Were We Getting Together on Thursday or Friday?

Today’s biblical contradiction is different from the first two. In Proverbs and Genesis, an ancient editor looked at two texts that contradicted each other and said, “Ah, we’ll put them both in.” Faced with two texts of equal authority, the editor did not feel qualified to make a decision between them.

Today’s contradiction is different because it does not come from a single passage of a single book, or even one book at all. On the one side, we have the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke; and on the other we have John. The issue: on what date was Jesus crucified, the day before the Passover seder, or the day after the seder?

Matthew, Mark and Luke agree on many things. That’s why they’re called the “Synoptic” gospels, because you can “see them together.” The gospel of John often goes its own way, but most often it can simply be understood as narrating stories and details that were omitted by the other three for whatever reason. Logically, you can solve a lot of the tensions that way.

Not this one. Here are the relevant Synoptic texts (all NRSV):

Matthew 26:17-19: 17 On the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?’ 18He said, ‘Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, “The Teacher says, My time is near; I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.” ’ 19So the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the Passover meal.

Mark 14:12-16: 12 On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, ‘Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?’ 13So he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, 14and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, “The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?” 15He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there.’ 16So the disciples set out and went to the city, and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal.

Luke 22:7-13: 7 Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. 8So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, ‘Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it.’ 9They asked him, ‘Where do you want us to make preparations for it?’ 10‘Listen,’ he said to them, ‘when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house he enters 11and say to the owner of the house, “The teacher asks you, ‘Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ ” 12He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there.’ 13So they went and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal.

All three of the Synoptics are clear: The day before the crucifixion was the first day of eating matzoh, and Mark and Luke specify further that the Passover lambs were being sacrificed at the Temple that day. The meal that night, the Last Supper, was a Passover seder. You might notice that observing the first day of Unleavened Bread on the day before the seder is not consistent with biblical or rabbinic practice. It’s an interesting historical puzzle. Perhaps the gospel writers, who were probably not Jewish, misunderstood the importance of sweeping all the yeast out of the house on the day before the seder and counted that as the first day of Unleavened Bread. Perhaps Jewish practice in the first century CE, which predates the first rabbinic writings by 100 years, was different from how Passover is celebrated today. Either way, it doesn’t affect our question here, which concerns when the crucifixion was relative to the seder.

Now let’s see how John tells the story. The first notice of time is John 13:1a: “Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father.” Pretty vague, but clear on one point: the next events occur before Passover starts. Those events are the rite of washing the disciples’ feet, and a long “farewell discourse” (John 13-17). Jesus then retreats to a garden where he is arrested (John 18). Note that nowhere in there is the Last Supper mentioned. Maybe it’s just a difference of emphasis, a choice about what to focus on. Let’s see.

The next mention of time is John 18:39, where Pilate mentions an otherwise unknown custom of a prisoner release “at the Passover” (John 18:39). The Greek there is en tō pascha, which could mean “in the Passover,” and that somehow we’ve skipped to the Passover proper without it being narrated.

Except Pilate then interrogates Jesus and presents him to the crowd again (John 19:14): “Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’” “The day of Preparation for the Passover”: What can that mean but what the Synoptics called “the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed” (Mark 14:12)? This makes sense of John’s en tō pascha: Pilate is speaking on the first day of Unleavened Bread (perhaps, as we conjectured above, actually the day of sweeping out the yeast)–but in any event a full day earlier than he appears in the Synoptics.

The reason for this is simple. For John, as the Baptist said (John 1:29), Jesus does not eat a Passover lamb; he is the Passover lamb, and the crucifixion is his sacrifice. The Synoptic gospels certainly believe Jesus will suffer for the sake of the world, but they do not use Passover imagery to describe it.

It’s not really three against one, though. As is clear from the table above, the Synoptic gospels are so close that in fact two of them must have been using the third as a base. Because Mark is the shortest, and because Matthew and Luke add similar material to each other that is not present in Mark, the best guess is that Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke used him as a skeleton for their own accounts. So really, it’s a matter of Mark vs. John. It’s still a doozy, though: was Jesus crucified before or after the seder, one of the holiest moments in Jewish life?

Avoiding this contradiction would take some fancy footwork. One proposed solution is that the well-known tension between the Pharisees and Sadducees resulted for this one year in two different dates for Passover. Since Passover always has to start in the evening on the 15th day of the month of Nisan (according to rabbinic tradition), this would require that the Pharisees and Sadducees started this particular Nisan on different days. This is not actually completely impossible, since in rabbinic tradition, a month only begins when two witnesses say they saw the new crescent moon. So it’s conceivable, say, that the Pharisees rejected the Sadducees’ witnesses who said they saw the new moon one night, and only accepted witnesses who said they saw it the next night. That would put the two counts of the month one day off.

The problem is that this would be socially and religiously catastrophic. The Sadducees would be sacrificing their lambs in the Temple a day earlier than the Pharisees; and what’s more, the Pharisees would be sacrificing their lambs on what the Sadducees considered a holy day of rest. There’s no credible way such a disaster would have occurred and not be remembered by Josephus and the rabbis who recorded the history of this period. It’s not physically impossible, since no history can be complete; but the burden of proof would be entirely on those who argue that the Bible contains no contradictions, and the only evidence you could muster would be the statement that the Bible contains no contradictions. Such circular reasoning can be satisfying if you already believe that proposition, but not if you’re trying to decide on logical grounds whether a contradiction exists or not.

This kind of thing is why reading the gospels together like this has never been encouraged by the church. In the late second century CE, the Christian scholar Tatian produced a harmony of the gospels called the Diatesseron. In it, the gospels were put into four columns, and texts that referred to the same events and speeches were lined up. Issues like the one we’re talking about here would have become obvious–and unsettling. No wonder the church authorities destroyed all the copies they could get their hands on.

So what day was it? John’s theological bias towards sacrificial imagery may lean us towards favoring Mark’s as the more historically accurate. That’s not a bad guess, but that’s really all that it is. The short answer is, we don’t know on which day Jesus was crucified. We don’t know if he celebrated a seder that year. Really, this is what an irreconcilable contradiction does: It shows you the limits of what you can know. And sometimes it can force you to decide what’s really important.