Most people, when asked about the dates of
Christ’s birth and death, will not hesitate to answer that Jesus of Nazareth
was born between two eras and His birth actually is the beginning of the
Current (Christian) Era. At the age of thirty He began His ministry which
lasted fààor three years. After that He was crucified at the age of thirty-three,
that is in
However, the only precise chronological marker
in the Gospels themselves is the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate
was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch
of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene – during the high priesthood of Annas and
Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert” (Lk. 3:1-2, NIV). This time (the fifteenth year of the reign of
Tiberius) corresponds
to 28-
Also, the Scripture does not contain any explicit references to Jesus’ age. On the one hand, Luke tells us that “Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry” (Lk. 3:23), but there is no telling how precise that “about” was. On the other hand, some contemporaries viewed Christ as “not yet fifty years old” (John 8:57). So how old was Jesus when Pilate gave Him over to be crucified? In order to answer this question, one has to know the dates of His birth and crucifixion.
The chronology that became common nowadays –
the one starting from the Birth of Christ – is the least helpful when one tries
to calculate the date of the event itself. This chronology was introduced in
The date of the Crucifixion is more clear, but
less certain. All the Evangelists agree that it happened under the jurisdiction
of Pontius Pilate, governor of
The earlier date (A.D. 30) is supported by the tradition of a 33 years old Jesus (even in that case He is 34 years old) and the tradition that goes back to the 3rd century A. D. (Origen, Julius Africanus), that the darkness covering the earth from noon till 3 pm (Mt. 27:45; Mk. 15:33; Lk. 23:44) was the solar eclipse described by Phlegon in his thirteenth book of Olympiads. Phlegon’s work itself did not survive, but the fragment with a description of an eclipse is preserved in a number of secondary sources, i.e. by Jerome: “Indeed Phlegon, who is an excellent calculator of Olympiads, also writes about these things, writing thus in his thirteenth book: ‘In the fourth year, however, of olympiad 202, an eclipse of the sun happened, greater and more excellent than any that had happened before it; at the sixth hour, day turned into dark night, so that the stars were seen in the sky, and an earthquake in Bithynia toppled many buildings of the city of Nicaea’” [3].
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But the solar eclipse that, according to Phlegon, took
place in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (most probably it is
the full solar eclipse on 24 November
But it does not mean that we have no astronomical indicators for this event. When the Apostle Peter in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost cites a list of the fulfilled signs of the “day of the Lord” predicted by Joel, the words “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood” (Joel 2:31; Acts 2:20) do not seem to puzzle the audience at all. Although the Gospels do not mention the moon turning into blood, Luke, as he cites the words of the Apostle in the Book of Acts, refers to this fact as to common knowledge. This reference was so obvious for early readers that the later parabiblical writers – from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus to the pseudo-historical correspondence of Pilate with Herod – never fail to mention a blood-colored moon [5].
“Blood-colored moon” is a well-known phenomenon observed during lunar eclipses (unlike the solar ones, lunar eclipses happen when the moon is full) when the moon is not fully covered by the shadow of the earth, but is fully covered by the shadow of the earth’s atmosphere. In such cases the surface of the moon is illuminated only by the light that has gone through the earth’s atmosphere tangentially. The shorter waves of the visible spectrum (light blue, blue, green, and even yellow ones) are dispersed and absorbed in the atmosphere. As the result, only the longest, dark-red rays reach the moon’s surface. A similar effect can be observed on the earth when the sun is setting behind clouds on the horizon and only dark red rays fall on an object.
According to the catalogue of the lunar eclipses in the first century A.D. [6], in A.D. 30 there were no lunar eclipses till the end of May, whereas in A.D.33 a partial lunar eclipse with the magnitude 0.5764 happened when the moon rose at the night of April 3 – that was exactly the first full moon after the spring equinox, i.e. on the Passover, as Nissan 15 began. The eclipse took place from 16:12:50 to 19:02:56 on the universal time, that is from about 6 pm to 9 pm according to the local time in the Middle East – the very period called the first watch of the night. Fig. 1 shows how the moon passed through the shadow of the earth’s atmosphere on that day which gave the moon dark-red color.
If we accept this
suggestion, then Peter, as he mentions in the Pentecostal sermon (recorded by
Luke in Acts 2) the moon’s “turning into blood,” refers to the event that had
been witnessed by all the audience. This supports the conclusion that the
Crucifixion should be dated by the 14th of Nissan (April 3)
Bibliography
1. Åôèìîâ Ñ.Þ. Âèôëååìñêàÿ çâåçäà. – Ñèìôåðîïîëü: ÄÈÀÉÏÈ, 2009. – 56 ñ.2. Hebrew Calendar. – http://www.cgsf.org/dbeattie/calendar/?roman=33 3. Èåðîíèì Áëàæåííûé. Èçëîæåíèå õðîíèêè Åâñåâèÿ Êåñàðèéñêîãî, 202 (29/32). Öèò. ïî Äåðåâåíñêèé Á.Ã. Èèñóñ Õðèñòîñ â äîêóìåíòàõ èñòîðèè. – Ñïá: Àëåòåéÿ, 2001. – Ñ.29.
4. Exact Date of Christ's Crucifixion – http://catholicknight.blogspot.com/2007/04/exact-date-of-christs-crucifixion.html
6. List of 1st century lunar eclipses. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1st_century_lunar_eclipses#cite_note-0#cite_note-0