For most Christians, Holy Saturday is a day of waiting, the pause between Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, and Easter Sunday, his resurrection day according to the New Testament stories.

Some churches hold a religious vigil on Saturday, pausing to contemplate the death of their savior and anticipating the next day when the congregation can say “Alleluia” and “He is risen.”

Jesus died “in the ninth hour,” around 3 p.m., Friday, and had risen “when it was yet dark” Sunday. Holy Saturday, the only full day when Jesus was dead, gets little attention in the Bible’s gospels.

Saturday is skipped over in the book of John.

Luke moves from Friday to Sunday, saying, “the sabbath drew on.”

In Mark, “And when the sabbath was past” is how the Sunday text begins.

Only Matthew tells of that Saturday. In chapter 27, verses 62-66, Jesus is referred to as “that deceiver”:

“Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate,

“Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again.

“Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first.

“Pilate said unto them, Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can.

“So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch.”

Are the priests and Pharisees violating the sanctity of the sabbath by petitioning the government on Saturday?

When the stone is unsealed early Sunday morning, Jesus isn’t in the tomb.

In Matthew, “the angel of the Lord” is sitting on the rock that the angel rolled from the tomb entrance; the watch keepers shook from fear “and became as dead men.”

Mark says, “a young man … clothed in a long white garment” is in the tomb.

In Luke, it’s “two men … in shining garments” standing by the women who were going to put spices on Jesus’ corpse.

In John, Mary reported the empty tomb to two disciples who looked in and left; she stayed and saw “two angels in white” inside the tomb, then Jesus appeared outside it.

None of the gospels has the resurrected Jesus speaking of the time he was dead.

“All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth,” Jesus said in Matthew, and he didn’t mention hell.

In Revelation 1:18, Jesus said that he died, but he didn’t say what death was like: "I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death."

The four gospels show that people tell stories in different ways, maybe in combination with the writer giving particular emphasis to a perspective — like Matthew and John using angels and Mark and Luke writing about men in garments.

The four evangelists, as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are known, were not eyewitnesses, so they told what they heard in stories passed along to them.

The little differences in Bible stories can present a challenge to people who believe that every word in the Bible is divine truth. Bible study, and the study of other religious scripture, might give them a way to live with more than one story, and to appreciate the ways they vary.

The story differences show a reason there are many Christian denominations today. People see things in a variety of ways, and while they can believe in the general story, the details might make one person United Methodist, another Seventh-Day Adventist, and a third Antiochian Orthodox.

People might look to creeds, catechisms, and faith statements to know what their particular church says about death; Jesus didn't dwell on it. Someone who claims to be spiritual but not religious could be open to the morals that the stories imply rather than exactitudes that have been muddled in translation.

Though Holy Saturday is mostly passed over in scripture, it's a natural time to pause briefly at the end of Lent before attention turns to rebirth.

First Published April 4, 2015, 4:00 a.m.