Jesus Died Twice!

This is an illustration of discrepancies within the New Testament that I frequently use with my students. It is a “textbook case” be- cause both Mark and John give explicit indications of when Jesus dies. And he dies at different times, depending on which Gospel you read.

Mark was probably the first Gospel to be written. Scholars have long thought that it was produced about thirty-five or forty years after Jesus’ death, possibly around 65 or 70 CE. The first ten chapters of Mark are about Jesus’ public ministry in Galilee, the northern part of Israel, where he teaches, heals the sick, casts out demons, and confronts his Jewish opponents, the Pharisees. At the end of his life he makes a journey to Jerusalem in order to celebrate the Jewish feast of Passover; while he is there he is arrested and crucified (chapters 11–16).

To make sense of Mark’s dating of the crucifixion (and of John’s, for that matter), I need to provide some important background in- formation. In the days of Jesus, the Passover, held annually, was the most important Jewish festival. It was instituted to commemorate the events of the Exodus that had occurred centuries earlier, in the time of Moses, as recounted in the Old Testament book of Exodus (Exodus 5–15). According to that account, the children of Israel had been enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years, but God heard their cries and raised up for them a savior, Moses. Moses was sent to the Pharaoh and demanded, speaking for God, that he “let my people go.” But the Pharaoh had a hard heart and refused. In order to persuade him, God empowered Moses to send ten horrible plagues against the Egyptians, the last of which was the most awful: every firstborn Egyptian child and animal would be killed by the angel of death.

The Israelites were given instructions to avoid having their own children slain. Each family was to sacrifice a lamb, take some of its blood, and spread it on the doorposts and lintel of the house where they lived. Then, when the angel of death arrived that night, he would see the blood on the door and “pass over” that Israelite house, moving on to houses without the blood, to murder a firstborn child. And so it happened. Pharaoh was struck to the heart, and in anguish he let the Israelites (600,000 men, plus the women and children) leave his land. But after they set out, he had a change of heart, marshaled his army, and chased after them. He tracked them down at the Red Sea—called the “Sea of Reeds” in Hebrew—but God performed yet another miracle, allowing Moses to part the waters of the sea so the Israelites could cross on dry land. When the Egyp- tian armies followed in chase, God caused the waters to return and drowned the whole lot of them.

And so Israel was saved from its slavery in Egypt. God commanded Moses that from that time onward the Israelites were to commemorate this great event by a special meal, the annual Pass- over celebration (Exodus 12). In Jesus’ day, Jews from around the world would come to Jerusalem to celebrate the event. On the day before the celebratory meal was eaten, Jews would bring a lamb to the Jerusalem Temple, or more likely purchase one there, and have it slaughtered by the priests. They would then take it home to prepare the meal. This happened on the Day of Preparation for the Passover.

Now the only confusing aspect of this celebration involves the way ancient Jews told time, the same way modern Jews do. Even today the “Sabbath” is Saturday, but it begins on Friday night, when it gets dark. That is because in traditional Judaism the new day begins at nightfall, with the evening. (That’s why, in the book of Genesis, when God creates the heavens and the earth, we’re told that “there was evening and morning, the first day”; a day consisted of night and day, not day and night.) And so the Sabbath begins Friday night—and in fact every day begins with nightfall.

And so, on the Day of Preparation the lamb was slaughtered and the meal was prepared in the afternoon. The meal was eaten that night, which was actually the beginning of the next day: Passover day. The meal consisted of a number of symbolic foods: the lamb, to commemorate the original slaughter of the lambs in Exodus; bitter herbs, to remind the Jews of their bitter slavery in Egypt; unleav- ened bread (bread made without yeast) to remind them that the Israelites had to flee from Egypt without much warning, so that they could not wait for the bread to rise; and several cups of wine. The Passover day, then, began with the evening meal and lasted ap- proximately twenty-four hours, through the morning and afternoon of the next day, after which would begin the day after Passover.

Now we can return to Mark’s account of Jesus’ death. Jesus and his disciples have made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. In Mark 14:12, the disciples ask Jesus where they are to prepare the Passover meal for that evening. In other words, this is on the Day of Preparation for Passover. Jesus gives them instructions. They make the preparations, and when it is evening—the beginning of Passover day—they have the meal. It is a special meal indeed. Jesus takes the symbolic foods of the Passover and imbues them with yet more symbolic meaning. He takes the unleavened bread, breaks it, and says, “This is my body.” By implication, his body must be broken for salvation. Then after supper he takes the cup of wine and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, that is poured out for many” (Mark 14:22–25), meaning that his own blood must be shed.

After the disciples eat the Passover meal they go out to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. Judas Iscariot brings the troops and performs his act of betrayal. Jesus is taken to stand trial before the Jewish au- thorities. He spends the night in jail, and the next morning he is put on trial before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who finds him guilty and condemns him to death by crucifixion. We are told that he is crucified that same day, at nine o’clock in the morning (Mark 15:25). Jesus, then, dies on the day of Passover, the morning after the Passover meal was eaten.

All this is clear and straightforward in Mark’s Gospel, but despite some basic similarities, it is at odds with the story told in the Gospel of John, which is also clear and straightforward. Here, too, Jesus goes to Jerusalem in the last week of his life to celebrate the Passover feast, and here, too, there is a last meal, a betrayal, a trial before Pilate, and the crucifixion. But it is striking that in John, at the beginning of the account, in contrast to Mark, the disciples do not ask Jesus where they are “to prepare the Passover.” Consequently, he gives them no in- structions for preparing the meal. They do eat a final supper together, but in John, Jesus says nothing about the bread being his body or the cup representing his blood. Instead he washes the disciples’ feet, a story found in none of the other Gospels (John 13:1–20).

After the meal they go out. Jesus is betrayed by Judas, appears before the Jewish authorities, spends the night in jail, and is put on trial before Pontius Pilate, who finds him guilty and condemns him to be crucified. And we are told exactly when Pilate pronounces the sentence: “It was the Day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon” (John 19:14).

Noon? On the Day of Preparation for the Passover? The day the lambs were slaughtered? How can that be? In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus lived through that day, had his disciples prepare the Passover meal, and ate it with them before being arrested, taken to jail for the night, tried the next morning, and executed at nine o’clock A.M. on the Passover day. But not in John. In John, Jesus dies a day earlier, on the Day of Preparation for the Passover, sometime after noon.

I do not think this is a difference that can be reconciled. People over the years have tried, of course. Some have pointed out that Mark also indicates that Jesus died on a day that is called “the Day of Preparation” (Mark 15:42). That is absolutely true but what these readers fail to notice is that Mark tells us what he means by this phrase: it is the Day of Preparation “for the Sabbath” (not the Day of Preparation for the Passover). In other words, in Mark, this is not the day before the Passover meal was eaten but the day before Sabbath; it is called the day of “preparation” because one had to pre- pare the meals for Saturday on Friday afternoon.

And so the contradiction stands: in Mark, Jesus eats the Passover meal (Thursday night) and is crucified the following morning. In John, Jesus does not eat the Passover meal but is crucified on the day before the Passover meal was to be eaten.4 Moreover, in Mark, Jesus is nailed to the cross at nine in the morning; in John, he is not con- demned until noon, and then he is taken out and crucified.

Some scholars have argued that we have this difference between the Gospels because different Jews celebrated Passover on different days of the week. This is one of those explanations that sounds plausible until you dig a bit and think a bit more. It is true that some sectarian groups not connected with the Temple in Jerusalem thought that the Temple authorities followed an incorrect calendar. But in both Mark and John, Jesus is not outside Jerusalem with some sectarian group of Jews: he is in Jerusalem, where the lambs are being slaughtered. And in Jerusalem, there was only one day of Passover a year. The Jerusalem priests did not accommodate the calendrical oddities of a few sectarian fringe groups.

What is one to make of this contradiction? Again, on one level it seems like a rather minor point. I mean, who really cares if it was one day or the next? The point is that Jesus got crucified, right?

Well, that is both right and wrong. Another question to ask is not “Was Jesus crucified?” but also “What does it mean that Jesus was crucified?” And for this, little details like the day and time actu- ally matter. The way I explain the importance of such minutiae to my students is this: When, today, a homicide is committed, and the police detectives come in to the crime scene, they begin searching for little scraps of evidence, looking for the trace of a fingerprint or a strand of hair on the floor. Someone might reasonably look at what they are doing and say, “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see that there’s a dead body on the floor? Why are you snooping around for a fingerprint?” Yet sometimes the smallest clue can lead to a solution of the case. Why, and by whom, was this person killed? So, too, with the Gospels. Sometimes the smallest piece of evidence can give important clues about what the author thought was really going on.

I can’t give a full analysis here, but I will point out a significant feature of John’s Gospel the last of our Gospels to be written, probably some twenty-five years or so after Mark’s. John is the only Gospel that indicates that Jesus is “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” This is declared by John the Baptist at the very beginning of the narrative (John 1:29) and again six verses later (John 1:35). Why, then, did John—our latest Gospel—change the day and time when Jesus died? It may be because in John’s Gospel, Jesus is the Passover Lamb, whose sacrifice brings salvation from sins. Exactly like the Passover Lamb, Jesus has to die on the day (the Day of Preparation) and the time (sometime after noon), when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple.

In other words, John has changed a historical datum in order to make a theological point: Jesus is the sacrificial lamb. And to convey this theological point, John has had to create a discrepancy between his account and the others.