John 12:1

Ver. 1. “ Six days before the Passover, Jesus came therefore to Bethany where Lazarus was whom he had raised from the dead. ”

It would seem from the Synoptics that Jesus came directly to Jerusalem from Peraea, passing through Jericho. In order to bring them into agreement with John, it is enough to suppose that Jesus descended from Ephraim into the valley of the Jordan and rejoined before Jericho the great caravan of pilgrims who came from Galilee through Peraea. He thus took, in the reverse way, the same road which Epiphanius afterwards traversed who relates to us “that he went up from Jericho to the plateau with a man who accompanied him across the desert, from Bethel to Ephraim.” In truth, I do not understand why this so simple hypothesis should shock the impartiality of Meyer. He presents as an objection the statement in John 11:54; but the time of silence was now past for Jesus. We know from Luke that already before entering into Jericho Jesus was surrounded by a considerable multitude (John 18:36), that he passed the night at the house of Zacchaeus (John 19:1 ff.), and that the expectation of all was excited in the highest degree (John 19:11; Matthew 20:20 ff.).

The distance from Jericho to Bethany might be passed over in five or six hours. The main part of the caravan continued its journey even to Jerusalem on the same day, while Jesus and His disciples stopped at Bethany. This halt is not mentioned by the Synoptics; there is no reason for calling it in question. Very often one or two of the Synoptics present before us similar vacancies, which can only be filled by the aid of the third. Twice, a case of this kind is presented in the narrative of the following days: Mark 11:11-15 informs us that one night elapsed between the entry on Palm-day and the expulsion of the traders; we should not suppose this interval when reading the accounts of Matthew and Luke. According to Mark 11:12; Mark 11:20, a day and a night passed between the cursing of the fig-tree and the conversation of Jesus with His disciples on the subject, while in reading Matthew one would suppose that this conversation followed the miracle immediately. These apparent contradictions arise from the fact that, in the traditional teaching, the moral and religious importance of the facts by far outweighs their chronological interest. If such is the relation of the Synoptical narratives to each other, in spite of their general parallelism, it is not surprising that this phenomenon reappears, on a still greater scale, in the relation between the Synoptics and the fourth Gospel, which is absolutely independent of the tradition.

The οὖν, therefore, is connected with John 11:55: “ The Passover of the Jews was near. ” The turn of expression πρὸ ἓξ ἡμ. τ. π., six days before..., may be explained by a Latinism (ante diem sextum calendas) in which the preposition is transposed (Baumlein); or perhaps the most natural explanation of this form of expression is the same as that of the construction John 11:18 (where it is applied to local distance). The determination of time (six days) is added, in the genitive, to the word which indicates the starting-point of the reckoning (the Passover); comp. Amos 1:1, LXX: πρὸ δύο ἐτῶν τοῦ σεισμοῦ, two years before the earthquake (Winer, § 61, 5). Jesus knew that He would have need of all this time to make a last and striking impression on the minds of the people of the capital. On what day, according to this expression, are we to place the arrival of Jesus at Bethany? The answers are very different in consequence of the uncertainty in which writers find themselves respecting the following points: 1. Are we, or not, to include either the day of the arrival at Bethany or the first day of the Passover in the six days mentioned? 2. Must the first day of the Passover be fixed, in the language of John, on the 15th, as the first great Sabbatic day of the Paschal week, or already on the 14th, as the day of preparation on which the lamb was sacrificed? Finally, 3. Must Friday (which is certainly the day of the week on which Jesus was put to death) be regarded as the 15th of Nisan of that year (according to the meaning ordinarily attributed to the Synoptics), or as the 14th, the day of the preparation (according to the meaning which most give rightly, as it appears to me to the narrative of John)? It is impossible to pursue in detail the manifold solutions to which these different possibilities give occasion. The summary result is the following: Some (Tholuck, Lange, Wieseler, Hengstenberg, Luthardt, Lichtenstein, Keil) place the arrival of Jesus at Bethany on Friday, a week before the Friday on which Jesus died; others (Meyer, Ewald, Weiss) on Saturday, the Sabbath which preceded the Passion; others (de Wette, Hase, Andreae, etc.) on Sunday, the next day; finally, Hilgenfeld, Bauer, Scholten, Baumlein, on Monday.

Among these possible different suppositions, that which appears to me, at this time, the most probable, is that set forth by Andreae, in the excellent essay entitled: Der Todestag Jesu (in the Beweis des Glaubens, July and Sept., 1870). The sixth of the days mentioned in John 12:1 is Friday, the day of Jesus' death, that is, according to the very clear meaning of the chronology of John (see the detailed treatment of this whole question at the end of chap. 19), the 14th of Nisan, or the day of the preparation of the Passover of that year. It would follow from this that the day of the arrival at Bethany was Sunday, the 9th of Nisan, at evening. Jesus, after having passed Saturday (Sabbath) at Jericho at the house of Zacchaeus, went up on the next day, Sunday, with the caravan from Jericho to Bethany, where he stopped, leaving the others to continue their journey to Jerusalem, and it was on the evening of the same day that the banquet was offered to Him which is about to be related. The next day, Monday, the solemn entrance into Jerusalem took place.

In my first edition, I left out the 14th (Friday, the day of Jesus' death) from the six days, as already included in the Passover feast. In fact, this day plays the principal part in the story of the institution of the Passover in Exodus (chap. 12), and Josephus (Antiq. xii., 15, 1) counts eight feast days, which shows that he includes the 14th. But, on the other hand, we must recognize that there is a difference between the feast of unleavened bread and the feast of the Passover properly so called: if the former necessarily included the 14th, on which the leaven was removed from the Israelitish houses, the latter did not properly begin until the 15th, to end on the 21st, these two days having the Sabbatical character and forming the beginning and ending of the Paschal week. Then another difficulty in this way of counting is, that in starting, in the count of six days, from Thursday the 13th, and in going back from that day, we come to Saturday as the day of the journey from Jericho to Bethany.

Now, it cannot be admitted that Jesus made so long a journey on the Sabbath. Meyer, to escape this consequence, holds that Jesus had passed the night in a place quite near to Bethany, in order that He might be able to reach there the next day without violating the Sabbath ordinance, according to which one could not make a journey on that day of more than twenty minutes. But why, in that case, did He not arrange so as to reach Bethany also on that evening? And, besides, there was no place where one could stop between Jericho and Bethany. I had proposed a somewhat different solution, which seems to me now to be that of Weiss: Jesus had made most of the journey from Jericho to Bethany on Friday, but He arrived only at the earliest hour on Saturday (from six to seven o'clock in the evening); and thus this Saturday was indeed the first of the six days before the feast. The feast was not offered Him until the next day at evening, towards the end of this Sabbath; the next day but one, Sunday, He made His entry into Jerusalem. This combination, however, is far less simple than that which has been proposed by Andreae; and how could the rest of the caravan which was going to Jerusalem have still made their journey from Bethany to Jerusalem without violating the Sabbatic prescription?

According to Hilgenfeld, Baur, etc., who take the 15th as the starting- point for the calculation, and include that day in the six, the arrival at Bethany took place on Monday, the 10th of Nisan. According to some of these interpreters, the evangelist sought by this date to establish a typical relation between the arrival of Jesus and the Jewish custom of setting apart the Paschal lamb on the 10th of Nisan. Such an intention would evidently compromise the historical character of our narrative. But this alleged relation between the arrival of Jesus and the setting apart of the lamb, is not in any way indicated in the narrative; and the idea of this comparison could not have entered the minds of the Greek Christians for whom the author designed his work.