Aractus Wrote:There are too many coincidences in the story for it to be invented.You don't have one story. You have four separate stories which you have stitched together to appear as one narrative.
You say that the meal Jesus ate with his disciples was not the passover meal, but in the synoptic gospels Jesus instructs the disciples to make preparations for the Passover. Your only reason for your claim is that John clearly says Jesus was crucified on the Day of Preparation of the Passover. He couldn't have eaten a passover meal if he died the day before passover.
This apparent conflict is a real problem, only if you start from the assumption that God wrote all four accounts and made no mistakes, no self-contradictions. It's no problem at all if we make the perfectly sensible assumption that we have different accounts here by human authors who can disagree about details and make mistakes. Matthew/Mark/Luke say that Jesus was crucified on the day of Passover. The Jewish day begins at sundown, so it is the day following the Passover meal. John says that Jesus was crucified on the Day of Preparation. So what?
Besides which, you cannot by any means reconcile the time of day in the different accounts. Mark says that Jesus was crucified at the third hour (about 9 am) and John says it was at the sixth hour (about 12 noon).
There is a pretty obvious theological reason why John differs from the other three. In his gospel John the Baptist identifies Jesus as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." So John sees the death of Jesus as happening just at the time the paschal lambs would be sacrificed on the Day of Preparation.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
