Great and Holy...Thursday?

 

Biblical scholar James Tabor argues - quite persuasively - that Jesus wasn´t crucified on a Friday, but on a Thursday, and that the Last Supper therefore wasn´t a (revised) Jewish Passover meal.

Tabor´s presentation could be controversial even among atheists and other skeptics of matters Biblical. He treats the Gospel stories as reliable historical records. Thus, Tabor´s point isn´t simply that early Christians *claimed* that Jesus had been executed on the Thursday of Passover, but that this actually happened. Further, higher critics often claim that the Gospels contradict each other on precisely this point. The Synoptics seem to place the death of Jesus on a Friday, while John backdates it to a Thursday. The reason is surely theological: John wants to emphasize that Jesus is the “Paschal lamb”, killed for the sins of the world. And during the Jewish Paschal celebrations, the lambs were slaughtered and eaten on a Thursday. That the Gospel stories are contradictory are then taken as evidence that they are unreliable as historical sources. Indeed, Jesus simply *couldn´t* have been processed on a Friday, a sabbath day! But if Tabor is right, and all Gospels agree on the date of the crucifixion, these problems disappear (but somewhat ironically at the price of contradicting well-established Christian tradition).

Another thing also struck me: if Jesus was crucified on a Thursday, the Last Supper must have been on a Wednesday. But if so, the Last Supper can´t have been a Jewish Passover meal. I´m not sure what Tabor´s take is on this, but it could certainly be used to argue that the Last Supper was “the first Christian mass” and hence constituted a very early break with Jewish tradition (already during the earthly ministry of Jesus). Of course, it could also be taken as evidence that Jesus belonged to a sect of Judaism which celebrated the Passover in a somewhat different way from mainline Judaism. The two propositions aren´t mutually exclusive, but both contradict the claim that the Jesus Movement was *simply* a Jewish group among others, with or without Messianic pretensions for their leader, and that the big changes came much later…

Interesting!