It is evening over Jerusalem, and the city smells of roasting lamb.
It has been the fourteenth of Nisan, and it is drawing to its close; as the darkness falls, the feast begins. In a thousand houses the tables lie ready — the lamb roasted over the fire, the bitter herbs, the unleavened bread, the four cups poured. Fathers lean towards their children and begin to tell the old story, the story the people have told on this evening for more than a thousand years: how they were slaves in Egypt, and how the blood of a lamb on the doorposts made death pass by. Passover. The night of deliverance.
But this evening there is something else, something most of those at the tables give no thought to. Outside the wall, on a hill shaped like a skull, three crosses stand against the falling sky, and on the middle one, that afternoon, there hung a man whom some had called the Lamb of God. He is dead. In the very hour when the first Passover lambs were falling in the temple, He cried out and gave up His spirit, and they buried Him in haste, just before the sun set and the feast began — a new tomb, a stone rolled across it. While the people now eat the lamb that made death pass over, the One to whom all those lambs had pointed lies in the dark of a rock-hewn grave, and no one at the tables knows that the deliverance they are singing of was accomplished that afternoon outside the wall.
And if you step outside, away from the lamplight, and look up, you will see one thing more. The moon has risen over the Mount of Olives — full and unblemished, for it is Passover, and Passover always falls at the full moon — and through the course of the evening she has climbed high above the city. And then, late in the evening, while in the houses the cups still go round, a shadow slides across part of her face, and that gnawed edge glows a dull copper-red, and so she hangs for a while high above the rooftops — no blood moon, but a marred moon, in the night of the Passover.
Hold that image, but hold it loosely. It is no proof — this book will lay no weight on it at all, and it will warn you each time image and argument threaten to blur. But it did happen, that night, above that city: the astronomy leaves no doubt of it. Take it, then, as it is meant — not as a stone in the argument, but as the air in which the argument begins.
For this evening has a date, and the date is what this book is about. It is Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of April, in the year 31.
And here is the strange thing, the point where it all begins. Open a scholarly list of the possible dates for the crucifixion — the years the experts weigh against one another — and this Wednesday is not on it. Not as a candidate examined and found wanting. Simply: absent. And yet, as the coming chapters will show, she lies in plain sight in the standard literature — in the greatest authority on the subject, even as the ordinary reading — and she has never been admitted among the contenders. She has never been weighed.
Why not?
That is the question of this whole book, and the answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: a single assumption kept her out before anyone looked. The assumption that the crucifixion fell on a Friday. As long as that Friday is not a conclusion but a starting point, a Wednesday is not a candidate but a category error — a date one does not test, because one already knows it cannot be.
This book does the opposite. It tests the Friday instead of assuming it. It lays down a measure — out loud, checkable, and just as strict on both sides — and it asks, without knowing the outcome in advance: if you truly measure instead of inherit, which day is left? It goes through the day, and the year, and the calendar, and the week; it weighs the whole field, the opponent at his strongest, up to and including the date the whole world has kept for centuries.
And at the end it returns, once more, to this evening — the same copper-red moon above the same fresh grave. But by then you will have weighed for yourself.
First the beginning: the axiom that is no measurement.
It is evening over Jerusalem, and the city smells of roasting lamb.
It has been the fourteenth of Nisan, and it is drawing to its close; as the darkness falls, the feast begins. In a thousand houses the tables lie ready — the lamb roasted over the fire, the bitter herbs, the unleavened bread, the four cups poured. Fathers lean towards their children and begin to tell the old story, the story the people have told on this evening for more than a thousand years: how they were slaves in Egypt, and how the blood of a lamb on the doorposts made death pass by. Passover. The night of deliverance.
But this evening there is something else, something most of those at the tables give no thought to. Outside the wall, on a hill shaped like a skull, three crosses stand against the falling sky, and on the middle one, that afternoon, there hung a man whom some had called the Lamb of God. He is dead. In the very hour when the first Passover lambs were falling in the temple, He cried out and gave up His spirit, and they buried Him in haste, just before the sun set and the feast began — a new tomb, a stone rolled across it. While the people now eat the lamb that made death pass over, the One to whom all those lambs had pointed lies in the dark of a rock-hewn grave, and no one at the tables knows that the deliverance they are singing of was accomplished that afternoon outside the wall.
And if you step outside, away from the lamplight, and look up, you will see one thing more. The moon has risen over the Mount of Olives — full and unblemished, for it is Passover, and Passover always falls at the full moon — and through the course of the evening she has climbed high above the city. And then, late in the evening, while in the houses the cups still go round, a shadow slides across part of her face, and that gnawed edge glows a dull copper-red, and so she hangs for a while high above the rooftops — no blood moon, but a marred moon, in the night of the Passover.
Hold that image, but hold it loosely. It is no proof — this book will lay no weight on it at all, and it will warn you each time image and argument threaten to blur. But it did happen, that night, above that city: the astronomy leaves no doubt of it. Take it, then, as it is meant — not as a stone in the argument, but as the air in which the argument begins.
For this evening has a date, and the date is what this book is about. It is Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of April, in the year 31.
And here is the strange thing, the point where it all begins. Open a scholarly list of the possible dates for the crucifixion — the years the experts weigh against one another — and this Wednesday is not on it. Not as a candidate examined and found wanting. Simply: absent. And yet, as the coming chapters will show, she lies in plain sight in the standard literature — in the greatest authority on the subject, even as the ordinary reading — and she has never been admitted among the contenders. She has never been weighed.
Why not?
That is the question of this whole book, and the answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: a single assumption kept her out before anyone looked. The assumption that the crucifixion fell on a Friday. As long as that Friday is not a conclusion but a starting point, a Wednesday is not a candidate but a category error — a date one does not test, because one already knows it cannot be.
This book does the opposite. It tests the Friday instead of assuming it. It lays down a measure — out loud, checkable, and just as strict on both sides — and it asks, without knowing the outcome in advance: if you truly measure instead of inherit, which day is left? It goes through the day, and the year, and the calendar, and the week; it weighs the whole field, the opponent at his strongest, up to and including the date the whole world has kept for centuries.
And at the end it returns, once more, to this evening — the same copper-red moon above the same fresh grave. But by then you will have weighed for yourself.
First the beginning: the axiom that is no measurement.