Good points, peacefulpete.
Kosonen wrote:
The Israelites celebrated their first Passover the 14th day of the first month and left the same day.
This is a common mistake Christians make due to thinking that Passover begins with "eating." It doesn't. It begins with a sacrifice--or at least it used to. (I got this from my brother who converted to conservative Judaism and from one of my closest friends who is a rabbi.)
The date on the Jewish calendar for Passover is Nisan 14 at sundown, that part is correct. But what starts at Nisan 14 is not eating, but this:
You shall keep [the lamb] until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight.
Passover begins with the act of the slaughter of the lamb, "at twilight," a sacrifice--which only later turns into a meal: a communion with God. But since the slaughtering must be done first by the fall of night, it is the 15th when the next festival day begins, the Festival of Unleavened Bread (otherwise there is no bread to eat with the meal...and no meal to eat, period.)
Deuteronomy 1:6 explains:
You will make the Passover sacrifice in the evening, when the sun goes down, at the time when you went forth out of Egypt.
Jewish days go from evening to evening. Thus it was during the daytime, on the 14th, when lambs were gathered and collected, sundown (twilight) when they were slaughered, and thus the 15th when the Passover seder began.
This is why today Jews celebrate their Passover meals on the 15th, not on the 14th. One did not have a meal to eat or celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread until the 15th. The Jews could not have had enough time to gather all those lambs together on the 14th, slaughter them all at "sundown" or "twilight" of the 14th, and have a meal going...which would be the next day on the Jewish calendar, the 15th.
In John's gospel, the author has Jesus die the "day before Passover" on "Preparation day" instead of Passover as in the other accounts. (John 19:14) Why? A narrative device to teach a point.
In John's gospel Jesus is "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."--John 1:29, 36
Preparation Day is Nisan 14, the day Jews were gathering lambs to slaughter them for the passover communion meal or seder. In the gospel of John, Jesus is "the Lamb of God," who is slaughtered on Nisan 14 on the eve before Passover, whose "blood" literally gets spilled on wood and bones not crushed, like the Passover lamb of ancient times.--Note the details of John 19:31-37.
Scholars and the Church Fathers agree that the rabbinical figure Jesus of Nazareth died on the 15th on Passover. The author of John was merely using a series of religious motifs to instruct.