3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 1

As I have written about before (and before), this is the time of year when Christians celebrate the brutal killing, burial, and alleged resurrection of their savior god for the sole purpose that this same god could turn around and forgive them for violating his rules in the first place.  Aside from the absurdity of that story and its implications, the narrative itself was bungled in its telling by the authors who wrote it down nearly a century after it supposedly occurred.

[caption id="attachment_1045" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="I love me some boiled sacred cows."][/caption]

Starting today, Friday April 22 and going through Sunday April 24 will be a point by point reminder of the story's events and their bungled timeline.  The problem centers around fixed points of time referenced in the story.  If the authors had simply been more vague in their retelling of what would have by then been nearly century old tale, they wouldn't fall into the traps they do.  As it happens, by being so specific in naming exact days of the week, they manage to make Jesus' prophecy of his burial and resurrection into a bungle.
The story of Easter actually begins earlier in the week than on the day the Jesus character was killed.  According to the Gospels, Jesus and his disciples observed the First Day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, better known as Passover.  The first and last days of this 7 or 8 day observance are considered holidays and holy to the Jewish people.  This establishes a clear and fixed point in time to start measuring.  The first day had technically began sundown the previous day.

That evening, approaching sundown, Jesus and his crew sit down to their Passover feast.  The night proceeds with Jesus having communion with his disciples, telling of his coming betrayal, death, and resurrection, and then he and a couple of his closest disciples leaving the house to go pray.  Jesus spends most of the night praying, commonly known as the Agony in the Garden.  He is then arrested and hauled before the clerical council to answer to the charges of blasphemy.  They find him guilty and, in another moment of fixing the time, they remand him over to the Romans "when the morning came".

[caption id="attachment_1046" align="aligncenter" width="727" caption="Why do NONE of these guys look even vaguely Middle Eastern?"][/caption]

Pontius Pilate then has a morning of dealing with Jesus and finally has him up on the cross that morning, as Luke makes clear Jesus was already crucified by the "sixth hour", or noon.  According to Matthew, he was dead by the "ninth hour", or 3 PM that day.  And what day was it?

Here we get another fixed moment in time.  It was the Preparation Day, the day before the Jewish Sabbath.  This means Friday, and they had to rush to get Jesus off the cross or risk violating the Sabbath, which occurred at sundown.  Thus, let's back up.  If Jesus was killed on a Friday, the means the previous day was the first day of Passover, which ended at sundown that previous night (which is why the Jews waited until after sundown to arrest him).  That makes the first day a Thursday and Jesus killed on a Friday.  Since the only other Sabbaths in the near timeline would be the weekly Sabbath on Saturday and the end of Passover Sabbath over a week later, we can conclude nothing else.  And that's where the trouble starts....

 

[caption id="attachment_1047" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Trouble starts with T and that rhymes with C and that stands for crucifix..."][/caption]