Strengthen your faith in God's word

Mark says the disciples made ready “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the passover” (Mark 14:12), and that evening Jesus said, “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). But the next morning the Jews “went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28), and it was still “the preparation of the passover” (John 19:14). If He had eaten the passover, how had they not yet eaten it? Many say John and the other Gospels disagree about the day.

The law fixes the passover to a day: “In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the LORD’S passover” (Leviticus 23:5; Numbers 9:3). A day ran “from even unto even” (Leviticus 23:32), so the fourteenth began at evening, on Tuesday that year, and ended at evening on Wednesday. Christ kept the passover as the fourteenth began. That was “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the passover” (Mark 14:12); “in the evening he cometh with the twelve” (Mark 14:17) and ate “this passover” with them (Luke 22:15).

The rulers kept theirs at the other end of the same fourteenth, on Wednesday at evening. So on Wednesday morning they would not go into the judgment hall, “that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28). John says plainly that the supper came first: it was “before the feast of the passover” (John 13:1), and the day of the cross was still “the preparation of the passover” (John 19:14).

So both are true as written. Christ ate the passover on the fourteenth, and the Jews had not yet eaten theirs when He stood before Pilate. And that afternoon, still the fourteenth, as the lambs were killed for the evening, “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Within the one day the law appointed, He ate the passover with His disciples and was Himself the passover.

Haley gives this among the two leading answers: that the Lord and His disciples kept the passover a day before the Jews, there being “two distinct days, both legal” for keeping it. The other, that John’s “passover” means the rest of the feast and the supper fell on the Jews’ own evening, can’t stand with a Wednesday crucifixion, which three days and three nights require (Matthew 12:40).