Does the bible contradict itself? No, of course it doesn’t. But sometimes it looks as if it does, and we have to look quite closely to see if we can explain the apparent contradiction. Here is an interesting example.
Passover on Thursday or Friday?
What follows is based on the following assumption: Jesus ate the last supper on a Thursday evening, was arrested later that night and was crucified on Friday morning. Now, Matthew, Mark and Luke (commonly termed the Synoptic Gospels) all tell us that the Thursday was Passover Day, and that the last supper was the Passover meal. Thus, Luke introduces his account of the last supper with these words (22:7,8 NIV):
“Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, ‘Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.” (Matt. 26:17-19 and Mk. 14:12-16 give the same information as Luke, using different words.)
The Gospel of John says Friday
Yet the Gospel of John tells us repeatedly that Passover day was not the Thursday, but the Friday. To begin with, John introduces his account of the last supper with the statement, “It was just before the Passover feast” (13:1). And at the end of the supper, John says that Jesus sent Judas away and “some thought Jesus was telling him to buy what was needed for the Feast” — another fairly clear indication that the Passover feast had not yet begun.
In his account of the events of the Friday, John is even more emphatic that the Passover meal had not yet been eaten. He says in 18:28 that the Jewish rulers took Jesus to Pilate’s palace but refused to go inside, for this reason: “To avoid ceremonial uncleanness the Jews did not enter the palace; they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.”
Again, on three occasions in Chapter 19, in verses 14, 31 and 42, John tells us that the day of the crucifixion was “Preparation Day.” According to the Grimm-Thayer Greek Lexicon, the word used here had two meanings: 1) the day the Jews prepared for the weekly Sabbath, in other words, Friday and 2) the day they prepared for a major feast. Since this particular Friday was also, according to John, the day leading up to the Passover, it was “Preparation Day” in both senses of the word — a fact to which John carefully draws our attention in verse 31. From John’s wording in verse 14, it appears that the important fact to him was that this day was “the Preparation of the Passover.” (We shall see later why this mattered to John.)
Thus John is just as definite in saying that the Friday evening was Passover as Matthew, Mark and Luke are that it was Thursday evening. What are we to make of this?
A disputed area
We are far from the first to notice the problem. In the article, “Pass-over,” Smith’s Bible Dictionary gives us this warning:
“Whether or not the meal at which our Lord instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist was the paschal [Passover] supper according to the law, is a question of great difficulty. No point in the Gospel history has been more disputed.”
Those words seem to be just as true today as when they were written in the late nineteenth century. Having read quite a number of authorities on the subject, we note that numerous alternative explanations have been proposed, none of which seem very convincing. Yet, unless something important has escaped my notice, there appears to be a fairly simple solution to the problem.
Let’s begin by considering the accepted date of the Passover.
The date and timing of Passover
According to Moses, the Passover was to be eaten on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, a date which usually falls close to our Easter (Exo. 12:6-11; Lev. 23:5; Num. 9:4,5; 28:15). By way of confirmation, Moses calls the fifteenth of that month “the day after the Passover” (Num. 33:3).
That seems quite unmistakable. Yet, if you ask any Jew the date of Passover he will tell you it is the fifteenth of Nisan. This is stated, for example, by Rabbi M. Alper in the article “Passover” in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge and by Rabbi M. Waxman in the article “Jewish Holidays” in the 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica.
How did this clash come about? We cannot be sure, but the available evidence suggests it arose from the Jewish religious leaders’ tendency to tamper with God’s law. As the Lord complained to them in another connection, “you nullify the Word of God by your tradition” (Matt. 15:6).
When was “in the evening”?
The KJV of Exodus 12:6 said the Passover had to be killed “in the evening” and eaten “that night.” The Hebrew phrase translated “in the evening” means, literally, “between the two evenings,” and there has been a great deal of argument about its exact significance. Dr. Alfred Edersheim, a converted Jew, says in his book, The Temple – Its Ministry and Services as they were at the Time of Jesus Christ:
“The lamb was to be killed on the eve of the 14th or rather, as the phrase is, ‘between the two evenings.’ According to the Samaritans, the Karaite Jews and many modem interpreters, this means between actual sunset and complete darkness (or, say between six and seven p.m.); but from the contemporary testimony of Josephus, and from Talmudical authorities, there cannot be a doubt that, at the time of our Lord, it was regarded as the interval between the sun’s commencing to decline [shortly after noon] and its actual disappearance. This allows a sufficient period for the numerous lambs which had to be killed…” (Chapter 11, pgs. 211-12).
There is strong evidence that the Jews of Christ’s day took the “first evening” to be halfway between noon and sunset. Our knowledge of their custom comes from these two passages from the first-century historian, Josephus:
“In the first month which…is called…Nisan…they offered the sacrifice which is called the Passover on the fourteenth day of the same month” (Antiquities 11-4-8).
“So these high priests, upon the coming of their feast which is called the Passover, when they slay their sacrifices from the ninth hour till the eleventh [i.e. 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. with the Passover meal eaten on the 15th, which began at 6 p.m., ed.]” (Wars 69-3).
This Jewish interpretation of “between the two evenings” as “between 3 p.m. and sunset” appears to have been a typical piece of Pharisaical scripture-wresting. Common sense suggests that the view ascribed by Edersheim to “the Samaritans, the Karaite Jews and many modern interpreters” is right: the most natural meaning of “between the two evenings” is between sunset and the beginning of total darkness. All the eight leading versions of the Bible that I keep on my desk support this view. The KJV, RSV and GNB of Exodus 12:6 give us “i
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One