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The Connection between the Crucifixion and the Passover, Part I
The symbols of Christmas have been stored away. In Christian churches we are 
in the poorly defined season of Epiphany, waiting for Lent to appear on the 
horizon. Supermarket advertisements of seafood dishes for the Lenten diet 
announce Lent's arrival, but little attention is paid to it until its last week when 
the climax of the Christian story is relived. Holy Week includes the 
celebrations of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Psychologically, we are 
moving from the cheering crowds of Palm Sunday to the jeering crowds of Good 
Friday. 
In the biblical narrative these final events in Jesus' life are set against 
the background of the Jewish observance of the Passover, which provides a clue 
into how the earliest Christians came to understand the meaning of Jesus' 
death. Whether that placement is a matter of history or is instead an interpretive 
liturgy is the place I want to begin this week in a series of columns that 
will attempt to re-interpret the founding moments in the Christian story. 
Both the Passover and Holy Week celebrate death and the birth of new life and 
in the process, call those observing these rites to new beginnings. Both the 
Passover and the Passion Narrative speak of a deliverance from bondage. 
Passover's bondage was slavery in Egypt. Holy Week's bondage was the 'bondage of 
sin.' Passover related a death and resurrection experience of a nation at the Red 
Sea; Holy Week a death and resurrection experience of an individual. In later 
Christian practice, the waters of baptism, in which we are said to enter 
Christ's death become, when we are raised from those waters in a symbolic 
resurrection, the gateway to eternal life. In this manner the liturgies of Passover, 
Eucharist and Baptism came to be united. From as far back as our written 
Christian sources go the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus were set in the 
context of the Jewish Passover. The Passover was located in the calendar at that 
moment of early spring when, at least in the northern hemisphere, tiny shoots of 
green living things are breaking through the crust of an apparently dead 
'Mother earth.' When the passion narrative of Jesus was linked to Passover this 
time became attached to the story of his death and resurrection. 
In an earlier book, "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?" I assumed the 
historicity of that connection, but further study through the years has challenged this. 
I am now convinced that liturgical pressure and not remembered history forced 
the two events together. I also now believe that it was the difficulty in 
making sense of the death of Jesus that caused the early Christians to identify 
the cross with the Passover and that this in turn provided the theological 
lynchpin needed to understand Jesus' death as being related to salvation. This 
insight has caused me to rearrange in a radical way the time line of the gospels. 
The first step is to separate the cross from the Passover. The second step, 
and perhaps far more important one, is to recognize that the experience of 
resurrection has to be separated from the day of crucifixion not by three days, 
but by perhaps as long as six months to a year. That time frame would put an end 
to that late developing tendency to think that the resurrection has anything 
to do with a resuscitated body. If I can demonstrate the truth of these two 
possibilities then I can show that there is a different way to look at the story 
of the cross and to explore anew the meaning of Easter. 
To open the first timeline it is essential to know exactly what the Bible 
says. Mark, the first written gospel (70-75 C.E.), assumes that the meal on the 
night before the crucifixion is the Passover meal. He portrays Jesus (14:13ff) 
as sending disciples in search of a man who will lead them to a large 
furnished upper room, where they can prepare for the celebration. Mark then chronicles 
in intimate detail the final twenty-four hours in Jesus' earthly life. This 
stylized narrative begins in Mark 14:17 when the evangelist notes that "when it 
was evening," that is around 6:00 pm, the disciples gathered with Jesus for 
the Passover meal. That meal usually lasted for three hours or until 9:00 pm 
when it ended with the singing of a hymn and departure. Mark then describes 
seven other episodes, each of which is another three-hour segment as that fateful 
night unfolded. We are told that Jesus and his disciples go to the Garden of 
Gethsemane, where Peter, James and John could not watch with him one, two or 
three hours. It was now midnight. The act of betrayal is thus set at the darkest 
point of the night. The arrested Jesus is then dragged before the Chief 
priests for a trial that presumably lasted until 3:00 a. m. One quickly doubts the 
historicity of this episode since the Torah forbade Jewish authorities from 
sitting in judgment at night. Liturgy, however, can ignore that historical 
detail. 
In the watch of the night between 3:00 and 6:00 a. m., known as "cockcrow," 
Mark tells us the story of Peter's threefold denial, one for each hour I would 
suggest. At the crowing of the cock it is now 6:00 am and Mark's text tells us 
right on cue (15:1) that "as soon as it was morning" the Council of the Jews 
led Jesus away to Pilate. This new three-hour segment includes the stories of 
Barabbas, the lashing of Jesus and the crown of thorns. Mark then informs us 
(15:25) that it was the "third hour" or 9:00 am when they crucified him. When 
the sixth hour came (15:33) Mark said that darkness covered the earth until the 
ninth hour or 3:00 p.m., when Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, my God, 
why hast thou forsaken me?" and breathed his last. From 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. 
Mark suggests that they have time to remove his body from the cross and to bury 
him fittingly in Joseph's tomb. It is thus obvious that the earliest version of 
the crucifixion story is liturgically shaped to be a twenty-four vigil, 
divided into eight segments and was constructed not to tell believers what actually 
happened but to lead them into a remembrance of who Jesus was and the role he 
played in the drama of their salvation. 
That conclusion is heightened by the realization that almost all of the 
content that Mark uses to develop his story of how Jesus died, comes not from 
eyewitnesses but from two primary sources in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures: Psalm 
22 and Isaiah 53. From Psalm 22, Mark draws the words, "My God, my God, why 
have you forsaken me." He described the crowd at the cross using the words of 
this Psalm (v.7,8). Next he tells the story of Jesus' thirst again using the 
words of this Psalm (v. 14,15). Then he relates the account of the soldiers 
dividing his garments based on this Psalm (v.18). This is clearly not remembered 
history. In Isaiah 53 a portrait is drawn of one called the Servant or the 
Suffering Servant of the Lord. Isaiah says this Servant figure "was numbered with 
the transgressors" (v. 12). From that line, Mark created the story of the two 
thieves crucified one on each side of him. Isaiah says that the Servant figure 
was "with a rich man in his death" (v.9), so Mark created the story of a ruler 
of the Jews, Joseph of Arimathea, who made his new tomb in a garden available 
to receive the body of Jesus. Isaiah notes that the Servant made intercession 
for the transgressors (v. 12), so the stage is set for Luke to expand Mark's 
narrative by supplying the words of Jesus' intercession for the soldiers, 
"Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Mark has noted 
earlier (15:50) that when Jesus was arrested, "all of his disciples forsook 
him and fled," which means that we must embrace the fact that Jesus died alone. 
There were no eyewitnesses to record the details of Jesus' final hours so 
Mark's biblical account cannot be history. It is interpretive material, highly 
stylized and presented in a liturgical format. This clearly acknowledged data 
destabilizes all the claims for the historicity of the final events in Jesus' 
life other than the fact that the Romans executed him. Once we open this door, 
the possibility that the entire story of the Jesus' Passion is interpretive 
material, not historical memory, demands new attention. 
Before moving to additional data supporting this conclusion, I need to note 
that in Mark, Matthew and Luke we do not have three separate accounts of the 
death of Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke have Mark's gospel in front of them as 
they write. While they both edit Mark and add to his narrative here and there, 
they accepted Mark's basic framework and time line. The Last Supper in all three 
of these gospels is the Passover meal, suggesting that the crucifixion 
occurred on the day following the Passover. Matthew adds an earthquake at the time 
of the crucifixion, and puts a temple guard around the tomb. Luke adds the 
story of one of the thieves being penitent (Lk 23:39-43) and gives the women, 
watching from afar, a bigger role. However, these are not independent 
corroborations of the Passover connection. Matthew copied into his gospel about 90% of 
Mark's content while Luke copied about 50%. Mark was the one who put the 
crucifixion and the Passover together. Matthew and Luke accepted that placement. 
Finally, we note that the Fourth Gospel, John, is an independent source. John 
refers to a final meal that is characterized by a foot-washing ceremony but 
it is clearly not the Passover meal. John then is free to connect the 
crucifixion itself with the moment the Paschal Lamb is slaughtered. This meant that for 
John the Passover celebration would have occurred after sundown on the day 
Jesus was crucified. The timing is different but the connection between the 
death of Jesus and the Passover is no less real. In all four Gospels the story of 
the crucifixion is shaped by images from the Passover. 
Does it make any real difference if the Passover observance was not the 
historical context during which the crucifixion occurred? I think it does for it 
breaks open the literalism of the past and drives us to explain how the two came 
to be related. That in turn provides a doorway into the primitive 
understanding of the Christ experience. We have only just begun, so stay tuned. 
– John Shelby Spong


Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Pauline from Oxford, U.K. asks
What is the relationship between Christianity and other religions?
Dear Pauline,
Every religious system the world over begins as a way of enabling people to 
enter the experience of transcendence and meaning. There is something about 
self-conscious human beings that forces us to seek to commune with the source of 
our life. That experience is so deep that I am not sure there is such a thing 
as a nonreligious human being. There are certainly human beings who reject a 
particular religious content but none that fail to raise the ultimate questions 
that create our various religious answers. 
All of this is to say that the great religions of the world have codified 
that eternal quest into systems of thought that now dominate the various regions 
of the world. Christianity is today primarily the religion of the Western 
world and those areas that have been colonized by Western powers. Islam is the 
religion of the Middle East stretching into Africa in the West and Indonesia in 
the East. Hinduism and its child Buddhism dominate the religious landscape of 
the East. 
There are clearly many divisions inside each of these religious traditions. 
There are also minority religious movements like Jews and Jains that are 
scattered throughout the regions of the world and that live under the domination of 
one of the majority traditions. 
Conflict arises in the world of religion when any system decides that it has 
captured the Ultimate Truth of God and therefore all other systems are 
defective or subject to conversion. I honor the pathway that Christianity has offered 
me since it enables me to walk into the wonder of God. This does not mean, 
however, that I am, somehow, incapable of also honoring the pathway that others 
walk. If we believe that God is one then all pathways to God are in the last 
analysis, journeys toward the same goal. I intend to live within my faith 
traditions as deeply as I can. That does not mean that I will ever allow my 
devotion to the God I meet in Christ to be used to denigrate any religious system 
different from my own. I hope that religious maturity might soon lead us all in 
this direction. 
I hope this helps.
– John Shelby Spong

Dick Kroeger
65 Stubbs Bay Road
Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126