Good Friday Trivia
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50 free Good Friday trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Good Friday is the quietest day in the Christian year and one of the most widely observed, and this quiz covers both the story and the customs that grew up around it. It starts with the name itself, why 'good' means holy, why the Anglo-Saxons called it Long Friday and the Germans call it the Friday of Sorrow, then walks through the Passion: Pilate and Herod, Barabbas, Simon of Cyrene, the place of the skull, the seven last words, the spear, and Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, along with what Tacitus and Josephus had to say and which years scholars think it happened. The second half is about how the day is kept: the Three Hours' Agony, the fourteen Stations, the Pope at the Colosseum, Tenebrae's snuffed candles, silent bells, black vestments and the epitaphios of the Orthodox world, plus the things people actually do, from hot cross buns and Bermuda kites to Ireland's old pub ban, the crucifixions of Pampanga, Iztapalapa's two-million-strong Passion Play and the plague vow of Oberammergau. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gets its due at the end. The easy questions suit anyone who has been to a service; the expert tier asks about Pius XII's reforms, Hong Kong's 1875 ordinance and Poor Robin's Almanac. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the day, the Passion and the traditions, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Many Catholics give up meat on Good Friday and traditionally eat which food in its place?
Fish
Fish is the traditional stand-in on days of abstinence. The custom even shaped fast food: McDonald's added the Filet-O-Fish in the 1960s after a franchise in a Catholic part of Cincinnati kept losing its Friday trade.
Q 02Good Friday's 'good' once meant holy, a sense also heard in 'good tide', an old name for which festival?
Christmas
Christmas was 'good tide' because 'good' once marked any day the church kept as sacred. The popular story that Good Friday began as 'God's Friday' is not the origin the Oxford English Dictionary gives.
Q 03Old English called Good Friday 'Long Friday', a name that survives today in which group of languages?
Nordic
Nordic languages kept the old name: Danes say Langfredag and Swedes Långfredagen. The 'long' is put down to Jesus's drawn-out suffering, or to the day's long fast and church services.
Q 04Germans call Good Friday 'Karfreitag', from the Old High German word 'kara', meaning what?
Sorrow
Sorrow: 'kara' meant grief or lament. The same Germanic root gave English 'care', which meant sorrow and anxiety long before it meant looking after someone.
Q 05The 'Maundy' of Maundy Thursday comes from the Latin 'mandatum', meaning what?
Commandment
Commandment: the name is traced to the day's Latin antiphon, 'Mandatum novum do vobis', Jesus's new commandment to love one another, given after he washed his disciples' feet.
Q 06The Good Friday Service of the Great Three Hours' Agony runs between which hours?
Noon and 3 p.m.
Noon and 3 p.m. are the hours when the Gospels say darkness covered the land. The three-hour service is credited to Jesuits in Peru, and Lutherans, Anglicans and Methodists now keep it too.
Q 07Mark's Gospel says Jesus was crucified at 'the third hour', which is about what time today?
About 9 a.m.
About 9 a.m.: Mark counts the day's hours from sunrise, so the third hour is mid-morning. John's Gospel tells it differently, with Pilate still judging Jesus at about the sixth hour.
Q 08Which Bach work, written for Good Friday in Leipzig, lay neglected until Mendelssohn revived it in 1829?
St Matthew Passion
St Matthew Passion was written for Good Friday at Leipzig's St Thomas Church. It was all but forgotten until a 20-year-old Mendelssohn conducted it in Berlin, which set off a wider revival of Bach's music.
Q 09In Luke's Gospel, Pilate learns Jesus is a Galilean and sends him to which man, in Jerusalem for Passover?
King Herod
King Herod here is Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee. Luke says he had long hoped to see Jesus work a miracle, mocked him when he stayed silent, and ended the day as Pilate's friend, having been his enemy until then.
Q 10Which prisoner did the crowd choose to have released instead of Jesus?
Barabbas
Barabbas had been jailed for insurrection and murder. Some early manuscripts of Matthew call him Jesus Barabbas, which turns Pilate's offer into a choice between two men named Jesus.
Q 11Who was compelled by the Romans to carry Jesus's cross?
Simon of Cyrene
Simon of Cyrene came from a city in what is now Libya and was just passing by. Mark names his sons, Alexander and Rufus, which suggests that Gospel's first readers knew the family.
Q 12Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion, has a name meaning what?
Place of a skull
Place of a skull is the Gospels' own translation of the name. Latin Bibles rendered it Calvaria, their word for a skull, and that is where English gets the name Calvary.
Q 13The traditional site of Calvary is enclosed within which Jerusalem building?
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Q 21On Good Friday the Pope traditionally leads the Stations of the Cross at which Roman landmark?
The Colosseum
The Colosseum was plundered as a stone quarry for centuries before the popes made it a shrine to the early martyrs, and Benedict XIV set up Stations of the Cross inside it in the 1700s.
Q 22Which Holy Week service, named from the Latin for 'darkness', has its candles put out one by one?
Tenebrae
Tenebrae ends in total darkness with a sudden crash, the strepitus, made by slamming books or banging the pews. It probably began as a signal to leave, and was later read as the earthquake at Jesus's death.
Q 23Catholic churches celebrate no Mass on Good Friday, so Communion comes from hosts consecrated on which day?
Maundy Thursday
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is shared by rival Christian denominations, so for centuries two Muslim families have kept its key and opened its door each morning as neutral guardians.
Q 14How many 'last words' or sayings of Jesus on the cross are traditionally counted?
Seven
Seven sayings are counted, yet no single Gospel has them all: three appear only in Luke, three only in John, and the last is a cry shared by Matthew and Mark.
Q 15Jesus's cry from the cross, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani', is in which sister language of Hebrew?
Aramaic
Aramaic was the everyday speech of Jesus's Galilee. The cry quotes Psalm 22, but its verb for 'forsaken' exists only in Aramaic and not in the psalm's Hebrew, so Mark keeps the words as they were spoken.
Q 16In John's Gospel, why did the soldiers leave Jesus's legs unbroken, unlike those of the two men beside him?
He was already dead
He was already dead, so there was no need to hasten the end. The soldiers broke the other men's legs so the bodies could come down before the Sabbath, and one pierced Jesus's side with a spear instead.
Q 17Which member of the Sanhedrin asked Pilate for Jesus's body and laid it in his own new rock-cut tomb?
Joseph of Arimathea
Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus in haste, since the Sabbath began at sunset. Medieval legend later sent him to Britain, where he was said to have founded the first church at Glastonbury.
Q 18Which Roman historian wrote that 'Christus' was executed under Pontius Pilate, in his account of Nero and Rome's great fire?
Tacitus
Tacitus mentions the execution while explaining whom Nero blamed for the fire. He was no friend of the new faith, calling it 'a most mischievous superstition', yet scholars treat his line as an independent Roman record.
Q 19Which scientist tried to date the crucifixion from the visibility of the new moon, and favoured AD 34?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton's study, printed after his death, asked which Passovers could have fallen after a Friday. Modern scholars run the same test with better astronomy and favour AD 30 or 33 instead.
Q 20The Stations of the Cross retrace which Jerusalem street?
Via Dolorosa
Via Dolorosa, the route Jesus is said to have walked, winds through the Old City. Stations were set up in churches far away so that people who could never make the pilgrimage could still walk it in miniature.
Maundy Thursday's evening Mass consecrates extra hosts for the next day. They are carried in procession to a side 'altar of repose', where they are kept overnight.
Q 24In French tradition, what falls silent over Good Friday because it has supposedly flown to Rome to fetch Easter eggs?
The church bells
The church bells really do stop: Catholic churches traditionally ring none from the Thursday evening before until the Easter Vigil. The tale of a trip to Rome explains the silence to children.
Q 25Which pope overhauled Catholic Holy Week services in 1955, a few years before the Second Vatican Council?
Pius XII
Pius XII's reform let the whole congregation receive Communion at the Good Friday liturgy. Since the Middle Ages only the officiating priest had done so.
Q 26In the Russian Orthodox tradition, what colour vestments do clergy usually wear on Great and Holy Friday?
Black
Black is the Slavic custom for the weekdays of Holy Week. Byzantine service books ask only for 'dark' vestments, so the colour is far less common in Greek churches.
Q 27Greek Orthodox churches carry a cloth icon called the epitaphios through the streets on Good Friday evening to re-enact what?
The burial of Christ
The burial of Christ is staged as a funeral: the cloth icon is laid on a bier covered in spring flowers and carried through the streets with all the ceremony of a real one.
Q 28A magnitude 9.2 earthquake, North America's strongest on record, struck which US state on Good Friday 1964?
Alaska
Alaska shook for more than four minutes, yet it was the tsunamis that killed most of the victims, some of them as far away as California.
Q 29Which spiced bun is traditionally eaten on Good Friday in Britain?
Hot cross bun
Hot cross bun: the cross marks the crucifixion and the spices recall those used to embalm Jesus. Buns baked on Good Friday were once believed never to go mouldy, so people hung them in the house for luck.
Q 30Under which monarch did London, in 1592, limit spiced bun sales to burials, Christmas and Good Friday?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I was on the throne when London's Clerk of Markets issued the decree. Bakers caught selling the buns on any other day had to hand their whole batch to the poor.