This was the day a lunar eclipse happened,the Gospel does say the moon went blood red.
WAS JESUS CRUCIFIED ON APRIL 3 AD 33?
by badboy 13 Replies latest jw friends
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ozziepost
Dunno, does it matter?
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badboy
iT MIGHT BECAUSE THE memorial is on wrong date!
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ozziepost
That's immaterial to me.
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apfergus
Even if it was on April 3rd according to the Gregorian calendar, remember that the day of the Memorial is set using the lunar calendar and the date changes year to year.
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Leolaia
I just checked Skycafe....Yes, there was a lunar eclipse that day but not observable from Jerusalem. By the time the moon rose above the horizon at 5:57pm, just a sliver of the lunar eclipse was left:
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badboy
Do none of these clever blogs check their facts?
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Leolaia
LOL....I love doing fact-checking myself... :))
Which blog did you find that theory on?
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TheListener
What year did Jesus die?
WTS says 33CE others say 30CE.
What year was jesus born?
I typed out a nice well worded post but lost it. So this one was short and to the point.
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Leolaia
TheListener....It is not possible to specify a date of birth because of conflicting data in Matthew and Luke. In presenting Jesus as a new Moses figure and King Herod as a Pharaoh figure (who kills the Jewish children and from whom Jesus flees into a foreign land until he is dead), Matthew squarely puts the birth of Jesus in the reign of Herod the Great who died in 4 BC. Note that some time passed from the time Jesus was born until the Magi came to Jerusalem with the news of the king's birth (2:1), and more time would have passed from then until Herod's death (2:19), so if we were take the story credulously we could not put the birth at 4 BC but sometime earlier, e.g. 6 BC or so. Luke also sets the beginning of his story in the reign of "King Herod" (1:5), but dates only the prophecy of the birth of John the Baptist to this time (Zechariah must wait until "his time of service comes to an end" before he can return to his wife). The date of Jesus' birth is instead dated to "the time Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census of the whole world; this census, the first one, took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria" (2:2), but the census that is known to have occurred during Quirinius' governorship took place in AD 6. Clearly, both these dates are incompatible.
There are several ways to try to harmonize the two datings. One is to pronounce Josephus as unreliable in his dating of the death of Herod, another is to declare that Josephus is unreliable about the date of Quirinius' census, another is to interpret the Greek of Luke 2:2 in a way that makes it refer to "the census that preceded that which was held when Quirinius was governor of Syria," a reading that makes the Greek somewhat awkward. In some cases, these suggestions are stipulative and are motivated more by harmonizing concerns than actual known historical problems outside of the biblical text, in the third case it is hard to judge that the suggestion is more plausible than the plain reading of the text. Luke also gives a very precise dating in Luke 3:1-2 of the ministry of John the Baptist (i.e. to AD 28-29), but unfortunately he does not say how old John the Baptist was at the time. It does say that "Jesus was about thirty years old when he started to teach" (3:23), i.e. born around 3-2 BC, but this falls later than Herod and before Quirinius' census. John 2:20 states that it has been 46 years since Herod's rebuilding of the Temple, which points to AD 28 as the beginning of Jesus' ministry, but again it does not say how old Jesus was. Yet John 8:57 implies that at least in appearance Jesus was "not fifty yet," a phrase which may suggest that Jesus was in his forties, i.e. born between c. 20-10 BC.
Thus there is pretty good agreement about AD 28-29 as about the time Jesus began teaching, at least between Luke and John, but the date of Jesus' birth is much less clear, and the date of the crucifixion is also ambiguous too because the length of Jesus' ministry seems to be shorter in the synoptics than in John. Since the gospels differ more widely in different areas than simply dating, the most probable explanation is that the various gospel writers had different conceptions about the chronology or varying traditions about the timing. The range of dates for the crucifixion would all fit between the limits of AD 26 to 36 which was the length of time Pontius Pilate was procurator.
The Society side steps these exegetical difficulties by using the "seventy weeks" apocalyptic survey from Daniel 9 to fix the date of Jesus' baptism. This approach is seriously flawed because it adopts a later reinterpretation of prophecy (dating to the third century AD) based on a modified text of the passage (i.e. Theodotion's Greek text rather than the Hebrew), rather than what the passage was likely originally referring to, and it must massage secular Persian chronology to achieve a pre-determined date (i.e. AD 29).
