The Crucifixion Week
Two calendars, drawn one above the other, because everything turns on this: the biblical day runs from sunset to sunset and the civil day from midnight to midnight, so the two do not line up. The offset between the rows is not a decoration — it is the real sunset at Jerusalem on that day, computed by the same engine the calendar page uses.
Where the knot is
The lamb is killed on the fourteenth and eaten on the fifteenth. It is said twice, in words that leave no room.
In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the Lord’s passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto the Lord: seven days ye must eat unleavened bread. Leviticus 23:5-6
And again, where the keeping of the passover itself is in view:
In the fourteenth day of this month, at even, ye shall keep it in his appointed season. Numbers 9:3
Now set the supper beside that. If that supper was the Passover meal, then he ate the lamb before it was killed — or he died a day late. Neither can be true of one who is himself the lamb. There is only one arrangement in which the supper and the crucifixion each fall on their own day: the supper in the first hours of the fourteenth, and the death at the close of that same fourteenth, at the hour the lambs are being killed in the temple.
The two sabbaths
This is the hinge, and it closes with two verses that appear at first to contradict each other.
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. Mark 16:1
And in Luke, of the same women and the same spices:
And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment. Luke 23:56
One says the spices were bought after the sabbath. The other says they were prepared before it. That can only stand if these are two different sabbaths — and the text says which two.
The Jews therefore, because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day, (for that sabbath day was an high day,) besought Pilate that their legs might be broken. John 19:31
The fifteenth is a high sabbath, the first day of Unleavened Bread, whatever weekday it falls on. The seventeenth, that year, is the weekly sabbath. The sixteenth lies between them, and the spices fit exactly there: bought after the high sabbath, prepared before the weekly one.
With one sabbath these two verses stay a contradiction. With two, nothing is left to reconcile.
Three days and three nights
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. Matthew 12:40
The instrument counts this out rather than asserting it. It takes the burial in the last minutes of the fourteenth and the rising at the close of the seventeenth, and counts the whole nights (sunset to sunrise) and the whole days (sunrise to sunset) that lie between. Three and three come out.
It then counts the Friday reckoning in exactly the same way: buried just before the sunset that ends the Friday, risen before the sunrise of the first day of the week. Two nights and one day come out. That is not my verdict; it is the same routine, let loose on other hours.
There is a common way round this — that “three days and three nights” is a figure in which part of a day counts as a whole. That way exists, and whoever takes it does not need this instrument. But then the sign he chose for himself is no longer something anyone can check, and being checkable was what made it a sign.
Firstfruits
Then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest: and he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the sabbath the priest shall wave it. Leviticus 23:10-11
And Paul calls him by that same word:
But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. I Corinthians 15:20
The day after the weekly sabbath, within the week of Unleavened Bread. In a year whose fourteenth is a Wednesday, the seventeenth is the sabbath and the eighteenth is Firstfruits — and that is the day the tomb is found empty. The account closes, and nobody had to lay it out that way.
Which years can this be?
This is the part a diagram cannot do and a calendar can. Pilate governed from AD 26 to 36. Let this site’s calendar walk those eleven years and ask in which of them Passover falls on a Wednesday.
Three remain: 27, 30 and 33. And in all three, Firstfruits falls on I 18, the day after the weekly sabbath — exactly what the pattern requires. The weekdays of the whole week then come out one for one: the tenth a sabbath, the thirteenth a Tuesday, the fourteenth a Wednesday, the seventeenth a sabbath, the eighteenth a Sunday.
The buttons above the strip walk those three years. They are not typed in: the instrument looks them up afresh each time, from the same new-moon and equinox computation the calendar page runs on.
What this instrument is not
It does not prove which year it happened in. It shows which years can carry the description, which is a different thing. Of the three, 33 is the usual choice and 27 too early for most, but that weighing is historical rather than astronomical, and the instrument does not do it for you.
It also rests on this calendar: months opening at the conjunction, and the first month being the one that holds the first full moon after the March equinox. Open the month at the first visible crescent instead and everything moves a day or two, and other years answer. That is a real difference, it is set out on the calendar page, and it is worth knowing that you are making it.
And it is about the days, not the doctrine. Whether the supper was a seder, whether the three days should be read plainly or idiomatically — those have been argued for centuries. All that stands here is this: here is what the calendar does, here is what the text says, and you can lay the two side by side.
Where this comes from
The shape of this strip — two calendars one above the other, with the events hung from them — follows a teaching by 119 Ministries, Was the Last Supper a Passover Meal?. The argument about the two sabbaths, about the fourteenth against the fifteenth, and about the three days and three nights is worked out at length there; this instrument is the arithmetic side of it.
What does not come from that teaching is a single number. The dates, the weekdays, the sunsets and the question of which years can carry this are computed here with this site’s own calendar, out of the new moons and the March equinox. Anyone checking the source therefore checks two things separately: the argument there, and the reckoning here.
The calendar, for the whole year → · Moria, to check the verses → · Texts and datasets used →