Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

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Rabbi Milton
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by Rabbi Milton »

Stephan Huller wrote:
> But what do you do about the Sabbath reference in John 19:31? If the Day of Preparation
> was just before the Sabbath how could the fifteenth have been on a Wednesday?
i.e:
Why shouldn't Christian revisionists have the chief priests ignoring dictates of the Torah,
given that they have the Messiah breaking leavened bread in depictions of the Last Seder?

These are the wrong questions entirely. As John is presumed from Rev. to have been a
prophet, and not just an apostle, the questions should be:

What do you do about the violation of the prohibition against doing ordinary work by the
chief priests (going to Pilate, entering his domain, submitting pleadings before a pagan
overlord on an ordinary matter so as to neglect overriding duties at the Temple in going to the
sepulchre & sealing it)? How could the day after the Crucifixion have been on a Saturday, let
alone on the 15th?
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by Peter Kirby »

Welcome to the forum, Rabbi Milton. Good questions. :)
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by Secret Alias »

What do you do about the violation of the prohibition against doing ordinary work by the chief priests
:scratch:
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semiopen
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by semiopen »

[wiki]Hebrew_Roots/New_Moon[/wiki]
The Sanhedrin, which was the council of elders in Israel, would confirm the sighting of the new moon based upon reliable witnesses and shofars were blown in accordance with the scripture to announce the beginning of the month.
My impression is that this is total BS, an invention of the writers of the Talmud. There apparently was a lunar calendar, but it's not clear to me how Rosh_Chodesh was worked out.

However if the sects were actually on two different calendars, it's possible that Passover could happen on wildly different dates. Note Thanksgivukkah
Thanksgivukkah is a holiday name portmanteau neologism given to the convergence of the American holiday of Thanksgiving and the first day (and second night) of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah on Thursday, November 28, 2013
I don't know of any evidence in the NT that Yoshke was on a different calendar than the rest of the country.

PS - Essene Calendar http://www.bibarch.com/concepts/calendr ... lendar.htm
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by semiopen »

Hebrew_calendar
Traditionally, for the Babylonian and Hebrew lunisolar calendars, the years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19 are the long (13-month) years of the Metonic cycle. This cycle, which can be used to predict eclipses, forms the basis of the Greek and Hebrew calendars, and is used for the computation of the date of Easter each year.
Probably this was done in Second Temple times, it's difficult to imagine it during the First Temple.

Regarding the Essenes Solar calendar -

It seems everyone gets impressed by 364 divided by 7 equals 52, where 364 is almost 365. However a solar year is 365.25 days so this becomes a problem. This started bothering me yesterday because it blows up the theory that Passover would always start on the same day (Wednesday).
With only 364 days, it is clear that the calendar would after a few years be very noticeably different from the actual seasons, but there is nothing to indicate what was done about this problem. Various suggestions have been made by scholars. One is that nothing was done and the calendar was allowed to change with respect to the seasons. Another suggestion is that changes were made irregularly, only when the seasonal anomaly was too great to be ignored any longer. (Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, pp. 19–20)
Without understanding the actual mechanism of adjustment, I don't see how we know the Essene Passover happened on Wednesday in the year of Yoshke's virtual crucifixion.

Passover is also a holiday when Jews were required to visit the temple
Historically, together with Shavuot ("Pentecost") and Sukkot ("Tabernacles"), Passover is one of the three pilgrimage festivals (Shalosh Regalim) during which the entire population of the kingdom of Judah made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem.[10] Samaritans still make this pilgrimage to Mount Gerizim, but only men participate in public worship.
The tales of the masses of people in Jerusalem seem exaggerated, but it's hard to believe that this holiday could be celebrated at two totally different times. Even a wretched holiday like Hanukkah seemed weird when it was celebrated on Thanksgiving.

Regarding the OP; an unintended consequence of Stephan's equating the two Johns was that this is a huge complement to JohnT. This has led him to start acting even odder than usual.
However, Geza Vermes in his book titled: "The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls In English", points out the Qumran community, a.k.a. the Essenes had a different yearly calendar than the Temple Priests and thus had a different day for Passover. "..."Passover, the fifteenth day of the first month, was always celebrated on a Wednesday;"...pg79.
Maybe Vermes actually wrote this but -

Death in the afternoon - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/m ... eligion.uk
Here is the most likely scenario of the Passion. The Last Supper took place on Thursday evening, at the start of 14 Nisan. Later, Jesus was led by the Jewish police to Annas for interrogation without trial. On Friday morning, he was arraigned before Pilate and condemned to crucifixion as "King of the Jews". He died on the cross and was buried before the start of the sabbath, which was also Passover.

This feast, coinciding with the full moon after the spring equinox, most probably fell that year on Saturday April 8. So Jesus died at 3pm on Friday April 7 AD30.

· Geza Vermes is professor of Jewish studies at Oxford University and author of The Passion (Penguin)
So here we see Vermes giving a completely different account.
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by andrewcriddle »

semiopen wrote: Hebrew_calendar
Traditionally, for the Babylonian and Hebrew lunisolar calendars, the years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19 are the long (13-month) years of the Metonic cycle. This cycle, which can be used to predict eclipses, forms the basis of the Greek and Hebrew calendars, and is used for the computation of the date of Easter each year.
Probably this was done in Second Temple times, it's difficult to imagine it during the First Temple.

Regarding the Essenes Solar calendar -

It seems everyone gets impressed by 364 divided by 7 equals 52, where 364 is almost 365. However a solar year is 365.25 days so this becomes a problem. This started bothering me yesterday because it blows up the theory that Passover would always start on the same day (Wednesday).
With only 364 days, it is clear that the calendar would after a few years be very noticeably different from the actual seasons, but there is nothing to indicate what was done about this problem. Various suggestions have been made by scholars. One is that nothing was done and the calendar was allowed to change with respect to the seasons. Another suggestion is that changes were made irregularly, only when the seasonal anomaly was too great to be ignored any longer. (Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, pp. 19–20)
Without understanding the actual mechanism of adjustment, I don't see how we know the Essene Passover happened on Wednesday in the year of Yoshke's virtual crucifixion.
In order to keep feasts on the same day of the week, intercalation must occur in multiples of seven days. A simple crude solution is to add an extra week every six years.

Andrew Criddle
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by semiopen »

andrewcriddle wrote: In order to keep feasts on the same day of the week, intercalation must occur in multiples of seven days. A simple crude solution is to add an extra week every six years.

Andrew Criddle
Thanks Andrew,

I thought of similar solutions, but didn't think they were likely. My guess is that the Enochians/Essenes just stopped following the solar calendar for holidays at some point when the shift was obvious and didn't want to correct the books.

Why somebody would want to think that such a virtually divine character like Yoshke would follow such an idiotic calendar baffles me.

I was looking at earlier posts and noticed Stephan had already made several of my points.

The Vermes quote I gave above suggesting 30CE as a good time for the virtual crucifixion because of the full moon on April 8th - Saturday, which contradicts JohnT's link that the full moon was on April 6th that year. I think the link's date is more likely but wonder how a scholar of Vermes caliber could make such an error in his speciality.
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DCHindley
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by DCHindley »

semiopen wrote:
andrewcriddle wrote: In order to keep feasts on the same day of the week, intercalation must occur in multiples of seven days. A simple crude solution is to add an extra week every six years.
The Vermes quote I gave above suggesting 30CE as a good time for the virtual crucifixion because of the full moon on April 8th - Saturday, which contradicts JohnT's link that the full moon was on April 6th that year. I think the link's date is more likely but wonder how a scholar of Vermes caliber could make such an error in his speciality.
I'm not sure I follow your Julian date for the 1 Nisan that fell in 30 CE.

Parker & Dubberstein (1956) calculate a new moon for this month on or before March 25. Their reconstruction of the Babylonian calendar uses their interpretation of the standard 19yr intercalation cycle that is supposedly correlated against (Julian) dates from Babylonian cuneiform tablets.

What date are you correlating your date against?

DCH
Clive
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by Clive »

Is there any evidence that the extra days needed to align solar and lunar calendars were inserted during feast periods, might a special sabbath have extended for two or three days?

Thus it would be possible to keep Sabbaths on a "Wednesday".
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Clive
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Re: Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

Post by Clive »

I wonder if a new academic subject "calendar translation studies" is needed.

It looks as if people in every day life actually used several calendars and would translate between them automatically. So a basic question must be asked, what calendar was being used when and where and why by a writer, what calendars were being used by scribes and translators? Might a writer have used different calendars in different parts of a text?

Calendars are fixed to various points, Jesus's birth or a reign of a king for example. They may be long - Mayan, or short, a reign. Measuring time is difficult and different maps of time have evolved. We need to overlay them and see what we have.
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