2. This day of Pentecost, on which the Holy Spirit was given, was the first day of the week. A number of eminent authorities, chief among whom is the chronologist Wieseler, compute it to have been the seventh. This question hinges upon that of the day of the Lord’s death. It is almost universally admitted that Christ was crucified on Friday. But it is disputed whether that Friday was the fourteenth or the fifteenth of Nisan. From Leviticus 23:15, 16, we learn that Pentecost, signifying literally the fiftieth, was counted from the second day of unleavened bread. The paschal lamb was killed at the close of the fourteenth day of the month Abib or Nisan, and the next day, the fifteenth, was the first day of unleavened bread. This day was regarded as a holy Sabbath; and from the morrow following, that is, from the sixteenth of Nisan, fifty days were to be reckoned to determine the day of Pentecost.
Wieseler contends that the Lord was crucified on the fifteenth of Nisan—the first day of unleavened bread. The sixteenth of the month would therefore fall on the seventh day of the week, and fifty days, reckoned from and including this, according to the manner of the Jews, would fix the day of Pentecost on the Jewish Sabbath. It is interesting to observe that many who agree with Wieseler in regarding the Friday of Christ’s crucifixion as the fifteenth of Nisan, still reckon the fifty days so as to make Pentecost fall on the first day of the week. Prominent among these chronologists is Canon Wordsworth.
In all frankness, we would admit that Wordsworth’s reckoning will not hold. If the Friday on which the Lord was crucified was the fifteenth of Nisan, and if that day was observed as the first day of unleavened bread so that the specified fifty days would be reckoned from the following day, then Pentecost must have occurred on the seventh day of the week.
Others of our ablest scholars, such as Greswell, Elliott, and Schaff, maintain that the day on which our Lord was crucified was the fourteenth of Nisan. An exhaustive discussion of this whole question would be out of place in these columns. We give a brief, and we think conclusive, argument in favor of the view that the Friday of our Lord’s death was the fourteenth of Nisan, and that therefore the fifteenth Nisan, or first day of unleavened bread, coincided with the Jewish Sabbath. The reasons in favor of this view are the following:—
(1.) The language of John, chap. 18:28, intimates clearly that the Jews had not, on the morning of Friday, yet partaken of the passover. Friday could not therefore have been the fifteenth of Nisan.
(2.) The same day, Friday, John states that “it was the preparation of the passover.” (Chap. 19:14.) It seems next to impossible to understand this expression in any other way than as referring to that day, Friday, as the day of preparation for Passover observance, or, in other words, as the day preceding the fifteenth Nisan.
(3.) John’s statement, in chap. 19:31, that the Sabbath following the day of crucifixion was “a high day,” admits of no easy or natural explanation except that of the coincidence of the first day of unleavened bread, or the fifteenth Nisan, with the seventh-day Sabbath.
(4.) The anti-typical character of Christ, as the Paschal Lamb of God and the true Passover Sacrifice (John 1:29, 36; 1 Cor. 5:7), would lead us to expect that the very day and hour of his death would correspond with the time of the killing of the typical Passover lamb. If it be urged that Christ himself, with his disciples, in obeying the requirements of the law, killed the Passover on the evening of the fourteenth, and that the Synoptical Gospels intimate this, it may be replied that such an interpretation of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is not required, and that the exceeding difficulty, not to say impossibility, of harmonizing it with the statements already quoted from John, is quite decisive against it. It is much easier to interpret the Synoptists in the light of John’s Gospel. In this chapter, 13:1, we are informed of a supper before the passover. That this was the same supper spoken of by the Synoptists, though one day before the usual time, in order that the true Passover lamb might be put to death at the time appointed, appears from the peculiar nature of the message sent by chosen apostle, to the “good man of the house”—a message of special direction, pointing out something of an unusual character. (See Matthew 28:18; Mark 14:14; and Luke 22:11.) There are also in the Synoptical Gospels a number of statements showing that the Friday on which our Lord was crucified was not marked by the Sabbatic sacredness belonging to the first day of unleavened bread. (See Matthew 27:59; Mark 15:42, 46; Luke 23:56.) This seems to be the easiest and most natural way of harmonizing the apparent discrepancies between the Synoptists and John.
(5.) Wieseler’s own chronological tables may be used against him to show that the Friday of our Lord’s crucifixion was the fourteenth of Nisan. We would speak with becoming diffidence, in any attempt to make out a system of chronology for the events recorded in Scripture. There are, however, in Wieseler’s elaborate book, tables independently proved to be accurate. By them, admitting the year of our Lord’s crucifixion to have been A. D. 30, which is regarded by most chronologists as highly probable, and admitting also that the day was Friday, which will not be disputed, it is shown, beyond all doubt, that Christ died on the fourteenth of Nisan, and must have eaten the passover with his disciples on the first hours of that day, the preceding evening. The tables referred to show, by the most minute and accurate calculations, that in the year, A. D. 30, the new moon for the month Nisan appeared on Wednesday, the next to the last day of the preceding month, corresponding to March 22, at eight minutes past eight o’clock in the evening. Hence, it would follow that the first day of Nisan commenced on Friday evening, March 24, corresponding, as to daylight, with Saturday, March 25; of course, the Friday of the next week, would be the seventh Nisan, and the same day, the following week, the fourteenth. Thus, according to Wieseler’s own tables, Friday of the week of our Lord’s passion is made out to be the fourteenth of Nisan. The fifteenth of Nisan, then, or the first day of unleavened bread, coincided at that time with the seventh day of the week, or the Jewish Sabbath; and reckoning fifty days from the morrow, that day included, we find Pentecost falling on the first day of the eighth week following our Lord’s crucifixion.
So clear and emphatic is the testimony of the primitive church to this fact that many who hold that the Friday of Christ’s death was the fifteenth Nisan still do so in cordial indorsement of that fact. They reconcile the apparent difference between John and the Synoptists by supposing that the Jewish authorities, probably because of the crucifixion, or for some other reason, did not observe the Passover at the usual time, but, passing by the fifteenth Nisan, in reality kept the sixteenth in its place; and thus counting the fifty days from the seventeenth of the month, instead of the sixteenth, Pentecost would fall on the first day of the week.