vid

If THAT is really the source, then the claim is very far from actual quote.

Look at how Britannica puts it, for example:
Could Sextus' dating be overclaimed in Britannica, and subsequently copied by everyone without checking?

Yes, there are more dating clues in bible than just Herod and census. Luke 3:23 says Jesus started preaching at age 30, after being baptized in 15th year of Tiberus, which is quite safely dated to 29. That gives earliest possible birth date 1BC, and conflicts with Herod. Another dating of Luke that apologists have to dismiss.

and one nitpick:
Why 330? Earliest direct mention of 25th december is AFAIK Chronography of 354

Roger Pearse

Some of the texts in the Chronography predate 354. There are lists of bishops which are not brought up to date iirc, for instance.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

If anyone when Googling comes to a link for journals.cambridge.org that they can't access and if you have a Firefox browser with a Firefox extension called User Agent Switcher, you can set your User Agent to "googlebot" before clicking and you'll gain access.

If you have Firefox you can get the extension from the Mozilla site. After you install it you then have to create a User Agent profile and the definition of the googlebot is:

Googlebot/2.1 (+[url]http://www.google.com/bot.html[/url])

This will tell Cambridge that you are a googlebot doing your usual information gathering. Don't forget to set your User Profile back to "default". (You can also trick sites that want Internet Explorer by setting your User Agent as IE.)


spin

spin

I've been through all the fragments and there seems to be nothing else, so on face value it seems that the Britannica article is hopeful and the people who cite it know no better.

So which Google pages do you see that need improvement regarding the dates?


spin

vid

I presume you meant wikipedia pages.

I found these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Jesus

I also think the list of comments by ancient christians on date of announciation should be added to following page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation

squiz

Nice hack. Do you have an example document on which we can test it?

Ben C Smith

Please note that Luke does not say that Jesus started his ministry at age 30; he says he started ministry at about [ωσει] age 30. This widens the potential dates considerably, and renders Luke 3.23 only broadly useful in establishing a birth date for Jesus.

(Please note also that I am not motivated to point this out in some attempt to reconcile Matthew, Luke, and history. I think they conflict.)

Ben.

Chili

Very nice works spin and I know that you can do this well, but might it be said that all this elaboration finds its origin with the Annunciation as a Romantic expression for the onset of menopauze. The rest just comes about on its own and really is "as easy as eating and drinking."

spin

Yes, sorry, you're right.

Right. These I'd assumed.

Looked through this. I think it does well with the sources, referring to the 354 CE date as the earliest christian celebration of 25 Dec.

I've given notice in the discussion of the page that there are three different birth years supplied for the Matthean date of birth, which I'll probably put between 8-6BCE with the proviso that it could have been earlier.

ETA: In fact, I made the necessary changes.

I can't really see any problem with the birth day information, so what exact would you change?

It could be done, sure, but it wouldn't be a priority of mine, because I aimed to reduce the amount of apologetic material on Wiki as my interest. If you want to prepare the material, I guess I could post it on Wiki, if you'd like.


spin

spin

This was my Google search:

alice whealey syriac testimonium flavianum

The first item that comes up should be to a Cambridge article.

ETA: The use of the googlebot User Agent is also helpful to some other places that require subscription for ordinary users but free access so that Google can index the material. Some closed forums for example.


spin