For three years the Gospel writers move quickly — a miracle here, a journey there, months passing in a sentence. Then they arrive at this week, and everything slows down. Nearly a third of the Gospel record is spent on these seven days. That alone tells you where the story has been heading all along.

The chart below places the crucifixion on Thursday. That is a minority position and I do not think it can be proved; the reasons are set out immediately after the chart.

A word about Thursday

One thing to say plainly before you start, because the chart says it without saying it. Laying the week out this way puts the crucifixion on Thursday rather than on the traditional Good Friday.

I do not think that is provable from the text, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Here is the honest state of it. Where your Bible prints Friday — and this one does, in Mark, in Luke and twice in John — the Greek word underneath is Preparation: the day before a Sabbath. Because that was ordinarily a Friday, the word came to mean Friday, and most translators render it that way. But which Sabbath it was preparing for is the question. John says the Sabbath that week was “an especially important day of rest” — a festival day, not the ordinary weekly one. If that is right, there were two Sabbaths in that week and the Preparation was not a Friday.

If it is not right, the traditional reading stands. Tradition holds Friday, and so do a great many people who have studied this far more closely than I have. I arrange the week the way you see it because that is how the days fall for me when I read the accounts straight through. I would not go to the wall for it.

And nothing in the week depends on it. The meal, the garden, the trials, the cross and the empty tomb are the same either way. Only the label on one square changes.

What follows is the week laid out day by day, with all four accounts side by side, so you can see how they fit together. The dates are the days of the Jewish month. Remember that a Jewish day begins at sunset, not midnight — which is why the Passover meal and the arrest fall on the same day here, though we would naturally call them evening and small hours.

Sunday, the 10th

• The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem
• Teachings on His death

Matthew 21:1–11 · Mark 11:1–11 · Luke 19:28–44 · John 12:12–50

The day before — Saturday — He had been in Bethany, where Mary anointed Him (John 12:1–11).

Monday, the 11th

• He curses the fig tree
• He drives out the moneychangers

Matthew 21:12–23 · Mark 11:12–19 · Luke 19:45–48

Tuesday, the 12th

• Teaching in the temple — on His authority, on taxes, on the resurrection, and on the signs of His return
• Judas makes his plan to betray Him

Matthew 21:23–26:16 · Mark 11:20–14:11 · Luke 20:1–22:6

Wednesday, the 13th

• The Passover meal
• Gethsemane
• The arrest
• Before the Sanhedrin
• Peter’s denial

Matthew 26:17–75 · Mark 14:12–72 · Luke 22:7–65 · John 13:1–18:28

Passover begins this evening at 6:00 p.m. John gives five chapters to the upper room alone — the washing of feet, the vine, the promise of the Comforter, and the prayer of chapter 17.

He had told the disciples He would die. They had heard it and not heard it, the way you do.

So the meal begins ordinarily and then stops being ordinary. He gets up in the middle of it, takes off His outer clothing, ties a towel round His waist and washes their feet — the job of the lowest servant in the house, done by the host. Peter refuses, then over-corrects and asks to be washed all over, which is very Peter.

Then bread and a cup, and a sentence repeated more times than any other sentence in human history.

Then Jesus took bread and spoke a prayer of thanksgiving. He broke the bread, gave it to them, and said, “This is my body, which is given up for you. Do this to remember me.”

Luke 22:19 · GOD’S WORD Translation

He is holding the Passover in His hands and telling them it has been about Him the whole time.

Judas leaves. John notes the detail that it was night.

Afterwards, an olive grove. This is the part of the night the Gospels do not tidy up. He asks three friends to stay awake with Him and they cannot manage it. He asks His Father, more than once, whether there is any other way.

Abba! Father! You can do anything. Take this cup ⟦of suffering⟧ away from me. But let your will be done rather than mine.

Mark 14:36 · GOD’S WORD Translation

There is no answer in the text. Only the end of the prayer, and then torches coming up the hill.

He is arrested by an armed party guided by one of His own, tried at night before the high priest’s council, struck, and spat at. And out in the courtyard, warming himself at a fire, the friend who had sworn he would die first says three times that he has never met Him. Then a rooster — and Luke adds the detail that finishes you.

Then the Lord turned and looked directly at Peter.

Luke 22:61 · GOD’S WORD Translation

Whose clock?

A difficulty worth knowing about. The chart above runs on John’s clock. John places the crucifixion at the hour the Passover lambs were being killed, with the meal still ahead; Matthew, Mark and Luke appear to place the last supper as the Passover meal itself, the night before. Those are not the same timetable.

People have tried to reconcile them for a very long time — different calendars in use at once, different ways of counting a day, different meanings for “Passover” across the eight days. None of the solutions has won. I have followed John here because the lamb and the hour are the point of this chart. You should know that is a choice, and that it is contested.

Here is how I read it, and I want to be plain that this is a reading and not a rule. Jesus knew what the next day held. He did not need a lamb; He was about to be one. So He kept the meal with His friends early — while He still could — and then died at the hour the lambs were being killed.

The Law makes no provision for that. There is an exception in Numbers 9 for a man who cannot keep the Passover at the proper time, but it moves the meal a month later, not a day earlier, and it is for someone unclean from a death or away on a long journey. Neither fits. So I am not claiming a legal loophole. I am saying a man chose how to spend his last evening, and that the timing was His, not the calendar’s.

Thursday, the 14th

• Judas hangs himself
• Jesus before Pilate, then Herod, then Pilate again
• The crucifixion
• The burial

Matthew 27:1–61 · Mark 15 · Luke 22:66–23:56 · John 18–19

Tonight at 6:00 begins the Sabbath for the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

By morning it has become a legal matter, and the law that matters is Rome’s.

Judea was an occupied province. The temple leadership could try a man; they could not execute one. So the charge changes on the way from the council to the governor. Before the priests it is blasphemy. Before Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, it becomes something Rome will act on: this man calls Himself a king.

Pilate does not want it. He tries three ways out — he sends Him to Herod, he says more than once that he finds no case, and he offers the crowd a prisoner.

That prisoner is worth stopping on.

There was a man named Barabbas in prison. He was with some rebels who had committed murder during a riot.

Mark 15:7 · GOD’S WORD Translation

The Jews shouted again, “Don’t free this man! Free Barabbas!” (Barabbas was a political revolutionary.)

John 18:40 · GOD’S WORD Translation

Not a thief. A man who had tried to free Israel the way people have always tried to free countries — by killing. And his name says something the crowd would have heard without stopping to think about it. Bar abba. Son of the father.

So two men stand in front of that crowd, and both of them are called son of the father. One would take the kingdom with a knife. The other had told them plainly that His kingdom does not work that way. They ask for the knife.

Then notice what actually happens to Barabbas. He is not pardoned. He is released because somebody else goes to the cross that was waiting for him. The first man Jesus ever stood in for was guilty, and knew it.

Pilate stops resisting, and a Roman governor sentences a provincial to a Roman death.

It is worth being plain about what that means. Crucifixion was a Roman execution, carried out by Roman soldiers, under Roman authority, on a Roman charge. The sign fixed above His head was not theological. It was political, and it was the charge: the King of the Jews. Rome crucified thousands of people. This is what it did to men it thought were trouble.

The soldiers flog Him. Then they dress Him up. They throw a cape over His shoulders — Mark and John say purple, Matthew says bright red, and either way the joke is the same, because purple is what a king wears. They twist thorns into a crown and put a stick in His hand for a sceptre. Then they kneel down in front of Him.

They knelt in front of him and made fun of him by saying, “Long live the king of the Jews!”

Matthew 27:29 · GOD’S WORD Translation

The charge was that He claimed to be a king. The mockery is the charge, acted out. And in a few hours they will nail the same words over His head, and stop laughing. They walk Him out to a place beside a road, where executions were meant to be seen, and they nail Him to a cross between two criminals.

And then the Gospels do something strange for ancient writing. They slow down and record what He said.

Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” Meanwhile, the soldiers divided his clothes among themselves by throwing dice.

Luke 23:34 · GOD’S WORD Translation

He answers a dying criminal beside Him, and the answer is a promise rather than a sermon.

I can guarantee this truth: Today you will be with me in paradise.

Luke 23:43 · GOD’S WORD Translation

He looks down at His mother and puts her into the care of a friend — the most ordinary thing a dying son can do.

Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing there. He said to his mother, “Look, here’s your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Look, here’s your mother!”

John 19:26–27 · GOD’S WORD Translation

He says He is thirsty. And then there is a cry nobody would invent about a man they were claiming was God.

At three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Mark 15:34 · GOD’S WORD Translation

That sentence is not a new one. It is the first line of a psalm of David’s — one the New Testament reads throughout as being about the Messiah — and He quotes it word for word.

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away from helping me, so far away from the words of my groaning?

Psalm 22:1, a psalm by David · GOD’S WORD Translation

Then read on in it, because David writes a line that has nothing obvious to do with anything in his own life.

They divide my clothes among themselves. They throw dice for my clothing.

Psalm 22:18 · GOD’S WORD Translation

And look again at what Luke recorded a few paragraphs above, in the same breath as the prayer for forgiveness: the soldiers divided his clothes among themselves by throwing dice. John, watching it happen, says outright that this is what the psalm was for.

So when Jesus speaks that first line, He may be doing what a Jewish teacher does — naming a psalm by its opening words and pointing at the whole of it. He is also, plainly, saying it. Both are true, and the second one is why nobody would have invented the sentence.

After Jesus had taken the vinegar, he said, “It is finished!” Then he bowed his head and died.

John 19:30 · GOD’S WORD Translation

Not I am finished.

One word, and it is the last one

The Greek is a single word: τετέλεσται, tetelestai. It is worth slowing down for, because English cannot carry it in three syllables.

The verb is teleō — to bring a thing to completion, to carry it through to its end, to fulfil. And it is in a tense English does not really have. Greek’s perfect describes an action finished in the past whose result is still standing. Not it ended. Closer to: it has been brought to completion, and it stays completed.

John uses it twice within three verses, which is not an accident.

After this, when Jesus knew that everything had now been finished, he said, “I’m thirsty.” He said this so that Scripture could finally be concluded.

John 19:28 · GOD’S WORD Translation

So this is not a dying man observing that it is over. It is a workman putting down his tools. Everything the older books were reaching for — the lamb, the blood on the doorpost, the scapegoat, the priest who could never sit down because the work was never done — arrives here and stops. Not paused. Finished.

The writer of Hebrews makes the same point with a piece of furniture.

Every day each priest performed his religious duty. He offered the same type of sacrifice again and again. Yet, these sacrifices could never take away sins. However, this chief priest made one sacrifice for sins, and this sacrifice lasts forever. Now he holds the honored position—the one next to God the Father on the heavenly throne.

Hebrews 10:11–12 · GW

The priests stood, every day, for centuries, because the job was never done. This one sat down. Nothing further is needed, and nothing further is coming.

A wealthy man named Joseph, from the council that had condemned Him, asks Pilate for the body and buries it in his own new tomb. Mark keeps a small, terrible detail: Pilate had to check, because men usually took longer than this.

Pilate wondered if Jesus had already died. So he summoned the officer to ask him if Jesus was, in fact, dead.

Mark 15:44 · GOD’S WORD Translation

Friday, the 15th

• A guard is placed at the tomb

Matthew 27:62–66

Mourning.

Saturday, the 16th

Silence. Mourning.

He is dead.

Sunday, the 17th

• Early morning — the Resurrection
• He appears to Mary at the tomb
• Afternoon — He appears to the disciples on the Emmaus road
• Evening — He appears to the disciples in the upper room

Matthew 28:1–15 · Mark 16:1–13 · Luke 24:1–49 · John 20:1–23

He is risen!

Today also begins the Feast of Firstfruits — the feast He fulfills on the very day He rises.

Early, while it is still dark, women go to the tomb to finish a burial that had been done in a hurry. They are worried about the stone. The stone is not the problem.

Now watch what the four accounts do, because this is where readers are usually told to look away.

They do not match. Matthew has one angel, Mark a young man in white, Luke two men, John two angels. Matthew names two women, Mark three, Luke a longer list, John only Mary. The order of the appearances is different. Anyone who has ever taken statements from witnesses to the same event will recognise this exactly.

What they agree on is everything that would be embarrassing. All four say the first witnesses were women — in a culture where a woman’s testimony carried little legal weight, which is not a detail you invent if you are building a case. And all four say His own followers did not believe it.

The apostles thought that the women’s story didn’t make any sense, and they didn’t believe them.

Luke 24:11 · GOD’S WORD Translation

John remembers that two of them ran to the tomb and one outran the other, which is a pointless thing to keep unless you were there.

Four independent memories of an astonishing morning, agreeing on the shape and differing on the details, is what truth looks like when it has not been coordinated. A single tidy account with no seams would be easier to defend and much harder to believe.

Mary stays behind after the others leave, crying, and mistakes Him for the gardener.

Jesus asked her, “Why are you crying? Who are you looking for?” Mary thought it was the gardener speaking to her… Jesus said to her, “Mary!”

John 20:15–16 · GOD’S WORD Translation

He says her name. That is the moment she knows.

Abraham, and the substitute

Look one more time at the bottom row of the chart.

When Abraham raised the knife over his son, God stopped him.

“Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you did not refuse to give me your son, your only son.”

Genesis 22:12 · GOD’S WORD Translation

A ram was caught in a thicket, and Isaac walked down the mountain alive.

Abraham named that place The Lord Will Provide. It is still said today, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

Genesis 22:14 · GOD’S WORD Translation

On this mountain there was no ram in the thicket. God the Father had one Son, and for this to be finished He did not withhold Him. Paul takes the sentence spoken to Abraham and turns it round to point at God.

God didn’t spare his own Son but handed him over ⟦to death⟧ for all of us. So he will also give us everything along with him.

Romans 8:32 · GOD’S WORD Translation

Abraham was not asked, in the end, to give up his son. God was.

Afterward

• One week later — Thomas sees Him (John 20:24–31)
• By the sea — “afterward” (John 21:1–25)
• Forty days later — the Ascension (Luke 24:50–53; Matthew 28:16–20)

Read this week slowly, and read it in more than one Gospel. Each writer saw the same days and kept different details — that is not a problem to solve but a gift to receive. Put them side by side and the picture fills out.