Upvote:1
In the absence of a direct statement about which year Jesus died, we need to infer the year by indirect means.
One means is to determine the year Jesus began his ministry and then add to this the number of years of Jesus ministry, to arrive at the year of the crucifixion. Luke's Gospel provides two clues as to the year Jesus began his ministry:
This method arrives at a date that is too open-ended, and is rarely used to calculate the year of the crucifixion.
This tells us only that John the Baptist began his mission between 26 and 28 CE, and probably 28 CE. At some stage, Jesus came to John and was baptised: he is commonly assumed to have come to John in 29 CE, but the Gospel does not say so, meaning that Jesus could also have come to John as early as, say, 26 CE or as later as the early 30s. On the most common assumption that Jesus came to John in 29 CE, we need only add the length of Jesus mission and arrive at a date for the crucifixion.
At this point, we strike another problem. We know that Jesus would have travelled to Jerusalem each year for the Passover, just as Luke says his parents had taught him to do (Luke 2:41), but the synoptic gospels make no mention of any journey to Jerusalem until the final, fateful journey. The brevity of the account, especially in Mark's Gospel, suggests that Jesus' mission lasted less than one year, and he was crucified in 30 CE.
On the other hand, John's Gospel clearly has Jesus travel to Jerusalem for the Passover festival three times before the final, fateful journey. In this case, Jesus' mission was almost four years in duration. Assuming, once again, that Jesus began his mission in 29 CE, the crucifixion took place in about 33 CE.
The Passover date was determined by the phase of the moon and did not always fall on the same day of the week. So, another way of establishing the year of Jesus' crucifixion ought to be to determine on which year, within the appropriate range, the Passover fell on a Friday. Unfortunately, because of intercalations applied to the ancient Jewish calendar, there is too much uncertainty for this to be a useful method. The same issue means that we can not really say on which day of the year the crucifixion took place.
If the darkness that the gospels report at the moment of Jesus death, exactly 3 o'clock in the afternoon, could be attributed to a solar eclipse, then science could give us the answer, since every eclipse, past and future, can be calculated precisely. Unfortunately again, this is no possible, as solar eclipses can not occur near the day of the Passover.
The most commonly accepted years of the crucifixion are 30 and 33 CE, but other
years from 29 to 36 CE have been suggested. Everything is really only speculation.
Upvote:12
The traditional date is Friday, April 3rd, 33 AD. The most commonly held date by modern scholars is Friday, April 7th, 30 AD.
The factors in figuring this.
Of these, one of the most sure is the date of Pilate's reign. This limits the range of answers to a 10-year window. Also, if one accepts the testimony of Phlegon in correspondence to the unexplained darkness at the same time as a lunar eclipse, you would point to a 33 AD date.
Isaac Newton figured a 29 AD baptism, and counted 5 passovers, and concluded 34 AD. Many favored a 30 AD date after that, but popularity of the traditional 33 AD date is on the rise.
In my opinion, probably April 3rd, 33 AD at around 3:00pm local time fits the best.
Note: This is another article that lists several points for determining the day of the crucifixion.