What day is it?
Caleb
Shipmate Posts: 5
in Kerygmania
I thought I had it, more or less - but now I am not so sure!
By correlating bits from Genesis, Leviticus, Jonah and the New Testament, I was fairly happy that the crucifixion of Jesus was on Nisan 14 i.e. the same time as the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, with his burial being in haste before the Passover sabbath began on Nisan 15 .
However, Mark writes ""On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, ‘Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover? Unless I have missed something this would make the crucifixion date Nisan 15, a sabbath day. Three things I do not understand are:
Would the chief priests and teachers of the law have held a trial, even a show trial in a kangaroo court on the sabbath?
Would they have done it at any time that week because Mark noted that they said themselves, ",,,,not during the festival, or the people may riot"?
What gap is there between twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month when the Passover begins and the start of the fifteenth day of that month when the Lord’s Passover begins~ (from Leviticus 27)
By correlating bits from Genesis, Leviticus, Jonah and the New Testament, I was fairly happy that the crucifixion of Jesus was on Nisan 14 i.e. the same time as the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, with his burial being in haste before the Passover sabbath began on Nisan 15 .
However, Mark writes ""On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, ‘Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover? Unless I have missed something this would make the crucifixion date Nisan 15, a sabbath day. Three things I do not understand are:
Would the chief priests and teachers of the law have held a trial, even a show trial in a kangaroo court on the sabbath?
Would they have done it at any time that week because Mark noted that they said themselves, ",,,,not during the festival, or the people may riot"?
What gap is there between twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month when the Passover begins and the start of the fifteenth day of that month when the Lord’s Passover begins~ (from Leviticus 27)
Comments
Not sure if the explanation is in original, but some are.
I'm sure someone must have done a PhD including it to a high level of detail.
It's an in Mark 'contradiction'.
So either Mark got confused and had Jesus doing something on Saturday then said he died on Friday (which seems unlikely at such short distance, but maybe he was counting backwards and forwards and messed up)
Or Mark thought wrongly that "the feast" was earlier than it was. (Why use it as a reference if you don't know? Though I bet there are novels with "it was a wednesday two days before Easter").
Or the "first day" is genuinely earlier, somehow (If the reference to the sacrifice is explaining the season rather than the day, it is easier to expand the festival)
Why does the Old Testament have the lamb sacrificed on Nisan 14 and before the Passover meal while the New Testament has the real Lamb being sacrificed on Nisan 15 and after the Passover meal?
is the suggestion that the first day of Unleaven Bread was actually the day before the passover.
For example, it means that from a Jewish perspective, including the perspective of Jesus and the disciples, the meal, the trial and the crucifixion happened on the same day, not on two consecutive days. (This also means that the Hebrew words or concepts behind references to “the evening” or “late in the day” actually correspond to what we’d call afternoon.) And the day on which both the Last Supper and the crucifixion happened would be the day on which the Passover was actually remembered and, through the meal, participated in.
As for why Jesus wasn’t killed when the Passover lambs were being sacrificed, a few things come to mind. One is that had Jesus been killed when the paschal lambs were slaughtered, then Jesus would not have been able to eat the Passover meal with his disciples, which he said he had long desired. It was the meal, not the sacrifice itself, that was seen as the central act, the focus, of Passover. The sacrifice was merely a necessary act of preparation for the meal.
Given that, it seems to me that for the early Church, the connection between the Passover meal and the crucifixion and the early Church’s “breaking of bread” was the significant connection. I suspect that the sacrifice of the paschal lamb was seen as being implicit in the Passover meal.
Also, separate from the Passover lamb, the chronology given in the Gospels, with Jesus dying at 3:00, would make his death happen at the time of the daily “evening” sacrifice. (The sacrifices of paschal lambs would, as I understand it, happen afterward, between the evening sacrifice and sunset.) So, a connection is made between both the Passover and the daily sacrifice.
And yes, as @Jengie Jon says, there is a theory that some groups, like the Essenes, used slightly different calendar calculations.
Perhaps this is mentioned in the podcast, but it is my understanding that a Hebrew word/term used in the Torah with relation to Passover and that can be translated as “first” can also be translated as “previous/prior.” The Gospels, of course, were written in Greek, not Hebrew, but it’s my understanding that the Greek of the Septuagint translates that Hebrew word with a Greek work that’s similarly flexible. So that may contribute to some ambiguity.
FWIW. Sorry I don’t remember or know more.
John probably has the right chronology in having Jesus crucified on 14 Nisan and rising on 16 Nisan (the day of waving the sheaf). The synoptics have Jesus crucified on 15 Nisan and rising on 17 Nisan (the day of waving the sheaf according to an alternative interpretation of Leviticus 23.11.