Easter is the most important holiday of the Christian year. It’s more important than any other holy day of obligation; it’s more important than Christmas; it’s even more important than Good Friday (which actually is not a holy day of obligation).
Given how important it is, can we figure out when Easter was—historically?
If you read many contemporary sources, you’ll find two dates commonly proposed for the year in which it occurred: A.D. 30 and A.D. 33.
Can we figure out which one?
We can, and in the process, we’ll also learn the month and the day it occurred on.
But we should be aware of one thing before we begin, which is that there has been a change in the calendar. There were many calendars in the ancient world, and in Jesus’ day, the most direct equivalent of ours was the Julian calendar, which was introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C.
The Julian calendar was quite good, but it didn’t estimate the length of the year as precisely as we can today, and so—over a period of centuries—it started getting progressively out of synch with the earth’s physical year.
By 1582, the Julian calendar was ten days out of synch, and so in that year, Pope Gregory XIII jumped it forward by ten days and introduced a modification to help keep it in synch with the physical year, giving us the Gregorian calendar that we use today.
This creates a problem when talking about dates before 1582. What date should we use for an event? Its Julian date or its Gregorian date?
Since historians work with sources written before the modern calendar was introduced, they go ahead and use the Julian date for events before 1582. Otherwise, they’d have to change all the dates in the sources they use to make calculations, which would create a big, confusing mess.
So for the material I’m about to cover, we’ll be using Julian dates, and then I’ll convert to the Gregorian date at the end.
The general timeframe that we’re looking at is the high priesthood of Caiaphas, under whom Jesus was put to death (Matt. 26:3-4, John 11:49-53). He was in office between A.D. 18 and 36.
But we can get more specific than that, because we also know that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate (Matt. 27:24-26, Mark 15:15, Luke 23:24, John 19:15-16), and Pilate served as the Roman governor of Judaea between A.D. 26 and 36.
That narrows it down to about a decade, but Luke contains a clue that narrows it down further. He tells us that John the Baptist began his ministry “in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar” (3:1). This year is best understood as A.D. 29, and all four Gospels reveal that Jesus began his ministry after John the Baptist did, so that makes 29 the earliest year for Jesus to begin his ministry. We’re now looking in the range between 29 and 36.
All four Gospels reveal that Jesus was crucified on a Friday (Matt. 27:62, Mark 15:42, Luke 23:54, John 19:42) in conjunction with the Jewish holiday of Passover (Matt. 26:2, Mark 14:1, Luke 22:1, John 18:39). So in what years between 29 and 36 did Passover fall on a Friday?
Here are the days of the week and dates when Passover fell in this range:
- Monday, April 18, A.D. 29
- Friday, April 7, A.D. 30
- Tuesday, March 27, A.D. 31
- Monday, April 14, A.D. 32
- Friday, April 3, A.D. 33
- Wednesday, March 24, A.D. 34
- Tuesday, April 12, A.D. 35
- Saturday, March 31, A.D. 36
There are only two Friday Passovers in this period—the one in A.D. 30 and the one in 33, which is why you hear those two years commonly proposed.
But can we decide between them, and if so, how?
The solution is found in the Gospel of John. If all we had were Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we might suppose that Jesus’ ministry lasted only a year. These Gospels mention only one Passover—the final one where Jesus is crucified—though a careful reading reveals hints of at least one other occurring.
However, John is explicit that at least three Passovers happened during Jesus’ ministry. The first is mentioned in 2:13, the second in 6:4, and the third in 11:55.
Since Passover is an annual feast, that means Jesus’ ministry took a minimum of something over two years to complete, and that rules out A.D. 30.
We can thus be confident that the original Good Friday fell on April 3, A.D. 33, which means that the original Easter took place two days later, on Sunday, April 5.
Now we have the date in question, but it’s still on the Julian calendar. What would it be using our calendar?
When historians apply our calendar to events before the Gregorian calendar was introduced, they refer to it as the “proleptic” Gregorian calendar. (Proleptic is a fancy word that means “anticipated”).
Doing the needed conversion, we find that the Julian date of Good Friday—April 3 of 33—becomes the proleptic Gregorian date of April 1 of 33, and the Julian date of Easter—April 5—becomes the proleptic Gregorian date of April 3.
So the devil may have thought he’d gotten rid of Jesus on our April 1, but when Jesus came back on the 3rd, what an April Fool the devil turned out to be!