Can the Dates of Jesus' Death Be Reconciled?

Examining Professor Pitre's Harmonisation of the Gospels

During my undergraduate degree, my thesis supervisor suggested that I look at the discrepancy between John and the Synoptics on the date of Jesus’ death.¹

This is one of the most glaring contradictions in the Gospels - and surely the most fascinating. While the Synoptics place Jesus’ death on 15th Nisan, after the Passover meal was eaten, John places it on 14th Nisan, on the eve of Passover.²

It raises a whole sweep of questions: How could the date of Jesus’ death be in dispute? Did early Jesus followers not agree among themselves when Jesus died? And if someone had moved the date, what reason could they have for doing so?

Most of the attempts to reconcile these accounts seemed wildly implausible. Most commonly, they rely on positing two Passover meals; perhaps Jesus had a “quasi-Passover” before the actual Passover (so N.T. Wright);³ or celebrated according to an Essene calendar before his execution on the eve of the (official) Passover.⁴

Yet the evidence for two Passovers on the same week is sparse.⁵ And these harmonisations often seem more motivated by the theological concern of preserving the view that scripture must be historically accurate than a natural reading of the text.

In the end, however, I determined that there was a way to reconcile the texts. Rather than relying on a doubling up of Passovers, my solution depended on a close analysis of the language of the Gospels. In doing so, I followed (what was then) a fresh treatment of the problem by Professor Brant Pitre, in Jesus and the Last Supper (2015).

According to Pitre, the Synoptics are very clear that Jesus ate the Passover on the night of 15th Nisan and was crucified afterwards. But the language of John is less clear - and when read closely, Pitre thinks, it is in agreement with the Synoptics.

Shortly after my undergraduate dissertation, I came to re-consider this interpretation. Exploring the last supper again in a master’s assignment, I came to realise that I had made some mistakes. So what were they?

There are three tricky passages. In what follows, I will summarise Pitre’s reading of these verses before offering my analysis and explaining why I changed my mind.

Brant Pitre’s Reading

The first verse is John 13.1:

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father.

What ensues is Jesus’ last supper (deipnon; v.4), in which Judas leaves to betray Jesus.

For some exegetes, this is a clear indication that John sets the last supper one day before the Passover, so it is not a Passover meal. The difficulty is that ‘before’ (pro) is open to interpretation. It could mean a day before. But John is not that specific - as he is elsewhere in the passion - with his timing. This leaves it open to interpretation.

The second verse, John 18:28, is more striking evidence for the pre-Passover dating of John. After supper, when Jesus is arrested and taken to Pilate, we are told:

‘Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover.’

This would seem to indicate that the Passover meal (15th Nisan) had yet to occur.

Once again, however, the language is ambiguous. While the Passover can refer to the main meal on the 15th Nisan, ‘Passover’ (pascha) is also a term that is used in the Septuagint to refer to the offerings throughout the seven days of the feast (Deut. 16:1-3; 2 Chron. 35:7-9).⁶

If the last supper in John is the Passover, then ‘the Passover’ the Jewish leaders wanted to eat was one of these other meals throughout the seven-day feast.

The third verse, John 19:14, also seems to offer a clear passover dating. When Jesus is before Pilate, it reads:

‘Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover, and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’

What could be more clear? John states that Jesus died on ‘the day of Preparation for the Passover.’ This places the text in firm tension with the Synoptics.

The difficulty once again is the language. The Greek text does not say that it was the ‘day of preparation’ but rather that it was paraskeue tou pascha (‘preparation of Passover). And Pitre notes that the term preparation (paraskeue) could often denote the day before the Sabbath (as it does in both Mark and elsewhere in John.)⁷

In his reading, then, John 19:14 should be taken to mean: ‘It was Friday [the day before the sabbath] of the Passover [week]'.’⁸

My Analysis

There is no possible way to do justice to Pitre’s intricate argument in a post of this length. I will therefore focus on what I consider to the focal points of the issue: the nature of the last supper, and the chronological references following it.

The Last Supper

Pitre rightly draws attention to the ambiguity of the phrase, ‘Now it was before the feast of Passover’, which occurs before the last supper in connection to Jesus’ knowledge of his fate. He is right that it could be taken to mean, ‘just before’, so that what proceeds could be the Passover meal.⁹

Yet aside from later verses which clarify the chronology (18:28, 19:14), there is a positive reason to question this interpretation. Namely, that those elements which are most telling of the Passover meal in the Synoptics are curiously absent from John.

These include the interpretation of the elements of the meal - so natural to a Passover setting; the singing of a hymnon after the meal (cf. Mk. 14:26), alluding to the latter Hallel Psalms; and any allusion to the presence of anyone else at the meal (cf. Mk. 14:18). Those elements which are remain are apropos to any Greek meal, such as the beloved disciple reclining on Jesus’ breast (13:23), and the dipping of a morsel (13:26).¹⁰

After the Arrest

What of the two verses after the last supper Pitre uses to support his harmonisation?

The idea that the priests had already eaten the Passover and that they did not want to defile themselves before eating the Passover offering(s) offered later is weak.

It is true that the Greek word pascha is used in the Septuagint to refer to a Passover offering eaten later in the week. However, the phrase ‘to eat the Passover’ naturally refers to the eating of the Passover meal on the 15th Nisan. This is demonstrated by its consistent usage within the Gospels.¹¹

Pitre’s interpretation of John 19:14 as ‘the Friday [paraskeué] of Passover’ is also unnatural. While it is true that ‘preparation’ could refer to Friday (on its own), it is mistaken to think that the word means Friday. The word means preparation, and the majority of translators are therefore right here to think it denotes Passover eve.¹²

Why the Difference?

We have seen that John therefore does contradict the Synoptics on the date of Jesus’ crucifixion. While both place the death on a Friday, they disagree on which Friday. The Synoptics place it after the Passover meal (15th Nisan) and John on the 14th Nisan.

But why do they disagree? One common suggestion is that John — now often considered to have known one or more of the Synoptic Gospels — moved the date for theological reasons. By having Jesus die on the eve of the Passover, Jesus died on the same afternoon that the Passover lambs were sacrificed.

This theory is attractive due to a number of distinctive elements in the Johannine crucifixion: the mention of hyssop (Jn. 19:29; Exod 12:22), Jesus’ unbroken bones (19:36-37; Exod. 12:46), and an unwoven, seamless tunic (like that of the High Priest) all fortify its paschal theme.¹³

In this Passover portrait, Jesus is the new High Priest who offers himself as the paschal lamb. He is - as Augustine would recognise him - both priest and victim (Confessions, 10.43). This presentation fits John’s strong thematic interest to present Jesus as the fulfilment of a whole panoply of Jewish institutions.

Yet perhaps the idea that John consciously moved the date is too literary. It assumes that John had only the Synoptic tradition and made a conscious decision to aver. Yet there are other possibilities. For instance, in an important 2014 article, Helen Bond suggests that even the Synoptic tradition of Jesus’ death may have been an attempt to impose chronological precision on a more amorphous, earlier tradition.¹⁴

The historical problems associated with executing Jesus on the 15th Nisan - on one of the holiest feasts of the year - are well known. Yet there are some clues that Jesus may have died before the feast itself, such as the Jewish leaders’ expressed interest that Jesus should not die during it (Mk. 14:2).¹⁵ This chronology arguably makes more historical sense than having Jesus executed on Passover or even the eve of Passover.

But if neither the Synoptics, nor John, are precisely correct in their chronology, when did Jesus die? Already in 1 Corinthians, Paul makes reference to Jesus as the ‘paschal lamb’ (5:7). This association suggests that Christ may have died around Passover, as the Gospels claim. Yet the exact date may have been before the 14th or 15th.¹⁶

If Jesus was executed around Passover, it makes sense that the memory of his death should draw upon the rich symbolism of the festival - and make use of that Passover frame in different ways. Human memory is fallible; biblical chronology is often theological rather than strictly historical; and groups often rely upon a memory of events which helps them to process trauma than the retrieve the past itself.¹⁷

Ultimately, for many Christians today, the precise date of Jesus’ death is of much less importance than the meaning such a chronology conveys. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Gospels offer not a single, disinterested account of the past. Rather, they show us the myriad of ways in which human memory worked to realise the true significance - and meaning - of Jesus’ death in the early decades of the faith.

Regardless of the date of Jesus’ death, Christians still celebrate Christ their ‘paschal feast’ each Sunday - much like Paul, without a chronological reference. In this feast, Jesus is both lamb and High Priest; he is the new Moses who liberates God’s people, and the One who - in pouring out his Life - inaugurated a new spiritual reality.

While it was the history of Passover that stirred many of these connections, these truths stretch beyond the past into memory, theology and imagination. And in this feast, more than any, it is the memory that matters, whatever lies behind the Gospels.

1. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are called Synoptic because they share much of the same material; they can therefore be seen together (syn-opsis). 

2. The day began at nightfall, so that Jesus dies on 15th Nisan, after he has celebrated the Passover meal, while in John, Jesus eats a (non-Passover) last supper and he dies on the afternoon that Passover lambs were being sacrificed in preparation for the Passover meal in the Synoptics. In all four Gospels, Jesus’ death takes place on a Friday. The only disagreement is the calendrical date of Jesus’ death. Some scholars are confused on this point. See, for instance, D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, 242.

3. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 2012), 556-559.

4. See Annie Jaubert, The Date of the Last Supper, trans. I. Rafferty (Staten Island: Alba House, 1965). For a more recent and most ambitious attempt to revive this hypothesis, see Colin J. Humphreys, The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

5. On Wright’s “quasi-Passover” and the Essene hypothesis, see Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), 260-282.

6. See Pitre, Last Supper, 352-356.

7. See Mk. 15:42-43; Jn. 19:31. Pitre, Last Supper, 357-360.

8. Pitre, Last Supper, 357-360.

9. Pitre, Last Supper, 340-345.

10. Pitre draws a parallel to Judas leaving the meal to give to the poor and Tobit giving to the poor on a feast day (Jn. 13:29; cf. Tobit. 2:1-3). Yet almsgiving was possible at any time of year, and would have been apropos around Passover. Perhaps a stronger allusion is the idea that Judas left to buy something for the feast. Yet it is unusual that he would do so when ‘it was night’, when the feast would have already begun. See Pitre, Last Supper, 345-352.

11. See Mt. 26:17; Mk. 14:12, 14:14; Lk. 22:11; 22.15; cf. Lk. 22:8.

12. For a detailed discussion of this point, see Maurice Casey, Is John’s Gospel True? (London: Routledge, 1996), 22-24. Surprisingly, Casey’s masterful work receives no citation by Pitre.

13. See Helen K. Bond, “Discarding the Seamless Robe: The High Priesthood of Jesus in John’s Gospel” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity. Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal, eds. David B. Capes et al. (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007), 183-94. 

14. See Helen K. Bond, “Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination,” NTS 59 (2013): 461-475 (466-471.)

15. Bond, “Death of Jesus,” 468-470.

16. It seems more likely that Jesus was executed before rather than after Passover on the grounds of security at Passover and for reasons pertaining to the psychology of the pilgrim crowds (who would have swiftly left the city after the feast.) See Bond, “Death of Jesus,” 471.

17. See Bond, “Death of Jesus,” 471-475.