Could the Emperor Maximinus Prescription of the Acts of Pilate Have Been 'Positive' - i.e. to Support a Particular Sect?

[Charles Wilson]

Qumran-2.jpg (178.28 KiB) Viewed 4201 times

[Charles Wilson]

From Eisenman and Wise, Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, ISBN-10: 0140232508 ISBN-13: 978-0140232509

[Secret Alias]

I literally did nothing.

[DCHindley]

Parker & Dubberstein (Babylonian Chronology) dates Nisan 15 of 21 CE, based on Cunieform tablets, to April 17 (Julian) 21 CE. Whether that is a Friday or not I do not know. It is also not known if the Judeans were following Babylonian 19 year intercalation cycle at this time, or doing it independently with some sort of 3 yr cycle.

This online calculator says that April 17, AD 21, was a Thursday in the Julian calendar. Another calculator agrees. No idea how accurate any of this is.

My feeble understanding is that Judeans in the homeland continued to use actual observation of the first crescent to determine the 1st day of any lunar month, while the Babylonians long before had switched to calculated system to determine the date. This makes it possible for the Julian date of the 1st visible crescent to be one, even two, days delayed, so there you could have 15 Nisan occur on Friday in 21 CE.

But not so fast! Babylonians also added intercalated months as a 2nd Adaru or a 2nd Ululu, while Judeans reportedly only intercalated an extra Adar, not Elul. Judeans of the diaspora would use Macedonian months. I think the Macedonian calendar, which was also Lunar, followed the Babylonian system, but this is subject to debate, as an extra intercalated month was introduced into it in 46/47 CE. I seem to recall they both may have used 3 (or was it 8?) yr intercalation schemes, although the sages tried to intercalate if the cycle would put 15 Nisan before the vernal equinox. Of course it is possible for authorities, even ancient ones, to be wrong.

DCH

[Secret Alias]

EVEN. These guys were a bunch of morons. Look at how many times they confirm the existence of salamanders and the phoenix!

[Ben C. Smith]

EVEN. These guys were a bunch of morons. Look at how many times they confirm the existence of salamanders and the phoenix!

Salamanders exist:



So does Phoenix:

[Secret Alias]

But the Patristic salamanders were born from fire or lived in fire or multiplied in fire. I forget. It's amazing how much of my brain space is devoted to complete nonsense.

[Secret Alias]

Here it is. They always made terrible arguments for the existence or omnipotence of God like Gregory Thaumaturgus:

If then the salamander, a mortal animal subject to corruption, renders the burning quality of a flame ineffectual because of its great amount of coolness, how should we deny that God, who is superior to death and corruption, possessed impassibility when he encountered death?

Gregory of Nyssa:

There is also another species of “generation” besides these, in which the cause is immaterial and incorporeal, but the generation is an object of sense and takes place by corporeal means;—I speak of the word which is begotten by the mind: for the mind, being itself incorporeal, brings forth the word by means of the organs of sense. All these varieties of generation we mentally include, as it were, in one general view. For all the wonders that are wrought by nature, which changes the bodies of some animals to something of a different kind, or produces some animals from a change in liquids, or a corruption of seed, or the rotting of wood, or out of the condensed mass of fire transforms the cold vapour that issues from the firebrands, shut off in the heart of the fire, to produce an animal which they call the salamander,—these, even if they seem to be outside the limits we have laid down, are none the less included among the cases we have mentioned. For it is by means of bodies that nature fashions these varied forms of animals; for it is such and such a change of body, disposed by nature in this or that particular way, which produces this or that particular animal; and this is not a distinct species of generation besides that which is accomplished as the result of nature and matter.

[Ben C. Smith]

But the Patristic salamanders were born from fire or lived in fire or multiplied in fire. I forget. It's amazing how much of my brain space is devoted to complete nonsense.

Paracelsus designated the salamander an "elemental of fire" based on such legends. (Gnome = earth; undine = water; sylph = air.)

[Ben C. Smith]

Asbestos was thought by some in the Middle Ages to be salamander skin.