They knew perfectly well that there was no hard evidence. The whole point of what I wrote in §2 is that, prior to Clement, people avoided calculating Jesus’ dates. Like I said, it’s creative adjustments all the way down. Modern editions and translations of Tertullian, even critical editions, frequently ‘correct’ his figures and details because they’re so flagrantly wrong.Īnd they do all of this in support of a date that was originally reached thanks to a chronological marker they all knew was wrong - the eclipse of 29 CE. Africanus has to make up the idea that intercalary periods count as extra years, as well as glossing over several bits of Daniel, not least what he says about when the 490 year period begins. Just look at how selective Clement and Tertullian have to be with their treatment of regnal periods to make them line up with Daniel’s ‘70 weeks’ prophecy. You did read §2–§5, didn’t you? The acrobatics are in plain sight. If it means concocting, then yes.ĭoes that mean I think early Christians engage in ‘breathtaking mental acrobatics’, as Förster puts it? Well, yes, of course. HRT hasn’t a shred of credibility and it never should have been taken seriously.ĭoes that mean I support CT, then? Well, no, not if the C stands for calculation. That is, Christmas and Easter are the archetypes for solstice and equinox festivals, not copies of pagan ones. There’s very little evidence of Mediterranean solstice or equinox festivals before the Christian ones came along.The notion that Christmas was originally on 6 January and later transferred to 25 December is based entirely on a 12th century scribal gloss (see Roll 1995: 150–152, 2000: 279–280).Mithraism and Saturnalia are irrelevant, and Yule is mediaeval. ![]()
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