and the appearance of the first few stars in the evening sky, when the moon first was visible in the darkening sky.
But there is a day's difference between the accounts. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke; so named because they share a similar narrative, in contrast to John), Jesus is said to have been crucified and died after the Passover meal on what then was Passover day (Nisan 15). In the Gospel of John, Jesus dies before the Passover, while the meal still was being prepared (Nisan 14). The question is whether Jesus died before or after this Last Supper and whether it truly was a Passover meal. When, in other words, did the Day of Preparation and the Day of Passover fall on a Friday in the reign of Pontius Pilate? That date determines the year in which Jesus died.
Mark was the first Gospel to be written, sometime shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 when, on Passover that year, the Romans laid siege to the city, destroying the Second Temple four months later (Josephus, The Jewish War, V.3.1, VI.4.8; cf. Mark 13:2, "there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down"). He recounts that, on "the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the passover [lamb]," the disciples asked Jesus where they were to prepare the meal "that thou mayest eat the passover" (14:12; also Matthew 26:17; Luke 22:15, "I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer").
(It should be remembered that, although Jesus and his disciples partook of a Passover meal in the evening at the start of Nisan 15 and he died later that Friday afternoon, both events in the Jewish calendar still occurred on the same daythe Last Supper being eaten in the twilight that marked the beginning of Friday Passover, which then extended to sunset that night and the beginning of the Sabbath on Saturday.)
John was the last Gospel to be written, about twenty-five years after Mark's account. He relates that Jesus died "before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father" (13:1). So, too, in the Jewish Talmud, "On the eve of the Passover Yeshu [Jesus] was hanged....he was hanged on the eve of the Passover" (Mishnah Sanhedrin, 43a).
The Jewish authorities refused to enter the building however, "lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover" later that evening (18:28). This obliged Pilate, somewhat incongruously, to meet with them outside, passing to and from his own palace as he questioned first Jesus, and then his accusers. Finally brought out for judgment, Jesus was led away to be crucified. "It was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour" (noontime) (19:14, 16).
Having had a Last Supper the evening before, Jesus does not partake of a Passover meal but is sentenced and crucified while, in the Synoptics, it still was being prepared. When Luke, for example, says it was about the sixth hour that Jesus reassured the thief on the cross that he would be with him that day in paradise (23:44), in John, Jesus still was standing before Pilate, who declared to the Jews, "Behold your King!" (19:14). This would have been sometime after noon but before sunset that evening. (Philo speaks of Passover "beginning at noonday and continuing till evening," The Special Laws, II.37.145.)
(In the Synoptic Gospels, the Last Supper is a Passover meal and the crucifixion occurs on the Day of Passover itself, Nisan 15. In John, this Last Supper is eaten the evening before and Jesus is crucified on Friday afternoonbut that is the Day of Preparation, Nisan 14.)
In John, moreover, this Passover fell on a Saturdaythereby coinciding with the weekly Sabbath. "That sabbath day was an high day" (19:31), in which the two festivals were celebrated on the same day, and Friday (Nisan 14) was the Day of Preparation for them both. This was the same time that the lambs were being prepared for the Passover feast at moonrise later that evening and the beginning of Passover Day (Nisan 15). Jesus himself has become the sacrificial lamb or, in the words of John the Baptist, "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (1:29, 36), dying at the same time as the paschal lambs were being ritually slaughtered in the Templeas prefigured by I Corinthians "For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (5:7).
According to Josephus, this would have been "from the ninth hour till the eleventh" (3 p.m. to 5 p.m.) (War of the Jews, VI.9.3). By the first century AD, the number of lambs killed by priests at the Temple was so great that sacrifices had to begin earlier in the afternoon. For Passover in AD 70, Josephus relates that 256,500 lambs were slaughtered at Jerusalemas the Jews themselves would be later, when they had gone there to celebrate but then were trapped inside the besieged city by Titus and his Roman legionaries.
And "because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day" (John 19:31), Jesus has to die before the beginning of the Sabbath, when capital punishment was prohibited by Jewish law (cf. Deuteronomy 21:23, "His body shall not remain all night upon the tree"). This is why John alone speaks of the legs of the two thieves being broken so that they not remain alive on the cross. Unable to lift themselves to breathe, suffocation would come all the more readily and death hastenedbefore the start of the Sabbath (and Passover) that evening, only hours later. (Cicero relates a proverbial remark said of Titus Plancus, whose shifting alliances allowed him to survive the politics of Rome. "He cannot die unless his legs have been broken. They have been broken, and he lives," Philippics, XIII.27.)
The legs of Jesus no doubt would have been broken as well, had he not already died (as confirmed by the thrust of a spear in his side), thus fulfilling God's command that "neither shall ye break a bone thereof" of the paschal lamb (Exodus 12:46; also John 19:36 "a bone of him shall not be broken"; contra, I Corinthians 11:24, "Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you").
Jewish law also prohibited rulings in a capital case being made at night. A person could be tried and acquitted on the same daybut not convicted. If there was an initial verdict of guilty, the trial had to be adjourned until the following day, when the decision could be reaffirmed. During that time, members of the Sanhedrin were permitted to change their minds, although only to acquit if originally there had been an argument for conviction. There then was a vote and a final verdict pronounced. Thirteen of the twenty-three members of the Sanhedrin had to render a guilty vote to convict (Mishnah Sanhedrin, 4.1, 5).
It was this deliberative procedure that precluded capital cases from being adjudicated on the eve of a Sabbath or feast day. The court would not know whether the defendant was to be acquitted or convicted until it convened the next day and its decision finalized. If guilty, an execution the day after that would defile the sanctity of these holy days.
Indeed, Augustus himself had decreed that Jews "be not obliged to go before any judge on the Sabbath-day, nor on the day of the preparation to it, after the ninth hour" (Antiquities of the Jews, XVI.6.2). This excused Jews from appearing before a Roman tribunal when they otherwise would be preparing to celebrate the Sabbath that Friday afternoon.
The Synoptic account of the Sanhedrin considering such a case on the eve of Passover is therefore suspectas is the discrepancy between their intention not to arrest Jesus "on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people" (Mark 14:2) and his actual arrest on that very day. Curious, too, is the mention of Simon who, having "coming out of the country" (14:21), was compelled to carry the cross of Jesus. The presumption is that he had been working in the countryside and walked into townboth of which would have violated the injunction to "not do any work" on the Sabbath. In Acts, for example, the distance from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem was "a sabbath day's journey" (1:12). According to Josephus, this was five stadia or furlongs, about a thousand yards (Antiquities of the Jews, XX.8.6.), which is to say that it was short enough not to constitute "work." Josephus of Arimathea also was busy on Passover day, asking Pilate for the body of Jesus, buying a linen shroud, wrapping Jesus in it, and laying him in the tomb (Mark 15:43, 46).
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