Essenes always held Passover on Wednesday?

[Clive]

Maybe some were not fixed, but cyclical, following the moon sun and planets? How would people translate between fixed and cyclical calendars? Would they use fixed ones? Quarter days are cyclical for example, is all you need is a time of year and x years of king so and so? Maybe Jubilees are very important as reset points?

[semiopen]

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

JohnT gave a link Spring Phenomena 25 BCE to 38 CE - http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomi ... ing-phenom

April 6, 30 is given as the full moon after the Spring Equinox.

This is sort of confirmed at http://www.moonpage.com/index.html if you plug in April 6 30 in the date and fiddle with the time a little. I picked this link at random, but notice today that most calculators don't go back that far.

I'd be delighted if this wrong or questionable. I'm not even clear whether JohnT was relying on it. Anyway I noticed this was different that the April 8th Vermes gives in the article I quoted.

[DCHindley]

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?

JohnT gave a link Spring Phenomena 25 BCE to 38 CE - http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomi ... ing-phenom

April 6, 30 is given as the full moon after the Spring Equinox.

This is sort of confirmed at http://www.moonpage.com/index.html if you plug in April 6 30 in the date and fiddle with the time a little. I picked this link at random, but notice today that most calculators don't go back that far.

I'd be delighted if this wrong or questionable. I'm not even clear whether JohnT was relying on it. Anyway I noticed this was different that the April 8th Vermes gives in the article I quoted.

My apologies, I was thinking 1 Nisan and you were talking 14 Nisan (Passover).

JohnT's link is a little hard to follow, but I think the author of the article, who used the computer at the US Naval Observatory, was trying to choose the likely dates for the Passover in the Julian years 25-38 by providing dates and times for the Vernal Equinox (Passover has to follow this date per various literary sources), the next Full Moon following the Vernal Equinox (roughly 14 days after the date of the preceding New Moon), and the dates of New Moons falling immediately before and after the Vernal Equinox.

From this, theoretically, one can estimate the earliest possible date for 14 Nisan in any of those years. I say "estimate" because it is possible that, due to intercalations, the New moon on which Nisan was reckoned to start (by Judeans) was the one following the Vernal Equinox.

But intercalation is another matter that can really complicate things. We know with fair certainty when Nisanu started in any one year, in the Babylonian calendar, from R A Parker & W H Dubberstein, Babylonian Calendar 1956. The Babylonians had been determining the start of a month by calculations rather than observation for a couple centuries, but could intercalate the extra month in either Addaru or Ululu (Judean Adar & Elul).

But what exactly was the Judean intercalation cycle like? My feeble understanding, though, is that Judeans did not always follow the Babylonian calculations, preferring observation of the crescent moon immediately following the New Moon and agricultural considerations, and they always intercalated an extra Adar, never an extra Elul.

The following table illustrates that it is much easier to synchronize a 364 day cycle to an eight year 354 day lunar cycle than to the Metonic cycle used by the Babylonians and Macedonian calendars.

365.25	364	diff	354	diff	term
8	10.00	3.000	90.00	3.000	octaetris
19	23.75	0.792	213.75	7.125	Metonic
24	30.00	1.000	270.00	9.000	Schematic 364 day

To help make sense of all this calendar talk, here is a table roughly correlating Babylonian, Judean, and Greek months, but be warned, there are so many variables that any calculation can get bogged down in uncertainty.

Babylonian	Hebrew	Macedonian
Nisanu	Nisan	Artemisios
Aiaru	Iyyar	Daisios
Simanu	Sivan	Panemos
Duzu	Tammuz	Loos
Abu	Ab	Gorpiaios
Ululu	Eiul	Hyperberetaios
Tashritu	Tishri	Dios
Aransamnu	Heshvan	Apellaios
Kislimu	Kislev	Audynaios
Tebetu	Tebeth	Peritios
Shabatu	Shebat	Dystros
Addaru	Adar	Xanthikos

Footnote: In A.D. 46/47 it is probable that the correlation between the Babylonian and the Macedonian calendars was altered by the insertion of an additional month into the cycle of the Greek months. (Source: P&D page 26)

The last time I devoted much attention to this matter was about a decade ago, and it seemed at the time that we just didn't have enough specific correlations or sophistication in analyzing these cycles to reconstruct the actual Judean calendar in this general period.

The tools are there, but we still need individuals, with just the right combination of available time and motivation enough to exert the considerable effort, to work out just what could, or could not, have occurred, and thus validate or invalidate the various reconstructions that have popped up ancient and modern.

DCH

[Clive]

Plato used the word aeon to denote the eternal world of ideas, which he conceived was "behind" the perceived world, as demonstrated in his famous allegory of the cave.

Christianity's idea of "eternal life" comes from the word for life, zoe, and a form of aeon,[10] which could mean life in the next aeon, the Kingdom of God, or Heaven, just as much as immortality, as in John 3:16.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon

In Physics there is currently discussion of is the universe eternal or not.

A pregnant moment in intellectual history occurs when H.G. Wells’s Time Traveller (“for so it will be convenient to speak of him”) gathers his friends around the drawing room fire to explain that everything they know about time is wrong. This after-dinner conversation marked something of a watershed, more telling than young Wells, who had never even published a book before The Time Machine, imagined just before the turn of the twentieth century.

What is time? Nothing but a fourth dimension, after length, breadth, and thickness. “Through a natural infirmity of the flesh,” the cheerful host explains, “we incline to overlook this fact.” The geometry taught in school needs revision. “Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked…. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”

Wells didn’t make this up. It was in the air, the kind of thing bruited by students in the debating society of the Royal College of Science. But no one had made the case as persuasively as he did in 1895, by way of trying to gin up a plausible plot device in a piece of fantastic storytelling. Albert Einstein was then just a boy at gymnasium. Not till 1908 did the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski announce his “radical” idea that space and time were a single entity: “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

So spacetime was born. In spacetime all events are baked together, a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down. The time dimension only looks special for the reason Wells mentioned: our consciousness is involved. We have a limited perspective. At any instant we see only a slice of the loaf, a puny three-dimensional cross-section of the whole. For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is just that, a sensation, and different for everyone. Instead of one master clock, we have clocks in multitudes. And other paraphernalia, too: light cones and world lines and time-like curves and other methods for charting the paths of light and objects through this four-dimensional space. To say that the spacetime view of reality has empowered the physicists of the past century would be an understatement.


Philosophers like it, too. “I conclude that the problem of the reality and the determinateness of future events is now solved,” wrote Hilary Putnam in 1967.

Moreover, it is solved by physics and not by philosophy. We have learned that we live in a four-dimensional and not a three-dimensional world, and that space and time—or, better, space-like separations and time-like separations—are just two aspects of a single four-dimensional continuum….
“Indeed,” he added, “I do not believe that there are any longer any philosophical problems about Time.” Case closed.

Now comes a book from the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin aiming to convince us that time is real after all. He is frankly recanting the accepted doctrine—an apostate:

I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the time-bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth….

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... -regained/

I propose xianity is a religion of time.

[Clive]

In terms of plot devices, beginnings and ends, creations, big bangs and apocalypses, are far more fun than boring cycles!