2. This day of Pentecost, on which the Holy Spirit was given, was the first day of the week. A number of eminent authorities, chief among whom is the chronologist Wieseler, compute it to have been the seventh. This question hinges upon that of the day of the Lord’s death. It is almost universally admitted that Christ was crucified on Friday. But it is disputed whether that Friday was the fourteenth or the fifteenth of Nisan. From Leviticus 23:15, 16, we learn that Pentecost, signifying literally the fiftieth, was counted from the second day of unleavened bread. The paschal lamb was killed at the close of the fourteenth day of the month Abib or Nisan, and the next day, the fifteenth, was the first day of unleavened bread. This day was regarded as a holy Sabbath; and from the morrow following, that is, from the sixteenth of Nisan, fifty days were to be reckoned to determine the day of Pentecost. Wieseler contends that the Lord was crucified on the fifteenth of Nisan—the first day of unleavened bread. The sixteenth of the month would therefore fall on the seventh day of the week, and fifty days, reckoned from and including this, according to the manner of the Jews, would fix the day of Pentecost on the Jewish Sabbath. It is interesting to observe that many who agree with Wieseler in regarding the Friday of Christ’s crucifixion as the fifteenth of Nisan, still reckon the fifty days so as to make Pentecost fall on the first day of the week. Prominent among these chronologists is Canon Wordsworth. In all frankness, we would admit that Wordsworth’s reckoning will not hold. If the Friday on which the Lord was crucified was the fifteenth of Nisan, and if that day was observed as the first day of unleavened bread so that the specified fifty days would be reckoned from the following day, then Pentecost must have occurred on the seventh day of the week. Others of our ablest scholars, such as Greswell, Elliott, and Schaff, maintain that the day on which our Lord was crucified was the fourteenth of Nisan. An exhaustive discussion of this whole question would be out of place in these columns. We give a brief, and we think conclusive, argument in favor of the view that the Friday of our Lord’s death was the fourteenth of Nisan, and that therefore the fifteenth Nisan, or first day of unleavened bread, coincided with the Jewish Sabbath. The reasons in favor of this view are the following:— (1.) The language of John, chap. 18:28, intimates clearly that the Jews had not, on the morning of Friday, yet partaken of the passover. Friday could not therefore have been the fifteenth of Nisan. (2.) The same day, Friday, John states that “it was the preparation of the passover.” (Chap. 19:14.) It seems next to impossible to understand this expression in any other way than as referring to that day, Friday, as the day of preparation for Passover observance, or, in other words, as the day preceding the fifteenth Nisan.