Ben C Smith

IOW, you have no examples of people who derive their dating of the life of Christ from Arius.

Ben.

mountainman

What about the Jewish Hebrew scholars
who dont mention any Jesus at all in the
overall scheme of history and conjecture,
and do not regard the NT as anything special?

(See Momigliano on Jewish belief and the Torah)



The Jews and Arius have a common perspective.


Best wishes


Pete Brown

PhilosopherJay

Hi Joe,

Yes, I think we do need to conflate Matthew and Luke to get the 33/30, but we also need to ignor a lot of contrary evidence.

John tells us that Jesus is approximately 50 and dies under Pontius Pilate. If we go by Josephus (and his dating may be an interpolation) we get 26 C.E. - 37 C.E. for the time of Pontius Pilate. This gives us 23 "B.C.E. to 14 B.C.E. for the birthdate of Jesus. So, from John, we get 26 B.C.E. to 26 C.E. as the earliest lifetime dates for Jesus and 14 B.C.E. to 37 C.E. as the lastest dates for Jesus

Mark gives us no age but we are only given events that seem to happen in the time of Pilate, 26-37 C.E. Because of his lack of information, he is easy to harmonize.


Matthew seems to give us no specific birthdate, but tells us that Jesus was still a child in Egypt when Herod died. If we assume that a child in the Hebrew tradition is twelve or under, we may take this 16 B.C.E. - 4 B.C.E. as his range. He also portrays Jesus dying under Pilate, so we have a range of from 16 B.C.E. to 37 C.E.

The thing to notice here is that without Luke, if we try to harmonize the three gospels of Mark, Matthew and John, the best we can do is select a date from approximately 14 B.C.E. to 37 C.E. This harmonizes John and Matthew and does not contradict Mark. We can say that Jesus was born around 14 B.C.E. escaped to Egypt and came back as a child at the age of 10 or 11 in 4 B.C.E. He was executed at the age of 50 in 37 C.E.

Let us call this the Three-Gospel-Harmony #1.

It is only when we bring Luke into the mix that things gets impossibly mixed up. Luke gives two dates for the birth of Jesus, 6 C.E. (the time of the census) and the time of Herod <4 B.C.E. At this point, the best we can do is say that he was mistaken about the 6 C.E. date and harmonize him with the 14 B.C.E.-37 C.E. date that we found from the other three gospels.
But then he goes and tells us that John the Baptist (approximately the same age as Jesus) started preaching in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. This is 28-29 C.E. He then talks about another historical event (3:19) the marrying of Herod to his brother's wife, which appears to happen post 32-33 C.E. according to Josephus. Jesus' ministry is less than one year in Luke, so we have to assume that Jesus is killed between 33-37.
So within Luke there are two contradictorary dates the <4 B.C.E. and 6 C.E. dates for the birth of Jesus and the 29-30 and 33-37 date for the crucifixion. However, since the second dates are only contradictions created by using the information in Josephus, we can suggest that Josephus screwed up and ignor these contradictions and take the first dates of <4 B.C.E. for the birth and 29-30 for the crucifixion.
Overlooking the internal contradictions of Luke, we can harmonize some of his dates with Mark and Matthew. < 4 B.C.E. to 29-30.
We, unfortunately, have to kick out John and his information about Jesus being around 50.

We may call this Three-Gospel-Harmony #2.

This second harmony does not actually give us Jesus' age at the time of his death. Luke knows nothing about the flight to Egypt and appears to directly contradicts Matthew when he says (2:41) "Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover". But there is no actual reason in the texts themselves to place the birthdate in 4 B.C.E. and give the age of Jesus at death at 33.

So we can say that by ignoring contrary evidence in the gospels, we get the death date of 30 C.E. from Luke's single sentence that John began preaching in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. However there is nothing to suggest the age of 33. This seems to be arrived at by the desire to minimize the apparent contradiction between Jesus being in Egypt as a child as Matthew tells us and Luke telling us that he went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. If he was born in 4 B.C.E., just prior to Herod's death, then he could have spent only a few months in Egypt and still attended Passover in Jerusalem. A death at the age of 33 gives us the best possible harmony between Matthew and Luke in this regard.

Now, in considering the age of Peter Parker and Spiderman, we should note that in certain comics, he is drawn as as teenager 15-17 years old. In other comics he is drawn as a young man 20-30 years old, and in still other recent ones, around 35 years old. It may not be possible to harmonize all these story arcs, but by ignoring certain contradictions within the story arcs and ignoring either the earliest or latest ones, we should be able to present an accurate timeline for his life which matches with historical events mentioned in the comics. Trying to harmonize the movies with the comics will present its own set of problems, but if we are willing to turn a blind eye here or there, it should not be too difficult.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay





Luke also tells us that John is born in the days of Herod and Jesus follows some months later. So basically we

andrewcriddle

I'll just add that according to Josephus Pilate governed Judea from c 26 to 36 CE. Hence a crucifixion under Pontius Pilate must have occurred in that date range.

Andrew Criddle

ETA

PhilosopherJay beat me to this sorry.

squiz

I must have missed this one. What is your reference for this?

PhilosopherJay

Hi Squiz,

The key text in John is this:

8.56 Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad." 8.57 The Jews then said to him, "You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?" 8.58 Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." 8.59 So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.

This appears to suggest that Jesus was almost fifty years old. That early Christians took this as the correct interpretation and that Jesus was almost fifty comes from the text "Against Heresies." This text is attributed to Irenaeus by Eusebius. Eusebius suggests he wrote it in the second half of the second century.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2:22

5. They, however, that they may establish their false opinion regarding that which is written, "to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord," maintain that He preached for one year only, and then suffered in the twelfth month. [In speaking thus,] they are forgetful to their own disadvantage, destroying His whole work, and robbing Him of that age which is both more necessary and more honourable than any other; that more advanced age, I mean, during which also as a teacher He excelled all others. For how could He have had disciples, if He did not teach? And how could He have taught, unless He had reached the age of a Master? For when He came to be baptized, He had not yet completed His thirtieth year, but was beginning to be about thirty years of age (for thus Luke, who has mentioned His years, has expressed it:"Now Jesus was, as it were, beginning to be thirty years old," Luke 3:23 when He came to receive baptism); and, [according to these men,] He preached only one year reckoning from His baptism. On completing His thirtieth year He suffered, being in fact still a young man, and who had by no means attained to advanced age.Now, that the first stage of early life embraces thirty years, and that this extends onwards to the fortieth year, every one will admit; but from the fortieth and fiftieth year a man begins to decline towards old age, which our Lord possessed while He still fulfilled the office of a Teacher, even as the Gospel and all the elders testify; those who were conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord, [affirming] that John conveyed to them that information. And he remained among them up to the times of Trajan. Some of them, moreover, saw not only John, but the other apostles also, and heard the very same account from them, and bear testimony as to the [validity of] the statement. Whom then should we rather believe? Whether such men as these, or Ptolemæus, who never saw the apostles, and who never even in his dreams attained to the slightest trace of an apostle?

6. But, besides this, those very Jews who then disputed with the Lord Jesus Christ have most clearly indicated the same thing. For when the Lord said to them, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day; and he saw it, and was glad," they answered Him, "You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?" John 8:56-57 Now, such language is fittingly applied to one who has already passed the age of forty, without having as yet reached his fiftieth year, yet is not far from this latter period. But to one who is only thirty years old it would unquestionably be said,"You are not yet forty years old." For those who wished to convict Him of falsehood would certainly not extend the number of His years far beyond the age which they saw He had attained; but they mentioned a period near His real age, whether they had truly ascertained this out of the entry in the public register, or simply made a conjecture from what they observed that He was above forty years old, and that He certainly was not one of only thirty years of age. For it is altogether unreasonable to suppose that they were mistaken by twenty years, when they wished to prove Him younger than the times of Abraham. For what they saw, that they also expressed; and He whom they beheld was not a mere phantasm, but an actual being of flesh and blood. He did not then want much of being fifty years old; and, in accordance with that fact, they said to Him, "You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?" He did not therefore preach only for one year, nor did He suffer in the twelfth month of the year. For the period included between the thirtieth and the fiftieth year can never be regarded as one year, unless indeed, among their Æons, there be so long years assigned to those who sit in their ranks with Bythus in the Pleroma; of which beings Homer the poet, too, has spoken, doubtless being inspired by the Mother of their [system of] error:—
Οἱ δὲ θεοὶ πὰρ Ζηνὶ καθήμενοι �*γορόωντο Χρυσέῳ ἐν δαπέδῳ:



The MontanistTertullian in Adv. Judaeus (8.11-18) written circa two hundred also gives the age of Jesus at the time of his death as thirty.

Richard Carrier has an interesting article on a different topic at http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...r/thallus.html, which mentions this quotation by a 9th century Monk named Syncellus who quotes Eusebius:

Jesus Christ..underwent his passion in the 18th year of Tiberius [32 AD]. Also at that time in another Greek compendium we find an event recorded in these words: "the sun was eclipsed, Bithynia was struck by an earthquake, and in the city of Nicaea many buildings fell." All these things happened to occur during the Lord's passion. In fact, Phlegon, too, a distinguished reckoner of Olympiads, wrote more on these events in his 13th book, saying this: "Now, in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad [32 AD], a great eclipse of the sun occurred at the sixth hour [noon] that excelled every other before it, turning the day into such darkness of night that the stars could be seen in heaven, and the earth moved in Bithynia, toppling many buildings in the city of Nicaea.

We may presume that Eusebius knew that Herod died in 4 B.C.E. and thus presume that he is saying that Jesus was at least 35 years old when he died.

This raises an interesting question. The view that Jesus died at thirty was evidently the view of the Valentinian gnostics such as Ptolemaeus and the gnostic Montanists in the second century. The view that he died at fifty was probably, if we follow the tradition of Irenaeus, the view of the early Catholic Church. That he died at thirty-five plus was apparently the view of Eusebius and the Fourth century Roman Catholic Church. Who was actually the first person to suggest that Jesus died at age 33?

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Minimalist

True, but.

Both Matthew and Luke indicate that John the Baptist was arrested before Jesus began his ministry. Josephus confirms that he was arrested and killed by Herod Antipas.

However, Luke also claims that J the B was upset about a marriage between Antipas and Herodias, widow of Phillip of Iturea. Phillip did not die until 33/34 AD. (Josephus, again.) Further Josephus confirms that a marriage did take place, but adds the logical stipulation that Antipas had to obtain the approval of Emperor Tiberius as both Antipas and Phillip were Roman client-kings and such a matter would be a matter of state. Antipas could hardly sail to Rome and back in less than a few months so it is fairly safe to assume that such a wedding could not have taken place before 35AD. Is it reasonable to think that J the B would have been denouncing a marriage, between two rulers of other countries (he was a Judean, living under direct rule) before such a marriage had taken place?

Thus, even assuming that John was arrested in the later part of 35 it does not leave a great deal of time for "Jesus" to have started his ministry, do all his magic tricks, and still be crucified by Pilate in the early Spring of 36 (which is when Passover always occurs.) It's really just a matter of a few months.

aa5874

According to NASA records on total eclipses in the 1st century, there was no total eclipse over Judea at 32 AD, there was a total eclipse at 29 CE, but it passed towards the northern border of present day Israel, and it lasted no more than 2 minutes during its path.

See http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclips...Eatlas0021.GIF

Minimalist

They really aren't interested in "facts", aa.

PhilosopherJay

Hi aa5874,

This is consistent with the Phlegon story being a forgery. Not a great surprise with the information coming from Eusebius.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay