Mark 14:1 It was now two days before Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread. The leading priests and the teachers of religious law were still looking for an opportunity to capture Jesus secretly and kill him.
The account goes on to say that after Jesus held the Passover meal with his disciples, he was arrested and tried before the Sanhedrin. Does anyone actually think the Sanhedrin would hold a criminal trial then, or is this an inconsistency in the gospels?
It's an excellent point, and of course it is absolutely true that even capital trials under Jewish Law were postponed until after the holiday, even if they were almost completely through the process of adjudication.
Now, what I am about to say is something that I have no conclusive proof for, but I strongly am of the opinion that the accounts of Jesus' comings and goings around Jerusalem in the gospels are the results of compressed and merged narratives.
If nothing else, I cannot help notice that in Matthew 21, when Jesus enters the city, the people are waving palm branches and shouting
hosha na hosha na, and
baruch ha-ba b'shem Hashem (Blessed is he who comes in God's name). Now, there's only one holiday when Jews are waving palm branches, and singing
hosha na hosha na, and reciting Psalm 118 (of which the third or fourth line to last is "Blessed is he who comes in God's name...")-- that holiday is Sukkot, the Festival of Shelters (sometimes translated, unfortunately, as the Feast of Booths, or the Feast of Tabernacles), which takes place about a week after the High Holidays, in the autumn. In fact, to this very day, Jews still wave palm branches (they are called
lulavim, singular
lulav), sing
hosha na hosha na (literally it means "save us," and it is a prayer for rain), and recite the Hallel, which is Psalms 113-118. The scene is unmistakable. It could not be anything else.
But, by Matthew 26, without Jesus ever appearing to have departed and returned from Jerusalem, and without any great passage of time being related, all of a sudden it's about to be Passover! Now, to me, it seems deeply unlikely that the authors of the gospels would not be able to tell Sukkot from Passover, or would mix the two up out of ignorance. It seems far likelier that there were two narratives of Jesus in Jerusalem: one where Jesus enters the city at Sukkot, and one where he either enters or is already at Jerusalem at Passover; and at some point in the redaction of the gospel texts, the two narratives were fused and compressed for the sake of brevity and preservation of dramatic tension.
My point in relating that example is to say that, presumably, if there had been an actual Sanhedrin trial of Jesus (which, actually, I doubt that there was at all-- and if there were, it would have been entirely improper, and conducted by a partial, corrupted Sanhedrin) it probably would have been after the holiday, but this fact has simply been redacted out of the gospel account in order to preserve dramatic tension and brevity.
