The Last Week

Jesus had been to Jerusalem before. What is different this time is that the arrival is arranged. Mark 11:1-6 has him send two disciples ahead with instructions about a colt and a password, which means the animal was prepared in advance. Whatever else the entry is, it is not spontaneous.

The crowd spreads cloaks and, in Mark's wording, branches they had cut from the fields. The palms are John's detail, in 12:13. The shout is Psalm 118:25-26, a pilgrim psalm, with Hosanna at the front of it: a Hebrew cry meaning save now, worn smooth by liturgical use into something close to an acclamation, but not so smooth that its sense had vanished. Mark adds a line the psalm does not contain: blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David.

Matthew and John both quote Zechariah 9:9 to explain the donkey, and Mark does not, which is worth noticing since Mark rarely misses a scriptural cue. Matthew's citation produces a famous difficulty: he mentions two animals in 21:7, apparently taking the two halves of the Hebrew poetic line as describing two beasts rather than one. Some argue Matthew knew what he was doing and had an eyewitness report of two animals; others that he has read the parallelism woodenly. It is a small thing, and pretending it is not there is a larger one.

The whole scene is an enacted claim, and everyone in Jerusalem that week was primed to read it. Passover was the festival of a nation's liberation from an occupying power, held in a city under an occupying power, with the Roman garrison reinforced for the week precisely because the authorities knew what the crowds were remembering. Pilate would have come up from Caesarea for the festival with troops. Into that, a man rides a donkey through a royal psalm. Mark then ends the day with a wonderfully flat sentence: he looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve. Nothing happens. The confrontation is the next morning.

He overturns the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those selling pigeons, and stops people carrying goods through. Then he teaches, quoting Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 in Mark 11:17: 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations,' and 'But you have made it a den of robbers.'

Two things have to be got right here. The first is scale. The Herodian temple platform covered something like thirty-five acres, and at Passover the city held a vast pilgrim population. One man with a handful of followers did not shut it down. This was a demonstration in one part of the complex, visible enough to be reported and to be remembered, and small enough that the temple police did not immediately arrest him.

The second is meaning, and here there is a genuine dispute. The traditional reading is a cleansing: a protest against commercial abuse in the court of the Gentiles, corruption in the exchange rates, and the exclusion of foreigners from the one court open to them, which is why the Isaiah quotation ends with the words 'for all the nations'. E. P. Sanders argued instead that the action symbolised destruction rather than reform. His case is that money-changing and the sale of sacrificial animals were necessary services, not abuses, and that the Jeremiah phrase is lifted from a sermon whose whole point was that the temple would be destroyed. On that reading the overturned tables are a prophetic sign-act announcing the end of the present order, which fits what Jesus is made to say in Mark 13 and fits the charge brought at the trial in Mark 14:58 about destroying this temple. Others read it primarily as a messianic claim to authority over the house. The readings are not wholly exclusive, and a student should be able to argue each.

John places this episode at the start of his Gospel, in chapter 2, not at the end. Three explanations circulate: that it happened twice, that John moved it forward for theological reasons because his Gospel is built around a different arrangement of feasts, or that the synoptics moved it back. The second is the majority view among critical scholars; the first has serious defenders who point out that John's version has its own details and its own saying attached. Nothing in the rest of the week depends on settling it.

Whatever it meant, it had consequences. Mark 11:18 says the chief priests and the scribes heard it and looked for a way to kill him, and that is the group with both the motive and the access. Within four days he is dead.

The synoptics could not be plainer. Mark 14:12 sets the preparations on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb was to be sacrificed; the disciples go and prepare the Passover; and in Luke 22:15 Jesus says he has eagerly desired to eat this Passover with them before his suffering. Then during the meal come the words over bread and cup, which Paul had already put in writing in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, some years before any Gospel we have.

John tells it differently, and the difference is consistent across several verses rather than resting on one. John 13:1 introduces the meal as just before the Passover Feast. John 13:29 has the disciples suppose Judas is going out to buy what is needed for the feast, which makes little sense if the feast had begun. John 18:28 has the accusers refusing to enter the Praetorium, Pilate's residence, to avoid being defiled and unable to eat the Passover, on the morning after the meal. John 19:14 dates the sentencing to the day of Preparation for the Passover. And John 19:31 calls the coming Sabbath a High Sabbath. Read straightforwardly, John has Jesus dying at the hour the lambs were being killed.

Here are the main solutions, each with its cost. First, that John has shifted the date deliberately for theological reasons. His Gospel opens with the Baptist calling Jesus the Lamb of God, and closes the crucifixion with the note in 19:36 that not one of his bones would be broken, which is the rule for the Passover lamb. On this reading John is telling the truth about who Jesus is at the price of a day's precision, and he expected readers to notice. The cost is that it concedes a historical inaccuracy in one of the four accounts, which for some readers is a serious cost and for others is simply what ancient writing is like. Second, the reverse: that John has the chronology right and the synoptics have assimilated a farewell meal to the Passover because that is what the church's own meal had become. Supporters note that the accounts of the meal in Mark and Paul contain none of the distinctive Passover elements, no lamb, no bitter herbs, no recital, and that a trial and execution on the festival day itself is hard to credit. The cost is that it requires three Gospels to have got the same thing wrong in the same direction.

Third, that two calendars were in play. Annie Jaubert argued in 1957 that Jesus followed the solar calendar known from Jubilees and the Qumran texts, which would place his Passover on a Tuesday evening and give room for the crowded sequence of hearings. The proposal is ingenious and was taken seriously, and it has largely not persuaded, mainly because the resulting multi-day timetable is not what any Gospel describes. A weaker version, that Galileans and Judeans, or Pharisees and Sadducees, reckoned the day of slaughter differently, has some attraction but very thin evidence. Fourth, harmonisation through the vocabulary. Paraskeue is the ordinary Greek word for Friday, and Mark 15:42 glosses it as the day before the Sabbath, so John 19:14 may mean the Friday of Passover week rather than the day before the Passover meal. Pascha can stretch to cover the whole festival and the offerings eaten during it, so John 18:28 may refer to the festival meals still ahead rather than the Passover meal itself. On this reading there is no discrepancy, only two idioms. The cost is that it has to carry all of John's notices at once, and John 13:1 and 13:29 are harder for it than 18:28 and 19:14.

Where does that leave a teacher? Say this: both traditions agree that Jesus was executed on a Friday, in Jerusalem, under Pontius Pilate, at Passover, and was buried before the Sabbath. The disagreement concerns one day, and it is genuinely unresolved. The majority of critical scholarship judges John's dating to be theologically shaped; a substantial body of careful work defends the harmonisation on the vocabulary; and the Jaubert solution remains a minority option. Anyone who tells your students the matter is closed, in either direction, has not read the other side.

Mark's garden scene is one of the least flattering passages in the New Testament, and it is in the earliest Gospel. Jesus is deeply troubled and distressed, says his soul is consumed with sorrow to the point of death, falls on the ground, and prays that the hour would pass from him. The three disciples he brings with him fall asleep, three times.

The prayer keeps the Aramaic word Abba in the Greek text, as Paul also does twice, in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6. The retention of the original word in Greek-speaking churches is a small but real indication that this address was remembered as characteristic. The older claim that Abba was childish language equivalent to daddy has been largely abandoned by specialists; it is an ordinary intimate family address, and the significant thing is the intimacy of it in prayer rather than any supposed baby talk.

Luke 22:43-44, the angel strengthening him and the sweat like drops of blood, carries a textual question a student should know about. The verses are missing from several of the earliest and best manuscripts, including the papyrus known as P75 and Codex Vaticanus, and present in many others. The BSB prints them in the ordinary text, with no brackets, and puts a footnote at the end of verse 44 that reads 'Some manuscripts do not include verses 43 and 44.' So a student reading the BSB sees the verses as plain scripture and has to read the footnote to learn that the question exists. A reader who weighs the manuscript evidence heavily may judge the verses a later addition; a reader who weighs their early attestation, their wide spread among other manuscripts and their wording may judge them original. The page does not decide that, and the lesson should not either. Editors are divided on whether Luke wrote them or whether they are an early and treasured addition. Say so from the front rather than being asked about it.

The arrest party comes from the chief priests, the scribes and the elders. Mark reports a disciple cutting off an ear, and then, in 14:51-52, a young man who was following, wearing a linen cloth around his body, whom they catch hold of, and who pulls free of the cloth and runs away naked. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why that detail is in the Gospel, which is a reasonable argument that it was in the tradition Mark received. Then a sentence that costs the movement more than any other in the chapter: everyone deserted him and fled.

The Jewish proceedings are reported differently by each writer. Mark has a night session before the whole council, with false witnesses, the high priest's question, the answer, the charge of blasphemy, and then a further consultation in the morning. Matthew follows Mark. Luke has only the morning session. John has no council trial at all: a hearing before Annas, a transfer to Caiaphas reported in a single verse, and then Pilate. The regularity of a night trial is often challenged by appeal to the Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin, which forbids capital trials at night and requires a conviction to wait until the following day. That appeal has to be made carefully. The Mishnah was compiled around AD 200, it reflects rabbinic ideals after the temple had gone, and the court that met in the early thirties was run by a Sadducean priestly aristocracy who did not share those rules or that tradition. The Mishnah may describe a system that never operated in this form. It is legitimate to argue from it that Mark's scene looks irregular; it is not legitimate to treat it as a legal code in force at the time.

Pilate presents a genuine historical tension. In all four Gospels he is reluctant, pressed into the execution against his own judgment. In Philo's Embassy to Gaius he is described as inflexible and merciless, with a record of executions without trial, and Josephus records two incidents in which he provoked the population, one of which ended with Pilate backing down. Two explanations are offered and both are reasonable: that the Gospel writers, working under Roman rule and wanting to distinguish the movement from rebellion, shifted the weight of responsibility; or that Pilate had by this point been rebuked for earlier provocations and had learned caution. That second explanation is sometimes sharpened by appeal to the fall of Pilate's patron Sejanus in AD 31, which would have left him exposed; note that this version of the argument only works if the crucifixion fell in AD 33 rather than AD 30, and the two dates are both live candidates. Present both explanations, and be clear which of them depends on which date.

The physical facts of crucifixion should be stated once, without lingering and without euphemism. Rome used it on slaves, rebels and provincials, and on almost no Roman citizens; Cicero called it the most cruel and disgusting penalty and said the very word should be kept away from a citizen's thoughts. It killed slowly, in public, by exhaustion and asphyxiation, and it was designed to humiliate as much as to kill. Mark gives the sequence in hours, with the crucifixion at the third hour and darkness from the sixth to the ninth. John 19:14 puts the sentencing at about the sixth hour, which is a second timing disagreement, smaller than the calendar one and usually explained by different conventions for reckoning or by the approximate force of about.

Two details carry real historical weight. The first is the notice of the charge fixed to the cross: the King of the Jews. Nobody in the early church would have invented a Roman political charge as the official reason for the execution, and it is the single clearest indication of how Rome understood the case. The second is archaeological. In 1968 an ossuary was found at Giv'at ha-Mivtar in Jerusalem containing the bones of a man named Yehohanan, with an iron nail still through the heel bone. It is the only physical evidence of a crucifixion victim from the region that has been widely accepted, although the original reading of the bones has been challenged since, and it shows something the historical arguments about the burial will need in the next lesson: a crucified man could be taken down and laid in a family tomb.

Mark ends the crucifixion with a quotation and a torn curtain. The cry from the cross, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani, is Psalm 22:1 in Aramaic, and the Gospel does not explain it, soften it or answer it. Peter had called him the Christ back in 8:29, but the title Son of God had until this point come only from the narrator in 1:1 (where the BSB prints the words and footnotes that some critical editions omit them), from the voice out of heaven, and from the demons. The first human being in Mark's whole Gospel to declare him Son of God, in 15:39 (the Greek has no article, and some read 'a son of God'), is the Roman centurion who has just watched him die.