Against Attempts to Find a Precise Date for Jesus’s Crucifixion
(avg. read time: 5–10 mins.)
I have previously reviewed data about the time of Jesus’s birth and early Christian attempts to determine this date, so it is only natural to address the chronological issues on the other end of his life. Over the years, many scholars have claimed that it is possible to know the precise date on which Jesus was crucified. And yet, these dates are contradictory, usually being placed in 30 or 33 CE. Those years are chosen because, supposedly, the Passover fell on Friday in those years and not in the other possible years of Jesus’s crucifixion. I say “supposedly” because, for reasons I will explain later, the attempts to date Jesus’s crucifixion with precision, much less with precision in these specific years, face insurmountable obstacles based on what we know from our sources and, more importantly, what we do not know from our sources.
First, let us consider the proposed options for the “precise date” for Jesus’s crucifixion. On the one hand, many scholars insist that the date is April 7 (construed as being Nisan 14) in 30 CE.1 This date is reached by a combination of a popular reading of Johannine chronology as claiming that Jesus died during the day of Nisan 14, the supposition that this must have happened between 29 and 34 CE (given both the reference to the fifteenth year of Tiberius in Luke 3:1 and the demands of Pauline chronology), and the belief that the only years in which Nisan 14, being a full moon, fell on a Friday were 30 and 33 according to astronomical calculations and older calendrical tables (such as Parker and Dubberstein’s work, which I have interacted with previously).2 Since 30 appears better aligned with Luke 3:1 (provided that one takes this year as being 28), many scholars who insist that we can know the precise date advocate for a date in 30, which they equate to the full moon on April 7.
The other “precise date” is April 3 (construed as being Nisan 15) in 33 CE.3 This proposal proceeds on the same bases as the previous argument, opting instead for 33 because the fifteenth year of Tiberius in Luke 3:1 is construed as 29, and the subsequent Passovers in John are understood as adding three years (2:13; 6:4; 11:55). Although the three Passovers do not get us to 33 if we assume the first Passover was in the year after the baptism (30), it is thought that the demands of Jesus’s crucifixion being on a Passover on a Friday are enough to suggest that 33 is the better option. Thus, an extra Passover is assumed somewhere in this chronology (perhaps at John 5:1).
I am putting off further chronological deep dives for work that is at least presented for publication, wherein I would like to take into account the various chronologies of Jesus’s life over the history of the Church. But for now, based on work I have already done, I think the most natural reading of the relevant texts, disregarding astronomical evidence as some precise indicator (as we should for reasons I will outline later), is that Jesus died in 31 or 32. Again, I have not taken all the different factors into account with this argument, but there is good reason to choose one of these years. As I noted in parts 10 and 11 of my series on when Jesus was born, Luke 3:1 and John 2:20 go well together based on information we have from other texts, particularly if Jesus comes to John the Baptist sometime before the turning of the Julian calendar to the next year, so that his baptism was in 28 or 29 and the Passover in John 2 is the next Passover. After all, John 2:20 independently indicates that this Passover is in Nisan of 29 or Nisan of 30. The addition of the two other Passovers mentioned after that would bring us to the Passover of 31 or 32. The only reason these years are ever ruled out and some shortening or lengthening of one of our chronological anchors takes place is because it is said that Passover could not have been on Friday in these years.
Note that in the following I am not even arguing against these attempts at precision on the basis of the differences between the Synoptics and John in describing Jesus’s relation to the Passover. In the end, even on the typical readings that the Synoptics say one thing and John quite another, the difference is not whether Jesus was crucified on a Friday (cf. John 19:14, 31; 19:42–20:1), but whether or not that Friday he was crucified on was Passover per se. There are many issues wrapped into this that should be dealt with separately and I am not yet willing to do such a deep dive project. Instead, I will recommend Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Last Supper for further review. But regardless of the solution to the issues raised by the Synoptic and Johannine accounts, they are not actually relevant to the question of chronology here, because they can provide us no more precision in addressing the question of dating one way or another.
Although I have used Parker and Dubberstein’s work before, it was with the awareness that their accounts were flawed in converting Babylonian chronology to Judean calendars. One significant flaw is that they do not account for Sabbatical years in using intercalary years where a thirteenth month would be added, though the tradition of not making Sabbatical years intercalary is likely from before the time of the rabbinic texts. In the period from Tishri 40 BCE–Tishri 70 CE, there were 16 Sabbatical years (the first in 37/36 BCE and the last in 69/70 BCE), but in Parker and Dubberstein’s calculations covering this period, they intercalate on five Sabbatical years in Tishri 37–Tishri 36 BCE, Tishri 23–Tishri 22 BCE, Tishri 13–Tishri 14 CE, Tishri 27–Tishri 28 CE, and Tishri 62–Tishri 63 CE.4 As such, their whole calendar surrounding this period is thrown off.
Astronomical calculations are also not helpful not only because there is up to a two-day margin of error in determining when a new month begins with a new moon, as these were based on observation. We also do not know when the years were intercalated or precisely how often. I will reiterate what I have written elsewhere on this subject.
Jews had local variations and different ways of determining the proper time of the Passover, apart from the standardized rabbinic model and the nineteen-year cycle utilized today.5 Aristobulus of Alexandria was thought to have observed the “rule of the equinox,” in which Passover always fell after the vernal equinox, and this rule would be influential even in later Christian texts.6 Later Jews in Alexandria had their own independent means of designating a date for Passover through astronomy, of which Alexandria was a bastion.7 Antiochene Jews (or likely Antiochene) had their own timetable mentioned in a document drafted by Eastern bishops in the event of the contentious Council of Sardica (343). The bishops had drafted a list of thirty dates for the Paschal full moon from 328–357, but they also produced an accompanying list of dates for the Jewish Passover from 328–343 (as, apparently, they did not wish to attempt to predict the dates when Jews would observe it in the future), wherein the dates range from March 2 to March 30.8 Thus, they seem to have observed a “rule of March,” in which Passover was always observed in the Julian March.9 Josephus writes of a letter announcing the death of Tiberius (March 16, 37 CE) coming during a feast, which likely would have arrived in Judea in late April (Ant. 18.122–124).
The rabbis themselves lacked a precise calendar until sometime in the fourth century. The lunar calendar needed an intercalated thirteenth month every so often to be aligned with the solar calendar, but the rabbis initially decided on whether or not to intercalate by paying attention to three signs, any one of which could be used as a reason to intercalate a month: the premature state of crops, the undeveloped state of fruit, and the lateness of the equinox (t. Sanh. 2.2–3). What qualifies as the “lateness of the equinox”? It must be sixteen days or more later in the month (2.7). The Tosefta further indicates that the month could not properly be intercalated if the pigeons or lambs born in spring were unseasonably late, but that rabbis could still use this reasoning as a supporting basis for their decision (2.4). Intercalations had to be done with a full, proper month and could not be done a year in advance (2.8). In fact, decisions were typically made in Adar, the month before Nisan (2.13), although it was technically allowed any time after Rosh Hashanah and before Nisan, and thus at any point in the last six months of the year (2.7; b. Roš Haš. 7a; b. Sanh. 12a). The Tosefta also expounded on a certain set of instructions in 2.12 by saying that the month could be intercalated due to difficulties of travel (e.g., roads and bridges being damaged), ovens being unfit for roasting the Passover offering, or Diaspora Jews on the road who need more time to get to Jerusalem (but not in the case that they have not left their houses; b. Sanh. 11a). In both sources, the presumption was that decisions on intercalations came from Judea (t. Sanh. 2.13; b. Sanh. 11b).10
Given that these are rabbinic writings and not first-century ones, why should we think that any of these applied in first-century Judea? One, amidst all the citations of second-century rabbis, we have reference to a letter (t. Sanh. 2.6) by one Rabbi Gamaliel containing the general signs that rabbis operated by, including that the pigeons (alternatively translated as “turtledoves” here and in the biblical texts) were still tender, the lambs were too thin, and the crops were not yet mature. This could be a reference to Gamaliel I (the teacher of Saul of Tarsus) or Gamaliel II. Both were first-century rabbis, but the former may have been intended, as the text references him and the elders sitting on the steps of the Temple Mount. Of course, it is possible that the tradition mixed up which Gamaliel it was, but this letter would still be from the first century in any case. By contrast, the attention to the equinox was first emphasized by one Rabbi Shimeon ben Gamaliel. This was more likely Shimeon ben Gamaliel II, since he was known for his Greek learning and his observation of the skies, while the first Shimeon was a revolutionary in the time of the First Jewish War with Rome. Two, the reference to the pigeons/turtledoves as relevant for the dating of the Passover is unlikely to have been invented after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. While lambs would still be slaughtered for Passover thereafter, pigeons/turtledoves would no longer be used for purification offerings after the temple was destroyed. Therefore, we have some significant indications that at least some of these directives for when to add the intercalated month go back to before the destruction of the second temple.
With all of these points and factors of imprecision noted in terms of observation of when months began, and thus of when the fourteenth or fifteenth moon would be reckoned, as well as of what years had intercalated months and the imprecise bases on which decisions of intercalation were made, we have some rather severe obstacles to overcome that astronomic calculation cannot eliminate. There is enough margin of error around all of these factors that we can never be precise on the calendar date. All that we can say with reasonable confidence is that he died on a Friday in proximity to a full moon in March or April, most likely in 31 or 32 CE.
James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 312; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 402; Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Jesus and Paul: Parallel Lives (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2007), 53; Ben Witherington III, New Testament History: A Narrative Account (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 134. For a more cautious assertion of this date with a review of older scholarship, see Josef Binzler, The Trial of Jesus (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1959), 72–80.
Richard A. Parker and Waldo H. Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.–A.D. 75, Brown University Studies 19 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1956).
Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible, rev. ed. (Hendrickson, MA: Peabody, 1998), 353–69; Harold Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977), 65–114; Colin J. Humphreys and W. Graeme Waddington, “The Date of the Crucifixion,” JASA 37 (1985): 2–10 (available at https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1985/JASA3-85Humphreys.html). For popular sources, see https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/april-3-ad-33; https://www.ncregister.com/blog/7-clues-tell-us-precisely-when-jesus-died-the-year-month-day-and-hour-revealed.
Parker and Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology, 44–47.
Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar Second Century BCE—Tenth Century CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2–21, 28–46, 50–62, 75–79, 85–97, 132–54, 155–210.
Ibid., 50–53.
Ibid., 78–79, 119.
Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 185.
Stern, Calendar, 75–78. On textual problems with this list, see ibid., 126–29.
For more on rabbinic reckoning, see Roger T. Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 282–89.