The American Churchman: Holy Week in America

And welcome to the American Churchman Podcast, where we encourage Christian men to take responsibility. What do Christian men make? They make lots of things. They make culture, they make babies, they make money, but all of the things that we make to glorify God, that's the point of this, and we want to encourage you.

So I'm your host, John Harris, and we, as always, have my co-host here, Matthew Pearson. Hey, Matthew, how you doing?

I'm doing good, John. I'm doing good. Life is busy and crazy, but I'm just more than happy to be here.

We're both flustered, and people could probably tell. I look like Scruffy John with my hat here. I was actually just in line at the post office last minute trying to get the date stamped on my tax returns to make sure that I don't get a penalty.

I shouldn't be this last minute on it, but it just worked out that way. So yeah, what about you? You got stuff going on this week, right?

I do. I was a good boy, and I got my taxes done in a timely fashion. But no, yeah, very, very busy week. We're not quite at the end of the semester we're getting there, though. I got two big papers. I'm not doing too many classes right now, but I got two big papers due beginning of May, and then I have an exam for my Greek exegesis class soon, so I'm sort of trying to balance that.

I remember, John, I was just on here talking about how we didn't have a job, and now I'm working three jobs and doing some, so just balancing all that fun stuff. Easter's coming up, so I'm going to be with my family, my fiancée, her brother.

I'm going to be spending it with them as well, and her parents are going to be coming down to Florida. So it's going to be a crazy, busy week, busy weekend, but I'm really excited for it. All the busyness is just despite the stress and all that.

It's a reminder of God's provision in many areas, and so there's some stress, but I'm thankful for the stress. We can put it that way.

I guess if you're going to be a pastor, you're going to be self-employed technically, and if you don't have someone to do the treasurer that actually goes through and does all your finances and accountant, you end up paying quarterly taxes.

I'm just saying this because my dad's a pastor, and he's done this, and now I'm doing the same thing. I'm paying quarterly taxes. I'm self-employed. It's so complicated. It's like you feel an extra dose of 1776 on days like this.

I'm just kind of like, man, this is ridiculous. I preached last Sunday, and it was Palm Sunday, and so I wove that into the message. I don't know. I've been impressed with the idea lately that life is so temporary.

We only get such a short time. It's a breath, and God wants us to orientate ourselves.

Orient.

I said it like George W. Bush.

Orientate.

No, orient ourselves to the higher things, and Holy Week is a week for that. Now that taxes are out of the way, hopefully, I can do that a little more prudently, but isn't it like that with holidays, though?

Christmas is the same thing. That's the time when we go to church, and we talk about reflecting on these divine truths, and then it's like trying to run here, run there, get ready, make food, but we do need that time.

Hopefully, you can get that time. I know I'm looking forward to having some time myself to reflect. Do you have any traditions in your family? Before we get into this, I'm just kind of curious. I was thinking about that before the show.

My wife and I were talking about it.

What do you do for Easter?

It's a little different than Christmas or even the Fourth of July. You have the eggs and stuff, but that's more of the cultural kind of—that's not the religious side of it. What do Christians, other than the normal liturgical things, I guess—maybe we can get into that a little.

What do they do?

What do you do in your family?

My mother, every year, will make a birthday cake. No, I'm thinking of Christmas now, birthday cake for Jesus. This is why you know my brain is fried. No, we have some fun Easter traditions. My mom, when I was a kid and she told us about the Easter bunny, she would write, it's not here, so we'd go to different places in the house with notes.

Me and my sister would go to find our little Easter basket, and all my family would just come over to our house and celebrate. Someone would make a ham, someone would bring this. I have an uncle that is Cuban, and so him and his wife always bring Cuban food, so a little Tampa thing there.

We have our fun little quirks, and we've kept that up every year, where we just have mainly family get-togethers, going to church in the morning, rest of the day is with family. Nothing particularly unique that I can think of, though, other than just family gathering and stuff like that, but usually go to the Good Friday services.

What's interesting is that this year my church back in Tampa is actually not doing a Good Friday service. They're doing a Maundy Thursday service, which I thought was interesting. I know what Maundy Thursday is, but I was like, oh, giving up the Good Friday service.

Yeah, because I was there this past Sunday, and I'm like, I was looking forward to the Good Friday service because I was going to come home to Tampa on Friday, but I'm like, oh, well, no Good Friday service this year, but a lot of the normal Christian cultural things we do.

Yeah, dress up, right? That's one of the things we've kept, and people who don't normally go to church end up going to church. It's interesting they're doing Maundy Thursday instead of Good Friday, though, because the churches that do Maundy Thursday generally are more high church, liturgical, and they're definitely going to do Good Friday as well, but my mom grew up in that.

She had a Lutheran background, so she did Maundy Thursday. I think each day of Holy Week, there was something, and of course, I'm pretty sure they did Lent. I could be wrong about that. I don't think that's unique to Roman Catholics, though.

Yeah, in an evangelical tradition that I'm part of, Lent is kind of looked down on as like there's a suspicion around it. You must be Catholic if you're doing it or something. I don't know. Actually, I think it's not a bad idea if it's put in the proper frame, but anyway, Dr. Bob has a really important message here.

My church, he says, is roasting 150 pounds of brisket and throwing an egg on Saturday.

That's a lot of brisket.

Yeah.

Where's your church, Dr. Bob? I might want to come.

Yeah, there should be leftovers for us, right?

Oh, my gosh.

That sounds like a great tradition. Well, anyway, maybe we can get into that a little more. We have an article on the subject of Easter or Resurrection Sunday. Some evangelicals don't even say Easter anymore, so that might even be something to talk about.

Did we want to discuss the attribute of God, not John?

One of the attributes of me is I'm late to the podcast. No, yeah, I was about to say let's do our attributes of God like we usually do.

The Holiness of God

Yeah, certainly. This one is not particularly lengthy. I thought it was fairly straightforward, but we'll see how much time that we do spend on it. Sometimes I think the ones where I'm like, oh, I put the least amount of writing into this one.

I'm like, oh, this will be really short, but it ends up being long, so I guess we'll see. But our attribute today is the holiness of God. And for many OG, young, restless reform types that may be in the crowd, that holiness of God may trigger an R .C. Sproul book in your mind, which I hate to say I've not actually read R .C. Sproul's Holiness of God.

It's been recommended to me many times. I own the book, but I have not read it. But yeah, we're going to be talking about holiness as an attribute of God. And starting off, there's a few verses we go to for this.

I think the most popular ones would be Isaiah 6, 1 through 7, and then Revelation 4, 8 through 11. We'll only be reading from the Isaiah 6 one. We may come back to the Revelation one. But those are like the fairly like when you think of the holiness of God, you kind of conceptualize in your mind heavenly worship and all the angels and the saints bowing before God, proclaiming his holiness.

And that sort of is what this verse from Isaiah 6 is speaking of. So I'm just going to read verses 1 through 7 of Isaiah chapter 6. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

Above it stood the seraphims, each one had six wings. With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory. And the post of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from off the altar. And he laid it upon my mouth and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.

A beautiful imagery of what the holiness of God is and how God is exalted over all things and how part of when we say like when we define holiness, what the most common definition given is like, you know, set apart, someone that is set apart.

And surely when we think of God, God is set apart not just from sin and fallenness and things like that, but just in general, like there is God is his own like being. There's nothing which is like him in any particular way.

Of course, we as rational creatures bearing God's image, we are like God in certain capacities for he has made us in his image, but in and of himself intrinsically, there is nothing like God. And in that sense, we can say that God is set apart and holy.

But of course, you know, if you want to hear, as always my little more, I guess you could say scholastic definitions of things or like how a lot of these guys go, I'll of course cite my sources. I always do.

And it's the same one that I always give. I'm going to be going through Richard Moeller's, you know, Greek and Latin theological dictionary. And then a few weeks ago when discussing mercy, I sort of drew in this book by English Presbyterian, William Bates, which is called the Harmony of the Divine Attributes and the Contrivance and Accomplishment of Man's Redemption.

We'll be pulling from that as well. I'm going to read a brief quote from there. It's not too brief, but it's really good. So I'm going to read it, of course, because I can. So that's what we'll do. But when speaking of the holiness of God, like in a more like specific sense, aside from just holiness being set apart, the holiness of God, essentially, like according to Moeller, as summarizing the doctrine of the Reformed and Lutheran Protestant scholastics, the holiness of God refers to the absolute goodness of God's being and willing.

So it refers to the absolute goodness of God's being and willing. This holiness can be spoken of both in regard to God intrinsically referring to the essential goodness and righteousness of God's. In other words, like what makes God God, all that is in God is God.

God is essentially good. He is essentially righteous. And so by speaking of God as holy, you're predicating of God the fact that he is essentially good and righteous. But it can also be spoken of extrinsically in referring to the goodness and righteousness of his own divine will towards creatures, specifically and particularly in calling all rational creatures, that is, men, or the angels to be holy as he is holy.

This holiness can also be described not just positively, but negatively in that it is what distinguishes God from all that is sinful and tainted within the created order. And so, like I said in the very beginning, when we think of holiness as being set apart, that negative definition really plays into that because part of what it does is it sets apart God from all that is sinful and tainted within the created order.

But we can also speak of it in the sense, as I said earlier, of God being set apart in general. Quite a few years ago, not that long ago, I'm thinking of the late 2000 teens, there was a book from Michael Heiser that came out called The Unseen Realm.

And when I was, back when this came out, I was eating it up. I thought it was the coolest thing, but I kind of thought it was the coolest thing for wrong reasons just because I got off on scandalizing normie evangelicals by saying, did you know when the Bible speaks of there being multiple gods, they're real gods.

They're not just false idols or whatever. And essentially the thesis of Heiser's book is that when the Old Testament speaks of the various gods, that's referring to members of God's divine council, like the angels that either remained in place or that fell away, such that when we read about the false gods, these are real entities which are actually demons.

In every evangelical or Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or whatever other flavor of Christianity you want to talk about, they all affirm this. But part of the reason the book was scandalous is because Heiser's thesis is like, he wants to call them gods.

He wants them to be lowercase G gods. And the difference between capital G God and these lowercase G gods is that we still can retain some form of monotheism because this God is distinguished from all the others.

But part of the confusion from this book is that there's almost a sense in which it is true that the Hebrew Elohim is translated to be, it can talk about God or it can talk about gods. But when we speak about language and things like that, language is not always theology.

When we speak about theology, sure, we're using words from scripture, but we're building concepts that are, they're contextualized by where they're spoken of in scripture, such that when Paul says, man is justified by faith and not by works of the law, versus when James says, man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

We understand that justification here is being used in a different sense. One being the sense of imputing to someone like a righteousness, whereas the other is talking about being a vindication. So we understand that words have their different usages.

And the reason I went on that rant about Michael Heiser's book when talking about holiness is because it's not just that God is like another God, He's just a more powerful one. God is entirely apart from all of creation, entirely transcendent, entirely above, entirely eternal, entirely distinct from all things, such that He alone is truly holy.

And because man is created in the image of God, because the angels are also rational creatures who, this is controversial, some people say they're made in the image of God, others say they're not. I'll let the listeners decide on what they feel about that.

But all rational creatures that bear God's image are in some sense called to be holy, to imitate God. We are to be like God in some way or the other. And that's part of what the process of sanctification is.

Remember our very first definition of holiness, the holiness of God refers to the absolute goodness of God's being and willing. We too are called to be truly good, to be truly holy, to be righteous. And this happens in the process of sanctification where the spirit of God infuses into us supernatural gifts whereby we may be truly righteous.

Of course, this is grounded in the imputed righteousness of Christ, but that's all what sanctification is about. The Christian life is not just imputed righteousness, but it is on this firm foundation where we have true righteousness, where we bear good fruit, where we obey the law of God.

And so that is where holiness sort of comes and practical matters. But there's this one quote from William Bates' book, I referred to him earlier, that I want to read. I'm not going to say the title again because it's really long.

I'll just say the first part. The Harmony of Divine Attributes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this part of his book is very, it's really good to meditate on and it's a beautiful book to read. I recommend all of you guys go read this.

You can find it on the Internet Archive, but this is a quote. He's speaking of holiness of God. He says, of all the perfections of the deity, none is more worthy of his nature and so peculiar or admirable as his infinite purity or his holiness.

It is the most shining attribute that derives a luster to all the rest. He is, quote, glorious in holiness, Exodus 15, verse 11. Wisdom degenerates into craft, power into tyranny. Mercy loses its nature without holiness.

He swears by it as it is his supreme excellency. And then quoting one of the Psalms, he says, once I have sworn by my holiness that I will not lie unto David. It is the most venerable attribute in the praise whereof the harmony of heaven agrees.

The angels and saints above are represented, expressing their ecstasy and ravishment of the beauty of holiness. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. Isaiah 6, verse 3.

This only he loves and values in the creature, being the impression of his most divine and amiable perfection. Inferior creatures have a resemblance of other divine attributes. The winds and thunder set forth God's power.

The firmness of the rocks and the incorruptibility of the heavens are an obscure representation of his unchangeableness. But holiness, that is the most orient pearl in the crown of heaven, shines only in the reasonable creature.

And upon this account, man only is said to be formed after his image. And so we could say much more about holiness, but as I always say, that would be the holiness of God in a nutshell.

Yeah, Sproul says when the angels decide to focus on an attribute, they don't say love, love, love, right? They say holy, holy, holy. This is, if you're going to do the whole gentle and lowly thing and try to reduce Jesus or God down to the primary attribute, actually holiness is a better, probably a better attribute to focus on than even love in some ways.

And one of the things too, you caught my attention when you said, when you talked about that book,.

Who wrote that book?

Was it Heisner?

Oh, William Bates.

Oh, Bates.

Oh, what are you talking about?

No, no, no.

You're talking about the unseen realm. That's Michael Heiser.

Yeah, Heiser.

Okay.

Yeah, I haven't read that. That's interesting though. I have a friend of mine who just keeps sending me stuff like about this very topic that, oh, God's got a council in the heavens and it's a lot of speculation about Nephilim and there's stuff, just all the fanciful creatures.

And I know Haunted Cosmos kind of contributes to some of this. There's a re-enchantment kind of vibe, I guess out there. I see it even in the pagan realm. Near me, there's all these witch shops and young people really want to get into the spiritual stuff.

But when you look at God's holiness, I mean, that's re-enchantment. And I've tried to encourage people, look for those mountaintop experiences. Elijah, Moses, Jesus, all these guys. They would go be with God in a desolate place and have an experience with God in those places.

I don't mean to be overly mystical, but there is something that's somewhat enchanting and I don't dare I say mystical about the Christian life. And you can have that with God. You don't need to look for it in other places, I guess is my point.

Yeah, certainly. No, a lot of it is speculative and sort of based off like ancient or Eastern conceptions of divine councils and things like that and kind of arguing that the Israelites were being polemical and there's a grain of truth in those and so God uses those.

But I used to be a big fan of it, but I think it's a possibility that God does have some sort of divine council in the same way that he exercises his will through man, he can do so through a particular set of angelic beings.

But I think a lot of it can fall down to speculation and of course, as Christians, we all do know that there are spiritual beings out there and you don't have to insist on calling them gods, but if you really want to and you can qualify and clarify and retain a firm monotheism, then be my guest, I guess.

Just don't try to scandalize people. That's what I would say. And that's a temptation for people that especially younger guys like me that study theology is we want to find a way to say something true, but in the most scandalous way possible.

I don't know why we love it so much, but we just do sometimes. You know, it's like the reformed guy who reads like Calvin on baptism where he attributes some sort of soteriological effect to this means of grace.

And we're like, oh, baptism saves first Peter 320. And it's just like, okay, yeah, in a sense, yeah, we qualify. But yeah, that's just like a temptation for a lot of us is, but you know, we don't have to cause scandal to say true things.

I was thinking about Colossians 2 .18. It says, let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism and worship of angels. And I'm not saying that anyone that gets fascinated with this is worshiping them, but you do need to be careful because that is something scripture warns about.

You want to make sure that God is the primary focus. So anyway, pseudo Dionysius.

Is hardest hit.

Holy Week and the Timeline of Easter

Let's talk about Easter a little bit. We got a article here on the truth script website. And let me see if I can show everyone what we're looking at. All right, here it is. So I should also remind people true script has sponsored the podcast.

And if you want to give it as 501C3 just scroll down all the way to the bottom and push publish or sorry, donate, or if you want to write with us,.

Push publish.

Okay, so the article, there's a few actually good articles, lessons from Canaan on conquering enemies, biblical foundations of confessional practice, and then three crosses, two Sabbaths, one empty tomb, the timeline of Holy Week.

So I'm going to click on that and it'll bring you to, actually my brother wrote this one too, but no, no, he didn't. Sorry, he posted it, but it's by Tom and Nathan Rush. So we had Tom Rush on the podcast not too long ago, and he's one of the board members.

Of true script.

And so anyway, this goes through the different days in Holy Week. And we were just talking about this. So maybe I'll just read a little portion here. You got Palm Sunday, which is Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, right?

And we all know what that is, right? And then you have Maundy Thursday. Now he did skip over, I think it's Holy Tuesday and Wednesday. There's a, actually, let me hold on. I pulled it up somewhere else.

Let me just read for you what those are since he skipped it. All right, these days reflect, Holy Monday to Wednesday. These days reflect on the events leading up to the crucifixion, different traditions focused on various gospel readings, such as Jesus cleansing the temple on Monday or Judas's betrayal.

Wednesday is also called Spy Wednesday. Okay, I have not heard of Spy Wednesday, but there you go. So that pre is before, I guess in some traditions, getting to Maundy Thursday. And Maundy Thursday, Jesus holds the Last Supper.

He's arrested, his trial runs through the night and many churches hold a Maundy Thursday service where the Lord's Supper or a mass of some sort is observed. Do you know what Maundy means, Matthew, out of curiosity?

I don't recall. No, I've heard it before, but I don't remember.

So it's from Mandatum, which is a Latin for commandment. And it's about Jesus's greatest commandment, which is to love. And so the new commandment that he gives to us, that's what Maundy Thursday is about.

And we have Good Friday.

I didn't know either until I looked it up, so don't feel bad. Or at least I forgot it. And then Good Friday, obviously is the most solemn day. Jesus is before Pilate. He's crucified between 12 and three and his body's buried before six.

And many churches hold Good Friday services in which the seven last words of Christ, his sayings from the cross are given special emphasis. Often these services are very somber with the apparent assumption by some that the cross was the greatest failure of all time or at least should be considered a very sad occasion.

I don't wanna pick on the guy. I might've already said it on the podcast. There was someone recently though that was saying Jesus, like he was a failed political leader because he died and stuff. And so someone in our circles who should know better.

Anyway, he did not fail. Good Friday is not a failure. And then Easter Sunday. And that is a celebration of the resurrection. So some people call it Resurrection Sunday. Does your church call it Easter or do you guys call it resurrection?

We call it Easter Sunday, my home church in Tampa.

Yeah, I think most churches do, but it's kind of, it's actually a little taboo at my church to call it that. Like it's seen as kind of like a pagan thing. And I don't know that I agree with that. I don't, I'm fine calling it Resurrection Sunday.

Totally fine with that. I think it goes back to the venerable deed. There's this quote. And as far as I know, this is the only quote that links Easter or links this celebration with Ishtar. But Ishtar was supposedly this fertility goddess.

And we don't really know though, a whole lot about Ishtar at all. We don't really, all we know was there was a tradition that developed and the time of the year spring was already called Easter or however they pronounced it during the time of venerable deed.

And so he just, there's a quote where he's like, oh yeah, that's the time of year where we celebrate Christ's resurrection. And so it's more like a seasonal kind of, I guess it just developed into this.

That's my understanding at least, but it isn't like the co-opting of a pagan celebration, which is how a lot of pagan guys and some fundamentalist traditions, I guess, go along with this and they frame it that way.

Like we just stole the pagan celebration. No, not at all. There's really no connection there. It just happens to be the time of the year that was called Easter, Ishtar, Ishtar, whatever. And that also, it parallels and over time this development.

So anyway, I don't feel bad about calling it that, but some people do. And if your conscience bothers you, then that's fine. Call it resurrection.

Yeah.

And the church itself has been celebrating Easter since almost the very early in the beginning. So Irenaeus of Lyons actually helped to prevent a schism within the church in the late second century. It was called the Pascal Controversy.

And essentially what had happened was a lot of Easter minor, they would celebrate Easter on the time of the Jewish Passover. So it's, I think it's quarter decimation. Asia minor, yeah.

Oh, you said Asia minor. Yeah, okay.

Oh yeah, my bad. Yeah, Asia minor. They had celebrated it on the 14 Nissan or the Jewish Passover, whereas Rome, and then a lot of the Eastern churches would not do that. They would try to make sure it fell on a certain Sunday.

And so the Bishop of Rome, Pope Victor actually excommunicated the churches that celebrate on Passover, but Irenaeus was able to get him to lift the excommunication. So it's a fairly early practice to celebrate Easter.

I can't tell you for sure off the top of my head if they called it, if they called it Easter, I know they refer to it as like Pascha, but maybe that translates to Easter. I don't recall. Off the top of my head.

I don't think it translates, but the Venerable B did connect the two and he, I mean, that's pretty early. I mean, he lived from seven or according to Wikipedia here from 672 or three to 735. So I like a lot of things in the Christian tradition.

This did develop, but we've obviously the theological significance is we have always had Christ's celebration of Christ's resurrection. That's every Sunday, because that's why we meet on Sunday. And then we also have this new meaning given to the Passover, Pascal, as you say.

And so that's something that Christians have celebrated in memoriam. So those things have always been there. It's just a matter of what we've called them. And I guess when we've celebrated them and I think I thought it was a council of, everyone says the council of Nicaea was everything.

So I thought, I really do think it was.

They did discuss the date at the council of Nicaea. I don't remember what the conclusion was, but this was, I was referring to an earlier controversy in the late second century that had happened where Pope Victor sort of was like overreaching over a slight disagreement and Irenaeus was able to be the peacemaker and get him to lift the excommunication.

Yeah.

So the rushes talk about the three crosses. There's no need to be dogmatic when attempting to discover the day on which Christ actually died. That he died is the important part of it. And there are controversies.

There's guys I've met I've run across who are so adamant in their configuration of exactly when it happened. But anyway, it happened. And so this is interesting. He says two Sabbaths, a very important point in the timeline of Holy Week is the fact that there are two Sabbaths.

Understanding this will provide a tremendous help. Tom Rush says, I'll propose another more plausible and I believe more biblical timeline for a week. But first we need to get to some preliminary and foundational issues.

So the Jewish calendar is generally believed that Jesus died in the year 8030, give or take a year or two. The Jewish calendar operates off a lunar month, which with special emphasis on the seasons of the year in which the various feasts of the Old Testament were set.

And in the modern world, especially the West, we operate on the Gregorian calendar, which was established in 1582. So converting dates and days, that's, I guess, a problem. But he said that God sets the feasts in holy days of convocation in Israel to be observed in their seasons.

And since the calendar was lunar, the Jews had 12 months rotating 29 or 30 days. That means 354 days in a year. Consequently, adjustments had to be made and a leap year was observed seven out of every 19 years where an elite month was added.

And by observation, we mean that a new month started when the two credible witnesses could testify that they had seen the first silver of the moon in the night sky. The shofar would be sounded and all would know that a new month had started.

A leap month would be added when the priests would go outside and realize that it wasn't spring yet and therefore not time to observe Passover. And then, so these are, I guess, just methods he's talking about in trying to reconcile these dates.

So that's the observation method. The arithmetical method, he says, is the Sanhedrin developed a mathematical formula to determine the calendar. Their secret was discovered and published in 8358 and became the customary way of determining leap years.

The problem in going backward from 8358 with conversions to Gregorian calendar dates is problematic and can only be done with best guesses. So we have these, this is something historians deal with all the time, going back into the past, especially with different peoples.

You don't think about it because we're so used to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, but this was not always the case in every civilization. And so trying to transpose, especially when you have centuries of time between you and previous dates, transpose like what day of the week was it in our conception can be a difficult thing.

He talks about the Jewish day. Another important preliminary issue is that how Jews reckon days, right? They start at 6 p .m. around, it's the evening basically, is the beginning of the day. Whereas for us, that's morning.

And so I actually, this is funny, and this is a side comment, but the Seventh-day Adventists are the guys who are really adamant about Saturday worship. I don't know that I've met any of them who are like, if that's what they believe, like, do they actually start it the night before?

That's a pretty uniquely Jewish thing. But anyway, so anyway, he goes through, I'm not gonna read all of this, but he goes through the math, as we say, and then gives us the timeline of events. So I'm gonna skip over some of the math and just give you like the solution here.

So Friday preceding Holy Week, Nisan 8, begins Thursday evening. John tells us that Jesus was in Bethany, just two miles from Jerusalem, six days before the Passover. So Passover is on the 14th, so he arrived on the 8th.

And this culminates in all these events that lead up to the crucifixion and resurrection. Saturday precedes, so this began Friday evening. We don't really have any information. He was probably resting at that point.