The Sixty-Nine Weeks Lesson 4: Date of the Crucifixion

Five arguments prove that Jesus died on a Friday.

Good Friday observance dates from antiquity. There is no evidence that Christians ever placed Jesus' death on another day. If Jesus did not die on Friday, how likely is it that the church could have forgotten the real day, allowing church leaders to substitute another and gain universal acceptance for it?

A central theme of the New Testament is that Jesus rose on the third day. Jesus' own prediction that He would rise on the third day is noted eight times in the Gospels (Matt. 16:21; 17:23; 20:19; Mark 9:31; 10:34; Luke 9:22; 18:33; 24:7). Fearful of what this prediction might provoke, the authorities resolved to set a guard at His tomb until the third day (Matt. 27:64). That He in fact rose on the third day is asserted once in the Gospels (Luke 24:46), once in Acts (Acts 10:40), and once in the Epistles (1 Cor. 15:4).

The Jews used inclusive reckoning. When measuring the number of days between two events, they counted the day at the beginning of the interval as the first day. For example, in fulfillment of the law mandating circumcision of a male child when he is eight days old (Gen. 17:12), the Jews have always performed the rite one week after the day of birth. The day a week later is the eighth if the day of birth is the first (1).

Biblical references to the third day also assume inclusive reckoning. If the interval starts when someone is speaking, today is considered the first day, tomorrow the second, and the day after tomorrow, the third.

10 And the Lord said unto Moses, Go unto the people, and sanctify them to day and to morrow, and let them wash their clothes,
11 And be ready against the third day: for the third day the Lord will come down in the sight of all the people upon mount Sinai.

And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected.

In both cases, we would have said "two days from now," or "after two days," counting tomorrow as the first. But the Bible says "the third day." It counts today as the first because today frames the beginning of the interval. Other texts exhibiting the same way of reckoning the third day include Leviticus 7:15-17, Leviticus 19:6, and Acts 27:14-19.

The Gospel writers affirm that Jesus rose on a Sunday, the first day of the week (Matt. 28:1; Luke 24:1; John 20:1). Mark says,

Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.

Because it was the day of the Resurrection, Sunday became known as the Lord's day (Rev. 1:10). Among the Jews, the first day of the week extended from Saturday evening to Sunday evening. Therefore, in its proclamation that Jesus rose on the third day, the early church was placing the beginning of the interval on the day extending from Thursday evening to Friday evening. Saturday-Sunday was the third day if the first was Thursday-Friday. Thursday-Friday was therefore the day of His burial, the event defining the beginning of the interval.

For two reasons it is indisputable that the day of His burial was the same as the day of His death.

• In the afternoon of the day when Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples on the road to Emmaus stated that it was then the third day since Jesus was condemned and crucified (Luke 24:20-21).
• Joseph of Arimathaea took the body of Jesus in the "even" (literally, "lateness" (2)) on the day of His death (Matt. 27:50-60) and finished burying the body before the new day began at nightfall (Luke 23:50-54).

The synoptic Gospels make it plain that Jesus died in the afternoon (Matt. 27:46-50; Mark 15:34-37; Luke 23:44-46). Hence, the foregoing evidence that He died and was buried between the evenings of Thursday and Friday leads inexorably to the conclusion that Friday was the day of His death.

Luke says clearly that the next day after Jesus' death and burial was a Sabbath; that is, a Saturday. It follows that Jesus died on a Friday. Luke's chronology for the period of the entombment is the most explicit.

53 And he [Joseph of Arimathaea] took it [Jesus' body] down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.
54 And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath drew on.
55 And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.
56 And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment.
1 Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.

Some have argued that the Sabbath mentioned in this narrative (v. 54) is not Saturday, but the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which was also a day of rest (Lev. 23:6-7). The following considerations furnish sufficient rebuttal:

• The passage says that the women rested on this Sabbath according to "the commandment" (v. 56). The writer evidently assumes that the commandment needs no further identification. For most readers, the commandment forbidding work on the first day of Unleavened Bread would be obscure, but the fourth commandment of the Decalogue—the commandment forbidding work on Saturday—would be well known. There are many allusions to it earlier in Luke's Gospel (Luke 6:2, 7; 13:14; etc.).
• The narrative passes directly from what happened on the Sabbath to what happened on the first day of the week, on Sunday, as if the two days were consecutive. There is no hint of any time between.

Luke is not alone in stating that the Sabbath came one day after Jesus' death. The same assertion appears in the Gospels of Mark and John (Mark 15:42; John 19:31).

All four Gospels concur that Jesus was buried on the "day of preparation" (Matt. 27:62; Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54; John 19:14, 31, 42). This expression refers to Friday, the day of preparation for the Sabbath (3). Ancient literature supplies no evidence that this expression ever referred to any day but Friday. Thus, Friday was the day of Jesus' death.

Luke's account brings to our attention that after the women prepared materials for treating the body, they rested on the Sabbath. He is obviously explaining why they did not attend to the body immediately. If He died on Thursday, the explanation is insufficient. If He died on Wednesday, the explanation is not only insufficient, but the women's behavior was bizarre. Despite earlier opportunities, they did not come to work on the body until it had begun to decay and stink.

Objections. Many people believe that Jesus died on a Wednesday or Thursday, not Friday. The case for a longer burial rests primarily on two arguments.

• In two places the Gospels represent Jesus as predicting that His resurrection would occur "after three days" (Matt. 27:63; Mark 8:31). "After" is a poor translation, however. The Greek preposition is meta, normally used to show that one thing accompanies another. The phrase in question suggests that the Resurrection would accompany the end of three days. Within virtually the same passage, Mark places the Resurrection both "after three days" (Mark 8:31) and on "the third day" (Mark 9:31), showing that he regarded the expressions as interchangeable.
• When the Pharisees requested a sign, Jesus said,

  For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

To underscore the parallel between Jonah's experience and His own, Jesus fitted both to the measure given in Jonah 1:17: three days and three nights. Yet how was this prediction concerning His own experience fulfilled if He was buried on Friday night, only thirty-six hours or so before His resurrection on Sunday morning?

There are two possible explanations. Many commentators have argued that Jewish idiom allowed any part of a day to be considered a whole day-and-night period. But this is doubtful (4).

Another possible explanation assumes that Jesus was giving the duration not of His entombment, but of His death. Scripture teaches that when Jesus died, His soul descended to Sheol, or Hades (Psa. 16:10; Acts 2:27, 31; 1 Pet. 3:18-20), and that His descent to Hades took Him to "the lower parts of the earth" (Eph. 4:9). Therefore, when Jesus spoke of His stay in "the heart of the earth," He was referring to His soul's stay in Hades. To refer to His actual burial place—a small excavation at the earth's surface—as the heart of the earth would have been poetic extravagance indeed.

If the three days and nights started when Jesus died, the sum "three days" creates no difficulty. He was dead during part of the day on Friday and all of the day on Saturday. Christian tradition has always imagined that He did not rise until the first light of Sunday. The three nights are more problematical, however. Yet Jesus' death indeed continued for three nights if the first night by His reckoning was the supernatural darkness that enveloped the world during His final hours on the cross and perhaps for a brief time after He died (Luke 23:44-45) (5).

The limitations on our knowledge keep us from dogmatically asserting which interpretation of the perplexing utterance in Matthew 12:40 is correct. Yet we can assert with confidence that to use this utterance as the main argument against a Friday crucifixion is bad hermeneutics. The doubtful interpretation of a difficult text does not overturn the plain meaning of many simple texts. Much good evidence demands the conclusion that Jesus died on a Friday.

The Gospel of John places Jesus' trial in the early hours of the morning before the Passover meal.

Then led they Jesus from Caiaphas unto the hall of judgment: and it was early; and they themselves went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover.

The Passover meal was eaten in the evening at the outset of Nisan the fifteenth. Since Jesus died about 3 p.m. on the day of His trial, John's disclosure that the trial fell on the fourteenth of Nisan implies the same date for the Crucifixion. During the afternoon of the fourteenth, many thousands of lambs were slaughtered in the Temple, one for each family or company of people that would eat the Passover meal together in the evening. It is therefore likely that Jesus died just as all the lambs were being killed.

Yet the synoptic Gospels state clearly that the Last Supper was held on the first day of Unleavened Bread. The Gospel of Mark, for example, testifies,

And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the passover?

The law of Moses prescribed that the Feast of Unleavened Bread should be celebrated for seven days, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first of Nisan (Lev. 23:6). Therefore, as far as the law was concerned, the fifteenth was the first day of the feast. If the Last Supper, in the evening at the start of a new day, was on the fifteenth, Jesus' death in the following afternoon was on the fifteenth also. A cursory examination of the Synoptics might therefore suggest to the reader that Nisan the fifteenth, not the fourteenth, was the date of the Crucifixion.

The explanation for the apparent contradiction between John and the Synoptics is very simple. In Jesus' time, the Jews regarded the fourteenth of Nisan as the first day of Unleavened Bread. The meaning of Mark 14:12 and of the corresponding passages in Matthew and Luke is that the Last Supper was prepared and eaten in the evening at the beginning of the fourteenth. Thus, by implication, the Synoptics place the Crucifixion on Nisan the fourteenth, not the fifteenth.

Several ancient sources agree that the Jews regarded the fourteenth as the first day of the feast.

• In Mark 14:12, the writer removes any possible confusion by explaining what he means. He defines the first day of the feast as the day when the lambs were killed. They were killed in the afternoon of the fourteenth, between three and five o'clock (6).
• Josephus in one passage speaks of Passover as a festival lasting eight days (7), and elsewhere he states explicitly that the festival began on the fourteenth (8).
• The Talmud says that the rabbis considered the fourteenth as the first day of Unleavened Bread (9).

Date of the Transfiguration Verified

The conventional view is that the Transfiguration fell in the last year of Jesus' ministry. But whereas the other Synoptic writers do not specify the interval between the Transfiguration and the Crucifixion, Luke clearly sets them a year and several months apart. In his Gospel, the Transfiguration comes before the visit to Jerusalem when Jesus spoke the Parable of the Unfruitful Fig Tree, which strongly implied that His ministry would last another full year (Luke 13:6-9).
We find in Daniel 9:26 a prophecy looking forward to a key event between the Transfiguration and the Crucifixion. Given that the sixty-nine weeks ended on December 14/15, 31, we can compute the date of this intervening event. Then, given that the Crucifixion fell on April 3, 33, we may verify this date by historical records. The second argument will be developed fully in the next lesson.
Daniel 9:25 contains an easily overlooked prophecy giving the interval between the Transfiguration (or, more precisely, the announcements a few days earlier) and the Resurrection. If we use this prophecy to compute the date of the Resurrection, the result is in harmony with the established date of the Crucifixion. The lesson after the next will present the third argument.

1. T. O. Beidelman, "Circumcision," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987), 512.
2. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, reprinted in, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, by W. E. Vine, Merrill F. Unger, and William White, Jr. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984), 374.
3. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, eds., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 627; Josephus Antiquities 16.6.2.
4. There is no doubt that the expression "three days and three nights" is idiomatic. See 1 Sam. 30:12; Esth. 4:16. The question is whether it can describe a period barely longer than thirty-six hours. Many who say it can have resorted to the Jerusalem Talmud. "It has been taught: R. Eleazar b. Azariah says, 'A day and a night constitute a span, and part of a span is equivalent to the whole of it'" (Talmud Yerushalmi, Shabbat 9.3). From this they have inferred that it was customary among the Jews to speak of any portion of a day as a whole day and night, so that part of Friday, all of Saturday, and part of Sunday might be called three days and three nights. What Rabbi Eleazar taught was, however, a minority view. The Talmud sets it aside in favor of the view that part of a span is not equivalent to the whole of it. In any case, the Talmudic debate centers on how days should be counted in determining a particular type of ritual cleanness. Rabbi Eleazar is not saying that for all purposes he considers part of a span as equivalent to the whole.
5. Paul Smith, personal communication, 8 March 2000.
6. Philo De Specialibus Legibus 2.145 (De septenario 18); Josephus Wars 6.9.3; Mishnah, Pesahim 5.1.
7. Josephus Antiquities 2.15.1.
8. Josephus Wars 5.3.1.
9. Babylonian Talmud, Pesahim 5a.
10. Colin J. Humphreys and W. G. Waddington, "Dating the Crucifixion," Nature 306 (1983): 744.
11. Roger T. Beckwith, "Cautionary Notes on the Use of Calendars and Astronomy to Determine the Chronology of the Passion," in Chronos, Kairos, Christos, ed. Jerry Vardaman and Edwin M. Yamauchi (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 192-193.
12. Tacitus, Annals 4.1, states that AD 23 was the ninth year of Tiberius. Dio Cassius, Roman History 58.24.1, tells us that the Roman government itself regarded AD 34 as the twentieth year of Tiberius. Hence, his fifteenth year was AD 29. For conversion of the consular years reported by these historians into years of the Christian era, consult Elias J. Bickerman, Chronology of the Ancient World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 184. The many attempts to show that Luke is counting years from a starting point earlier than Tiberius's accession to the throne after Augustus's death on August 19, AD 14, have increasingly fallen into disfavor as scholars have considered the evidence of ancient histories, inscriptions, papyri, and coins. The unanimous testimony of these varied sources is that ordinary imperial reckoning ignored the partial authority enjoyed by Tiberius before Augustus's death. See George Ogg, The Chronology of the Public Ministry of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 178, 270-271; Paul L. Maier, "Sejanus, Pilate, and the Date of the Crucifixion," Church History 37 (1968): 6; A. Kindler, "More Dates on the Coins of the Procurators," Israel Exploration Journal 6 (1956): 54-57.
13. Harold W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1977), 45-63.
14. Josephus states that Pilate succeeded Valerius Gratus as procurator of Judaea after Gratus had served eleven years under Tiberius Caesar. See Josephus Antiquities 18.2.2.
15. Maier, 8-9.
16. Philo De Legatione ad Gaium 24, In Flaccum 1.
17. E. M. Blaiklock, The Archaeology of the New Testament (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984), 52-55; Maier, 9-12.
18. Maier, 11.
19. Philo De Legatione ad Gaium 24.
20. Josephus places Pilate's removal a few months before the death of Tiberius, which occurred early in AD 37. See Josephus Antiquities 18.4.2.
21. Dale Moody, "A New Chronology for the Life and Letters of Paul," in Chronos, Kairos, Christos, ed. Jerry Vardaman and Edwin M. Yamauchi (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 224-225.
22. Ibid., 230-231; S. Dockx, "The First Missionary Voyage of Paul: Historical Reality or Literary Creation of Luke?" in Chronos, Kairos, Christos, ed. Jerry Vardaman and Edwin M. Yamauchi (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 211.
23. Humphreys and Waddington, 744.