In our new book, The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived, we assume but do not argue for a precise date of Jesus’s crucifixion. Virtually all scholars believe, for various reasons, that Jesus was crucified in the spring of either A.D. 30 or A.D. 33, with the majority opting for the former. (The evidence from astronomynarrows the possibilities to A.D. 27, 30, 33, or 36). However, we want to set forth our case for the date of Friday, April 3, A.D. 33 as the exact day that Christ died for our sins.
To be clear, the Bible does not explicitly specify the precise date of Jesus’s crucifixion and it is not an essential salvation truth. But that does not make it unknowable or unimportant. Because Christianity is a historical religion and the events of Christ’s life did take place in human history alongside other known events, it is helpful to locate Jesus’s death—as precisely as the available evidence allows—within the larger context of human history.
Among the Gospel writers, no one makes this point more strongly than Luke, the Gentile physician turned historian and inspired chronicler of early Christianity.
Luke implies that John the Baptist began his public ministry shortly before Jesus did, and he gives us a historical reference point for when the Baptist’s ministry began: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar . . .” (Luke 3:1)....
We can never be reminded too many times of the gospel of grace. It is a message that is not just information, but also food, and light, and warmth—it is a message that is effectual. And there is a word we should all love more than we do—effectual.
Our condition apart from Christ is one of utter helplessness. We were dead in our trespasses and sins. We were slaves to sin, having to do its bidding, and we were free from the control of righteousness. All our efforts to cease being unrighteous just created a different kind of unrighteousness—the religiosity of the carnal man. This religiosity always veers to some form of works righteousness, because the energy for such religion comes from pride, and not holiness. But pride is our sinful condition. We are dead in our sins, and the name of that death is pride, self, me. And for all the striving that it generates, the word for such religiosity is ineffectual.
But while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were steeped in our unloveliness, Christ came down from Heaven in order to love us. He abandoned His will to the will of the Father—the very thing we had refused to do—and was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. He was stripped, beaten, flogged, nailed to a cross of wood, thrust through with a spear, taken down, laid in a tomb for three days, after which point He came out of that tomb with your forgiveness outstretched in His two hands. The thing about it is that when hands like that have been pierced in that way, whenever they are carrying forgiveness of sins, they are incapable of dropping it.
So He came out of that tomb carrying our righteousness, our justification, our perfection. And He offers it to us here—free grace—in the gospel, in the declaration, in the preaching, in the Supper. And so this is the message summed up—that we, the unrighteous and filthy, are given the grace to be able to say, without fear of contradiction, the Lord our Righteousness.
"The essence of Adam’s sin was that he put himself in God’s place. The essence of Christ’s obedience is that He put himself in our place. Because of his life in our place, and His death in our place, we are freed from our sins.....
....Because Jesus was filled with horror and cried out, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” we are filled with wonder and cry, “My God, my God, why have you accepted me?”
Because Jesus said, “I thirst,” we can drink from the fountain of living water and never thirst again.
Because Jesus said, “Woman, behold your son,” and felt the pain of separation from His earthly family, we can experience the blessing of being united "ith a heavenly family.
Because Jesus cried, “It is finished!” our new life can begin.
Because Jesus committed His spirit into the Father’s hands, God commits His Spirit into our hearts.
Jesus is the Passover Lamb — the substitute that protects us from the wrath of God. He experienced the curse of God, the punishment for sin, the hellish torments of eternal damnation — all for the glory of God and the salvation of His people."
Hat Tip: internetmonk.com-Trevin Wax, Counterfeit Gospels, p. 97f
[Christ's] death becomes metaphorically paradigmatic for the obedience of the community . . . the fundamental norm of Pauline ethics is the christomorphic life.--Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
'. . . always carrying in the body the death of Jesus . . .' --2 Cor 4:10
