Until Shiloh Comes: Reconciling the Chronology of Jesus of Nazareth

By John Jennings

This book brings a fresh perspective on how important dates in the life of Jesus of Nazareth can be understood in relation to prophecy, number, calendar, religious feasts, the rotation of the priestly divisions and astronomical events of the day. It seeks to reconcile a theoretical framework provided by the Old Testament with actual observations recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

The chronology resonates with Old Testament paradigms established in the Torah, including Sabbath, Tabernacles, and the Flood. It provides a reconciliation of the priestly divisions across the First and Second Temple periods. It fulfils the prophecies of Daniel and Jeremiah and ensures that the words of the Psalmist that ‘All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them cane to be’ are quite literally true.

This book provides the first comprehensive chronology for the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It is fully consistent with biblical paradigms and Old Testament prophecy. It reconciles the biblical text to modern scientific and astronomical data. It provides hard scientific evidence to support its conclusions. Like most major scientific breakthroughs, the solution is logical, elegant, and comprehensible. It will stand the test of time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728353197

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© 2020 John Jennings. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/17/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5320-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5321-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5319-7 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scriptures marked NIV are taken from the NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (NIV):

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW

INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright©

1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™. Used by permission of Zondervan

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,

nor the staff from between his feet,

Until Shiloh comes

And to him shall be the obedience of the people.

Genesis 49:10 – translated from the original Hebrew text

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1     The Problem

Chapter 2     The historic narrative

Chapter 3     Daniel

Chapter 4     Calendar

Chapter 5     Feasts

Chapter 6     Number

Chapter 7     Census

Chapter 8     Priesthood

Chapter 9     John

Chapter 10   Temple

Chapter 11   Star

Chapter 12   Jesus

Chapter 13   Magi

Chapter 14   Theology

Chapter 15   Witnesses

Chapter 16   Conclusion

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Chronology

Bibiliography

Dedication

To my parents and grandparents who walked before

me, to my wife who has walked beside me and for my

children, whom I hope will one day walk ahead of me.

Preface

I vividly remember my daughter playing Mary in the school Nativity play when she was around 10 years old. She had no spoken words to say but simply held the baby Jesus aloft as if presenting him to the world and the heavens. It was both moving and innocent in its appeal. Unfortunately, the innocence of childhood is too quickly lost and is generally replaced by cynicism and doubt. In a modern era driven by scientific rationality then the events of the Nativity and in particular the idea of a virgin birth is often treated with disdain.

The exact dating of the events of the Nativity story has been a mystery that has defied a coherent explanation for over two thousand years. Of the gospel writers only Matthew and Luke provide any detailed narrative. For them establishing an exact chronology for these events was never their primary concern. Both agree it took place in the days of King Herod and that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea. Beyond that there is considerable divergence in what facets of the story they chose to reveal.

My starting point to establish a definitive chronology for Jesus began with studying the Book of Daniel. In particular, I had long been fascinated with Daniel Chapter 9 as it hints that there is a way to interpret text that could provide a solution to calculate when the Anointed One would come.

After much reading and research, I came across a paper written in 1990 by American theoretical physicist David Lurie. He understood that the phrase ‘the seven sevens and the sixty-two sevens,’ could be interpreted as a simple algebraic expression. He proposed that the decree that Daniel referred to was that of King Cyrus issued in 538 BCE. This decree exhorted Jews held in captivity in Babylon to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. Lurie’s solution provided an answer for the coming of the Anointed One in 6 BCE. I have extended Lurie’s ideas and instead of using an algebraic expression I substituted a straight-line equation. The detail of my reasoning is covered in Chapter 3 – Daniel.

With an overall theoretical framework in place I then looked at Luke’s Gospel and began to develop a rationale to understand how the rotation of the priestly divisions operated across the First Temple and Second Temple periods. Here my training as an accountant came to the fore. I conducted a ‘thought experiment’ in which the priesthood maintained a bank account across the entire First and Second Temple period. Like the old British Imperial system which consisted of pounds, shillings and pence then this imaginary bank account would have had a system of gold, silver and copper coins. A coin would be deposited at the start of each week on a Sunday and would cover a period of a week to the following Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Gold coins would be deposited during the major feast weeks and copper coins would be inserted every ordinary week. Thus, at the start of the First Temple period, the first division would commence proceedings and deposit one copper coin. This weekly practice would continue until all of the 24 divisions had served in the Temple. This period would constitute a single rotation of the priesthood. Using my banking analogy then at this point 24 copper coins would be exchanged for a silver coin. This is comparable with the old British Imperial system where 24 copper pennies could be exchanged for a silver florin, equivalent to two shillings. This hypothetical bank account would act as a chronometer. After adjusting for opening and closing years, the number of gold coins when divided by three (for the three major Jewish feasts per year) would establish the exact number of years the system had operated. The silver florins would establish the total number of rotations of the 24 priestly divisions and finally the copper coins would establish exactly which division was on duty in a particular week.

After much trial and error, I established exact opening and closing dates across the First and Second Temple periods. The Second Temple period reconciled with dates supplied in the Book of Ezra, the writings of Josephus, the Jewish Talmud and the calendric system developed by the Qumran community. On the basis that Jesus was born in 6 BCE I calculated a precise date in 7 BCE which would have placed Zechariah in the Temple when crowds were present. My chronology from a Lucan perspective was beginning to take shape.

I now turned my attention to the Gospel of Matthew who paid particular attention to the visit of the Magi and the star that they followed. I focussed my research on the events of 7-5 BCE and became conversant with the work of American astronomer Michael R. Molnar and in particular his book ‘The Star of Bethlehem; the Legacy of the Magi’. Unlike other astronomers, who simply imposed their solution onto the problem and disregarded events on the ground, Molnar’s approach really sought to get under the skin of the Magi and understand how they thought. He drew particular attention to the heliacal rising of Jupiter in Aries on 17 April 6 BCE which he thought signalled the birth of Jesus. My work showed that this couldn’t have been the date of birth but it could have been a date for conception.

I subsequently came across the work of a number of German academics who had, at the turn of the 20th century, proposed that the heliacal rising of Jupiter in Aries coincided with the conception of Jesus.

Using a number of motifs laid down in the Old Testament, as well as those established by church tradition, I came to see the week of 17 April – 24 April 6 BCE as being central to understanding the incarnation and the life of Jesus. I reconciled these dates with themes such as Passover, Tabernacles, the Eighth Day, Sabbath, the establishment of the First Temple when the altar was first dedicated and finally the reconstruction of the Second Temple which was started during the reign of Herod the Great. I came to the conclusion that this week had to be understood as a Second Week in Creation, a theme which I develop in Chapter 14, Theology.

Using this as a basis, I was able to identify all the major dates in the life of Jesus and establish how the twenty-four priestly divisions bore silent witness to the life of Christ.

Within the overall narrative I have sought to interweave relevant scientific data and academic research drawn from a range of disciplines from over the last 150 years. I believe that this work now brings together all these findings and provides the first clear and thorough understanding of the chronology of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

1

The Problem

1972 was an eventful year. America was still embroiled in the Vietnam War and Republican US President Richard Nixon was seeking a second term in office. On the morning of 17 June, a number of burglars were arrested inside the office of the opposition Democratic Party located in the Watergate building in Washington DC. The intruders were caught trying to tap phones and steal documents. Nixon sought to cover up the crime and for a time managed to conceal his misdemeanours. Matters came to a head in August 1974 when his role in the affair came to light. Although he was never prosecuted for his role in Watergate, he was the first president in US history to resign while in office.¹

The year was the longest on record. Atomic clocks could now measure time with unprecedented accuracy and in 1972 Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC) replaced Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the universal standard. The SI unit of time, the second, had been redefined in 1967. Prior to that it had been generally understood to be 1/86,400 of the mean solar day. The new definition stated that it was the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Accordingly, two leap year seconds were added to the year, one on 30 June and the other on 31 December ² . As the year drew to a close, the last manned mission to the moon took place although President Nixon had committed the US government to further expenditure with the Space Shuttle programme.³

At Oxford University, Geza Vermes was working as a reader in Jewish Studies. His book Jesus the Jew, which was first published by Harper Collins in 1973, helped launch a new search for the historical Jesus. Vermes was a Hungarian Jew who escaped the Nazis and had initially trained to be a Catholic priest. He rose to prominence as a Hebrew scholar who had been at the forefront of translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. These documents had been discovered in a Palestinian cave by locals in 1946–47, although further discoveries were made up to 1956. These ancient texts highlighted the practices of the Qumran community, an ascetic Jewish sect that is thought to have operated from the second century BCE to just before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Vermes’ earlier book ‘The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English’ was first published in 1962 and sold half a million copies. Doubtless his publishers at the time felt that a fresh approach to the historical Jesus would prove to be just as lucrative. His approach was indeed a breath of fresh air. Like an expert restorer he sought to peel away the layers of Christian myth that had built up over the twenty centuries that had passed since the time of Jesus’ death. He sought to reclaim Jesus as a figure in Jewish history, portraying him within the domestic, religious and political setting of first-century Palestine. From the Gospel record in Mark he argued that Jesus had four brothers and several unnamed sisters. This immediately stripped away the portrayal of Mary as a perpetual virgin, a notion which he dismissed as but one of the accumulated myths surrounding Jesus.

Vermes portrayed Jesus as a first-century hasid, a holy man who was an itinerant preacher, healer and exorcist whose mission was primarily to the Jewish community of his day. He argued that the foundations of the early Church were largely based on the teaching and writing of Paul. Unlike Jesus, Paul could legitimately claim to be a social hybrid; at one and the same time, he was both a Jew, a convert and a Roman citizen. Consequently, it would be Paul who would become the foundation stone for this new hybrid religion – one that would adopt some of the motifs of Judaism and fuse them with the teaching and practices laid down by its founder.

Vermes adopted the consensus position held by the majority of the academic community, which understood that the Gospel of Mark was the first to be written. He argued for the primacy of Mark’s Gospel as the main historical source for the life of Jesus. At a later date, mostly likely in the decade 80-90 CE, both Luke and Matthew independently drew upon the work of Mark in constructing their portraits of Jesus. Vermes argued that the birth narratives given by Matthew and Luke were late additions to the Gospels, inserted only when the main body of the work had been completed. He felt that the primary motive for their inclusion was theological rather than historical.⁴

The quest to determine an exact chronology for the events recorded in the Gospels has to date proved to be elusive. A plethora of theories abound. Supporting historical evidence from the time is severely limited and consequently there is no common consensus as to either the year of birth or the year of death of Jesus of Nazareth. In addition, no definitive explanation has yet been provided as to what celestial body constituted the Star of Bethlehem.

Within scholarly circles, three broad groups have emerged which could be described as the Traditionalists, the Revisionists and the Rationalists each of which, to a greater or lesser degree, has established their own entrenched positions.

The Traditionalist position can probably trace its origins back to the Victorian era and was led by Emil Schürer, a German Protestant theologian who devoted his life to providing an epic history of the Jews around the time of Christ. Schürer’s position was based on his interpretation of the works of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus and the facts and chronology that Josephus presented. He claimed that Herod had been installed by the Romans in 40 BCE and reigned as king for a total of thirty-seven years, thirty-four of them following the death of his opponent Antigonus. By treating the opening and closing years as complete years, irrespective of whether they were or not, this would suggest that Herod died in 4 BCE.⁵ This fitted with other facts provided by Josephus who had stated that Herod had died between a Jewish fast and feast and shortly after an eclipse of the moon. A date of 4 BCE fitted the bill. Astronomical records showed that there was a partial eclipse of the moon on 12–13 March 4 BCE and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which commenced with Passover, was celebrated on 11 April. This ensured that Herod’s death occurred somewhere between these two dates in 4 BCE. On the basis that the Magi visited Herod towards the end of his reign, this would mean that the latest date for their arrival would have been sometime in the first three months of 4 BCE. If Herod’s decision to kill all boys under two years old was carried out shortly after the visitation, then it meant that Jesus would have been born in 6–5 BCE with the earliest date for his birth being sometime in the first three months of 6 BCE.

If a date for Jesus’ birth sometime in late 5 BCE is assumed and Luke’s statement that Jesus was around thirty years old when he began his ministry was factually correct, then by extrapolation it would place the start of his ministry in late 26 CE with his death being some three years later in 30 CE. In calculating the number of years when moving from BCE to CE it is important to remember that there was no Year Zero; the calendar went straight from 31 December 1 BCE to 1 January 1 CE ensuring that the first complete year in the Common Era was 1 January 1 CE to 31 December 1 CE.

Just over four full years in the BCE era and almost 26 years in the CE era would suggest that Jesus would have been around thirty in late 26 CE. The Gospel narrative stated that Jesus was crucified on a Passover Friday which was immediately followed by a Jewish Sabbath, the Saturday. His resurrection would therefore have been on the first day of the week, a Sunday. A dating of 30 CE fitted these facts.

For the majority of the 20th century Schürer’s interpretation was the most widely accepted although there were dissenting voices, notably John Knight Fotheringham (1874-1936), a British academic and astronomer who devoted his later years to the study of historical eclipses. In 1934 he published a paper which argued that the year of death of 33 CE provided a better fit with both historical facts and astronomical data. Using evidence provided by Syrian coins he argued that the fifteenth year of Tiberius ran from 1 September 28 CE to 31 August 29 CE.⁶ This correlated with Luke’s chronology that dated the start of John the Baptist’s ministry to the fifteenth year of Tiberius. His immediate predecessor was Caesar Augustus and the date of his death is a well-attested event and occurred on 19 August 14 CE. On the assumption that John’s ministry pre-dated that of Christ by some months, then a likely date for the start of Jesus’ ministry would be in late 29 CE with his death in 33 CE. A date of 33 CE fitted the bill as it too had a Passover Friday followed by a Sabbath. A start date for Jesus’ ministry in late 29 CE combined with a death in 33 CE would correlate with the Gospel of John which indicates that the length of Jesus’ ministry was around three and a half years.

The Revisionist argument gained momentum in 1983 when materials scientist Colin Humphreys and astronomer Graeme Waddington revisited Fotheringham’s earlier work with the benefit of improved technology. Their findings were published in the scientific journal Nature on 22 December 1983. An exact date of death on 3 April 33 CE was proposed as this date was accompanied by a lunar eclipse as recorded in Acts 2:20:⁷

The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.

In order for the Gospel records to be correct, French Revisionist academic Gerard Gertoux provides strong evidence that supports a later date for the death of Herod bringing it forward to 1 BCE. Among his arguments for a later dating is the fact that in 1 BCE two eclipses were observed – one in January and the other in December. Both of these were full eclipses rather than the partial eclipse of 4 BCE. In addition, he points to a crowded timetable of events in the life of Herod, that a death at or around the time of Passover in 4 BCE would have been difficult to justify. A death in either January or December 1 BCE would provide a less crowded timetable ensuring that all the scheduled events could take place.⁸

Luke wrote that Jesus’ age at the start of his ministry was around thirty. On the basis that Luke’s statement was literally true then this would naturally bring the birth date further forward in time to the period 3–2 BCE. In addition, and in order for Matthew and Luke to be historically accurate, it must have meant that Herod lived beyond the Traditionalist version of events and died sometime after 4 BCE. Revisionists claim that many of the early Church fathers also supported a date for Jesus’ birth somewhere in the period 3–2 BCE.

Supporters of a later date for Herod’s death in 1 BCE also point to uprisings within Judea which they believe took place within a year of Herod’s death. The insurrections were believed to have focused around the Jewish feasts, the Feast of Weeks in early summer and the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn of 1 BCE. Restoration of Roman authority was imposed by the Roman commander Varus who marched south from his power base in Syria with two legions at his disposal. Along the way he subjugated a number of Judean rebels, reduced the citizens of Sepphoris to slavery and destroyed the town of Emmaus, before finally relieving a beleaguered Roman legion held up in Jerusalem. The action subsequently became known as the War of Varus, although to describe it as a war was something of a misnomer. By 1 CE order had been restored. Upon Emperor Augustus’ orders, Herod’s will would have been ratified and his son Archelaus was installed as national leader in Jerusalem. His two other sons Herod Antipas and Philip were installed as subordinate rulers, or tetrarchs, in Galilee and the area around the Golan Heights.⁹

The final group are the Rationalists, such as Vermes, who support neither a Traditionalist view nor a Revisionist view. They question the validity of the Gospel narrative and in particular the historicity of Luke’s record, especially in relation to the census and the governorship of Quirinius, whom they point out was not governor of Syria until much later in 6 CE. For this group, the birth narratives are theological constructs which were simply tacked on at the end to provide additional justification to the claims made by their authors and in particular the notion of a virgin birth.

The Traditionalists and Revisionists have both tried to reconcile the birth date with astronomical portents observed by the Magi. Traditionalists have focussed upon astronomical events in the years 7-5 BCE whereas the Revisionists have looked for possible portents in the years 3-2 BCE. Despite the advent of computer software that can mimic the motion of the night skies back in first-century Judea, no consensus has yet emerged that correlates an astronomical event or events with an exact date for the birth of Jesus.

The events of the recent past such as those of 1972 can be considered to be historically accurate due to the overwhelming body of reliable information that is available. By contrast, the historical evidence to support Jesus’ birth is limited. Consequently, other sources of information must be considered in order to provide a clear picture of exactly what happened all those years ago.

This work is an attempt to reconcile these differences and provide a reasoned argument based upon an understanding of prophecy, calendar, number, Jewish feasts, the rotation of the priestly divisions, astronomical and scientific data within the historical context of a first-century setting. Whilst many have proposed dates for astronomical observations and attempted to link dates to particular feasts in the Jewish calendar, they have generally done so in isolation and failed to provide a coherent rationale. This work attempts to redress this imbalance and in so doing offers a position that reconciles and incorporates strands of all arguments, Traditionalist, Revisionist and Rationalist.

Notes to Chapter 1

1Bernstein C and