Holy Week - Tradition and History.

Christians throughout the world are familiar with Holy Week, beginning on Palm Sunday, commemorating the Triumphant entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem.  The celebration begins in earnest with Holy Thursday, which commemorates the Last Supper and the washing of the disciples feet.  A vigil is held until Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion, and concludes on Easter day, the most important feast in the Christian calendar.

And this timeline is all wrong, because of a misunderstanding on the part of gentile Christians regarding the Gospels.

What do we know?  In Matthew chapter 12, Jesus prophesied his time in the tomb: "But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."  (Matt 12:39-40)

But if Christ was crucified on Friday, he would have spent but two nights and only one full day in the earth.  There's been a lot of twisting and spinning done on the part of Christian apologists to reconcile this, and none of it has been necessary.

Nowhere in the Gospels was it said that Jesus was Crucified on a Friday.  What is conclusive is that the resurrection took place on a Sunday, the first day of the week (John 20:1).  The only other bit of evidence about the day of the crucifixion is that the high priests wanted the bodies off the cross before the beginning of the Sabbath (John 19:31, Luke 23:54, Mark 15:42 ).

To the early Gentiles who had converted to Christianity, the Sabbath meant one thing: Saturday, the Jewish day of rest.  Therefore, if the High Priests were worried about the beginning of the Sabbath, then Christ must have been crucified on a Friday, and the entire Holy Week schedule was based on this when the liturgical calendar was established.

The thing to remember, though, is that this was the Passover, a Great Sabbath; much different than the weekly Sabbath, and wasn't tied to a specific day of the week.  The Jewish Calendar was a Lunar Calendar.  A Jewish month begins at the new moon, and lasts 28 days.  Occasionally, they would throw an extra month into the year, just to keep the months more or less in synch with the seasons.  They also observed the equinoxes and solstices, which remained constant throughout the year.  The first month of the Jewish Calendar is Nisan, and it begins at the new moon closest to the spring equinox.  The Jewish day begins at sunset, i.e., Saturday begins at sundown Friday.

The Jewish Passover feast begins on the 14th day of Nisan, or the first full moon after the equinox (Exodus 12:2-6, Lev 23:5, Numbers 9:1-3). Of course, this can happen on any day of the week, and sundown on that day begins the Great Sabbath of Passover.  We are told many times in the Gospels that Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  There is great significance to this, as the day of preparation is the day the Passover lamb is slaughtered, as Jesus was to be killed to atone for the sins of many.

Tradition holds that Jesus was around 33 years old when He was crucified.  It's generally understood that Jesus was born in 4 BC.  The following shows the days of the week that Passover fell on for the years that Jesus may have been crucified, along with the Julian Day.

26 AD Wednesday, March 20

27 AD Monday, April 7

28 AD Saturday, March 27

29 AD Thursday, April 14

30 AD Monday, April 3,

31 AD Saturday, March 24

32 AD Saturday, April 12

33 AD Wednesday, April 1

34 AD Saturday, March 20

As we can see, the Great Sabbath of the Passover coincides with the weekly Sabbath on four of these years.  But does that square with the prediction of Matt 12:39-40?  If Jesus dies on a Friday, that leaves just one full day and two nights in the tomb.  But if Jesus was crucified in AD 29, he would have been 33 years old, according to tradition, he would have been Crucified on a Wednesday, the day of preparation, and would have spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the tomb, to be raised sometime after sundown Saturday.  Three full days and nights, as he foretold.  The dates and tradition align perfectly.  The mistake was when non-Jewish Early Christians interpreted the reference to the Sabbath to be the weekly Sabbath, not the Great Sabbath of Passover.

It's proper and right that we commemorate the Last Supper and Good Friday.  Just keep in mind that the last supper actually happened on Tuesday, and the Crucifixion on a Wednesday.  The church isn't going to change its liturgical calendar, but that's of little consequence.

The Christian celebration of Pascha, the resurrection (It's only called Easter in German and English), properly occurs on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.  The Eastern Orthodox religion still calculates the religious holidays off the Julian Calendar, which has slowly been going out of synchronization with the Gregorian calendar in use by the rest of the world.  This is why the Eastern Orthodox frequently celebrate Pascha on a different date than Western Christian traditions.  Unfortunately, the Orthodox feel that the appropriate change can only come through an ecumenical council, and the Orthodox believe that no ecumenical council can be valid without the Roman diocese being represented.  Since Rome and the Orthodox church are in schism, the Orthodox cannot hold what they believe is a valid ecumenical council.