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14. THE MOVABLE SABBATH

First, the date. The outside range of the date of Jesus' crucifixion is the tenure of Pontius Pilate -- 26 to 36 A.D. But the Luke gospel tells us -- perhaps reliably -- that John the Baptist began his ministry in "the fifteenth year of the government of Tiberius Caesar," which would have been fallen between the summer of 28 A.D. and the fall of 29 A.D. (Augustus died in the summer of 14 A.D.); Jesus' death would have to have been after that date. Many biblical scholars have settled on April 7, 30 A.D. as the date of Jesus' crucifixion, which possibly provides enough time -- at the most twenty-one months and at the least nine months -- for John to have gathered his considerable following, and for Jesus to subsequently have pursued his wide-ranging ministry and built his own formidable organization. However, that time frame is very tight. But the year 30 A.D. is mandated because, in that year, the day following the Passover meal was a Friday. And that is the sequence presented in the Mark gospel, the model for all the synoptic gospel chronologies and still the authority for much modern scholarship.

Mark's chronology has a crucial flaw, however. To see that error clearly we must begin where Mark begins, with the last supper. "And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the passover, his disciples said to him, Where will you have us go and prepare that you may eat the passover?" (Mk 14.12). The Passover feast, of course, remembered God's charge to the Jews enslaved in Egypt that they slaughter an unblemished lamb on the fourteenth day of the first month, dab the blood on the door posts of each house, and feast on the rest of the lamb; that night God passed through Egypt, killing all the firstborn, sparing only those houses marked with the blood, thus prompting Pharaoh to let the Jews go (Ex 12.6-32). In memory of that ancient deliverance, the Passover lambs were to be slaughtered on the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan (Nisan was the first month of the festival year, although the secular New Year was Oct. 1), and eaten the same evening. After sunset that same evening -- sunset began the new day in the Jewish system of dating -- the feast of unleavened bread began, a seven day celebration of the flight from Egypt, which the Jews made with such haste that they didn't have time to wait for the bread to rise. This sequence is spelled out plainly in Leviticus 23:5: "In the fourteenth day of the first month at evening is the Lord's passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread...." So Mark is not technically correct to say that the passover is killed on the first day of unleavened bread; the lambs were slaughtered in the afternoon just preceding. Still, there is no reason to doubt that Mark's Jesus was indeed referring to a Passover meal, and a Passover meal is what the author of Mark believed the last supper to be.

After eating the Passover and celebrating the first eucharist, Jesus went over to the Mount of Olives, was arrested by the multitude, tried before the Sanhedrin that night, and crucified at the third hour (nine a.m.) of the day -- the next day by our reckoning, still the fifteenth day of Nisan by Jewish reckoning. Jesus died at the ninth hour (three p.m.) of the same day -- still the fifteenth day of Nisan, still the first day of unleavened bread. Then Mark tells us, "now when the evening was come, because it was the day of preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, an honorable counsellor, who also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus" (Mk 15.42). This seems quite clear: The day Jesus died was the day before a sabbath, and sabbaths ordinarily begin at sunset Friday and continue until sunset Saturday. Thus Good Friday was on a Friday.

The problem, though, is that sabbaths don't always fall on Saturdays. The Hebrew term shabbat doesn't mean any particular day of the week; it means "a cessation of labor." And there are several sabbaths, associated with holy days, which can fall on any day of the week. One of these is the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the fifteenth of Nisan. This is stipulated in Leviticus 23.5-7: "on the fifteenth day... is the feast of unleavened bread unto the Lord: seven days you must eat unleavened bread. In the first day you shall have an holy convocation: you shall do no servile work therein." In Leviticus 24.11, which refers to the presentation in the Temple of the "wave sheaf" (the first sheaf of barley), which took place on the morning of the sixteenth day of Nisan, the term shabbat is specifically used: "And he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the sabbath the priest shall wave it." This "morrow after the sabbath" was the sixteenth day of Nisan. Thus the fifteenth day of Nisan was always regarded as a sabbath, even if came on a Wednesday.

Then there is Mark's concept of the "day of preparation" for the sabbath, a Marcan invention which has no parallel in Jewish terminology. Jews always busied themselves with shopping and cooking in the day before a sabbath, but there was no formal "day of preparation." There was, however, a very specific twenty-four hour period of preparation for the sabbath on the fifteenth of Nisan; this day of preparation was in itself a sort of sabbath, in that all work had to cease on the night of the fourteenth of Nisan, except for hairdressers, tailors, and laundry-workers, who were permitted to work until noon (obviously so that people could be properly done up for the passover feast). As part of the ritual of preparation, on the night of the fourteenth of Nisan houses were searched for leavened bread, which had to be disposed of or eaten by the next morning; after noon the lambs had to be brought to the Temple, slaughtered, then taken home and roasted on pomegranate spits. This sounds more like the day of preparation to which Mark refers.

The most glaring problem with the Marcan chronology, however, is that it places Jesus' trial and execution on the holy sabbath day of fifteen Nisan. We are supposed to believe that the Jews arrested Jesus and convened the entire Sanhedrin on a sacred day when labor of any type was prohibited, and that a Jewish crowd begged for a crucifixion that would have profaned the very occasion they should have been celebrating in their homes. Remarkably, even Mark's high priests realize this problem: "In two days was the feast of the passover, and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take [Jesus] by craft, and put him to death. But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people" (Mk 14.1-2). The priests proceed to ignore their advice just a few verses later, though perhaps the failure of internal logic is the author's.

So we must leave Mark's chronology with some suspicion that its author is as confused about Jewish customs as he is by his own story line. We find relief in John, although the Johanine chronology is often summarily dismissed by those who rely on Mark. According to John, when Jesus was taken to Pilate's "judgment hall" the morning after the arrest, the priests would not enter, because they were worried they would be defiled and unable to eat the passover feast that evening (Jn 18.28). Jesus was then sent out to be crucified at the sixth hour (noon). "The Jews therefore, because it was the day of preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day, (for that sabbath day was an high day,) besought Pilate that their legs might be broken, and [that] they might be taken away" (Jn 19.31). Thus John's Jesus was crucified on the fourteenth of Nisan, the "day of preparation" for the sabbath on the fifteenth of Nisan -- no Friday required. Unfortunately, that also places Jesus' crucifixion at exactly the same period -- after noon on the fourteenth of Nisan -- as the slaughter of the Pascal lambs, symbolism perhaps a bit too rich to be entirely credible. However, moving the crucifixion back a few hours, to the night and morning of fourteen Nisan, provides the same chronology found in the commentarii of Pilate's wife.

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