A contradiction often raised by skeptics, whether Muslims or others, centers on the day
Christ was crucified. The Synoptic Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark and Luke) state that
Christ was crucified on Friday, the day after Passover Eve. John, on the other hand, seems
to imply that Christ was crucified the day before, on Thursday. We have decided to quote
the late Dr. Gleason L. Archer’s entire response from his book, Encyclopedia of
Bible Difficulties, since he does a masterful job of showing that no real
contradiction exists between these accounts.
Was Christ crucified on Thursday or Friday?
The uniform impression conveyed by the synoptic Gospels is that the Crucifixion
took place on Friday of Holy Week. If it were not for John 19:14, the point would never
have come up for debate. But John 19:14 says (according to NASB): "Now it was the day
of preparation [paraskeue] for the Passover; it was about the sixth hour. And he
[Pilate] said to the Jews, ‘Behold, your king!’" The NIV suggests a
somewhat less difficult handling of the apparent discrepancy: "It was the day of
Preparation of Passover Week, about the sixth hour." This latter translation takes
note of two very important matters of usage. First, the word paraskeue had already
by the first century A.D., become a technical term for "Friday," since every
Friday was the day of preparation for Saturday, that is, the Sabbath. In Modern Greek the
word for "Friday" is paraskeue.
Second, the Greek term tou pascha (lit., "of the Passover") is taken
to be equivalent to the Passover Week. This refers to the seven-day Feast of Unleavened
Bread (Heb. massot) that immediately followed the initial slaughtering and eating
of the Passover lamb on the evening of the fourteenth day of the month Abib, which by
Hebrew reckoning would mean the commencement of the fifteenth day, right after sunset. The
week of masso-t, coming right after on the heels of Passover itself (during which
masso-t were actually eaten, along with the lamb, bitter herbs, etc.) very naturally
came to be known as Passover Week (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed.,
12:1041), extending from the fifteenth to the twenty-first of Abib, inclusively. (Arndt
and Gingrich [Greek-English Lexicon, pp. 638-639] state: "This [i.e., Passover]
was followed immediately by the Fast of Unleavened Bread … on the 15th
to the 21st. Popular usage merged the two festivals and treated them as a
unity, as they were for practical purposes.") It was unnecessary to insert a specific
term for "week" (such as sa-bua) for it to be understood as such.
Therefore, that which might be translated literally as "the preparation of the
Passover" must in this context be rendered "Friday of Passover Week."
It turns out, therefore, that John affirms just as clearly as the Synoptics that Christ
was crucified on Friday and that His sacrificial death represented an antitypical
fulfillment of the Passover ordinance itself, which was instituted by God in the days of
the Exodus as a means of making Calvary available by faith to the ancient people of God
even before the coming of Christ.
Note that in 1 Corinthians 5:7 Jesus is referred to as the Passover Lamb for believers:
"Purge out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, just as you were
unleavened. For Christ, our Lamb was sacrificed for us." The statement of E. C.
Hoskyns on John 19:14 is very appropriate here: "The hour of the double sacrifice is
drawing near. It is midday. The Passover lambs are being prepared for sacrifice, and the
Lamb of God is likewise sentenced to death" (The Fourth Gospel [London: Farber
and Farber, 1940], ad. loc.). It simply needs to be pointed out that the lambs referred to
here are not those that were slaughtered and eaten in private homes-a rite Jesus had
already observed with His disciples the night before ("Maundy Thursday")- but
the lambs to be offered on the altar of the Lord on behalf of the whole nation of
Israel. (For the household observance on the evening of the fourteenth of Abib, cf. Exod.
12:6; for the public sacrifice on the altar, cf. Exod. 12:16-17; Lev. 23:4-8; 2 Chron.
30:15-19; 35:11-16. These were all known as Passover sacrifices, since they were presented
during Passover week.)
Thus it turns out that there has been a simple misunderstanding of the phrase paraskeue
tou pascha that has occasioned such perplexity that even Guthrie (New Bible
Commentary, p. 964) deduced an original error, for which he had no solution to offer.
The various ingenious explanations offered by others, that Christ held His personal
Passover a night early, knowing that He would be crucified before the evening of the
fourteenth; that Christ and His movement held to a different calendar, reckoning the
fourteenth to be a day earlier than the calendar of the official Jerusalem priesthood;
or that He was following a revised calendar observed by the Essenes at Qumran-all these
theories are quite improbable and altogether unnecessary. There is no contradiction
whatever between John and the Synoptics as to the day on which Christ died —
it was Friday. (Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties
[Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1982], pp. 375-376)