Josephus, together with the Jewish writer Philo, records that in the time of Christ large numbers of Jews were still sacrificing the Passover lamb at their homes rather than at the Temple. This shows that many Jews understood God's original command and intent to be a domestically killed Passover celebrated at home, not a Temple-centered sacrifice. Philo makes it especially clear that two groups sacrificed the Passover in two different ways. The larger group killed the lamb at home. The smaller group, the religious leaders who controlled the Temple, followed the pattern established under kings like Hezekiah and Josiah and sacrificed it at the Temple. Because these leaders controlled the Temple, they were the ones who left the record of what was going on. The Temple-centered Passovers of Hezekiah and Josiah were administrative decisions made under extreme religious perversion, which God accepted because of hardness of heart, much as Moses permitted divorce. They did not replace the original command given in Exodus 12, Numbers 9, and Leviticus 23. The testimony of Josephus and Philo confirms that the home-killed Passover persisted and was understood as God's original intent.

Josephus, an eyewitness, records in Wars of the Jews (Book 6, Chapter 9, Section 3) that 256,500 Passover lambs were counted in Jerusalem in 4 BC, with no more than ten persons to a lamb, which amounts to about 2,700,200 people keeping the feast. His figures are accurate as to the number of lambs and people, but they cannot mean that all the lambs were slain at the Temple. The Mishna, Alfred Edersheim, and Joachim Jeremias show that the Temple's space, its three courses of slaughterers, and the two-hour slaughtering window limited the sacrifices to about 18,000 lambs, enough for only 180,000 people. That leaves Josephus' count 2,520,000 people short. Even half his figure would have required seven and a half days of slaughtering, and the full number would have required fifteen days. Josephus' numbers therefore prove that most first-century Israelites killed their own lambs at home or in inns, apart from the priests and the Temple. Two approaches to Passover ran side by side: the Temple-centered practice of the Jewish leadership, and the home-killed lamb at the beginning of the 14th, which matches Exodus 12 and which Jesus kept. The New Testament confirms this, since Mark 14:12 describes lambs being killed at the very time the disciples asked where to prepare the Passover.