4/5/2026 – Below is the transcript of Goodacre’s Short on YouTube here. Below the transcript is a Claude.ai response to a prompt offering the transcript and asking for more insight particularly regarding the different starts of the day of the Jewish calendar and the Roman calendar.
Hello, my name is Mark Goodacre. I’m recording from home at the moment on Good Friday. I was in class today and because it was Good Friday, the bells of Duke Chapel rang at midday.
And midday is a really key point in the Synoptic and Johannine narrative. In the Synoptics, it’s the moment when darkness came over the earth in John’s gospel, it’s when Jesus is crucified. But that’s not the most interesting conflict between the Synoptics and John.
Probably the biggest conflict is, what day was it? It’s clear that in both the Synoptics and John, this is happening on a Friday, i.e. the day before the Sabbath, because they make a big deal about the Sabbath being the next day. But it does seem to be the case that in the Synoptic gospels, Jesus is crucified on Passover itself, whereas in John’s gospel, he’s crucified the day before.
Now, lots of people think that the Johannine dating is more plausible, because if Jesus is crucified before Passover, you can understand why all the Jewish actors involved, the high priests and so on, are actually doing this before Passover, because on Passover itself, they want to be with their family celebrating Passover, right? The fun thing though is that in John’s gospel, there’s a theological reason for Jesus to be crucified the day before Passover, which is that the Passover lambs are sacrificed on that day before Passover, and Jesus is the Lamb of God in the fourth gospel, John 1:29, the Lamb of God.
So there’s a theological reason for Jesus to be crucified the day before Passover in John. There’s a theological reason for Jesus to be crucified at Passover in the Synoptics. How do we resolve this? Is it one or the other? Is the Synoptics right, or is John right? I think we’ll never know.
If we’re asking the historical question, there’s actually a very good article by Helen Bond, where she points out that sometimes our memories assimilate to particular key dates. So let’s say the early Christians were celebrating Jesus’s crucifixion at Passover, and they start thinking it happened at Passover. They’re celebrating it the day before Passover, they start thinking it happened on that day. Maybe Jesus was crucified round about that time. Maybe it was a week before, a few days before, who knows.
But what happened is in the telling of the story, the telling of the story assimilates to the memory of the specific ritual celebration. I think that’s an important consideration, and I think at the end of the day, sometimes when you do historical research on Jesus, you actually have to say, I don’t know.
And there I think this is one of these things where you have to say, it may not be Passover. It may not be the day before Passover. It was in that general region.
NOTE TO SELF – Look for posts here about this issue that point out the unlikely actions by the priests hold trials on Passover. Also remember that back then the day began at sundown. Below is a Claude.ai response that is helpful.
CLAUDE.AI Prompt: In the [above transcript], Mark Goodacre discusses the different views on when Jesus was crucified. He does not mention the issue of in that time the day began at sundown. How do he and other critical Bible scholars evaluate all the potential issues, including whether the writers of the Synoptics and John perhaps did not understand when the Jewish day began?
Response: This is a rich and complex area of scholarship. Goodacre’s short talk really only scratches the surface — scholars have identified a whole nest of interrelated problems, and the sunset-to-sunset reckoning of the Jewish day sits right at the heart of many of them. Here is a comprehensive breakdown:
The Issues Goodacre Raises (and What He Leaves Out)
Goodacre correctly identifies the core tension: the Synoptics seem to place the Last Supper on Passover itself (Nisan 15), while John seems to place the crucifixion on the eve of Passover (Nisan 14). He also correctly notes Helen Bond’s important point that liturgical commemoration may have shaped the memory of the event’s timing. But the picture is considerably more complicated than his brief talk suggests.
The Jewish Day Beginning at Sundown
This is probably the single most important calendrical issue Goodacre omits. At the time of Jesus, the Roman calendar day began at about sunrise, while in the Jewish calendar the day began at about sunset. This means every Jewish calendar day overlapped two different Roman calendar days, and every Roman calendar day overlapped two different Jewish calendar days. Bible Interp
This creates immediate interpretive problems. Some scholars have argued that the gospel authors used the Roman calendaring system to date events in Jerusalem that unfolded according to a Jewish calendaring system — and this produces real chronological friction in the texts. Bible Interp
For example, the Passover lamb was to be slaughtered on the afternoon of Nisan 14. The Passover meal was then eaten at the beginning of Nisan 15 — which, by Jewish reckoning, began at sundown that same evening. So what we might naturally call “Thursday evening” was, by Jewish reckoning, already the beginning of Friday (Nisan 15). In Jesus’ time, even among the majority who reckoned the day as sundown to sundown, many Jews regarded the fourteenth of Nisan as the first day of Unleavened Bread — not meaning the first day when leavened bread was forbidden, but the first day of the entire festival. The Moorings. This means what looks like a contradiction between the Synoptics and John may partly dissolve once this reckoning is properly understood.
R. T. France, in his commentary on Matthew, concluded that the apparent conflict between the Synoptics and John is “based on a Western cultural misunderstanding: in the Jewish day, which begins at sunset, the evening is the beginning of the day, not its ending, as it is for us.” Dr. Jim’s Essential Bible Teaching
Did the Gospel Writers Understand the Jewish Calendar?
This is a genuinely contested question among critical scholars, and it cuts in different directions depending on which gospel you are examining.
Mark is widely considered the earliest gospel and was probably written for a Gentile audience. Notably, scholars like A. J. B. Higgins have noted that Mark elsewhere (e.g., 7:3, 11, 34) elucidates Jewish terms for Gentile readers Church Society, which suggests Mark was conscious of his audience’s unfamiliarity with Jewish practice. The question is whether his time references reflect accurate Palestinian Jewish reckoning or a more Hellenized or Roman frame of reference.
John presents a particularly sharp problem. One theory is that John followed the Roman practice of calculating the new day beginning at midnight, rather than the Jewish reckoning — though this Roman practice was used mainly for dating contracts and leases, not everyday life. Wikipedia Most scholars find this explanation strained.
A more serious concern raised by Gary Greenberg and others is that the gospel writers appear to have placed the start of the Sabbath at the next sunrise instead of the upcoming sunset, which is what a writer using a Roman frame of reference would do. Bible Interp If true, this would mean at least some gospel writers were not consistently applying Jewish day-reckoning even when describing Jewish events — a significant finding.
However, most mainstream critical scholars stop short of saying the writers did not understand the Jewish calendar. The more common view is that the writers understood it, but that their accounts were shaped by theological interests, liturgical practice, and the needs of their audiences, in ways that introduced real ambiguity into the chronology.
The Deeper Tangle: Multiple Overlapping Problems
Scholars have identified several distinct but interrelated problems that compound one another:
1. The “Preparation Day” problem. The Greek word paraskeuē (“preparation”) was the standard word for Friday among early Jews and Christians, since Jewish households prepared for the Sabbath every Friday. John clearly means Friday, since he says this paraskeuē was the day before the Sabbath (John 19:31). Biola University The phrase “Preparation of the Passover” in John 19:14 may therefore simply mean “Friday of Passover week,” not “the day before Passover began” — which would bring John into alignment with the Synoptics.
2. The flexible meaning of “Passover.” Because Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were so closely related in time and theme, their titles were sometimes used interchangeably. Luke says “the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called the Passover” (Luke 22:1), referring to the whole festival. Ligonier Ministries John uses the word “Passover” eight times in his gospel, and in every case the Passover festival as a whole seems to be meant rather than the specific Passover meal. Apologetics Press This flexibility creates real interpretive difficulty.
3. The Pharisee/Sadducee calendar split. One proposed solution is that the Pharisees celebrated the Passover on Nisan 13/14 while the Sadducees waited until Nisan 14/15. On this reading, Jesus celebrated the Passover on Thursday night according to the Pharisaic calendar (which is what the Synoptics record), while John was writing with the Sadducean calendar in view when describing the actions of Jesus’ enemies. Evidence Unseen
4. The Essene/Qumran calendar hypothesis. In 1957, Annie Jaubert proposed that Jesus held his Last Supper at Passover time according to the Qumran solar calendar. Colin Humphreys later proposed a “double Passover” scenario in which the Synoptics and John use two distinct lunar calendars — the Synoptics using what Humphreys calls the original pre-Babylonian Jewish lunar calendar, and John using the modified post-Exilic calendar still in official use. Wikipedia This is an ingenious but highly speculative proposal.
5. The time-of-day problem. On top of the day problem, there is also a time problem within the day itself. Mark states the crucifixion was at the third hour (9 a.m.), Luke emphasizes a period of darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour (noon to 3 p.m.), and John places Jesus’ condemnation at about the sixth hour (noon). Liberty University Andreas Köstenberger argues that in the first century, time was often estimated to the closest three-hour mark, and that Mark intended to provide the setting for the three hours of darkness while John seeks to stress the length of the proceedings. Wikipedia
Where Critical Scholarship Lands
Most mainstream critical scholars today — including Goodacre himself — tend toward a position of honest agnosticism, consistent with what he expresses in the talk. There have been many proposals attempting to resolve the two different accounts: some suggest John is ignoring historical accuracy to make Jesus’ death coincide with the slaying of the Passover lambs; others suggest John and the Synoptic authors were using different calendars. Biola University
Scholars like Helen Bond, whom Goodacre cites, push the question in a more historical-critical direction, arguing that the very act of ritually commemorating the crucifixion at Passover likely shaped how the story was told and remembered, making it very difficult to recover a secure historical date beneath the theological layering.
The sunset-to-sunset issue, far from solving the problem, actually reveals how deep it goes: once you account for the fact that Jewish “days” straddle what we would consider two calendar dates, the already-difficult task of harmonizing the gospel accounts becomes even more complex — and, for many critical scholars, ultimately unresolvable with certainty.
