Lecture 16: The Last Week, the Day of the Cross, and the Roman World of the Epistles

The lecture, section by section

1. The weight of the last week

   The gospels bend toward the final week. Mark has been called a passion narrative with a long introduction, nearly six of its sixteen chapters given to it; Matthew devotes his last three chapters, Luke his last three, John his last four to the last week and what follows. It is not only the climax but the purpose for which Jesus came. Two background questions frame the study: the year of the death, which follows from the fifteenth year of Tiberius plus a three and a half year ministry, so that conservative advocates of the Friday crucifixion argue for either AD 30 or AD 33; and, before the year can be settled, the day.

2. Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday

   Friday has been the nearly universal conviction of the church since the calendar was fixed, but two evangelical alternatives persist: Scroggie's Wednesday, in his Guide to the Gospels, and Westcott's Thursday, in his classic work on John. Hoehner observes that the whole debate is at root about Matthew 12:40, three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Scroggie takes the phrase as a literal seventy-two hours, which forces a resurrection on Saturday, hours before any appearance, and a Wednesday cross. Westcott needs only parts of three nights and three days, counting back from a pre-dawn Sunday resurrection to a Thursday burial. Whether the idiom, part of a day counts as the day, extends to the fuller phrase cannot be proven from Jewish literature either way; the phrase simply is not discussed there.

3. The third day settles it

   What Jewish literature does make clear is the meaning of the third day, and the New Testament says repeatedly, beginning from Jesus himself in Matthew 16:21, that he would be raised on the third day. In inclusive Jewish reckoning the third day is the day after tomorrow: told on a Friday to return on the third day, a student comes back Sunday. One verse speaks of three days and three nights; multiple verses speak of the third day. Essex is completely convinced of the Friday crucifixion, and the Wednesday theories' twelve-hour gap between a Saturday resurrection and the Sunday appearances tells against them, since the gospels bind the resurrection closely to the dawn discoveries. If he were choosing among the alternatives, he adds, Thursday's argument is stronger than Wednesday's; but he is not choosing.

4. Was the last supper the Passover?

   Luke 22 could hardly be plainer: go prepare the Passover that we may eat it; where is the room where I may eat the Passover; they prepared the Passover; I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, and I shall never eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. The contrary case rests on John 18:28, where the leaders will not enter the praetorium on Friday morning lest they be defiled and unable to eat the Passover, from which Westcott concluded the meal lay ahead and the last supper was not Passover. Two answers: Carson argues that Passover there names the whole feast running into Unleavened Bread, not the lamb itself; and the leaders of Israel were not so punctilious as we imagine, so some looseness of practice is entirely possible. Hoehner's two-calendar theory, Galileans reckoning midnight to midnight and Sadducees sunset to sunset, reads more into the evidence than it holds, as most exegetes have concluded. The New Testament's own testimony stands: Jesus kept the Passover, the lamb slain Thursday, and Paul can say that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed.

5. Essex against the silent day

   The traditional Palm Sunday scheme includes a silent Wednesday with no recorded events. Essex's one avowedly non-traditional conclusion removes it from the other end. John 12:1 says Jesus came to Bethany six days before the Passover; if Passover falls Friday, inclusive counting puts the arrival on Sunday, the supper that evening, and the triumphal entry on Monday. A Saturday arrival founders on the Sabbath day's journey: coming up the two-day road from Jericho, Jesus could not lawfully travel to Bethany before sundown, and the harmonizing explanations, that he waited at the outskirts or moved after dark, strain more than they solve. So his notes run one day later than the harmony until Thursday, with no silent day. He holds it loosely, grants that Dr. Thomas has all of church tradition on his side while he has only, he jokes, the exegesis of John 12, and promises no grade penalty for disagreeing.

6. From Gethsemane to the sealed tomb

   On the harmony's midnight-to-midnight reckoning, the arrest in Gethsemane falls around midnight into Friday, the trials run through the night, and the crucifixion begins about nine in the morning. Darkness covers the land from noon to three, and Jesus yields up his spirit at about three in the afternoon, with burial complete between five and six. The objection that too much must happen between death and burial fails: the soldiers' verification and breaking of the others' legs, Joseph of Arimathea's request, possibly made before the death, the release of the body, and the wrapping without the full spices all fit within two or three hours. On Saturday the leaders obtain a seal and a guard from Pilate, remembering the scoundrel's claim that he would rise on the third day; after the resurrection they buy the soldiers' story that the disciples stole the body.

7. The day of preparation, and the special Sabbath

   John calls the burial day the day of preparation, with the Sabbath at hand. Wednesday and Thursday advocates must make that Sabbath a special one, the feast day itself treated as a Sabbath. The Friday answer is that Judaism knows no such usage: throughout the Old Testament and Jewish literature, Sabbath means the seventh day; feast days on which no work was done were feast days, not technically Sabbaths. The day of preparation is Friday, preparing for the weekly Sabbath, and the burial is complete before full darkness brings the Sabbath in.

8. The ten resurrection appearances

   The notes isolate the ten appearances of the risen Christ. Five fall on the first Sunday itself, all in and around Jerusalem, from the dawn discoveries to the evening in the locked room; appearances six through nine, on the traditional accounting, occur in Galilee across the forty days; the tenth is at Jerusalem for the ascension. A student's sharp question about the harmony's placement of Mark 16 draws out a wrinkle: Mark speaks of the eleven and of a reproach for unbelief, seeming to telescope the first appearance to the ten, Thomas absent, with the second a week later when Thomas is reproached, one more sign, Essex notes, of the peculiarities of Mark's longer ending, about whose originality he has already voiced reservations.

9. Preach the gospel, not the life of Christ

   How should the harmony shape preaching? For Essex, it is a study tool, not a pulpit method: he keeps it open beside every gospel passage to know where the text sits in the flow of Christ's life and whether an apparent parallel is a true one, but in the pulpit he preached Mark and John as Mark and John, almost never importing parallels. Dr. MacArthur, preaching through Luke, does the same, cross-referencing only as needed. The other model is honorable: S. Lewis Johnson preached the events of the life of Christ from a harmony, in the tradition of G. Campbell Morgan's The Crises of the Christ, and Ellisen's book on the parables reads them in their chronological setting with real insight. But the counsel stands: preach the gospel as the gospel, and bring in other accounts only to explain what must be explained.

10. Rome's conquests, and two kinds of provinces

    The epistles address believers across an empire, so the background widens from Judaism to Rome. The Republic, founded in 509 BC, expanded through the wars with Carthage, defeated Antiochus III in 190 BC, annexed Macedonia, destroyed rebellious Corinth in 146 BC as an object lesson, received the province of Asia by bequest in 133 BC, took Syria from the dying Seleucids, and in 63 BC Pompey entered Jerusalem, establishing a client kingship; the province of Galatia was assembled in 25 BC. Octavian and the Senate established the empire in 27 BC. Its provinces divided into two kinds: senatorial provinces, long loyal, garrisoned lightly, governed by proconsuls sent yearly by the Senate, their revenues flowing to the Senate, including Asia with Ephesus, Macedonia with Thessalonica, and Achaia with rebuilt Corinth, where Gallio sat in Acts 18; and imperial provinces on the frontiers, governed by Caesar's legates, home to the legions, their revenues flowing to Caesar personally, which mattered supremely, for the emperor who paid the army from his own purse needed no senate's budget, and whoever controls the army controls the empire. Judea answered through the legate of Syria to Caesar himself. Of the emperors, Augustus appears by name in Luke 2, Tiberius in Luke 3, Claudius in Acts 18; the Caesar of Paul's appeal was Nero, unnamed, and tradition assigns John's exile to Patmos to Domitian.

11. Philosophers, historians, satirists, and papyri

    Roman literature opens the moral world of the letters. Cicero translated the Greek philosophers into Latin and popularized them among the Roman intelligentsia. Seneca, the Stoic advisor whom Nero finally forced to suicide, embodies the era in which philosophy had become ethics, teaching how to live; many admired what Seneca said and practiced none of it. The historians Suetonius and Tacitus, with their snide asides about Christianity as a shameful superstition, prove the faith was known to Rome's elite by the century's end. The satirists, Juvenal, Martial, Ovid, Petronius, are the sitcoms of the age, exposing banquets, immorality, and loose ethics. Essex draws the pastoral point: first-century Gentile believers lived amid rampant immorality, abusive masters, and flaunted vice, and would greet our complaints with, what else is new; and Paul wrote Romans 13 on submission to authorities when the emperor was Nero. Alongside the literature, the papyri recovered in the last century and a quarter, family letters, business documents, gave scholarship its great linguistic discovery: there is no special Holy Spirit Greek; the New Testament is written in koine, the common Greek of the eastern empire.

12. The army, the cities, and the patron's ladder

    Rome's military ran wholly under Caesar: twenty-six legions of six thousand citizen-soldiers, each under a legate, with tribunes over cohorts and centurions over hundreds, the centurion the backbone of the army; auxiliaries of non-citizens who earned citizenship after twenty years of the dirtier work; the nine thousand of the Praetorian Guard as Caesar's personal troops; and a navy that, the pirates long cleared, mostly ferried soldiers. Citizenship could also be bought, as the commander who rescued Paul admits in Acts 22, or granted for service. Socially, the empire was a city empire: wealth, power, and prominence lived in the cities, and when God chose the apostle to the Gentiles he chose a man reared in the free city of Tarsus, at home in city life, though none of the twelve were city men. And the whole society was a ladder of patron-client relationships, from the emperor at the top through every household, even among slaves; everyone was patron to some and client to others, advancement ran on whom you knew and whom you made look good, and the carrot of citizenship kept the ladder loyal. Gentile converts brought those instincts into the church, hearing words like, imitate me as I imitate Christ, with ears trained by patronage.

1. Essex is dogmatic on Friday, open-handed on the silent day, and jokes about both. What does his manner model about distinguishing the convictions worth defending firmly from the conclusions worth holding loosely?

2. The last supper as true Passover means Jesus ate the meal that pointed to himself, hours before becoming the Lamb. How should that shape the way a church comes to the Lord's table?

3. First-century believers lived under Nero, among patrons, satirists, and flaunted vice, and Paul still wrote Romans 13. What does their situation say to Christians who feel their own culture is uniquely hostile?