Professor A. Jaubert gives compelling reasons to accept both chronologies – the dates we find in the Synoptics and in John.
Jaubert used the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls to demonstrate that Judaism was not monolithic in its religious observance in the first century. There were different sects and factions—Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots—and one way they differed from one another was in their timing of the feasts. The group that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls followed a solar calendar rather than the lunar calendar kept by the Jerusalem priests. For Jews following the solar calendar, in the year of Jesus’ death Passover would have fallen on a Tuesday, while for the Temple priests it fell on the following Friday. Jaubert noted, further, that the early Church commemorated the Last Supper not on the night before Good Friday but on the Tuesday before. This tradition is preserved in Syriac sources, including the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum (Teaching of the Apostles). Thus the early Christians whose language and culture were closest to Jesus’ own—those who spoke and wrote in Aramaic—could have preserved the memory of a Tuesday Passover.
Jaubert’s proposal solves not only the apparent discrepancy about the date of the Last Supper but also another problem in harmonizing the four Gospels: How could so many events have transpired between the evening meal on Thursday and the execution at midday on Friday? Christians since antiquity have struggled with that question. The Gospels report that Jesus underwent five trials, before five different judges (Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, and the assembled Sanhedrin), in five different places—and all of this took place between the time of his arrest and the execution of his sentence. It’s hard to see how so much could happen in those few hours after midnight. The events, as we find them, fit much more neatly into a Tuesday-to-Friday time frame: the Last Supper on Tuesday, the Jewish trials on Wednesday, the Roman trials on Thursday, and the death sentence and crucifixion on Friday.5 That is, in fact, the sequence that appears in the Didascalia Apostolorum. (Pope Benedict XVI reproposed this chronology, persuasively, in his homily for the April 5, 2007, Mass of the Lord’s Supper.) 66-7
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