If it be granted that the supper was eaten on the evening of the 14th of Nisan, the apprehension, trial, and crucifixion of our Lord must have occurred on Fri- daj' the 15th, the day of holy convocation, which was the first of the seven days of the Passover week. The weekl}^ Sabbath on whicli he lay in the tomb was the 16th, and the Sunday of the resurrection was the 17th.
(2.) But, on the other hand, if we had no information but that which is to be gathered from John's (iospel. we could not hesitate to infer that the evening of the supper was that of the loth of Nisan, the day preceding that of the paschal meal. It appears to be spoken of as occurring before the feast of the Passover (xiii, 1, 2). Some of the disciples suppose that Christ told Judas, while they were at supper, to buy what they "hatl need of against the feast" (xiii, 2'j). In the night whieli follows the supper, the Jews will not enter the prreto- rium lest they should be defiled, and so not be able to " eat the passover" (xviii, 28). When our Lord is before Pilate, about to be led out to crucifixion, we are told that it was " the ])reparation of the Passover" (xix, 14). After the crucifixion, the Jews are solicitous, " because it was the jjreparation, that the bodies should not re- main upon the cross on the Sabbath day, for tliat Sab- bath day was a liigh day" (xix, 31).
If we admit, in accorclance with the first view of these passages, that the last supper was on the 13th of Nisan, our Lord must have been crucified on the 14th, tlie day on which the paschal lamb was slain and eaten ; he lay in the grave on the 15th (which was a "higli day" or double Sabbath, because the weekly Sabbath coincided with the day of hoi}' convocation), and the Sunday of the resurrection was the 16th.
It is alleged that this view of the case is strength- ened by certain facts in the narratives of the synoptical Gospels, as well as that of John, compared with the law and with what we know of Jewish customs in later times. If the meal was the paschal supper, the law of Exod. xii, 22, that none " shall go out of the door of his house until the morning," must have been broken, not only by Judas (John xiii, 30), but by our Lord and the other discijjles (Luke xxii, 39). (It is true that, ac- cording to Jewish authorities, this law was disused in later times. But even if this were not the case, it does not seem that there can be much difficulty in adopting the arrangement of G res well's //«r?«OHy, that the party did not leave the house to go over the brook till after midnight.) In like manner it is said that the law for the observance of the 15th, the day of holy convocation with which the paschal week commenced (Exod. xii, IG; Lev. xxiii, 35, etc.), and some express enactments in the Talmud regarding legal proceedings and partic- ular details, such as the carrying of spices, must have been infringed by the Jewish rulers in the apprehend- ing of Christ, in his trials before the high-priest and the Sanhedrim, and in his crucifixion ; and also by Si- mon of Cyrene, who was coming out of the country (Mark xv, 21 ; Luke xxiii, 26) ; by Joseph, who bought fine linen (Mark xv, 46); by the women who brought spices (Mark xvi, 1; Luke xxiii, ,56), and by Nicode- mus, who brought to the tomb a hundred pounds weight of a mixture of myrrh and aloes (John xix, 39). The same objection is considered to lie against the supposi- tion that the disciples could have imagined, on the evening of the Passover, that our Lord was giving di- rections to Judas respecting the purchase of anj'thing or the giving of alms to the poor. The latter act (ex- cept under very special conditions) would have been as much opposed to rabbinical maxims as the former (Lightfoot, I/or. Ueb. on j\Iatt. xxvii, 1).
It is further urged that the exiiressions of our Lord, "My time is at hand" (Matt, xxvi, 18), and ^'this Pass- over" (Luke xxii, 15), as well as Paul's designating it as " the same night that he was betrayed," instead of the night of the Passover (1 Cor. xi, 23), and his identifying Christ as our slain paschal lamb (v, 7), bccra to point to the time of the supper as being peculiar, and to the time of the crucifixion as being the same as that of the kill- ing of the lamb (Neander and Llicke).
(3.) It is not surprising that some modern critics should have given up as hopeless the task of reconciling this difficulty. Several have rejected the narrative of John (Bretschneider, Weisse), but a greater number (es- pecially De Wette, Usteri, Ewald, iMej-er, and Thiele) have taken an opposite course, and have been content with the notion that the first three evangelists made a mistake, and confounded the meal with the Passover.
2. The reconciliations which liave been attempted fall under the following principal heads :
(1.) Those which regard the supper at which our Lord washed the feet of his disciples (John xiii) as hav- ing been a distinct meal eaten one or more days before the regular Passover, of which our Lord partook in due course according to the synoptical narratives. This method has the advantage of furnishing the most ready way of accounting for John's silence on the institution of the Holy Communion. It has been adopted by Mal- donat (t>« John xiii, 1), Lightfoot, and Bengel, and more recently by Kaiser {Chronolor/ie ttnd Ilarmonie der vier Ev. ; mentioned by Tischendorf, St/nop. Erang. p. xiv). Lightfoot identities the supper of John xiii with the one in the house of Simon the leper at Bethany two days before the Passover, when ]Mary ])oured the oint- ment on the head of our Saviour (Matt, xxvi, 6; Mark xiv, 3) ; ai.d quaintly remarks, " While they are grum- bling at the anointing of his head, he does not scruple to wash their feet" (A'a-. Ileb. on John xiii, 2, and Matt, xxvi, 6). Bengel supposes that it was eaten only the evening before the Passover {On Matt, xxvi, 17, and John xviii, 28),