What actually happened in the first Holy Week?
Have you ever sat and read through the gospel accounts of Passion Week, and tried to work out chronologically what is happening? And take yous done that with the 4 gospels? (It is easiest to do that latter using a synopsis, either in print or using this 1 online.) Why not do it as part of your Holy Week devotions this year? If you do, y'all might discover several things.
- Though there are variations in wording and in some details, in that location is a striking agreement between all four gospels in the order of the chief events during the week.
- The events at the beginning of the week around Palm Sunday, and at the terminate of the week around the crucifixion seem very decorated, nevertheless the middle seems very quiet—the event of the 'silent Wednesday'.
- The main result on which the gospel accounts disagree on the social club of events is in relation to the denials of Peter by Jesus, which come earlier in Luke's gospel, and are spread out in John's gospel.
- Jesus' trial is more than detailed, with more people involved in different phases in John than in the Matthew and Mark, the latter two treating it in quite a compressed way equally more or less a single effect.
- The synoptics claim explicitly that the last supper was some form of Passover repast (which must happen after the lambs are sacrificed), whilst John makes no mention of this, and appears to have Jesus crucified at the moment that the Passover lambs are sacrificed.
These anomalies have made the question of the Passion Calendar week chronology 'the most intractable trouble in the New Attestation', and it causes many readers to wonder whether the accounts are reliable at all. For some, they are happy to inhabit the narratives in each gospel equally they are, and not worry virtually reconciling each account with the others, or any of the accounts with what might accept actually happened.
Just I am not sure it is quite so easy to leave it there. After all, the discussion 'gospel' means 'announcement of good news nigh something that has happened'; a fundamental part of the Christian merits is that, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has done something, and then nosotros cannot evade question of what exactly happened and when. Sceptics (both popular and academic) brand much of these credible inconsistencies, and so there is an apologetic job to engage in. And agreement how these bug might be resolved could potentially shed new low-cal on the meaning of the texts themselves.
Iii years agone, I caught up with Sir Colin Humphreys' bookThe Mystery of the Final Supper, in which he attempts to solve this problem. Humphreys is an academic, and a distinguished i at that, though in materials science. He has written on biblical questions before, though is non a biblical studies professional, but he does engage thoroughly with some central parts of the literature. He identifies the main elements of the puzzle nether four headings:
- The lost 24-hour interval of Jesus, noticing the lull in activity in the centre of the calendar week.
- The trouble of the terminal supper; what kind of meal was it, when did it happen, and can we harmonise John'due south account with the synoptics?
- No time for the trials of Jesus. If nosotros include all the different elements, they cannot fit within the half night from Thursday to Friday morning.
- The legality of the trials. Here, Humphreys notes that later Jewish sources prohibit the comport of a majuscule trial during the nighttime, and crave that whatever decision is ratified on the morning post-obit the get-go trial.
The book is set out very clearly and logically (as you might wait) and includes a good number of tables. Early on Humphreys helpfully tabulates the events in the gospels, showing their relationship.
Having started by looking at the biblical texts, in the middle of the book Humphreys goes on a long scientific exploration, delving into the astronomical issues backside the construction of Jewish calendars, and using this to argue for a particular engagement for the crucifixion. The key issue here is identifying the dates of the calendar from what nosotros know of the moon phases, and then finding the years when the Passover falls on a Friday, which it will practise on average only one year in seven.
Humphreys and so uses other well-established information to eliminate outlying dates, and argues for Jesus' death at three pm on Fri, Apr 3rd, Advertizement 33. He is not solitary in this, though the fashion of his argumentation will have lost many mainstream New Testament specialists (at that place is quite a nice, clear argument working through the information at this Cosmic site). He assumes that the gospels are historically accurate, and takes them every bit his basic data, when most scholars would want him to exist much more than provisional. If the instance was expressed more in terms of 'were the gospels accurate, it would lead to this conclusion' might have been more persuasive for the society—merely and then Humphreys is primarily writing for a popular and not a professional audience. There is no particular problem in asking the question Humphreys does in fact enquire: are the narratives nosotros take capable of coherent reading, and if nosotros taken them seriously, what do nosotros find?
I was much more interested, though, in the afterwards capacity, where Humphreys explores the gospel texts in particular in the light of the calendrical groundwork. Although his proposals about the unlike calendars in use at the time of Jesus are speculative (even if plausible), there can exist no doubtfulness that unlike calendarswere in use, and that it is quite likely that different gospel writers are making reference to different calendar schedules which could give rise to apparent anomalies in the gospel chronologies. In particular, some calendars worked dusk to sunset (as Jewish calculation works today), others counted from sunrise to sunrise, and the Roman calendar counted from midnight to midnight, as we do now. It is not hard to see how the phrase 'on the side by side day' tin can now have iii different possible meanings.
Information technology is as well clear that the gospel writers vary in the emphasis that they give to chronological issues. And so, whilst Luke offers some very specific markers in his narrative to locate the gospel story to wider world events (which has been typical of his overall approach), and John includes frequent temporal markers in relation both to Jewish feasts and successive days of Jesus' ministry, Matthew is happy to group Jesus' teaching and ministry building into non-chronological blocks, and Marker has long been recognised as linking events in Jesus' ministry thematically rather than chronologically. Humphreys uses an everyday example to illustrate this: if I cutting the lawn and do some weeding, and someone asks my wife what I have been doing, and she says 'He has been doing some weeding and cut the backyard' then we would not describe our two accounts as 'contradictory'. Chronology just hasn't been an important issue here.
Humphreys' solution rests on proposing that, in celebrating the Passover with his disciples, Jesus used pre-Exile calendar which ran sunrise to sunrise and was at least a mean solar day alee of the official Jerusalem calendar, then that there could exist up to 2 days' difference in calculation. This means that, if the Jerusalem Passover took place on the Friday, post-obit the sacrifice of the lambs on Friday afternoon, information technology would be possible for Jesus to celebrate his own Passover (and not only a 'Passover-similar repast' as some scholars accept suggested) as early as the Wednesday. Humphreys believes that the man conveying the water jar (in Luke 22.10 and parallels) is a signal that the Upper Room was in the Essene quarter of Jerusalem, where there would non have been any women to undertake such roles. And the agenda differences business relationship for Mark'due south statement that the lambs were sacrificed on the 'first mean solar day of the feast of Unleavened Staff of life', (Marker 14.12) which is a contradiction that scholars accept in the past attributed either to Marker's fault or his careless writing.
At some points, I think Humphreys' case is actually slightly stronger than he claims. For example, John'due south phrase 'the Passover of the Jews' in John 11.55 could arguably be translated as 'the Passover of the Judeans', thus emphasising communal and calendrical differences, and Matthew highlights the differences between the crowds of pilgrims and the local Jerusalemites in their response to Jesus. Richard Bauckham has argued that John is writing on the supposition that his readers know Mark, and so there is no need for him to recount the details of the Passover meal in John thirteen and following. And in the latest edition of Bauckham'due southJesus and the Eyewitnesses, he argues (in an boosted chapter) that the 'Dearest Disciple' is the author of the gospel but is not John son of Zebedee, and so not one of the Twelve, but a Jerusalemite. This explains some of the distinctive perspectives of John's gospel with its Judean and Jerusalem focus in contrast to Mark's focus on Galilee—but would besides account for calendrical differences.
There are some points of strain in Humphreys' statement—for me, the near testing one was Humphreys' account of the erect crowing three times, the first of which was (he argues) the Roman horn blown to signal the approach of dawn, thegallicinium which is Latin for 'cock crow'. (I always struggle to exist convinced past an argument that claims a repeated phrase really means unlike things at different times when the phrase is identical.) Simply in that location are also some interesting means in which his reading makes improve sense of some details of the text, such every bit the dream of Pilate's wife—which she could not have had time to accept nether the traditional chronology. Moreover, one of our primeval testimonies to the concluding supper, in 1 Cor 11.23, does not say (as much Anglican liturgy) 'on the nighttime earlier he died' merely 'on the night that he was betrayed'. I will exist sticking with the latter phrase in my future utilize of Eucharistic Prayers! And when Paul says that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for united states (1 Cor 5.seven), and that he is the first fruits of those who sleep (1 Cor 15.20), Paul is reflecting his death on Passover (equally per John, even though in other respects Paul's account matches Luke, and it is largely Paul and Luke's language we employ in liturgy) and his resurrection on the celebration of First Fruits two days afterwards.
Humphreys is certainly bold in taking on cardinal scholars, including Dick France (with whom I would always hesitate to disagree), but in every case he gives citations and explains where the disagreement lies. When the book was kickoff published, Mark Goodacre wrote a brief web log on why he disagrees, and the debate in comments—including from Humphreys himself—are worth reading. Goodacre'southward principal concern is Humphreys' anxiety virtually demonstrating the reliability of the gospel accounts, and the need to eliminate contradictions.
1 of Humphreys's primary concerns is to avoid the idea that the Gospels "contradict themselves". The concern is one that characterizes apologetic works and it is non a business organization that I share.
But I wonder whether concern well-nigh this aim has led many scholars to dismiss the particular too quickly; much of academic scholarship is ideologically committed to the notion that the gospels are irredeemably contradictory. (If I were being mischievous, I would point to the irony of Mark's resisting Humphrey'south challenging of a scholarly consensus, when that is precisely what Marker is doing himself in relation to the existence of 'Q', the supposed 'sayings source' that accounts for the shared material of Luke and Matthew…!) And nosotros need to have seriously that fact that Humphrey'due south arroyo resolves several key bug (including the silence of Wednesday, the lack of time for the trial, the reference in Mark fourteen.12, and Pilate's wife's dream) that are otherwise inexplicable or are put down (slightly arbitrarily) to writer error.
I think there are some further things to explore, just it seems to me that Humphreys' case is worth taking seriously. (Published in before forms in the concluding three years. I repost it hither, since I think it bears repeating—and delving into the gospel narratives is always a valuable devotional activity. The motion-picture show of the Terminal Supper enacted on Zoom seemed rehearsed this yr.)
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