The date of the crucifixion.

In case clarification is needed, in Greek, verses 1 through 4 are all one sentence. Everything in the sentence (verses 1-4) is prefaced by "Now before the feast of passover..." Nothing in that sentence is grammatically during or after "The feast of the passover".

 

I am not sure about your calendar, and mine could be wrong, but the online one I am using says Nisan 15 is a Saturday in 26AD.

 

As pointed out in 30AD, the 14th was a Wednesday. The 15th a Thursday. The preparation supper was on Tuesday evening for the 14th, the day of preparation. The trial and crucifixion was on Wednesday for the 15th on Thursday. Christ died between noon and 3pm. Was buried by 6pm. Was in the grave 3 whole days: Thursday the 15th, Friday the 16th, Saturday the 17th. Rose by 6am Sunday. The body was gone by Saturday noon or earlier. The tomb was not sealed until Friday some time, because "they" remembered after Thursday the 15th was over, it needed to be sealed. The body could have been viewed all day Thursday the 15th and on Friday until the tomb was sealed.

timeanddate dot com dot being "." I have no reason to believe it is wrong. Sometimes Nisan is in March and sometimes April. The Calendar claims Sabbath and high Sabbaths cannot be confirmed before a certain date. But days and numbers still exist. You can put any date from 1AD to 3999AD.

 

I did misread my chart. It's actually 27 AD where 14 Nisan begins on Wednesday.

NISAN 14, 22-36 A.D.

 

It seems that historians cannot get it right either. How can they claim the crucifixion in 27AD, while claiming John the Baptist died in 30AD?

Who actually died when? These dates would mean John baptized Jesus in 22AD.

Then to top it off, the claim is that John only baptized from 28-29AD, was placed in prison and beheaded in 30AD. How can John baptize Jesus a year after the Cross?

It is not just reconciling the year of the birth of Jesus, but the years of the ministry of John the Baptist. Another date given by the Bible. Based on Luke 3:1-3

1 Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene,

2 Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

3 And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins;

 

No problem. 27 is not one of the years I looked at for this thread. There seems to be two sets of Thursdays. Two sets of Tuesdays. At least one set of Saturdays in a 7 year cycle.

 

Based on grammar. Everything after "Now before the feast of the Passover...", for several chapters, is before the feast of Passover. That's the power of the phrase.

This is largely irrelevant to my argument but there are several problems with this majority text.

1) If supper is ended, then what's going on in verse 26? Eating? And this is after the foot washing, right? The procedure is to enter the abode, wash your feet, then eat (without your dirty sandals on because you just washed your feet). Jesus rises "from the supper" to wash their feet, then in verse 12, takes the garments reclines again, to eat (verse 26), with loins ungirded and no sandals on washed feet. But you said the supper was ended? Obviously, it was not ended. The majority text is wrong, QED.

2) Verse one says "feast of Passover" and verse two says "supper". There isn't even a definite article, i.e. "The supper", which would have distinguished it from an ordinary supper. If it were as you claim, it should say, "and the passover meal being ended...". The passover meal is not even a supper. Jesus only girds his loins to wash their feet, not to eat. When he sits down to eat, the garments are taken up, not girded about the loins, no sandals on clean feet.

3) Logic: The other rather obvious thing is that if it reads as you say, "Before supper ... and supper being ended" means that nothing actually happens before supper. I mean, in your view, what happened before supper?

What about the fact that Herod died circa 4 BCE. That puts Jesus birth in 7 or 6 BCE (I'm using BCE instead of BC to avoid Jesus being born before Himself). By your reckoning, Jesus would have been pushing 40 at the crucifixion.

 

Yes, those are good points. The proposed dates of John's ministry are tied to these civil entities that have their own traditional dates, which seem to cloud issues rather than clear them up.

If I remember correctly, there also seem to be hard problems surrounding Augustus' decreeing the world to be taxed at the time of Jesus' birth. Trying to figure out how many such decrees were issued, when those decrees were given and when they were eventually implemented in Judea is a bit a puzzle. Also, nailing-down the year of Herod's death is not straightforward. The only thing people seem to agree upon is that Herod died some years BCE.

 

Yes the death is given between 4 and 1, a wide range. 3 people were supposed to get Herod's divided kingdom. The same 3 are mentioned in the ministry of John the Baptist. So 30 years later, they were still ruling. Allegedly the date of Herods death is in controversy, because the 3 wanted to be ruling before Herod died, to get "his authoritative blessing". If they started to rule in 1BC, then Herod died before that. Changing their rule to before Herod died in 1BC to 4 BC cannot then place Herod's death earlier to force Herod to die before their reign started. That is a self defeating argument.

Also the point of saying Jesus had to be born 2 years before Herod died is also pointless. Herod based the 2 years on when the wisemen first saw the star. Herod never new they found a young child. Also it seems that Joseph never took Mary back to Nazareth, but instead they fled to Egypt. It was probably only a few months after the birth, when the wisemen found the family. The star appeared 1 year prior so the wisemen had time to travel from the east. "Young child" does not mean Jesus was already 2 years old.

If Gabriel is the star they saw, Gabriel appeared more than 9 months prior to the birth to let Mary know she would be pregnant. I doubt it takes 2 years to get from India or even China to Jerusalem on foot. If it took a year, and they started 10 months before, Jesus was not more than 4 or 5 months old.

Even if Herod died in December of 4BC, Jesus could have been born in the summer of 4BC. I put the birth in 4BC. If Herod died in 1BC, that only means they did not leave Egypt before Jesus was 3 or 4.

Claiming a 3 year difference in Herod's death does not necessarily move the birth of Jesus 3 years earlier.

Many reasons are given why Herod was killed. Should not killing hundreds of babies in and around Bethlehem be at the top of the list? He had already made several wills and named several successors. Even the 3 that were given power were named prior to his death. Yes, he had tried and succeeded to set up a few choices as rulers, and then killed them off. It was not out of character to kill innocent people, and that is why a few decided to end his life.

Both dates are fine with me. I think Herod still could have been killed only a few months after the Bethlehem incident. Jesus' birth does not need to be moved to 7 or 6 BC.

The only reason the calendar is even off would be because the date of Nisan 15 in 33AD landed on a Saturday. The church thought at that time, still does, that Friday has to be the day before Passover and the same day as the Sabbath. They do not follow Scripture that indicates they were not the same day that week. So the first year, represents 33 and a few months to April as the 33.5 year life of Christ. Much later scholars went with a 30AD date that did separate the Passover from the Sabbath, thus sending the birth into 4 BC.

 

I am encouraged that we are starting to agree that supper had not actually ended but was in the process of taking place -- foot-washing being a ritual that takes place before a meal. And so the majority text reading of John 13:2 is wrong in this case. The majority text is not always right which is why people should never argue a text's validity base solely upon its majority.

 

With all respect, those are not good-enough reasons to favor the "oldest known texts". If the variant doesn't make sense with the context, as is the case here, it is a "less preferred reading" no matter how old it is. That's hermeneutics 101.

You cited the sop only and ingored "The Lord's Supper". The two together are enough to demonstrate that in no way has "supper being ended" back in verse 2. To insist upon that defies logic. The Holy Spirit is logical and doesn't contradict Himself. The majority is just flat wrong, in this case. It's not always wrong, but it is sometimes wrong and this is one of those times.

Be that as it may, I wish you a pleasant day.

 

I'm also paying attention to Matthew 26:20-28. Count how many times it says, "As they did eat" or "As they were eating". These are things going on after John 13:2. So how does that fit with "the supper being ended"? It's contradictory. The plain sense of all the scriptural evidence suggests the majority text here is just wrong.

 

The biggest argument against the majority reading in John 13:2 is that nothing ends up happening "Before the feast of Passover".

By contrast, the minority reading puts everything before the feast of Passover right up to Jesus' body being taken down from the cross, right before the Passover meal is to take place at sundown all over Judea at the close of 14 Nisan. To deny this is to deny that Jesus Christ is The Passover Lamb, or that if He is, then God got his dates wrong by arranging for Him to be sacrificed not on Passover. Nobody should desire to be in the camp that believes this.

The narratives help us out here quite strongly. There are three witnesses that teach us exactly when the arrest is made so that we don't get confused:

Matthew 26:4-5 "But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.
Mark 14:1-2 "But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people.
John 13:1 "Now before the feast..." (you know, "Not on the feast day")

By all Biblical accounts, Jesus was arrested not on the feast.

 

The Law determined what really happened. The Passover Lamb is slaughtered on 14 Nisan. Jesus is the Passover Lamb. The plotters unwittingly do God's will. The plotters unwittingly "keep the Law" in killing The Passover Lamb.

That's what I call brilliant.