The four gospels disagree on who carried the cross and what hour it was
The Passion, from the Latin for suffering, covers the last days of Jesus and is remembered every Holy Week. Read side by side, the gospels diverge: Mark sets the crucifixion at nine in the morning after the Passover meal, while John has Jesus handed over at noon the day before it.
Matthew, Mark and Luke, the so-called Synoptic Gospels, tell broadly similar versions; John's differs a great deal. Even the boundaries of the story are disputed. Puskas and Robbins confine it to the trials and death, Pope Benedict XVI's 2011 book on Holy Week limits it to the crucifixion itself, and Matson and Richardson stretch it from the entry into Jerusalem through the resurrection, calling the whole span Passion Week.
On the broadest reading the sequence runs from the welcome into Jerusalem and the expulsion of money-changers from the Temple to an anointing, the Last Supper, prayer at Gethsemane, the arrest, hearings before the Sanhedrin and before Pontius Pilate, the execution at Golgotha and the burial by Joseph of Arimathea. Some communities add a Friday of Sorrows for Mary. The word itself later spread to accounts of martyrs, sometimes in its Latin form passio.
The variations are revealing. Only Luke has Pilate send Jesus to Herod Antipas, who hopes in vain for a miracle. The Synoptics say Simon of Cyrene bore the cross, with Mark even naming his sons Alexander and Rufus, whereas John says Jesus carried it himself. Some manuscripts of Matthew call the released prisoner Jesus Barabbas, and since Barabbas means son of the father, an early telling may have set two men named Jesus against each other. The accounts of Judas clash too: Matthew has him hurl the money into the Temple in remorse, while Acts says he bought a field with it.
Scholars also flag later additions. The verses in Luke describing Jesus in anguish at Gethsemane are missing from the oldest manuscripts and wander between locations in others, so most modern scholars think they were inserted, probably to argue against docetism. Beyond the canon, a fragmentary Gospel of Peter offers another version, part of which surfaced in Cairo in 1884.
Source: Passion of Jesus
