When Jesus was brought before Pilate, “it was the day of the Preparation of the Passover” (John 19:14; emphasis added). Passover lay in the near future. And yet Jesus told his disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this the Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15; emphasis added). What is commonly called “The Last Supper” was the Passover.
If, however, the arguments of Colin J. Humphreys’s The Mystery of the The Last Supper hold up, there is no discrepancy. We may believe Jesus did celebrate the Passover on Nisan 14, not according to the calendar devised during the Babylonian Exile, however, but according to the pre-exilic calendar of ancient Israel. Those calendars were as different from each other as, say, the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar differs from the equally serviceable calendar of the Eastern Orthodox.
The pre-exilic calendar, being 364 days in length, is evenly divisible by 7. In such a calendar, therefore, any given date falls on the same day every year. Therefore, that calendar’s Nisan 14 has always fallen on a Wednesday since the first Passover. Humphreys’s hypothesis, to which I cannot do justice here, dissolves apparent discrepancies that have challenged faithful readers of the Gospels.
For example, even though Jesus was arrested after eating His Passover, John’s Gospel has servants of the high priest Caiaphas conducting Jesus to Pilate’s hall of judgment before the “official” Passover: “and they themselves went not in the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28b).
Humphrey shows his readers how difficult establishing that chronology is. But not impossible. His labors rest on the assumption (against modernity’s grain) that the Bible is not presumed to be in error except when one cannot wiggle out of admitting its accuracy. He argues that we are within our rights to believe that Jesus celebrated the Passover on April 1, A.D. 33, three days “before the time set for the observance of the Passover in Israel,” which officially fell that year on April 4.
Again, if Humphreys is right, the official time-setters did not use the ancient Mosaic calendar. But Jesus did, as was His prerogative. They used the calendar created during the Babylonian exile and brought into Jerusalem at the exile’s end in 538 B.C.
Jesus went to the Cross to pay the penalty for our sins on Friday, April 3, two days after the Passover He ate, just as the lambs for Saturday’s official Passover were being slain.
Humphreys’s solution easily accommodates the series of Gospel events that, on the traditional reckoning, occur after the Last Supper on Thursday night but before the Crucifixion Friday morning.
One such event is the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin. Tradition puts it at night, contrary to Mosaic law for capital offenses, yet no Gospel writer hints that this trial violated the law. It also strains credulity to imagine members of the Sanhedrin violating it when they were preparing to commemorate the Passover a few hours later.
The Lord chose to observe the original, Mosaic calendar, according to which the events subsequent to the Last Supper, as recorded in the Synoptics, took place before the observance of the Passover in Israel.