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The Times
and Places of Jesus
We welcome "when" and
"where" questions about Jesus.
by Paul L.
Maier
In his famous advice to
Christians, Peter wrote, "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who
asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" (I Peter 3:15). If he
were writing today, one wonders if the apostle might not have adjusted his
message for the bimillennium of Christianity: "Always be ready to explain to
everyone the reason why next year is A.D. 2000."
Unlike all other
world religious systems (except for our parent Judaism), Christianity rests
squarely on fact: on actual people, places and events that are genuine parts of
a real past. Twenty centuries ago, God, more tangibly than ever before, entered
human history in the person of Jesus Christ.
And Christ Himself, far
from being any myth, was just as historical a personality as the Roman emperor
Augustus in whose reign He was born. This statement, so obvious to Christians
and the fair-minded anywhere, needs to be emphasized in a secular world in
which improbable claims from competitive, non-historically-based religious
systems have created a link in many minds between religion and mythology.
Instead, we challenge the world to ask when and where questions about
Jesus, since they can be answered so easily.
Jesus and time
Mythical personalities and events are not open to questions involving
time. One does not seriously ask, for example, "In what year did Zeus and Hera
get married?"
Historical figures, on the other hand, should be
generally datable within a reasonable range of years, if the sources provide
enough evidence. After the patriarchs in the Old Testament and across the rest
of the Bible, such dating of most major personalities and episodes is not only
possible but even expected in our Bible dictionaries and commentaries.
Jesus of Nazareth is a case in point. Since the chronologies of the Herods, the
Roman emperors and the governors within the time frames of the Gospels are
firm, Jesus birth can reliably be placed between June and December of 5
B.C. The date of His crucifixion is even more precise, with a balance of
scholarship now inclining to April 3, A.D. 33.
Why, then, is our
calendar four or five years off? Why will next year be, literally, A.D. (In the
Year of the Lord) 2004 or 2005 rather than 2000?
Before our present
calendar, and until the 500s A.D., events in Western civilization had been
dated A.U.C. (ab urbe condita, in Latin), "from the founding of the city"
(i.e., Rome). Often they were also anchored to the accession year of a given
Roman emperor, especially Diocletian (A.D. 284305), who, ironically, was
a vicious persecutor of the very church that for the next two centuries was
still using him as a calendrical anchor!
In the year 525, however,
Pope John I wanted a solution to the problem of how to calculate the proper
Sunday on which to celebrate Easter. He assigned the task to Dionysius Exiguus
(Denis the Little). Dionysius was a very learned monk-mathematician-astronomer
from Scythia, who now abandoned the previous calendar because he "did not wish
to perpetuate the name of the Great Persecutor, but rather to number the years
from the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
In redoing the
calendar to pivot about the birth of Christ, however, he innocently committed
what became historys greatest numerical error in terms of cumulative
effect. He dated the Nativity in the year 753 from the founding of Rome, when
in fact Herod the Great had died only 749 years after that event. And since
Herod was very much alive in the Nativity accounts, Jesus had to have been born
some months before Herods death.
In view of the limited research
materials in the ancient world and the difficulty in their retrieval, we should
actually be surprised that Dionysius came as close as he did.
Before
his reform, relative or comparative dating was usually the rule: anchoring a
date to the beginning of some famous figure or political rulers reign.
Thus, Luke is at pains to give us an accurate time for the beginning of John
the Baptists ministry and therefore Christs also:
"In the
fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caeser, 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" (Luke 3:1).
Here there are six documentary "footnotes,
" as it were, to fix the year as A.D. 28/29, according to our calendar (of
which Luke knew nothing at the time). This is unusual precision for an ancient
source, especially when compared with such other religious luminaries as
Gautama Buddha or Zoroaster.
Accordingly, all chronological references
associated with Jesus presuppose Him to be an authentic personality living at a
specific time in history.
Jesus and geography
Since we
live in a "time-space continuum, " geographical considerations are also
important in weighing the historical accuracy of Jesus. Legends and mythology
have settings in nirvana, Never-Neverlands, Oz, Valhalla or other illusory
places. (Authentic locations are sometimes involved, to be sure: Zeus
supposedly spent his boyhood at Mt. Ida on Crete before becoming CEO on Mt.
Olympus. Both mountains do exist, even if Zeus does not.)
The Old and
New Testaments, on the other hand, are studded with place names: names of
countries, provinces, regions, cities and villages; names of seas, lakes,
rivers and streams; names of mountains, hills, plateaus, plains and valleys.
Such proper place names fill our Bible dictionaries, and all of them are
standing challenges to anyone who doubts that the stage for the many
divine-human encounters in Scripture is rock solid.
Most of the Bible
place names are readily identifiable today, and many have been excavated
archaeologically. In the case of Jesus, His journeys through life are traced by
armies of pilgrims to the Holy Land to this day, from His birth at Bethlehem in
Judea, through His youth at Nazareth in Galilee, across His public ministry in
Capernaum, Samaria and Judea, along His travels to Tyre, Sidon and
Caesarea-Philippi, and on to His suffering, death, resurrection and ascension
in Jerusalem. All the locations associated with Jesus are authentic and
situated just as described in the New Testament. The Pool of Siloam, for
example, where Jesus healed the blind man of John 9, is still there, and still
flows with water.
Following Jesus ministry, St. Pauls
mission journeys are so accurately described by Luke in the Book of Acts and
Pauls own letters that the itineraries can be confirmed today as 100
percent accurate in terms of location and order of place names. From the
patriarchs in the Old Testament, then, to the apostles in the New, Gods
people always seem to be moving from one place to the next.
But such
restless travels by Bible figures also served a higher purpose that they could
hardly have envisioned at the time: they provided authentic locational bases
for the Bible record in general, and for the life and ministry of Jesus of
Nazareth in particular.
The stage for the divine-human encounters
recorded in the Old and New Testaments is solid indeed. All time and place
references associated with Jesus of Nazareth, then, presuppose an authentic
personality, living at a definite time in history, and moving between specific
sites that can easily be identified 2000 years later.
Dr. Paul L. Maier is professor of Ancient History and chaplain
at Western Michigan University-Kalamazoo, MI.
Reprinted with
permission from The Lutheran Witness magazine (October,
1999).
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