How would you like to use the same Bible reading schedule that Jesus used? The Gospel of Luke provides some very important clues that may make it possible for you to rediscover that ancient schedule. In chapter four those clues are found in the account about a meeting he attended at his synagogue.[i] The account in Luke informs readers that Jesus was called upon to read from the scroll of Isaiah on one Shabbat.[ii] By the way, he went to services on Saturday, not Sunday. Shabbat, the Sabbath, began at sundown on Friday and ended at sundown Saturday.
Being called to read from the scrolls was a very special honor that would have been bestowed only on a Jew. This also reveals that Jesus could not only read the Hebrew language in which the scroll was written, but that he was also very familiar with the Isaiah scroll. Unlike flipping pages in a book, he would have had to “roll” through a scroll that was 23.5 feet long[iii] to find the specific section he read. The scroll did not have chapter or verse markers like you find in your Bible today. They were added over a thousand years later by Gentiles.[iv]
Jesus did not just randomly pick the section from Isaiah to read that day. The cantor handed him the Isaiah scroll to read from because it was scheduled to be read on that Shabbat. The weekly Torah readings are called the parashat hashavuah[v] and during the time of Jesus the complete cycle to read the Torah took three years to complete. This is called the “Triennial Cycle,”[vi] but do not confuse it with the “Triennial Cycle” used in synagogues today.
Luke’s information provides us with important evidence that helps fill in the details about that day in the synagogue. In order to understand it you must understand the weekly rituals of reading from the scrolls in the synagogue. As stated above, all readings were done according to a three year schedule. Based on our research this schedule is no longer followed, but the most ancient schedule that we have found, which contains the section Jesus read that day, has been placed on our website. You will find a link below.
The first scroll to be read was the Torah Scroll, which contains the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The second scroll read is the one for the haftorah, which literally means the "concluding portion." The custom of reading the haftorah dates back to the time of King Antiochus, a 2nd century BCE Syrian-Greek who forbade the Jews to read from the Torah but did not extend this ban to the Prophets. The haftorah was selected because of a thematic relationship to the weekly Torah reading or to that day or time period.
The section that Jesus read was Isaiah 61:1-2, which reveals that the Torah section that Jesus and the rest of the congregation heard first that day, was Deuteronomy 15:7–17:13. When we locate these reading on the Triennial Schedule we discover that the reading would have taken place on the last Shabbat of the month of Heshvan in the third year of the cycle. When we look up that date on a calendar today, it would be November 26, 2011.
We do not know the exact year in which Jesus read that day, so we cannot be sure of which yearly cycle this year’s date is. However, we can step back in time and read the same Torah section, with their haftorahs, on the same Shabbat. By completing the Triennial Cycle you will not only experience something that Jesus and his followers experienced, it will also add a new dimension to your understanding of the words of Jesus that are recorded in the Synoptic Gospels. Compare his words to the weekly sections of the schedule.
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