![]() ![]() ![]() … that great and notable day of the Lord … … It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment … There is no intended implication that the tree decorating was done specifically on Christmas day itself. Today, it would be similar to speaking to a Hindu audience and saying "Christmas, when they decorate evergreen trees" to remind them of when Christians make a big public display of the season. ![]() Mark could be using the phrase " when they killed the passover lamb" to remind the Roman people of what Passover was. Mark was writing to a Roman audience, whose knowledge of Judaism would be limited to the more obvious and blatant activities associated with it.įrom a public perspective, the time of Passover would be known as the time of year when the Jews killed an unusually large number of lambs, all on one day.Įverything else associated with Passover happens indoors, where it wouldn't become general knowledge among the Romans. Others say " when they sacrificed the Passover lamb" or " when they killed the Passover lamb". The expression " the Passover lamb was being sacrificed" is unique to the NASB translation. It would be too much here to go into all the arguments about this controversial issue, but anyone interested might search for "When was Jesus Crucified" where I say a lot more about this. We ned to remmber that John wrote in a Greek-Roman environment long after the fall of Jerusalem. Alfred Edersheim (THe Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah) and other scholars have in my view convincingly shown that John uses Roman time in all the 4 places in the gospel where he specifies a time of day. It also allows for Jesus having celebrated the Passover meal like most other Jews the evening before, Thursday evening.Īnother question is whether the "sixth hour" is by normal everyday and Jewish counting of hours, meaning at noon, or by the Roman counting sometimes used in historical and official records, meaning 6 a.m. This agrees with the fact that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, and in this verse in John, Jesus stands accused in the early morning before Pilate. It is therefore likely that the correct understanding here is that it refers to the Friday within the Passover week. Since Nisan 14 would fall on different weekdays, there would always be a Sabbath somewhere within the Passover week. ![]() Originally, the Passover was only one day, Nisan 14, followed by the 7 days of Unleavened Bread, but we see in the NT that the two had merged, so pascha could refer to both festivals as a unit. It can refer to the Passover lamb slaughtered on Nisan 14, the Passover meal, celebrated after sunset on Nisan 14 (the beginning of Nisan 15) and the weeklong Passover festival. The word pascha has several different senses depending on context. This is probably the background for the suggestion that the Greek paraskeuē could also refer to the eve of the Passover. Hovewer the Jews could talk about the "eve" of the Sabbath as well as the "eve" of a festival. It is to my knowledge never used as the day before a festival. By the time John wrote it had become a fixed expression for Friday, and it is still used in Modern Greek for Friday. It is even explained in Mark 15:42: "it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath"(KJV). It occurs 6 times in the NT, 3 of them in John. The day called paraskeuē is only used in the NT to designate a Friday, the day before the Sabbath. Παρασκευὴ τοῦ πάσχα day of preparation for the Passover (or Friday of Passover Week). There are two ways of understanding the Greek genitive as the BDAG dictionary suggests: A literal translation from Greek is something like: It was Passover's preparation (day). ![]()
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