The Crucifixion
Event · About AD 31
Passion Week
The Crucifixion Wednesday, the 14th · The Preparation · The third hour
Daniel’s Seventy Weeks
Sixty and nine weeks, 446 BC–AD 31 173,880 days, in years of 360 days
The Years
- The Year AD 31
- The Crucifixion in AD 31, by Daniel’s seventy weeks. Ussher: AD 33
- “The fourth PASSEOVER in which CHRIST, our Passeover, was sacrificed”
On Wednesday, the fourteenth day of the first month, “the preparation of the passover” (John 19:14), AD 31, about the 25th of April: He was buried before evening, when the high day began, the first day of unleavened bread (John 19:31; Leviticus 23:6-7). Daniel’s sixty and nine weeks, 173,880 days of 360-day years from the commandment of Nehemiah 2:1 in 446 BC, ended the Sunday before, when He came into Jerusalem as King (Daniel 9:25; Zechariah 9:9), and after them “shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself” (Daniel 9:26). The fourteenth fell on a Wednesday in AD 31 only if that year’s first month was the later of the two spring moons, a month added because the barley was not yet ripe; by the earlier moon it would have been a Tuesday in March, and no record shows which the Jews kept. Ussher puts it in AD 33, on the day before the weekly sabbath, Friday, April 3: he brings Jesus to Pilate “(April 3.)” and has the Pharisees go to Pilate on the sabbath, “The next day (the fourth of April)”. The timeline follows the text’s “three days and three nights” (Matthew 12:40), as Difficult Passages answers it.
Where the year isn’t Ussher’s, the text sets it, and the note says how. Ussher’s years and sentences are from his Annals of the World (1658), quoted as printed.
