The Year of the Cross

Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judea from about AD 26 to AD 36. The cross is inside those years. That is the wall. Everything tighter is an argument about Passover and about how Luke counted Tiberius.

John's last supper and last morning use the language of the Passover. The Jews do not enter Pilate's headquarters so they will not be defiled, but may eat the Passover. John 18:28 Pilate presents Jesus about the sixth hour on the day of Preparation of the Passover. John 19:14 The synoptic Gospels present the last supper as a Passover meal. Mark 14:12 Luke 22:15 The week lesson walks that difference, including the question of which evening was the meal and whether John and the synoptics are using the same clock for "preparation." The year question is what this scroll adds.

Passover begins on the fifteenth of Nisan, and the lamb is killed on the fourteenth. In a year when the fourteenth falls on a Friday, the preparation and the crucifixion line up with the church's memory of a Friday death and a Sunday resurrection. Astronomical tables for which years the fourteenth fell on Friday, in the years Pilate was in office, are not unanimous, because they depend on how the new moon was observed and whether a month was inserted. The two years that keep surviving the argument are AD 30 and AD 33.

AD 30 fits a baptism around AD 28, about thirty years of age, and a ministry of about two or three years. AD 33 fits a later start, or a longer reading of John's feasts, and it has a Friday fourteenth of Nisan on some reckonings that AD 30 does not. Both are inside Pilate's decade. The timeline prints both and calls the card an estimate. Printing one of them in a headline as the date is how study Bibles sound more certain than the evidence.

The resurrection is the first day of the week after that death, in all four Gospels. Luke 24:1 John 20:1 The year does not change the morning. Pentecost is fifty days later, in the same season, and Acts begins there. The year of the cross, whichever of the two it was, is the year of the church's birth. That is as much as this scroll will lock down.