(3.) John’s statement, in chap. 19:31, that the Sabbath following the day of crucifixion was “a high day,” admits of no easy or natural explanation except that of the coincidence of the first day of unleavened bread, or the fifteenth Nisan, with the seventh-day Sabbath. (4.) The anti-typical character of Christ, as the Paschal Lamb of God and the true Passover Sacrifice (John 1:29, 36; 1 Cor. 5:7), would lead us to expect that the very day and hour of his death would correspond with the time of the killing of the typical Passover lamb. If it be urged that Christ himself, with his disciples, in obeying the requirements of the law, killed the Passover on the evening of the fourteenth, and that the Synoptical Gospels intimate this, it may be replied that such an interpretation of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is not required, and that the exceeding difficulty, not to say impossibility, of harmonizing it with the statements already quoted from John, is quite decisive against it. It is much easier to interpret the Synoptists in the light of John’s Gospel. In this chapter, 13:1, we are informed of a supper _before_ the passover. That this was the same supper spoken of by the Synoptists, though one day before the usual time, in order that the true Passover lamb might be put to death at the time appointed, appears from the peculiar nature of the message sent by chosen apostle, to the “good man of the house”—a message of special direction, pointing out something of an unusual character. (See Matthew 28:18; Mark 14:14; and Luke 22:11.) There are also in the Synoptical Gospels a number of statements showing that the Friday on which our Lord was crucified was not marked by the Sabbatic sacredness belonging to the first day of unleavened bread. (See Matthew 27:59; Mark 15:42, 46; Luke 23:56.) This seems to be the easiest and most natural way of harmonizing the apparent discrepancies between the Synoptists and John.