What day of the week did Jesus die?

The day before the Sabbath

The Gospels never say “Friday.” They name the day by the one that came after it.

When evening had now come, because it was the Preparation Day, that is, the day before the Sabbath,

The Jewish week ran up to the Sabbath, the seventh day, and each day began at sunset. So the Preparation Day, when everything was made ready for the Sabbath, is what we call Friday. Luke says the same: “It was the day of the Preparation, and the Sabbath was drawing near” (Luke 23:54). That is why the burial was rushed. Joseph of Arimathea had to ask Pilate for the body, wrap it and close the tomb before sundown. The women watched, then “rested according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56) and came back with spices on Sunday morning (Mark 16:1–2).

The hours on the cross

Mark tells the day in three-hour steps, counted from sunrise, the way people then told time.

It was the third hour when they crucified him.

• The third hour, about 9 in the morning: Roman soldiers crucify him between two condemned men.
• The sixth hour, noon: darkness covers the whole land (Mark 15:33).
• The ninth hour, about 3 in the afternoon: he cries out the first line of Psalm 22, and soon after he dies (Mark 15:34–37).

About six hours, then. Crucifixion could take days, and Pilate is surprised to hear that Jesus is already dead (Mark 15:44). Matthew and Luke keep Mark’s darkness from the sixth hour to the ninth (Matthew 27:45; Luke 23:44).

John’s different day

John agrees on the day before the Sabbath, and adds that this Sabbath was a special one (John 19:31). But he places it differently in the festival. In Mark, Matthew and Luke, the Thursday evening supper is the Passover meal (Mark 14:12), so Friday is the first day of the feast. In John, the supper comes a day earlier. On Friday morning the priests stay out of Pilate’s headquarters so that they can still “eat the Passover” (John 18:28), and the sentence falls at noon.

Now it was the Preparation Day of the Passover, at about the sixth hour.

In John, then, Jesus dies on the afternoon when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple, and John quotes the rule for the lamb: “A bone of him will not be broken” (John 19:36; Exodus 12:46). His sixth hour also clashes with Mark’s third. Readers have offered answers for centuries, from different ways of counting hours to copyists’ slips; none settles it. Both traditions agree on Friday.

Which Friday?

Pilate governed Judaea from AD 26 to 36, which sets the window. Within it, astronomers can reconstruct when the Passover moon fell, and the two dates most scholars choose are Friday, April 7, AD 30, and Friday, April 3, AD 33.

Why some say Wednesday

One saying makes some readers doubt the Friday: the Son of Man will be “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). A few groups move the crucifixion to Wednesday or Thursday to make the count work. Most readers answer that people then counted inclusively: part of Friday, all of Saturday and part of Sunday make “the third day,” the phrase the Gospels and Paul use most (Matthew 16:21; 1 Corinthians 15:4). The English name Good Friday keeps an old sense of “good”: holy. Why Christians then met on Sunday is another story: why Easter is on a Sunday.