{"id":10270,"date":"2014-03-19T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T10:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog-journals.internal\/?p=10270"},"modified":"2014-03-19T10:17:49","modified_gmt":"2014-03-19T10:17:49","slug":"when-did-jesus-die-memory-and-the-religious-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2014\/03\/19\/when-did-jesus-die-memory-and-the-religious-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"When did Jesus die? Memory and the Religious Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In this blogpost, Helen Bond discusses her article \u2018Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination\u2019<\/a>, which was published in<\/strong> New Testament Studies <\/i><\/a>at the end of last year (59\/4)<\/strong>.<\/strong> <\/i><\/p>\n

When it comes to the death of Jesus, the difference in chronology between John\u2019s Gospel and the Synoptic tradition is well known. While both maintain that Jesus died on a Friday, in John\u2019s gospel that Friday is the Day of Preparation, while in the Synoptics it is Passover itself. Scholars have come up with a number of ingenious ways to resolve this discrepancy (largely focusing on calendrical considerations), but in the end the dominant scholarly view is that we simply have to choose one over the other. So either Mark is correct and John has changed things for theological reasons, or vice versa.<\/p>\n

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, scholars have tended to opt for John\u2019s account here. Despite its obvious theology (Jesus as the new paschal lamb), the Fourth Gospel presents a much more coherent narrative which avoids the difficulties of Mark\u2019s arrest on the feast day and the unpleasantness of his Jewish kangaroo court. It is John\u2019s dating, along with astronomical considerations, which gives the commonly accepted date of Jesus\u2019 crucifixion \u2013 7 April 30 CE.<\/p>\n

When we look at Mark\u2019s account, however, it is clear that only two (quite likely Markan) passages specifically note that Jesus died on the day of Passover itself \u2013 14.1 and 14.12-16. Curiously, a number of other passages tell against this dating: the decision of the chief priests not to arrest Jesus during the feast (14.2), the note that Simon of Cyrene had just come in from the country\/field (15.21), and Joseph of Arimathaea\u2019s shopping expedition (15.42-46). These discrepancies suggest that Mark adapted an older account, situating Jesus\u2019 death on the day of Passover onto a tradition which dated things rather differently.<\/p>\n

Scholars who note the Markan difficulties most often assume that the evangelist\u2019s source exhibited a Johnannine<\/i> chronology, which Mark has altered for his own purposes \u2013 most likely to make theological connections between the Passover seder<\/i> and the Christian Eucharist. But I see no evidence for a Johannine dating \u00a0in the text. In the rest of the article, I draw on studies of individual and collective memory to suggest a rather different historical reality, and a different pattern of Christian reflection on tradition.<\/p>\n

I suggest that we should understand Jesus\u2019 death \u2018at Passover\u2019 in the same way that a modern Christian might talk of the death of a loved one \u2018at Christmas\u2019. The expression might mean that the person died on the 25th<\/sup> December, but it might easily refer to any time within a week or so of the feast. Similarly, Jesus might have died some time prior to the festival, perhaps up to a week beforehand. In the course of time, this death \u2018at Passover\u2019 was relocated to (at least) two differing yet theologically important dates by early Christians. By the 50s, Paul was a witness to what was probably a widespread understanding of Jesus as \u2018our paschal lamb\u2019 (1Cor 5.7). As the first passion narratives began to be composed, however, this theological understanding had to become more concrete. The tradition known to John placed Jesus\u2019 death at the very moment that the lambs were sacrificed in the Temple, casting him as the new paschal lamb, whose death removed the sins of the world. A different tradition linked Jesus\u2019 last meal to the Passover, so that the Eucharistic commemoration of Jesus\u2019 death now took the place of the Passover meal, and became the symbol of the new covenant between God and his people. This is the interpretation found in Mark and enhanced in the longer version of Luke 22.14-20. Thus, both the Johannine and Markan traditions narratively represent Jesus\u2019 death as profoundly meaningful, but both are based in the end not on any historical reminiscence, but on collective theological symbolic elaborations of the memory that Jesus died \u2018around Passover.\u2019<\/p>\n

The phenomenon of significant dates acting as magnets for historical events is widespread not only in the Hebrew Scriptures, but also in Jewish and early Christian authors. Josephus notes that the Second Temple fell on precisely the same date as the first Temple had fallen to the Babylonians (9th<\/sup> Av; War<\/i> 6.269), and Eusebius went so far as to claim that Jerusalem fell at Passover<\/i>, a note which presumably incorporates his sense of divine retribution on the Jewish people for the death of Jesus (H.E<\/i>. 3.5.5-6). What is important in these dates is not the precise historical point in time, but the location of an event in a theologically resonant schema, in which God is seen to be in control.<\/p>\n

If I am correct in my hypothesis, then we can no longer use John\u2019s Gospel to date Jesus\u2019 death. If neither tradition is historically correct, then it is no longer a question of working out on which year the Day of Preparation fell on a Friday. All we can say with any degree of certainty is that Jesus\u2019 death occurred after the appearance of John the Baptist and before the likely beginnings of Paul\u2019s mission \u2013 that is to say, any time between 29 and 34 CE.<\/p>\n

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In this blogpost, Helen Bond discusses her article \u2018Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination\u2019, which was published in New Testament Studies at the end of last year (59\/4). When it comes to the death of Jesus, the difference in chronology between John\u2019s Gospel and the Synoptic tradition is well known. While […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":10278,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,372],"tags":[746,1071,1062,1061,1072,1063,1067,1059,1060,1064,1065,1069,1068,1066,1070,361,365],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-religious-studies-humanities","tag-bible","tag-collective-memory","tag-crucifixion","tag-easter","tag-good-friday","tag-gospel","tag-helen-bond","tag-jesus","tag-jesus-christ","tag-john","tag-mark","tag-new-testament","tag-new-testament-studies","tag-passion","tag-passover","tag-religious-studies","tag-theology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10270"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}