the belief that Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem (12:12–19) John 12:12 states that on "the next day", a great multitude who had come to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, "heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem", and so they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him. presents Jesus in Bethany "six days before the Passover", so His entry into Jerusalem can be understood as taking place five days before the Passover, on "the tenth day of the Jewish month Nisan, on which the paschal lamb was set apart to be 'kept up until the fourteenth day of the same month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel were to kill it in the evening'. "‘On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household. And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the persons; according to each man’s need you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats. Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month" (). Greek pilgrims in Jerusalem (12:20–36) Some Greeks () had also made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the feast (John 12:20). Jesus' interest in teaching the Greeks of the diaspora has already proved a matter of some intrigue in chapter 7 (). Bengel's Gnomen notes that "it is not clear that they were circumcised: certainly, at least, they were worshippers of the One God of Israel" - they were present in Jerusalem "that they might worship at the feast (). John uses the same word, προσκυνειν, proskunein, literally to kneel and kiss the ground, in in relation to the Jewish-Samaritan debate over the sacred place "where one ought to worship" (John 4:20, NKJV translation), where He announces that "the hour is coming when you will [worship] neither on this mountain (Mount Gerizim), nor in Jerusalem". Meyer's New Testament Commentary and the Expanded Bible (2011) both state that these pilgrims were "gentiles". They had presumably "heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem" on the same basis as the Jewish multitude mentioned in John