Did Jesus die in 30 AD and not 31 AD on a Wednesday and not Friday?

By Koot van Wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD) Visiting Professor, Department of Liberal Education, Kyungpook National University, Sangju Campus, South Korea, Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College Australia

Anyone working with ancient chronology will be either an expert and humble about it or arrogant and thus skew. Videos have been made recently attacking Adventists that they are wrong in saying that Jesus died in 31 AD and also that Jesus did not die on Friday but Wednesday. The whole purpose of this attack is multidimensional: destroy 31 and you destroy 1843 and 1844, destroying 31 and you destroy 457 BCE, the date of Ezra 7. Higher criticism was doing that already at the time when Adventism as a church was organized. But discoveries like the Elephantine Papyri and a business document from Ur that S. Horn discussed in the article below from Review and Herald 1953 in April 30, explains that the Jews did reckon their calendar from Fall to Fall and not another way. Scholars counted wrongly thinking that Ezra and other Jews were using the Persian/Egyptian calendar for reckoning and thus came to 458 as the date. What they did not know is that Jews calculated from Fall to Fall and thus what is said on a cuneiform tablet from Ur that Artaxerxes I started to reign in December of 465 means that until Fall of 464 those 9 months were not calculated in by the Jews since it is the accession year or what the Sumerian language of the Old Babylonians and Assyrians read as MU.SAG.NAM.LUGAL.LA or in Akkadian as reš šarrutiya “the beginning of the reign”. The Assyrians tended to count it in but the Babylonians did not. That is why there was a discrepancy in the reign counting of Sargon II that one tablet [of Assyrian hands] said that it was the year of the 11^th palu of his reign but another tablet [Babylonian hand] said that it was the 9^th palu of his reign. Famous scholars were confused about this and called it an error. But it is not. The year an assassination by a ruler of another ruler was counted in by the Assyrians and part of the total while the Babylonians did not reckonize that year so that 11^th of palu will be 9^th of palu in Babylonian counting. But it is the same year.

Anyone working with calendars need to be humble since there are many problems.

Modern contesters of Adventist positions on chronology is trying to use computers to sort out the chronological problems of the past. This is arrogant. A computer cannot solve Ancient Near Eastern chronology. It can help and assist in calculations but cannot establish the accuracy of dates absolutely. Why? The Passover calculation that was normally done by Sadducees was taken over by Pharisees after the Maccabeen revolt. Thus, during the time of Jesus there may have been uncertainty due to factional fighting between these two sects since the Pharisees were in control of the temple. The Sadducees had methods to calculate it exactly. Modern computers can tell you the astronomical assigned day but it cannot explain the human acclaimed day of the Passover in past history. Other denominations like Herbert Armstrong use to argue about the Wednesday death of Christ instead of the Friday death of Christ ever since the 1960’s. His book is online. So modern debaters on video and emails are echoing the viewpoints of the Church of God and other Armstrong groups who are also keeping Sabbath but without Ellen White. They also try to run down the inspiration of Ellen White in Desire of Ages who said that it was in the Fall (Desire of Ages 233, 234). The following article is an explanation by Siegfried Horn as to what and why Adventists belief it is the Fall to Fall calculation and why it is 457 and not 458. The views of Horn and Wood are correct and this writer endorses their conclusions without any doubt or need of adjustment. The Elephantine Papyri were also my seminar tasks during my honors studies under prof. dr. Walther Claasen of the Semitic Languages and Cultures Department of Stellenbosch University in 1985. The Papyri is of incredible importance of the serioous student of the Bible and the conclusions of Horn in the article below are very stable.

The Basic Date of the 2300-Year Period Confirmed by New Discoveries

By Siegfried H. Horn

(Review and Herald Vol. 18 April 30 1953: 8-9)

Seventh-day Adventists have held for more than, one hundred years that Christ began His mediatorial work in the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary in 1844, using this date to mark the end of the great prophetic period of the 2300 years (Dan. 8:14). They have also taught that the period began, along with the seventy weeks (Dan. 9:24), at the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem in the time of Ezra (Ezra 7), in 457 B.C.

Both these dates of this great prophetic period were taken over from the Millerites, but with a different interpretation of the events connected with the close of the period. In the time of William Miller the events described in Ezra 7, from which is derived the starting point of the 2300 years, were dated by most theologians in the year 457 B.c., a date that Adventists from the beginning of their history have accepted as correct. This and other dates connected with Biblical history were computed some two to three hundred years ago, with the use of the best source material then available. At that time the Bible was considered by Christians of all shades as a reliable source book for secular as well as Biblical history, and its chronological statements were used with other sources as a basis to arrive at correct dates.

The events narrated in Ezra 7, with which the 2300-year period is connected, are dated in the seventh year of Artaxerxes I, a Persian king, since the little province of Judea was part of the Persian Empire

in the time of Ezra. The B.c. dates for the years of Artaxerxes' reign were known through the canon of Ptolemy, which is a list of secular rulers compiled by the Greek astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, who lived in Egypt in the second century of the Christian Era. This list extends from the eighth century B.c. to Ptolemy's day.

Ptolemy's canon was and is accepted as correct because it can be checked by astronomical calculations. Yet not until recent decades could scholars fully understand this king list for two reasons. First,

they did not know the difference between the Egyptian calendar, which Ptolemy used, and the Babylonian calendar, which the Persians used; and second, only after many ancient dated documents were found by archeologists were scholars able to date exactly the reigns of many Babylonian and Persian kings. But until very recently there was no known document that indicated the time of the year when Xerxes died and Artaxerxes came to the throne. Therefore difference of opinion was found among writers as to the exact beginning and ending of the year that Ezra referred to when he said "the seventh year of Artaxerxes."

A full explanation cannot be given within the limitations of a Review article, but it may suffice to say that the problem hinged on two factors: first, the time of year in which Artaxerxes succeeded his father; and second, whether Ezra reckoned Artaxerxes' years by a calendar that began in the fall or in the spring.

Since Nehemiah's statements (Neh. 1:1; 2:1) show that the Jews at that time reckoned the years of Persian kings by means of their own calendar, in which the month Kislev preceded Nisan in the same calendar year, the conclusion was reached that the twentieth year of Artaxerxes was counted by the Jews from the fall of 445 B.c. to the fall of 444, and not from the spring to the spring as the Persians reckoned it. Likewise the seventh year of Artaxerxes was then reckoned by Ezra from the fall of 458 B.c. to the fall of 457, since Ezra and Nehemiah were contemporaries (Neh. 8:9; 12:36-38), and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which were one book in the ancient Hebrew Bible, would have used the same calendar throughout. Hence, all the events recorded in Ezra 7 took place in the year 457 B.c., and Artaxerxes' decree went into effect in the fall of that year after Ezra had reached Jerusalem. (See E. G. White, The Desire of Ages, pp. 233, 234.)

With the emergence of higher Bible criticism during the nineteenth century, the statements made by Nehemiah with regard to the reckoning of regnal years were questioned, like many other Bible passages. This was done especially since the contemporary cuneiform documents showed that Artaxerxes' seventh regnal year was reckoned by the Persians from the spring of 458 B.c. to the spring of 457, and the twentieth year from spring to spring, 445/4. Many historians and critically inclined Bible scholars thought that the Jews counted like the Persians, and that the statements in Nehemiah contained mistakes. This is the reason that a number of modern books dealing with Ezra's return from Babylon date that event in the year 458 B.C.

The accuracy of the date forming the starting point of the 2300-year period is of the utmost importance to a correct understanding of that prophecy. It is therefore a matter of joy and satisfaction to the student of the Bible to see that recently discovered archeological material has vindicated Nehemiah and corroborated the date that Adventists have used for more than one hundred years in connection with Ezra 7, by basing the reckoning used by Ezra on that attested by Nehemiah.

The reconstruction of the Jewish calendar from sources outside the Bible has been a difficult task, since the available source material is extremely scarce. Only a few Jewish dated documents of the Old Testament period have so far been discovered.

These were all written in the fifth century B.c., the same period in which Ezra and Nehemiah lived. These documents, written in the Aramaic language on papyrus, come from a Jewish colony of Elephantine, a Nile island in Upper Egypt. They give us much information concerning the religious and civil conditions under which the Jews lived. Some of them are official documents similar in nature to those interspersed in the books of Ezra and Esther, and thus support the authenticity of the documents quoted in the two mentioned Biblical books. Several of the dated papyri bear double dates, one in the official Egyptian calendar, the other in the calendar used by the Jews. Unfortunately, the documents that bear two year dates came from that part of the year in which there was no difference between the Jewish system of reckoning and the Persian one, so that the real nature of the Jewish calendar could not be ascertained by means of these documents.

However, another group of papyri lying in a locked trunk in a New York storehouse was waiting for many years to be rediscovered. These had been bought by Mr. Charles Edwin Wilbour, a collector of Egyptian antiquities, in 1893 while traveling in Egypt. They had been shown to another scholar, and then brought to America in Mr. Wilbour's trunk. There they remained, because of the owner's death soon after his return from Egypt, until the trunk passed into the possession of the Brooklyn Museum as part of a bequest of Wilbour's daughter.

When the trunk was opened three or four years ago, the papyri were rediscovered, and after a laborious work the very brittle documents were mounted under Vass so that they could be studied by experts. Dr. Emil G. Kraeling is preparing the publication of the papyri in two volumes, to be issued by the Brooklyn Museum this year.

It was in April, 1952, that the writer saw these manuscripts for the first time in the Brooklyn Museum. Owing to the generosity of John D. Cooney, the curator of the Museum, he was allowed to copy the date lines of the fourteen dated papyri, and later received also photographs of these priceless documents. They at once double the number of our dated Jewish documents of the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.

As soon as Dr. L. H. Wood, who for years has worked on the date problems of the formerly known papyri, and the writer began to study the dates of these new papyri, it became evident that one of them proved conclusively that the Jews of Elephantine, like Nehemiah, reckoned the years of the Persian kings according to their own system, and that their calendar year began in the fall, and not in the spring, like the Persian calendar. This discovery therefore proves that Nehemiah's statements concerning the twentieth year of Artaxerxes contain no errors. Since Nehemiah and the Jewish writers of the Elephantine papyri lived at the time of Ezra, there is no reason left to doubt that Ezra reckoned the years of Artaxerxes in the same way.

During the recent Bible Conference held in Takoma Park, Maryland, this find was briefly announced in one of the studies on archeological discoveries that establish the veracity of the Bible and the trustworthiness of its text. It was stated at that time that this discovery

"gives us virtually the evidence that we are correct in dating the events in Ezra 7 as having taken place in 457 B.c."

Since that time some additional evidence has come to light which makes this date even more certain than it already was. When working on a report concerning this subject in December 1952, the writer looked through a recently published book on business documents which had been unearthed in Ur, the city where Abraham was reared. There he found a tablet by which it can be proved that Artaxerxes I had come to the throne not earlier than December 465 B.c.—several

months after the beginning of the Jewish calendar year. Thus the nine months lying between his accession to the throne and the next Jewish New Year's Day were counted as falling in Artaxerxes' accession year, the "accession year" of a king being the interval between a king's accession to the throne and the next New Year's Day.

Artaxerxes' first year could therefore not have begun, according to Jewish reckoning, earlier than the fall of 464 B.C.

These two discoveries are extremely valuable for establishing the chronology of Ezra 7. One provides the date of Artaxerxes' accession to the throne, and the other proves that the Jews of the time of Ezra and Nehemiah reckoned the years of the Persian rulers according to their own fall to fall calendar. Thus conclusive evidence is provided by which it can be shown that the seventh year of Artaxerxes, according to Jewish reckoning, began, in the fall of 458 B.c. and ended in the fall of 457 B.C. The four-month journey of Ezra, beginning in Nisan, took place therefore in the spring and early summer of 457 B.c., and the decree of Artaxerxes went into effect shortly afterward.

We see thus that the date, the fall of 457 B.c., held for a long time by Seventhday Adventists as forming the starting point of the great 2300-year prophetic period, is correct, and consequently also the date at which this period ended—the fall of A.D. 1844.

A detailed study of the chronology of Ezra 7 and the Jewish calendar of that time is being prepared for an early publication in book form as a report of the Advent Research Committee appointed by the General Conference.

Added Notes by this writer:

The book reference is the following:

S. H. Horn and L. H. Wood, The Chronology of Ezra 7: a report of the Historical Research Committee of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists (1953). See the James White Library at the Center for Adventist Research/Lower Floor at BS 1355.S4 1953.

Sources:

1. http://documents.adventistarchives.org/Periodicals/RH/RH19530430-V130-18.pdf

2. Koot van Wyk, “Did Jesus die on Wednesday and not Friday? Towards Solutions at http://www.egw.org at VAN WYK NOTE no. 822.

3. John Bowman, “Is the Samaritan Calendar the Old Zadokite one?” PEQ Vol. 91 (1959): 23-37.

4. M. Baillet, “Le Calendrier Samaritain” RB Vol. 85 (1978): 481-499.

5. A. Jaubert, “Le Calendrier des Jubilés et de la Secte de Qumrân” VT Vol. 3 (1953): 250-264.

6. S. Talmon, “The Calendar Reckoning of the Sect from the Judaean Desert” Reprint from Aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Scripta Hierosolymitana Vol. IV Jerusalem 1958, 178ff.