(February 19, 2015 at 10:59 pm)watchamadoodle Wrote: This question is bugging me, and maybe somebody here can answer: Is there any significance to the date of the crucifixion? If I was a gnostic Jew inventing a biography of Jesus, I might set the date of the crucifixion as a fulfillment to some numerical master plan. Maybe the crucifixion is a magic number of years before the destruction of the 2nd temple? Maybe something else?
There are a couple reasons why it happened at Passover. One is historical, the other mythological.
The first is that unlike today, Passover involved a sacrifice which could only be made in the temple at Jerusalem, and so Jews converged on Jerusalem over Passover. The holiday celebrated the Hebrew escape from Egypt (whether true or fictional) and the Hebrews were currently ruled by the Romans, a symbolic point lost on neither the Romans nor the Jews. Given the crowds plus the symbolism, the day was a flashpoint for civil unrest. Consequently there were many Roman soldiers in the Jerusalem every Passover and the Roman governor was likely to be close by. There was an incident not many years before Jesus' crucifixion where a Roman soldier mooned the crowd and started a riot.
So while he'd been preaching in the hinterland, Jesus had both a political and a religious reason to be in Jerusalem over the Passover weekend. And the Romans had good reason to be touchy about people who could raise crowds, caused unrest in the temple, etc.
The second reason is mythological, or as Dritch says, because of the sacrifice of the lamb and the symbolism associated with that. However, there was no current Jewish tradition of a messiah or king who sacrificed himself. To the extent the Jews expected a messiah, they expected a warrior king (again one of the reasons for unrest in Jerusalem). Paul says that the crucifixion itself was the major stumbling block for the Jews in accepting Jesus as the messiah. But surrounding peoples did have myths about sacrificed gods. So any significance having to do with self sacrifice is a latter add-on probably by gentiles.
It's interesting that in the earliest of the gospels Jesus is crucified after the passover meal (Mark: 14-15) but in John, the latest gospel and most gentile oriented (and anti-Jewish) of the gospels, Jesus is crucified after noon on the day before the passover meal, just as if he was the sacrificial lamb (John: 18-19). I don't think that that change is coincidental. It has everything to do with symbolism.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.
