The Passion Narratives were some of the earliest oral or written accounts of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. The term passion comes from the Latin for “suffering” (patior/passus) and is found in the Bible, in Acts, “To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3, emphasis added). Although scholars differ on where the Passion Narratives begin and end in the individual canonical Gospels, they usually agree that the material dealing with the period from Gethsemane through the Grave is included (see Matthew 26:36-27:66; Mark 14:32-15:47; Luke 22:39-23:56). In the Fourth Gospel the material found in John 18:1-19:42 is often associated with the Passion.
