Easter Poll - date the Cross

JackRT said:

We also don't know the year of the Birth except to say sometime between 4BC and AD6.

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Yes, after the death of Herod the Great.

Christian Gedge said:

If I showed you a coin with Tiberius’ head on it, one year before his father died, would you be convinced that Luke was counting from his co-regency?

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No.
He still wasn't crowned Emperor until 14 AD.
29.5 AD fits with the timeline compiled from adding the time periods from Adam until the commencement of Jesus Ministry on earth. Exactly 4000 years.

keras said:

No.
He still wasn't crowned Emperor until 14 AD.
29.5 AD fits with the timeline compiled from adding the time periods from Adam until the commencement of Jesus Ministry on earth. Exactly 4000 years.

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Really? Everywhere i've looked couldn't agree on a set amount of years. What's the evidence that it was 4000?

Christian Gedge said:

Does "about thirty" mean thirty-four?

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Yes. He would have been 34 at His baptism.
Luke was quite imprecise and we know Jesus must have been past thirty, as Jewish males cannot become Priests until older than 30.

Nathaniel Red said:

Really? Everywhere i've looked couldn't agree on a set amount of years. What's the evidence that it was 4000?

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Here is the timeline I compiled by using the time periods as given in the Bible and the known historical date of the Babylonian conquest.
7000 years from the Creation to the Completion of Mankind:

Genesis 1:27 Adam was created in 3970.5 BC subtracted back from 586 BC, from:

Gen 5:3 Seth +130, Gen 5:6 Enoch +105, Gen 5:9 Kenan +90, Gen 5:12 Mahalalel +70, Gen 5:15 Jared +65, Gen 5:18 Enoch +162, Gen 5:21 Methuselah +65, Gen 5:25 Lamech +187, Gen 5:28 Noah+182, Gen 7:6 The Flood came when Noah was +600, Gen 11:10 Our year 2314.5 BC

Arpachshad +2 - born to Shem after the flood. Gen 11:12 Selah +35, Gen 11:14 Heber +30, Gen 11:16 Peleg +34, Gen 11:18 Reu +30, Gen 11:20 Serug +32, Gen 11:22 Nahor +30 , Gen 11:24 Terah +29, Gen 11:26 Abram +70, Abram was +52 when God called him and they left Ur. Our year 1970.5 BCE He lived in Haran for 23 years, then went to Canaan at age 75. Genesis 12:4 Total years so far = 2000


Gen 17:1, Abraham was 99 when the Covenant was made with God. +47 Genesis 17:1-8

Galatians 3:17 Paul states that the Law was given +430 after the Covenant. Total years elapsed until the Exodus – 2477, in our year 1493.5 BC.
[Many ancient records say Comet Typhon passed close the earth at that time. It was the cause of many of the disasters in Egypt.]

1 Kings 6:1 The Temple construction starts, in the 4th year of King Solomon +480 since the Torah was given at the Exodus.. 1 Kings 11:42 Solomon 40 minus 4 = +36, 1 Kings 14:21 Rehoboam +17, 1 Kings 15:2 Abijah +3, 2 Chron 16:13 Asa +41, 1 Kings 22:42 Jehoshaphat +25, 2 Kings 8:17 Jehoram +8, 2 Kings 8:26 Ahaziah +1, 2 Kings 11:1-3 Athaliah +6, 2 Kings 12:1 Joash +40, 2 Kings 14:2 Amaziah +29, 2 Kings 15:1-2 Azariah +52, 2 Kings 15:33 Jotham +16, 2 Kings 16:2 Ahaz +16, 2 Kings 18:1-2 Hezekiah +29, 2 Kings 21:1 Manasseh +55, 2 Kings 21:19 Amon +2, 2 Kings 22:1 Josiah +31, 2 Kings 23:31 Jehoahaz +3mths, 2 Kings 23:36 Jehoiakim +11, 2 Kings 24:8 Jehoichin +3mths, 2 Kings 24:18-20 Zedekiah +11, who ruled until the Babylonian captivity in our year of 586 BC.

Total elapsed years to the first exile of Judah = 3386.5

586 BCE + 613.5 years + 2 comes to 29.5 AD, the date of Jesus’ baptism. Luke 3:1 Plus 2 to include the total number of elapsed years, as our calendar system counts years from their commencement.

3386.5 + 613.5 = 4000 years from Adam to Jesus.

January 2020 AD - 29.5 AD = 1990.5 years since the commencement of Jesus’ Ministry.

1990.5 + 4000 = 5990.5 years, is where we are now. 5990.5 + 9.5 = 6000 years

2020 CE + 9.5 = 2029.5 AD.

Exactly 2000 years for the present Church age, until Jesus Returns.
4000 since Abraham, 6000 since Adam. Next comes the 1000 year reign of Jesus.

7000 years is God’s decreed time for mankind.
Those who have been found worthy will go into Eternity with God. Revelation 22:1-5


Addendum: Because Jesus worked in His mission on earth for 3½ years, the two ‘days’ prophesied in Hosea 6:2 and confirmed by Jesus in Luke 13:32, that He will spend in heaven from Ascension to Return, maybe should have the 3½ years added to it, making a total of 2003.5 years since 29.5 CE = 2033 for His Return and the commencement of the Millennium.

Lets look at your maths more closely:
Firstly- Herod commenced the Temple rebuild in the Eighteenth year of his reign. Which was 20-19 BC
Then- you have a wrong idea of how to treat the BC/AD changeover.
When Dionysius [the 'short', also I reckon; 'the idiot'] compiled the Gregorian calendar, he started BC, counting backward and AD counting forward; both as year one each way. The years are counted before they have elapsed. We saw this happen as year 2000 clicked up and everyone celebrated, BUT only 1999 years had passed!

So, when we look for a fulfilment of a decreed period, such as in Ezekiel 4:4-6, we must add 1 each way to our system, as I show in my timeline above. Which you seem to avoid.

Therefore - I think Herod started the Temple job in 19 BC. He actually demolished the old one and had new foundations built, the Wailing Wall is part of it, so 19 BC is the most likely start of the rebuild.
19 BC + 27 AD = 46 years. Plus two, as there is only 44 elapsed years between those 2 dates. Equals 29 AD and I stand by the timeline as per the 47 Bible verses quoted.

keras said:

Lets look at your maths more closely:
Firstly- Herod commenced the Temple rebuild in the Eighteenth year of his reign. Which was 20-19 BC
Then- you have a wrong idea of how to treat the BC/AD changeover.
When Dionysus [the 'short', also I reckon; 'the idiot'] compiled the Gregorian calendar, he started BC, counting backward and AD counting forward; both as year one each way. The years are counted before they have elapsed. We saw this happen as year 2000 clicked up and everyone celebrated, BUT only 1999 years had passed!

So, when we look for a fulfilment of a decreed period, such as in Ezekiel 4:4-6, we must add 1 each way to our system, as I show in my timeline above. Which you seem to avoid.

Therefore - I think Herod started the Temple job in 19 BC. He actually demolished the old one and had new foundations built, the Wailing Wall is part of it, so 19 BC is the most likely start of the rebuild.
19 BC + 27 AD = 46 years. Plus two, as there is only 44 elapsed years between those 2 dates. Equals 29 AD I stand by the timeline as per 47 Bible verses.

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Dionysius Exigius (aka Dennis the Short), a monk from Russia who died about 544, was asked by Pope John I to set out the dates for Easter from the years 527 to 626. It seems that the Pope was keen to produce some order in the celebration of Easter. Dionysius decided to begin with what he considered to be the year of Jesus' birth. He chose the year in which Rome had been founded and determined, from the evidence known to him, that Jesus had been born 753 years later. He did have an error in that because one emperor changed his name during his reign, Dionysius counted him twice.


He was almost certainly acquainted with a suggestion by Hippolytus (170–236) that the date of Jesus' birth was December 25, but the trouble was that Hippolytus had not backed up this claim with sound arguments. Dionysius, however, had just the argument: His contemporaries claimed that God created the earth on March 25. It was inconceivable that the son of God could have been in any way imperfect. Therefore Jesus must have been conceived on March 25. This meant that he must have been born nine months later—December 25. Dionysius also concluded that, as a perfect being, Jesus could not have lived an incomplete life so he must have died on March 25 as well!


December 25 was an auspicious choice. In 274, in Rome, the Emperor Aurelian declared December 25 a civic holiday in celebration of the birth of Mithras, the sun god. By 336, in that same city, Christians countered by celebrating the birth of Jesus, the son of God, on December 25. Christians in Antioch in 375 celebrated the birth of Jesus on January 6. Christians in Alexandria did not begin to celebrate Christmas at all until 430. So until Dionysius came along there was confusion over dates, and debates raged, even over the usefulness of celebrating the birth of Jesus at all. What had been universally important for all Christians—the pre-eminent event—was the celebration of Easter.


When, in 527, he formalized the date of Jesus' birth, Dionysius put Christmas on the map. Jesus was born, he declared, on December 25 in the Roman year 753. Dionysius then suspended time for a few days, declaring January 1, 754—New Year's day in Rome—as the first year in a new era of world history.


With a stroke of ingenuity Dionysius had managed to shift the attention of the church from Easter to Christmas. From this point in time it seemed only logical to celebrate the birth of Jesus before his death. If Jesus' death by crucifixion had made possible salvation for all people everywhere, so the argument went, then his birth was the sign that God was identifying with human kind by taking human form.


But Dionysius made a mistake in his calculations. Perhaps he had never read the gospel account of the birth of Jesus. In Matthew Jesus is said to have been born while Herod was still King (2:1). That would translate into 4 BC (or even earlier) according to the calculations of Dionysius. As a consequence, for Christians the year 2000 is not two thousand years after the birth of Jesus, but more like 2004.


That was not his only mistake. Dionysius followed the convention of his times and, as the Roman calendar moved from the year 753 to 754, he called the latter "year one" of the New World order—anno domini, the year of our Lord. The concept of naught (zero) didn't come into Europe from Arabia and India until about two hundred years later. As a result, centuries end with naught and begin with the digit one. So for us the year 2000 was the end of one millennium but it was not the beginning of the next: that occurred in 2001.


Later, when Pope Gregory tidied up the calendar on 24 February 1582, the calendar lost eleven days. To synchronise the calendar of Dionysius with the movement of the sun, October 4 became October 15, and to avoid having to make further adjustments a leap year was introduced. Pope Gregory must also have known of the mistakes made by Dionysius but all he did was to confirm them, perhaps hoping that no one would notice.


There is one other problem. Bishop Ussher (1581–1656) worked out the precise year of creation as 4004 BC (he knew about Dionysisus getting the date of Jesus birth wrong). But he also advanced the view that the earth had a total life span of six thousand years. In order to come up with this conclusion he based his calculations on all the generations mentioned in the Bible.


In reality we do not know when Jesus was born—neither the year, the month, nor the day. The chronology of our western calendar is based on mythology masquerading as theology. We do well to treat it all with the humour it deserves.

keras said:

I do not see the date of the Crucifixion as a critical time. It only denotes the end of the 69th 'week' of Daniel 9:26, followed by the cataclysm of the Roman conquest 40 or so years later.
We still await the 70th 'week' of the final seven years of this Christian era.

What is more critical is the date that Jesus commences His ministry. Which was about mid 29 AD, as Luke 3:1-3 informs us.
That date starts the final 2000 year segment of man ruling the earth and making a mess of it!

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This is a classic example of manipulating Scripture to fit your doctrine. Sadly, both the method and the doctrine are wrong, thus the conclusion is wrong.

Christian Gedge said:

If I showed you a coin with Tiberius’ head on it, one year before his father died, would you be convinced that Luke was counting from his co-regency?

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Exactly. Amen!

Christian Gedge said:

Let’s keep this simple? All we have to remember is that Dionysius never gave us a year zero. So, the timeline steps from 1 BC to 1 AD as the timeline shows.

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That's right, it is simple; Our years are counted at their commencement.
Therefore when calculating a set period over the BC/AD switch, then you must add two years to make up the full elapsed years.
But for years within either BC or AD, we just add the periods normally.

It took me a long time to sort this out, as this anomaly at the BC/AD break has confused many.
I see you do as many advise; you add 1 year. But there is no year zero both ways, you must add two.

Re your post #33; as we cannot be 100% sure as to when Herod actually started to rebuild the Temple, we must shelve that issue.
But the timeline I posted in #26 stands as positive proof of all the dates for God's Plan for mankind.

sovereigngrace said:

This is a classic example of manipulating Scripture to fit your doctrine. Sadly, both the method and the doctrine are wrong, thus the conclusion is wrong.

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Your post is a classic example of a persons precious doctrine being challenged and they are unable to rebut it. Tough!

Christian Gedge said:

It's getting near Easter! We celebrate the cross and resurrection because it was the apex of human history. We agree that the earth-shattering sacrifice on Calvary was the fulfillment of that which was written.

Why is it then that there isn't unanimous agreement about the date of the crucifixion? Experts differ from approximately AD 27 to AD 36 as to when it happened and followers say it doesn't matter much anyway. It does matter. It is the center point of prophecy! Entire prophetic systems stand or fall on correct timing as it concerns the chronology of the cross.

So when? Exactly when was it?

Full article here

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The thinking in that part of the world is event oriented, not time oriented. You see the writers of the Bible referred to a time period as when so and so was reigning. That is an event. The writers of the BIble lived in a culture that does not care WHEN something happened but THAT it happened. So no one recorded the year Jesus was born or the year he did with any kind of historical link where we can put a date on it. The whole of the BIble pretty much is like this as that was their orientation.

We in the west are time oriented. We want to know when. As to prophesy depending upon that event, that is only if one is a dispensationalist, that is one thinks there are world events that depend upon ticks of the clock.

The only one that I can think of in the NT where ticks of the clock play a role is the prophesy that some of those who were responsible for Jesus' death, the Jewish leadership, would see "him coming in the clouds" which means the judgement of God not him taking a cloud flight down. The Jewish people, particularly Jerusalem, was severly judged in 70 Ad by God and those who pierced him saw it. That generation saw what Jesus said they would. That is the only time table I can think of.

Jesus' second coming is dependent upon events on the earth, not ticks of the clock. So when the crucifixion happened, exactly the year, is not important if one understands Matthew 24 as those who were watching for the signs to leave Jerusalem. (They did when they saw the armies surrounding the place as Jesus told them.)

Christian Gedge said:

I can't agree with you Dorothy. The keeping of time in the Old Testament was very strict with their new moons and sabbaths etc.

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Dear CG, the moons are an event. Their basis of time was an event that is not a continuous movement of sun and earth in relationship. It is still event oriented. You want to know a year measured not by events. They measured by events.

Then, when the New Testament opened, it was with John declaring, "The kingdom of God is at hand," and after him came Jesus saying, "The time is fulfilled!" (Mark 1:15) He was referring to a precise count of years that provide us with accurate dates right down through the inter-testament era.

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Why didn’t any of them ever mention time then? Why didn’t they tell us when Jesus was born, the month and day? Or how many years since Augustus reigned so we could pinpoint the year?
Just because they used the word “time” doesn’t mean hours, minutes, and year. Even we don’t use “Time” to mean hour and minute every time.

Christian Gedge said:

Okay, so they measured by "events." Well, the biggest event in history was the atoning death of Christ. Yes? So, what Im asking is, when was it?

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When Jesus was 33. When Pilot was governor. At the Passover.

It relates to the count of Sabbath cycles (weeks) prophesied by Daniel. And they were mentioned as "the times" by Jesus and Paul. John also alluded to them.

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So when did that clock start ticking? Why did no one who was there and wrote about it mention the date?

Dorothy Mae said:

So when did that clock start ticking?

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Daniel wrote the following vision:

Dan 9:24 “Seventy weeks have been determined
concerning your people and your holy city
to put an end to rebellion,
to bring sin to completion,
to atone for iniquity,
to bring in perpetual righteousness,
to seal up the prophetic vision,
and to anoint a Most Holy Place.
25 So know and understand:
From the issuing of the command to restore and rebuild
Jerusalem until an anointed one, a prince arrives,
there will be a period of seven weeks and sixty-two weeks.
It will again be built, with plaza and moat,
but in distressful times.
26 Now after the sixty-two weeks,
an anointed one will be cut off and have nothing.
As for the city and the sanctuary,
the people of the coming prince will destroy them.
But his end will come speedilylike a flood.
Until the end of the war that has been decreed
there will be destruction.
27 He will confirm a covenant with many for one week.
But in the middle of that week
he will bring sacrifices and offerings to a halt.
On the wing of abominations will come one who destroys,
until the decreed end is poured out on the one who destroys.”

The clock started ticking in the 7th year of King Artaxerxes when he issued the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. That was 457 BC. Messiah the Prince started his mission 483 years later, just as the prophecy predicted.

Dorothy Mae said:

Why did no one who was there and wrote about it mention the date?

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Actually, Luke wrote that the Lord started his mission shortly after John the Baptist:

Luke 3:1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, 2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.