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When the women came to the tomb early Sunday morning, Jesus was already risen! The angel said, “He is risen; he is not here” (Mark 16:6). He was not at the sepulcher Sunday morning. Therefore, Jesus could not have risen later than Saturday evening – three days after his burial.
Three days before Saturday would place the crucifixion on Wednesday! That Wednesday was a preparation day – a preparation day for what? For the annual Feast of Unleavened Bread. The first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread is always an annual Sabbath (Lev. 23:6-7). So, Thursday that year was an annual Sabbath.
So that we would know that that Sabbath which followed the crucifixion was not the weekly Sabbath, John was inspired to call it a “high day” (John 19:31). According to Jewish usage this expression means an annual Sabbath or Holy Day that may occur any day during the week.
Now look at your Bible again.
Mark picks up John’s account by adding that after that Sabbath – the high day of the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread – the women bought sweet spices to use in anointing the body of Jesus (Mark 16:1). This purchasing of the spices could not have been on Thursday, the annual Sabbath. It had to be on the following day, Friday.
Having made their purchases and prepared these ointments on Friday, the women then “rested the sabbath day according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56). This was a different day – the weekly Sabbath, the seventh day of the week. Upon its close, Jesus was raised from the dead exactly there days and three nights after he was buried, and the tomb closed.
Could anything be plainer?
Your Bible proves that the resurrection was not on Sunday. The crucifixion was not on Friday. Rather, Christ was crucified on Wednesday and was resurrected on Saturday, three days and three nights later. (This is all explained in much greater detail in the booklet The Resurrection Was Not on Sunday. You can find it on our website, www.thebiblefund.org.)
But then where did the Good Friday-Easter Sunday tradition come from? How did it find its way into the professing Christian Church? Why is it observed throughout the entire Western world today?
Where Easter Came From
Believe it or not, Easter was observed thousands of years before the time of Christ and the beginning of the Christian era!
Easter is merely the slightly changed English spelling of the name of the ancient Assyrian goddess, Ishtar. It was pronounced by the Assyrians exactly as we pronounce Easter today.
Hislop says in The Two Babylons that Easter “bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the ‘queen of heaven,’ whose name,
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