A Feast Out of Season

Nine words. No journey. Eighteen centuries of explanations.

Open the sixth chapter of John and read the fourth verse: and the passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh. Nine words. On them the church built its picture of Jesus: the three Passovers, the three-year ministry, the thirty-three years.

But read the verse where it stands and a question rises that troubled preachers as early as the fourth century: the Passover is near, and nobody goes. Not the five thousand, camped on a hillside with no provisions for the road. Not the twelve. Not the Lamb Himself, commanded by covenant to appear before the face of Yahweh, and called spotless by every witness who knew Him.

Something has to give: the clause, or the Lamb.

A Feast Out of Season follows the evidence wherever it leads:

• The covenant's sworn terms, and the two commanded feasts the verse forces the sinless One to miss
• The empty year the clause creates, and the prophecy it breaks to the day
• The medieval Greek copies that marked the verse doubtful with the scribes' own critical signs
• The manuscripts where it stands in the margin, or not at all
• The early fathers who counted the Passovers of John, and never counted this one
• The quarrelsome second century, with motive, idiom, and mechanism to supply it

The strongest evidence against this book is presented first, at full strength, with a full scholarly apparatus of footnotes, and the objections are given a whole chapter argued to win. Fully illustrated with 38 original plates: manuscript facsimiles, covenant charts, maps of the land, and the chronology counted to the day.

Nothing is cut from your Bible. Everything is put on the table. Search the Scriptures daily, whether these things are so.