ALTHOUGH Easter and Passover normally occur close together, they’re a month apart this 12 months. Passover is late — on 22 April — because this 12 months the Jewish lunar calendar has an additional month. Interestingly, every 12 months, there may be a little-known festival one month after Passover: the Second Passover, unconnected with Easter.
This is the Passover for Jews who had been made ritually impure by being involved with a dead body shortly before the pilgrim festival, or who, in precedent days, were on an extended journey when the feast was going down, and so couldn’t be within the temple in Jerusalem at the suitable time.
The biblical amendment to Passover, giving some Jews an additional month by which to have a good time the festival, is written in Numbers 9.6-14. The early-first-century Jewish historian Philo of Alexandria suggests that it was convenient to have one other Passover in Jerusalem for the massive influx of pilgrims from outside Judaea: “One country won’t contain all the nation by reason of its great numbers. . .” (Moses, vol. II).
Nowadays, the Second Passover is used only by Jews who would have been involved with burying the dead shortly before Passover, and are due to this fact temporarily “corpse-contaminated” (because it known as). This 12 months, the festival falls on 22 May.
THE biblical clause for those exempted from the primary Passover owing to being away on an extended journey would seem to have applied to Jews living within the diaspora in the beginning of the Common Era. I actually have suggested (in the most recent variety of the Polish Journal of Biblical Research) that, in keeping with John’s Gospel, Jesus died on the Second Passover. This theory proposes that Jesus became ritually impure after the raising of Lazarus (which, within the Gospels, is the one story by which Jesus raises an individual from the dead near the time of Passover).
In the Bible, the impurity from a dead body lasts for seven days, and requires a ritual of purification on the third and seventh days (Numbers 19.11-22). It is probably going that, as a Jew, Jesus would have undergone some form of formality purification after he brought Lazarus back to life. After raising Lazarus, Jesus separated himself, together with his disciples, within the town of Ephraim, near the wilderness (John 11.54); I suggest that this was because he was corpse-contaminated.
The later-first-century Jewish historian Josephus, in his opus Jewish War, notes that Jews would begin gathering in Jerusalem every week before Passover. My suggestion is that Jesus remained absent during Passover when the Jews were within the temple (John 11.56) because he was still unclean.
A MONTH later, on the Saturday night six days before the Second Passover, Jesus, now purified, arrived at Lazarus’s house in Bethany (John 12.1). He would have travelled after sunset in order not to interrupt the sabbath. The following day, Sunday — day certainly one of the six days before the Second Passover — Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
Reckoning the times from their starting after sundown (the start of the calendrical day within the Jewish calendar), the timeline would seem like this:
MONTH ONE
One week before Passover (John 11.55)/Passover (John 11.56): The worshippers are within the Jerusalem temple; Jesus and his disciples are absent in Ephraim
MONTH TWO
Saturday night, six days before the Second Passover (John 12.1): Jesus arrives at the home of Lazarus in Bethany.
Sunday (Day One): The triumphal entry into Jerusalem
Monday (Day Two), Tuesday (Day Three), Wednesday (Day Four)
Thursday (Day Five): Meal begins
Friday (Day Six): Meal ends. Day of preparation. Jesus dies. Second Passover/ sabbath
Saturday/Sabbath (Day Seven)
Sunday: Resurrection
THIS theory shouldn’t be as far-fetched as it’d appear. There could be no reason for the second set of Passover pilgrims to feel that they’d missed the principal Passover event in Jerusalem. Having a separate Passover for people unable to attend the primary Passover within the temple for religious or practical reasons was common practice.
The scholar Michael Daise notes that the Second Passover “enjoyed great currency” in the primary century, and will have “readily fallen inside the purview of the Fourth Evangelist”.
The earliest known use of the festival’s name, the “Second Passover”, occurs within the Dead Sea Scrolls, within the lists of the so-called “calendars of the priestly courses”: timetables, written in Hebrew, for the weekly rota of service of priestly families on the Jerusalem temple.
The calendars, from Qumran — the archaeological site where a sectarian Jewish community once lived, surrounded by caves where the scrolls were discovered — have been dated to the late first century BC and the early first century AD. The papyrus manuscripts, nonetheless, weren’t officially published until 2001; so generations of New Testament scholars didn’t have the advantage of knowing that the “Second Passover” was listed in Jewish sectarian documents through the time of Jesus.
IN THE Synoptic Gospels, the day after the Last Supper is the day of the crucifixion and likewise the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The Last Supper is considered the Passover meal. In John’s Gospel, Jesus died on the “day of preparation”, which is before sundown on the day of an unnamed solemn assembly that takes place within the evening.
Since, within the Bible, the Second Passover is known as Passover, without the Feast of Unleavened Bread, this might well be the “solemn assembly” — a reputation to distinguish it from Passover — that coincided with the sabbath on the day that Jesus died.
Curiously, the Feast of Unleavened Bread shouldn’t be mentioned in any respect in John’s Gospel, although it is rather necessary in the opposite Gospels. The final meal in John’s Gospel shouldn’t be Passover.
Instead of containing discrepancies, the Fourth Gospel offers a dramatic twist: Jesus becomes the Passover lamb for the Second Passover. The references forbidding the breaking of a bone of the Passover lamb, and never leaving its stays until the morning, are within the biblical passage concerned with the Second Passover.
Not only does the Fourth Gospel possibly preserve a festival that was widely used through the time of Jesus, however it might also have given the now almost forgotten day an intriguing early Christian story.
Helen R. Jacobus is an honorary Research Fellow on the Centre for Biblical Studies, on the University of Manchester. “The Gospel of John and the Second Passover” is published within the Polish Journal of Biblical Research, volume 22.
