I hope questions are allowed here. I am curios if there is a different sort of scientific calendar which does not use the birth of Jesus as a reference like AD and BC. For example Kurzgesagt’s calendars use the the current year plus 10000 as this represents the human better or something like that.
Would there be a way to do this more accurately? How could we, in a scientific correct way, define a reference from where we are counting years?
Also I have read about the idea of having 13 months instead of 12 would be “nice” because then we could have a even distributed amount of days per month.
Are there already ideas for this? What would you recommend to read?
I’m always intrigued by this sort of hypothesis, can you recommend a good link to an alternative explanation for the early church?
Like I get that early Christians worked in a lot (LOT) of existing mythology to make Christianity palatable/ relatable to various local groups. But where could the early Christians have come from if not a Jesus like figure?
Er, saying the birth date of Jesus is off by a few years isn’t the same as saying he didn’t exist at all.
Our AD system of years was devised in the 6th century by a dude Dionysius Exiguus who probably wanted to replace an existing dating system based on the reign of Diocletian, the Era of Martyrs.
But no one really knows how Dionysius worked it out exactly, or if he even actually used the birth date and not some other shit like nativity. The bible itself doesn’t give exact dates, people commonly dated it by a passage saying he was about 30 during the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, so you have to work out how long ago Tiberius’ reign was and then go from there, but it also doesn’t say he was exactly 30…
Then there’s other shit like how the diocletian era system had a different start date and some confusion over exact ruling lengths of emperors which would mess up counting back through the years.
So this, coupled with scholars trying to figure out dates of things in the bible based on trying to date events mentioned like the census has led to biblical scholars dating the birth to like 4 or 5 BC and that the dude who was trying to figure that out 600 years after the event got it a bit wrong.
It’s wiki so not the greatest source, but this article goes over most the issues about trying to date the birth
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus
And another about trying to date other events:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Jesus
Dating ancient events can be tricky when people were using different dating systems based on shit like when roman consuls or emperors reigned, or when the Olympics happened, or from years since the biblical creation (anno mundi, still used in the Hebrew calendar for religious purposes).
Adoption of the AD system of counting years by most of Europe by the 10th century has made dating since then a lot easier. But even then you have some annoyances like the adoption of the Gregorian calendar which not everyone did at the same time or in the same way leading to differences of up to 2 weeks between the different systems: like how the Russian February Revolution of 1917 actually took place in March because the Russians refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar until after they overthrew the tsar, and a bunch of Orthodox Christians still use the Julian calendar for the dates of religious holidays like Christmas.
So to end this long rambling diatribe: dating old shit ain’t an exact science and dates of ancient events can be a bit blurry.
Might want to do your own research on the historical existence of Jesus. I might be wrong, but I think there is evidence if a man having a really lived and fitting Jesus’ story. Don’t just listen to random dudes in the intern because they wrote a long text and linked Wikipedia!
My question was in regard to the part of the comment:
Well, I’m talking about two different things here, the first being the hypothetical date for Jesus’s birth.
A close reading of the events points to 4 BC as being the year, and the time of year being sometime in Spring “when shepherds watch over their flocks by night.”
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1978QJRAS..19..194S
As for if Jesus was real at all… well, there’s absolutely no contemporaneous evidence from his lifetime that he was ever real, no written record, no first hand account, nothing.
The first mention of Jesus was by Flavius Josephus around 93-94 AD, some 60 years after the Crucifixion, but even that may be a 3rd century insert by a Christian transcriber known as Eusebius of Caesarea.
The problem with the Josephus text is two fold: 1) We don’t have the original, just copies of copies of copies. 2) None of the works quoting Josephus prior to Eusebius make any mention of the Jesus quote which makes it highly suspicious.
The bulk of the New Testament isn’t a result of Jesus at all, it’s all because of Paul, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus.
Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular, then he claimed to have this amazing conversion experience on the road to Damascus, changed his name to Paul, and started talking about this Jesus fellow.
We know Paul existed, we have his letters, other writings, and peers talking about him. How odd none of that exists for Jesus…
A couple of really good books to read about Saul/Paul and the early days:
https://whosoever.org/freeing-jesus-a-review-of-liberating-the-gospels-by-john-shelby-spong/
https://whosoever.org/rescuing-the-bible-from-fundamentalism/
Yeah I get that there isn’t much direct evidence of Jesus. But when you say “Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular” aren’t you referring to his persecution of Christians?
I thought my question was pretty simple: if Jesus didn’t exist, where did the early Christians (that Saul was persecuting) come from?
We have letters from Paul, because he sent them to other Christian communities. Where did those communities come from?