Walter Rane, The Resurrected Christ. Courtesy of Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

A study of this scope and intent cannot fully resolve the many complicated issues regarding the chronology of the final days of Jesus’s life. Even though harmonizing the four Gospels is not always easy, the basic sequence of events in the passion narratives, if not the precise chronology, is fairly clear. Still, as briefly discussed in chapter 6, one problem is that the Synoptics suggest that Passover began the evening before Jesus was crucified, yet John’s Gospel portrays the feast as starting at sunset after his death. Another problem arises from what three of the Gospels mean when they note that “the Sabbath” began shortly after Jesus’s death and burial (Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54, 56; John 29:31). The usual—and arguably most natural—way of understanding these notices is that they refer to the weekly Sabbath, but it is possible that they refer to the first full day of Passover, which was what was called a “festal Sabbath.” The question of what “Sabbath” in these texts meant thus affects the possible days of the week on which the Last Supper and the crucifixion might have fallen. Both these problems add to the difficulty of trying to determine the specific year in which Jesus died and was resurrected. As a result, these considerations have led us to suggest only a possible working chronology for Holy Week rather than trying to argue confidently for a specific chronology.[1]

The Sequence of Events

Even without a detailed study of the texts, most traditional Christians are familiar with the basic sequence of events in Jesus’s last week from their celebration of Holy Week: he entered Jerusalem in triumph on what is now called Palm Sunday; he celebrated the Last Supper and prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane on Thursday evening; he was crucified, died, and was buried on Good Friday; and he arose triumphant from the tomb early in the morning on Easter Sunday. In actuality, however, the Gospels present less secure evidence for the timing of even these major events let alone other, less celebrated events, such as which days he taught in the temple, when he delivered the Olivet Discourse, or when the unnamed woman anointed his head in Bethany. In fact, the only securely timed event is the resurrection itself, which all four Gospels explicitly identify as having occurred on “the first day of the week” (Mark 16:2; Matt 28:1; Luke 24:1; John 20:1).

With a few notable exceptions, however, the Gospels do present the same basic sequence of events, perhaps because these written accounts were based upon preexisting, probably oral primitive passion and resurrection narratives. In addition, Mark, presumably the earliest of our canonical Gospels, has imposed upon this sequence a series of relative time markers, which arranges the events by days. By counting back from the first day of the week, where the Gospels all place the resurrection, we then find the triumphal entry on the Sunday of the previous week:[2]

The events of Jesus’s last week then fall neatly into the different days with the triumphal entry on a Sunday (following Mark 11:1); the cursing of the fig tree on Monday (following Mark 11:12); his teaching in the temple on Tuesday (following 11:20); the anointing in Bethany, sandwiched between the plot of the Jewish leaders and Judas’s decision to betray Jesus on Wednesday (following 14:1); the Last Supper, Gethsemane, and the arrest of Jesus on Thursday (following 14:12); Jesus’s condemnation, crucifixion, and burial on Friday (15:1); and the Sabbath intervening death and resurrection on Saturday (as noted by 15:42 and 16:1). This is, in fact, the very schema that apparently gave rise to the earliest Christian liturgical calendar of Holy Week with Palm Sunday a week before Easter and the important observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in between.

Despite the apparent straightforwardness of this sequence, other than placing the resurrection on the first day of the week, some of the time markers—such as the Passover and the Sabbath—are not as clear or as certain as they may appear. For instance, at first glance there appears to be a discrepancy between the proposed Wednesday marker, “Now when the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were two days away” (14:1, authors’ translation), and the Thursday notice, “On the first day of Unleavened Bread (14:12, authors’ translation), because “two days away” should be Friday, not Thursday. This inconsistency, in fact, led some late nineteenth-century commentators to suggest that the anointing of Jesus (Mark 14:3–9; parallel Matt 26:6–13) took place on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, a position followed by President J. Reuben Clark Jr. (1871‒1961), a longtime member of the First Presidency, in his harmony of the Gospels.[3] The Harmonies of the Gospels in both the 1979 and 2013 versions of the Church’s Bible Dictionary avoided taking a definitive stand on the exact timing of most events of Passion Week by grouping them under expressions such as “the sixth day before Passover” and “the second day before Passover,” but they differed in how they dealt with the events that we have placed on Wednesday. The 1979 edition placed Mary’s anointing of Jesus’s feet on “the sixth day before Passover,” while his anointing by the unnamed woman and Judas’s conspiracy with the Jewish leaders on “the second day before Passover.” The 2013 edition, however, harmonized the two anointings on the sixth day, placed the conspiracy on the day before Passover, and followed President Clark by noting “events of this day are unknown” on the second day.[4] Our possible resolution of the problem seeks to maintain Mark’s sequence of relative time markers by reading “two days away” inclusively rather than exclusively, which places the anointing by the unnamed woman and Judas’s conspiracy on Wednesday, the traditional day of their observance.[5]

The Passover, the Sabbath, and the Timing of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion

More challenging for the Marcan chronological scheme is the identification of the days of the week for both the Passover and the “Sabbath.” First of all, the Thursday time marker referencing the first day of the feast of Unleavened Bread (which by this period was the same as the first day of Passover) is complicated by the explanatory phrase “when they sacrificed the paschal lamb” (Mark 14:12), because technically the slaughter of the Passover lambs took place in the afternoon of Nisan 14 (Exod 12:6; Num 9:11), the day before the festival officially began at nightfall (Exod 12:18; Lev 23:5; Num 9:3, 5, 11; KJV, “at even”), which was the official beginning of Nisan 15. Has Mark conflated the preparation for the Passover with the Passover itself? As noted in our discussion about the timing of the Last Supper in chapter 6, the Synoptics maintain the Last Supper was a Passover meal—a meal prepared the afternoon of Nisan 14 (involving not only securing the upper room but also the sacrifice of a lamb) and then eaten after the Passover officially began after sunset (Mark 14:14, 14‒16; Matt 26:17, 19; Luke 22: 7‒8, 11‒15). On the other hand, in John the Last Supper was held specifically “before the festival of the Passover” (John 13:1) and thus was simply Jesus’s final meal with his disciples. Accordingly, in John, Jesus is condemned and executed on Nisan 14, with Passover beginning shortly after his burial (John 13:1; 18:28, 39; 19:31, 42). Is Mark’s earlier, problematic statement that Passover was “two days away” thus a subtle signal that the Johannine chronology is historically correct?[6]

Jesus at the Last Supper. Courtesy of Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

Second, both the Mark 15:42 and Luke 23:54 references to the Sabbath in connection with Jesus’s being buried are preceded by references the burial taking place at the end of “the day of preparation” (Greek, paraskeuē; Hebrew, ʿereḇ haššabbāṯ).[7] In both cases, this should naturally refer to the period at the end of Friday afternoon when observant Jews prepared for the Sabbath, which began at sundown. In fact, Mark goes on to explicitly to specify that this preparation day was “the day before the Sabbath” (Greek, prosabbaton).[8] However, John 19:14 uses the same term not for the preparatory period for the Sabbath but rather as “the day of preparation for the Passover” (Greek, paraskeuē tou pascha). Because the first and seventh days of the Passover festival were days of solemn assembly (KJV, “holy convocation”) upon which no work could be done (Exod 12:6:4; Lev 23:7‒8; Num 28:18‒25), they were technically sabbaths regardless of what day of the week they fell on.

This possibility has led some to argue that if the Johannine chronology is correct, the Sabbath that began at the close of the day on which Jesus was crucified was thus a festal Sabbath and not necessary the weekly Sabbath. In this case, the crucifixion could have been on a Thursday. Friday, the first day of Passover, would then have been a festal Sabbath with Saturday being the usual weekly Sabbath. This reconstruction is particularly attractive to those who advance it because it seems to fulfill better not only the passion predictions that Jesus would be raised “on the third day” (Mark 9:31; 10:34; parallels Matt 16:21; 17:23; 20:19; Luke 9:22; 13:32; 18:33) but also his earlier prophecy that “the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” even as Jonah had been in the belly of a sea monster for the same period (Matt 12:40; cf. Jonah 1:17).[9] However, while a Thursday crucifixion placed Jesus in the tomb for three nights, it put his body in the tomb for only two days and a very short part of a third, which has led even to the unusual proposal that the crucifixion was on a Wednesday, with Thursday a festal Sabbath and Saturday the weekly Sabbath.[10]

While both these alternate reconstructions favor a Johannine timing of a Passover following the crucifixion, a Friday crucifixion is still in harmony with the evidence provided by the Fourth Gospel. The fact that Jesus’s death was “a day of preparation” is reiterated soon after his death, when the Jewish authorities request that those crucified have their legs broken to hasten their deaths “to avoid having the bodies remain on the cross during the Sabbath—for it was an especially important Sabbath” (John 19:31, authors’ translation; emphasis added). While it could have been “an especially important Sabbath” (Greek, megalē hē hēmeras ekeinou tou sabatou; KJV, “for that sabbath was an high day”) merely because the first day of Passover was itself a holy day, this passage can also be read to suggest that it was the convergence of both the festal and weekly Sabbath that made it so important.[11] While we noted in our discussion in chapter 6 that various ways of harmonizing the Synoptic and Johannine chronologies are largely unconvincing,[12] one of these attempts is worth noting here because of how it involves the timing of Passover and more than one “Sabbath.” Usually this argument rests on the suggestion that Jesus celebrated the Passover the night before his death according to the solar calendar used by the Jewish sect at Qumran thought to be responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. In contrast to the standard lunisolar calendar (a lunar calendar periodically corrected with an intercalary month to match the seasons of the solar year) employed by most Jews, this community, thought to have consisted of a group of a sect called the Essenes, followed a strictly solar calendar that was so designed that holidays fell on the same day of the week each year. Because the Qumran calendar had Passover begin at sunset on a Tuesday, a Wednesday crucifixion would make a Tuesday Last Supper be a Passover meal according to the solar calendar. Jesus was then executed on Friday, with both the lunar Passover and the weekly Sabbath beginning at sunset after he was buried.[13]

Table 1:Alternative chronology as proposed by Jaubert and Ruckstuhl.

As ingenuous and interesting as such proposals are, they remain only possibilities. Roger T. Beckwith, the librarian of the Oxford Evangelical Research Trust in Oxford, has done extensive research into ancient calendars, and his research has led him to remind us, “The chronology of Passion-week is a difficult and complicated problem,” and it requires “caution before too hastily rejecting certain solutions and accepting others.”[14]

The Possible Year of Jesus’s Death

Efforts to determine the year when Jesus was crucified take into account evidence from contemporaneous historical information, the biblical texts, and, on occasion, astronomical calculations. To a certain extent, Latter-day Saints can also bring evidence from the Book of Mormon to bear, though this is complicated because of uncertainties regarding the Nephite calendar.[15] Roman and Jewish sources provide the dates of AD 26‒36 for the governorship of Pilate and AD 18‒36 or 37 for the high priesthood of Caiaphas.[16] The chronological points of reference for Jesus’s birth and ministry, however, are not always as exact. Jesus was baptized during the ministry of John the Baptist, which started in “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius” (Luke 3:1), but different ways of calculating the starting point of that emperor’s rule places that date between AD 27 and 29. Jesus then began his own public ministry when he was “about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23; emphasis added), but the actual year of his birth,[17] which is needed to calculate the ministry based upon that already approximate reference, is still debated, as is whether the ministry lasted two or three years.[18] Other points of reference include statements made by “the Jews” about the status of Herod’s reconstruction and expansion of the temple (John 2:20) and Jesus’s being under the age of fifty at the time of one of their debates with him (John 8:57).[19]

Del Parson, Jesus the Christ. Courtesy of Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

Although some scholars place the crucifixion as early AD 26, as late as AD 36, and anywhere in between, there is a general consensus based upon the scriptural and historical evidence that it occurred in AD 30 or perhaps 33.[20] To try to resolve the issue, various attempts have been made to use astronomical calculations to determine the dates of the new moon for each of the years of Pilate’s governorship. Because Jewish months began with the sighting of the new moon, these dates can theoretically then be used to determine the equivalents in our Julian calendar for the Jewish dates Nisan 14 and 15. One of the first serious efforts to do this was done in 1966 by biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias (1900‒1979), and another widely recognized study was attempted in 1983 by Colin Humphreys and W. Waddington of Oxford’s Department of Metallurgy and Science of Materials.[21] Nevertheless, scholars differ on how reliable such calculations are given that determining the date of Passover and other festivals in this period was based upon actual sighting of the new moon by human observers rather than by astronomy. Such sightings could be affected by weather and human error; translating these projections of the occurrence of the new moon into Julian dates is also complicated by questions regarding how the Jewish lunisolar calendar might be adjusted for the seasons in a given year.[22]

Selecting one of the possible dates then depends on (1) whether one operates according to the Johannine or assumed Synoptic timing of the crucifixion and (2) whether one accepts the traditional Friday, the possible Thursday, or even a Wednesday timing. Because weather or other problems with visibility might result in the new moon not being seen on time, Passover might have been a day before or after the projected date.

Table 2: Drawn from those of Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, 38; Humphries and Waddington, “Dating the Crucifixion,” 744; Blumell and Wayment, “When Was Jesus Born?,” 67; and Chadwick, “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ,” 155, 157.

While a detailed analysis of this information is beyond the scope of this discussion, the details in the table above illustrate the complexity of the issue and the somewhat mind-numbing number of possibilities. In short, according to the Johannine reckoning that has Jesus crucified the afternoon before Passover, a Thursday crucifixion could have occurred in AD 27; a Friday or perhaps a Thursday crucifixion in AD 30; a Friday crucifixion in AD 33; or a Wednesday crucifixion in AD 34.

Carl Heinrich Bloch, Christ on the Cross. Wikimedia Commons.

Humphries and Waddington preferred a Friday, April 3, AD 33 date, and Harold Hoehner, professor emeritus of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, also strongly argues for a that year, noting that a trial of Jesus after the fall of Pilate’s patron Sejanus in AD 31 best explains Pilate’s reaction to the threat by “the Jews” that “If you release him, you are not a friend of Caesar. Everyone who makes himself a king acts in opposition to Caesar” (John 19:12).[23] Brown, on the other hand, felt that a Friday in either AD 30 or 33 was possible.[24] For more in-depth discussions of all the evidence, including evidence from the Book of Mormon, we refer readers to two different studies by Latter-day Saint scholars. One is a discussion entitled “The Gospels on the Timing of Jesus’s Death” in a longer article, “When Was Jesus Born?,” by Thomas A. Wayment, a professor of classics, and Lincoln B. Blumell, an associate professor of ancient scripture, both at Brigham Young University. The other is a detailed article by Jeffrey Chadwick, a professor of religion and an archaeologist at Brigham Young University, entitled “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ.” Both studies prefer a year of AD 30, with Blumell and Wayment opting for a traditional Good Friday death of Jesus[25] and Chadwick advancing an interesting proposal that combines a Thursday crucifixion and a possible Tuesday Last Supper that would have coincided with the solar calendar known from Qumran.[26] At this point, we are open to either an AD 30 or 33 date, recognizing that AD 30 may be more in harmony with the bulk of scriptural evidence (including the Book of Mormon) but also recognizing the strong, external historical support for AD 33 (especially because it puts Pilate in a post-Sejanus position).

Table 3: Traditional Ordering accepted by Humphreys & Waddington (33); Brown (AD 30 or 33); Huntsman, God So Loved the World (no year proposed); Blumell & Wayment (AD 30)

Table 4: Adapted from Chadwick, "Dating the Death of Jesus Christ," 173.

Toward a Working Chronology

The complexity—and continuing uncertainty—of all these arguments explain our hesitancy to advance a fixed, certain chronology for either the year or the final week of Jesus’s life. Instead, in this book we have adopted a working chronology based largely on the general sequence of events in all four Gospels, the relative time markers provided by Mark, and the liturgical practices of traditional Christianity since at least the fourth century. When a single Gospel changes the order of events, we have sought to explain this in the chapters above by considering what symbolic or theological reasons might have led the evangelist to change the order for literary reasons. A clear example of this is Mark’s transposition of the temple incident from Sunday to Monday, where he places it between the cursing and withering of the fig tree (Mark 11:12–25). Other examples might include the position of the anointing of Jesus (Mark 14:3‒9; parallels Matt 26:6‒13. John 12:1‒7) and, of course, the ongoing debate over whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal.

Because we have primarily proposed this working chronology for devotional purposes, there is particular utility in marking these days at the same time our friends of other Christian denominations are celebrating them. For instance, even though many Latter-day Saints feel that Jesus was actually born in the spring, whether on April 6 or on a date about that time, by marking it on the traditional Western date of December 25, we are able to share the joy of Jesus’s birth with not only our fellow Christians, but we can also enjoy the holiday with those who are not religious. Similarly, even if Jesus might have been crucified on a Thursday, commemorating his suffering and death on Good Friday gives us a common day to recognize his great sacrifice for all of us.[27] §

For Further Reading

Beckwith, Roger T. Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic Studies, 51–70, 289–302. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

Blumell, Lincoln H., and Thomas A. Wayment. “When Was Jesus Born? A Response to a Recent Proposal.” BYU Studies 51, no. 3 (2012): 53–81.

Chadwick, Jeffrey. “Dating the Birth of Jesus Christ.” BYU Studies 49, no. 4 (2010): 5–38.

———. “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ.” BYU Studies 54, no. 4 (2015): 135–91.

Hoehner, Harold W., Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 1978.

Humphreys, Colin J., and W. G. Waddington. “Dating the Crucifixion.” Nature 306 (December 22, 1983): 743–46.

Wayment, Thomas A. “The Birth and Death Dates of Jesus Christ.” In From Bethlehem to the Sermon on the Mount, 383–94.

Notes

[1] Some of what follows represents a revision and expansion of material originally appearing as “Jesus during His Last Week,” God So Loved the World, 129‒33.

[2] Borg and Crossan, Last Week, ix–xi.

[3] Clark, Our Lord of the Gospels, 395. See our discussion in chapter 5, page 95 above.

[4] Bible Dictionary (1979), “Gospels, Harmony of,” 693–94, and Bible Dictionary (2013), “Gospels, Harmony of,” 769–71.

[5] France, Gospel of Mark, 548; Huntsman, God So Loved the World, 39‒40, 131. This is the position that we have adopted in our discussion of Wednesday in chapter 5 above.

[6] Witherington, Gospel of Mark, 364.

[7] Hort Balz, “paraskeuē,” EDNT 3.34‒35.

[8] See Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1350; Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, 294.

[9] See the list of authorities cited by Harold W. Hoehner, “The Day of Christ’s Crucifixion,” Bibliotheca Sacra 131 (1974): 241‒49.

[10] Alpheus Davison, “The Crucifixion, Burial, and Resurrection of Jesus,” Palestine Exploration Fund 38 (1906): 124‒29, was one of the first to advance such a proposal, further arguing that because Friday was a “normal” (i.e., not a sabbath) day, this was when the women were free to buy the spices that they brought to the tomb with them Sunday morning. For critiques of both the Wednesday and Thursday proposals, see Harold W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 1978), 65‒71.

[11] This is a challenging phrase to render, its literal translation being the awkward “for it was a great day of that Sabbath.” While both Brown, Gospel according to John, 934, and Keener, Gospel of John, 1150‒51, favor its importance, stemming from it being both the Sabbath and Passover, Brown notes that in this period there is no clear evidence for an especially holy Sabbath. Additionally, Lincoln H. Blumell and Thomas A. Wayment, “When Was Jesus Born? A Response to a Recent Proposal,” BYU Studies 51, no. 3 (2012): 78n54, point out that all other Johannine references to “sabbath” (John 5:9–10, 16, 18; 7:22–23; 9:14, 16) are to the weekly Sabbath, not any annual festal Sabbath.

[12] Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1361‒69; Marshall, Last Supper and Lord’s Supper, 71‒74; Seely, “The Last Supper,” 72‒74.

[13] Annie Jaubert, The Date of the Last Supper (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1965), 95–117; Eugen Ruckstuhl, Chronology of the Last Days of Jesus (New York: Desclée, 1965), 113–40.

[14] Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, 289.

[15] Randall P. Spackman, “The Jewish/Nephite Lunar Calendar,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 48–59, and the discussion of Blumell and Wayment, “When Was Jesus Born?,” 62‒64.

[16] For the prefecture of Pilate, see Schürer, History of the Jewish People, 1.383‒87; Smallwood, Jews under Roman Rule, 160‒67; Huntsman, “Before the Romans,” 280n29. For the high priesthood of Caiaphas, see Josephus, Ant. 18.2.2, 4.3 §33‒35, 95 (Whiston, 588, 593), together with Schürer, History of the Jewish People, 2.230, 234; Smallwood, Jews under Roman Rule, 159, 172.

[17] Jesus was born as much as two years before the death of Herod, which a lunar eclipse mentioned by Josephus, Ant. 17.6.4 §167 (Whiston, 565 and 565n3) dates to March 13 or 14, 4 BC. See Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ, 11‒27, and Raymond. E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 412‒18, 547‒56.

[18] The Synoptics portray what seems to be a single year ministry; John presents a two- or three-year ministry, depending upon whether it describes three Passovers (John 2:13; 6:4; 12:1) or four (the feast in John 5:1 is not specified). See the discussion of Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ, 29‒64; Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ,” BYU Studies 54, no. 4 (2015): 150‒53.

[19] Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1373, and Thomas A. Wayment, “The Birth and Death Dates of Jesus Christ,” in From Bethlehem to the Sermon on the Mount, 390‒91.

[20] See the summary and list of Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1374‒75 and n50, and the discussions of Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ, 95‒99; Wayment, “The Birth and Death Dates of Jesus Christ,” in From Bethlehem to the Sermon on the Mount, 391‒94; Blumell and Wayment, “When Was Jesus Born?,” 64‒70; and Chadwick, “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ,” 141‒42. For the surprisingly late proposition of AD 36, see Nikos Kokkinos, “Crucifixion in AD 36: The Keystone for Dating the Birth of Jesus,” Chronos, Kairos, Christos: Nativity and Chronological Studies Presented to Jack Finegan, ed. J. Vardaman and E.M. Yamauchi (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 133–64.

[21] Jeremias, Eucharistic Words of Jesus, 36‒41; Colin J. Humphreys and W. G. Waddington, “Dating the Crucifixion,” Nature 306 (1983): 743–46.

[22] See the discussions of Blumell and Wayment, “When Was Jesus Born?,” 66‒70, and Chadwick, “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ,” 154‒65. While their arguments are detailed, in short, Blumell and Wayment counsel caution in employing such astronomical projections while Chadwick has more confidence in the correlation between astronomy and what would have been actually observed.

[23] Waddington, “Dating the Crucifixion,” 746; Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ, 100‒114.

[24] Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1376.

[25] Blumell and Wayment, “When Was Jesus Born?,” 66‒70. They assume a Friday crucifixion throughout their discussion, a position first adopted by Wayment in “The Birth and Death Dates of Jesus Christ,” 393‒94.

[26] Chadwick, “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ,” 168–69.

[27] Huntsman, God So Loved the World, 131‒33.