Tristan Scott

No, I'm sure they had some method, I just don't know what it was.

I'm also saying that it seems that it's hard to pinpoint bithdates of most figures of this era. The Stoic Seneca, for example, his birthdate is not known, even Herod the Great's birthdate cannot be pinpointed to the actual year, yet I'm sure Herod's geneology is well known.

aa5874

Since the writing of Genesis it would appear that there was a Jewish calender.

In the book called 1 Chronicles at ch. 27, it will noted that the Jewish calender had at 12 months.

DCHindley

Most likely a Greek source would use the Seleucid era from Syria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleucid_era

This era starts with the return of Seleucus I Nicator to Babylon in 311 BC after his exile in Ptolemaic Egypt. The starting point in the year for goverment business was in autumn, but the common people and many business contracts assumed the year began in spring. The calendar would contain lunar months using the Macedonian month names.

There may also be regional differences in whether the stubby part of a year between the actual seizure of control of the government to the beginning of the next calendar year was treated as a "year" of reign or as an "accession year" that does not go into the count of regnal years. The start of the 1st day of a month could vary by a day or so depending on whether it is established by observation or calculation. It is believed that both the Seleucid common and the civil calendars used calculated months, most likely identical to one another.

A Jewish source could use a lunar calendar, either adopting the local version of it as used in the temple (starting in autumn) or use the civil calendar (started in spring). It might call months by Hebrew name or by number (this is where epoch comes in).

A Roman source would use the Julian calendar as it was practiced by the early 1st century (it went through some changes in its early days). Months are fixed as we know them today and have Latin days. New year is Jan 1st by 1st century. Year may be measured by rule of the emperor, which has similar accession year issues as Seleucid calendar, or by naming a pair of consuls governing in Rome, which can be tricky as sometimes consuls die or for other reasons are replaced so there could be more than two - so which two any one source picks may differ from another. We do have several surviving lists of consuls, but we do not always have a complete lists of all consuls governing in any one calendar year.

Josephus used many sources, each of which used one of these dating systems, but makes no attempt to adjust for era or epoch used, and thus his dates can be hard to establish exactly, even when he gives a precise date. Most all historical sources have this degree of uncertainty to them, even when precisely dated. Some business contracts are "double dated" by two calendars just to make sure dates of contracts are not misinterpreted.

DCH

aa5874

But, even if the birthdates of many significant persons of antiquities cannot be found, the date or time of their deaths have been recorded using the lenght of time that the Emperor of that period reigned.

In the NT, John the Baptist, started preaching in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, and the supposed Jesus was around thirty years sometime afterwards, but even though some of the authors of the Jesus stories were claimed to be disciples of Jesus, none of them used an exact year of reign of Augustus or Tiberius to date the birth or death of Jesus.

The death of Jesus must have been very significant to the disciples and followers, if he did exist, and claimed he would have been killed by the chief priest.

The disciples were supposedly present in the night when he was arrested, and the women like Mary Magdalene and the other Marys saw Jesus on the cross.

Jesus is claimed to have died at Passover, sometime around the 14th day of Nissan, yet no author even the author of gLuke who claimed to have used the testimony of eyewitnesses, stated exactly the year Jesus died with respect to the reign of Tiberius or the governorship of Pilate.

The most significant date, the date of his death, to soldify the historicity of Jesus is missing.

Many thousands of persons would have known the date that Jesus died, if he really had thousands of followers and was put on trial and executed for blasphemy.

And what undermines the historicity of Jesus even more is that the persons who went to view the dead body of Jesus could not find it.

So, we have no specific date of death, and no dead body of Jesus.

The authors of the Jesus stories resolved the matter by claiming Jesus resurrected and ascended through the clouds, still without any specific date of ascension, after satating that he was conceived through the Holy Ghost of God.

The historicity of Jesus is in serious jeopardy.

Tristan Scott

Not always, look at Tacitus, there is no concensus as to when he died. But I'm not debating that there was no real record of the Jesus figure's birth or death, or for that matter that there was any contemporary record of such a person. The lack of secular contemporary records of the Jesus figure has been known for 2000 years, it's nothing new. The fact that there wasn't leaves other possibilities.

One would be that Jesus is a complete fabrication

One is that the Jesus figure is overstated in the NT and other religious sources. He could have just been a small time preacher in Galilee, who's following and stature multiplied after his death.

Another could be that he is modeled after someone else, a Macabee perhaps or some other Jewish hero of the era. Maybe a Zealot or Essene, or maybe just an insurgent.

Another could be that he is a composite of Jewish leaders of the era. This is particularly compelling when you consider that many of the Jesus teachings found in the NT are similar to the teachings of Hillel, a liberal Jewish rabbi a generation older than the Jesus figure who founded a whole new school of Jewish thought. If we consider the upheaval going on in the Jewish community after the Macabees-you know a lot of times we forget that the birth of Christianity coincided with the birth of Rabbinic Judaism-we can see how Christianity could have splintered from all of this as a monotheism for gentiles. (This, of course could have happene with the other possibilities I have enumerated as well.)

Anyway, since we have to speculate because all of the information we have is tainted from one degree or another, I think it's important to logically look at possibilities.

eheffa

The Divine Son of God, Second person of the Trinity, Saviour of the World character of the Canonical Gospels didn't make it onto your list of possibilities... It does seem a stretch when you consider how flawed this picture really is - unless of course God values credulity & hates the skeptic. :constern01:

-evan

aa5874

The one that Jesus is a complete first century fabrication is the one I am pursuing. The other possibilities are far weaker to argue based on the information I have seen.

If Jesus did exist and was a Jew, it is very difficult for me to understand why he would be called Christ and eventually worshipped as a God after being executed by the request of the Jews for blasphemy, that is, Jesus was eventually worshipped by Jews after he was executed for claiming to be a God or his Son.

Jesus was just propaganda to deter the Jews from believing and expecting the true Messiah, the true Christ, as found in their sacred scriptures, that was expected to destroy the Romans or all the enemies of the Jews.

Now, unlike Jesus of the NT, there are no extant supposed biographies of Tacitus where his birth and death are mentioned multiple times and still all dates of the events are either ambiguous or missing.

Virtually every author of the NT wrote that Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, yet every one of them failed to mention the specific time of his death.

A letter writer called Paul preached that Christ was crucified and died all over the Roman Empire and never once mentioned the specific dates of these most important events.

There is an abundance of information about the supposed crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus, probably more than any other character of antiquity, when an earthquake and darkness covered the area for hours, yet no secular writer in the extant history of mankind can pinpoint these calamities within a specific year in the reign of Tiberius.

Tristan Scott

No they did not. I feel comfortable enough with the history of how and why Jesus became God to know that these are not possibilities.

ynquirer

Your notion of ‘the true Christ’, as found in the scriptures, is defective, but this is a different discussion. However, within your own approach, limited though it is, calling Jesus ‘the Christ’ would have been of use for Josephus to accomplish his political ends, which were nothing other than deter the Jews from believing and expecting the Nationalist messiah.

Tristan Scott

I'm not sure why you find it difficult to believe that this would be possible. Do you think all Jews of the 1st. c.(or any century for that matter) spoke with one voice. Judaism has never been a religion that dicouraged disagreement, disagreement is a cornerstone of studying Torah. If you are referring to the NT accounts, it is clear that there was a lot of disagreement among Jews over the Jesus figure. There could have been many reasons for all this, the most likely being that he never claimed to be a deity and if he was executed it was either for political reasons internal to the Jewish community or it could have been that the Romans saw him as an insurgent and executed him unilaterally. If the latter were the case, it is easy to see why the account would have been later redacted to put all the blame on the Jews and absolving the Romans.

Who do you think instigated this propaganda?